Recap: Astronauts became stranded on the ISS after NASA made the choice to not risk their lives in the return trip of the faulty Boeing Starliner capsule last year.
Fast forward to yesterday, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were able to hitch a ride back back after being stranded aboard the ISS since the Startliner ordeal.
From the homepage of ubu.web:
A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.
Next time you have an hour to yourself. Peruse these archives. Watch, listen, read and learn from others that came before us. The about page says it all:
Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts.
Since the beginning of the iPhone, Apple has resisted opening up it’s operating system in many ways. The App Store being the biggest walled garden, but the lesser known and perhaps more arcane is the browser on your iPhone.
As of writing, you can install an alternative browser on your iOS device: Google Chrome, Edge, DuckDuckGo etc. But really, under the hood… it’s actually powered by a Safari webview. Which means, it’s running webkit. The real Google Chrome on the other hand runs a Blink-based version of Chromium. Browser vendors render HTML and CSS differently. We’ve known this for a while. Surely you’ve noticed you bank’s website looks different on Chrome versus visiting the same website on Firefox. Heck, some even have wholly different JavaScript Engines.
Apple, has for years successfully kept alternative browsers on iOS locked-into using Webkit to the dismay of Google and consumers. Last year in February, there was a concerted test to see how well a Blink-based browser would fair on iPhones. You see, Apple has resisted allowing apps to use alternative browser vendors for years because of several reasons.
Apple likes to keep a iron-grip control on marketshare of it’s software. It is an old war that software companies continue to fight. For good reason too. It’s part of their strategy to keep users within the flywheel of their subscription businesses and tick-tock product cycles. If Apple wants to maintain market share of it’s browser, it must remain competitive. The problem with webkit, and Safari the browser by extension is, it’s lacking in terms of feature development and popularity. There are claims that webkit can has superior power management, simple to extend, secure and less of a memory hog.
Yet, people continue to chose Chrome, even at the risk of antitrust and performance. Turns out, users like to see nice software features! Novel!
All this being said, apparently the only consumers that will get to have true alternative browser choices on their mobile Apple devices will be EU consumers. Another disappointing reason to be American.
Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster as It Ages. Why is this speedrunner putting his Super Nintendo in the freezer? Science.
Condensation Cube (1965) is one of Hans Haacke’s earlier works. While over time the artist developed a critique of art as an institution and system, these early works focus on art in the sense of process and physical system. Interested in biology, ecology and cybernetics, in the mid-sixties Haacke was influenced by the ideas of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, especially those outlined in his General System Theory of 1968. For the Austrian biologist and philosopher, a living organism is an open system that continuously changes depending on its dialogue or interaction with the environment. Haacke’s early works, such as Condensation Cube, transpose this concept to the realm of art.
Read more at the MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona).
I took yesterday off and went to Brooklyn to get a tattoo from @sheepdoghead. It’s easily the sickest tattoo I have gotten so far. Follow this man!
I posted about it here on Bluesky as well. It was a good day 😊
From Ernie Smith at tedium.co:
The reasons why the MTA ultimately decided to utilize OS/2 as it digitized some aspects of the subway system mirror the hype surrounding the launch in the early 1990s. But a lot of that conversation and development started years before. Behind the scenes, Microsoft and IBM were working on the next generation of operating systems. While modern tech lore has Gates and Microsoft fleecing IBM over MS-DOS, at the time IBM clearly felt otherwise.
Rather than bemoan lost profits, IBM seemed to recognize a gap in its knowledge and it began the push to develop next-generation operating systems at a fundamental level, at first in partnership with Microsoft. This, almost predictably, worked out for IBM about as well as the MS-DOS deal did. However, in a very narrow window in the late 1980s, executives at the MTA were looking to remove tokens from the subway system and replace them with a prepaid card. The benefits were obvious, allowing for easier fare increases while offering tiered pricing. Riders would now have the option to choose between an individual or round trip option and an unlimited option that covers a set amount of time.
