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Oct 29, 2024: botsin.space shutting down highlights one of the biggest weaknesses of the Fediverse: lack of true portability. That’s a lot of history …
Oct 26, 2024: Ashes of Man (Sun Eater #5) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: This series has not shied away from killing off major characters, to say the least, but …
Oct 25, 2024: Beautiful ad campaign from Mullvad: At Mullvad VPN, we have a very clear position on marketing. We have a strong policy against paying for reviews, a …
Oct 23, 2024: Pocket Casts has a cool unintended side effect of how it syncs to devices. As it replays my history of subscribing and unsubscribing the list of …
Oct 18, 2024: Kingdoms of Death (Sun Eater #4) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: I couldn’t stop. There’s something about the story line and the gradual …
Oct 12, 2024: The West Wing came out on Blu-ray on October 1st!
Oct 7, 2024: Demon in White (Sun Eater #3) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: I’m appreciating more the time-skips and forward references but I’m still not …
Sep 25, 2024: Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: The deus ex machina was a little much here, but also clearly not necessary from a plot …
Sep 25, 2024: We want to inform you that some of the albums and tracks you purchased on Qobuz will no longer be available for re-download after October 1, 2024. …
Sep 2, 2024: The Pariah starts a fun (completed) series by Anthony Ryan, and is on sale for $2.99.
Aug 30, 2024: Empire of Silence (Sun Eater #1) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: There’s something interesting here, at least at the core. The world building is …
Aug 17, 2024: Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: This was an interesting one. A lot of disconnected and reconnected plot lines that danced around …
Aug 4, 2024: The Roku channel might be the most inconvenient “channel” to ever host baseball games. No tvOS app, no webOS app. And when you finally get playback …
Jul 25, 2024: River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I loved the hints throughout of the impact of the actions as perceived a few hundred years later; really a …
Jul 7, 2024: I think my servers have appreciated the move out of the poorly ventilated cabinet they were hanging out in.
Jul 5, 2024: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I was a bit disappointed by the last Kay novel, but this one is a return to form. I love how well we marinate …
Jun 29, 2024: Absolutely the right reaction to court-ordered censorship. OpenDNS Suspends Service in France Due to Canal+ Piracy Blocking Order
Jun 23, 2024: knock is the most convenient way I have ever dealt with DRM removal from legal puchases (Kobo.com in this case). What a gift, but since killed by the …
Jun 17, 2024: The Will of the Many (Hierarchy #1) by James Islington ★★★★★: Solid, unpredictable, interesting world building and plot. An absolute joy of a novel …
Jun 10, 2024: 14 years between videos on their channel, gotta love it. I miss ska.
Jun 8, 2024: Hard-hitting journalism from the San Francisco Standard: People who work at restaurants near the building said OpenAI employees dine at their …
May 18, 2024: Swift’s string manipulation is one of its biggest misses. It focuses on Unicode clarity at a cost of what programmers actually need it to do. …
May 13, 2024: Part of the @system76 terms for purchasing hardware includes this weird provision: You will not register or use any Internet domain name that contains …
Apr 29, 2024: The best part of macOS 14 is turning off iCloud Drive and still having CloudKit function.
Apr 22, 2024: Surprisingly easy to send myself pgp-encrypted email from a server without thinking about it: … | { printf "Subject: subject\n\n”; gpg --armor …
Apr 20, 2024: Moving from Fastmail to Proton Mail, it compressing mail contents reduces my email storage size from 5.7 GB to 1.7 GB.
Apr 17, 2024: Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★☆☆: A fun but minor side story in the Fionavar Tapestry world. Happy to enjoy it, but a little outside of the things I …
Apr 13, 2024: This episode of Sesame Street (5304) features a segment of a discussion between Sarafina and Meadowlark. Absolutely baller names. Like S-tier.
