This Is My Last

• 14 Oct, 2026 Snoopy Missing On iPhones

  Dear Apple,

  There is a beautiful Snoopy and Woodstock watch face on Apple Watch. There is a beautiful Snoopy and Woodstock screensaver on Apple TV. And now, there is a beautiful Snoopy and Woodstock face on HomeView.

  Why are Snoopy and Woodstock missing on iPhones? Why isn't there an animated wallpaper with Snoopy and Woodstock on iPhone lock screens?

  Or did you run out of money to pay the license fee for the biggest platform you have?

  Thank you.

  Sincerely,
  A Peanuts fan.

• 14 Oct, 2026 Just Finished Reading: Hollywood, Ending

  I am not an actor. I have no desire to be an actor today, and I didn't wanted to grow up to be an actor when I was little. I have no idea how to tell the difference between good actors and excellent actors. Never ask me to predict who will win the Oscars.

  (Yes, I know winning awards isn't entirely merit-based.)

  John Green's Hollywood, Ending is set in the world of actors, a world that I don't know much about beyond watching late night talk show and Entertainment Tonight. However, it painted a wonderful world with many characters that I can identify with. And it has -- in my eyes -- a lot of essential and urgent things to say about acting and the arts.

  This is the first John Green novel that I have read; I'll be reading his earlier works soon enough.

  (Note: There are descriptions about child abuses in the novel, and you may not want to read this book if you are sensitive of this topic.)

  ~

  Link:

  • Hollywood, Ending, by John Green
  • John Green Was Never Just for Kids. His New Novel Proves It., by Laura Miller, Slate
  • ‘Hollywood, Ending’ Review: John Green’s Newest Novel Offers an Authentic Look at Fame, by Cloris F. Shi, Harvard Crimson
• 13 Oct, 2026 Siri in a Speaker with a Screen

  HomeView, that's the new Siri-in-a-Speaker-with-a-Screen device, which was announced by Apple today. No new app stores for this device.

  Also: updated HomePod mini and updated Apple TV 4K. All with Siri AI. Oh, and Apple Home Collection, which are accessories developed with two third-parties, LG and Schneider.

  ~

  Links:

  • Apple Announces HomeView Smart Display, by Dan Moren, Six Colors
  • Home, by Apple
• 13 Oct, 2026 “It’s Boring as Hell.”

  I see in your resume that your previous job was with the army… and then there is this twenty-eight year gap. Can you explain that?

  Oh, I took a walk.

  ~

  Link:

  • ‘Some Things Are Worth Dying For’: Karl Bushby’s Incredible 28-Year Walk Home, Through Deserts, Kidnappers and Polar Bears, by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
• 13 Oct, 2026 What Permissions do macOS Apps Need

  Adam Engst of TidBITS has a nice roundup on why we need apps that need Full Disk Access on macOS, and what we really need from Apple for these apps.

  macOS need to keep up with the times and provide customers with a secure and private environment while maintaining the openness of the Mac. I hope Apple is serious, and aren’t just looking for quick fixes.

  iOS is where a lot of us are spending time with, just because iiPhones are with us always, and all the apps are on it. But macOS is where most of us spend our quality and creative time. Getting macOS right is important.

  ~

  Links:

  • Why Full Disk Access Matters—and What Apple Should Fix, Adam Engst, TidBITS
  • Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS, Apple
• 12 Oct, 2026 Castro, the Podcast Player App, Changes Ownership

  As reported by James Cridland of Podnews, the podcast player app that I am using, Castro, has been sold. Again.

  If I am counting accurately, this will be the fourth owner. This app has gone through ups and downs, and have been neglected at multiple times. It's not just a lack of updates. There is a server component that is critical to the day-to-day usage of the app, so any problems with the server will directly impact customers.

  Let's see how the new owner will take care of this app. I am not pessimistic about the fate of this app, but I am not optimistic either.

  ~

  Link:

  • Maple Media Buys the Indie Castro App, by James Cridland, Podnews
• 12 Oct, 2026 Waiting, Hope, Patience

  I, on the other hand, am waiting to try out my new identity. I am waiting to do things that i have all the time for and none of the money to pay for. I am waiting to find out how much of all the time I have left.

