Apple’s favorite fictional team, The Underdogs, is back with an eight-minute ad—I’m sorry, short film—about the widespread, CrowdStrike-inflicted Windows Blue Screen of Death of 2024. Via The Verge, which describes it:

Apple’s ad follows The Underdogs, a fictional company that’s about to attend a trade show, before a PC outage causes chaos and a Blue Screen of Death shuts down machines at the convention. If it wasn’t clear Apple was mocking the infamous CrowdStrike incident, an IT expert appears in the middle of the ad and starts discussing kernel-level functionality, the core part of an operating system that has unrestricted access to system memory and hardware.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon protection software operates at the Kernel level, and a buggy update last year created BSOD issues that took down banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, and much more.

But not, of course, Macs, which were impervious to the assault.

The video was funny in the cringe way most of The Underdogs commercials are (they’re all a bit try-hard and need to improve their work-life integration), but it made the point: Macs are secure by default (and also have a bunch of time-saving features).

A couple of “production” notes:

• All five domain names on the business cards are registered (between April 15 and July 21, 2025), but none take you to a working site—not even a redirect.
• On the other hand, all the cards have a valid QR code that takes you to Apple at Work. Delightfully, instead of being printed on the cards, the QR codes appear to be physically cut-and-pasted on—exactly what you’d expect from companies unwilling to reprint their business cards.
• One domain not shown but can be inferred—that of our hero company, betterbag.com—does redirect to the same Apple at Work site. That domain was registered in September 2011. (Note: It’s not, as I mistakenly typed one time, betterbags.com—plural. That’s a real bag company. I wonder how they feel about the misdirected traffic.)
• At least one other fictional company, Origami Boxes, also uses Macs—you can see their hardware, and it’s still running.

• The “Credits” at the end describe the various security features (for example, Gatekeeper “Protects users from malicious software” and XProtect “Automatically detects and removes viruses and malware”), Apple hardware (Mac mini, Apple Watch) and software (Shazam, Genmoji, Find My), plus “special guests,” including Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, JigSpace, Mailchimp, Myngly, Adobe Acrobat, Reddit, and Slack.
• Curiously, while Numbers makes an appearance, Pages and Keynote do not, which makes me wonder how they got their presentation up on screen—PowerPoint? Really, Apple?

As long as I’m in the hacker space, I might as well mention the latest Raspberry Pi OS, named Trixie, which dropped last week. Simon Long writes on the Raspberry Pi blog:

We’re past summertime, and it’s an odd-numbered year, which means there is a new major release of Debian Linux, which in turn means there is a new major release of Raspberry Pi OS. This year’s version of Debian is called Trixie — as many of you know, Debian releases are named after characters in Disney’s Toy Story series of films, but all the well-known characters have already been used, so the names are getting increasingly obscure! Trixie is apparently a blue plastic triceratops who appears in Toy Story 3, but I must admit I can’t remember her — then again, I only watched that one once, because it got a bit sad towards the end…

I’m disappointed Long didn’t remember Trixie. She’s adorable, voiced by the very funny Kristen Schaal, and not at all obscure! He’s right about the sad, though.

But I digress.

Right. The release.

The biggest change: the Linux system clock, which was headed to its own Year-2000-style apocalypse in 2038, forestalls the issue by moving from a 32-bit number to a 64-bit number, so come 2038, the world (again) won’t collapse because of a date rollover—we now have until the year 292,277,026,596 to worry about that.

(You don’t remember Y2K? Kiss a programmer.)

There’s also a new desktop theme (new icons, new font, new desktop backgrounds; still ugly) and an updated “Control Centre” (yes, Raspberry Pi is based in the U.K.).

I haven’t had much need for my Raspberry Pis recently, thanks to Digital Ocean, but perhaps I’ll update them just to see how the new Trixie OS feels. It’s got to be better than macOS Tahoe 26, amirite?

Qualcomm, on its acquisition of maker-focused Arduino for an undisclosed amount (via Emma Roth at The Verge):

Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies’ powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.

