While poking around for Christmas music, I found this little-known recording of Louis Armstrong reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, recorded shortly before he died. The poem, first published in 1823, would be Armstrong’s final commercial recording. Armstrong taped it on February 26, 1971, on a reel-to-reel recorder at his home in Queens, New York, during his last spell of good health. Truly one of the great voices of all time. Tags: Louis Armstrong · video 💬 Join the discussion on kottk [more]

Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order. Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.  ★

You can watch the first 8 minutes of Severance season two right now on Apple TV+. The season starts on Jan 17. To prep, you might want to watch a recap and/or the excellent season one finale. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from 32 choices. One limitation is that the only options are free fonts — some of my favorite monospaced fonts aren’t free and thus aren’t included (e.g. Consolas, Berkeley Mono, or Apple’s SF Mono). Another limitation is that s [more]

Blockbuster auteur Christopher Nolan’s next movie will be an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. Here’s what we know and don’t about it so far: The film will be a “mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX technology” distributed by Universal Pictures. The Odyssey will open in theaters on July 17, 2026. The cast is said to include Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, and Robert Pattinson. Given the recent interest in retelling [more]

Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again. If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you. PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were [more]

This hotel in Monterey Bay, CA has a stick library available for dogs. “Every morning my dog would carefully pick one out to take to the beach.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

You shouldn’t be driving over 100 mph — and your car shouldn’t let you. “The NTSB recommended that automakers be required to install technology to prevent reckless speeding.”

A roundup of the words of the year for 2024, including brat, manifest, kakistocracy, polarization, brain rot, enshittification, sanewashing, girl mossing, vibe, and broligarchy. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Pricing calculator for creator economy platforms. For instance, if you have a newsletter with 1000 subscribers that pay $5/mo, Substack will cost you $500/mo, Patreon $400/mo, Ghost $19/mo, Beehiiv $39/mo, Ko-fi $6/mo, Buttondown $29/mo. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996. This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist onl [more]

Gisèle Pelicot, Dominique Pelicot, and what many men would do. “What would a woman do to an unconscious man if she thought no-one would find out?”

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to check as you await your favorite’s show’s n [more]

Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski: I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious sport with abandon. Rickey played a timid sport with flash. Rickey irritated and thrilled and frustrated and dominated and left us all wanting more. “When we were kids,” his teammate Mike Gallego said, “we played in the backyard emu [more]

Roundup 12/22/24

Rickey Henderson has died aged 65. “There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.” He was so fun to watch. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee: To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was. Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the hist [more]

Last minute gift idea for the art fan in your life: Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Saw this in the bookstore this morning and it’s such a beautiful book. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

My mouth is watering reading this retrospective by Cup of Jo’s retiring food writer, Jenny Rosenstrach. Lots of good recipes, like Smashed Pea Toasts with Ricotta? Yum. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Balkonkraftwerk: a German word meaning “balcony power plant”, aka the low-cost solar panels people are hanging from their balconies to generate extra household energy. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Mike Allen, in the bizarre notes-hurriedly-jotted-on-a-napkin house prose style of Axios: Kara Swisher, the popular podcaster and pioneering tech journalist, is trying to round up a group of rich people to fund a bid for the Washington Post, she told us. One big problem: Jeff Bezos, the owner, has shown no interest in selling. Why it matters: Swisher — who started in the Post mailroom, and became an early tech reporter at the paper (and later one of the first at The Wall Street Journal) — believ [more]

A Thirty-Year-Old Man Today vs. a Thirty-Year-Old Man in 1884. “Today: Is working toward paying off a two-bedroom condo by age seventy-five, if all goes well. 1884: Owns a drafty, four-hundred-square-foot cabin by the crick. Loves it.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Shopify executives want to emulate the right-wing project of their Silicon Valley peers

I posted this picture of my jade plant flowering on BS and a lot of people expressed surprise that jade plants flower, and I was wondering: did you know jade plants flower? Growing up, my mom always had lots of jade plants, and I was in my twenties the first time I saw flowers on jade plants in Northern California. It blew my flipping mind is what it did. The flowers are little pink stars with tiny antennae that make the flowers look like they’re sparkling. I think they’re so dainty and gorgeou [more]

Al Green released a soulful cover of R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts,” and it whips. Of the song, Green said: “I could really feel the heaviness of the song, and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it. There’s always a presence of light that can break through those times of darkness.” Last year, Green released a version of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” (via @allyourscreens.bsky.social) Tags: Al Green · music · R.E.M. · video 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

“As an entomologist, I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects.” Murder hornets eradicated from the US. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Talking with John Ganz about the tech right in power

20-minute video of carving a capital “I” in stone. I love how you can tell how deep he’s carving by the volume of the hammering. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

PLUS: What I got right and wrong about 2024

Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini, and Michael Silver have written a devastating profile of the most dysfunctional franchise in all of U.S. pro sports, the New York Jets, whose dysfunction has a clear and obvious root cause: meddling idiot owner Woody Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune). One example: A few weeks later, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of F [more]

Gisèle Pelicot is the person of the year for 2024. “She told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that ‘it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them’”.

