FeedCity

Here is the monthly archive for Scripting News in OPML, for September. I've been systematically creating this archive since May 2017. And also have been able to reconstruct the archive for most of Scripting News going back to 1994. I've been doing a lot of work with the contents of this archive in the last month.

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss Apple’s September product announcements, and Meta’s Orion prototype AR glasses. Absolutely no baseball talk, almost.

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Allen Pike:

As I understand it, my first experience in a self-driving car was typical:

• Minute 1: “How safe is this? Will it notice that cyclist? What about those construction cones?”
• Minute 10: “This is wild. It’s driving so calmly and safely. I love it.”
• Minute 20: (Bored, checking my email in the back seat.)

It was like a firmware update to my brain.

Imagine how exhilarating subways must have been a century ago — zipping across cities in high-speed underground trains. All technology becomes mundane quickly. It’s kind of amazing when you notice it happening with yourself.

Om Malik, after Apple’s September 9 “It’s Glowtime” event at Steve Jobs Theater: I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves....

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The Cincinnati Enquirer: Pete Rose, the Cincinnati native who became baseball’s all-time hits leader as well as one of the most divisive figures in the sport’s history, died Monday, according to a TMZ report, which was confirmed by his agent, Ryan Fiterman. He was 83. A...

Simon Willison: Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. ...

And finally, if I were the czar of ActivityPub, I'd add Markdown support to the spec because it ain't the web if you can't link in your writing. Maybe even invent some new kinds of links, after all it's been 35 years since the first web was invented.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I'd add Markdown support to Threads so writers could use the basic communication tool of the web.

If I were benevolent dictator of BlueSky, I'd add Markdown support there too. Btw, can you really claim to be part of the social web when you don't support the web's most basic feature -- linking??

If I were benevolent dictator of Mastodon, I'd add Markdown support everywhere so we'd have links and simple styling.

New episode from the Podcast0 feed about the open source release of Frontier, still the most powerful scripting environment ever. Someday the ideas in this product will be commonplace. And I would love to use a Linux port if anyone is so inclined.

If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky or Mastodon, also post it to your blog. Not a huge deal but every little bit helps.

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Jason Snell, Six Colors: These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ev...

Thread: Much easier than struggling with ActivityPub, would be a set of functionally equivalent APIs and a common understanding of what a “post” is among various social web systems. This how we created solid interop in the blogging world, and it would work here too.

This blog has been running for: 29 years, 11 months, 22 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds. Still diggin!

BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll earlier this year. And there are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. There are many new things in this work -- the way we read the web hasn't been worked on in a long time. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. I've changed the way I develop, again. For the better, I believe.

I've fallen behind on my Podcast0 feed. This is the episode for Sept 27, 2004. And there were two podcasts on the next day, the 28th, and I'm going to re-release those over the next couple of days. Today's episode is a review of an RSS reader that Yahoo came out with. I wasn't happy with it. The next one actually kind of historic, it's about the open source release of Frontier. It's still out there, and I really want it running on Linux if anyone is interested. More later.

Every September, the whole extended family at Relay FM raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the most amazing institutions in the world. St. Jude is dedicated to curing childhood cancer and helping families affected by it. Since 2019 Relay has raised over $3 million, and their best-ever single month was just north of $775,000.

This year they’re already at $925,000, within earshot of a cool million, with three days to go in the month. Let’s make that happen.

Update, 30 September: And, boom, they hit it: $1,041,913.31 and still counting.