“Arduino” is practically synonymous with “DIY hacker projects,” and, I’ll admit, I still think of them as just the tiny microcontroller breadboard used by hobbyists to learn electronics and programming. The company closed a $22 million fundraising round two years ago, valuing them then at $54 million, which would be a rounding error at twice that for the $182 billion Qualcomm.

This seems like an unlikely pairing, making me skeptical this will end well for Arduino, but maybe it’s just an infusion of cash, and a chance for Qualcomm to sell more of its hardware to hobbyists and tinkerers while walking them up the enterprise ladder. Still, enshittification is real, and tiny companies have a way of quietly disappearing once acquired by behemoths. Crossing my fingers for Arduino and a generation of makers.

(Arduino also announced UNO Q, a $44 USD “dual-brain platform” powered by both a Qualcomm Dragonwing processor that runs Debian Linux and a realtime microcontroller, along with the free Arduino App Lab, “a brand-new integrated development environment that unifies the journey across real-time OS, Linux, Python, and AI.” I never got into the Arduino ecosystem—I was always a software guy, so I landed on the Raspberry Pi side of the divide—but this new kit and IDE have definitely caught my eye.)

The Steve Jobs Archive has a wonderful digital exhibit about Steve Jobs’ Stanford address, which closes with the “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” quote I referenced in my remembrance:

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Steve’s commencement address at Stanford, we are sharing a newly enhanced version of the video below and on YouTube. It is one of the most influential commencement addresses in history, watched over 120 million times, and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world.

If you’ve never seen the commencement address, you won’t regret the fifteen minutes. If you’ve seen it before, you already know it’s always worth revisiting. It’s an experience that stays with you.

Be sure to explore the related artifacts at the bottom of the page. They are equally wonderful.

Kagi, the surveillance-free, paid search company, introduces Kagi News, a free news aggregation service:

Kagi News operates on a simple principle: understanding the world requires hearing from the world. Every day, our system reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives. We then use AI to distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.

Up to 12 stories in each user-selected category, published once per day at noon UTC.

Naturally, Kagi touts its privacy-focused design:

Your reading habits belong to you. We don’t track, profile, or monetize your attention. You remain the customer and not the product.

Kagi has also open sourced the web app and list of feeds that power the system.

After using it the last few days, I found many of the summaries useful, with helpful additional context, but several had a telltale smell of “AI.” For example, an “Apple” story headlined “MacOS Tahoe adds customization and Live Activities; Homebrew install tips” was an odd amalgam of barely related stories that made little sense together.

I’m not yet sure how Kagi News fits into my news consumption routine. I currently read dozens of RSS feeds every day and I can’t imagine being satisfied reading a handful of summarized stories instead. Beyond that, the selection of stories it features rarely matches my definition of “most important,” though it’s already exposed me to stories I might not have otherwise seen. It’s a promising idea, and I think it’ll be valuable to many people looking to curtail their news consumption, but it’s possible the entire concept of a “healthy news diet” is simply anathema to me.

As a follow-up to the Anthropic copyright settlement book search tool, here’s how the National Writers Union sees the settlement:

This is not the settlement that we as a union want, or that writers as creative workers deserve. But if writers do nothing, they may receive nothing, or less than they are entitled to. So in this moment, the NWU urges ALL writers to be proactive to see if their work is included and make claims for their full share of the settlement money – and to object if they think the settlement is unfair and should be rejected.

They are encouraging authors to register themselves with the settlement administrator, noting:

If you do nothing, you might get nothing at all. You might get a payment anyway, if your publisher tells the settlement administrator that you are entitled to a share, and if they can find you. But it could be less than you are entitled to.

There’s little reason for anyone to opt out except in the highly unlikely event that you are planning to bring your own separate lawsuit against Anthropic. (Good luck with that.) If you opt out, you will get no money from the settlement.

There’s a minute chance enough authors (and publishers) will object to the settlement that it doesn't go through. I’ll admit there’s a small part of me that hopes it blows up, mainly because I feel Anthropic is getting away with massive piracy for a pittance. You can be completely in the tank for AI and still want to see Anthropic (and OpenAI and Meta and …) fairly compensate the creators on whose works these AIs are trained. I suspect, though, that most authors will roll their eyes in contempt and begrudgingly accept these token payments rather than risk getting nothing.

