Tech Blogs - BlogFlock

Feed Patterns for URLs for a Few Sites - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-27T20:37:00.000Z

Bookmarked, very handy.

nikitonsky is being grumpy - Grumpy Website

2026-01-27T14:04:47.000Z

nikitonsky: Apparently B stands for “See more...”

Thanks @sumpfsuppe for the video

#Bold #TextStyle #Menu #Submenu #MicrosoftWhiteboard

Apple ‘Honours’ Martin Luther King While Working Against His Legacy - Pixel Envy

2026-01-27T03:30:51.000Z

Jason Anthony Guy:

Dr. King was a radical. Yes, he spoke of peace and nonviolence, and also advocated for dramatic social change and economic justice. Dr. King didn’t encourage passivity, he endorsed disruption. […]

Guy posted this on 20 January, which is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, days before Alex Pretti was murdered and Tim Cook attended a screening of ‘Melania’. I had been meaning to link to it since then, and last week’s events made it all the more pressing. Guy quotes King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, though I have chosen some additional context:

[…] First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action” […]

Cook is, at best, the kind of moderate who would disappoint King: someone who, optimistically, agrees with the goals of those protesting the horrific turn this second administration has taken but disagreeing with its methods. Cook’s legacy used to be carrying Apple in the post-Jobs era to new financial heights. Now it is gold trophies and authoritarian appeasement.

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Tim Cook Attends Screening of Propaganda for Authoritarian’s Wife - Pixel Envy

2026-01-27T03:20:00.000Z

Regular readers may have observed I have tried to be careful with how much I write about the rise of fascism in the United States. It is not because I do not notice or care — quite the opposite — but because I think the correct viewpoint for me is of an outside observer: what is most relevant about this administration from a Canadian perspective. And, also, because I assume many of you are already getting your fill of truly awful news. Some things are just so obviously bad that it seems almost perfunctory for me, of all people, to say anything. However.

Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone:

On Saturday, the same day that an ICE agent shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti as he was restrained, face first on ground in Minneapolis, a few dozen VIPs — including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Queen Rania of Jordan, and former heavy-weight champion Mike Tyson — gathered at the White House for a lavish party, complete with custom-made popcorn buckets and gift boxes emblazoned with the first lady’s portrait, to celebrate the forthcoming documentary Melania: Twenty Days to History.

Andy Jassy and Mike Hopkins, both of Amazon, were also in attendance, but that is partly explained by the company’s $40 million bid for the rights to film part of the brief period between the election and inauguration. $28 million of that went straight into Melania Trump’s bank account. Apparently, this is not a bribe or unduly coercive in any way. Imagine that.

Cook, though? He was there because he wanted to be. This was on the same day that, as Stuart writes, agents of the U.S. government murdered a second citizen in Minneapolis in three weeks, and then lied about it. Renée Good and Alex Pretti both embodied courage. Cook chose fealty and, ultimately, cowardice.

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FTC Appeals Ruling in Meta Monopolization Case - Pixel Envy

2026-01-27T01:39:25.000Z

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed a notice that it will appeal the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s November 2025 ruling in favor of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) in the FTC’s monopolization case against Meta. The appeal will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

I wonder if Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, will continue referring to it as “one of Lina Khan’s most prominent anti-big tech cases”, despite its origins in the first Trump administration and this appeal landing in the second one.

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nikitonsky is being grumpy - Grumpy Website

2026-01-26T20:07:10.000Z

nikitonsky: Buttons floating over content were a mistake

Thanks juanca for the video

26th January 2026 at 18:36 - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-26T18:36:00.000Z

TIL custard doesn’t contain banana and it’s yellow for other reasons.

I’m shook.

Sponsor: StopTheMadness Pro — Take Back Your Web Browser - Pixel Envy

2026-01-26T14:30:27.000Z

StopTheMadness Pro is a Safari extension for iOS and macOS that stops website annoyances and privacy violations. When websites try to block your copy and paste, block your contextual menu, block your keyboard shortcuts, play videos without your permission, or track your link clicks, just stop the madness!

Made by indie developer Jeff Johnson, StopTheMadness Pro is a one of a kind Safari extension with a huge number of unique features, too many to list them all! Here are a few more:

Show Safari’s native video controls, including Picture-in-Picture.
Set video playback speed on websites.
Redirect URLs to alternative websites. In macOS Safari, redirect URLs to alternative web browsers.
Force links to open in the same tab, or force links to open in new tabs.
Customize fonts on websites.
Add your own CSS and JavaScript to websites.

In addition to Safari on iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness Pro supports Firefox and Google Chrome on macOS.

StopTheMadness Pro is a one-time universal purchase for iOS and macOS in the App Store.

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AI Policy and the Inevitable - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-26T14:04:00.000Z

Let’s be honest this is white tech for the one percent.

🔥

25th January 2026 at 09:34 - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-25T09:34:00.000Z

Seems fine and very normal I can’t travel into the city I live in because grown men can’t be trusted to watch football without punching each other or police horses

Jurassic World Rebirth - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-24T22:49:00.000Z

This is certainly one of the movies in this franchise.

I’ve never wanted every character to die more than in this movie.

Unsung - Pixel Envy

2026-01-24T05:35:28.000Z

Last month, Marcin Wichary began publishing updates to Unsung, a new blog about “software craft and quality”. Contra “backseat software”; among the posts published so far is a list of well-made apps and websites.

I disagree with some of the choices, but one thing you will notice is that there are very few examples from the world’s biggest vendors. Most are indie projects. That says a lot to me about the kinds of software with which people develop a connection.

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Backseat Software - Pixel Envy

2026-01-24T05:22:21.000Z

Mike Swanson:

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

You have heard about this stuff before, but Swanson’s piece is not mere repetition. There is history, and reasonable suggestions on how to correct the current oft-miserable state of software.

