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!

🆕📝 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. 👌

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. 🐾 🇺🇸

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! 😁

🆕📝 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.

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!)

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!

CARROT Weather has debuted its take on ACME Weather’s Alternate Predictions with a very similar multi-modal forecast feature. Here’s Chance Miller, at 9to5Mac:

The new multi-model forecast feature lets you compare multiple weather simulations to see the full breadth of outcomes for any given system or forecast.

I have a feeling that this sort of aggregated forecasting is going to become table stakes for weather apps before long.

John Gruber: ‘Modifier Key Order for Keyboard Shortcuts’

While I’m at it, here’s a pet peeve of mine. When you write out a keyboard shortcut using modifier key names, you connect them with hyphens: Command-R. But when using the modifier glyphs, you should definitely _not_include the hyphens. ⌘C is correct, ⌘-C is wrong. For one thing, just look at the shortcuts in the menu bar — the shortcut for Copy has been shown as ⌘C since 1984.

I love me a good style guide.

Ben Lovejoy, at 9to5Mac, shared a shortcut he found that collects all your longest videos for easy clean up — something, amazingly, you can’t do with Smart Albums:

I didn’t necessarily expect to be able to filter by file size or video length on my iPhone, but I did think the Mac Photos app would offer that capability. Turns out I was wrong.

Fortunately, Reddit user FrozenMaize has created a Shortcut you can use to add all of your longer videos to an album. You can edit the shortcut to specify the length of the video in minutes and the name of the album in which you want to store them.

🆕📝 RIP Mac Pro

I guess they were just waiting for permission from @siracusa@mastodon.social. 😆

Feeling super grateful for the things that have come together to allow me to live my life in this wonderful way: A body that moves well outside, a supportive wife who helps me prioritize my adventures, parents who got me into scouting and encouraged me to pursue an unconventional career, friends who understand that many of our trips are low-key also trainings, and a community full of people who value professional guidance in their outdoor endeavors. 🫶

I’m not ready for ice season to end, but getting down to Gunks today while weather was nasty up north reminded me that climbing rocks is pretty sweet too. Gonna be a great season. Glad to share the day with good people. 🧗

PSA: If your order from the Apple Store is showing that it isn’t eligible for a return, even though you know you’re within the 14-day window, all is not lost. Contact Apple Support — I did it through iMessage — and they’ll sort it out.

Glad I knew I had the two weeks and decided to double-check!

None of you warned me that even though Slide Over made its (stunted) return to iPadOS 26, the Shortcuts action to open apps in that mode has been removed. 🙁 That was going to be the saving grace of updating, and now I’m sad.