• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, 2013

    Watched on Tuesday March 12, 2024.

    Tuesday March 12, 2024
  • The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2012

    Watched on Friday March 8, 2024.

    Tuesday March 12, 2024
  • ⚖️ It is an uncharacteristic misstep, in terms of both litigation strategy and public relations, for Apple to poke the EU bear by terminating Epic’s developer account. Whether Apple is right about Epic's intentions is irrelevant. This move looks petty and, worse, calculated to avoid exactly the kind of competition from exactly the kind of competitor the Digital Markets Act intends to encourage.

    Wednesday March 6, 2024
  • 😔 Yahoo is accelerating its enshittification of Engadget, in a move that really surprises absolutely no one because, well, it's Yahoo:

    "Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: 'news and features' and 'reviews and buying advice.' The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders."

    This is sad. I have been an Engadget reader since the beginning, and while its glory days have been gone for a while, the writers keeping it alive have done great work.

    Friday February 23, 2024
  • Links

    ,

    Law

    Chris Geidner at Law Dork has the best explanation of why the 5th Circuit’s jurisprudence has become so, to use a legal term of art, whacky:

    At the end of the day, there are essentially three groups of active judges on the Fifth Circuit: There are “mad vibes” judges, legally conservative judges, and legally moderate (or more left) judges.

    Geidner is so insightful and prolific that, and I mean this as a high compliment, it irritates me a little.

    A quote screenshot from an article by Chris Geidner in his Law Dork newsletter, which says:&10;&10;At the end of the day, there are essentially three groups of active judges on the Fifth Circuit: There are “mad vibes” judges, legally conservative judges, and legally moderate (or more left) judges.
    Sunday February 18, 2024
  • Notes

    The top seven free apps in the news category of the iOS App Store are a mix of proudly user-hostile mismanagement, fear mongering, hyperlocal hate, and Nazi monetization.

    The image shows a screenshot from an iPhone of the iOS App Store displaying the 'Top Charts' section for free apps. The top seven apps are listed: 1. Reddit - Social Forum & Community Chats, 2. X - Formerly Twitter, 3. Nextdoor: Neighborhood Net..., 4. NewsBreak: Local News & Alerts, 5. Citizen: Local Safety Alerts, 6. Substack - A home for readers, and 7. Police Scanner. Icons for 'Today', 'Games', 'Apps', 'Arcade', and 'Search' are at the bottom of the screen. The device's status bar indicates it's 9:15 with Wi-Fi and battery level at 86%, and a 'News' widget is visible in the top right corner.
    Tuesday January 30, 2024
  • Links

    🔗 Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

    Bill Toulas, writing at Bleeping Computer:

    Targeting open-source software developers tends to backfire for companies, as others fork or clone the code repositories to prevent the projects from disappearing.

    At this time, the Haier home assistant plugins have been forked 228 times, many occurring since the news of the legal threats.

    Now?

    1,462 forks.

    These were niche plugins for niche software for a niche audience before Haier let the lawyers loose.

    Hey Haier, Ms. Streisand called… she wants her effect back.

    Thursday January 18, 2024
  • ☄️ I’m watching this Yaccarino interview very long after it occurred, but time has not dulled the stings of how uninformed and naive she was about Twitter and Musk.

    It’s hard to believe a seasoned executive fell so far so fast, but there’s no denying the descent when you’re standing in the crater…

    https://youtu.be/hYymRU-bfpQ

    Sunday January 14, 2024
  • Notes

    Stop turning awesome apps into internet noise machines

    The news aggregating app Artifact is shutting down.

    Jarrod Blundy wrote at his blog HeyDingus:

    I do wonder if it would have had a brighter future without the ability to add comments. I never engaged with that social aspect of the service, and I expect it contributed massively to its complexity and moderation costs.

    I think about this every time a good news or link aggregation app goes away. These apps are, fundamentally, trying to help you sort the signal from the noise in an overwhelming “media ecosystem” or whatever we’re supposed to call it these days.

    As soon as they add their own social layer on top of the news and the links, they have betrayed their best use case and their most loyal users. It’s like buying a pair of earplugs, only to have them turn into in-ear headphones or hearing aides you don’t need and never asked for.

    Engagement, which they thought would spike after going social, craters. Resources, which were optimized and sufficient and scalable with increasing revenue over time, are siphoned off, as Jarrod wrote, into moderation and increasingly complex development cycles.

    It’s a kind of death spiral that most founders notice too late, so kudos, of a sort, to Artifact’s founders for knowing the telltale signs of a terminally ill app, and letting it die with some dignity.

    There are already plenty of places to share links and half-baked hot takes. The real challenge, for Artifact’s founders and anyone else with the leadership, technical and fundraising skills to tackle it, is to build something extremely useful to individuals without draining all of its lifeblood into a push for “social” that ultimately just turns it into another internet noise machine.

    Saturday January 13, 2024
  • Books

    Finished reading: Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White 📚 — ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

    Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.

    It sure is.

    What a hell of an amazing book to relegate to the unjustly dismissed “children’s” shelves. This book gets five stars, no question about it.

