All podcast websites should work like this

Matt Birchler made a really cool searchable database for his Comfort Zone podcast, complete with clickable transcripts that start the audio so you can hear your search query in context. He envisions it as something podcasters could sign up for:

[Users could] add their own RSS feed, and then all details would automatically pull from their feed. The back end should also automatically check for updates on feeds every 6 hours or something like that as well. Transcript updates should pull from the remote files and not be a part of the code base, and there could be an upload UI to add these files from the web portal.

You’ve gotta go play around with it. All the show notes for each episode are also there, and included in the search — a nice touch.

Personally, I think all podcast websites should work like this! It’d be way more useful that most podcast hosting service-provided sites.

Watched: For All Mankind S5E1, First Light 📺

We are so back! These season openers have ever-more stuff to catch us up on with their decade-long jumps, so it dragged a little bit. But I have no doubt that it’ll pick up. Can’t wait to see what this season’s heart-racer scene will be.

At long last, I’m jumping into a smart lock and doorbell. I’ve been waiting patiently for years for the right features (UWB, battery-powered, Apple Home) at a decent price, and Aqara’s finally done it. Get ‘em on sale through tomorrow.

Smart Lock U400 ($270 $230)

Doorbell Camera G410 ($145 $100)

He’s less bananas about this one, but I’d say it’s equally surprising! 😆

Here's a take:

The "new" compact tab bar in iPadOS 26.4 is good and I like using it with vertical tabs in Safari (which, yes, you can enable).

macstories.net/notes/well-i-gu

😳 @viticci@macstories.net is a mad lad for this, but I can’t help but appreciate the Shortcuts wizardry to solve one’s own problem.

You probably shouldn't do this.

I really like Claude Code in iMessage, but I hate its permission prompts. So, I figured out how to automate them with Shortcuts.

Here's how: macstories.net/tutorials/autom

I’m no kitchen connoisseur, but I do appreciate a good gadget. Looks like a worthy update — the biggest since 1955! — to the classic KitchenAid stand mixer. Per The Verge, it adds fine-grained speed control, a bowl light, auto-off, and (!) a new mixer head that scrapes the bowl with a friction sensor!

A black stand mixer with a metallic mixing bowl and a beater attachment is placed on a kitchen countertop. The background features a dark, marbled backsplash and warm lighting enhances the overall ambiance.

Watched: Zootopia 2 🍿

A bit of a slow start, and it followed a lot of the same paths as the first movie… buuuuut by the end, I was into it and laughing along. Overall a good message again, too. 👍 (Lots of familiar voices — great cast!)

Managed to squeeze in my 37th (maybe last?) ice day of the season on Central Pillar, NSOP — what a delight, and so many options to climb! I led two new lines, including a thrilling thin overhanging pillar. Perfect weather and awesome company with Don Mellor. If this is it, the cup is full!

Two climbers ascend an icy, frozen waterfall using ice axes, surrounded by rocky terrain and sparse trees. A person in climbing gear ascends an icy cliff on a mountain surrounded by dense evergreen forest under an overcast sky with the sun visible. A person climbs an icy waterfall using ropes on a rocky cliff. Surrounding the climber are bare trees and a partly cloudy blue sky. Person wearing climbing gear ascends a frozen waterfall using ropes. They are surrounded by ice formations and trees in a natural setting. Ropes hang on a steep ice-covered cliff while bare branches extend from the top against a partly cloudy sky. A person wearing ice climbing gear smiles while holding an ice tool against a frozen waterfall in a snowy, forested area. The jacket displays the text Mountain Equipment.

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#184]

An iWeb revival, a nostalgic letter from Greece, a thought-provoking water story, the origin of “Wendy”, comprehensive Apple charging data, a baseball score critique, and a delicious Midleton Mule.

I hope, someday, we get to where our identities around the web are all based on unique domain names. When mentioning someone in a post, I always need to decide if I’m going to mention/link them by name, by their social media handle, or by their site. What if they were one and the same?

.me domains are perfect for this.

Micro.blog is close (you can @-mention a domain to link to it, and follow a site’s RSS feed by following it’s @-domain), but Bluesky is leading the way here:

On Bluesky and the AT Protocol, you can set domains that you own like bsky.team or alice.lol as your username.

Speaking of whimsy, nice tribute to the Mac Pro by @ismh86@eworld.social in the 512 Pixels header. 👌

A screenshot of a webpage from ‘512 Pixels’ with an article titled ‘The Mac Pro is Dead’, dated March 26, 2026. The article discusses Apple’s confirmation of discontinuing the Mac Pro. The header includes a realistic icon of the 2019/2022 Mac Pro in place of the usual 1984 Macintosh in the site’s logo.

Man, @matt_birchler@mastodon.social’s Quick Subtitles app looks so cool, well-designed, and thoughtful that I wish I had a use case for it. It’s been fun to follow along with its development journey.

As you can probably tell, I’m catching up on RSS and am reading through the ‘Birchtree’ feed. 😉

Matt Birchler shared a macOS terminal command to remove the play button on icon-sized video files:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLInlinePreviewMinimumSupportedSize -int 99999

Then restart the Finder by running killall Finder and the change will be in place.

And it doesn’t affect Quick Look:

And don’t worry, this does not impact the ability to hit spacebar on an icon to see a large preview of it.

