2026-07-28 23:00:00
For Apple's entire existence, there's been a sort of "debate" over what sort of company Apple is. Are they a hardware company, or are they a software company? The truth, of course, is that they're both, and their ability to deliver at the highest level on both fronts is what has made their products so compelling.
However, in 2026, I think there's a third contender. In addition to being a hardware company and a software company, Apple is very much a rent-seeking company. Based on how lots of people talk about Apple these days, that rent-seeking characteristic seems to be the only absolute hard requirement for them. Basically, unless the winds really change in the future, Apple will never make another computer where they don't always collect 15-30% of all commerce that happens on that device.
Quinn Nelson recently raised the possibility of Apple making a portable gaming device. Based on what we know about Apple, it seems like they could make a really nice competitor to the Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck, and other gaming PCs. They even have the Game Porting Toolkit for macOS, which they could use to make it possible for people to play Windows games they purchased on something like Steam, the Epic Games Store, or Xbox on the device. Quinn was on The Talk Show last week, and the conversation honestly depressed me a bit. The primary reason both John and Quinn seem to think this will never happen is that Apple would never make a new product where they don't control what you can buy while taking their chunk of the profits.
Whether that's actually true or not, I find it a bit depressing that that's where we are in the Apple punditry, where we won't even entertain the idea of Apple making something, not because the hardware would be bad, not because the software couldn't work, and not because it isn't the sort of thing the company does, but because they wouldn't be able to collect their commission on everything sold for it.
2026-07-28 18:44:11
Ghosthunter is a new CLI that lets you browse and search your Ghost site. It’s free and works with any Ghost blog. You can install it via homebrew with:
brew install mattbirchler/tap/ghosthunter
After installed, you run ghosthunter init to add your site URL and admin key. This will run an initial sync so you have a local cache of your posts. From then on, you just run ghosthunter (or ght) and you get a super quick interface to see your whole history. From here, you have quick access to every post ever, complete with search. The use case I was trying to solve was for when I need to remind myself of when I wrote something, so I just need a link to something I wrote recently. I currently do it by opening my browser, coming here, hit Command+K to bring up search, and find what I need. It's okay, but it's a hell of a lot quicker to do this in the CLI on a local database (don't worry about storage either, my 4873 posts amount to 21MB storage with this tool).
Oh, and because it's a CLI, your agents can use it as well. Here's an example of using an open-ended search that gets results in a way a normal search from the Ghost UI would not find results on its own. This won't be the main use case for me, but hey, if it's useful sometimes, that's lovely.
That's really all there is to it. If you have a Ghost blog and work from the command line, I think you'll like having this tool in your toolbelt.
2026-07-28 07:00:00
Jay Peters: Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc
An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain't what it used to be.
I got an analog pocket a couple years ago, and I think it's an awesome product. I was able to insert my Game Boy cartridges from 20 years ago and was able to play them immediately, just like I did back then. Well, on a backlit screen with 10x the pixel density, but still.
The impression I get is that a lot of people have this vision in their head for what physical media still is today, and it simply isn't. Sure, I technically didn't own Golden Sun on the GBA. I technically had a license, but for all intents and purposes, I owned that game. And the evidence is, without Nintendo authorizing anything, I'm able to play it on a new piece of hardware, and it works great. No network downtime is gonna prevent me from doing that.
But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy. This isn't even to mention the fact that when you pop the disc in your drive, you're not playing from the disc. It's installing it to your internal hard drive and is probably installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the game actually work at all.
All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
2026-07-28 06:11:56
I would bet at least 80% of people who say they read every line of code their AI agents write, don't. I'm not saying I do or that this is a problem with today's models, I'm just saying it out loud because I feel like it's a thing and a lot of people feel like they can't say it, even if it's true.
2026-07-27 19:00:00
TLDR: You can play three daily puzzles at nonogame.app right now!
Here is one I didn't see coming…
In the mid-2000s, around the time Sudoku was getting popular here in the US, another game came on my radar around the same time, nonograms. Nonograms were similar to Sudoku in that they gave you a grid and asked you to use process of elimination logic to fill it out in a very particular way, and it scratched the same itch as Sudoku for me.
I got back into playing this game in the past month, and while I found a really good app on the iPhone, I hadn't found a web interface that I actually enjoy using. And well, that sounded like a fun weekend project, so I took some time this weekend and put together nonogame.
I won't get into all the details here. You should just go play it if you want to get an idea for how it works, but it is a desktop optimized way to play nonograms, and for my money, it is the best UI for doing this on the web.
Anyway, the concept here is that you can come to the site every day and there are three puzzles for you to solve: a small, a medium, and a large. They follow the newspaper puzzle format of being easiest on Monday and getting harder through the week until you get the most difficult ones on Sunday.
I also wanted to explore having a really nice flow from anonymous to logged in to paid users. Anyone can go to the site and play today's daily games. Nothing carries over till tomorrow or anything, but you can play them and enjoy them for 5 to 30 minutes, depending on how difficult they are. If you create a free account, which is of course password free and relies on welcome emails and passkeys, you can still play those daily games, but you can also save your progress and build up streaks and play across different devices. Finally, if you pay for the service, you'll get to go back in time and play previous days puzzles. And there are dozens of collections and over a thousand other puzzles you can play on demand.
Last but not least, I'm pleased with the favicon I made for this, which evokes the Quick Reviews heart. ❤️
2026-07-27 06:30:23