Third day of the Micro.blog winter wonder photo challenge: firelight.

Calvin Tomkins, leading up to his 100th birthday, wrote a series of journal entries for The New Yorker, a mix of memories from his career and the new challenges of getting older and losing his vision:

When she types my spoken text, I spend the next few days editing it on my antediluvian laptop—changing words, deleting sections and redoing them, fine-tuning the focus. This gets harder and harder, but the alternative, I fear, is doing nothing.

The technical explanation for how Bluesky has implemented their find friends from contacts is fascinating. I don’t plan to do anything with phone numbers again, but I still learned some things from it.

Rainy day in Austin. Looking out from my car as the skyline fades up into the mist.

OpenAI often makes fun of their own product names — “really bad at naming things” — but Google’s image product is literally called Nano Banana. 🍌

I like this blog post by Robin Rendle about whether the current disruption of search engines might be a good thing:

Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

Most blogs are not monetized with ads and shouldn’t be. There are still indirect benefits to writing on the web. Sharing for the sake of it, bringing people into newsletters or subscriptions, and building an audience that leads to other good things, jobs, friends.

For day 2 of the winter photo challenge: cozy blanket and cozy book, The Spellshop.

John Gruber blogging at Daring Fireball about the updated Apple TV logo animation and sound:

The new one feels like a branding stroke unto itself. Sonically, it doesn’t evoke anything else. It just sounds rich and cool. Visually, with its rotating prism effect, it does evoke the classic six-color Apple logo.

The new one is great. The glowing background of the old logo actually bugged me from the very beginning. Something about it felt wrong, like design that uses too many gradients getting muddled instead of crisp and clear.

MacStories 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award: Unread. Congrats @johnbrayton!

Eleven years after its inception and eight years after its second sale to a different developer, Unread still stands out in the third-party indie app market because it’s managed to honor its lineage while adapting to the ever-changing nature of the Apple ecosystem.

If you missed it, we brought our Core Intuition podcast back for another special bonus episode. We catch up on AI, the new Micro.blog Studio plan, Daniel’s family and college search, losing trust in Tim Cook, and whether Steve Jobs can be replaced.

Manu Moreale:

How about, instead of preventing “the kids” from accessing social media, we go in the opposite direction and keep all the adults out? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

🙂

Joking aside, I do think there is something to just make the social web better, for everyone.

Great blog post from Matt Haughey on driving a VW Buzz from Texas to Oregon. When the Buzz was announced, I was hoping it would look a little more old-school VW, but seeing one in person they look really good. Seems mostly well designed inside too.

Watched: Mushka. Andreas Deja helping keep hand-drawn animation alive, purposefully showing the pencil lines in the age of AI and computer-generated everything. 🍿

We just posted a new Core Intuition! Wha…?! Episode 26.2.

Nick Heer on locked Apple accounts:

Given this tight control, the bar for locking a user out of their Apple Account and, to some extent, out of their devices should be unbelievably high.

As an aside, I use iCloud but also (less frequently) copy my photos to Dropbox and Google Photos. Too important to only have one synced copy.

Tesla robotaxis in Austin no longer need safety drivers. Worrisome. Elon Musk’s insistence that self-driving does not need radar or lidar is just needlessly dangerous. Waymos drive better than human drivers in part because they can see better.

Six years ago I blogged about my favorite Christmas movies. No changes needed yet. 🎄

Too many guns. I don’t have a lot of words beyond what has already been said for years. Sad for the victims and families from Brown University and Bondi Beach. We should watch what Australia does next and learn from it.

For the first day of the winter photo challenge, no actual frost anywhere near me, although it is nearly freezing in Austin, so I’m going with Frosty.

Watched: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Another great one. 🍿