zacwest

Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store. Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect.

I could understand limiting new registrations, but permanently and irreparably breaking people's website domains and email addresses feels pretty hostile considering how little resources this must take up.

The historic information in here was really interesting, and a great example of an article rapidly expanding in scope and detail. How they combatted corporate IT “security” software by pretending to be a VPN is quite unexpected.

Cal Academy released their own press release[1] about this, which included a nice gallery of photos and videos[2].

[1] https://www.calacademy.org/press/releases/claude-the-albino-... [2]: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/i447nodpnda2agq00ekw1/AIhVA36...

They are working on an SDK, which they will use for their own Linux client: https://proton.me/blog/proton-drive-sdk-preview

If you want to get location accuracy lower than 500m without significantly impacting battery life, you can use region monitoring. There's two paths:

1. Set up a region around the user's current location. If they exit it, note the location and set up another one around that location. This will give you around 100m accuracy, which is the minimum diameter of the monitored region.

2. Set up regions in various cardinal directions that nearly-or-just-barely overlap. If they enter one of those regions, note the location and set up another set around the current location. This can give you something closer to 50m accuracy.

For (2), this is how I did it in the Home Assistant iOS app, largely for zones that people wish to monitor which are smaller than 100m. You can find some of the annoying math here[1] (and there's tests all over for it), the logic for setting up regions here[2], and computing them here[3].

[1] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/blob/master/Sources/Sh... [2]: https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/tree/master/Sources/Ap... [3]: https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/blob/2dfbe3c0e52a30417...

You then use `restic` telling it to use rclone like...

    restic ... --option=rclone.program="ssh -i <identity> user@host" --repo=rclone:

I've been doing this on rsync.net since at least February; works great!

These are the changes that Apple was forced to make, specifically referencing 3.1.3 (Other Purchase Methods) and 3.1.3(a) (“Reader” Apps):

3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.

3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.

The bit about the (formerly required in the US) entitlement is:

Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to create or manage an account.

They required you use a trackingless, generic URL that was unvarying per user, so you probably didn't run into it super often. Offhand, the Kobo app did use it.

Except for 'reader apps' (those that sell digital content, basically) which Amazon is. Plus, Apple's rules are applied unevenly; Amazon is a giant WebView on Apple TV but it's disallowed for everybody else.

I've used Podlet <https://github.com/containers/podlet> somewhat successfully for this.

You can do non-root systemd units, including Quadlets. See <https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...> under "Podman rootless unit search path."

I like the `rdap` cli from https://www.openrdap.org (in Brew, too: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/rdap#default). Very clean, concise output.

Knowing focus status and being told live when it changes are public API. I think other apps just choose not to do it. Sample project: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

This doesn't change the search engine, it attempts to redirect from whatever one is configured in the settings. It's very much an unreliable hack.

Facebook never federated so their implementation was just an API they couldn't control to them:

Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.

They've started work on a Linux version, too.

I think this is a pretty great step in the direction of not being wholly dependent on one platform; makes you start thinking about your website as the source and the social media networks as just a representation.

https://micro.blog has a good implementation of this for both the Fediverse and Bluesky. A random example of mine that has an array of 'em if you want an example: https://zacwe.st/2025/02/12/amazon-is-removing-the-ability.h...

Fish is such a great shell. More often than not it reads my mind about what to do (e.g. with its fantastic history autocomplete), but I’m really excited for this minor breaking change note:

alt-left and alt-right will now move by one argument (which may contain quoted spaces), not just one word like ctrl-left and ctrl-right do.

Paze (https://www.paze.com/) feels to me like the collective banks’ attempt to wrestle back control here. You could imagine a world where it’s a separate side channel for payment for the same credit card accounts but without the rent-seeking intermediaries.

Probably the first step would be a good, non-regular-expression (IIRC, URLs are not regular) based link parser that's ported to every possible language on the planet.

You can somewhat work around this using Karabiner Elements. I map caps lock to esc (when tapped) and ctrl (when held) with a 'complex modification' rule that looks like:

    {
      "description": "caps_lock to left_control or escape",
      "manipulators": [
        {
          "from": {
            "key_code": "caps_lock",
            "modifiers": {
              "optional": ["any"]
            }
          },
          "to": [
            {
              "key_code": "left_control"
            }
          ],
          "to_if_alone": [
            {
              "key_code": "escape"
            }
          ],
          "type": "basic"
        }
      ]
    }

"Communications of the ACM" (https://cacm.acm.org/) is a great source for a variety of topics. It recently went digital-only and is included in an ACM membership.

https://archive.is/ms1ke

I agree some of the stations are somewhat repetitive, especially those stuck intentionally in an older genre like Lithium or one of the decades channels. I think the mix tends to still be less than surface level in those. They also have DJ-hosted segments; I think Tom Morello has a lot more flexibility in what he's playing, for example. It's still their superpower compared to the algorithmic track selections.

I love SirusXM. They are a truly unique offer in the modern music landscape of algorithm-driven music listening experiences. The human curation of shows and stations is why I listen. That said, they have a lot of problems: I have to complain yearly to keep my $8/mo rate, and they seem to be slowly moving toward wanting more algorithmic content with their Pandora merger.

I wish they'd focus more on growing their technology (e.g. a macOS app). They just did a big rewrite on all the platforms, seemingly toward this goal; I hope they keep going down that path.

If the government forces them to adopt more modern subscription practices, I think _more_ people would use their platform, not less.

An episode of Effectively Wild did an interview with the author: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effectively-wild-episode-2004-ho... (54:51).

Verisign's statement: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230503005605/en/Ver...

.zip feels like it might get annoying for auto-linking in text messages, but this is a great set of actually-generic ones.

I wonder what other cryptographic ceremonies are out there. I really enjoyed the operational separation in the overview here and seeing the technical details reminded me a lot of how many hardware security keys I have in my life now.

Generally on Apple platforms the move here would be putting the shared binary into a dynamic .framework rather then trying to eliminate the shared dependency. Is this a limitation of authoring it in Go that it has to be entirely static?