furbo.org is Craig Hockenberry's place to write for the web. He makes app and runs websites.
Visit furbo.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Apr 2010 – Oct 2026
Life, Learning & Writing 4Tools & Productivity 3Tech Industry & Business 3Web & Frontend 1Society, Policy & Culture 1Security & Privacy 1
Well, it happened. We knew it was coming. A prick pulled the plug. And what bothers me most about it is how Phony Stark did it. My mom passed away just before Christmas. Her decline was something everyone in the family saw coming and we prepared for her demise. It still hurts like hell, but […]
I recently appeared with John Gruber on The Talk Show. During the episode, the following exchange took place: @gruber: “How do you pronounce the ‘at’ symbol?” @chockenberry: “At” @gruber: “Right” Another @thetalkshow gem. — Jim Lipsey (@Jim_Lipsey) March 24, 2014 When it comes to naming characters, the Unicode…
Until Gizmodo publicly apologizes to Gray Powell, this is going to be in my /etc/hosts and in all of the DNS servers under my control: 127.0.0.1 gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 www.gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 m.gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 gawker.com 127.0.0.1 www.gawker.com 127.0.0.1 m.gawker.com The person at fault is the shithead who…
I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this […]
There’s a new “feature” in Sonoma, and no one besides Apple is quite sure what it is. Alerts for deprecated APIs are now appearing frequently. Sometimes when you launch an app, and sometimes at random. Here are three I got the other day after waking a MacBook from sleep: From a UI point-of-view, these alerts […]
I’ve been using the Internet in one form or another since the mid-80’s. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff happening on our global network. On Tuesday, I experienced something extraordinary. It all started with a text message from my partner Ged at 8:30 AM: Mail server down. Please take a look […]
I’m old enough to remember a time before the Internet. I know what it’s like to develop software both with and without a worldwide network. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s. Of course there have been improvements in our tools and techniques, but the basic act of creating…
Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.) The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a […]
I’m happy to announce the release of a new tvOS app called Blank. It turns your screen black and keeps it that way until you press any button on a remote. Seriously, that’s all it does. Here’s the screen you see when you launch the app for the first time: That second paragraph hints at […]
A friend of mine recently pointed me at a well hidden command line tool. In the JavaScript framework used by Safari and other parts of Apple’s products, there is a tool called jsc. It’s a command line interface for JavaScript that uses the same code as the rest of the system. You can find the […]