From Literary Hub, The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of 2024. Book bannings, AI, Gaza, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Taylor Swift, Alice Munro, The Hugo Awards, etc. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Megastars used a pandemic-era grant intended to save music venues from closing to pay for sneakers and birthday parties, which is especially annoying because of how many venues closed after not receiving funding. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott writes about the $2 billion in donations her foundation gave in 2024 and also some alternate and forgotten definitions of the word “invest”: “To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Killings of Young Mothers. In the US, “when women under age 25 get pregnant, their odds of death by homicide more than double.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight. I’ve said this before but it’s incredible that they picked Eilish for this: I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went superno [more]

Hmm. I don’t know. I haven’t liked Superman in a movie since the early 80s. What do you think? Does Superman even make sense as a contemporary superhero? Tags: movies · Superman · trailers 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Joe Otterson, reporting for Variety: “Silo” has been renewed for both Seasons 3 and 4 at Apple TV+, with the fourth season set to be the show’s last. The renewal news comes as the post-apocalyptic drama is currently airing its second season. The sixth episode of Season 2 is due out on Dec. 20. The season finale is scheduled to debut on Jan. 17. I feel bad complaining about a good show not only getting renewed, but renewed through to a planned conclusion. I fucking hate when good shows get cancel [more]

The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think? Tags: Christmas · holidays · music · The Muppets · video 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the painting is an engrossing read as well as a good opportunity to appreciate van Gogh’s piece. Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting [more]

I’m an Apple News+ Article. Come and Get Me, Baby. “‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ I whisper from my protected paywall’s safe, loving embrace.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Saving this for future reference: the 25 most popular recipes published by NYT Cooking in 2024. Includes a link to the full top 50. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Thanks to a large donation, lift tickets will be free all season at Storrs Hill Ski Area in NH. “We hope this initiative brings neighbors together and inspires a love of skiing in a fun and accessible way.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Marisa Kabas correctly asserts that Substack’s latest announcement reaffirms their status as a publication (and not a platform) and as a place that will publish disinformation and hate under the guise of “free speech”. As we wrote in the Substackers Against Nazis letter, “there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale.” And by championing Bari Weiss and her worldview, Substack is once again putting its thumb on the scale. But this is the bit that really c [more]

How to make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament of John McClane crawling through the air duct. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

One last item on Acorn 8. Whether you are a longtime Acorn user (like me), or a would-be new user, you should set aside some time to actually read Acorn’s documentation. It’s a full user manual, and it not only describes, in detail, what every feature in the app does and how to use them, but also a vast array of “how-to” tutorials, many of them videos. In broad strokes, there are two approaches to documenting a serious, professional-level app or software system. One way is a comprehensive functi [more]

I am almost positive that I have posted this before but I don’t care: rotating sandwiches. (There seem to be a couple spinning clockwise but maybe that’s just an optical illusion?) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image. For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail [more]

Dave Nanian, writing on the Shirt Pocket blog: macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error. In the past, Resource Busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means, on most systems, there’s no fix. It just fails. Since Apple took away the abilit [more]

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (Bookshop) is a book by Milton Mayer for which he interviewed ten ordinary Germans about their experiences living in Nazi Germany. From the synopsis: “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book [more]

Jamelle Bouie: “Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” 100,000%!! This is driving me *nuts*. Dem pols: fight or piss off.

From the United States to the European Union, threats to the app are growing

Gus Mueller: This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It’s still a one time purchase to use as long as you’d like, and as usual, the full release notes are available. I want to highlight some of my favorite things below. “Select Subject”, “Mask Subject”, and “Remove Background” are new commands which use machine learning (or A.I. if you prefer) to find the most important parts of your image, and then perform their respective operations. This has been a [more]

🔔 Laaaast call for The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you still have holiday shopping to do, it’s probably coming down to the last day or two for ordering in time for Dec 25 (Xmas and also the first night of Hanukkah).

