FeedCity

My dad who was a paramedic for 30 years just sent me this video. They used to show it during EMT training classes in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s pretty funny.

www.youtube.com/watch

President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up.

It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).

They all say podcasting‘s open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.

Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple.

I’m pleased to say that I will be editing another volume in the Auden Critical Editions series: the 1951 collection Nones. 

I would like to have an OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing.

Just noted that Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continu...

I wrote a this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards.

So pleased to see Philip Hensher’s rave review of Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch. I had the privilege of reading Nonesuch during the process of composition, and let me tell you, it’s everything Hensher says it is. What a book. See also Andrew Motion’s review in the TLS: “These ...

A reader pointed out that the 2026 Formula 1 season starts in Australia on March 8. You will recall from October that Apple TV is now the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 in the U.S. Apple is already dabbling with live immersive sports broadcasting for VisionOS with a limi...

At my last job, at Audible (hi Audible folks, if you’re reading this!), I led the effort to port our remaining Objective-C to Swift. When I started that project, Objective-C was about 25% of the code; when I retired it was in the low single digits (and has gone even lower si...

Ordinal0 (via Hacker News): In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools. As part […]

Brent Simmons: Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears. I’ve never used Spotlight for this on macOS (preferring LaunchBar) but have […]

Mohammad Azam: We started with a simple model. Then we added a new property and transformed existing data. Then we introduced a uniqueness constraint and cleaned up duplicates before enforcing it. Each change felt small in isolation. But every one of those changes altered the structure of data already stored on disk. […] SwiftData gives […]

Paul Ford, in an op-ed for The New York Times (gift link):

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

Michigan City, Indiana, February 2026.

From the video Last chance for these old lenses.

I have way too much camera equipment, and most of it I don’t even use, so I’ve been on a selling spree lately. I sold a few things including some lenses, but when I found these two sitting on a shelf in the closet, they made me pause. They are the Zeiss 16-70mm f/4 and the Sony G 70-350mm. I made so many good images with these two back in the day… but I haven’t touched them in a while. So, to decide whether I love them or list them, I’m taking both out to Lake Michigan to shoot some amazing winter scenes and see if they can still perform.

I wrote a little article on photography as a daily habit for the Creative Eye Magazine from the Royal Photography Society. Honored to be part of their issue number 99!

Can’t imagine a better Lenten endeavor than to read and reflect on Matt Milliner’s close encounter of the chatbot kind.