Posts from December 2024

• “Hey gamers remember, on Dec 26 a lot of kids are gonna be online playing with their gifted console/game/pc for the first time. Be nice.” – via @dinocornel
• An Ode to Christmas Eve
• It’s a Christmas miracle! Netflix subscribers can play Civilization VI on iOS devices, free and with no ads. – via hiro.report
• In 1996 Sir Purr became the only NFL mascot to ever be involved in a live play. – via @gregstreetz83
• Is it just me or does every Instagram link shared via Apple Messages on iOS 18 take you to the wrong post? And the preview of the link in Messages never works.
• The Alphabet Fades Away – via @anthony_onumonu
• Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger, on lawmakers’ unfounded theories about those weird drones over New Jersey: “Members of Congress need to not be opportunistic idiots who say shit that’s not true.” – via crooked
• Drinking caffeine (the equivalent of a very strong cup) thirty minutes before aerobic exercise increases fat oxidation by 11% in the morning and by 13% in the afternoon. – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club
• A pregnant woman in Texas claimed her fetus was an HOV lane passenger, but got a ticket anyway.
• New England’s largest outdoor sculpture park is in Brookline, New Hampshire, about an hour north of Boston. – via my dad

• Plenty of excellent stories from Longreads: The Most Popular Editors’ Picks of the Year and Our Most Popular Stories of the Year
• My friend Steve the Bartender recently did a Christmas Cocktail Special livestream!
• Brilliant: ElevationLab has created an AirTag battery booster that lets you replace the default CR2032 battery with a pair of AA batteries instead, theoretically extending the charge of an AirTag for a decade.
• You’ve got less than a week until the big day, so don’t forget to check out my quick list of easy Christmas gifts for parents.
• This short video on the effects of a smartphone on your child is painfully accurate.
• I know you’re getting tired of me talking about Shrinking, but I think it’s important to note that in a series featuring freaking Harrison Ford giving the performance of his career, it’s Ted McGinley – who plays Derek, the neighbor of Jason Segal – who rules the show. (McGinley was also in Happy Days, The Love Boat, and Revenge of the Nerds!)
• A Tiny Christian College in Michigan Is Infiltrating Florida’s Schools
• My son and I just happened to be watching TNF and were able to see the NFL’s first successful fair-catch free kick since 1976.
• I adored Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife. Just astounding writing. Beautiful in the best way, including the gut-punch, “In Memory Care, one sees and hears many things one wishes to forget.”

• Just a few days ago I said Shrinking was the best show on TV right now. Obviously I didn’t think I needed to include an “except for Bluey“ disclaimer, because certainly everyone agrees Bluey might well be the best show in the history of television. And they’re working on a Bluey movie?!
• “A well-placed swear word triggers emotional and physiological arousal, like an adrenaline boost, where your heart beats faster, and your sympathetic nervous system is given a charge, which enhances focus and energy just enough to help you perform better.” – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• “As we continue to face adversity in our daily lives, I’m reminded of the power of the deep breath and the walk in the woods, the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system.” – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• I’m very frustrated that we haven’t made time to watch the new Disney+ Star Wars series Skeleton Crew yet. Winter break starts this weekend so I imagine big bowls of popcorn and a few hours—in between football games—glued to the TV. (I’m worried that shareholders will look at the streaming numbers and decide it’s not worth the cost to keep producing Star Wars content.)
• Sotheby’s just auctioned off a 115-pound, two-foot-tall slab of marble that, around a millennia and a half ago, was inscribed with the Ten Commandments. – via crooked
• You are cutting it close if you haven’t gotten all your Christmas and/or Hanukkah shopping done yet. Might I suggest a plain white bolt t from Aviator Nation? They are crazy comfortable, cozy, stylish, and on sale right now. (Or you could buy someone an Apple App Store gift card and tell them to use it to download my handy cocktail recipe app!)
• Health department medical detectives find 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are preventable.
• The latest issue of Simple Apple Tutorials from Gannon Nordberg is a killer iPhone Notification Detox Guide.
• Bad news for people who hate good news:
  • 93% of kindergarteners in the U.S. are up to date on their childhood vaccines. – via Your Local Epidemiologist
  • HPV vaccines have been linked to a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women over the last decade. – via kottke