36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024, including Chappell Roan, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, The Substance, Twisters in 4DX (🤔), and Nobody Wants This. (I think there’s maybe a better version of this list out there…) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A group of scientists warns against creating mirror cells. This sentence is somehow not sci-fi: “Drug developers might be able to create mirror antibiotics, but the treatments might not be ready to use until a mirror pandemic was out of control.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Writer Karen Attiah recently wrote about the pleasure of perusing other people’s personal libraries and then asked her followers what their “personal foundational texts” were…those books that people read over and over again during the course of their lives. Here was her answer: Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin were foundational books for me — and probably why I’m in journalism today. Otherwise: Autobiography of Malcolm X And lately: Anaïs Nin’s diaries And I haven’t re-read them in a long time, [more]

Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world. There’s no ballet here in Nigeria. There’s no one to look up to. There are no theaters. There are no productions. There are no ballet schools at all. The only thing you have is yourself and the internet. From a piece in Dance Maga [more]

Blackmagic Design: Blackmagic Design announced it will start taking pre-orders for the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera — the world’s first commercial camera system designed to capture Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro — today with deliveries due to start in early 2025. DaVinci Resolve Studio will be updated to support editing Apple Immersive Video early next year, offering professional filmmakers a comprehensive workflow for producing Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro [more]

It is easy to be cynical about the do-gooding motivations of a $3 trillion company, but Apple’s commitment to accessibility is admirable. This music fan bought Airpods Pro and nearly cried after learning they were also hearing aids. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Yo-Yo Ma played the prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major at the reopening of the Notre Dame in Paris. I bet this sounded wonderful, with the sound reverberating around the cathedral. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to stare at1 as you await your favorite’s show’s weekly release! Unlike any other anime aggregation site out there, Jiiiii has a collection of beautiful native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro, making it the best way to keep up with anime on Apple devices. We ev [more]

Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?) Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums. And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch. This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the [more]

Apple has renewed Silo for two more seasons. The show will end after season four, having told “the entire story contained within Hugh Howey’s books”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog: Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders, but it meant that we often had zero notice of breaking changes introduced by Apple. During this time, Apple placed an emphasis on improving the security of MacOS, continually locking the operating [more]

A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. Tags: HBO · The White Lotus · trailers · TV · video 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts, the most popular set of 2024 (18M views) is by “Argentine power duo” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso. Their music is “heavily dependent on electronic sounds” but for Tiny Desk they went traditional and it sounds great. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS messages sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all. Turns out Google Fi doesn’t support RCS fully either. Google Fi is Google’s cellular pho [more]

Excellent five-minute short video from the ever-insightful Kirby Ferguson for The New York Times, exploring why everything looks the same, sounds the same, and seemingly is the same in today’s pop culture. The short answer: that sameness is only pervasive when you only look at what’s promoted by our three-headed social media hegemony (Meta, YouTube, and TikTok).  ★

Actual things my parents said while watching my son’s swimming lesson. “MOM: He’s so beautiful. The teacher must be beside herself. DAD: She’s barely controlling herself. She’s trying not to cry. [HE IS CRYING A BIT]” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

HPV vaccines have been linked to a steep drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women. “We observed a substantial reduction in mortality — a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths over the last decade.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Read to the end for a real good post

During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description: Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk perfo [more]

“Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country.” Among high income countries, the US has the highest rates of adults with multiple chronic conditions, shortest life expectancy at birth, highest rate of avoidable deaths, etc. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Update: The store is now closed. My sincere thanks to everyone who’s bought one (or in many cases, more than one). Original post: Unsurprisingly given that I went a few years without selling DF-branded shirts, while I procrastinated on launching a modernized new store (long story short: Shopify is a killer platform — the new store now supports everything from Apple Pay to order tracking), response to this round of classic logo apparel has been great. Orders from last week started going out over [more]

Isle of Tune: a web-based game where you build streetscapes that play music when a car is driven on them — trees, house, and light poles all make different sounds. Big Star Guitar vibes. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

From an old version of the Wikipedia page for Warren G and Nate Dogg’s Regulate, an extremely dry synopsis of the song. “Warren, unaware that Nate is surreptitiously observing the scene unfold, is in disbelief that he is being robbed.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Hello, everyone. I just launched a few new features related to the comments here on kottke.org: 1. The ability to fave comments. This feature has been in test mode for the past few months, and I’m happy it’s finally getting a wider release. Only kottke.org members can fave for now (but I may open it up for everyone depending on how things go). For now, only you will be able to see what you’ve faved. The number of faves on each comment will be displayed next to the fave button (again, I’m going t [more]