To implement this revolutionary upgrade, the MTA went with a known entity, IBM. At the time, it made a lot of sense.[…] To understand why, you need to understand the timing. Waldhauer continues, “The design is from a time before either Linux or Windows was around. OS/2 would have seemed like a secure choice for the future.”
So for a lack of options, the MTA went with its best one. And it’s worked out for decades, as one of the key software components of a quite complex system.And it might even survive beyond that, according to Waldhauer: “I will go out on a limb and say that as long as MetroCard is accepted in the system, OS/2 will still be running.”
Official support for OS/2 apparently lasted until 2007! Hell of a run IBM.
Related:
David Bazan has consistently produced music that scratches my itch. Careful lyrical slices of a life rife with internal struggles, his Pedro the Lion records are embedded into my amygdala. In my opinion, Winners Never Quit and Control are quintessential albums that sit in my teenage requiem. Bandcamp interviews Bazan on some of his influences, past and future, and of course, his bandcamp picks. Highly recommend reading, and happy listening.
joshholtsclaw.com – An incredible blog post from Josh Holtsclaw, an Art Director at Pixar. I love coming across these. This post in particular documents a lot of the process, design thinking and iteration that goes into the art direction for the film Incredibles 2
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business – not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
I am not interested in shelling out money to use productivity apps. This is for two reasons:
If those two items resonate with you, you’ve come to the right place. There’s of course problems with staying with the Apple ecosystem. For example features and bugfixes typically only ship once a year. Sometimes, you get no features at all in a given release cycle! A small trade-off for inexpensive productivity apps.
I love Obsidian. Especially because you get a lot for free. But, I keep coming back to the Notes App. It is simply too easy to use and frankly more available when I just need a place to jot something down. It also seems that Apple is making incremental steps to improve Notes, especially in the context of Apple Intelligence making its way to iOS users very soon:
https://www.threads.net/@ipedro/post/C7kVjYeuloz
That being said, the true power of the Notes app lies hidden within another another app altogether… Shortcuts! iOS Shortcuts are the key to unlocking more effective productivity across the Apple ecosystem.
I’m shamelessly re-posting Volkov’s iOS Shortcuts from his piece titled, The Digital Minimalist’s Complete Guide to Information Management in Apple Ecosystem:
Basic with No Tasks:https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9f26253a78a7462b87eb29a374e88fe4
Daily Plan based on Reminders:https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d980745a1468406cbc11f63df7cbb271
Daily Plan based on Things 3 (latest version):https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b28b3936596d44fea7311cc92e59e6d9
Daily Plan for TickTick (a bit different logic):https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/47d10b291c9747c2b744059289c6ed33
I recommend taking Volkov’s Shortcuts and editing them to your liking! For example, I like the ‘Basic’ shortcut as a base template. I edited the shortcut to always save a note in a Daily Notes folder and to always default to ISO 8601 date format (e.g. 2024-06-29).
Probably anecdotal at this point, but I keep my Shortcut on my homescreen over the actual Notes app, so I can always tap right into my Daily Note:
If you want my fork of Volkov’s daily note shortcut, you’re welcome to have it. Link here.
A Texas legend. A prolific satirist. A poignant and irreverent political superstar in a state full of bullshitters and snake-oil salesmen, Kinky was a breath of fresh air. From the Texas Tribune:
Friedman gained a reputation as a provocateur. In the early 1970s, he formed the satirical country band Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys — which penned songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.” Later, he published novels that often featured a fictionalized version of himself, including “Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola” and “Armadillos and Old Lace.”
In politics, Friedman staked out unusual positions at the time for someone seeking statewide office in Texas, like legalization of marijuana and casino gambling. He supported same-sex marriage in 2006, long before the Supreme Court legalized it nationally, quipping, “I support gay marriage because I believe they have right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”
The last time I saw Crawford’s work at the MoMA it was maybe around 2021. It left me filled with anguish and a lot of contempt for industrial progression. Which, frankly I needed the perspective. Immensely thankful I live in a city where I can go visit the MoMA to experience Anatomy of an AI System in person.
From the about page of calculatingempires.net:
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.