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...

I’m not really sure that I care whether bots scrape Newsonaut and dump its contents into training grounds for large language models.

In fact, I kind of hope they do. There is nothing sacred on this site. If it gets chewed up and spat out into the primordial soup of the Internet, then so much the better.

Maybe my permuted content will slightly improve the response that someone, somewhere gets from an AI chat. I’m pretty sure any scrapings from Newsonaut would be accurate and possibly, at times, entertaining.

So welcome, bots. I embrace the slopiverse.

Addendum: OK, so they took it all long ago without my consent. A man can dream of freedom, can’t he?

This marks my 43rd post of the year, which is one more than the 42 I had in 2020. My next goal is to surpass the 64 posts I had in 2014. My best ever was 169 in 2011. In those days, though, it was more like a job. Now, writing has become one of the great pleasures of my life. You can see a graph of my progress on the Explore page.

On the one hand, there are plenty of HTML entities that can be used as icons on your blog. On the other hand, just try finding them! I wrote about this recently when I pointed out that there is indeed unicode for the magnifying glass commonly used for search. It’s just not c...

#julyreply

I replied three times for Robert Birming’s JulyReply challenge.

He now has a new challenge called AuguStory, where you write the story of your blog. That seems like something I could sink my teeth into.

Here are links to my three July replies:

» I seldom own my books

» Markdown makes learning HTML less scary

» Your metablogging is awesome

Blaugust is upon us, an annual challenge to set goals for the number of times you post in a month. Top prize goes to those how publish every day during August, but even five times will win you a bronze award. This is the first time I have heard of Blaugust, but a few years a...

While looking for something else, I came across a folder on my Mac called “free for X”. In it were a bunch of plain text HTML files which together made up a Mac freeware website that was the predecessor to thriftmac. So I uploaded it to a server, opened the home page and ...

Katrina Evans has started a pixel club based on little windows. I’m an old dog willing to learn new tricks so I headed over to Piskel and gave it a shot using one of Katrina’s window templates. I decided to acknowledge wildfire season with a sunrise in the smoke. An orange orb in the grey was an easy start for a beginner. More often, I have a nice view of rivers, mountains and clear blue skies. If I get better at pixel art, I’ll try to show those instead. Edit: Katrina warned me they can be addictive, and sure enough I now have an animated gif of the Newsonaut rocket taking off.

#julyreply Michael Harley prefers to read books on an e-reader, and makes sure he truly owns them by stripping off the DRM if possible. » I own my books This is not a problem for me because I mostly borrow books from the library with an app called Libby. The library system w...

#julyreply A post by Adam Newbold about how to ensure your website is portable had me thinking about how I sometimes do exactly what he advocates — upload HTML files to a server. Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day The idea is that y...

[This post is for RSS Club members only.] RSS Club was started by Dave Rupert as a way of providing RSS-only content. I took it as both a technical challenge and a thought-provoking way of talking about the pros and cons of RSS. One of the things I like most about RSS is tha...