FeedCity

I remain unhappy with Apple’s passkey backup story. There’s little documentation about this, but from what I can tell: There are no automatic versioned backups. (Syncing is not backup because it doesn’t protect you against human error, bugs, or attacks.) Even if you have a Time Machine backup, it’s not possible to restore it to […]

Tonight, I enjoyed the Zodiak while waiting for my soup to simmer. I love Karl Grandin’s doodles on the can. 👽

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the opening of Apple Music Hall, a brand-new state-of-the-art live music venue in London’s storied Battersea Power Station, designed to connect artists and fans through bespoke, intimate performances unlike anywhere else.

Apple might be the most interesting architecture company in the world this century. They have a core look and feel they apply to their own facilities built from the ground up (e.g., Apple Park, certain flagship retail stores), but they also have tremendous respect for historic buildings they take over.

The balconies in Apple Music Hall are bronze, but the lighting (at least in Apple’s photos) is so warm that the balconies look a little like giant Mac Minis.

Dan Luu serves up some copiously documented claim chowder: After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future. Note that I didn’t attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorre...

Michael Steil: Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC. Playing around with the GXSlidemaster app,...

Currently reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot. This won’t be my last time reading this infinitely lovable book, but it will be my last time teaching it, so I’m warning my students to expect some melancholy moments. 📚

New example script, shows how to build an RSS feed from a single Mastodon user's account. This is mainly to show past Frontier users how the new product is progressing, not released yet.

Apple: Siri AI is a completely reimagined version of Siri that is more personal and powerful. With detailed responses and rich, natural conversations, Siri AI helps users get more done than ever before. Built on Apple Intelligence, this new version of Siri draws on personal context understanding to help users find what they need in […]

Ken Case: OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions. […] In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for […]

Apple: iPhone Handoff lets you use one phone number between two devices, so you can switch between them whenever you want. It makes it easy to move back and forth between devices optimized for the moment — like weekday business or weekend adventures. […] After iPhone Handoff is set up, one iPhone becomes the main […]

Alexander Cohen: The Post reported that UK security officials had issued such a TCN, in secret, in January 2025, requesting that Apple create a way to access encrypted iCloud data belonging not just to UK users, but to Apple users worldwide. The chutzpah of it all was astonishing. Apple’s position (privately, since they were prohibited […]

Alex Blake (Hacker News): The ‘ads’ in question appear in the Settings app in iOS. They can be found near the top of the iPhone’s display and promote several products to the user, including paid-for iCloud+ storage, free trials for services like Apple Music and Apple TV, and the AppleCare+ extended warranty. Infuriatingly for iOS […]

Juli Clover: The iPhone 18 Pro Max has a battery capacity over 20 watt-hours, which means there are additional shipping requirements. If an iPhone 18 Pro Max needs to be shipped somewhere, its maximum battery capacity has to be limited through firmware. […] Customers who need to ship the iPhone 18 Pro Max for repair, […]

Mike Bombich: I remember seeing this one way back in Big Sur; you’d create a perfectly functional bootable copy of the system, but it wouldn’t show up in the Startup Disk Preference Pane. Apple ultimately resolved that issue in macOS Monterey, but now we’re seeing it again — unfixed in the Golden Gate release candidate. […]

Apple Developer: As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing changes to its App Tracking Transparency framework in the European Union. Beginning with iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers will have the option to use an alternat...

I don’t know what truck this video fell off the back of, why it took 16 years, or how it came into the hands of “Sir Mix-A-Lot Rare Music”, but I’m sure glad it did.

Apple Support: iPhone 18 Pro Max offers a huge increase in battery life, in part due to increasing the battery capacity to over 20 watt-hours (Wh). Devices with a single-cell battery over 20 Wh have additional shipping requirements in most countries and regions. To addre...

Unsung heroes of the web -- librarians.

The early web was just this incredible new tool that no one knew yet how it would be used and what it would be used for.

The first Yahoo was a card catalog.

Netscape had a What's New page with links to interesting stuff.

apple.com was a Unix box under a librarian's desk. They started adding stuff that was useful to users and developers. No business model, just the librarian approach to information. Circulate it.

I think if a new web is to be born, it's because it's again a possibility with the advent of AI.

Listen to librarians, they probably have some good ideas of where to start.

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“Update My Phone & Apps: Guide” is an iOS app from developer Tair Olzhasev. By default, the only thing it does for free is give you a “Check for Updates” button that launches the system Settings app. It doesn’t even take you to the General → Software Update screen. It ju...