I’ve never been bothered by the ability to watch videos at postage stamp size, and actually thought it made a fun demo of macOS’s whimsy back in the day. But good to know you can turn it off.

John Gruber laments that Apple missed its chance to require apps on tvOS to use the standard video player:

What Apple should have done right from the start with the tvOS-based Apple TV a decade ago is require all apps to use the system video player. No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. […]

Apple should use the App Store approval process for the benefit of users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?

I don’t accept that it’s too late. They should do the necessary engineering to let video be forced into a system player, similar to how the picture-in-picture player works on iOS.

John Gruber: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’

The Guardian screenshot Bose captured, where only 11 percent of the entire screen shows text from the article, is the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. But somehow this strategy is deemed sustainable for websites.

The vast majority of articles I read on the web are through RSS or Instapaper, so no/few ads. Dunno how non-nerds put up with this.

Puppy’s first protest attending Saranac Lake’s No Kings rally today. A great event filled with people who still have hope. 🤞 Bella did very well with it being her first time around a crowd and among the noise and cars. She brought lots of joy herself. 🐾 🇺🇸

Protesters standing on a sidewalk holding various signs with messages such as NO WAR HONK FOR DEMOCRACY. They are near a road, trees, and signs for East 3 to 86 bike route. A black dog is held on a leash by a person in a green coat, surrounded by people wearing colorful jackets on a snowy sidewalk with a blue recycling bin nearby.

Yesterday, I got to add two items to my ‘Bits of Joy’ folder1 where I save nice notes that people share with me.

A podcaster/writer (who I’ve followed for well over a decade) said he was “eternally envious” of my blog’s design, and the local legend climber (who literally wrote the first guidebooks) complimented me on my relaxed and methodical climbing style. It really made my day — twice! 😁

  1. Craig Mod calls this his hey, you're not a piece of shit.md file. 😂 ↩︎

🆕📝 Launchpad was great for uninstalling apps; Spotlight is not

Uninstalling apps on macOS is not as easy as it should be.

iOS 26.4 fixed the annoying bug that made it take two tries to get the ‘Speak Screen’ accessibility feature to start. Now it’s back to normal and makes listening to my read-later queue with a triple-click of the side button awesome again. 😌

Sneaky sneaky! Threads swaps the On/Off position for its email notifications setting compared to all the other ones. Unsurprised, but they almost got me.

The image shows two side-by-side screenshots of an app’s settings interface. Left has ‘On’ first. Right has ‘Off’ first.

Always a pleasure to get out with Don Mellor in his nature habitat. Despite yesterday’s rain, today’s drop in temps made conditions quite good in Chapel Pond Canyon. Gonna swing and kick for as long as we can!

1: Lions on the Beach (WI4-) (good, but won’t last) and a peek at Rule of the Bone (WI3+) (boney)
2: Hot Shot (WI4) (great)
3: Whales in the Jungle (WI3) (thicker than I’ve ever seen)
4: Ice Slot (WI4) (spicy)
5: Far side of Chapel Pond
6: Walking across the pond (okay today, might not be tomorrow)
7: Upper Washbowl (the rock is calling!)

Climber ascends an ice-covered rock face using gear in a snowy, forested mountain setting under a clear sky. A climber ascends a steep ice-covered cliff using ice axes while secured by a pink rope in a forested mountainous area under a clear blue sky. Frozen waterfall cascades down a rocky cliff surrounded by trees in a snowy forest landscape. Climber ascends icy slope using crampons in a forested area with rocky cliffs and leafless branches visible against a clear blue sky. Sun casts light over a snowy foreground and frozen lake surrounded by a dark, forested hill under a clear blue sky. Frozen river stretches through a valley flanked by snow-covered evergreen trees against a clear blue sky in a mountainous landscape. Sunlit mountain stands still while shadows cover a forested valley below under a clear blue sky.

If it actually works as advertised this time — a big if — Gurman’s predictions for Siri sound like exactly what I want out of it. From Connected 🎧:

Other potential features of note:

  • Merging Siri and Spotlight under Siri brand
  • Completing tasks within apps
  • Integrating web search within queries

Claude Code can now “dream” to fix bloated memory files:

Auto Dream fixes this by mimicking how the human brain works during REM sleep:

→ It reviews all your past session transcripts (even 900+)

→ Identifies what’s still relevant

→ Prunes stale or contradictory memories

→ Consolidates everything into organized, indexed files

→ Replaces vague references like “today” with actual dates […]

We’re increasingly modeling AI agents after human biology — sub-agent teams that mirror org structures, and now agents that “dream” to consolidate memory.

What could go wrong?

(Via Dave Winer)

🤮 I don’t have a NYT subscription, so I can’t read the whole thing, but I think I might actually throw up the first time seeing this on a paper bill:

Trump’s Signature Set to Be Added to America’s Currency. nytimes.com

Whoa! Amit Gawande has totally upgraded his excellent ‘Post Stats’ plugin for Micro.blog and it looks gorgeous. Lots more stats too:

How long does it take to read everything you’ve ever written? What’s your longest posting streak? When do you actually post? v2 answers all of this in a modern card-based layout.

I don’t know if they’re related, but I reported a Post Stats bug to Amit last week (which he resolved very quickly) and now there’s a brand-new version. Maybe diving in to fix the bug was the nudge he needed to start the revamp. 🙂

My microblog’s stats are here. Thanks @amit!