John Gruber, “X Once Again Marks the Spot”: If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts...

Back in mid-September, I wrote about reconsidering my Apple Watch use, in large part because I don’t like the promised upcoming “Audio Intelligence” features. And, I thought, it could be good to have one less always-on computer screen with me. Right? Well, I went ahead and ordered that Fitbit Air, and I’ve been...

“We built Muse to help people build the world they want.” — Alexandr Wang of Meta Most people never say what they want. It’s not because we don’t want. We want fiercely and constantly. We may not say it, but we do type it. Not directly, but it’s implied in every search we make. Every post we thumbs-up. Every video...

Last year, I wrote an article called “Seriously, Markdown” in which I gently dismantled the “nobody can do serious writing in Markdown” arguments that come up every so often. I got some pushback, none of which I confess I found particularly convincing because they invariably rehashed points I addressed in the...

For most of my life, I just wasn’t a watch person. Sometime after college, when whatever cheap watch I had at the time broke, I just stopped bothering. The advent of smartphones—my first was the T-Mobile Sidekick, which deserves its own post at some point (people either forget or just never knew that the Sidekick...

I came across a blog post today that hit me harder than expected. It’s nominally about one specific action and person—companies and people giving money to David Heinemeier Hansson’s “Omacom Foundation,” despite DHH’s well-publicized turn toward fascist ideology—but it’s also about, well, everything. Brennan Kenneth...

I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since before it was called Connected. Federico is a man of strong opinions and, from...

In July 2022, I wrote “Thoughts on Leaving California” about my move back to Florida after twenty years in the Golden State; I followed it a year later with “A Year Back in Florida”, which ended with “I’ll check back in after another year.” I’ve been doing that annually ever since, although the date has kind of...

There’s been buzz recently about how a nascent web and mobile astronomy app, Dark Hours, got wildly incorrectly rejected from Apple’s App Store. Then maybe it turned out that the rejection wasn’t so wild because Apple may well have been looking at the astrology app the developer first submitted under the name...

I’ve written before about being between two communities with very different attitudes toward our current generative AI moment: Artists, writers, and other (non-tech) creators mostly loathe it with every fiber of their being, to the point where they’ll vociferously argue that so much as asking Claude for a list of...

Back in the olden days, there was an Insert key on Mac keyboards. (There still is on PC keyboards, although in many programs it doesn’t actually do anything anymore.) If you were editing text, you had two different modes, overwrite and insert. If you were in insert mode, then when text was in front of the cursor,...

In November of last year, I wrote about what I did and didn’t want to do in Emacs. It’s great for anything that involves text editing/processing, good for certain kinds of management tasks (it’s a great Git client, and even has surprisingly useful file management tricks up its sleeve); it’s not—at least to me—great...