Roundup 12/16/2024

Read to the end for a surprising tirade against Elon Musk

Another week with another outstanding indie developer whom I’m delighted to thank for sponsoring DF. This week, it’s Sophiestication Software promoting the return of CoverSutra — a previous hit from the “delicious” era of Mac apps that is now back and better than ever. After over a decade, the rejuvenated (reanimated?) CoverSutra has been reimagined as a sleek, standalone music player for your Mac that lives in your menu bar, giving you seamless access to your music library. Instantly search by [more]

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is wide open at the moment — including the final week of the year. I know sponsors are sometimes hesitant to book weeks around major holidays, but, well, Daring Fireball is never “closed”. And traffic to the site is remarkably consistent even during weeks like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Nerds get bored and want to read interesting stuff. Q1 2025 weeks are wide open too, but I only just now opened those wee [more]

Robby Soave, writing at Reason, “Pete Hegseth’s Acceptance to West Point Is a Story”: Here’s what happened. On Wednesday, Hegseth posted on X that ProPublica — which he described as a “Left Wing hack group” — was planning to publish a bombshell report contradicting Hegseth’s account that he had been accepted to West Point in 1999. Hegseth set the record straight by publishing his letter of acceptance, signed by West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant General Daniel Christman of the U.S. Army. Bu [more]

Once again, The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you’re shopping online, especially from smaller retailers, getting your order in this weekend is probably a good idea for delivery before Xmas or the first day of Hanukkah.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple plans to stop selling the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, and third-generation iPhone SE in European Union countries later this month, to comply with a regulation that will soon require newly-sold smartphones with wired charging to be equipped with a USB-C port in those countries, according to French blog iGeneration. All three of these iPhone models are still equipped with a Lightning port for wired charging. In a paywalled report today, the website said the iPhone mo [more]

Nifty new convert-to-Markdown library from a small indie development shop named Microsoft: The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.) It presently supports: PDF (.pdf) PowerPoint (.pptx) Word (.docx) Excel (.xlsx) Images (EXIF metadata, and OCR) Audio (EXIF metadata, and speech transcription) HTML (special handling of Wikipedia, etc.) Various other text-based formats (csv, json, xml, etc.) The API is simple: from ma [more]

Ryan Christoffel, also at 9to5Mac: There are two key features that are part of iOS 18.2, but aren’t yet ready for the Mac: Genmoji Mail app redesign Genmoji are an especially unfortunate omission, as they’re available on both iPhone and iPad with iOS and iPadOS 18.2. Meanwhile the Mail app redesign is currently iPhone-exclusive, so it’s missing from both the Mac and iPad in these next software updates. The omission of Genmoji creation in MacOS 15.2, and the omission of the new AI inbox categoriz [more]

Chance Miller has a good rundown for 9to5Mac: The update includes major new Apple Intelligence features, upgrades to the Camera Control on iPhone 16, a redesign for the Mail app, and much more. The new Apple Intelligence features lead the list, and certainly lead Apple’s marketing, but there’s quite a bit else new in 18.2 too.  ★

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories “Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together”: In testing the updated Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration, I’ve run into some limitations that I will cover below, but I also had two very positive experiences with the Notes app that I want to mention here since they should give you an idea of what’s possible. In my first test, I was working with a note that contained a list of payments for my work at MacStorie [more]

Adam Sharp has curated the most flamboyant ways to tell someone to pound sand in other languages, and it’s delightful. There’s “go ski into a spruce” from Finland, in Brazil you tell someone to “go pick little coconuts,” while in Poland you say “go to the park and paint the ceiling.” The most devastating in the entire thread, though, is the French saying, “go back home, your mother made you waffles.” If someone said this to me, they would need a dustpan to sweep up the dust of me. If someone sai [more]

“What would happen if you spent a nanosecond on the surface of the sun? Would it warm you up, burn you to a cinder, or do nothing at all?” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel. Tags: time lapse · video 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Look at feisty confectionary upstart Skittles trying to get in on the NERDS Gummy Cluster candy innovation money bazooka. Freeze-dried Skittles? They sound terrible. I must try them. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Read to the end for an unfortunately-timed scheduled post

Katie Robinson, reporting for The New York Times: After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called recess appointments. The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical [more]

This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient. While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased e [more]

