All Killer, No Filler: Inside Ironhead Records in Port Jervis, New York
Saddled between the New Jersey and Pennsylvania borders, and located in Orange County, New York, Port Jervis is one of those fantastic small cities that in recent years is experiencing a much-deserved renaissance.
I stopped in yesterday after visiting with my folks, he’s got a great selection and it’s rad to have a punk record store in my home town. Pretty weird to see it in Spin magazine though.
New macOS feature: automatically resize Finder columns to fit
I have reflexively double-clicked-to-right-size-a-column in macOS Finder tens of thousands of times. This is incredible.
Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback
San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week.
For the past few years, Comic-Con has allowed some forms of AI-generated art at this art show at the convention. According to archived rules for the show, artists could display AI-generated material so long as it wasn’t for sale, was marked as AI-produced, and credited the original artist whose style was used.
These rules have been in place since at least 2024, but anti-AI sentiment is growing in the artistic community and an artist-led backlash against Comic-Con’s AI-friendly language led to the convention […] changing the rules.
Versa58: A Modular System for Adding On to Your Swiss Army Knife
What if you could modify your Swiss Army knife with modules of your choice? That’s what Las-Vegas-based EDC company Keyport is enabling with their Versa58 system. It’s named for the keychain-sized Swiss Army Knives that are 58mm in length. Once you pop the knife’s press-fit handle sides—called scales—off, you attach an interface plate, and then the Versa58 modules can be magnetically attached to that.
A Swiss Army Knife with…plugins? Neat.
My wife’s great-great-aunt is the late Agnes Meyer Driscoll, a renowned cryptanalyst who played a central role in deciphering Japanese and German Navy codes in the 1920s and 30s.
Known as Madame X, she co-developed the “Communications Machine”, which became a standard enciphering device for the Navy for most of the 1920s, and was later considered the “first lady of naval cryptology”.
We were gifted some of her restricted-access Navy crypto assignments from the 1930s.
My son’s high school chorus group was invited to “open” for the Rockettes’ Christmas Spectacular at Radio City a few weeks ago.
Fourteen years ago I made a mix CD for my wife as a little stocking stuffer at Christmas time. Just a few of our favorite songs from that year to listen to while she’s in the car.
I also know enough Photoshop to be dangerous, so I made a silly cover to go with it (she’s a big Beatles fan).
The following year, I kept it going, and what was initially just a gag gift became an annual tradition: Photoshopping her into a favorite album’s artwork. I don’t even make the mix CD anymore (we have no way to play it!), but every year she still gets a new cover.
These are a few of my favorites… I don’t aim for perfection, the quality varies a lot from year to year, but I will say that I am unreasonably proud of how the G N’ R Lies cover turned out.
Check back after Christmas for the 2025 edition!
And here’s 2025!
An interview with Tobias Frere-Jones on the origins of the Gotham typeface:
What can be written about Gotham that hasn’t already been published? The typeface, commissioned by GQ Magazine in the early 2000s, is now so ubiquitous it has become part of the visual landscape and can be seen all over the world from Manhattan to Melbourne, Bangkok to Buenos Aires.
via Dan
We just saw Built to Spill open for Modest Mouse in October, but had to catch them again this weekend as they came through New York as headliners this time. Great show (sold out! on a Sunday night! in the Catskills!), even if it was a similar set list.
This was my first time at the Bearsville Theater, which is lovely. Good sound, easy parking, and a sweet lounge area with tons of seating and a view of the stage.
Public Domain Day 2026 Is Coming
From Nancy Drew to Animal Crackers to The Maltese Falcon, 1930’s greatest works enter the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Expect celebration, confusion, and at least one Betty Boop slasher film. Sorry in advance.
Little-by-little, over the last 10 years, my kids and I have built a small town in Minecraft.
It started unintentionally. My son, Tommy, came home from kindergarten one day excitedly talking about this new game he had heard about. Within a few days I was up to my elbows in redstone tutorials and modpacks.
We created a new world for our experiments, and called it simply, “Town”. We added some houses. He built a grocery store. I added a church.
A couple of years later his sister, Maggie, joined the fun and built a pet shop.
And from there, Town just kept growing. Over the years we’ve added a community pool, library, elementary school with working elevator, police and fire departments, hospital with helicopter and landing pad, clothing store, apartment building, gas station, arcade, renaissance faire, ice cream stand, working subway system, and more. Even a hydroelectric power plant!
The kids are getting older, and our construction crew doesn’t work as often these days. But we keep a running list of ideas to build and—usually when the weather gets cold—still come back together to take on a new project.
We just broke ground on an airport.
One more building, one more season, one more reason to sit next to each other and make something together.
Recently I set up an old iPad as a sort-of HUD and control panel that sits on my desk, with quick access to: 1) location for my wife and each kid1, 2) Homekit/Shortcuts buttons to control office lights and climate, 3) my Aranet CO₂ sensor, 4) this week’s weather forecast, and 5) my personal to-do lists.
A few of the home automation buttons integrate Sensibo, which is an awesome device that replaces your mini-split’s default “dumb” remote with a wifi-enabled “smart” device instead. It enables a ton of features that many mini-splits lack, like thermostat-style scheduling, Apple Homekit/Siri integration, filter status, etc.
I highly recommend Sensibo, but in trying to realize my control-panel-powered future I did run into some limitations with their Apple Homekit support, and thought I’d share how I worked around them.
There are two primary gaps in Sensibo’s Homekit integration:
Even though these features aren’t available through Sensibo’s built-in Apple integration, we can recreate them using the Sensibo API and Apple Shortcuts.
Change Fan Speed
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4d02c2fc69444067acdf690b4a7248ff
Change Temperature
Warmer: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/11a9942523224575bd3a09bb5c8d4c14
Cooler: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ed5a8561e1d34535b842ee56e86287b6
Note: many AC units show temperatures in Fahrenheit even though they store the values in Celsius. This can cause temperature adjustments to jump in slightly uneven increments rather than a precise 1 degree.
To use these Shortcuts you’ll need:
https://home.sensibo.com/api/v2/users/me/pods/?apiKey=PUT API KEY HEREOnce you have retrieved those, simply download and open the shortcut, paste your API key and deviceID in the Text fields where indicated, and save the Shortcut.
Once those values are filled in, you can run the Shortcut—it should immediately work.
Worse is better (also called the New Jersey style) is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in a 1989 essay to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality (“worse”) is a preferable option (“better”) in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.
Apparently called the New Jersey style (in part, at least) as a reference to systems like Unix and C (“worse”), both developed in New Jersey at Bell Labs.
Shooting an anvil on the Fourth of July, sometime in the mid 90s.
Saul Zabar, Smoked Fish Czar of Upper West Side, Dies at 97
A broad assortment of delicacies, including some 800 types of cheese and various breads to go with them, covered the ground floor. One flight up was an array of cookware. A small cafe was later added next door. Zabar’s also operates a thriving mail-order business through its website and catalogs, shipping its lox, bagels and gift baskets far and wide.
About a decade ago our town bought an old New York State prison that had been recently shuttered. They turned it into an amazing park with a loop for walkers and runners, and some light business use on the edges.
Though I have to question some of the planning… one of those “light” businesses is Green Thumb Industries, a cannabis manufacturer operating out of what looks like an Amazon warehouse. It’s a huge building, and reeks of weed.
I hadn’t realized that was the case the other day and took a jog by to check things out, only to come away with a contact high instead of a runner’s high 😛