A perfectly calibrated settlement.

Now that the Anthropic settlement has received preliminary approval, authors can look up their books in an official tool. From the Anthropic Copyright Settlement site:

To see if your book is included in the settlement, select how you would like to search and enter your search terms.

You can search by ISBN/ASIN, Title, Author, or Publisher.

The search results differ from the search tool The Atlantic created. The site has an FAQ about that:

51. My work was on The Atlantic’s list of LibGen files. Why is it not on the Works List?

The Works List only includes works that meet the Class definition (as identified in FAQ 5). A work on The Atlantic’s list of LibGen files may not meet the Class definition for many reasons […]

Those reasons will disappoint many authors whose work was pirated, but which didn’t meet the criteria for compensation.

A new (to me) daily logic game where you “figure out who is criminal and who is innocent.” The clues are of the “There are more criminals than innocents to the right of Frank” and “There are exactly 2 innocents in row 3” variety. Each clue leads logically to the next, and there’s no guessing allowed: if the available clues don’t allow for a logical determination of a suspect’s innocence or criminality, you’re prevented from making that call. There is also, naturally, a Wordle-style “social media” component for sharing your results and time. Here are my results from today (I’d be much better at this if I wrote down the identified logic and built truth tables. Instead, I try to keep it all in my head, with the demonstrated slow results):

I solved the daily Clues by Sam (Oct 1st 2025) in less than 33 minutes
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟨🟩🟨
https://cluesbysam.com

I loved (and was pretty good at) these logic puzzles as a kid, and this one hurts my brain in exactly the right way. I find them much more enjoyable than Sudoku.

And exactly what it says on the tin. This nine-minute trailer compilation will tell you quickly if this is your cup of ramen (“Beating you is what I do do do” is what hooked me). Gorgeous animation, vibrant characters, engaging story… oh yeah, and annoyingly infectious music. It comes by its three hundred million views honestly. Naturally a sequel and live action remake are in consideration. (Warning: spoilers abound in those links.)

Yes, every intro of the nearly 900 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was played live, but that’s not the reason—it’s because of improvisational jazz pianist Johnny Costa.

(I fell down @treehousedetective’s YouTube rabbit hole; his channel is filled with these surprising-yet-apparently-true nuggets. I highlighted this one because of its wholesomeness. Slightly less wholesome: why classic cartoon characters wear white gloves, why Mr. Snuffleupagus was finally revealed to adults, and why Doc and Marty were friends. I’ll never unknow these things.)

Jordan Mechner, answering a question he gets a lot:

Which is your favorite/definitive version of the original Prince of Persia game?

He runs through the various versions, starting with the one I played incessantly:

The Apple II version was the original. It’s the only version I programmed myself; Prince of Persia’s gameplay, graphics, animation and music were all created on the Apple II. I spent three years sweating over every byte (from 1986 to 1989), so it’s close to my heart in a way no other version can be. That said...

I was surprised to learn the 1990 PC version is Mechner’s preferred variant:

If someone asked me the best way to play old-school PoP online today, I’d likely recommend the DOS version.

He calls the Mac port “terrific” (I, surprisingly, never played it). Of the Super Nintendo version, which I played the heck out of, Mechner wrote in his journal:

Wow! It was like a brand new game. For the first time I felt what it’s really like to play Prince of Persia, when you’re not the author and don’t already know by rote what’s lurking around every corner.

He called playing it a “delighted thrill.”

Mechner also makes passing reference to “Sands of Time,” which I played a lot on my PlayStation 2.

Thirty-five years on, I’m still playing Mechner’s game. Sitting on my PlayStation 5 right now is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

Jayson Stark, writing for The Athletic back in March, examined the results of MLB’s Spring Training test of the Automated Ball Strike (ABS) Challenge System that’s coming next year (main link is paywalled, sorry; here are Apple News+ and Internet Archive links):

Stark spoke with players, managers, and team executives to get their take on the system. My main takeaway is that the system works… for some definition of “works”:

Every hitter, catcher and pitcher has an idea in his head of what a strike is and what a ball is. So for ABS to work — really work — the electronic strike zone has to feel essentially like the zone baseball players have in their heads.

