FeedCity

My WordPress mirror site stopped updating on August 12. It's now updating once again. I'll try to watch it more carefully.

The Atlantis project continues. Today I'm working on the code that updates the frontier.root object database using RSS, a technique I started in 2007. I actually let the codecasting.org name lapse, figuring I'd never get back to that stuff, but here we are, doing unpredictable things.

All of a sudden it's cold here in the Catskills this morning. It's still August, I don't get what's going on. We haven't had a really hot day all month. I'm starting my workday wearing a freaking hoodie and am thinking about turning on the heat.

Apple, after previously saying it would move Hide My Email to the private.icloud.com subdomain: After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com. The whole point of an email address like this is that it can be used anywhere someone does not want to provide an address that can be tied […]⌥ Permalink

In September, the European Commission began pondering how to correct its 2009 privacy law that resulted in cookie permission banners littering the web, with the resulting proposal announced in November. Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian: EU officials said users would remain in control of their data on the internet, but new rules on cookies — the […]⌥ Permalink

Felix Kent, Defector (gift link): […] I believed then and still believe that operating a car is too difficult for human beings. This is obviously not true at the level of making a car move. Making a car move is easy. A rat can make a car move. But the level of skill involved in […]⌥ Permalink

$5300 in $100s please. That's what we said at the bank this morning.See, whenever you have a free IRL event, you tend to get a lot of no-shows. Plenty of people sign up and RSVP, but ultimately far fewer show up.This isn't a big deal if you have unlimited space and anyone ...

Wikipedia: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”...

View fullsize View fullsize Galicia, August 2026. From the video Great conditions, very little time.

After a very long and hot summer, I finally get some moody weather. But of course, it was precisely on one of the busiest days of the summer due to family.

Fixed ’em. Fixed ’em all. Well, almost all — down to 10 bugs on the NetNewsWire bug tracker. (See the Mac 7.1.3 release notes and iOS for the big list of just-fixed bugs.) This means I’ve gotten the app to the place I’ve wanted to get to for a long time, where the bug...

Chance Miller:

Not to be overshadowed by the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, Apple today has also released an updated version of its Polishing Cloth. In an age of everything getting more expensive, the new Polishing Cloth is cheaper than before at $9 (down from $19). [...]

Apple released the Polishing Cloth in October 2021 and sold out almost instantly. While it has become a meme, it is genuinely a good polishing cloth for your Apple gear.

Moore’s Law comes for everything eventually.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Apple has officially announced its next product event, where it will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The event will take place on September 9 at 10 am, PT. The tagline reads “Surprise and shine,” and the invitation features a glowing Apple logo with a sun shining through.

Apple generally prefers Tuesdays, but on years when Labor Day falls in the second week of September, they move it to Wednesday.

European Commission: From baby-monitors to smart watches, from apps to computer programs, connectable hardware and software are omnipresent in our daily lives. Less apparent to many users is the security risk such products may present. The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying software or hardware products with digital elements. The […]

Omarchy: Omarchy is an omakase Linux distribution based on Arch, the tiling window manager Hyprland, and the desktop construction-kit Quickshell. It ships with everything a modern, savvy computer user needs to be productive immediately. From Neovim (btw) to Chromium, Obsidian to LibreOffice, and Kdenlive to OBS Studio. Hell, even a retro Winamp-style music player is […]

Richard Speed (Hacker News 3): XCancel’s home page now contains some minimal text stating: “On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.” It says the service has been halted “until further notice.” […] Nitter provided a way for users […]

After reading Bill Gates' story, I concur. I have seen bad behavior by Claude Code where it was doing tests of our S3 support, and it overwrote files that were critical to our apps, knocking at least one of them off the air. I'm at a loss as to what I should trust it with,...

Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape:

How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.

The corrected and slightly improved paperback version of my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles is now available. I really do think it’s his masterpiece and highly recommend it to you. Back when the first edition came out I wrote a brief essay on it for the PUP website. 

XCancel:

On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.

The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.

We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.

Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

I didn’t want to jinx them, but this obvious threat hanging over their head was the main reason I never linked only to XCancel rather than directly to tweets on x.com. This sucks not just because some people don’t want to visit x.com, but because XCancel was a faster-loading website with no bullshit.

Update: Nitter, the open source project that XCancel was an instance of, got the same cease and desist and also shut down.