Apr 9, 2024: Empire of the Damned (Empire of the Vampire #2) by Jay Kristoff ★★★★☆: The world is so rich and interesting, and the added viewpoint really helps sell …
Mar 29, 2024: Well, at least I didn’t accidentally shoot myself in the foot: $ ansible -a “xz –version” all xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5 xz (XZ Utils) …
Mar 29, 2024: There’s something really fun about poking at a project monorepo: apps, browser extension, docs, and web all in one tidy place. I have no …
Mar 23, 2024: I didn’t realize you could write arbitrary fractions in Unicode. On macOS, the shortcut key for the fraction character is ⇧⌥1. For example, “123⁄456” …
Mar 22, 2024: By a magnificently large margin my favorite band of all time is mewithoutYou. I couldn’t describe why if all the forest trees were pens and all the …
Mar 19, 2024: The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★☆: After reading several of Kay’s novels in a row, this one felt like the rare miss. I enjoyed …
Mar 10, 2024: Vivaldi is such a great power user browser. I don’t trust extensions, largely; having built-in ad blocking and now forced dark mode is such a boon. …
Mar 2, 2024: Lord of Emperors (Sarantine Mosaic #2) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: The back half of this novel really kept me on my toes; I couldn’t predict at …
Mar 1, 2024: Very impressed by Manet, an iOS music player for Jellyfin.
Feb 25, 2024: From Pebble Hunting: In 1951, when Bobby Thomson homered in the ninth inning to win the National League’s regular season, that single swing—a …
Feb 24, 2024: Monthly costs to stream baseball this year: $73 YouTube TV (no MLBN) $77 Hulu (no MLBN) $95 Fubo (and +$11 for MLBN) $100 DirecTV Stream (incl. hidden …
Feb 17, 2024: Sailing to Sarantium (Sarantine Mosaic #1) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I’m finding the best part of the author’s writing is the room to …
Feb 3, 2024: The Yuzu in this tea really kicks it up a notch.
Jan 30, 2024: A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Somehow the ending of this book made me truly feel for a side character we spent absolutely no time on. A …
Jan 24, 2024: The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle ★★☆☆☆: Full of tried-and-true retellings of the stories you’d expect, I felt like you could read Skunkworks or …
Jan 17, 2024: The Darkest Road (Fionavar Tapestry #3) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Great resolution to the trilogy. It feels like every character got a great wrap-up, …
Jan 12, 2024: The Wandering Fire (Fionavar Tapestry #2) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Getting a bit deeper into the Arthurian connections now. Definitely enjoying the …
Jan 4, 2024: The Summer Tree (Fionavar Tapestry #1) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Rarely any small plot points that left me dreading their resolution; always forward …
Jan 2, 2024: I wonder if “mint tea” will go the way of the napron and become “minty” in a few hundred years. Alexa certainly thinks so. 5 …
Jan 1, 2024: I’m (finally) reading The Fionavar Tapestry. Something I appreciate about Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing is he rarely drags a small plot point …
Jan 1, 2024: Standard Ebooks already has some of today’s newly public domain content!
Dec 27, 2023: A Veil of Spears (Song of Shattered Sands #3) by Bradley P. Beaulieu ★★★★☆: Consistently entertaining and unpredictable. Continuing the world building …
Dec 14, 2023: System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells ★★★★☆: Surprisingly difficult to jump back into this series. After orienting myself, I enjoyed …
Nov 30, 2023: I Fight For The Users: [I]t’s imperative that we also build decentralized services which empower users and give them control, rather than treating …
Nov 29, 2023: New feature in rclone’s latest release: nfsmount which allows mounting on macOS without needing FUSE to be installed. Great improvement!
Nov 23, 2023: I have absolutely no idea what this captcha is asking for.
Nov 15, 2023: Sometimes Copilot’s suggestions are really quite something.
Oct 1, 2023: yq can manipulate just the frontmatter of a file with its --front-matter flag. This should be useful for trying to merge my notes on books with my …
Sep 29, 2023: The sax rendition of the national anthem at the start of this Giants game was incredible. Better than any singer. What a boss.
Sep 10, 2023: “The Pirate Preservationists: When keeping cultural archives safe means stepping outside the law” Amazon redacting or removing content, …
Aug 30, 2023: Interesting which characters Gitea labels as “ambiguous.”