You know what won’t work? If that zone feels just like some sort of technological creation.

So which was it this spring? Uh, let’s just say it’s a work in progress.

Tigers catcher Jake Rogers, on reviewing the ABS results after games:

“It’s crazy,” Rogers said, “because on ABS, you look at the iPad … and (the pitch is) half an inch below the zone. And then we get our report back with the old strike zone, and it’s a full ball in the zone. So it’s like, wow, it looks like a strike. It feels like a strike. And all of a sudden, you’re thinking: Do you challenge, or do you not challenge? So you go back and look at it, and it’s a ball (on ABS).”

Journeyman pitcher, Max Scherzer:

In his recent appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and Doug Glanville, Scherzer said one thing he’d like to see is “a buffer zone, maybe around the challenge system. So hey, if you challenge and it’s in the buffer, the call stands. So you keep human power, the human element, still with the umpire.

“I’m OK changing the call when it’s an egregious call,” the Blue Jays’ future Hall of Famer said. “But when we’re talking about a quarter of an inch that you can’t really detect it, I don’t necessarily know if that makes the game better.”

I agree with Scherzer. It’s great to have the system to correct clearly wrong calls. I’m less enthused about relying on it to make a call based on fractions of an inch—which no human could reliably distinguish in the best of circumstances anyway. If an umpire calls a pitch a ball, and was “wrong” by an eighth of an inch, that’s not a bad call. It’s a human call, and baseball is still a human game.

Stark asks, ”Are we sure this is what we want?”

Do we really want a World Series decided by a pitch that’s literally the width of a hair off the plate? I asked that question of an AL exec. He swatted it away like a piece of lint.

“Maybe just get the call right,” he said.

Stark closes:

What’s the true goal here? What are we trying to accomplish?

Technology is awesome. Robots are the future. And right calls are better than wrong calls. But is the sport truly better off if a World Series gets decided on a pitch 1-78th of an inch outside a robotized strike zone? The answers are so much harder than the questions.

MLB, earlier this week:

Major League Baseball (MLB) today announced that the Automated Ball Strike (ABS) Challenge System has been approved for Major League play by a vote of the Joint Competition Committee. Beginning in 2026, the “Challenge System” will be used in all Spring Training, Championship Season, and Postseason games.

It looks like we’ll have computerized umpires regularly calling balls and strikes before we see a full-time female umpire in the game.

From the “How It Works” section of the announcement:

If a pitcher, catcher, or batter disagrees with the umpire’s initial call of ball or strike, he can request a challenge by immediately tapping on his hat or helmet and vocalizing a challenge. The pitch location is compared to the batter’s strike zone, and if any part of the ball touches any part of the strike zone, the pitch will be considered a strike. The home plate umpire will announce the challenge to the fans in the ballpark and a graphic showing the outcome of the challenge will be displayed on the scoreboard and broadcast. The entire process takes approximately 15 seconds.

The system’s been used at the Triple-A level since 2022, and at the Major League level during this year’s Spring Training and All-Star Game.

Baseball has always been a game of inches. Part of the joy and pain of the game is knowing that an inch here or an inch there can dramatically alter the outcome of an at-bat, a game, or a season. While egregiously bad calls deserve to be challenged and overturned, I’d hate to see the game become a contest of constantly challenged calls of balls and strikes. My love of baseball has already been strained under rule changes I detest. I’m hoping this won’t be one more reason for me to stop caring.

Jimmy Kimmel, returning to his show on Tuesday after his suspension over a pointed joke, quotes Jack Paar upon his return to The Tonight Show 65 years earlier, after walking off in protest over a censored joke.

Different circumstances, of course, but I appreciate that Kimmel (or his people) knows and respects the history of late night talk shows enough to make the reference.

