FeedCity

Wednesday waves. 🌊👋

Plus a field test of my new waterproof boots from Wildling.

The Pet Shop Boys have a new album out: Created in collaboration with Alan Turing biographer, Andrew Hodges, and performed by Pet Shop Boys and the Manchester Camerata Octet with narration by Juliet Stevenson, string arrangements by Sven Helbig and additional production, programming and synthesisers by Maarten Vos, the work explores eight significant chapters in […]⌥ Permalink

PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart. 

Not too long ago, Apple accessory company Elevation Lab released a product designed to silence the noises made by AirTags when they are out of range. That is a reasonable idea for an AirTag installed in something someone might steal. It is also a dangerous product in the hands of someone who might want to […]⌥ Permalink

I have been writing a special Tuesday newsletter for paid subscribers for five years now, which means there’s a bunch of really good stuff just kind of hiding in the archives over there. I’ve tagged a lot of of it on the newsletter homepage in categories like “notebooks,” “mixtapes,” “tutorials,” “zines,” “typewriter interviews,” etc. But […]

Last week’s newsletter began: An out-of-town developer tore a house down at the end of my street and cut down every single tree on the lot. As I watched the big T-Rex excavator claw down the walls, a thought ran through my head: If it can be built, it can be torn down. True of […]

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This was not entirely pre-planned, but: it turns out I’m publishing a typewriter interview with a cartoonist every week of October, and I just now realized they’re all contributors to The New Yorker. The first two are Roz Chast and Paul Noth! (Can you guess the other two?)

firstSentence, a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to display for an untitled post. It's always been a klooge, but this time with Claude's help we're using a new API in JavaScript, and supposedly it really works. I'm using it in one of my apps, and you might find it useful too, and let me know if it works for you.

The browser and the web it defines is a hairball in a hairball in a hairball in a hairball in a hairball.

The hairballs are named Chrome, Firefox, MSIE, Netscape, Mosaic.

Each in turn has had their way with the web.

The stack of hair defines a "web" that is far far away from the web we started with.

It was going pretty good for a while, if you could live with the all the modal popovers and paywalls, but now the current owners are excluding old sites, and imho when you do that, it's not the web any longer.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playin...

Finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot — for maybe the twelfth time. As I grow older and older, it grows greater and greater. 📚

Ring Rhyme in Latin - by Adam Roberts: “In terra Mordoris tenebrosissima” is especially fine. 

I'm a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was Yosemite or something like that (will check). In this version, Tahoe, it's entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to the top of the screen you get the menubar, but unfortunately there is no obvious command in the menu for undoing the mistake. I still don't know which gesture does this. And btw, the longtime Mac bug where some keystroke moves the dock to another window, that's still here. I can tell as I'm clicking the mouse, too late to stop, that this is one of those times. I've memorized a finger macro to get it back, but it used to piss me off a lot, but now it's kind of a gentle reassurance that someone is remembering how we got here.

Ethan Marcotte is tired of all the recommendations and suggestions in internet services. For the most part, I am, too. At the very least, I dislike how much they feel imposed or as a default, as though my use of most services should flow through the suggestions they provide. Even calling them “suggestions” or “recommendations” […]⌥ Permalink

Finished reading: The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley. One-third of this massive book concerns the personal and political life of TR; one-third concerns his astonishing achievements in the conservation of the American landscape and its creatures; and one-third describes his killing of animals, thousands of animals. It often seems that TR wanted to protect the willdlife of American from everyone except him and his friends. His bloodlust was a kind of mania, and Brinkley can do nothing (who could?) to explain how it co-existed with his lifelong commitment to protect wild animals and their environments. 📚

Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They're acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren't doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn't. It killed the web as a writer's platform. If you want to compete with Twitter, drop your proprietary protocols, hook up to the web standards, and peer with your competitors. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter joined you. They have the same kind of competitive spirit that big companies have. It's time for their competitors to not win users through guilt, rather by providing a better service.

After Ukrainian forces struck several data centres belonging to Russian internet services giant Yandex, a couple of charts began circulating social media purportedly showing a decline in traffic from Russian bots. The narrative suggested — by people like political scientist Ian Bremmer, journalist Jamie Dupree, TPM’s Josh Marshall, and historian Timothy Snyder — is that […]⌥ Permalink

Washington, September 2026.

From the video Backpacking into the heart of the North Cascades looking for the perfect photograph .

Mary Alyce Stephens (née Neader), posting on Cringely’s Facebook account: Hello, this is Mary Alyce, Bob’s wife. I am coming to you with immense sadness to let you know that Bob passed away. His obituary follows. His family is not requesting anything, however, if you wou...