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Speaking of Tips
houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kristin-tips-out-texas-funeral-22206178.php
The Houston Chronicle:
Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]
Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment.
I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.
Link: houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kristin-tips…
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Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App Store
9to5mac.com/2026/04/13/apple-removes-old-pages-keynote-numbers-apps-for-macos/
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Google Will Finally Begin Punishing Sites for Back-Button Hijacking in June
developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking
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Amazon to Acquire Globalstar, Announces Agreement With Apple to Continue Service for iPhone and Apple Watch
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John Calhoun on Steve Lemay
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Richard Moss’s 2010 Interview With John Calhoun on the Origins of Glider
macscene.net/d/4678-interview-john-calhoun-on-the-origins-of-glider-part-1
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Glider Is Back in the Mac App Store
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Steven Soderbergh Twice Pitched James Bond Projects
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Apple Frames 4
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Memory, They Say, Is the First Thing to Go
Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a few people told me they could swear they learned about it here, long ago. They were right!
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[Sponsor] WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer for AI Agents
Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.
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Tahoe Nitpick of the Day: ‘Reduce Transparency’ Makes Layers Harder to See, Not Easier
Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:
We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are.
Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows.
Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.
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John Martellaro, RIP
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Marcin Wichary Visits the Large Scale Systems Museum
I’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right.
I’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too.
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MacOS Tip: Enable the Zoom ‘Peek’ Gesture
unsung.aresluna.org/testing-tip-enable-the-zoom-peek-gesture/
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FT: ‘Meta Builds AI Version of Mark Zuckerberg to Interact With Staff’
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Viktor Orban Loses Election in Hungary, Concedes Defeat, Congratulates Opposition Winners
nytimes.com/2026/04/12/world/europe/hungary-election-orban-magyar.html
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Zed — A Font Superfamily
typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century/?utm_source=df
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Golden Tickets
More vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making them. Even something as mundane as weekly bus passes can be exuberant expressions of fun.
(Via Ian K. Rogers, who particularly notes the tickets’ integration of hand-lettering with typefaces.)
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Pan American Luggage Labels
Some graphic design fun for the weekend: achingly gorgeous art pieces recreating vintage Pan Am luggage tags, by Ella Freire. I love them all. The colors, the type, the shapes — sublime.
(Via Dan Cederholm’s Studio Notes.)
Link: ellafreire.com/collections/pan-american-luggage-labels
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★ Let Us Learn to Show Our Friendship for a Man When He Is Alive and Not After He Is Dead
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Ed Bindels’s Apple Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands
This new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible.
Link: applemuseum.nl/
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MacOS Seemingly Crashes After 49 Days of Uptime — a ‘Feature’ Perhaps Exclusive to Tahoe
sixcolors.com/link/2026/04/macs-crash-after-49-days-of-uptime/
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Adobe Diddles With Your /etc/hosts File
old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1sb6hzk/adobe_wrote_to_my_hosts_file_ive_never_had_an_app/oe1ap9h/
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Lickspittle of the Week: Todd Blanche
politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day-1022/
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way:
I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.”
The phrase Blanche was looking for is “Thank you sir, may I have another.”
Link: politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day…
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Anthropic’s New Claude Mythos Is So Good at Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities That They’re Not Releasing It to the Public
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Solar Eclipse From the Far Side of the Moon
Kottke:
This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit.
Follow NASA on Flickr for more.
Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these images to their wonderful Wallaroo app (which is how I’ve switched to one on my own iPhone).
Update 2: Nils Streedain has made wallpapers for the Mac optimized for OLED displays (HEIC native format, pure #000 black background, etc.). Gorgeous.
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Sam Altman, in a Video Released by OpenAI, Apparently Thinks AGI Is Going to Hit Society Like a Once-a-Century Pandemic
Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.
I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.
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