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Launched is a podcast by Charlie Chapman, where he interviews mobile app developers about their ideas and how they launched their products. Great show! I particularly enjoyed this episode, from last December 2021, with Ryan Jones the founder of Flighty and Weather Line. Both are great apps which I have used extensively. Ryan digs into how he transitioned from petroleum engineering to being an app creator, and the entire episode provides excellent content for anyone thinking of starting their own mobile app business. ...

I apologize in advance if you don’t give two hoots about social media conventions and norms. Saw this post by Taylor Lorenz over on Mastodon.social: Journalists will never stick around this app long term sadly unless it adds quote posting. We desperately need it to communicate effectively, build on each others ideas, and add crucial context to posts. These are things replies simply do not accomplish. Also quote posting or reblogging does not = harassment! Tumblr, for instance, has had the feature since the beginning. We need it here now too ...

Tough to do better than this article title “Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet”: If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way. ...

Joint reporting by The Verge and The Markup: Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts. ...

Here There be Risks From The Guardian a few days ago: But Mastodon’s model comes with its own risks. If the server you join disappears, you could lose everything, just like if your email provider shut down. A Mastodon server admin also has ultimate control over everything you do: if for some reason the owner of kpop.social doesn’t like that I boosted a toot from dolphin.town, they could remove it or even “defederate” the server, which would block all dolphin toots from the k-pop server completely. A server admin could also snoop on my private toots if they wanted to – or delete my account for any reason. ...

Finished editing this over the last few nights. The footage is all from May 2022 and the trip we took. Really digging this Artlist.io service for finding fun backing tracks to put behind the footage. Still trying different video edits, cuts, and effects using DaVinci Resolve. Overall - I think I’m getting better at this? ;) Oh, and it was a lot of fun to relive these warm summer days while fall and winter roll on in to New Jersey. ...

Winter is coming, and we’re back on the indoor biking train with Zwift. Got in a few outdoor rides this past month. Weekends were filled with a wedding and working on buttoning up the sunroom with insulation before the winter comes, which certainly took away from the time I would have been out biking on weekends. It has been a warm October. The first weekend of November looks like it will hit 71F on Saturday - so I guess I will be out biking this coming weekend. ...

Matt Levine, writing in Money Stuff on 25 October 2022: Over the past few months I have written a long piece about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. It is out today, and you can read it here. Some of the themes will be familiar to Money Stuff readers: I touch on crypto’s sometimes hilarious and sometimes insightful reinvention of traditional finance, as well as Bitcoin’s revolutionary (re)discovery of the fact that, if a bunch of people decide that something should be valuable, that’s enough to make it valuable. But I also try to start from the beginning of crypto and build step by step, to develop complex modern crypto ideas from first principles. ...

As a follow up to Part I and Part II, which included some narrative and photos of a recent motorcycle tour of New England, here is a video which cuts together GoPro footage taken from our ride. The primary source of footage is a trip down Route 100 in Vermont, starting in Stowe and ending once we had crossed the Green Mountain National Forest on Route 73. The polaroid photo effect was really fun to build (thanks YouTube tutorial videos!). The moving photos within those polaroid frames were made possible by extracting the video file from an iPhone Live Photo and embedding it into the image frame. All of those motion graphic effects were created using Davinci Fusion. ...

From The Verge: But upon examination, these new features are hardly the panacea that their boosters imply. Some elements presented as safety enhancements (like lane keep assist) may be little more than driver conveniences. For now, at least, those technologies that could save the most lives (like pedestrian detection) remain deeply unreliable. And even if ADAS eventually works flawlessly, it is likely to have only a modest impact on annual traffic deaths. ...