  ~

  Link:

  • The Waiting, by Agnes, Nomad Online
• 11 Oct, 2026 "Baklava, to a Dyslexic"

  From Tyler Gooch in McSweeney's, here are Crossword Clues Where It's Clear the Puzzle's Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-Wise.

  ~

  Link:

  • Crossword Clues Where It's Clear the Puzzle's Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-Wise, by Tyler Gooch, McSweeney's.
• 11 Oct, 2026 Writing in Geological Time, Living With a Cosmic Event, And More Links for Oct 11, 2026
  • Up a Creek, by David Schurman Wallace, The Baffler
  • The Cosmos Brought Back My Ex. Did It Also Give Me Cancer?, by Ellen Vanstone, The Walrus (Excerpt from Is This a Funny Story? A Stage-Four Memoir)
  • ‘People Forgot I Existed’: Audrey Niffenegger On Taking 14 Years to Write a Sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Sophie McBain, The Guardian
  • “Perfect Breakfast”, by Alejandra Kamiya, translated by Daniel Hahn, Literary Hub (Excerpt from The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest)
• 10 Oct, 2026 Just Finished Reading: Time Travel for Beginners

  I like time travel stories ever since I watched Marty McFly in Back to the Future series. I enjoy all the hijinks that are typically associated with time traveling, all the paradoxes and all the past-affecting-future and future-affecting-past.

  Here in Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty, time traveling doesn't seem to factor much in the story. It's all sightseeing and tours for quite a while -- and also wonderful characters in eveyday parent-and-teenager life. I was about to write-off time traveling as just a McGuffin when all of a sudden, timelines start to matter. Not in a Back to the Future Part 2 way in terms of plot devices, but in a life-and-death because-of-timelines kind of situation.

  Time traveling in the story is there, it seems, just for the characters to look back into their past. The plot is not complicated -- certainly the past and the future doesn't have too much interaction, and there isn't the usual trope of the cause-and-effects in a typical time traveling story. I didn't find out too much about the book before I started reading it, but I can't find any marketing materials advertising this as a time traveling (as in Back to the Future) story. Perhaps I've the wrong expectations coming in, just because of the title of the book.

  Maybe because of that, I didn't find the time traveling part of the story to be working for me. I really enjoyed the first two-third of the story -- the romance, the young adult situations, all the drama. The ending seems somewhat contrived and forced. Don't expect a science fiction, and you may be rewarded to a host of wonderful characters. (Except for the three characters at the agency. I still think of them as interchangeable.)

  ~

  Link:

  • Time Travel for Beginners, by Jaclyn Moriarty
  • Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty Review – An Imaginative Tale of Turning Back Time, by Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian
  • Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty: Review by Ian Mond, Locus
• 10 Oct, 2026 Being Human in the Age of AI

  It is already not easy to be a human. Now add AI.

  Fernando Borretti:

  Humans are social animals who can only flourish in the society of other humans. We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?

  Nathan Gardels, Noema:

  The challenge is not just about “disarming” the capacity of AI agents to act on their own, as the Pope has called for, but also about “arming” the integral conception of the human within the integrated cognitive framework in which we already dwell.

  ~

  Links:

  • No Man Is an Island, Fernando Borretti
  • We Are Already Post-Human, by Nathan Gardels, Noema
• 10 Oct, 2026 Everybody Does Know Your Name

  When you go out for a nice dinner, or maybe just to get some groceries to make your own meal, do you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name, or do you want to remain anonymous to the world?

  Of course everybody will know your name. You don’t have a choice.

  Brett Martin, The Atlantic:

  Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”

  ~

  Links:

  • The One Question I Can’t Stand at Restaurants, Brett Martin, The Atlantic
  • Woman Caught by Sheng Siong’s Facial Recognition Tech After Shoplifting 12 Times Gets Week’s Jail, by Shaffiq Alkhatib, Straits Times
• 09 Oct, 2026 Siri In Your Home

  Apple has announced a "special event" with the tagline "Welcome home."

  Now that Siri appears to be good enough, Apple is pushing into the home accessories market again, this time with an improved AI bot. As far as I can see, there aren't any rumors about significant new features for the updated HomePod mini speakers and Apple TV set-top box. So, the star of the show is probably going to be the rumored Siri speaker-with-a-screen device.

