I don't want it to be lost to the sands of time that Chrome’s auto-updating functionality was extremely impressive. At a time when browser updates happened infrequently and required manual installations, Chrome pioneered regular, lightweight, automated patches, and normalizing that did a world […]

usxports.gov, registered by the Department of State's Bureau of Political and Military Affairs. https://mastodon.social/@botgov/115191994244102322

So here's a weird thing that challenges my understanding of how iOS and macOS work. I gave $5 to Virginia Public Media (VPM). My credit card recorded it as “VPM.” iOS reported it as "Vpm.” But iPhone Mirroring rendered the iOS notification on my MacBook as […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Guess what? https://mastodon.social/@rejectedplates/115169388339354353

Why the heck does Apache keep hitting the ceiling for the number of workers, so it stops accepting new requests? The traffic isn't high enough to justify this! ... Ah. Well. Yes.

This was down for a few weeks until a) I realized with a start at bedtime last night that I hadn't seen an update in a while and b) somebody pinged me this morning with the same. It turns out CDC had simply moved the source JSON file. Fixed now, with updates coming every weekend […]

My chickens have discovered they can follow around the lawnmower and eat the fleeing, exposed insects.

As I watched, this yellowjacket tore off this larva’s head and flew away, heavily burdened with the body.

It took me forever to make a Metafilter account (I just showed up and read), and I felt like a Johnny-come-lately. But looking at Metafilter Activity Stats, I realize for the first time that actually September 2001 a) was pretty early actually b) puts me in good company with the huge spike of […]

abd.gov has been registered by the Executive Office of the President. https://mastodon.social/@botgov/115067423423754562

@saschameinrath I do believe you've gotten under Starlink's skin (see pages 5–6). https://cardinalnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/SpaceX-Comments-to-VA-Final-Proposal-Final-2.pdf

Our plum tree’s first-ever plum! Also, the figs are coming in fast and furious on our increasingly enormous fig tree. Time to start giving them away.

In 1997, posing with my Apple Newton, the computer that convinced me to move from DOS/Windows to the Mac.

So apparently we are within the last 60 days of dial-up AOL being a thing. https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued ht @mattl

@GeePawHill I've been enjoying Tyler Childers' new album. He's got this song that I think you might be fond of—a guy describing his love for the older woman he's in a relationship with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR_ihUk6VFk

I guess I have no concept of what license plates Virginia will and will not approve.

Jesus Christ, bot https://mastodon.social/@thisemailfindsyou/114949521549940095

crypto.gov https://mastodon.social/@botgov/114948514901920888

This kind of thing would have been impossible before LLMs. https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/114943689483847588

It's mystifying to me why no major browser has an option to wipe all cache, history, and cookies for the past, say, 5 minutes. The shortest period is always a lot longer than that. Every few years I'll accidentally see some shit that I did *not* want to see and would like to remove all traces of […]

You're doing great, macOS

I just remembered the feeling of ejecting a 3.5" floppy by pushing the eject button (on my PS/2), and the shock of the first time I used a Mac and it *ejected the disk by itself*.

This morning, while clearing some flood debris with a chainsaw, my left hand spontaneously became really painful to clench. I can’t pick anything up now. The human body is kind of shit, innit?

So…Amazon hasn't updated their computer storage categories in a while.

Toad in the hole

New, at KrebsOnSecurity.com: Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

Please report any account that tells you that you need to verify your #mastodon account to continue using it through a private message. It is a scam. We do not require identity verification. Real staff accounts either have a special role badge on their profile or are verified through the […]

Well here’s an interesting new scam.

I’m at a conference session in which a Comcast lobbyist is informing the audience (county executives) how they should run their public broadband expansion projects, and I think I'm doing an admirable job of not screaming.

It's weird having a bot that sometimes proselytizes https://mastodon.social/@thisemailfindsyou/114819288385287263

In used to call session tokens "magic cookies” and that was a lot better than just "cookies.”

the killer app of vibecoding website generators that let you 'recreate an app in one prompt' is phishing websites, it's just phishing websites, we all know this is how it ends up

Sure I guess I could deal with this Apache zombie-process problem, *or* I could just keep rebooting this EC2 instance every couple of days.

Nailed it https://mastodon.social/@thisemailfindsyou/114785314550841419

My wife and I paid off the school lunch debt at our kid's elementary school a few years ago, and later learned that the county never pursues those debts and just wipes the slate clean at the end of the school year, so we haven't done it since. YMMV! https://mastodon.social/@kottke/114773875880018174

Yessss https://mastodon.social/@kottke/114772995055971540

It gets 54 mpg, there are a million aftermarket mods, and it rarely needs repairs. https://www.theverge.com/news/689183/honda-reusable-rocket-successful-launch-test-landing

@nelson I'm getting a kick out of Gymnopédie / Take Five! They're both songs I know well—hearing them mixed together reminds me of the best bits of the mash-up craze of the mid-00s.

The more I learn about atmospheric chemistry, the more terrified and angry I am about satellite companies' blatant lack of consideration for how their actions will harm the atmosphere. I hope this gets a lot of press. Great work by a whole team of scientists, including @astrokiwi.bsky.social! […]

OK, the WWDC call screening announcement is great. You'll be able to prompt unknown callers to say who they are and why they're calling, and then you'll get a notification where you can accept the call or reject it. That'll be a great life upgrade.

@mathowie That Will Forte sketch was great. I've seen some very funny PowerPoint karaoke ("battledecks”) attempts—incorporating that into a sketch was a really good idea.

Rule 2: Don't try to express legal codes as YAML, and that includes JSON (which is a subset of YAML). https://jawns.club/@bendystraw/114636326882693368

I'm looking for security consultant recommendations! I support a non-profit that’s building PII-storing open source software that integrates with government data storage systems, and they would like a third-party security assessment. This is *not* about compliance, this is straight-up wanting […]

💅 https://mastodon.social/@thisemailfindsyou/114625590192615501

oh nooooo https://mastodon.social/@rejectedplates/114620144218211457

It me https://mastodon.social/@thisemailfindsyou/114615445247970318

New blog post! 💻💰📉 “18F’s profound legacy of procurement reform” https://sboots.ca/2025/05/30/18fs-profound-legacy-of-procurement-reform/ With quotes and links from @waldoj @danhon and many others, and gratitude to everyone who was part of this work. #18f

I wound up having to rely on my emergency backup printed speakers’ notes for a presentation today. No thanks to Google for having that backup option. https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/114598717016241276

I don’t know what ar.inspiredpencil.com is, but I am extremely sick of that site clogging up DuckDuckGo image search results with AI nonsense.

Generating printed speakers' notes from Google Sheets is just not possible. You'd think the company making presentation software that requires an internet connection would be really sensitive to the need for backup options when there's no connection, but they are not.