Aug 26, 2023: This concert video on an HDR screen is both impressive and blinding.
Jul 19, 2023: “The much-beloved BookTok sensation…” Hmm. No thank you, book synopsis writer, I think I will skip this one.
Jun 28, 2023: Happy 50th Birthday Ethernet Perhaps the most bizarre experiment was conducted in Paris, in April 1746, by Jean-Antoine Nollet. Using a snaking line …
Jun 10, 2023: I’m going to miss Reddit. It’s been an irregular part of my life for 12 years now. It’s been responsible for countless rabbit holes …
Apr 8, 2023: Made a simple command-line Swift script: > dict quasar quasar qua·sar | ˈkwāˌzär | noun […] > dict -o quasar Opening Dictionary.app…
Apr 5, 2023: From Pebble Hunting: It was just another day doing errands, traveling the same three or four routes that made up 90 percent of life. Looking for seeds …
Apr 1, 2023: Fell for this one. I would listen, I think. Costerton drops rap album to attract Gen Z to ICANN
Mar 27, 2023: I have been waiting for .foo! Google to drop EIGHT new gTLDs
Mar 1, 2023: Interesting look at the DNSSEC signing ceremony Verisign’s Role in Securing the DNS Through Key Signing Ceremonies
Feb 27, 2023: The registrar behind .tm, .sh, .io, & .ac (Divido) just released a flurry of single-character domain names on .tm for $30,000 a piece. Think a.tm. …
Feb 26, 2023: Why yes, I am backing up my NAS right now, how did you know?
Feb 18, 2023: This peep has lived a very hard life.
Feb 13, 2023: DevUtils.app, besides being incredibly useful, also injects a fun little whimsy in its random string generator. Ocean string!
Feb 9, 2023: Interesting seeing the rate of position players pitching over time. Look at that hickey stick growth! Almost a non-event now. From Stop Wasting …
Feb 3, 2023: The San Francisco Public Library app is pretty good for both physical books and ebooks. It’s able to check out an ebook and send it to Kindle …
Jan 28, 2023: Wrote a blog post about using Uptime Kuma’s “push” monitors to track e.g. cron jobs.
Jan 28, 2023: Using Uptime Kuma push monitors Uptime Kuma has a “push” monitor type which supports sending in status updates for something like a cron job to make sure it continues to …
Jan 20, 2023: I track my reading in Calibre and export it to my website to disseminate. Just made my by-rating and by-author pages use sections. For example, all of …
Jan 14, 2023: Received my first Year of Sanderson box today, pleasantly surprised by the contents. I also enjoyed seeing my neighbors receive theirs in the mail …
Jan 7, 2023: Interesting look at the history of the ferry system in the San Francisco Bay.
Jan 3, 2023: I’m surprised how many updates whois(1) receives on a regular basis.
Jan 1, 2023: If you have HomePods and worse-than-expected battery life on iPhone, try turning off Settings > General > AirPlay > “Transfer to …
Dec 23, 2022: Put together an app to compile user profiles from Slack into a Fediverse directory. I tried out GitHub’s Copilot and I was pleasantly surprised …
Dec 20, 2022: In this article, one of the SF Standard journalists sneaks into the Open AI office to try and find a subject to interview but ends up being asked to …
Dec 20, 2022: With unlimited options in the unlaunched gTLD .music they chose belem.music (live, despite Mastodon not thinking so) as their domain name.
Dec 13, 2022: Random bug of the day: The MatterAddDeviceRequest API new in MatterSupport requires adding the _matter._tcp value to the Info.plist list of allowed …
Dec 11, 2022: Fun new Seasonal post about artichokes and their wild history de-domesticating in California.
Dec 8, 2022: I needed to put Cloudflare in front of Caddy and realized that the X-Forwarded-For header became less trustworthy since Cloudflare will pass along the …
Dec 8, 2022: X-Forwarded-For sanitization in Caddy When reverse proxies like Cloudflare proxy a request, they communicate the original request’s source using the X-Forwarded-For header. This can …
Dec 7, 2022: Interesting cascading effect of the Twitter sale: the .social gTLD saw a 435% spike in registrations.