Kimmel’s monologue (6+ million viewers on TV, 18+ million on YouTube) struck exactly the right tone of defiance, conciliation, and emotion. He choked up during his “apology” for last week’s joke, and followed it up with this:

This show is not important. What is important is we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet and spend time with comedians and talk show hosts from Russia, countries in the Middle East, who told me they would get thrown in prison for making fun of those in power, and worse […]. They know how lucky we are here. Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country. And that’s something I’m embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air, and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That’s not legal, that’s not American, that’s un-American, and it’s so dangerous.

He went hard after Brendan Carr and Donald Trump, and took a dig at Disney while he was at it, reading a “statement” that was one of the “conditions” of his return:

To reactivate your Disney+ and Hulu account, open the Disney app on your smart TV or TV-connected device.

I’ve very rarely paid attention to Kimmel. I have no particular issue with him, beyond not finding him especially entertaining, but I’m glad to see he’s not backing down from this fight.

(Be sure to stick around for a very De Niro appearance by Robert De Niro.)

Brian Steinberg, Variety:

Disney and ABC will bring the comedian back to its schedule starting Tuesday night, after a decision to take his show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” off the air for an indefinite period of time. “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

“We’ve lost more money than Scrooge McDuck has in his vault. Please boycott your local affiliates now.”

Kimmel won’t be back everywhere, though; both Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar are preempting the show. Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter:

“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming,” the company said in a statement Monday. “Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.”

“We’re negotiating how much ABC will pay us to broadcast the show.”

“In the meantime, we note that Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be available nationwide on multiple Disney-owned streaming products, while our stations will focus on continuing to produce local news and other programming relevant to their respective markets.”

“No matter how hard we try, we can’t stop the signal. Besides, local news is cheaper to produce; someone else writes it, and we just read it.”

Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge:

Today, the company is launching prepaid passes, in which customers can pay a discounted price in advance on frequently taken trips. Passes will be offered in bundles of 5, 10, 15, or 20 rides, with the bigger bundle earning the bigger discount. Discounts range from 5–20 percent off the average cost of the ride, depending on the number of prepaid passes that are being purchased in advance.

So, Uber’s invented… transit passes?

Uber will market the passes to customers by comparing the single ride fare to a discounted fare when purchased in bulk. For example, a ride from Lower Manhattan to Midtown might cost around $19, but Uber will note that it can be as high as $30 with surge pricing. Customers who purchase passes in bulk won’t have to pay the inflated price, Uber says.

Quite the move from Uber, which controls surge prices, to offer “discounts” based on high surge prices.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for Negroni fans. From Imbibe magazine and Campari comes Negroni Week 2025:

For 1 week in September, bars and restaurants will mix classic negronis and negroni variations for a great cause.

That cause is (again) Slow Food:

Slow Food is a global movement of local communities and activists across more than 160 countries seeking to change the world through food and beverage. Slow Food envisions a world where everyone can enjoy food and beverage that is good for them, good for the people who produce it, and good for the planet.

No doubt there’s a participating venue near you—San Francisco offers 45 locations this year.

Last year I didn’t start until midweek, but I made sure it was on my calendar this year. This will be my tenth Negroni Week (at least!). As I noted last year:

[…] while I don’t need an excuse to tip a Negroni—it’s my favorite “daily drinker” cocktail—I welcome the opportunity.

I also remain an enthusiastic member of the Bitters and Bottles Negroni club. Over the years, they’ve crafted some unconventional concoctions, several of which I’ll revisit this week. To kick things off, I’ve selected their New Age Negroni.

One ounce each of:

• Carpano Bianco Vermouth
• Suncliff Gin
• Suncliff Cultivaro

Combine with lots of ice, stir quickly, and strain into an old fashioned glass with a large sphere or block of ice. Garnish with a twist of orange or grapefruit if you have it.

Enjoy slowly.