I really like this: “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” —Jonathan Edward Durham 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Ev Williams, writing the backstory of, and raison d’être for, Mozi: And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information. Perhaps the reason for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved this problem — for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was probably a pretty good reflection of many people’s real-life relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in common, and all kinds of other details. Another idea tha [more]

New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams: Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL. Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap. iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ: Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact people in my phon [more]

PLUS: Exclusive data on how people are using Anthropic’s chatbot

One last Letterman link: a new half-hour interview about interviewing with Zach Baron for GQ. I watched the first minute and I’m saving the rest for tonight: Baron: If you read pieces about you — pieces of press, profile stuff like that — from the ’80s and ’90s, even a little bit in the 2000s, you were often portrayed as miserable. Letterman: (laughs uproariously) Yeah, that’s great. I love that.  ★

The New York Times: George J. Kresge, who as the entertainer the Amazing Kreskin used mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday in Wayne, N.J. He was 89. A close friend, Meir Yedid, said the death, at an assisted living facility, was from complications of dementia. Kreskin’s feats included divining details of strangers’ personal lives and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck. And he had a classic trick at live [more]

In addition to two choices for t-shirts, the new DF Paraphernalia store also has the above hoodies, which are pretty nice, I have to say. I particularly like the drawstrings, which are much more substantial, almost rope-like, than the shoelace-like strings on most hoodies. I wear mine a lot, especially in the winter, as an extra layer. You’d look good in one. Here’s the thing. The store will not be open year-round. We’re taking orders now, printing to meet demand, and then we’re going to close i [more]

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”: Apple is developing its first server chip specially designed for artificial intelligence, according to three people with direct knowledge of the project, as the iPhone maker prepares to deal with the intense computing demands of its new AI features. Apple is working with Broadcom on the chip’s networking technology, which is crucial for AI processing, accord [more]

Erik Hayden, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter: For his next move, David Letterman is jumping in to the increasingly crowded free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST) space. The late-night great’s production company Worldwide Pants has inked a deal with Samsung TV Plus to bring around 4,000 hours of original video to the company’s streaming service, the firms said Wednesday. “I’m very excited about this,” stated Letterman, who glibly added, “Now I can watch myself age without looking in the mirror [more]

Juli Clover at MacRumors: Apple today made a mistake with its macOS Sequoia 15.2 update, releasing the software for two Macs that have yet to be launched. There is a software file for “Mac16,12” and “Mac16,13,” which are upcoming MacBook Air models. The leaked software references the “MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025)” and the “MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025),” confirming that new M4 MacBook Air models are in development and are likely not too far off from launching. It’s been widely rumored that [more]

Read to the end for a four-year-old Tumblr post that seems to be going viral this week for some reason

Casey Newton’s diatribe against AI skeptics illustrates a broader issue in tech journalism

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee. “I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.” It’s not over ’til it’s over.  ★

After Trump passes up an opportunity to say he will save the app, ByteDance is at a crossroads

Brandon Silverman: It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a small collection of incredible typography from something called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan and in fact, when I got married, my wife and I designed our wedding invitation based off of them. However, there has never been a place to see all of the art from the maps in one place. Until now. This website is a free archive dedicate [more]

Assessing Luigi Mangione's media diet

Finally, Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week. U.S. domestic orders placed by the end of the day Wednesday should arrive before Christmas. International orders — even those ordered by our good neighbors in Canada — most likely will not.  ★

Gary Marcus (and many others) respond

Read to the end for a video that made me feel a certain kind of way

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg: Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony earlier this year, and the duo agreed to work together on launching support for the PlayStation VR2’s hand controllers on the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a monthslong undertaking, I’m told. And Apple has discussed the plan with third-party [more]

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous pre [more]

Read to the end for a little song about a certain health insurance story

Roundup 12/08/2024

While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never again), I am reminded this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn. Recording the show often helps me coagulate loose ideas into fully-formed thoughts. Bo [more]

Late-breaking candidate for best new font of 2024.  ★

The greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge, “Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine”: Now, a defender of AI might — rightly — say that a real journalist should check the answers provided by ChatGPT; that fact-checking is a critical part of our job. I agree, which is why I’ve walked you through my own checking in this article. But these are only the public and embarrassing examples of something I think is happening much more often in private: a normal person is using ChatGPT and trusting the i [more]

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for November 2024

Donald Trump’s “first buddy” is using his position to revive personal vendettas

Purely fun, pay-whatever-you-think-fair app for the Mac from Simon Støvring (developer of numerous fine apps such as Runestone and Scriptable): Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences. There is something very core to the Mac’s origins about not just making a software toy like this, but putting effort into making everything about it really nice. Harks back to Steven Halls’s The Talking Moose an [more]

