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Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple TV+ is set to be available to stream for free from Saturday, January 4 to Sunday, January 5, providing its full catalog with no subscription fee. Following a series of teasers, Apple today confirmed the free weekend on social media, building anticipation for new releases early in 2025 such as the second season of Severance. Simply open the Apple TV app to watch for free.

Bizarrely, the only places Apple announced this seems to be on X and Instagram. Not a word on Apple Newsroom, for example. Update: OK, it’s also posted on Apple’s dedicated press release site for TV+, which I heretofore didn’t know existed.

Apple TV+ has an abundance of great shows (but a relative dearth of good original movies, with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon being the standout exception). I wouldn’t hesitate to argue that the average quality of an Apple TV+ original show is higher than that for any other streaming platform. It really is the new HBO. But for one weekend of free viewing I can easily name my two favorites, both of which I think will stand the test of time and long be remembered: Severance and Slow Horses.

Speaking of sponsorships, the Q1 schedule is filling up, but I’ve still got this week and next open. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

James Fallows, in a 2023 piece for The Atlantic, written when Carter entered hospice care:

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

An upcoming version of the Magic Mouse with voice control for AI would “make sense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today, though he claimed that he has heard no rumors about the feature so far.

Alongside the voice-input mouse, it’d make just as much sense to bring back some of that see-through 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching MacBooks to transparent aluminum.

Fun and interesting list overall (via Kottke), but #7 caught my attention:

Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.”)

Not sure what made the researchers pick those three cities, but in my experience they’re the only three cities in America where people walk at a reasonable clip.

(Sidenote: #1 on Hendricks’s list was an item claiming that Firefox and Chrome users tend to be happier and more satisfied employees than Internet Explorer or Safari users, because they’re the sort of non-conformist thinkers who install third-party web browsers rather than use the system default. As if the inclusion of “Internet Explorer” weren’t hint enough that one should be skeptical of this claim, the cited source is an article from 2016, and the study only applied to people with jobs as customer service agents. Chrome has 66 percent market share for desktop browsers today — pretty sure using it doesn’t make one a non-conformist.)

My thanks to Junjie for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Due, their excellent reminder app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I first linked to Due back in 2010, writing this short post:

I’ve been trying this $3 app for a few days and digging it — a convenient, low-friction way to set short-term reminders and timers. Sort of like Pester but for iPhone. Focused and thoughtful design.

A lot of apps have come and gone since then. But Due has thrived. I never would have expected it when I penned the short blurb above, but here we are at the very end of 2024 and I’ve been relying upon Due for 14 years and counting. I started using it then and haven’t stopped. Due has long held a permanent position on my iPhone’s first home screen. And for several years now, Due has been available, with seamless iCloud syncing, on the Mac.

You might ask why use Due instead of Apple Reminders. For me the answer is simple. Due’s conception and presentation of “reminders” works for me and my way of thinking in a way that Apple Reminders does not. I have tons of to-do items in Reminders. But for a certain type of recurring and one-off tasks that I want to be reminded about at a certain time, they go in Due.

For example, our trash gets picked up on Monday and Thursday mornings. So I have recurring Due reminders to take out the trash every Sunday and Wednesday night. I don’t want these in my calendar. I just want them in Due, and Due makes sure I see notifications at 9:00pm every trash night. Due’s intuitive snoozing options make it easy to postpone one of these by a day during weeks when trash pickup is delayed by a holiday. I also keep my reminders related to Daring Fireball’s weekly sponsors in Due — posting the new sponsor’s ad at the start of the week, and writing my thank-you post at the end of the week — which reminders were quite meta this week.

It turns out, that brief blurb I wrote about Due 14 years ago was meaningful to the success of Due. Reading Junjie’s remembrance about that post made me sit up a bit straighter, I’ll admit. I’ll accept some small measure of credit for discovering Due back then, but Due is so good, so distinctively original and useful, that I firmly believe its success was inevitable. Go check it out.

The New York Times:

While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.

