Coyote Tracks

John Gruber, “X Once Again Marks the Spot”: If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their prior assumptions. Okay, you know, I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about this, but since I was…

Back in mid-September, I wrote about reconsidering my Apple Watch use, in large part because I don’t like the promised upcoming “Audio Intelligence” features. And, I thought, it could be good to have one less always-on computer screen with me. Right? Well, I went ahead and ordered that Fitbit Air, and I’ve been wearing it instead of—not in tandem with—the Apple Watch for the last two weeks. (Actually, getting closer to three now.) The good It’s light and I don’t have to charge it often. They…

“We built Muse to help people build the world they want.” — Alexandr Wang of Meta Most people never say what they want. It’s not because we don’t want. We want fiercely and constantly. We may not say it, but we do type it. Not directly, but it’s implied in every search we make. Every post we thumbs-up. Every video we linger on. And at Meta, we know how to extract that information in ways you’ve never imagined. We know how much time you’re not spending with your family, how crippling your social…

Last year, I wrote an article called “Seriously, Markdown” in which I gently dismantled the “nobody can do serious writing in Markdown” arguments that come up every so often. I got some pushback, none of which I confess I found particularly convincing because they invariably rehashed points I addressed in the article. Also, people who got their hackles up tended to gloss over the part where I wrote, I’m not saying “give up and just use Markdown.” Being familiar with another markup system is a…

For most of my life, I just wasn’t a watch person. Sometime after college, when whatever cheap watch I had at the time broke, I just stopped bothering. The advent of smartphones—my first was the T-Mobile Sidekick, which deserves its own post at some point (people either forget or just never knew that the Sidekick had an on-device app store, visual voicemail, and one of the best pre-iPhone web browsers on it)—gave me a “watch” in my pocket. What else did I need, right? Well, sometime around 2014…

I came across a blog post today that hit me harder than expected. It’s nominally about one specific action and person—companies and people giving money to David Heinemeier Hansson’s “Omacom Foundation,” despite DHH’s well-publicized turn toward fascist ideology—but it’s also about, well, everything. Brennan Kenneth Brown writes in “Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH”, Much of the world has become far too complacent and complicit with people (and their companies) who…

I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since before it was called Connected. Federico is a man of strong opinions and, from all appearances, strong principles. In 2024, for instance, he and MacStories managing editor John Voorhees strongly called for AI regulation, writing, The trouble with the companies…

In July 2022, I wrote “Thoughts on Leaving California” about my move back to Florida after twenty years in the Golden State; I followed it a year later with “A Year Back in Florida”, which ended with “I’ll check back in after another year.” I’ve been doing that annually ever since, although the date has kind of crept up; this year I’m over a month late. I wrote 2024’s check-in during a 16-month stretch of unemployment. While part of that was a deliberate break, most of it wasn’t. That check-in…

There’s been buzz recently about how a nascent web and mobile astronomy app, Dark Hours, got wildly incorrectly rejected from Apple’s App Store. Then maybe it turned out that the rejection wasn’t so wild because Apple may well have been looking at the astrology app the developer first submitted under the name “Asterly”. Then it turned out that the web version of Dark Hours was strikingly similar—although UI-wise, hardly identical—to an existing web app called DarkHours (camelcase rather than…

I’ve written before about being between two communities with very different attitudes toward our current generative AI moment: Artists, writers, and other (non-tech) creators mostly loathe it with every fiber of their being, to the point where they’ll vociferously argue that so much as asking Claude for a list of good curry places in London is a betrayal of the Enlightenment. Tech people often embrace it even when they admit the downsides. There’s a lot of “the energy costs are horrible, stolen…

Back in the olden days, there was an Insert key on Mac keyboards. (There still is on PC keyboards, although in many programs it doesn’t actually do anything anymore.) If you were editing text, you had two different modes, overwrite and insert. If you were in insert mode, then when text was in front of the cursor, typing would insert text. If the | character represents the cursor: banana |crazypants And you typed plaid, you’d get: banana plaid|crazypants This is what you expect in modern…

In November of last year, I wrote about what I did and didn’t want to do in Emacs. It’s great for anything that involves text editing/processing, good for certain kinds of management tasks (it’s a great Git client, and even has surprisingly useful file management tricks up its sleeve); it’s not—at least to me—great for tasks that involve viewing, like RSS reading and PDF viewing. I’ve kept putting this to the test, and stand by most of what I said back then. Most of the time I’d rather view…

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last fifteen years and change, you’ve probably heard of Soylent, whether you wanted to or not. Nutrition drinks as a category have been around forever, pitched in various forms to dieters or weightlifters or people who just frequently find themselves rushing in the morning. Nobody gives their coworkers shit for grabbing a prepackaged smoothie for breakfast. Soylent, though, has a distinctly bad reputation. Partly, that comes from the fact that the original…

Technology needs another revolution. It's just not the one the industry seems hellbent on delivering.

It's a question I expect to be asked in the future. I have an answer, but I can't help suspect it's the wrong question.

On real restrictions in computing life versus imagined ones.