  We'll find out this upcoming Tuesday then.

  ~

  Link:

  • Apple Announces “Welcome Home” Product Launch for 13 October 2026, by Adam Engst, TidBITS
• 08 Oct, 2026 “Software Engineering”

  Margaret Hamilton:

  It helps to know what it was like back then for those of us building the Apollo on-board flight software. During the early days of Apollo, software was treated like a stepchild; it was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Considered a mysterious “black box”, it was regarded by many as an art, not a science. To me it was both. Understanding the subtleties of developing real-time asynchronous flight software was left up to the flight software’s systems- software experts. Having this kind of responsibility resulted in our creating a “field”, since there was no school at the time to learn “software engineering”. This necessitated our creating methods, standards, rules and tools for developing the flight software. We were always looking for new ways to prevent errors. When answers could not be found, we had to invent them as we went along.

  ~

  Links:

  • Interview with Margaret H. Hamilton, excerpt from Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities, 7th Edition, catskull.net
  • Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Helped Land Apollo 11 on the Moon, Dies at 90, by Claire Keenan, BBC
• 07 Oct, 2026 On the Afterlife of a Book, Publishing Book Reviews, and Other Links for Oct 8, 2026
  • Why Is Joan Barfoot’s First Novel Catching Fire Fifty Years Later?, by Emily Donaldson, The Walrus
  • The Little Magazines Should Review More Books, by Ross Barkan, Political Currents
  • So Light And Gold: On Envy, by B.D. McClay, The Lamp
  • Canada Has a New Apple. Its Story Is Bananas, by Andrew Seale, The Walrus
  • The Fine Dining Flip, by Bettina Makalintal, Eater
• 07 Oct, 2026 Platforms and Their Chilling Effects

  The good thing about podcasts -- the format, not the genre -- is that anyone can make a podcast and distribute the programs. It is not controlled by a small number of platforms, and if you don't like any particular platform, you can go to someone else.

  The bad thing about video podcasts, on the other hand, is that there is one extremely dominant platform: YouTube.

  As Jason Snell detailed on his Six Colors web site, he is offended by Spotify's disregard of the legal concept of fair use. Jason decided to delete his Spotify account and stop distributing his podcasts on the platform.

  On the other hand, he did make a decision to not use a clip of a song in one of his latest podcast -- even though he believes, and I agree, it will be fair use -- because, YouTube.

  Jason Snell, Six Colors:

  We aren’t playing the song, though, because I’m sure it would run afoul of YouTube and Spotify’s content algorithms, and we’d need to risk the argument that it’s fair use—and potentially threaten the distribution and revenue generation of our brand-new podcast. Nothing like having episode one of a five-part series disappear from the internet because we ran afoul of content scanning.

  ~

  Link:

  • Spotify Opens New Front in War on Fair Use, by Jason Snell, Six Colors
• 07 Oct, 2026 Just Finished Reading: Exit Party

  If there are parallel worlds, and I have doppelgängers in these worlds, I hope they are all happier than me.

  In Exit Party, the doppelgängers in these parallel worlds appear to have free wills. Even though there are still parallels, perhaps fated, we still see the characters making choices willingly.

  On the other hand, by labeling the two outcomes as Side A and Side B, like a vinyl records or cassette tapes, it seems that countries only end up in two scenarios, both nowhere near idealistic. Is there the future of humankind? Do we need to be that pessimistic?

  ~

  Link:

  • Exit Party: A Novel, by Emily St. John Mandel
  • Across the Universes, by Anita Felicelli, Alta
• 07 Oct, 2026 "Lost That Battle Decades Ago"

  Phil Baker, Fast Company:

  When I hear politicians demanding that iPhones be built in the U.S., it’s clear they have no understanding of how products are created and built. You can’t just wish it to happen. You would need to create much of what China and Taiwan have built over the past 30 years.

  It’s not just setting up factory buildings filled with assembly machinery and workers. You would need the entire infrastructure of suppliers and manufacturers of the parts that go into the products: the factories to build displays, batteries, and electronic components. You’d require the experience, and the right attitude.

  ~

  Link: Why America Can’t Build the iPhone, by Phil Baker, Fast Company

Older posts continues at the Archives.