For the first day of the winter photo challenge, no actual frost anywhere near me, although it is nearly freezing in Austin, so I’m going with Frosty.

Watched: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Another great one. 🍿

Just noticed a new F1 movie ad in the Apple Sports app. So weird that Apple has become a company that doesn’t mind upselling everything, cluttering the UI of their own apps. It’s a pattern at this point.

David Pierce introducing the latest Vergecast:

Here’s a thought: what if the next-generation Siri is awesome? Not just awesome for setting timers and dictating text messages (though that would be nice), but so awesome and fun to talk to that people actually start falling in love with their iPhones. We may not be prepared for what happens next.

It could happen. Expectations are so low that Apple could surprise people. I’m just skeptical that Apple is prioritizing the right things to get there.

Quick trip up to Dallas this weekend to see the kids. The weather turned cold overnight! ❄️ Speaking of the winter… We’re starting a 12-day holiday photo challenge tomorrow. 🎄

Great to see Wemby back tonight for the NBA cup semifinals, even in very limited minutes. 🏀

Coming 2026, in Denton.

Thinking more about Australia… Our kids are adults now, and they grew up through the rise of Instagram, through Covid shutdowns… We can choose to make a better environment for the next generation, if society makes progress on social media. Less anxiety, fewer ads, more time away from screens.

Good post from Creative Commons with concerns about pay-per-crawl efforts, including principles to guide deployment:

Pay-to-crawl represents a strategy that may work for some websites, and not all websites share the same underlying concerns. Pay-to-crawl systems should not be deployed as an automatic or assumed setting on behalf of websites by others, such as domain hosts, content delivery networks, and other web service providers.

Matches some of my thinking about Cloudflare and AI.

Enjoyed the discussion on Hard Fork about the Australia social media ban for kids. In a nutshell: it’s a good experiment that we will actually have data for in several years. No parent says, “I wish my kid was on Instagram and TikTok more often.”

Announcing a special Micro.blog winter photo challenge! @BonnieRue has written a new post with details over on the challenges blog. It starts on Monday and runs 12 days. ❄️

I’m hoping to add a new Micro.blog pin too for anyone who participates.

Not sure yet how to read the Epic vs. Apple appeals court decision. Seems like a partial Apple win, but Tim Sweeney says on Twitter / X that it’s actually good progress. I think we’ll know for sure when the district court judge updates her ruling.

A little-known Micro.blog feature is getting better visibility today: we store previous versions of private notes (and blog posts!) so you can restore them if you make an editing mistake or delete something. From @news:

Added note versions browsing to the web interface. When editing a note, you’ll now see a “5 versions” link in the corner. For Premium subscribers, we’re storing previous versions for a full year. (60 days for everyone else.)

The natural follow-up from my last post: people want a place to belong. Friends, a community. So the challenge is building a community that minimizes the more negative effects of tribalism. I’m not sure how to do this, but I can usually spot when things have drifted into unhealthy territory.

Let’s not confuse tribes and principles. Principles allow us to build coalitions with people who don’t agree with us on everything. They keep us on the right path, even when it’s unpopular. With tribes, we are heavily influenced by those around us, sometimes with social pressure to attack others.

Happy we got the new Android update out today. I worked on a few other web things tonight, queued up as pull requests to deploy in the morning. I think we’ve had a good pace of improvements lately, before things slow down a little for the holidays. Tomorrow: photo challenge announcement. ❄️

When driving sometimes I’ll have a few ideas for blog posts and I’ll try to narrate the gist of them so I can remember later. My digital notebook is full of discarded blog post drafts. Reminds me of Peter Dinklage’s character in Elf, pointing to his notebook:

I’ve got about 5 of 6 great starts here. I have one idea that I’m especially psyched out of my mind about.

🤪

Disney is licensing characters for Sora and investing $1 billion in OpenAI. Bob Iger: The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reac...

Not going to come close to hitting my reading goal this year. This year has been too much. Hoping to finish one or two more books before the end of the year, though… With the holidays approaching, great time to disconnect with a book.

When I was trying to simplify the Design page in Micro.blog earlier this year, I think I went too far, burying the CSS functionality inside of custom themes. I’ve reversed course today and elevated the button to a new section.

Watched the first half of Spurs/Lakers NBA cup game last night, too tired to stay up for the whole thing. West coast games always get me now. Caught up on the final quarter this morning. Spurs have such a complete team. Bench was great. 🏀

Usually when I think of something new to work on, I add a note in Micro.blog notes. Lately I’ve been trying something new: I’ll type the idea into Codex (cloud) and ask it to plan the basics, but to not write code yet. Then I can come back later to work on it and have some tips to keep in mind.

From a Bloomberg story about Tim Cook in Washington:

…Cook urged lawmakers not to require app store operators to check documentation of users’ ages and instead rely on parents to provide the age of their child when creating a child’s account…

While requiring Apple to check ages seems like an overreach, it’s better than requiring every app and website to do the same. I’ve lost faith in Tim’s leadership of the App Store, going back a few years to when he suggested in court that developers would have to pay Apple for sales outside the store, and continuing through his meetings with Trump.

I added a help page with an intro to using Pagefind in Micro.blog. Leon Mika also has a good post about it.

Andreas Deja has been sharing some drawings from the cancelled Disney feature My Peoples. Beautiful work. I would’ve loved to see this get made. There is more artwork over on this Disney wiki.

Submitted an iOS update to Apple for Micro.blog, hopefully will be approved in the next day. I think this is the best version of our app yet. Lots of little tweaks. Android will be submitted this week too.

Cory Doctorow has posted the text of a speech he gave about AI. It is very long, but absolutely worth setting aside some time to read, whether you’re an AI skeptic or enthusiast or somewhere in between. I was actually a little nervous to read it. Cory is an incredible writer...

Pebble is launching a ring called Index 01 for voice recording. The design looks a little more clunky than the upcoming ring from Sandbar, but the Pebble ring is less than half the price, with an open architecture. Pre-orders are going to fly off the shelves at $75.

Ben Werdmuller blogging about the enduring strength of RSS and ideas for the future:

Feeds have always been powerful for consumption. But the internet is a conversation, and the next generation of RSS-powered applications should unlock its potential for creation and collaboration.

Cold morning at Blanco State Park.