Joe Ross

Sophie, whose localghost website is a joy to explore, defends the craft of making sites for people to enjoy, not for AI bots to grind up and feed to their slop machines.

This is a delightful demonstration of the nuance of “progress.”

Legal/ethical merits of a trillion-dollar giant suing an indie influencer aside, it's absurd Apple's mad Prosser released iOS 26 early when Apple's doing the same by shipping an update that's unreadable under many common conditions.

🔗

This explains a lot about why I always found Leno so boring—he lacked a point of view. Easily the least interesting late night host of his generation.

There’s at least one night a month when despite best efforts, sleep just never arrives. Last night was one of those nights.

Happy Gilmore isn’t perfect, especially to modern sensibilities, but it’s a ton of fun, and the Bob Barker fight is still among the funniest celebrity cameos of all time.

Gin Blossoms can still rock it out, and Follow You Down was one of the first songs I recorded from the radio to make a mix tape.

Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…

I reviewed our digital subscriptions in preparation for the new year and one of the services I let go (at least for now) is YouTube Premium. It’s wild to me how shitty the ads are on YouTube. Google is probably the largest advertising provider in the world and YouTube ads are just pure garbage.

I think my kids had a good Christmas, but the disappointment in my three-year-old son’s voice this morning when he walked out to the Christmas tree and said “but there’s no more presents under the tree…” was palpable. And it was even worse when I explained Christmas is only one morning a year.

I don’t think the will last, given that it’s very porous, most Verge readers likely block ads anyway, and the comments section is already… lively. They should offer an easy way to support them without degrading the free experience, but I can’t blame them for trying something.

There are so many bearded dudes in Philly that I think I know from college. It can be very disconcerting.

Now that the kids are mostly sentient, Thanksgiving means fielding questions from them about why we’re vegetarians and most people aren’t. If anyone has any ideas let me know. I’m not sure they’ll understand I was radicalized by a YouTube rabbithole decades ago, given they’re both younger than 5…

Once in a while, I remember that the overwhelming majority of human beings prefer everything Coldplay did after Parachutes over that absolute gem of a record, and I realize that I should’ve known when that thought first occurred to me that I was in one of the darker timelines.

Sometimes, when I've really had it with my kids, I just look them right in the eyes and tell them, with the most stern and serious expression I can muster, "There will be no fourth chances!"

Dear watchOS 11,

I didn't stand when you suggested I should, so why did you tell me I did a great job getting closer to my stand goal?

Confusedly,

Joe

What are some good dinosaur apps and games to learn and play with your kids on iOS?

I’m happy to pay for good apps, I just want to avoid scams and low-effort nonsense.

A quick MS Word tip: Press control + shift + F9 to remove all hyperlinks in a selection of text. You may need to include the Fn or equivalent key if you're a keyboard nerd using several layers.

This is handy for work because while I'm writing briefs I like to keep the citations hyperlinked for easy reference/collaboration/discussion, but when it's time to file, those links usually go bye bye .

This is only my opinion, but it is one I strongly hold: is equal parts omnipotence and ADHD.

Google’s connected speakers and hubs are actually useful (unlike Alexa and Siri…), but it’s really hard when you’re super angry about something and have to mumble “Hey Google …” through gritted teeth. Just let us change the wake phrase.

(Yes I know some devices/command combinations don’t require a wake phrase but who has time to learn which)

About to watch the long Bluey episode with the family… will update afterward…

If your iPhone on iOS 17 becomes unresponsive, be warned:

You may if you decide to before getting them off the phone.

This happened to me today. I lost three photos of my son being cuter than any other son in the world.

That feeling when you've been reading The Hobbit to your kids and your four-year-old daughter insists, and I mean INSISTS, that the friend she made recently at dance class, whose name she had trouble remembering until just now, is named Thorin

It is an uncharacteristic misstep, in terms of both litigation strategy and public relations, for Apple to poke the EU bear by . 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 , 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.

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…

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 …

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

Bluey: The Videogame, for real life?!

Yup.

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 and tell me with a straight face that the plaintiff didn't set this up...

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 (‼️).

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.

It's not a great headshot. I look so... unfamiliar with the "Smile!" command. And thanks to a moment of poor judgment, and , 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...)

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…

#security #networking #routers

Julia Glassman, writing at (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.

I’m looking at the Be Our Guest dinner as my wife and I finalize our plans for #Disney World and I need someone to tell me why the menu at one of their top restaurant experiences is so vegetarian-hostile.

Pan-roasted zucchini?

Really?

Disappointing.

From a by its proprietor, :

Starr issued an “administrative stay” on Thursday that will last for 30 days while he considers the airline’s request for a stay of the order pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Judge Starr is having a good think about whether he’s willing to endure the near-certain reversal, and the more-likely-than-not searing bench slap that will accompany it…

So if one had, hypothetically, selected all of the files in the .txt/.markdown notes folder in their iCloud Files all, and mistaken the “duplicate” button for a “copy” button, is there an app or solution to de-dupe the folder from iOS?

The MacBook Air I'm posting this from is older than I'll admit in polite company, so I've been eyeing the new 15-inch Air, and today Amazon is - in all colorways - at a $200 discount.

Apropos of my earlier post about considering migration to a different Mastodon server:

Right now I do ActivityPubs primarily from mastodon.social. But I’m researching migration and reading about other folks’ experiences. I love omg.lol as a whole and social.lol is where I probably belong, but it’s daunting to move. If you decided to migrate here from another server when social.lol launched, let me know if you have any tips or tricks for someone considering the move!

So the Gummi Bears show from 1985-1991 was both something I think I saw in its entirety during its original run (I was born in 1983), and something I completely forgot had ever existed.

💬 Okay, I'm trying again to see if I can set it up so my updates on status.lol are imported to my Micro.blog and syndicated out from there.

Hey thanks @jmj@social.lol for the tip on getting my status.lol crossposting to Mastodon working again!

Everyone on social.lol should check out Joanna’s app status.log:

Now I have three Bluesky invites. Let me know if you're interested!

I have two Bluesky invites if anyone is interested. However, I’m only considering requests from people who will swear never to call posts on Bluesky… what lots of people on Bluesky are calling them. It’s not okay.

Re-installing the twitter app… just for a bit so I can complain to Dropbox about their gross downgrading flow dark patterns…

If you’re on Bluesky, come say hi. I’ve found some cool people, but it’s a … different vibe than my other communities, for sure.

(Shout-out to @maique@social.lol for the invite! I don’t have any yet, but I’ll pay it forward when I do.)

Of course I'm putzing around on omg.lol

Having fun rebuilding my Drafts app groups and actions from the ground up.

Listening to the National Security Law Podcast

Every time I visit omg.lol or social.lol I find a new fun thing to try. This time it’s status.lol and the neat app status.log by @jmj!