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Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from 32 choices. One limitation is that the only options are free fonts — some of my favorite monospaced fonts aren’t free and thus aren’t included (e.g. Consolas, Berkeley Mono, or Apple’s SF Mono). Another limitation is that some of the fonts in the tournament just plain suck. But it’s really pretty fun.

It’s also a good thing I procrastinated on linking to this for two months — it’s improved greatly in the weeks since Snell linked to it. The example code is now JavaScript, not CSS, which is a much better baseline for choosing a programming font. And there are some better font choices now.

I highly recommend you disable showing the font names while you play, to avoid any bias toward fonts you already think you have an opinion about. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Pro. My second favorite in this tournament is IBM Plex Mono. The most conspicuous omission: Intel One Mono.

Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again.

If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you.

PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were one of those readers who took a chance on Due, thank you.

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to check as you await your favorite’s show’s next episode.

Unlike any other anime aggregation site, Jiiiii has a collection of beautiful native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, making it the best way to keep up with anime on Apple devices. They even have a progressive web app in beta, that you can download on almost any other platform to get a similar experience.

The best part? No ads, no tracking, and complete privacy — all the benefits you’d expect from the indie husband-and-wife developers Dimitri and Linh Bouniol. (Dimitri streamed the entire development of Jiiiii to YouTube, and continues to do so every night.)

Catch up on anything you missed from the fall season, and get ready for the winter season’s new anime with Jiiiii, and never miss out on a show again.

Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski:

I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious sport with abandon. Rickey played a timid sport with flash. Rickey irritated and thrilled and frustrated and dominated and left us all wanting more.

“When we were kids,” his teammate Mike Gallego said, “we played in the backyard emulating Pete Rose’s stance or Joe Morgan’s. I believe Rickey emulated Rickey.”

Yes, Rickey was his own thing, entirely, completely, from the way he crouched at the plate (“he has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s heart,” Jim Murray famously wrote), to the way he slid headfirst on the bases (he modeled his slide after an airplane landing) to the way he held out virtually every spring (“You have to say Rickey’s consistent,” Don Mattingly said during one of those holdouts, “and that’s what you want from a ballplayer: consistency”) to the way he referred to himself in the third person (“People are always saying, ‘Rickey says Rickey,’” Rickey said, “but it’s been blown way out of proportion”) to the joyful confidence he exuded every time he stepped out on the diamond from age 20 to age 44.

“You wanna throw me out today?” he would ask catchers the first time he stepped to the plate. “Well, hang tight. Rickey’s gonna give you that chance.”

I don’t want to spoil a single word of the story Posnanski closes his piece with. Just be sure to read through to the very end.

See also:

From ESPN’s obit, by Howard Bryant and Jeff Passan:

He played his last game at 44 years, 268 days old Sept. 19, 2003, for the Dodgers, and his stolen base total remains more than 1,000 ahead of the current active leader.

Here’s the list of career steals leaders among active players, led by Starling Marte with 354 and Jose Altuve with 315. There are only four other active players with more than 200. Rickey had 1,406. Lou Brock is second place on the all-time list with 938 steals. So even if Marte (who is already 36 years old) or Altuve (34 years old) were to steal as many additional bases as Lou Brock did in his entire 19-year career — the guy who is second-place all-time — they’d still be well short of Rickey’s record. In the entire history of Major League Baseball there are only nine players who stole half of Rickey’s career number. But as FanGraphs’s Dan Szymborski observes, “The funny thing with Rickey is that you take away the stolen bases, he’s still easily in the top 10 for LF WAR all time.”

Also from ESPN:

Stories about Henderson were as legendary as his play, such as the true story of him once framing a million-dollar bonus check and hanging it on his wall — without first cashing it.

Last but not least, give a listen to this quick story from Giants great Will Clark, about a preseason game against Rickey’s Oakland A’s when the A’s coaches tried to give him the “don’t steal” sign. You know what Rickey did.

Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee:

To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.

Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the history of the game as well. Perhaps the best characterization of Henderson’s career came from Bill James who once wrote that, “if you could split Rickey Henderson in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” [...]

In 1980, his first full major league season, Henderson broke Ty Cobb’s 65-year-old American League record for stolen bases by swiping 100 bags to Cobb’s 96. In 1982 he stole 130 bases, breaking Hall of Famer Lou Brock’s all-time single-season record of 118. Henderson’s 130 steals that year stands as the record to this day. He would lead the American League in stolen bases in each of his first seven full seasons and nine of his first ten. He’d lead his league in steals in 12 seasons in all, the last of which came in 1998 when he was 39 years-old.

On May 1, 1991, Henderson broke Brock’s all-time stolen base record with his 939th steal and would go on to steal an astounding 1,406 bases before he retired. No player has come anywhere close to Henderson’s mark in the three decades since he set it and many doubt anyone ever will.

You have to be really good even to have had been on base that many times, to have had the opportunity to steal 1,400+ bases, let alone to have actually swiped them. He was amazing. He’s best known for his career base-stealing record, but Henderson — thanks to his speed, talent, competitiveness, and remarkable longevity — is also the career leader in runs scored. Scoring runs is how you win — you can make the case that no stat is more important in baseball, and Rickey (as everyone called him, including himself) scored more runs than anyone who ever played. Look at the names on the top 10 for career runs scored:

1. Rickey Henderson 2,295
2. Ty Cobb 2,245
3. Barry Bonds 2,227
4. Hank Aaron 2,174
5. Babe Ruth 2,174
6. Pete Rose 2,165
7. Willie Mays 2,068
8. Alex Rodriguez 2,021
9. Stan Musial 1,949
10. Derek Jeter 1,923

What a player, and character, he was. Rickey was the most exciting player I ever saw.

Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini, and Michael Silver have written a devastating profile of the most dysfunctional franchise in all of U.S. pro sports, the New York Jets, whose dysfunction has a clear and obvious root cause: meddling idiot owner Woody Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune). One example:

A few weeks later, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers another potential playmaker. The Broncos felt a deal was near. Then, abruptly, it all fell apart. In Denver’s executive offices, they couldn’t believe the reason why.

Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources. The Broncos ultimately traded the receiver to the Cleveland Browns. Last Sunday, Jeudy crossed the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the first time in his career.

Coming into this season, the Jets had hopes of ending the franchise’s 13-year playoff drought — the longest in the four major men’s North American sports — and quieting years of talk about the franchise’s dysfunction. Instead, this season has only cemented the Jets’ reputation.

The fans of every other team in the NFL that is having a disappointing season — like yours truly — are all texting this story to each other today, with the same message: “At least we’re not the Jets.”

Joe Otterson, reporting for Variety:

“Silo” has been renewed for both Seasons 3 and 4 at Apple TV+, with the fourth season set to be the show’s last.

The renewal news comes as the post-apocalyptic drama is currently airing its second season. The sixth episode of Season 2 is due out on Dec. 20. The season finale is scheduled to debut on Jan. 17.

I feel bad complaining about a good show not only getting renewed, but renewed through to a planned conclusion. I fucking hate when good shows get cancelled after one season.

But. While I really liked season 1 of Silo, season 2 has been a bore. We’re halfway through — five episodes — and everything interesting could have been put in one episode. Maybe one and half. I hope the remaining five episodes of season 2 pick up, but so far, it really feels like this entire season has just been padding, spinning its wheels, waiting to get to what’s next. Hugely disappointing, really.

One last item on Acorn 8. Whether you are a longtime Acorn user (like me), or a would-be new user, you should set aside some time to actually read Acorn’s documentation. It’s a full user manual, and it not only describes, in detail, what every feature in the app does and how to use them, but also a vast array of “how-to” tutorials, many of them videos.