James Savage, in his developer blog, A Devlog, on the importance of choosing the right name for your Xcode projects:

For example, a name that can easily be changed doesn’t give me a lot of pause, and this fortunately covers most of the type, property, and method names in a project. It’s always great to choose good names upfront if possible, but sometimes things change, and that’s what refactoring is for. Similarly, names that exist within some sufficiently narrow scope (like a private repository) really only need to make sense to their author. It’s the names that can’t be changed that I worry about.

Xcode helpfully illustrates this duality by asking for both a product name and a bundle identifier as part of its new project form. While it’s tempting to think that the product name matters more here (that’s an app’s brand after all) it’s really the easier of the two to actually change. That’s because, unlike a marketing name, an app’s bundle identifier becomes permanent once submitted to the App Store.

Helpful guidance throughout for all Apple developers.

(In making his point about the immutable nature of bundle identifiers, Savage reminded me of something I’d completely forgotten: the official X/Twitter app was originally created by a third-party developer before being acquired by Twitter in 2010, which is why its bundle identifier remains com.atebits.Tweetie2, betraying its origins as an independent app.)

The main link is to the Reuters story about the summary dismissal of Donald Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, but what I really wanted to highlight is the dismissal order itself. It’s just four pages and easily skimmed, and is a fantastic takedown of the bloated 85-page complaint Trump’s lawyers filed on his behalf.

Written by United States District Judge Steven D. Merryday, it opens:

As every member of the bar of every federal court knows (or is presumed to know), Rule 8(a), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, requires that a complaint include “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.”

Civil rights lawyer Joshua Erlich commented on Bluesky:

The court sua sponte dismisses the case for violating Rule 8(a).

So that means the court, all on its own, looked at the complaint and said it’s too long, too scattershot, too arbitrary to even count as a complaint. Never seen this happen to a private party with counsel.

(Apparently, it’s hard to get a complaint struck sua sponte for a Rule 8 violation in federal court. Congratulations to Trump’s legal team on this momentous achievement.)

The order calls the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible,” where readers “must labor through” the “many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations” that are filled with “abundant, florid, and enervating detail.”

It ends:

[…] a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief. As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.

Unsparing.

Trump was invited to refile his complaint (and will), but it’s clear that Judge Merryday was having none of Trump’s bullshit.

(The lawsuit itself, of course, is also utter bullshit. It’s a classic Trump maneuver: sue for an absurd amount of money, then settle for a smaller number to make the problem “go away.” It’s less direct than demanding a payoff, but equally obvious—a Trumpian lesson in “How to Structure a Bribe.”)

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission:

This recall involves Anker Power Banks with model numbers A1647, A1652, A1257, A1681 and A1689.

And:

Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled power banks and visit Anker’s Recall Page at https://www.anker.com/rc2506 to verify the product serial number and register for the recall.

If you have recalled products, after registering them, dispose of them safely:

Note: Do not throw this recalled lithium-ion battery or device in the trash, the general recycling stream (e.g., street-level or curbside recycling bins), or used battery recycling boxes found at various retail and home improvement stores. Recalled lithium-ion batteries must be disposed of differently than other batteries, because they present a greater risk of fire.

Anker is offering a full refund or gift card for affected devices.

This is an expansion of 2024’s recall of 2,100 battery packs. Earlier this year, Anker also recalled over a million older PowerCore 10000 (A1263) power banks.

I’ve written of my Anker devotion previously, and I have at least six Anker battery packs. Fortunately, none of them are affected by these recalls (though I do have a smaller capacity variant of the recalled Zolo 20K (A1689); mine is the 10K (A1688) model—I’m using it with caution).

Despite the recalls, I still trust and prefer Anker products. I don’t expect this will dissuade me from buying them in the future.

I hope I’m not burned by that trust.

(If you’re curious about possible technology failures that may have led to these recalls, Alex Hao at LumaField uses the company’s CT scanner to answer “What Went Wrong Inside These Recalled Power Banks?”)

FCC Chair Brendan Carr:

This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

TV Tropes:

A Stock Phrase. The easy way is usually giving in, and the hard way usually involves some kind of violence or torment.

Carr is a cartoonish mob enforcer—and not even an original one.

