Speaking of sponsorships, the Q1 schedule is filling up, but I’ve still got this week and next open. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

Link: daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

James Fallows, in a 2023 piece for The Atlantic, written when Carter entered hospice care:

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Link: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/jimmy-carter…

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

An upcoming version of the Magic Mouse with voice control for AI would “make sense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today, though he claimed that he has heard no rumors about the feature so far.

Alongside the voice-input mouse, it’d make just as much sense to bring back some of that see-through 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching MacBooks to transparent aluminum.

Link: macrumors.com/2024/12/30/gurman-magic-mouse-voice-control/

Fun and interesting list overall (via Kottke), but #7 caught my attention: Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.”)...

My thanks to Junjie for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Due, their excellent reminder app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I first linked to Due back in 2010, writing this short post: I’ve been trying this $3 app for a few days and digging it — a convenient, low-fric...

The New York Times:

While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Link: nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-dead.html

From an un-bylined post from OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday: The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We once again need to raise more ...

Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
• Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416

Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from...

Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again.

If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you.

PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were one of those readers who took a chance on Due, thank you.

Link: dueapp.com/

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired thi...

Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski: I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious spo...

Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee: To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Ri...

Mike Allen, in the bizarre notes-hurriedly-jotted-on-a-napkin house prose style of Axios: Kara Swisher, the popular podcaster and pioneering tech journalist, is trying to round up a group of rich people to fund a bid for the Washington Post, she told us. One big problem...

Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini, and Michael Silver have written a devastating profile of the most dysfunctional franchise in all of U.S. pro sports, the New York Jets, whose dysfunction has a clear and obvious root cause: meddling idiot owner Woody Johnson (heir to the John...

Joe Otterson, reporting for Variety: “Silo” has been renewed for both Seasons 3 and 4 at Apple TV+, with the fourth season set to be the show’s last. The renewal news comes as the post-apocalyptic drama is currently airing its second season. The sixth episode of Season ...

One last item on Acorn 8. Whether you are a longtime Acorn user (like me), or a would-be new user, you should set aside some time to actually read Acorn’s documentation. It’s a full user manual, and it not only describes, in detail, what every feature in the app does and how...

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s a...

Dave Nanian, writing on the Shirt Pocket blog: macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, i...

Gus Mueller: This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It’s still a one time purchase to use as long as you’d like, and as usual, the full release notes are available. I want to highlight some of my favorite things below. “Sele...

Blackmagic Design: Blackmagic Design announced it will start taking pre-orders for the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera — the world’s first commercial camera system designed to capture Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro — today with deliveries due to sta...

With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to stare at1 as you await your favorite’s show’s weekly release...

Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog: Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We d...

A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS messages sent between u...

Excellent five-minute short video from the ever-insightful Kirby Ferguson for The New York Times, exploring why everything looks the same, sounds the same, and seemingly is the same in today’s pop culture. The short answer: that sameness is only pervasive when you only look at what’s promoted by our three-headed social media hegemony (Meta, YouTube, and TikTok).

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=aToMV4wL2wc

Update: The store is now closed. My sincere thanks to everyone who’s bought one (or in many cases, more than one).

Original post: Unsurprisingly given that I went a few years without selling DF-branded shirts, while I procrastinated on launching a modernized new store (long story short: Shopify is a killer platform — the new store now supports everything from Apple Pay to order tracking), response to this round of classic logo apparel has been great. Orders from last week started going out over the weekend, and hundreds more are shipping today.

It’s too late now to get an order in for Christmas, no matter where you live, but it’s not too late to place an order from this batch of shirts and hoodies. But, we’ll probably close the store to new orders tomorrow (Tuesday), so don’t wait.

Link: store.daringfireball.net/

Another week with another outstanding indie developer whom I’m delighted to thank for sponsoring DF. This week, it’s Sophiestication Software promoting the return of CoverSutra — a previous hit from the “delicious” era of Mac apps that is now back and better than ever. Afte...

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is wide open at the moment — including the final week of the year. I know sponsors are sometimes hesitant to book weeks around major holidays, but, well, Daring Fireball is never “closed”. And traffic t...

Robby Soave, writing at Reason, “Pete Hegseth’s Acceptance to West Point Is a Story”: Here’s what happened. On Wednesday, Hegseth posted on X that ProPublica — which he described as a “Left Wing hack group” — was planning to publish a bombshell report contradicting Hegse...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple plans to stop selling the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, and third-generation iPhone SE in European Union countries later this month, to comply with a regulation that will soon require newly-sold smartphones with wired charging to be equipped ...