Posts tagged “apps”

• I have several of these LEGO lighting kits and love them.
• Is it really true that no one buys books? According to the author, in 2020 only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96% of books sold less than a thousand copies. Big, if true.
• I’d never even considered combining an Arnold Palmer with a margarita.
• Was This Little-Known Standoff Between British Soldiers and Colonists the Real Start of the American Revolution? – via my dad
• One of the most surprising revelations in the Peacock comedy Mr. Throwback is that the Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry is a brilliant actor. (Oh, and he also dunked in a game for the first time in six years.)
• I really cannot decide if this article on testing push notifications on the iOS simulator was generated by AI or a human, but it’s got some helpful code that I was able to use.
• Just… why?
  • GOP blasted for gutting Medicaid to pay for $4.5 trillion tax cut
  • Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities – via @tyleraking.com
  • In a strongly worded statement, Norwegian fuel company Haltbakk Bunkers has announced it will cease supplying fuel to U.S. military forces and criticized what happened when Ukraine president Zelensky visited the White House, referring to it as the “biggest shitshow ever presented live on TV.”
  • If “DOGE” is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then its tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned. – via @propublica.org
  • The inside story of mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff is pretty gross.
  • When You’re MAGA, They Let You Do It
  • Judge rules firing of federal workforce watchdog was illegal – via @browneyedsusan.bsky.social

• Almost 96% of new cars registered in Norway in January were electric. – via kottke
• The Wild True Story Behind Kendrick Lamar‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show
• The Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that insurance companies can’t bring their own legal actions against those blamed for the catastrophic 2023 Maui wildfire, allowing a $4 billion settlement to proceed.
• Trump’s Driving Legal Principle This Time: “What Are You Gonna Do About It?”
• The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was told by the Department of Justice that they’d lose their funding if the organization didn’t remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials.
• Aggeggio is a lovely Italian word for everyday objects.
• The ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’ of the United States Government
• I need to investigate Tapestry, from iconfactory. It looks like a cool iOS app for aggregating content, and I’ve loved pretty much every other app they’ve ever made. – via hiro.report

• Between 7AM and 7PM Eastern you can watch Bao Li and Qing Bao – the two new Giant Pandas at Smithsonian’s National Zoo – live on the Panda Cam as they explore their indoor and outdoor habitats at the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat.
• I know everyone is already drowning in what seems like an unrelenting torrent of insane news lately, but I feel like it’s important to highlight that last week Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett said he believes aliens have underwater bases on Earth.
• New research suggests that your coffee habit might help protect against type-2 diabetes. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• The Unassuming Town of Bristol, Rhode Island, Is One of America’s Best Hidden Gems for a Weekend Getaway – via my dad
• I recently watched the 1991 Steven Spielberg film Hook for – I think – the first time. Great fun.
• The new MCU-themed Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl hype video is pretty intense.
• Anyone interested in iOS app development with SwiftUI should be reading Swift with Majid.
• Workout.lol is a handy one-page web app that gives you an exercise routine based on what equipment you have available and which muscles you want to target. (Pairs well with musclewiki.com.) – via kottke, from way back in July of 2023
• It’s a bummer that the Dead Bothans Society has been abandoned. It looks like most of the site was archived, thankfully, and many of their videos are still available on YouTube.

• Were Back to the Future and The Goonies set on the same day? – via kottke
• Here’s a faithful recreation of me in the 1980s explaining my IT job to my grandparents at Christmas. It also perfectly mimics how I imagine I sound any time I talk to my teenager about pretty much anything. (But the danger presented by a poorly-maintained turbo encabulator is no joke!)
• Reverse Engineering Call Of Duty Anti-Cheat
• There are some hidden gems on this MacStories Best Apps of 2024 list.
• I have a generic digital photo frame at home that’s on its last legs. I got it well over a decade ago and was never thrilled with its buttons or input options, but at the time it was pretty awesome. Since then I’ve purchased multiple Pix-Star frames (website, Amazon) for far-off family members; I’m not a huge fan of those, either, and I don’t feel they’re worth the price tag. I just saw the Aura frame recommended in the hiro.report newsletter and it looks pretty nice, but it’s also pretty expensive. I’ve got at least two ancient iPads Mini collecting dust and am going to try repurposing those instead. (I’ll keep you posted.)
• To age on the internet is to exist in an accidental version of [a] time tunnel.
• I’m wondering for how long what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s definitely not forever, but it is still for today.
• I just received a text message that read, “Please be advised that we are currently conducting a lockdown drill at [your son’s high school]. This is a routine practice to ensure student and staff safety. Thank you for your understanding. STOP to end”
  What a utopia it would be if simply texting STOP to end was actually the solution.