David Frum, writing at The Atlantic, regarding his jarring appearance as a guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense — specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d headed. [...] I answered by reminding viewers of some history: In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary o [more]

It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks — but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous

Oliver Darcy, in a well-sourced report at Status (paywalled, alas, but with a preview of the article if you sign up for the free version of his newsletter, which I agree is sort of a “Yeah, no thanks” offer): Patrick Soon-Shiong is tightening his grip over the Los Angeles Times. The MAGA-curious owner, who drew controversy when he blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, has waded further into its operations since the November election, according to new information I have le [more]

Read to the end for a beautiful portrait

An election interference case in Europe sounds oddly familiar to America's story in 2016. How seriously should we take it?

The Verge’s Sean Hollister penned an excellent high-level summary of Pat Gelsinger’s ignominious ouster from Intel, under the headline “What Happened to Intel?” A wee bit of pussyfooting here, though, caught my eye: Just how bad was it before Gelsinger took the top job? Not great! There were bad bets, multiple generations of delayed chips, quality assurance issues, and then Apple decided to abandon Intel in favor of its homegrown Arm-based chips — which turned out to be good, seriously showing u [more]

A new white paper envisions a radically different technological future

It's a blow for free expression — and an enormous gift to YouTube

Read to the end for a post that transcends language

In lieu of a roundup, some holiday spirit

Read to the end for the revival of Elon Musk’s war on California high-speed rail

Read to the end for some very important ska content

Happy Thanksgiving!

With antitrust prosecutions in full swing, the company keeps giving regulators fresh reasons for concern

After adding millions of new users in weeks, the company tells Platformer that it will quadruple the size of its moderation team

Read to the end for an incredible own

Roundup 11/25/2024

Read to the end for a graph of Elon Musk’s real-time mental decline

Understanding the "AI Art Turing Test"

Read to the end for a good YouTube comment

The search giant is pushing back on the government’s plan to break it up — but competition is coming anyway

Brands know Musk has influence with Donald Trump and want to make sure he doesn’t use it against them

Read to the end for a very good meme

Chrome away from home

(*For now)

Read to the end for Rebecca

Roundup 11/17/2024

Read to the end for another Cybertruck fail

Read to the end for an important Haggis update

PLUS: YouTube's two primary intellectual values

Recent comments by Ford CEO Jim Farley give a more honest picture of why Chinese EV makers are leading

OpenAI, Google and others are seeing diminishing returns to building ever-bigger models — but that may not matter as much as you would guess

Read to the end for a very good crocheted tapestry

Trump has vowed to make good on his promise to save the app. What will it cost the company?

Read to the end for a vision of our horrifying present

Roundup 11/11/2024

Read to the end for a fascinating video a certain orange guy’s social media use

Read to the end for hamgurber

Media and politicians created a monster and lost control of him

Young men, social media, and the TikTok subject

Welcome to the first day of the rest of our miserable lives, I guess

Amazon’s low-wage, non-union model is a threat to key public institutions and their unionized workers

Read to the end for a VERY online cosplay

Read to the end for a fun jab at Mark Zuckerberg’s Halloween costume

Roundup 11/03/2024

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for October 2024

PLUS: "Big Justice" and "A.J." and "The Rizzler": Why?

Read to the end for The Pingu

Roundup 10/27/2024

PLUS: Gawker for bosses! The New York Yankees!

Roundup 10/20/2024

Celebrating three years of Read Max

This summer, a new video game came out that changed the way we think about comedy in games, becoming an instant smash hit in the process. That’s right, I’m talking about Thank Goodness You’re Here! from Coal Supper. Ok, yeah, sure, I work for Panic and we published the game, so I was contractually required […]

In January, I was invited to GDC, the Game Developers Conference, to give a talk about Playdate. That talk — “The Playdate Story: What Was it Like to Make Handheld Video Game System Hardware?” — has been made available free for all to view. Now, it’s been 10 years since my last talk at XOXO here […]

Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially […]

My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two. But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella. And you’re about to hear it too. Let’s go. Firehouse Five Plus […]

This is a short story about something delightful. In 2014, I did a bunch of music for my friends Neven Mrgan and Matt Comi who were making an incredible iOS game called Space Age. I had never written that much music in my life, and it was incredibly fun for me in every way. (You […]