🔗 My Words When I Am Gone // Greg Morris

I love writing, publishing, and interacting with people about my thoughts and ideas. Many of them are formed, flexed and even broken through online discourse and I value all the time and effort it takes. Writing changes you, it helps form ideas, and I find so much about myself just by typing out my internal monologue. So much so that when the time does come to cross the rainbow bridge I think I would miss it most of all.

Hot Take Incoming: Avatar 2 was a terrible movie. A disgrace of a storyline.

🔗 theunderground.blog

theunderground.blog is an experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader.

If you would like to read the latest posts, you can subscribe to the feed at https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml, using the feed reader of your choice.

Consider me intrigued. 👀

Thanks, Shortcuts, super helpful.

iPhone screenshot with a webpage stuck halfway on the screen.

🔗 Reverse-Engineered iMessage Comes to Android With Beeper Mini – Pixel Envy // Nick Heer

I am not defending Apple’s revenue or its likely stance; I do not much care either way. For what it is worth, I do not think Beeper Mini will actually make much of an impact because iMessage interoperability concerns are localized to the United States and a handful of other countries. But I do think Apple is protective of its network and will treat this reverse engineering exercise as a security problem. If it wants to launch iMessage on Android, it will do so on its own terms.

🔗 The Twelve South Butterfly 2-in-1 charger is what Apple’s MagSafe Duo should have been - The Verge // Antonio G. Di Benedetto

If you stare at it long enough, you realize that it kind of looks like Apple’s discontinued MagSafe Duo charger if you cut away all the ugly floppy bits.

This thing looks great, can be a stand, won’t be thwarted by a large camera bump, and might just make it into my travel bag (rather than swiping my MagSafe Duo from the bedside table for trips). Interestingly, while it’s only available as a pre-order directly from Twelve South, you can buy it right now from Apple.

🔗 Shot with Kino

When the Lux guys said on The Talk Show last month that Halide would “never, ever, ever” support capturing video, I had a funny feeling that they had something up their sleeve. Well, they did. It’s a video app called Kino and they’re building it in public over the next few months.

🆕📝 Crashing Clockwise #531: ‘I, Too, Like You’

Books, health data, household chores tech, nostalgia for old software, holiday traditions, and accessibility features are all covered this installment!

🔗 The Great iMac Realignment – 512 Pixels // Stephen Hackett

Apple said it was the first Mac designed from the ground up for Apple silicon, and it showed. I adore the design of this machine:

M1 iMac

I think the 24-inch iMac will go down in history as one of the most special computers Apple has ever made, earning a right to sit next to my G4 Cube and 20th Anniversary Mac.

Yeah, I’d say he’s right. 😍

🔗 Archive Your Old Projects // Arne Bahlo

Occasionally, you’ll need to move to a different domain, for example when re-doing a website. When talking to Ollie about this, he told me that some people leave their old websites online at <year>.<domain> and I love that idea3.

You can look up old content and redirect links, so your URIs stay cool. And in ten years it’ll probably still be online.

I don’t know how one would go about doing this, but I do think it’s a swell idea.

I’m not the only one who can’t help but notice when the logotype is in the wrong font (anything other than San Francisco), right? (The “e” is a dead-giveaway.)

Screenshot of company logos with Apple’s highlighted.

🔗 Alt vs Figcaption - thoughtbot

Images, however, have one more thing to consider: Assistive technologies need words to interpret an image. People sometimes need words to better understand why an image is being displayed.

Luckily we have a few ways to describe them in a human readable manner: alt and figcaption. These items house very different writing patterns though, and can be used both together and apart, depending on the conditions.

I’ve used these HTML tags for years, and still I learned some new things today.

🔗 Reliving that Snow Leopard Magic - MacStories // Stephen Hackett

Enthusiasts of all types always have that one special obsession. For muscle car people, maybe it’s one particular year of Ford Mustang. Photographers always have a favorite lens, while baseball players may have a favored bat or glove.

Ask almost any macOS fan, and they’ll tell you that Snow Leopard is their favorite version of all time.

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#121]

If there’s one thing I learned about Napoleon tonight, it’s that he loved to play with his cannons. 🍿

Just some wildly diabolical stuff you aren’t taught about the United States' pro-Nazi bits in the lead up to our involvement in WW2. 🎙️

overcast.fm/+4Ny82jL1…

🔗 Inside An Apple Lab That Makes Custom Chips For iPhone And Mac - CNBC

In November, CNBC became the first journalists to film inside an Apple chip lab, where it tests its latest M3 chips that replaced Intel processors in all new Macs. We also got a rare chance to talk with Apple’s head of silicon, Johny Srouji, and Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, about geopolitical risks in Taiwan, slowdowns and what’s next in AI.

CNBC did their homework for this opportunity.

🔗 iA Writer 7 - iA

When you copy and paste a conversation from ChatGPT, the copied text contains “You” before every question, and “ChatGPT” before every answer. We recognize this pattern and offer to automatically mark authorship.

iA Writer offers shortcuts, menus and right clicks to get it done and keep the authorship working even when you edit your texts elsewhere. We think that the extra second is more than worth it.

An interesting idea, but I’m not convinced everyone will find that extra second on every paste to be worth it.

🔗 Writing with AI - iA

Why should someone bother to read what you didn’t bother to write?

You know, I hadn’t considered that when you allow people to say and follow terrible things on your ad-driven platform, almost by necessity will ads be served up next to that terrible content for those users. As Ben says, it does put ad-supported (vs. subscriber-only) networks in a pickle. 🎙️

Holy smokes, the lengths the Planet Earth crew went to for getting both the shot and to take care not to disturb the critters nor their habitats are jaw-dropping and heartwarming. 🎙️

overcast.fm/+QN1qRPOO…

🆕📝 50% Off Phone Cases from the HeyDingus Store

The title pretty much says it all. Just use code FIFTY50 at checkout.

No-Shave November to Fresh-Face December. Photos were taken minutes apart. 😳📷

Two photos of a late 20s man. Left with long-ish facial hair, right with fresh shaven face.

I haven’t had this happen yet, but it sounds huge for general accessibility! Sure, we should be able to add alt text to photos we send, but, as @matt@isfeeling.social has been saying, our devices filling the the gaps is good news for everyone.

I was today years old when I learned Siri tries to announce the content of a photo when messages come through. 🤯
The photo below was announced as:
"a white & black analog clock on a white surface"

🔗 Why We’re Dropping Basecamp - Duke University Libraries Blogs // Will Sexton

So when we encounter a tech company boss who takes in a nationwide movement of organized protest against police brutalization and systemic racism, led by Black activists, and amplifies the rare incidents of violence, much of it instigated by the police or right-wing counter protestors, using the mendacious language of extremists to refer to it as “riots,” we have a good idea what we’re looking at.

A worthwhile read.