    White manages to address, in my opinion, so many of The Important Things We All Should Learn About Rather Young If Possible, including misogyny/clueless men, bullies, transactional acquaintances, competition, the joy and sorrow of freedom, the dilemma of the naive but intelligent, parenting (well, let’s be honest, mostly motherhood), the distinction between pathology and an innocent’s rational-from-their-perspective perceptions, the rarity and value of adults who are aware of the immediately preceding concept (like the inimitable Dr. Dorian), evolution, religion, birth and death, and, of course, the intergenerational power of real, no-but-seriously-really-real friendship that reaches out beyond its originators and enriches those who come after, in ways known and unknown, for years or decades to come.

    Like I said, just a hell of a book.

    Monday October 30, 2023
  • 📱 Someone please tell me which non-leather bifold wallet case to get for an #iPhone 14 Pro, preferably in pink. Extra points for MagSafe compatibility but it's not required.

    Tuesday October 24, 2023
  • 🤖 Don’t bother giving your three-year-old a comprehensive 10-minute explanation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early career up to The Terminator, featuring one of the absolute BEST accent performances of your LIFE, because, honestly, they aren’t going to appreciate it at all.

    Saturday October 21, 2023
  • 😕 Thanks to Casey Newton mentioning it on the #HardFork podcast and my having no judgment regarding the apps I try, I downloaded an app called bonk. Join the whatever this is and find me at https://bonkbonkbonk.app/friend/joeross

    Friday October 13, 2023
  • Notes

    iPhone as geek guardrails

    Here’s a reply I posted to someone I follow on Mastodon who, on being issued an iPhone by their employer for work calls, was wondering why anyone chooses it over other options when, for example, it’s hard to sideload something as simple as a custom ringtone:

    Look I need guardrails and I’ve known that ever since I was bopping around the command line on my HTC Evo 4G.

    Some of us stopped headbanging not because the music left our hearts, but because if you feel something too deeply for too long it can destroy you.

    That’s what was happening to me in the bowels of my root-and-rom addiction.

    Now I pay 0.99 for a ringtone to Tim Apple and say thank you sir may I have another because I’m safe from sudo-ing on my phone.

    Thursday October 12, 2023
  • 🤨 Is it true that despite paying for the special upgrade I can't set the #ChatGPT iOS app to default to 4 instead of 3.5?i

    Sunday October 1, 2023
  • Checkins

    Princeton Public Library.

    Saturday September 30, 2023
  • Law

    ,

    Notes

    Dear Lawyers Still Manually Numbering Paragraphs:

    Stop it.

    Here’s a tutorial:

    1. Place your cursor where you intend to begin the numbered section of your pleading.
    2. Click the numbered list button in your word processor.
    3. Repent, and feel your soul become lighter.

    Yours, scoldingly,

    Joe

    Wednesday September 20, 2023
  • 🎮 Bluey: The Videogame, for real life?!

    Yup.

    https://youtu.be/S-PYqMxXKKk

    Tuesday September 19, 2023
  • ⌚ Audio recordings are an overlooked way of keeping memories with your kids. Mine are both under 4 and, while pointing a phone camera at them often changes their behavior, a surreptitious audio recording is easy to do. I've got some great stuff that I'm almost certain an attempt at photos or video would've prevented. Aside from sleep tracking, this is the most common way I used my Apple Watch.

    Saturday September 16, 2023
  • ⚖️ Okay maybe I'm just a hopelessly biased defense lawyer but can anyone read this and tell me with a straight face that the plaintiff didn't set this up...

    Monday September 4, 2023
  • ⁉️ I’m curious: has anyone else recently seen excessive outgoing #DNS requests on their network from #Wyze cameras? This was a known issue a while ago but I thought they had fixed it.

    I've noticed unusual spikes in the past 60 days or so, and when I blocked Wyze and its related domains using NextDNS, logs showed they accounted for more than 40 percent of DNS requests from my network (‼️).

    Monday September 4, 2023
  • 🎸 I’ve played an acoustic guitar for and with my two kids since my oldest was born a few years ago, but today I plugged an old electric of mine into an amp for the first time in maybe ten years and the kids loved it, and it reminded me that there’s music-making at the core of me.

    Saturday September 2, 2023
  • 🤢 It's not a great headshot. I look so... unfamiliar with the "Smile!" command. And thanks to a moment of poor judgment, and Gravatar, it'll be all over the internet until I decide to change it again. Which will likely be soon...

    (Yes, I know it's not attached. That was intentional...)

    Thursday August 31, 2023
  • Notes

    ⚠️ So I’m going to do a real blog post about this when I find the time, but today I discovered that my router’s admin panel is accessible via a combination of selecting the right IP and appending a string of numbers to the name of the HTML page that contains the admin panel. The string is the same across a nonzero number of individual routers, some of which can be located with the right Google search…

    Saturday August 26, 2023
  • 🐎 Julia Glassman, writing at The Mary Sue (with major #spoilers for the newest batch of episodes):

    What makes this show so great is that it isn’t afraid to employ writing that’s savvy enough for adults to enjoy. Bluey navigates real conflicts, while her parents—the delightfully flawed Bandit and Chilli—work through believable, thoughtful issues of their own. This isn’t your average children’s show.

    And now, with ten new episodes having dropped on Disney+ earlier this summer (they came out in Australia a whole year ago), the show is getting positively meta.

    I dare even people without kids to watch a few random episodes of Bluey without learning something they wish they learned decades ago.

    Thursday August 24, 2023

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