• I thought this was a super interesting article about the ethical and legal issues of using CT scanners to “hack” boxes of trading cards. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• I cannot wrap my head around the fact that it’s now been more than two years since I first complained to Amazon about a bug in their Alexa iOS app—which makes it impossible to manage your Echo Show photo library once you add more than 120 photos—and they still haven’t fixed it. How can I be the only one who cares about this?
• A lone dolphin has been yelling into the Baltic Sea for years and no one is responding. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• I’m a sucker for creative gift wrapping tutorials.
• Far too many of our Christmas decorations do not have a power switch. I got several of these inexpensive power switches and it took me about five minutes to splice them into the wires so now we can turn things off and on without needing to unplug them.
• “imagine falling in love with someone to find out they got you 8 maids a milking and a combined 23 birds for Christmas” – via @teewatterss
• I recently watched Little Shop of Horrors (Warner Bros., 1986) for the first time in probably 25 years and I’m happy to report that it’s still pretty great.
• Happy holidays! After considering risk factors such as age and exercise, scientists found that people who enjoyed at least five ounces of dark chocolate per week had a twenty-one percent lower risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes. – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• Nike, NFL Announce 10-Year Contract Extension – via @sportslogosnet
• I can think of no insult worse than being told, “Go Back Home, Your Mother Made You Waffles.” – via kottke

• Open the microwave door as close to the timer hitting 0:00 as you can without the bell dinging. (My high score: 9766.) – via Kottke
• We would not accept [this] from a pizza company. Why do we from healthcare? – via @greg_meyer61
• Go to Amazon (app or website) and type “Thank My Driver” in the search bar. Doing this will prompt Amazon to give your last delivery person an extra $5 tip at no cost to you. – via @froggyab
• I hate that I love you: The neuroscience of heartbreak, a paper on what happens to your brain when you experience pain from love. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Wordiply is my new favorite daily mental challenge.
• Keira Knightley said she won’t have more kids because she can’t watch more Peppa Pig – via jezebel (threads / bluesky)
• Oprah‘s list of The Most Thought-Provoking Books of 2024 includes my favorite.
• The Gas Industry Is Paying Instagram Influencers to Gush Over Gas Stoves – via Mother Jones (threads / bluesky)
• Always follow the money, and especially when it comes to climate change. As newspapers withered in Florida and Alabama, a consulting firm filled the void – using money from power companies to prop up news sites promoting their corporate agendas. – via NPR (threads / bluesky)

• Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
• Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
• ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
• Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.
• On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
• You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.

• Reminder that Breaking Bad was a TV show about the U.S. healthcare system. – via Melanie D’Arrigo (threads / bluesky)
• I’m confused by the many complaints I’ve seen online recently about the streaming quality of NFL games on Amazon Prime. I have AT&T Gigabit fiber at home and for regular TV use the DirecTVStream app embedded in my Samsung TV. If I want to watch something on Amazon Prime, I use their app instead, also baked into the TV software. I honestly think the image quality of the Amazon NFL games beats what I see on NBC, CBS, FOX, and ESPN on DirecTVStream most of the time, which seems crazy to me. You’d think AT&T would either boost DirecTVStream bandwidth (since they own them) or somehow hamstring the Prime bandwidth. But that’s not the case at all.
• Anyway. This joke about berry packaging made me laugh out loud. – via Matt Margolis (threads / bluesky)
• I am a big fan of Wyze and have their front door deadbolt, doorbell camera, several security cameras, two outdoor plugs (for controlling Christmas lights), a bathroom scale, and at least a half dozen WiFi outlets around the house. They’re great.
• For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website – via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
• Threes is the iOS game I’ve played most frequently over the last decade. According to its lovely Statistics page, I’ve played it 7,838 times and my high score is 90,147.
• “Learning from other people’s mistakes is a lot less painful than learning from your own.” – via Tim Harford
• Feel-good story of the day? Giant Spoon Taken From Arizona Dairy Queen Found Thanks To Pokemon Go – via @pourmecoffee
• I’ve returned to this article a dozen times since he published it. If you’re working with iOS widget development, check out Launching iOS Apps with a Custom URL Scheme

If you want to add a “Share on Bluesky” hyperlink to your WordPress theme, this is the snippet I’m using. Also note that my theme requires FontAwesome for the bluesky icon.

<span class="label label-primary nobreak me-3"><a target="_blank" href="https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=<?php echo urlencode( get_the_title() ); ?>%0A%0A<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Share on Bluesky" rel="noreferrer"><i class="fa-brands fa-bluesky"></i></a></span>


• A man in Canada’s far north leapt on to a polar bear to protect his wife from being mauled, police say. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• I love this quote: “[Software bugs] are a lot like prime numbers. There are always more, but after you find the first couple billion they do thin out quite a bit.” – via @philcrissman (threads / bluesky)
• It’s a good idea to occasionally revisit the story of Roger and Elaine.
• Mark Ruffalo sounds like the name a dog would give if he was pretending to be a man. – via @the.yael
• Need to buy something for someone you can’t stand? Check out My Heinous Gift Guide for Sworn Enemies. And note that you don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. – both via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
• Jonathan Edward Durham is a good follow on threads and/or bluesky.
• Your Local Epidemiologist is a super informative newsletter that translates complicated health news, especially about viruses and colds.
• 19 Useful Mac Startup Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know
• What do you call a pig that does karate? A pork chop! – via 172 Corny Jokes To Tell To Kids You Love