Dec 5, 2022: The Defunctland video on Disney Channel’s Theme is enthralling. It’s an hour and a half of great storytelling surrounding the question: …
Dec 5, 2022: This opinion piece by Olivia Maki beautifully introspects the “post”-pandemic service industry: Now, more than ever, perpetuating a …
Dec 5, 2022: How landline telephones became a must-have in old San Francisco contains a neat tidbit: Shared 20-person outbound-only lines were the hook that drove …
Dec 5, 2022: A Retrospective on the IANA Transition describes how control of the DNS root servers were transitioned from IANA to ICANN as well the potential …
Dec 5, 2022: Just finished listening to the first season of the podcast uswithoutThem discussing the first album of mewithoutYou, A→B Life. The depth of the …
May 14, 2022: Sending text and files securely My desires for sharing something like credentials are all over the place: End-to-end encrypted is a must, no way around it; the options for …
Feb 21, 2022: IPv6 in a home environment IPv6 addresses are broken up into two halves: the network prefix and the interface identifier. It looks something like this, in hex notation: …
Oct 4, 2021: The version of less which ships in macOS Monterey (12.0) is 487, which was released in March 2017. Since then, it’s gained some features: Line …
Oct 2, 2021: Creating iOS simulators in bulk To work around Xcode’s disinclination for creating new simulators, I wrote a script which deletes all the current simulators and then creates …
Sep 16, 2021: Making shift-space send page up and other key mappings in iTerm2 A common problem when I am paging through less output is that, while the space key will go down a page, the shift-space shortcut does not go up. The …
Sep 14, 2021: Managing preference plists under Chezmoi Chezmoi handles my dotfiles, and it allows me to painlessly go to great levels of configuration management across machines. There’s one …
Sep 11, 2021: Technical debt that lasts forever I noticed that ls output is sorted case-sensitively on macOS; that is, “abc” is sorted after “Xyz.” It doesn’t appear …
Nov 20, 2020: Fixing slow Firefox loading when using Pi-Hole I run Pi-Hole to prevent clients on my network from loading dangerous or gross things like advertisements or tracking scripts. This normally works …
Jun 13, 2019: First, from The Dragonbone Chair: “Ko muhuhok na mik aqa nop, we say in Yiqanuc: ‘When it falls on your head, then you are knowing it is a …
Oct 19, 2018: I created iosfontsizes.com, a quick way to glance at the dynamic type sizes Apple predefines. It’s an evolution of a Gist I created which …
Sep 19, 2018: Robert Jackson Bennett, author of City of Stairs, wrote author notes for the book: Every once in a while – mostly due to reader comments – …
Sep 17, 2018: Standard Notes is an end-to-end encrypted notes syncing application built for longevity: Our revolutionary, paradigm-shifting 21st-century business …
Sep 11, 2018: Another risk for generic TLDs: your registry may turn the TLD into a spam-filled mess which permanently ruins your domain.
Jul 8, 2018: This documentary/ad from AT&T in the 1970s has Bell Labs employees introduce and describe how Unix differs from other operating systems, as well …
May 16, 2018: The Style Guide for Google’s open-source projects includes some interesting recommendations that I hadn’t seen before, including: For file …
Aug 27, 2017: Alignment rects in Auto Layout views In the UIView documentation, Apple describes alignment rects: The constraint-based layout system uses alignment rectangles to align views, rather than …
Aug 22, 2017: Doctors Without Borders uses drones to plan their operations by mapping people and infrastructure. What a smart use of of the technology. In places …
Aug 20, 2017: Better shadow performance on views There are two different uses for the shadowPath property on CALayer: Improving the performance of having a shadow Creating shadows that don’t …
Aug 13, 2017: Layout margins within a UIStackView The UIStackView property isLayoutMarginsRelativeArrangement allows insets similar to margin constraints on subviews in a UIView. Let’s consider …
Aug 2, 2017: ICANN created a history project documenting its formation nineteen years ago. I’m captivated by the interviews: corralling support and …
Aug 1, 2017: Is using a generic top-level domain a good idea? I’ve been thinking about switching over my website and email to one of the new top-level domains. This has lead me to investigating what the …
Jul 30, 2017: Libby is a nice way to browse the San Francisco Public Library’s collection of eBooks and audiobooks. It has a lot of rough edges. It makes up …
Jul 26, 2017: How Apple explains audio session prioritization, from Activating an Audio Session: I did not expect a comic when I clicked on the documentation link.
