FeedCity

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.

It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.

Last week I did an unusual podcast about three huge birds fighting over a fish in a nearby pond. Usually I write and talk about technology or politics, but this was such a compelling story and I didn't have any photos or video, so I did a verbal story. Hope you enjoyed it. W...

news.scripting.com continues to grow. There must be some word of mouth. Or perhaps people are refreshing it more often. I have no analytics except for a hit counter. Maybe I should do a little work on the site. Let me know if you have any feature requests.

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers them. Period.

San Francisco, August 2025.

From the video A hidden gem in San Francisco.

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law: CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the U...

It's the future, and the great power of the X galaxy, on the planet Y of star Z, has accidentally elected a despotic prime minister who also happens to be an excellent standup comic. Kind of like Robin Williams, from the planet you come from, but he's a centipede and only br...

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.

2003: "The Rule of Links is that you link when it's appropriate to do so. Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence."

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web.

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.

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After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month. The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily...

Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premiu...

Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week: Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Cons...

Elon Musk, Friday:

Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!

In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.

If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?

John McCoy, on the supposedly controversial Cracker Barrel rebranding: But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded ch...

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Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.)

Expected announcements for this event include:

• iPhones 17 (regular, Pro, Air)
• Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3
• AirPods Pro 3

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association:

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.⁶ We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

The footnote refers to the OED’s entry for “Calvinball”.

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating.