October ended with my least-scheduled week of the entire month, a break I needed after all of this month’s travel. My sole outside-my-home work event happened Tuesday, an Ars Technica event about AI that let me catch up with some friends from that outstanding publication. I went from that directly to the Kamala Harris rally at the Ellipse–the first presidential-campaign event I’d attended since going to an Obama rally in 2012.
Patreon readers got an extra post from me this week: an essay unpacking the Washington Post’s shameful and self-destructive decision not to run a presidential endorsement and comparing that to other reasons newsroom reporters can resent their paper’s editorial page.
10/28/2024: Apple Finally Replaces Lightning With USB-C on Keyboards, Mice, Trackpads, PCMag
This is a post I should have been able to write years ago, but with less than two months left before a European Union mandate to switch to USB-C for peripherals, Apple finally killed off Lightning on its mice, trackpads and most of its keyboards. Which means I can finally replace the antique mouse that came with the iMac that I bought in 2009, which I’ve kept long after replacing that computer just because it runs on AA batteries.
10/31/2024: Google Announces Play Store Tweaks to Entice More of Your Attention and Money, PCMag
When a company gives me an advance copy of its news, I try to add some context to my own writeup so I’m not just recapping their PR. In this case, that context was the “service fees” that Google charges developers and the court cases challenging them and Google’s control over Android apps.
10/31/2024: Passkey Adoption Reaches a New Milestone, Even With Uneven Support, PCMag
The context I added to this post: how late and spotty passkey support from companies holds back this authentication standard, and how out-of-date directories of passkey support make it harder for people to find companies that do offer this stronger, easier sign-in option.
11/2/2024: Let’s Fly: How to Watch a Rocket Launch From Florida’s Space Coast, PCMag
This is a post I’d had in mind for years, but I couldn’t write it as a proper how-to until I’d finally watched a launch from a part of the Kennedy Space Center open to the general public–which I did when I traveled to Florida to see the Sept. 12 launch of AST SpaceMobile’s first five production satellites.
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