Moira Donegan, The Guardian:

It is becoming dangerous – life-alteringly so – to tell the truth about the Trump regime, or even just to tell truths that the regime finds unflattering. Theirs is the dream of an insecure child: one of absolute power. They want to rule over us with malignant pettiness, to dispense favors and mercy to their allies and sycophants, and to dispense and encourage punishments to those who displease them. They want to control what we’re allowed to say, what we’re allowed to know. And they want to control what we are allowed to laugh at – certainly, never them.

In the era of absolute monarchy, European countries often had laws on the books banning the mockery of the king. So-called lèse-majesté laws made it treason to insult the “dignity” of the sovereign. The Trump administration seems to have taken this principle – that to mock is serious and punishable – and expanded it, extending the protective circle of the king’s authority outward until it encompasses all of his allies, too.

Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Karen Attiah, Terry Moran, Matt Dowd… all punished for daring to criticize Trump and his regime. Yet Fox News host Brian Kilmeade—who said of mentally ill homeless people, “Just kill ’em”—still has a job.^[1] We are witnessing government sponsored censorship via mob-style intimidation.

Austin Mann’s camera-focused iPhone review is the only one I eagerly anticipate each year. As always, both his location (Dolomite Mountains in northeastern Italy) and the photos (and video) he captures are simply stunning.

(Mann has a perspective on Cosmic Orange that caused me to briefly reconsider my color choice. He also mentions one iOS 26 feature I missed: using AirPods as a camera remote.)

Brooks Barnes, The New York Times (gift link):

Robert Redford, the big-screen charmer turned Oscar-winning director whose hit movies often helped America make sense of itself and who, offscreen, evangelized for environmental causes and fostered the Sundance-centered independent film movement, died early Tuesday morning at his home in Utah. He was 89.

Everyone has their own, but my two favorite Robert Redford movies are The Sting and The Natural. I love both unreservedly.

The Sting very well may be my first “heist”/“caper” movie, and thus the basis for my love of the entire genre.

The Natural competes with A League of Their Own and Field of Dreams for my favorite baseball movie, but nothing can compete with Redford’s iconic final swing. Gets me every time.

Beyond his unforgettable and illustrious acting career, I’m also grateful for Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, which brought to the world a new generation of filmmakers, several of whom—Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele, Rian Johnson, and Ryan Coogler, for example—have made some of my favorite movies.

RIP to “the best there ever was.”

Karl Groethe:

Twenty-five years ago I was an intern at Apple, reviving hundreds of sample code projects and writing new ones to help illustrate how to write programs and use various APIs for Mac OS X developers. […] My favorite creation I called PThreadSorts, a demo that visualized sorting algorithms by scrambling and sorting image pixels. This weekend, with Claude as my AI assistant, I brought it back from the dead.

Karl was on his (I think) third internship at Apple when I started there in 2001—technically he was my first intern, though I hadn’t hired him.

I vividly recall his efforts to modernize sample code then, and I love that he’s doing it again, this time with the help of AI to do the “heavy lifting.” This was a fun read—slightly technical, but very approachable.

(One interesting tidbit: The sample project originally included several Apple marketing images to exercise the sorting algorithms. Today’s Apple includes images created especially for sample code usage—it does not allow the use of any of its copyrighted or trademarked imagery, out of concern for losing legal protection. Apple was a very different company back then.)

Karen Attiah:

Last week, the Washington Post fired me.

The reason? Speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.

Attiah was with the Post for eleven years, where she was their Global Opinions editor and their “last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist.”

Her firing comes after several social media posts where she criticized the “ritualized responses” following Charlie Kirk’s killing:

“the hollow, cliched calls for “thoughts and prayers” and “this is not who we are” that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths.”

Her posts were restrained, and condemned “violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning.”

And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and the Post itself is dousing the light.

(You may recall that Columbia University cancelled Attiah’s course on Race, Media and International Affairs, leading her to launch Resistance Summer School to teach it anyway. The classes (which I attended) were terrific (and will be repeated and expanded—I’m again signed up, for 102). I’m hopeful she’ll now be able to expand further.)