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TikTok U.S. Prompts Users to Allow More Permissive Tracking, Advertising - Pixel Envy

2026-01-24T04:59:00.000Z

The TikTok deal announced in December is done. There is now a U.S.-specific version of the app running the same recommendations algorithm as the rest-of-the-world version but trained only on a bald eagle-approved data set. The U.S. app is owned by a bunch of friends of the family who bought it at a suspiciously low price. Oh, and users now have a more invasive privacy policy to contend with.

Reece Rogers, Wired:

Now that it’s under US-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. A spokesperson for TikTok USDS declined to comment.

Whether this represents an actual change in the data collected or merely a difference in description is something it seems Rogers cannot answer. However, it is a good reminder that lawmakers’ opposition to TikTok’s data collection was never based on a principled stance on user privacy.

This may be U.S.-only for now, but I am deeply concerned about the precedent it sets for the rest of the world. There is nothing I can see that limits the scope of the new U.S. app to only U.S.-based users. In the near term, I bet a few other countries could be pressured into switching to TikTok U.S.; farther into the future, what this looks like is an acknowledgement that the U.S. will take what it needs with whatever justification it wishes.

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23rd January 2026 at 20:20 - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-23T20:20:00.000Z

Jeffrey Murdock will return in Avengers: Doomsday

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube Ad Blocker for Safari - Pixel Envy

2026-01-23T19:00:30.000Z

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nikitonsky is being grumpy - Grumpy Website

2026-01-23T13:02:01.000Z

nikitonsky: Normally, when you hold down the Down or Up key on a keyboard, a webpage moves a little, then pauses briefly, and only then starts scrolling continuously. I think this is related to how key repeat works in the OS.

In Safari, however, the page scrolls continuously from the moment you hold the key down—no hiccups. Pretty cool!

#Safari #Scrolling

Two Major Studies Indicate the Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up - Pixel Envy

2026-01-23T05:58:11.000Z

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

For years now, we’ve been repeatedly pointing out that the “social media is destroying kids” narrative, popularized by Jonathan Haidt and others, has been built on a foundation of shaky, often contradictory research. We’ve noted that the actual data is far more nuanced than the moral panic suggests, and that policy responses built on that panic might end up causing more harm than they prevent.

Well, here come two massive new studies — one from Australia, one from the UK—that land like a sledgehammer on Haidt’s narrative — and, perhaps more importantly, on Australia’s much-celebrated social media ban for kids under 16.

The Australian study is sprawling, with over 100,000 youth participating over several years, though it should be noted it uses self-reported data only from weekdays and only for three hours after school. The study’s authors say that this “may not fully reflect total daily or habitual use”. (Also, they seem to have excluded nonbinary youth.) Still, the findings support a reasonable conclusion that children who spend a “moderate” amount of time using social media — about two hours daily or less — tend to have better outcomes, and it depends what they are doing.

The British study, on the other hand, found “distinguishing between active and passive use of social media played a limited role in our overall findings” suggesting “the distinction may be overly broad and does not sufficiently predict mental health”. So even the supposed quality of screen time might not have as much of an effect as we imagine.

The Australian government may have banned providing access to social media for people under sixteen, affecting millions, but these studies indicate it is an over-broad response to a complex topic. In explaining the limitations and caveats, the Australian researchers pointed out “[h]igher after-school social media use may also indicate fewer extracurricular or social opportunities” including those that may result from too much time spent on homework. That is not to say it would instead make more sense to me to ban homework, but it seems banning social media is both a red herring response to our built environment and has the potential to limit the actual socialization that takes place in these apps.

Canada is one of several countries working on a similar ban. Marie Woolf, Globe and Mail:

Prof. [Taylor Owen, of McGill University] warned that without a regulator, when a child hits the age when social media is allowed, they could “jump right into a social-media ecosystem that has no protections in it whatsoever.”

He said there is a need to address problems on platforms, which include certain kinds of content, “the incentives within them, the way the algorithms boost that content, the lack of guardrails, the lack of accountability, lack of safety teams and measures.” He added that a teen social-media ban would not resolve these problems on its own.

I am not knee-jerk opposed to considering the many harms created or exacerbated by online platforms; I think Owen is right in arguing for a more comprehensive vision. But if we are looking at correcting for failures in platform accountability, social media use by youth seems somewhat less important. The problem is that trying to make platforms in any way responsible for user-generated material will break the internet. It is much more straightforward — in theory — to add an age gate.

Then again, perhaps we ought to limit social media use by age. Not for children, though: anyone over 55 gets read-only access to a maximum of six verified accounts, akin to broadcast television.

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New Version of Siri May Run on Google Servers - Pixel Envy

2026-01-23T00:42:26.000Z

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

In yesterday’s report detailing Apple’s plans to turn Siri into a chatbot in iOS 27, [Mark] Gurman said that the company is in discussions with Google about hosting the forthcoming Siri chatbot on Google-owned servers powered by Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a class of custom chips designed specifically for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. The arrangement would mark a major departure from Apple’s emphasis on processing user requests either directly on-device or through its own tightly controlled Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.

Note that the press release last week regarding certain Apple Intelligence features set to be powered by Google’s Gemini specifically says “Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute”. Siri will have Apple Intelligence features but, in the company’s unique structure, it itself is not part of Apple Intelligence. Also note that Google in November announced Private A.I. Compute, which should be useful.

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Crucial Track: Bluey Theme Tune (Instrument Parade) [feat. Joff Bush] by Bluey - Robb Knight • Everything • Atom Feed

2026-01-22T14:08:56.000Z

One day you're cool, the next you're rocking out to Instrument Parade in your car.