• Scientific American published a list of all the interesting things to see in the night sky in 2025.
• Spotify’s Secret Star Wars Easter Egg: The Hidden Lightsaber Feature (I don’t usually stream music, but this is pretty cool.)
• Are you responsible for designing or developing any type of authentication for a website or app? Take a second and read the UX of login codes by Brad Frost.
• “You can’t speak to the weather’s manager. Mother Nature has no concierge. Your investment portfolio will not halt an inferno. A college degree won’t tame the blaze. In the way we all inhabit the same Earth, we are all made of blood and flesh that burns the same.” – via The Handbasket
• Own a Kindle? You can read the complete works of Shakespeare for free.
• The Jabberwocky was one of my mom’s favorite poems. I love that I can still recite most of it from memory and it always makes me think of her.

• Everyone should be following Nike Running Coach Bennett on Threads and/or Bluesky.
• Despite some choad that’s selling a nearly-identical knock-off of my app (that is somehow ranked #1 in the Food & Drink category in the App Store), the 48 hours surrounding Thanksgiving was a banner sales day for bartender.live, which was nice to see. If you haven’t yet, please rate and review my little side project. It really helps!
• We have several lighted Christmas decorations that burn through AA batteries. I’ve been buying rechargeable batteries for years and love them, but it still bugs me and I kept thinking there must be a way to convert these things to use AC power. I was ready to start researching amps and volts and power adapters and break out my soldering iron, but then found these cool dummy battery plugs that appear to do exactly what I need!
• Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke are national treasures that should be on money. This scene is incredible.
• Did you like Agatha All Along enough to listen to a ten-hour lo-fi remix of The Witches Road? – via @agentm
• Most of us are famously terrible at comprehending very large numbers, but I find it much easier to wrap my head around the idea that around two and a half billion T. Rex roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous Period than the fact that their reign lasted nearly two and a half million years. That is a long, long, long time to rule the planet. (Humans have been around, at most, for only about 300,000 years. Sharks have been around for something like 400 million years, by the way, which means they’ve been around just a bit longer than trees and probably twice as long as Saturn has had rings.)
• Tania Rascia just redesigned her blog (again) and added light/dark theming, which is something I’ve been meaning to do here for a long time. She also created a nice web developer starter pack on Bluesky.
• I’m a big fan of moo.com’s mini business cards, and they’re having a significant sale through Dec 5: 30% off and free shipping with promo code CYBERYAY
• Bryson DeChambeau’s Viral Golf Challenge: A Marketing Masterclass, How a Simple Idea Captivated Millions and Delivered Big Results – via Culture of Sport

• If I ever got name-checked on The Simpsons, I think I would spontaneously combust. – via @sepinwall
• How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time – via @theatlantic
• For about a year and a half I was really into intermittent fasting. I used a great app called Simple that helped me track my daily water consumption and weight, and also handled reminding me when my fasting windows were, let me log what I was eating and when, etc. The app was so good, I even gladly paid for an annual subscription to unlock bonus features. And then — for reasons I cannot imagine — the developers rolled out a “new” version loaded to the gills with whiz-bang AI features that made the app completely useless and incomprehensibly frustrating. I tried for a few months to get used to the new system, but eventually abandoned it, canceled my subscription, and still haven’t found a decent replacement. I abhor the continued enshittification of everything.
• Male bigfin reef squid may be the best fathers of all cephalopods. [Ed. note: But can they make Sunday morning chocolate chip pancakes?]
• It’s really a shame that Russell Brand has gone crazy, because Forgetting Sarah Marshall is easily one of the all-time best comedies.
• Strong Lloyd Dobler vibes in this essay, and I am here for it: “[P]eople do want to work, just not for the paltry wages they were making before the pandemic.”
• “If you spell your name backwards and place an umlaut over one of the vowels, that’s your IKEA name.” [Ed. note: Mine is Engäg and I’m a kitchen drawer divider.] – via @drewtalbert
• Regular exercisers drink more, a new study confirms, but are less likely to be problem drinkers. – via @outsidemagazine
• Black Friday / Holiday Sales:
  • The world’s comfiest t-shirts and coziest sweatpants are crazy expensive, but this weekend almost everything is on sale at Aviator Nation.
  • Everything at ’47 Brand is 30% off this weekend. Get all the best sports gear gifts here.
  • Need some everyday walking shoes? Everything is 50% off at Allbirds this weekend.
  • I have an AirPods Pro case and a wallet from Saddleback Leather Co. and they’re both exquisite. Not everything is on sale, but they do have some pretty good deals this weekend on a few things. (Their motto is, “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.”)
  • Use promo code BLACKFRIDAY to get 30% off (and free shipping) on everything at J. Peterman this weekend.
• Fun Fact: Jon Gries, the actor who portrayed Lazlo Hollyfeld in Real Genius (TriStar Pictures, 1985), went on to play Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite (Searchlight Pictures, 2004) and the love interest of Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus (HBO, 2021).

The team at iconfactory has been producing quality apps for a quarter of a century. (I first found them when I started playing the iPhone game Frenzic.) They have some really useful tools for developers as well as a few games and handy utilities for everyone else.