The AI infringement hits keep coming, reports Blake Brittain of Reuters:

Perplexity AI is the latest artificial intelligence company to be hit with a lawsuit by copyright holders alleging infringement after Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accused it of misusing their content in its “answer engine” for internet searches.

The reference companies alleged in New York federal court on Wednesday that Perplexity unlawfully copied their material and diminished their revenue by redirecting their web traffic to its AI-generated summaries.

Elissa Welle at The Verge:

In the lawsuit, the companies allege that Perplexity’s “answer engine” scrapes their websites, steals their internet traffic, and plagiarizes their copyrighted material. Britannica also alleges trademark infringement when Perplexity attaches the two companies’ names to hallucinated or incomplete content.

The 55-page filing (in which the company delightfully spells its name Encyclopædia) is filled with confusing, sometimes circular contentions. For example,

7. Perplexity’s so-called “answer engine” eliminates users’ clicks on Plaintiffs’ and other web publishers’ websites—and, in turn, starves web publishers of revenue […]

That ship has long sailed. People want answers, not just links. Is this much different than me reading an Encyclopedia Britannica article and then summarizing it in a post here? Am I stealing their content and revenue if my page ranks higher than Britannica’s?

That paragraph continues:

[…] To build its substitute product, Perplexity engages in massive copying of Plaintiffs’ and other web publishers’ protected content without authorization or remuneration.

Ah, there’s the rub! Wholesale copying of content is certainly not acceptable. If that’s the complete complaint, consider me convinced.

Welle’s Verge article also notes:

Perplexity plagiarized Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word plagiarize, the lawsuit alleges.

Plagiarizing “plagiarize” is funny. But after reading the actual allegation, I found it—to be kind—rather specious:

74. For example, when a user asked Perplexity, “How does Merriam Webster define plagiarize,” Perplexity spit back the exact definition of the term from Merriam Webster, which is identical to the definition in the print Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

What is it they expect to happen here? Should Perplexity not answer? Link to the Merriam-Webster site?

If you asked me this question, and I pulled out a copy of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and read the definition to you, am I in violation of copyright? Should I be expected to open the dictionary to the definition and slide the book across the table for you to read yourself?

At best it’s a leading question. At worst, it’s contrived—and the allegation contains several such examples.

What if Perplexity returned a different answer? Well, they’d then be accused of providing inaccurate information while attaching Merriam-Webster’s name:

93. […] Perplexity sometimes generates hallucinations in its outputs and attributes that text to Plaintiffs using Plaintiffs’ trademarks. Perplexity’s use of these marks alongside hallucinations is likely to cause dilution by blurring and/or tarnishing Plaintiffs’ famous marks. In addition, Perplexity’s use of these marks alongside hallucinations constitutes false designations of origin and confuses and deceives Perplexity users into believing (falsely) that the hallucinations are associated with, sponsored by, or approved by Plaintiffs.

In addition to complaining about exact reproductions, and “hallucinations” with their name on it, Britannica also complains that Perplexity’s answers aren’t exactly what Britannica wrote, actually:

94. It omits content from Britannica’s articles that it purports are exact reproductions of such articles.

So Perplexity is wrong for reproducing content exactly, inexactly, and inaccurately. In other words, for reproducing the content at all. Got it.

What’s unclear is whether Britannica would allow any of this behavior if Perplexity were to pay a licensing fee, because it seems Perplexity was happy to do so:

86. In May 2025, Perplexity reached out to Plaintiffs to discuss a potential partnership. The parties had an initial phone call on May 9, 2025 during which Perplexity did not provide any material information regarding the requested partnership, financial or otherwise. After the call, Perplexity requested multiple times that the parties negotiate a non-disclosure agreement before engaging in further substantive discussions. Neither Plaintiff ultimately executed a non-disclosure agreement or participated in any partnerships with Perplexity.

I’m all for Perplexity compensating Encyclopedia Britannica to gain access to its valuable content. And stealing content should be properly punished. Yet this lawsuit is filled with such scattershot arguments, it comes across as more a negotiation ploy than a legitimate complaint.