Great blog post from Matt Haughey on driving a VW Buzz from Texas to Oregon. When the Buzz was announced, I was hoping it would look a little more old-school VW, but seeing one in person they look really good. Seems mostly well designed inside too.

Watched: Mushka. Andreas Deja helping keep hand-drawn animation alive, purposefully showing the pencil lines in the age of AI and computer-generated everything. 🍿

We just posted a new Core Intuition! Wha…?! Episode 26.2.

Nick Heer on locked Apple accounts:

Given this tight control, the bar for locking a user out of their Apple Account and, to some extent, out of their devices should be unbelievably high.

As an aside, I use iCloud but also (less frequently) copy my photos to Dropbox and Google Photos. Too important to only have one synced copy.

Tesla robotaxis in Austin no longer need safety drivers. Worrisome. Elon Musk’s insistence that self-driving does not need radar or lidar is just needlessly dangerous. Waymos drive better than human drivers in part because they can see better.

Six years ago I blogged about my favorite Christmas movies. No changes needed yet. 🎄

Too many guns. I don’t have a lot of words beyond what has already been said for years. Sad for the victims and families from Brown University and Bondi Beach. We should watch what Australia does next and learn from it.

For the first day of the winter photo challenge, no actual frost anywhere near me, although it is nearly freezing in Austin, so I’m going with Frosty.

Watched: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Another great one. 🍿

Just noticed a new F1 movie ad in the Apple Sports app. So weird that Apple has become a company that doesn’t mind upselling everything, cluttering the UI of their own apps. It’s a pattern at this point.

David Pierce introducing the latest Vergecast:

Here’s a thought: what if the next-generation Siri is awesome? Not just awesome for setting timers and dictating text messages (though that would be nice), but so awesome and fun to talk to that people actually start falling in love with their iPhones. We may not be prepared for what happens next.

It could happen. Expectations are so low that Apple could surprise people. I’m just skeptical that Apple is prioritizing the right things to get there.

Quick trip up to Dallas this weekend to see the kids. The weather turned cold overnight! ❄️ Speaking of the winter… We’re starting a 12-day holiday photo challenge tomorrow. 🎄

Great to see Wemby back tonight for the NBA cup semifinals, even in very limited minutes. 🏀

Coming 2026, in Denton.

Thinking more about Australia… Our kids are adults now, and they grew up through the rise of Instagram, through Covid shutdowns… We can choose to make a better environment for the next generation, if society makes progress on social media. Less anxiety, fewer ads, more time away from screens.

Enjoyed the discussion on Hard Fork about the Australia social media ban for kids. In a nutshell: it’s a good experiment that we will actually have data for in several years. No parent says, “I wish my kid was on Instagram and TikTok more often.”

Good post from Creative Commons with concerns about pay-per-crawl efforts, including principles to guide deployment:

Pay-to-crawl represents a strategy that may work for some websites, and not all websites share the same underlying concerns. Pay-to-crawl systems should not be deployed as an automatic or assumed setting on behalf of websites by others, such as domain hosts, content delivery networks, and other web service providers.

Matches some of my thinking about Cloudflare and AI.

Announcing a special Micro.blog winter photo challenge! @BonnieRue has written a new post with details over on the challenges blog. It starts on Monday and runs 12 days. ❄️

I’m hoping to add a new Micro.blog pin too for anyone who participates.

Not sure yet how to read the Epic vs. Apple appeals court decision. Seems like a partial Apple win, but Tim Sweeney says on Twitter / X that it’s actually good progress. I think we’ll know for sure when the district court judge updates her ruling.

A little-known Micro.blog feature is getting better visibility today: we store previous versions of private notes (and blog posts!) so you can restore them if you make an editing mistake or delete something. From @news:

Added note versions browsing to the web interface. When editing a note, you’ll now see a “5 versions” link in the corner. For Premium subscribers, we’re storing previous versions for a full year. (60 days for everyone else.)