Jul 24, 2017: In Apple’s latest The Rock x Siri advertisement you can hear the Wilhelm Scream at 2m43s. After the episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz about its …
Jul 21, 2017: Age of Swords comes out next week, but that didn’t stop this Barnes & Noble from putting it out early. If I were willing to go non-digital …
Jul 13, 2017: Jeff Rosenstock’s WORRY. came out last October. Since then, I’ve listened to it dozens of times. I can’t think of an artist that …
Jul 7, 2017: I’m looking forward to Iron Gold. It’s the fourth book of the Red Rising series which explores distant future humans splintered into …
Jul 5, 2017: Personal names around the world explains the complication of names. The biggest take away: ask users for their full name and short name. Don’t …
Jul 4, 2017: Butterick’s Practical Typography has recommendations and pointers about laying out and writing copy. The ranking of system fonts is especially …
Jul 3, 2017: Vault 11 in the game Fallout: New Vegas contains an interesting experiment: how would people react if an authority tells them to sacrifice one of …
Jul 2, 2017: I’ve been listening to The History of English Podcast. It’s not easy to binge but it’s a mainstay in my weekly podcast rotation. …
Jun 28, 2015: Automating iOS app builds I believe an important part of the development process is getting a working version into the hands of others. As part of this, being able to install …
Jun 13, 2015: Localizing attributed strings on iOS In an iOS app, localization can be especially difficult when dealing with attributed strings. Fairly often, designers request something like: Read our …
Nov 1, 2014: T-Mobile: good ideas, bad experience When T-Mobile entered the wireless scene as the “Uncarrier” I was impressed. Their greatest contribution to the carrier ecosystem is …
Aug 7, 2014: Enabling bridge mode on AT&T U-verse These are instructions to configure a U-verse gateway to send all of its incoming traffic to your own router without impacting its normal networking …
Mar 5, 2014: Saving optimal JPEGs on iOS Conventional wisdom for creating a JPEG version of a UIImage is first to turn it into an NSData and immediately write it to disk like so: NSData …
Feb 26, 2014: Using the Xcode Structure menu Xcode’s Editor > Structure menu has a few great actions: These actions all act on either your cursor position or selection. Balance Delimiter …
Feb 14, 2014: Error arguments in Objective-C From the Programming with Objective-C (backup) overview from Apple: When dealing with errors passed by reference, it’s important to test the …
Feb 10, 2014: You might need to know the characters to truly appreciate, but in Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series, these quotes made me chuckle. From The …
Nov 26, 2013: Cleaning up old git branches My local git repository is full of branches which have long-since been merged: code review, one-off features, and quick bug fixes add up really …
Jul 16, 2013: Portable encrypted backups To keep track of the ever-growing array of passwords and private data, I use 1Password, which I could not recommend more. There’s a problem …
Jul 9, 2013: Getting into fantasy Science fiction has always been my favorite genre. I enjoy imagining possible futures and I’ve never stopped wondering what changes may happen …
Aug 18, 2012: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (via Contact): It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the …
Dec 23, 2011: Morality clauses in domain registration GoDaddy has received a lot of bad press for their support of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which they helped write and from whom they are …
Oct 13, 2011: Migrating from Kindle to iBooks I started off reading eBooks from the Amazon Kindle store. As time has progressed, I’ve found myself using my physical Kindle less and less. …
Sep 26, 2011: Incrementing with a bitmask Bitmasks are fun. There’s lots of little tricks you can do with them. A common situation is checking for the presence of a flag among elements …
Sep 25, 2011: From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: James: What are you after? Francisco: Money. James: Don’t you have enough? Francisco: In his lifetime, every …