I had a conversation with someone earlier about configuring digital audio output in context of a stream. The question was: what kind of output levels should you aim for when outputting music to…

**JUDICIAL CONVERGENCE / STARSHIP VELOCITY TRANSITION / APPARATUS QUANTUM FLUX**Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers now chief judge Northern District California. Apparatus misinterpreted "chief" as "primary…

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week. Things I consumed Kagi is adding functionality to remove paywalled sites from web searches. Although I do think paying for news and journalism…

Apple : Under the new terms: For App Store apps using Apple In-App Purchase , the commission will be 26 percent. For the vast majority of developers, including those in the App Store Small Business…

This is a video from Beijing of a little humanoid robot practicing for the upcoming World Humanoid Robot Games (aka robot Olympics, starting August 22nd) when it crashes hard into a padded wall,…

I successfully jailbreaked my 14 year old Kindle Touch 🎉 This after support for it was ended by Amazon back in May. Currently my plan is to use calibre to load new books onto it and KOReader to read…

Today Mark Gurman wrote for Bloomberg: Apple Cuts Jobs in Siri, Vision Pro Immersive Video and Gaming Teams Why is […] The post Mark Gurman’s good news for the future of Apple Immersive Video…

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: iPhone Fold is never going to be the name of the folding iPhone. “Fold” is Samsung terminology. Apple establishes naming conventions that everyone…

Spotify has solved the matching problem. I have spent 15 years daily exploring music: tens of thousands of hours and artists, from the past hundred years of recorded music. I minored in music in…

One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a…

Joe Rossignol: After years of holding out, Walmart today announced that it will finally begin accepting tap-to-pay options like Apple Pay in some of its Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in the…

Newfangled 'Hackquisitions' • Epic v. Apple • Meta v. States • OpenAI v. Apple • 'Stripe of AI' • Vision Pro Pickle

As I've discussed before, I have a habit of trying and eventually failing to create a balance between using social media and actually getting benefits from its use. Many people find themselves in the…

Sam Henri Gold recently published a post about Apple’s new MacBook Neo: a lower-power, but decidedly not less-than, version of the Apple hardware I’ve been loving for almost two decades…

I daily drove KDE Linux for almost a year and I liked it, but I'm also switching back to Fedora KDE. Here's my ramblings about it all. KDE Linux is the hot new Linux distro from KDE themselves. At…

For calibration, simulation, and ease of use in the early days of motion controls!

Aug 21/26I've been running Alfred on the Mac Studio for about eight months now, and I still catch myself reaching for the mouse out of old habit before I remember I don't have…

GitHub’s CTO Vlad Fedorov has posted apologetically about the 17th August outage which, he said, “lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes. It disrupted github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions,…

Video games & behavioral addiction The first truly addictive game I ever played was the original Diablo, way back in 1996. I had always liked games, but when you played Diablo you would actually lose…

CoAspire’s CHAOS (Coalition Heterogeneous Affordable Offensive Strike) system, composed of the RAACM-ER cruise missile attached to a booster and a launcher system, is billed as a sort of cheap…

I updated my Galactic Compass app for iPhone with augmented reality mode. Background: Galactic Compass is a floating green arrow that always points the way to the middle of the Milky Way, 26,000…

AI conducting user interviews mostly failed to probe deeply | AI UI tools break 1/4 of their design promises | The planning fallacy makes us believe more in schedules than they deserve | Cards as a…

Google announced an interactive Preferred Sources button yesterday that publishers can embed on their websites. One click marks the site as a reader’s preferred source across Search, Discover,…

You can spend £10,000, £15,000 or even £20,000 on a solar and battery system. Everything works perfectly when it is first installed — but what happens six months or two years later when something…

Rail advocates can rejoice: A new study by a consultant called HNTB concluded that a commuter train service between Austin and San Antonio is “viable.” Actually, the study itself used the…

Creating reminders in Apple’s Reminders app is easy: just tell Siri, something like “Hey Siri, remind me at 5pm on Tuesday to pick up my dry cleaning” or “Hey Siri, remind me…

YouTube will start counting "Views" of long form videos and livestreams from the very first frame of the video. This matches how Shorts Views have been counted since March 2025. Creators can find…

Week of August 14–21, 2026: Google caps how many extensions one publisher can list in the Chrome Web Store, an essay argues web apps should let users generate their own sandboxed extensions, and the…

David Imel, reporting for The Verge: Google’s new HiLight notification LED on the Pixel 11 Pro is nearly useless. Out of the box, the only two things it can glow for are when the phone is face down…

I get faster speeds when i update my linux laptop with bpn on. Indian problems ig

I want to talk about something that's been on my mind for a while: search has quietly gotten worse over the past several years, and I think it's worth being honest about why, and what it's actually…

I received a regular android phone recently. It has modern hardware which I would never buy for myself due to it’s incompatible to open bootloader/firmware. The only phone I would like to buy…

Some tools begin with a roadmap. Others begin with a question asked often enough that irritation wins. At my desk, two questions kept coming back: What is making that sound? What exactly is connected…

YouTube Version As it so happens, the other day I happened to click on a YouTube video entitled, “Meet The Silicon Valley Billionaire Ruining The World” and as it turns out it made a very…

I bought a DJI Osmo Pocket 4P and wanted to use the built-in WiFi 6 filetransfer capabilities to send my recording to my Windows PC. Turns out, you can only send it to the phone app and there is no…

so for the last several weeks meta has not been fingerprinting my song, “the penis (eek!)”, (which gets hundreds of thousands of plays daily) on their platforms. this means that i am…

It's been quite a week for the Home Watershed.Last week Meta unveiled Muse Glimmer, which gave us a taste of what might be coming.Over the weekend Alibaba dropped Qwen3.8-27B, which scores 52 on…

In a previous post I talked about WezTerm, a cross-platform terminal emulator application written in Rust that I liked. This time I’m going to talk about another one written in Zig called…

Back in 2006, when I first started Thriftmac , it was hard to find free Mac apps. In fact, it was hard to find any Mac apps at all. That meant snapping up links to pretty much any freeware I could…

Summary: C-SAT (Customer Satisfaction rating) is broken. Yet we rely on it. Yes, but how, when and why you ask for feedback is critical. Most CSAT scores are disconnected from the customer’s goal,…

I have been putting a load of my time into polishing the Fyne based desktop – and it is becoming a very productive system that I use day to day. I have presented the topic at a few events…

GENKI MANTA: Beyond the Pro Controller "A deeply tunable controller with MantaOS built in, analog Pulse Buttons, adjustable TMR sticks, TriStage Triggers and Maglev Haptics." That's a whole lot of…

We have upgraded and updated the Gear Calculator. Main improvements: Tire width and rim size are now two separate entries. Pick any tire width rather than being restricted to a list. We have entries…

I have multiple monitors and I use the cmd + tab application switcher often. I find the current behavior of macOS pretty confusing. By default, it only shows the switcher on the most recently used…

Got heat exhaustion / heat stroke a few times in 2025. One way to mitigate further heat damage is to keep track of early heat exhaustion symptoms. In my own personal experience, one reliable…

Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for…

I was inspired after running photoshop on the same 60p chip as in a Raspberry Pi Pico. I think about simpler computers and tradeoffs and link to some projects. I think about permacomputing and…

Note: This is a repeat of a piece I published awhile back after Facebook lost a couple of trials based on its alleged harms. I'm republishing it in part because it seem relevant given the…

Amazon would rather make your order emails useless than let you track packages without opening their app.