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Since the start of last year I have not been spending any money at Amazon. I’ve been happily buying my reading elsewhere. Today for the first time I ran into a genuine bump. I noticed that Canadian SF author Dennis E. Taylor released a fifth book in his fun and entertaining Bobiverse series last year, […]

Favorited Headless Everything For Personal AI by Matt Webb I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until […]

Photos from the New York Subway in the 1940s, by teenage Stanley Kubrick.

I am sending this out a day early as I have a new mystery book I want to finish this weekend, uninterrupted. Priorities, people! Also, I have decided that this weekend’s reading list has to be decidedly less technology. I mean, we get enough of it already. There is a lot of great non-tech writing …

Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Mac Minis with larger-capacity RAM chips — a base M4 model with 32GB of RAM, starting at $999, and the M4 Pro models with 64GB of RAM, starting at $1,999 — are “currently unavailable” on Apple.com. And estim...

Ron Conway, the longtime Silicon Valley investor and founder of SV Angel, announced on X that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Conway declined to disclose the specific type of cancer, saying he does not want speculation about his prognosis. Ron is optimistic and said that the treatment will run about …

Last week I released a new toolkit that includes docs for your AI programming partner. Ask it to read the docs, and then tell it about the editor you want. It works with WordPress sites via the wpcom API via the wpIdentity server. A new frontier. ;-)

Drakar, äliens och broderi i ett och samma nyhetsbrev. Inte så dumt! 📚

The people who call themselves Mets fans who are sad when the Mets don't make the playoffs are really Yankees fans.

My grandfather Klaas Zijlstra (1905-1993) was a farmer and cattle raiser. He grew up in Fryslân and always wanted to be a farmhand it seems (his father was a housepainter). There was ambition too, from leaving school at 12 and moving out on his 16th, he sought out farmers to work for that had a […]

Uit de Haagse krant van woensdag 25 juli 1928: Tegen radio-gerucht Raad van Amersfoort neemt maatregelen De Gemeenteraad van Amersfoort heeft een verordening aangenomen, waarbij verboden wordt radio-luidsprekers in werking te hebben met geopende deuren of vensters. Is dit waarom je bij rampen ramen en deuren gesloten moet houden alvorens de regionale radio aan te […]

Apple Design: Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement wit...

I wrote yesterday: And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized. On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded: Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positi...

This is good news, but not quite as good as I thought it was after reading the first few words

If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would find exciting and worth talking about. Then do it again. Ideally it would be something that reporters would like, that they could see themselves using. As you know, my Big Idea is give people choice of editors, for writers. But I just thought of a technical thing they could do and might make no sense, but how about running Claude skills. So anything a Claude app can do a WordPress plugin can do. I just built my first skill, and they can be Node.js apps. That's a pretty broad range of features you can support inside WordPress. Also ask users to tell you what would turn them on. Couldn't hurt, sometimes they have ideas that you as a developer never would think of. I made a few million dollars from an idea a user gave me once. Not kidding.

Sober or blotto
This is your motto
Keep muddling through

Ordering the texts for my classes … for the last time. (A solitary tear slides down my cheek.) All 19th and 20th century texts, which is somewhat unusual for me, but not altogether unrepresentative of what I do. The one book on the list I’ve never taught before is the Balzac...

A Manufacturing Town by L.S. Lowry (National Media Museum/Royal Photographic Society/SSPL/Getty Images), from an essay by Salford’s own Terry Eagleton. 

When I look at the choices offered to Americans by their two chief political parties, I always remember a line from Woody Allen’s “My Speech to the Graduates”: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Scott Hanson who works with me on all my projects is doing his WordPress development using Codex. Here's a plug-in they wrote. Loving this. So we're all turning this corner. There are so many things I want to do, but I keep hitting bumps. I recover and come back again, so far. And I go slowly. The bot wants to run at a breakneck pace, which I know from tons of experience gets you a worthless result. One of the byproducts of my current project is a /opml skill that reads and writes .opml files in a way that's compatible with all the apps that use OPML. Pretty sure of that since I published the first OPML file in 2000 or so. Not sure how I'm going to release the skill, but I want everyone to have it.