St. Louis ribs, cooked for 20 minutes in an Instant Pot then basted and baked for 10 minutes.

A cookie sheet loaded with enormous racks of ribs, thick with dark red barbecue sauce.

The cats are making an 80s alt rock album cover.

2 cats are sitting on a bedroom floor, facing away from the camera. One is looking back over his shoulder.

Little Snitch 6 came out yesterday with many quality of life improvements.

It’s always the first app I install on a new Mac. New versions are no-brainer upgrades for me. I still wish it had a way to sync rulesets between Macs so that I don’t have to train each one independently.

There’s a certain Apple ecosystem notetaking app I heard of from a paid blog post. I downloaded it; it was fine, but not my thing. Today I saw there’s a new version with a new name, and still very few App Store reviews. I googled for it and saw they issued a press release for the renaming.

I’m kinda curious how their focus on PR will work out. Will it keep it on people’s minds until they buy it? It’s not a small-app strategy I recall seeing before.

Adding AI the right way

Three of my favorite tools, BBEdit, Drafts, and iTerm, have added support for ChatGPT-style AI interactions. They’ve each done it in ways that respect me and my wishes. Their AI add-ons are standalone features off to the side. If I want to use the features, they’re there. If I don’t want to, I don’t launch them. None of my existing workflows have changed one iota: the AI is an addition, not a change.

This is how all tools should add AI features. I enjoy experimenting with AI tools to check out the current state of things. I’m not allergic to them and I don’t try to avoid them. It’s more that I have no interest in building my daily processes to depend on having them.

In which I try frying turnips for the first time.

A cast iron skillet is lined with a layer of 1/2” cubed turnips, glistening in olive oil.

I seriously love Oakland. It’s my kinda grimy.

A bunch of stickers on a service box. One has anime characters: one saying "trans rights!" and another saying "hell yeah!" A second sticker is for a psychedelic mushroom delivery.

I set my pillows on the floor to make the bed. Keeva had burrowed in by the time I got back around to that side. I didn’t have the heart to move her. Within moments she was snoring away.

A Boston terrier is burrowed in between several large, colorful pillows.The same Boston terrier is curled up and sleeping in the same spot.

I am not exaggerating this:

I created a new hostname in DNS, then added it to my existing webserver config.

It was online for 3 seconds – 3! – before getting a 404 request for /.git/config.

If you’re relying on obscurity to protect your services, get that right out your fool head today. You have about 3 seconds to get your act together.

In the time it took me to type this, I got another 62 requests:

     30 "/"
      3 "/.git/config"
      2 "/.vscode/sftp.json"
      2 "/v2/_catalog"
      2 "/telescope/requests"
      2 "/server-status"
      2 "/server"
      2 "/s/431323e2230323e2134323e2239313/_/;/META-INF/maven/com.atlassian.jira/jira-webapp-dist/pom.properties"
      2 "/?rest_route=/wp/v2/users/"
      2 "/login.action"
      2 "/.env"
      2 "/ecp/Current/exporttool/microsoft.exchange.ediscovery.exporttool.application"
      2 "/.DS_Store"
      2 "/debug/default/view?panel=config"
      2 "/config.json"
      2 "/_all_dbs"
      2 "/about"

Justice Department takes 'major step' toward rescheduling marijuana:

The Justice Department took a significant step toward rescheduling marijuana Thursday, formalizing its process to reclassify the drug as lower-risk and remove it from a category in which it has been treated as more dangerous than fentanyl and meth.

[...]

“Look folks, no one should be in jail for merely using or possessing marijuana. Period,” Biden said in Thursday’s video, his third time speaking extensively on the topic since his directive two years ago.

At last. Let’s put an end to this nonsense.

I have an IKEA Dirigera hub connected to my HomeKit setup. I also have a bunch of Nanoleaf Matter A19 bulbs in my house. I bought a new $8 IKEA Vallhorn motion sensor, paired it with the Dirigera, then set up a HomeKit automation to control my living room lights. It worked right on the first try. Yay, compatibility!

Old computer ads are something else.

Source: BYTE, Vol. 6, No. 9, September 1981, page 299

A black and white ad for an Epson printer. A little boy is standing in front of a classroom holding up a printout on fanfold tractor-fed paper. It’s a greyscale-looking picture of a woman who appears to be naked, covering her chest with one hand. The boy’s teacher is leaning over him, hand to mouth, looking astonished and dismayed. 
&10;
&10;Caption:
&10;
&10;“…And my dad says GRAFTRAX80 does better graphics than anybody. Epson.”

Python 3.13 is removing more Amiga “dead batteries” modules, like chunk:

The chunk module provides support for reading and writing Electronic Arts’ Interchange File Format. IFF is an old audio file format originally introduced for Commodore and Amiga. The format is no longer relevant.

I’m sure that’s the right thing to do. It still saddens me.

We bought a flower kit from Costco. It had some potting soil, pre-planted seeds, and a pot — just add water. It looked fun and easy.

That thing delivered. Wow, it delivered. It’s thick with new growth and buds.

A faux-wicker flower pot stuffed with growing lily stalks and several bright young pink-orange flowers.

I lost my Diablo 4 level 71 hardcore rogue today. Although I was momentarily bummed, I feel good that I got my first ever hardcore D4 character that high.

And no, it wasn’t to a Butcher. I took 6 of them down before the end.

My buddy picked us all up to go rollin’.

A shabby stretch limo painted with flames. We’re stylin’.

How I’m working right now. I couldn’t move if I had to.

A Boston terrier is sleeping on the floor, pressed against my sandaled foot.

I’m dying to know the story here.

Some keys on a lanyard saying “BAD BOYS BAIL BONDS” is hanging from a twig on the trunk of a tree. It’s probably 8 feet above ground.&10;

Apple: "What's a professional?"

Apple announced their new iPad Pro and I couldn’t care less. The hardware itself is brilliant, yet Apple insists on artificially limiting what you can do with it for reasons I don’t understand. A “pro” device would let me run Mac-style apps like Nova and a real local terminal. It would let me compile and run the software I write when Shortcuts scripting isn’t good enough. It would be more like a hyper-portable MacBook for doing things that don’t require a heavier and more powerful computer, and less like a giant iPhone that gives me free rein of a walled garden.

I bought a 2018 iPad Pro 13" when they were released and used it constantly. It was overpowered for the software available to run on it, to the point that my kid in college still uses it for classwork today. The hardware was never the limiting factor in what I could do with it. I finally replaced it last summer with a MacBook Air that’s worse for my wants and needs in every way but one: Apple’s OS for Macs lets me do the professional things that the as-powerful iPad can’t do. Apple ran an ad when that iPad Pro came out, asking “what’s a computer?” I wish Apple would ask themselves, “what’s a professional?”

My vision for the iPad doesn’t align with Apple’s. That’s OK. They know their target market. They’ll still sell a gazillion of these.

Just not to me.

You know how sometimes you come to decide that an entire niche market is so filled with awful and overpriced alternatives that you’d rather just write your own and give it away for free?

My toes are on the precipice.