FeedCity

Try going to web.org in a recent version of Chrome.

There’s a real “*Why do we need this?*” question here and I don’t think Apple’s video answers it, at all. You need to think you want it if you’re going to buy it. And even if you already had a HomeView set up, I’m not sure how often you’d use it instead of your phone, or instead of just talking to it like a screenless HomePod.

I didn't notice it at the time, but in the all the work we did about blogging, we had open channels of communiation, meant to make everyone feel like they had a stake. Big mistake, because they took this too literally and the way many people communicated was through orders, d...

Realization: There are two webs, one created by TBL that flourished until about 2006, and the VC-web that appealed to the masses, and grew like a weed -- and they called it the web. The confusion -- you could read it in a web browser, but that didn't make it of the web. My r...

Glenn Fleishman:

I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for inflation. So I charted it.

I suppose this doesn’t mean Apple has given up on making Apple TV content accessible, but the price-accessible path is just using the Apple TV app on the crapware OS your “smart” TV runs.

Currently reading: Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America by Douglas Brinkley 📚. Brinkley reports that one Civilian Conservation Corps company in New Mexico had a newsletter called The Woodpecker in which this psalm was featured:

Roosevelt is my shepherd, I shall not want;
He maketh me lie down on straw mattresses,
he leadeth me inside a mess hall,
he restoreth to me a job.
He leadeth me in the paths of reforestation for his country’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poison oak and ivy,
I will fear no evil, for he is for me.
His blankets and uniforms, they comfort me.
He prepareth a saw and ax before me in the presence of my commanding officer,
my shoes runneth over.
Surely beans and employment will follow me all the days of Roosevelt’s administration
and I shall dwell in a tent forever.

Angine de Poitrine in Lego

Sun-ha Hong, Tech Policy Press: Sometimes, failures do lead to wider stigma and skepticism around the technology in question. But this does not happen anywhere near as often as the massive levels of investment and inflated promises might warrant. The distinct characteristic of tech hype of the 21st century is the overwhelming centralization of wealth, […]⌥ Permalink

Bill Marczak, et al., of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab: This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps […]⌥ Permalink

Re: my post today on the still-vaporware Tesla Roadster and Benedict Evans’s maxim that “Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers”, a reader sent me this YouTube short of Charlie Munger’s answer to a question at Daily Journal’s 2020 shareholder meeting regarding Tesla’s volatility and Musk’s self-promotion. Munger said:

My thoughts are two. I would never buy it, and I would never sell it short.

[Audience laughs.]

I have a third comment. There was a man out in Los Angeles for years named Howard Ahmanson. He once said something that I’ve taken to my heart: “Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.” I think Elon Musk is peculiar and he may overestimate himself, but he may not be wrong all the time.

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors back on 9 March 2015: Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday at the “Spring Forward” media event in San Francisco announced that Apple TV will now cost $69, discounted from its regular price of $99. The new price for the set-top box arrives o...

Apple Developer News: As outlined in our App Review Guidelines, pornographic material has long been prohibited on the App Store — this includes apps that generate nudity or sexually explicit imagery, such as “nudification” apps that create sexually explicit images of rea...

Mark Zuckerberg, on X: Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple. John Ternus, replying: Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, ...

From the NetNewsWire blog: The latest version of NetNewsWire for iOS supports iPhone Duo, which is very much a novel iPhone with toolbars running up the side and all kinds of behavior. How we did it: we didn’t do any work at all. We built the app using Xcode 27.1 and th...

If you think Musk is either completely legitimate and trustworthy or an utter fraud, you are wrong. He has led his companies to extraordinary accomplishments, *and* he has made promises based on complete bullshit. He is a shameless bullshitter who *sometimes* delivers.

Apple (xip, downloads): Xcode 27.1 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27.1, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27.1 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27.1 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later. […]

Glenn Fleishman: The odds of this change in standards causing a security breach and your messages being exposed seem unlikely, at least right now. But after scrolling through conversations and seeing what’s going on, I feel Apple has omitted important signals for users when iMessage suddenly stops being used during a conversation. […] The impact […]

Mary Alyce Stephens (Hacker News, Reddit, TidBITS Talk): Mark Stephens, known to much of the world as Robert X. Cringely, passed away on October 3, 2026. He was 73. Mark was a gifted writer, journalist, storyteller, husband, father, brother, and friend. To millions of readers and viewers, he was Robert X. Cringely, the witty and […]

Tried a Wirecutter podcast about the state of sound bars. I thought, wow if they could really cover this I might try buying one again. But it was one of those all giggles shows and people saying how they didn't know anything about soundbars except that they suck. The person t...