FeedCity

App icons in MacOS are not mere buttons. You can drag them, move them, and drop things on them. You click them to select, and double-click to launch. They are richer objects that deserve a richer visual vocabulary.

Wednesday waves. 🌊👋 Video + photo.

Shot from up above on a sand dune. The audio is meh because of 15 mph winds. You can hear the dune grass crackling.

“Aamir F.”, on behalf of the Google Earth Team: We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on […]⌥ Permalink

Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:

Do you know anything about bookies?

What makes you think I know anything about bookies?

A bookie didn’t pay me off once.

What does that suggest to you?

I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.

What else would you like to discuss?

What do you know about racketeers?

Thanks to Bob Peterson for the link.

Vint Cerf, by the way, retired from Google last week at the spry age of 83.

Tyler Hall:

We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how 3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail.

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem.

So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane. And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon remains even when you quit the app.

Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.

Here’s a new mixtape, which was really inspired by me being depressed and watching Deerhunter do “Nothing Ever Happened” live in 2011 and getting really obsessed with the late Josh Fauver’s short scale bass. (The title comes from one of my favorite Bob Pollard lyrics: “I climb up on the house / weep to water […]

After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)

But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.

Asturias, June 2026.

From the video You don't need much to go on a mini photography adventure.

Mike Bombich: The USB device drivers report that they are destroying the “Rocket XTRM Q” device due to a “link change interrupt” APFS filesystem drivers report a “dangling mount”, failures to finish transactions before unmount, and dozens of “media is not present” errors.[…] storagekit collects a report of the “disappeared” devices and notices that one […]

Codeux Software: Textual is the world’s most popular application for interacting with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatrooms on macOS. […] Textual supports very powerful modern technologies such as the latest IRCv3 specifications, native IPv6, client-side certificate authentication, and much, much more in an easy to navigate, clutter free experience. Unfortunately (via Jan Lehnardt): Textual has […]

macOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 3 Release Notes: Apple Intelligence for Home requires an iCloud+ subscription starting at 2TB. Via Rajesh Pandey: As part of the upgrade, the Home app uses AI to generate summaries of motion alerts from compatible HomeKit Secure Video cameras. […] Apple likely requires the 2TB iCloud+ tier because HomeKit Secure […]

The latest typewriter interview is with violinist and author Vijay Gupta. A reader said he wished I’d included audio of the musical notation, but I think it’s a nice little treat for those of us who’ve spent years learning to read music. Walk yourself over to your instrument and check them out for yourself!

Mark Haddon let it slip on his Instagram that he’s working on a typewriter interview for me: before i even get started i need to celebrate the questions which are a) some of the best i’ve ever been asked (swipe for a selection) b) arrive *in the post* and c) come with a fabulous hand-made […]

Jennifer Daniel did not accept the analog constraints of the typewriter interview, and that’s what made this one extra great.

I throw a few things in the car and head to the northern coast of Spain, where not only I get some relief from the intense heat but I also get to make some beautiful images. It doesn't take much to do these things.

I vaguely recall first trying some version of Eliza back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is ...

The Eliza Archaeology Project: ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s [sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Wei...

That story reminds me that my old friend Ken Myers, who has interviewed thousands of people in his time, started out in radio as a student at the University of Maryland, where the very first person he ever interviewed was Johnny Cash. 

TIL that when, in 1935, Gertrude Stein did a book tour in support of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she visited the University of Texas and was interviewed by a student journalist named Walter Cronkite.  

Nikolai Ge, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1882)