Finished reading: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson. I read the e-book, but I also got the print edition in the mail yesterday. Half of the book is white text on black pages! I’ve never seen this before in a novel. 📚

After hours of downtime with our primary photo storage, I’ve given up on Linode and started restoring failed uploads and switching to our S3 backup. Very disappointing. I’ll post a final update to @news when everything is back online. I also learned some new things to make this more robust.

Feels like every day for a month I’ve been waking up to one emergency or another — some real, some fabricated. This morning, there was a power outage at a Linode data center that is affecting our photo hosting. Blah.

The new Billy Joel documentary — And So It Goes — on HBO was great. They had so much time to go deep on a lot of things. I actually knew next to nothing about him except the songs.

Did you know that you can open Bluesky starter packs in Micro.blog and follow people directly? I’d like to work on expanding this soon. Some more details and an example in this post last year. Micro.blog is small so it’s a good way to branch out.

A little surprising, Meta is expanding the Threads API. Might be time to consider doing more with it. Micro.blog can cross-post but only retrieve posts if the fediverse is enabled. Downside of doing more is jumping through the hoops of Meta’s approval machine.

Mac folks, any bugs you’ve noticed recently in the Micro.blog app? Fixing a couple little things for macOS 26 Tahoe beta.

Congrats to Manu Moreale on the 100th interview in his People and Blogs series! This one features Marisabel Munoz, who writes about her process of starting long-form blog posts by hand:

I use Moleskines (I prefer it due to the lines) and fountain pens—the ink’s flow slows my thoughts, helping me process them. Then comes the sculpting: what stays, what expands, what’s cut. It’s like editing, but not quite… more of a second draft.

Big fan of Internet Archive. I’ve also been occasionally using archive.is. Handy for grabbing a snapshot of an article, even in some cases behind a paywall. I do pay for a few magazines and websites, but not everything on the web!

Jason Snell has a first look at iPadOS 26:

It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode, or via a single tap it can turn into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads.

Enormous piles of money just sound crazy. Google spending $85 billion on capital expenditures this year, or about double what Twitter was sold for. Those AI data centers aren’t going to build themselves! Meanwhile, the scale of the OpenAI’s infrastructure in Abilene is starting to come into focus.

Upgraded to the latest Tahoe beta and now a couple of apps seem to be confused. Nova thinks it’s expired. I have an older serial number, but they should work forever just without updates. I think something might be weird with the system keychain.

Lupe Tortilla. 🌮

Mastodon will experiment with donation banners:

The initial campaign will appear via a banner to people that use our Android and iOS apps, if they are signed-in to an account on one of our instances, and only if their account has existed for four weeks or more. The banner will be easy to dismiss, of course, and we will not continually prompt users to donate.

Patron supporters have declined over the last couple of years, so they’ve had to rely on larger donations. Makes sense to rebalance to lots of smaller donations.

Meanwhile, sticking to paid subscriptions for Micro.blog. It’s more stable.

I hate to add to the noise and news overload, but this article by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic is a good summary of Trump’s crazy rants over the weekend, posting dozens of times in just one day:

Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

He’s obviously unwell. Eventually he’ll be gone and we can start to pick up the pieces left by failed, vengeful administration. 🇺🇸

Losing my mind again debugging HTTP signatures. So easy to have flakiness between implementations.

Excellent discussion on the latest ATP about Cloudflare. Very much in line with my thoughts from earlier this month.

Once again I’m alternating between reading three different books and can’t seem to make progress in any of them. Going to prioritize finishing Isles of the Emberdark since I’m starting to see video reviews pop up online. 📚

Walking around and noticing all the crepe myrtles today.

Didn’t notice until today that Kagi has a translation service. Simple, works well. This’ll be my new default instead of Google.

Lies do the most damage when there’s also a tiny bit of something real in them. Like 5% truth, 95% bullshit. It gives those spreading misinformation something to hold on to justify their actions. Maybe fanaticism is when we can no longer see anything except the 5%.

Sad to hear about Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Got lost for a while reading about his later work and looking for the lyrics to his spoken word album Hiding in Plain View. Just some of it:

It’s like life is one big masquerade party with cute masks
to mask unshapen identities made by us
to make us feel safe in the face of uncertainty,
but when we hide ourselves to please
we place a piece of our souls on hold
and the safety of that space eventually becomes
a poisonous pit of unexpressed feelings
and untended quirks that never quite get worked out

Rest in peace.

I posted a quick video to YouTube showing recent improvements in Micro.blog for Mac with notes, including shared notes and the new versions dialog for restoring an old note.

Fidji Simo’s blog post on joining OpenAI reads like an updated mission statement. This was a very good hire. She will be in charge of applications.