Mitch's Blog

Trump says he wanted to participate in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but the Secret Service would not allow it.

Reprehensible on two levels: He wanted to participate in a violent, criminal attempt to overthrow a legitimate election, and he was too chickenshit to do it.

CNN Airs New Tape of Trump Discussing Capitol Trip on Jan. 6

No, there isn’t a wave of TikTok teens supporting Osama bin Laden.

… everything we see about TikTok is just being filtered through a media and political apparatus that doesn’t know how it works and has no issue cherry-picking random nonsense out of the app to fit whatever agenda they subscribe to.

— Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day. TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden

For several months, I noticed that my MacBook Pro made weird hissing and clicking sounds in the morning. That’s bad, I thought, and I checked to be sure my backups were OK.

But other than that, I didn’t think about it. The sounds only lasted a second or two and only happened once or twice in the morning.

Recently, I realized the MacBook Pro wasn’t making the noise. It was my insulated coffee carafe, which rests next to the MBP when I’m having coffee at my desk in the morning.

I recently received this message in text spam:

Evelyn, it’s no sin to love each other and it’s not annoying.

Just that one single line of text. No greeting, no context, nothing else.

A+ for creativity. Genius.

Red Hat: ‘The power of AI is open’. I wrote about how the crimson cap crew at Red Hat says open source has what it takes to meet AI’s demands for rapid development cycles and compliance with security and regulatory standards.

I hate when blueberries get wrinkled. They’re like Oompa Loompa scrotums.

Esquire: Nazi-Curious Madman Currently Under Indictment For 91 Felonies Gives Speech. Headline of the week.

Interesting analysis on using social media to drive traffic by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day (one of my favorite newsletters). A couple of highlights:

• Threads is driving the most traffic. He thinks that’s just a bait-and-switch by Meta but is happy to ride it out while the fun lasts. I agree on both counts.
• He creates one-minute videos talking about what he’s written and posts them to various places.
• He takes a screenshot of one good paragraph and posts to X, Threads, etc. Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post and Casey Newton of Platformer seem to do the same.
• Like me, he doesn’t have a lot of patience with posting in each place in its native format. To me, that’s too much like work. Like filling out expense reports.

Also:

… my main takeaway from these early days living out in the wilderness of the new internet is that everything is a big mess right now and you can kind of go and do whatever you want wherever you want. Which is, obviously, a little scary for folks who haven’t used their browser’s URL bar in a while, but four of the biggest platforms are all showing the same recycled video content and the smaller social networks that aren’t are, well, just social networks. Which means platforms don’t really matter anymore. We’re in a moment of possibility and, sure, I wish I could just write my little emails and call it a day, but exploring the web and figuring out what works for me isn’t the worst thing in the world either.

The video idea is intriguing. And the audio could run as a podcast, too! On the other hand, I go weeks now where all the work I’m doing is marketing writing, which I’m still figuring out how to promote—much of that doesn’t have my byline. Nearly ALL of it, actually. How do I promote that kind of thing? And yet, some of my favorite podcasts come out on an intermittent schedule.

Red Hat debuts edge platform for vast device networks. I wrote about the Burgundy Beanie bunch at Red Hat launching Device Edge, an open-source, minimal-footprint platform for edge computing on small, resource-constrained devices.