Katie Zacharia fired after five days as White House press secretary:
Zacharia had a rocky start to her tenure as press secretary, hosting a widely panned first briefing on Tuesday. She had also faced questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.
Not even half a Mooch.
I just finished reading null: $cat /dev/null_ by Dienw Neb. I found an ad for it in the back of 2600 Magazine that piqued my curiosity. I’ve mentioned it here a couple times recently.
If you’re the kind of person who’d be reading these words I’m writing, you’d probably enjoy this book, and you should get your hands on a copy.
I don’t even know where to begin. There’s almost nothing I can tell you about the stories in it that wouldn’t spoil it in some way, and it’s far too good to take that away from you. Instead, I’ll talk about how it made me feel.
This book was made for me, personally. It could’ve been, anyway. It’s about me and my friends, hanging out in dodgy clubs, or rough parts of town, or late into the night on IRC, or in roomfuls of LAN party networks. Characters are arguing about the same stupid things we argue about. They troll each other in the same ways. People stick their head in to listen, catch a couple of sentences out of context, and nope out before they accidentally hear more. “Breathtaking” is usually hyperbole, but “Null” left me staring at a page, reading and re-reading it, breath held in wide-eyed wonder, at the magically realistic version of my youth on the page. Several times. It hooked me like few things ever have. If “Neuromancer” was the world I didn’t want, and “Snow Crash” the world I almost kind of wanted in spite of myself, “Null” was the world I’ve lived and breathed — but just foreign enough to remind me I was an outsider looking in.
And wow, is it different. If parts of our reality were embedded in “Null”, they were little bubbles of familiarity in a universe that’s fundamentally different in unspoken though almost tangible ways.
However, it’s not weird for the sake of being weird. I laughed out loud. Not a silent LOL that everyone knows is really a silent, tight-lipped fleeting grin. Actually out loud. I choked back tears during my morning commute. I closed my eyes and let my mind savor the poignant beauty, awed by the shared humanity of people in a timeline I wasn’t intended to fully understand. It’s a Moonlight Sonata, stunning and strange and haunting and sensuous.
This is not a book for everyone. Yet here you are, somehow in the placetime to be reading the random things I send to a screen. We likely have some life experiences in common, you and I. That means “Null” was made for you, personally, too. It’s inexpensive. Get a copy. When you’re done, please let me know. I’m dying to discuss this with someone.
PS: I think it’s base64. Let me know if you get further than that.
Unacceptable: Apple Health Sync is now behind a $99/year paywall for new accounts:
What’s changing for new members: for accounts created from October 13, 2026, automatic sync to third-party apps is part of Withings+.
Add Withings to my personal boycott list. If they’re gouging new customers today, I predict that within the year they’ll also charge existing users who purchase newly-launched devices.
They’ll never see another penny from me.
Lots of my neighbors are super into holiday decoration, and I’m here for it.
My inner contrarian nature is always sorely tempted to adopt, I don’t know, Perl or such, as my main hackery language. Why? Because if almost no one’s using it, it must be awesome, says a broken part of my head.
Guilfoyle tried to blame AI for damning texts in effort to save her job:
Guilfoyle told the White House the money-requesting texts were not legitimate, but had instead been generated by artificial intelligence.
Uh-huh. “AI did it” is the new “I was hacked”. But also, this KRON4 bonus content:
“I will not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service,” she added, although it’s unclear what exactly she was alluding to.
“There were no real decades of public service, there was some years of public service. There was some years in the media,” said KRON4 political analyst Michael Yaki. “There was some years when she was dating Donald Trump Jr. and being a flunky for the Trump Administration, but there were not decades of public service.”
I am a Plex lifetime subscriber. Within the last week, I’ve started seeing unskippable ads before and during movies I’m playing off my home server.
Oh hell no.
Jellyfin, here I come. I’ll be damned if I’m watching ads injected between my home server and my own TV via a service I already paid a lot of money for.
See ya, Plex. You were good before the enshittification.
First reaction: Whoa, I didn’t realize I’d clicked an AOL link.
Second: LOL, so that’s what they’re up to these days.
Third: clicks Back button
Today we went for a 10K/6.2mi hike through rolling hills. My wife wore a weight vest. I carried a 40lb backpack. My legs are quite angry with me right now and are whining incessantly. I’m punishing them by acquiring another 10lb weight to add to the pack. “Oh, you want something to cry about?”
Comcast is advertising their “WiFi Motion” feature, which is basically “pay us to track when you’re home or away”. I wonder how often they get subpoenaed for that information, or whether they give or sell it without the hassle of a warrant.
While I would never in a million years let this into my home or office, I thank them for drawing attention to their ability to spy on customers this way.
