In a thoroughly documented post on building the music app of his dream , Jon Hicks has a well-appointed vision in Jacket . He’s upfront about it being built with Claude, and adamant it’s “just for him”, but it looks like a viable product. I like the approach, especially the discovery and listen later features, but am personally fully invested in the dignified Spite app, which is designed perfectly…
Still thinking about this… watched Resurrection a few months ago, and have been meaning to re-watch Holy Motors . As these churn over in my memory, they feel like cinematic siblings. Also, that last act of Resurrection is in my permanent memory. So beautiful.
Love to see a turnout record for the Minnesota primaries yesterday (1.1 million), about a quarter of eligible voters in the state. There also seems to be a collective reckoning that primary polls are terrible.
Neon lighting. We all love it. WSJ with a nice dive into maintaining the format , and reformulating an historically terminated (due to cost effectiveness) color of neon, cyan green. Nice cinematic call-outs to Casablanca and Eyes Wide Shut , too. [Photo mine, unrelated; gift link URL]
Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss immersive sports on the latest Dithering , and I couldn’t agree more: Apple should just try setting up spatial recording in a courtside and/or elite seats in a sports arena for Apple Vision to see if it’s a better experience than the current “broadcast version”.
Keep it coming: the video store resurrection continues. The Video Store Minneapolis kicks off its physical store fundraiser and clinches the base goal in two days Joshua M. Greenberg ponders video stores as a lost third place I recall the iconic Video Update logo adorning my old local spot (’90s)
Damn this is spot on. It’s a long read and you’ll get the gist a fifth of the way through, but Aeon has a highly astute take down of the technocrats’ misinterpretation of our literary science fiction past , darkly reflecting on their actions and ambitions.
I didn’t realize regrinding old vinyl records was possible, but in the face of our climate crisis, it’s another trick the resuscitated industry has focused on. Good piece by Kyle Devine — Longreads link here , which is an excerpt from his book.
I fully support local coffee shops deploying canned brews, giving us a choice against (usually) poorly executed, mass-produced offerings at most grocers. SK Coffee released theirs earlier in the summer, and it’s an excellent first offering; alas, just wish it was more widely available at retail.
The Economist’s Big Mac index, a PPP analysis hitting its 40th year of kicking ass, demonstrates just how difficult it is to track the timely parity of global currencies . …for as long as currencies remain unmoored, and the Big Mac remains consistent, our index will serve a useful purpose—however distasteful its critics may find it.
We decided to return to the Pacific Northwest for our summer trip, three years after our last excursion. Nine days, spanning a landing in Seattle for a couple nights, a ferry into Canada’s Victoria on Vancouver Island for a few evenings, another ferry to Vancouver to pick up a car to drive up to our favorite resort in Whistler for three nights, and back to Vancouver to regroup and fly out the…
Thinking back a month and a half about my first attempted pizza in an outdoor oven. Kept it sliding on a mountain of semolina for the launch, it turned out well, and now I’m ripping a few of these every week for us. These pizzas can be elite, and with care, anyone can (probably) do them.
While I should have known, I wasn’t prepared for how much of a summer banger Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is. I may only be a fourth of the way through this opus, but it’s one of the breeziest 19th century reads I’ve wrangled, and so far, a pitch perfect swashbuckling adventure.
Streaming fatigue continues. The Verge captures the slow, steady movement that is backlashing streaming consolidations and DRM lock-ins . Also, a minor point not often cited, is bandwidth issues: It’s not just the cost of streaming that I have to worry about, either. Last year, I nearly exceeded my ISP’s data cap after I downloaded Baldur’s Gate 3 and kept up my heavy streaming habits. That was…
Under the lake surface.
I forgot who linked to this originally, but Groundbreaker has one of the more finely-worded perspectives about what’s happening with AI in the financial markets. Essentially, just as the subprime mortgage machine of 2008 relied on ever-accelerating home prices to support refinancing, current AI infrastructure relies on sustained, accelerating growth to service massive take-or-pay debt commitments.…
A bleak, but likely prophetic take from Aftermath of the collapsing videogame industry — insofar as larger, AAA games are concerned. Independent development, however, has been particularly healthy, fun, and innovative, and I hope that corner continues to grow.
A very nice MacOS app was released today — Aphera — for photo triaging and editing. Folks behind it: Ryan Carver, Naz Hamid, and Juan Pablo Zambrano, all bringing expertise to the project. Trying it out for a few weeks — and looking forward to using it after an upcoming vacation.
I hope other cities are seeing a similar trend to that of Minneapolis — we’re seeing a revival of independent physical video rental shops (the latest being a cafe/rental experiment called Saturn Video). So far three have entered the space. Here’s to hoping they stick around and this takes off.
The Hyland Lake Ski Jump has such an ominous presence.
Netflix… another company pursuing an audience they think they don’t have with content they erroneous think they need . Are they scared of YouTube? Probably. Are they focused on their core product that we the people originally signed up for? No. We all know attention spans are dwindling, attention consumption is changing, but metamorphosing into a mess of value propositions is either the result of…
Own your own content : POSSE it, they say. Own your content. Publish once, fork it five times. RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, webmention, pick your parasite. Fix the typo in two minutes. Already too late. Fossils wearing your name. The author’s footnote is also sage advice: “Length is not depth.”
The white line on the right side of US roads . Someone fought the good fight to get these accepted and implemented… who doesn’t love an origin story like this.
For anyone interested… been tinkering with a fast way to insert the current date (YEAR-MM-DD) on MacOS (alas, Tahoe). After struggling to get an Automator Applescript to work, Shortcuts (I guess?) was the most elegant way to do it. Sharing the shortcut here (it has a hotkey, but you can edit).
Old Dutch bringing out the summer party box — their classic Rip-L potato chips tricked out to imitate a juicy lucy cheeseburger . I applaud midwestern innovation of this kind.