FeedCity

After the election, I completely checked out of all news. No CNN or MSNBC. No online newspapers. No political podcasts. No SNL or late-night talk shows either. But the news about Hunter Biden’s pardon did break through: No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’...

Jenny Fox, children's book editor and author and the co-founder of Librarians = Literacy, calls for the New York City Department of Education to provide more schools with librarians and supports a new City Council bill to track the data.

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Book and film covers! I’ve updated Micro.blog to show little thumbnails of book covers when you blog about a book using Micro.blog or our companion app Epilogue. I wanted something visually helpful but less in your face than link preview banners. There’s also special support for Letterboxd links.

I’ve never thought custom emoji were a good idea. People say they love them, but how often are they used? Micro.blog spends a silly amount of time just downloading all the custom emoji from Mastodon instances so they can be displayed correctly. Currently 1 million custom emoji from 4000 servers. 🤪

WordLand is the easy editor that writers using WordPress always deserved. I updated the docs this morning to include very basic getting started stuff, and it now includes a link to a form where you can apply to be a tester. At this time it's limited to people who know how to write a bug report, how to find and read the JavaScript console in a web browser, and take a screen shot that shows clearly what went wrong. This the hardest part of getting a product fit for general use, and I'm too old to try to wrangle workable bug reports from well-intentioned users who basically aren't scientists. This time I'm determined to do this the right way without excess wear and tear on me. 😄

Weeks before taking office, President-elect Donald J. Trump is doubling down on tariffs. Even if the threat to impose them proves to be just a negotiating tactic or bluster, it is also a gambit that has immediate consequences. Ana Swanson, who covers trade for The Times, dis...

Donald Trump just announced that his FBI director will be Kash Patel. We know why: Because Patel himself has already suggested that in a second Trump term, law enforcement should pursue Trump’s enemies, and as a result, Trump’s pick already has leading MAGA figures in a frenzy of excitement about the persecution that’s coming. It’s all a reminder that Trump feels zero constraints of any kind, again raising the question: Are the guardrails gone? We talked to Michael Sozan, a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress and author of a useful report that grapples with this very question. Sozan explains how far Patel will be able to get in carrying out Trump’s campaign of retribution, and why there’s cause for deep alarm. 
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SEASON 3 EPISODE 74: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: Biden pardons his son. Terrific. Fully support. Now, do the rest of us. Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him...

For a while (years!) we’ve had both ActivityPub support in Micro.blog and cross-posting to Mastodon. ActivityPub is best if you want people on the fediverse to follow your Micro.blog account directly. No need to maintain a Mastodon account. Cross-posting is good if you want ...

I'm using the term "RSS-based podcasts" in place of "podcasts" to make sure whoever reads it knows to ask the question of other "podcasts," are you RSS-based? The best answer is to encourage YouTube et al to just connect their "podcasts" to RSS and everyone's happy. Like "organic cheeseburgers." :-)

Mum Foods. The best BBQ I’ve had in a long while.

One way to help RSS-based podcasts is to promote individual episodes from the past. Sometimes shows are done, but the archive contains good stuff. Not everything is based on current events. Music, art, history for example.

The Big Interview with Dan Rather podcast is a gold mine, esp when political blogs basically have nothing to say at least for a while. Just listened to his interview with Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and the Sopranos. There are nine seasons of this podcast between 2013 and 2021. Going to keep me busy for a while.

Substack’s RSS feeds are a disaster. It’s like the programmers never once looked at the XML output. You could say it doesn’t matter, but feeds and HTML that are cleaner and more readable are also usually faster to process and do something useful with.

I don’t seem like I’d be much of a skiier, do I? (I do not.) But here I am, doing skiing. It’s very (very) popular in Bend, Oregon because of the proximity to Mt. Bachelor (and to a lesser degree Hoodoo) and the outdoor lifestyle vibes here. People you know will be downhill skiing in […]

Good post by Allen Pike about Apple Intelligence. On-device AI is great for notification summaries, but falls short for much of the rest:

While an underpowered-but-automatic notification summary can be better than nothing, there isn’t a lot of purpose to an underpowered image generation app. You can tell from the name that Apple knows “Image Playground” is, at best, a toy.

Apple is a little bit trapped with their AI strategy. For some things they can’t be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. If I was Apple, I would focus only on what smaller models are great at — notifications and writing tools — and then open up Siri to be extensible with frontier models.

For the record, Bluesky has completely taken over from Threads. Threads is basically at zero, needs something to shake it up. Obviously this could be different for everyone. And engagement on Twitter is pretty close to zero. I still check in there periodically because despite what people say a lot of people I follow still post there. And I do too, since cross-posting costs me nothing. And it has been pointed out that deleting your Twitter account comes with a fairly huge risk. And if you do it, I wouldn't announce it, because anyone apparently can claim your account once it is completely deactivated. And that could create some problems for you. Probably better to hold the account indefinitely.

I've exported the data from Bingeworthy 2 in JSON and uploaded to a new public repo. It can be used to seed the ratings table for the updated instance.

And welcome to the time of year you can't remember what the day of the week is. For what it's worth today is Sunday. Feels like Monday?

And here, for the record, is the archive for November. A relatively lite month, only 87K worth of text. The norm is about 120K.