Merry Christmas! This present combines two of my favorite things into one shirt. 🎄

Today’s photo challenge prompt is travel. Driving by the old air traffic control tower at Mueller.

Jason Snell blogging at Macworld about how much the Siri delay has affected other products:

Nothing exposes the imbalance between Apple’s hardware designers and its software organization than multiple products reportedly being finished months or years in advance, forced to idle because their software isn’t up to snuff.

Apple might’ve dug a bigger hole with Siri than we realize. While balancing on-device models and private cloud is good in theory, it has fragmented Siri across devices, making it all but impossible to roll out a new assistant to HomePods, for example. They are 2+ years behind.

Hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday week. What a crazy year! I love this time, as things slow down, anticipating all the possibilities of the new year to come. 🎄

If you’re following the Micro.blog holiday photo challenge, there will be a special “pin” to unlock. It should be active soon, and it won’t be too strict about participation… I’m going to make it so it only requires posting in about half the holiday prompt days. Not too late to catch up! 🎄

For today’s winter wonder photo challenge prompt grinch, at the Trail of Lights. 🎄

Wemby reading Hero of Ages in French on Instagram. 📚

In addition to the Micro.blog holiday photo challenge, we also have micro.christmas, a fun domain that gathers up recent posts about the holidays.

My default AI for coding help is GPT-5.2 in Codex on “high”. It is very good. But just when I think they’ve mostly solved hallucinations, ChatGPT gets a couple easy fact-checks wrong. As models get more efficient and cheaper, I expect more users to be routed to longer thinking to address this.

“Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” — Kermit in The Muppet Christmas Carol 🎄

Going through more of my mom’s things, still miss her every day. And thinking of my dad often too, even though it has been many, many years now.

Kicking myself for deployment mistakes as we wind down for the holidays. We have a few big things planned for early next year. I probably should stop working on new things until then, but can’t resist. Also got new iOS and Android bug fixes submitted today.

Careless blunder while deploying a security improvement today, which caused posts created from the native apps to go into an outdated saved articles list for a short time. To minimize the fallout, I’ve restored them to drafts in your Posts list. You can post again or use the draft. Very sorry.

When we complain about the App Store, it’s not just the fees. It’s the lack of control and fragmented billing. With our Micro.one $1 plan — cheap! — I’m actually paying more to Stripe (33 cents) because credit cards aren’t good for small transactions. But having everything in one place is worth it.

I’m tempted to just get all my political news from Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue. But I do watch CNN every morning during breakfast. I don’t expect to break this habit until at least after the midterms, if ever. And politics is pervasive, everywhere. 🇺🇸

The New Yorker has put their 100-year archive online in a really nice way. I’ve poked around on a few old issues.

Over the last year I’ve scaled back my news reading… Cancelled the NYT, Washington Post, Atlantic, everything. I read blogs, tech news, and for long-form The New Yorker. And novels.

Laurens Hof at Connected Places wraps up the Threads / fediverse experiment:

My take is that Meta and Threads have played the game well. They immediately capitalised on the moment in 2023 when decentralisation and Twitter-alternatives got large-scale attention, and knew how to say the right buzzwords to ride the wave.

Threads with even partial ActivityPub support in maintenance mode is still better than a completely closed platform. But it is disappointing that Meta didn’t take this further.

Updated the Mac app today with a few little improvements, including a right-click context menu for Movies. I’ve wanted this a few times to copy a link to a movie or TV show. Most menus also support holding down the option key to switch to Markdown.

I missed that iOS 26.2 in Japan allows developers to replace Siri from the side button. This seems like a big deal.

Also from @timapple, blogging on returning to Micro.blog:

I have come and gone quite a few times over the years, but all that moving around has convinced me that this is where I belong. I am ready to hang up my coat and stay awhile.

Welcome! It makes me happy when people come back after trying something different. Micro.blog gets better every year.