I was recently diagnosed with both mild hearing loss and tinnitus. The hearing loss rarely bothers me, but the tinnitus flares up occasionally and can be quite irritating. While getting my hearing test, the audiologist suggested hearing aids would make ambient sounds louder ...

I was struck by this ad on the bottom corner of the front page of The Globe on Feb. 13, 1913. The newspaper was founded in 1844, and later absorbed The Mail and Empire to form The Globe and Mail in 1936, according to Wikipedia. A friend of a friend found it in an old cabinet.

The ad points out that much of the money Canadians spend on American goods is influenced by U.S. advertising. Over a hundred years later, that still holds true. Ask yourself why you buy certain brands. Are they really any better? Or are you just familiar enough with the name to make you feel comfortable buying it?

The Globe's solution, of course, was for Canadian businesses carry out advertising campaigns in the newspaper. That's one solution. The other is for Canadian consumers to think twice before being swayed by ubiquitous U.S. marketing.

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I continue to experiment with my Linux-based ThinkPad. I’m coming to grips with software, having found a nice (and free) writing app called GhostWriter. It’s not quite as nice as the IA Writer on my Mac, but it’s still pretty good. I’m using it now to write this post. On the...

Last night we were treated to a spectacular display of fireworks. The barrage lasted several minutes, with no pauses between the blasts. I suspect they were being fired from two or three points simultaneously. That was the best one. There were shorter, less-intense displays ...

So I’m driving along the information superhighway, being careful to obey the speed limit, when suddenly I hear a siren. It’s the internet police. Not again! During my first run-in with the internet police, the officer explained to me the difference between “lie” and “lay.” I...

I’ve long be Linux curious, and my wish finally came true over the weekend when my son installed Fedora and GNOME on an old ThinkPad for me. As I understand it, Fedora is the name of one of the Linux distributions, a.k.a. distro, and GNOME is the name of the desktop environm...

Every once in awhile, I see a beautiful, minimalist blog with impeccable typography, like this one from Manuel Moreale, and think I should do something similar with Newsonaut.

But then I think Newsonaut is already minimalist. Take away the sun and stars and it’s especially minimalist. Try it for yourself with this button.

Minimalize!

That will never work for me. If I’m going to turn my inner space into outer space, I need it to be in something that looks like outer space.

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Like a lot of people, I’m bummed about Reddit cutting off RSS access. I have a few subreddits that I like to check on regularly in my feed reader, and their feeds will no longer exist after mid-November. The good news is that Lemmy, the fediverse alternative to Reddit, has R...

This is now officially the third highest yearly output for Newsonaut, having surpassed my 64 posts in 2014. The only years when I did better were 2012 with 135 and 2011 with 169. Yes, this is my 66th post of 2026. There has been a resurgence lately in the indie web, and I’m...

Firefox 157 has a slick new interface. And the internet is losing its shit. The updated interface has been dismissed as “round” and already you can find instructions on how to roll back to the old look. And that’s a mild insult compared with “needless and ugly.” Such drama! ...

I’ve said in the past that I find posts written all in lower case to be hard to read, and I stand by that. I need a few capital letters here and there to get my bearings. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an appreciation for lower case. In fact I downright prefer it. Capita...

When the comics character Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” he was referring to pollution. He might have said the same thing about the dreaded algorithm. In a recent post at Skuthus, Skyler points out that the Bear Discover “trending list is full of naysayers,...

You’re driving along the information superhighway when suddenly you hear a siren, so you pull over. It’s the internet police. The officer gets out and comes over to your window. “What seems to be the problem, officer?” “I had to pull you over because I noticed you used the w...

[This post is for RSS Club members only.] There are four sites I occasionally check to catch up on what’s happening in the indieweb world: Bubbles, Bear Discover, Pika Pulse and Pagecord. In two of them you find posts about people’s hobbies, things that interest them, update...

If the main thing that attracts you to Apple’s new iPhone Duo is the larger display, keep in mind that the iPad mini is also available.

The iPhone Duo display is 7.6 inches, while the iPad mini display is a bit bigger at 8.3 inches.

And then there’s the price. The iPad mini, with cellular, comes to about one third of the price of an iPhone Duo.

Granted, there are things the Duo can do that the mini can’t, chief among them being the ability to fold. It has more screens and a better camera.

