The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Watched on Tuesday March 12, 2024.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2012
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Watched on Friday March 8, 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.
😔 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.
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.
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.
🔗 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.
☄️ 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…
Stop turning awesome apps into internet noise machines
Saturday, January 13, 2024
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.
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.
📱 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.
🤖 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.
😕 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 …
iPhone as geek guardrails
Thursday, October 12, 2023
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.
🤨 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
Saturday, September 30, 2023 →
Princeton Public Library.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023 →
Dear Lawyers Still Manually Numbering Paragraphs:
Stop it.
Here’s a tutorial:
- Place your cursor where you intend to begin the numbered section of your pleading.
- Click the numbered list button in your word processor.
- Repent, and feel your soul become lighter.
Yours, scoldingly,
Joe
🎮 Bluey: The Videogame, for real life?!
Yup.
Saturday, September 16, 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.
⚖️ 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...