In broad strokes, there are two approaches to documenting a serious, professional-level app or software system. One way is a comprehensive functional reference resource. That’s a way that you, the user, can teach yourself how to use a feature, refresh your memory about a feature you haven’t used in a while, or even just check to see if a certain feature even exists. The other is a narrative, storytelling, tutorial approach. That’s not teaching yourself — that’s letting an expert teach you, and today that’s often a visual approach through video.

Acorn’s documentation is so thorough that it encompasses both approaches. Either one would qualify Acorn as a well-documented application. But by including both, Gus Mueller should be given some sort of medal or award. Different people learn in different ways, and Acorn’s documentation is there for everyone.

It should go without saying, but no serious tool — hardware or software — is complete without thorough, polished documentation. Acorn goes above and beyond. It’s amazing enough that a company as small as Flying Meat — it’s really just Gus and his wife Kirstin — has produced a full-fledged professional-strength image editing application that has remained modern and cutting-edge for 17 years and counting. But it’s also accompanied by first-class comprehensive documentation.

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.

For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information — nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards — this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.

The rare sweet spot that Acorn hits is that it’s super-approachable to new and casual users, who just need an image editor sometimes, and super-powerful for power users who want to dig in.

Dave Nanian, writing on the Shirt Pocket blog:

macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error.

In the past, Resource Busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means, on most systems, there’s no fix. It just fails.

Since Apple took away the ability for 3rd parties (eg, us) to copy the OS, and took on the responsibility themselves, it’s been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work. And in that, they’ve failed in macOS 15.2. Because this is their code, and we’re forced to rely on it to copy the OS, OS copying will not work until they fix it. [...]

For those who may be working for Apple, or have good contacts, the bug is FB16090831. A fix would be really helpful, folks.

This means Shirt Pocket’s outstanding utility SuperDuper can’t make a bootable clone of your startup drive on a machine running MacOS 15.2.0. It’s worth noting that you can still use SuperDuper (or other backup utilities) to clone all of your data, which is, by far, the most essential data in any backup. But bootable startup-drive clones are an essential part of many people’s data integrity workflows.

This bug seems to affect CarbonCopyCloner and Apple’s own Time Machine, too. A bug like this is always unfortunate, but especially around the holidays, when it might take longer than usual to get fixed, even if the issue is escalated within Apple.

Update: This discussion thread at TidBITS-Talk seems to make clear that whatever might be wrong with Time Machine on 15.2 isn’t the same bug that’s preventing SuperDuper from making bootable clones.

Gus Mueller:

This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It’s still a one time purchase to use as long as you’d like, and as usual, the full release notes are available. I want to highlight some of my favorite things below.

“Select Subject”, “Mask Subject”, and “Remove Background” are new commands which use machine learning (or A.I. if you prefer) to find the most important parts of your image, and then perform their respective operations. This has been a request for a long time, and while I was doubtful of it’s utility, it’s actually pretty fun to play with and more useful than I figured it would be. So I’m glad I took the time to integrate it.

You can now set your measurement units to inches, centimeter, or pixels, and it shows up across the tools for your image, not just specific ones. This includes the crop palette, shape dimensions, filter settings… well, pretty much everything. This might be the oldest feature request I’ve implemented so far. And then related to this, Acorn 8 now has an on canvas ruler which you can use to measure out distances, straighten your image with, or even redefine the DPI.

Look up Table (LUT) support. LUTs are pretty fun, and they work by mapping one set of colors to another, enabling consistent or stylized visual effects. LUTs are used primarily in photography or filmmaking, and you can download and install new LUTs from various places across the internet.

And more, so much more. The release notes are copious, and for me, always interesting. Acorn remains one of my most-used tools. It’s fast, reliable, powerful, extensible/scriptable, and the interface makes so much intuitive sense. That’s all been true since version 1.0 back in 2007, and that’s why it’s been my go-to image editor since it was in early beta before version 1.0 back in 2007. It’s just faster and more powerful today.

Acorn is, simply put, one of the best Mac apps ever made. It’s that good. You’re nuts (sorry) if you don’t check it out while it’s available for just $20.