Still, with the iPhone’s screen size now approaching that of an iPad mini, you might want to look at this much less expensive alternative.

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Star Trek is now a Canadian enterprise. Here’s what made it so

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Some of my mother’s ashes are in a little cove in a little lake nearby.

In the summer, I sometimes take a kayak out for a visit. No matter what is on my mind, no matter what is troubling me, I always get the same answer.

“Have faith.”

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WHO – An author you would love to have a ‘one to one’ with? The author who comes to mind is Corey Doctorow. I mostly like his science fiction and I resonate with his essays on modern technology. My main fear is that I would not be able to hold my own, and he would soon be bo...

My post about Firefox generated a lively discussion on Hacker News, with many good points raised. The top comment (as of this writing) summed things up well: “It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to pus...

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” According to Wikipedia, it’s an adage that goes back to 1512 in Germany. People have known for hundreds of years that you should be careful not to throw out a good and vital thing in your zeal to get rid of a minor annoyance. I ...

During the last week, 39 per cent of visitors to Newsonaut were using Linux. That’s about as hard-core indie as you can get when it comes to systems.

Although I’m on macOS myself, I’m glad to see that my small indie contribution is making headway among Linux users. I have respect for their do-it-yourself spirit.

I was a little disappointed, though, to see that Chrome is the top browser with 60 per cent. I’d love to see Firefox doing better than a measly 12 per cent.

By the way, I’m getting these stats from GoatCounter, a donation-supported open source analytics platform that I use to satisfy my curiosity. It’s all general stuff, nothing about individual visitors.

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I’ve been doing tai chi off and on for over 40 years. I’m at the point where I feel qualified to teach it. Yet I’ve never written about it until now.

It’s hard to write about, not just for me but for anyone. I have read books and articles about tai chi and they are interesting to a certain extent, but always somehow seem lacking.

The only way you can really get an understanding of tai chi is by experiencing it. The only way you can learn is from an instructor, who in turn learned from another instructor.

Books, articles and videos can be an affirmation of your experience. They may support what you have learned in class. But they can never be a substitute for the real thing.

Tai chi has to become part of your life, something you do regularly because it embodies what you are, or what you are becoming. It’s not something out there. It’s something inside.

A 1958 “Buy Canadian” promotion from the Canadian Advertising Association, found on Reddit.

Back in 2006, when I first started Thriftmac, it was hard to find free Mac apps. In fact, it was hard to find any Mac apps at all. That meant snapping up links to pretty much any freeware I could find. On the plus side, it also meant that those few apps were likely maintaine...

Before and after: In AR mode, the centre of the galaxy is on the other side of a heat register in the floor. Galactic Compass is an iPhone app that does one thing and one thing only — shows a big green 3-D arrow pointing to the centre of the galaxy 26,000 ligh...

I really wanted to stick with Sublime Text, and I gave it my best shot ever. But VS Code has pulled me back in again.

This time is was format on save. It’s a must-have I forgot to mention — the code you mess up becomes tidy again when you hit save.

Three packages and a few hacks later, I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted. Meanwhile, with VS Code, it takes zero effort.

But what about those slow cold starts. They’re still there — 23 bounces in the dock plus eight seconds of non-bounce waiting. So a total of about half a minute compared with near instant for Sublime Text. And this is after another round of Claude helping me optimize.

My solution is the same one I have for Bitwarden, another slow poke. Just leave it running.

It’s popular for certain news organizations to have their reporters ask politicians how many genders there are. The “right” answer, apparently, is two. But a question like this is not fair to the politician or to voters. A politician’s opinion about the number of genders is ...

Sometimes, in conversation, someone will say a word or phrase and immediately follow it up with “Oh, I guess we’re not allowed to say that.” Usually it’s something racial, but it might also refer to sex or gender. I’m never sure how to respond. I mean, why would you want to,...

In the Newsonaut colophon, I list VS Code with the caveat: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” This is a line from The Godfather Part III where Michael Corleone expresses his frustrations over being unable to get out of the mafia. It was also parodied in T...

This is my entry for AuguStory, a blogging challenge from Robert Birming to tell the story of your blog. Once upon a time, Newsonaut was called Newsloops. The name was a mashup of news and Kamloops, reflecting my frequent commentary on local news for the newspaper where I wo...