Brent Simmons

  • I’ve stopped clicking on Twitter links. Starve the site of attention.

  • Since pretty early days in OS X, I’ve always held down the option key when resizing my Dock so that it snaps to a predefined, presumably good size.

  • I miss the old days when people would get really mad if an app phoned home.

  • Twitter is, like Gab, Parler, and Truth Social, a right wing social network.

  • “As I mentioned earlier” is Chatbot’s version of Siri’s exasperated “proceed to the route.”

  • Every layer of abstraction you add translates to lost productivity in the future.

  • The genius of Swift structured concurrency isn’t async/await — it’s @MainActor.

  • The easiest code to read, debug, maintain, and extend is synchronous code that runs on the main thread.

  • Another sign that the web heals as Twitter gets sicker — ooh.directory is a new collection of “blogs about every topic.”

  • Correct me if I’m wrong — but I’ve long thought that variables names like postId and sanitizeHtml are Microsoft form and names like postID and sanitizeHTML are Apple form. True?

  • John Scalzi, How to Weave the Artisan Web:

    Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to?

  • Blogs are social media. These days people seem to think social media is just social networking — it’s not. Blogs were referred to as social media long before there was Twitter.

  • MarsEdit 5 Public Beta includes a “New ‘Micropost’ interface for streamlined publishing of short-form posts” that I’m keen to try out.

  • This being your periodic reminder that macopenweb.com is a good list of apps.

  • I found this nice page of mostly-text-only websites.

  • Added to my RSS reader — twitterisgoinggreat.com/feed.xml

    (Via Daring Fireball.)

  • One time I overheard this bit of conversation on a bus:

    “Who works at Facebook?”

    “Nobody. It’s just part of the web.”

    I remain haunted.

  • I’m at the age where Touch ID works only about a third of the time.

  • Saw this cat yesterday.

  • Since micro.blog integrates with Mastodon, you can now follow me on Mastodon — I’m @brentsimmons@micro.inessential.com.

  • I tried a few Git clients for Mac today, and I couldn’t find one that prioritizes the part that matters most to me — writing the commit message.

    For me this needs to be front and center and large enough to fit everything I want to write. It should have shortcuts for frequently-used text, and I should be able to create templates for different kinds of commits.

    The commit message isn’t just some ceremony — it’s as vital as the code changes.

  • You have an unhealthy relationship with multithreading.

  • Life lesson it took me a long time to learn — that whenever you tell a busy and overwhelmed person to “let me know what I can do to help,” you’ve just put another task on their already-too-large pile. Now they have even more to do.

  • Go Phillies! The hopes and dreams of all of America are on your shoulders.

  • Prediction: Phillies win by two runs today. Verlander completes fewer than six innings.

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