My biggest productivity boost over the last two years is probably finally remembering - Option + ←/→ = go to beginning/end of word - Option + Shift + ←/→ = highlight word - Cmd + ←/→ = go to beginning/end of line - Cmd + Shift + ←/→ = highlight line

perfect, no notes

tempted to make macwright.com "more accessible for llms" but struggling to figure out a single way in which doing so benefits me

📝 I’ve shared this anecdote before, but I still think about it. So I wrote it down for the old blog. blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/why-dad...

Quite enjoyed this perspective from Jason Goldman on the Aboard podcast. As @ftrain.com says afterwards, I’m really glad he has chosen to spend his time communicating things like this. notes.jim-nielsen.com/n/2026-10-23...

never been so happy in my life to see the .aspx extension on my bank's website lmao

📝 Reading & learning about the history of nuclear weapons started as a niche interest seemingly divorced from everything work-related. But now that history feels tied more and more to the current moment. blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/skip-re...

Another day, another problem w/Netlify. This time it seems to be an (intermittent?) issue where all of the sudden the cloud CI thinks it should be building off the `master` branch when my branch has always been `main` Nothing changed other than it decided to look for `master` today

Typo of the day: "AI shift" but you typed "AI shit" And honestly, either works lol

📝 One of my arguments against putting icons in every menu item was: “Apple doesn’t do it!” Then they started doing it. Now they’ve stopped doing it. Now I can say, ‘Even Apple tried doing it, and now they say “Don’t”.’ What more could I wish for? blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/icons-i...

No More Icons In Every Menu By Default

Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in…

blog.jim-nielsen.com

See, I see an AI menu and I’m immediately uninterested This menu? I’m in.

Aaron Swartz, coding prodigy and hacktivist who helped develop RSS and was a co-founder of Reddit, died by suicide after facing $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison for felony charges, just for downloading pdfs of research papers with the intention of making them accessible to the public.

Julie S. Lalonde@julieslalonde.bsky.social · 2w ago

Being GenX/Millennial is such a trip. In our lifetimes, we saw people our age getting wild criminal penalties for pirating music and now have to sit and watch as companies gobble up our work with impunity.

I built a thing. I LOVED making it. It's called TinyLittleOffice. It's a web office suite (word processor, outliner, decks, spreadsheet, calculator, drawing tool, diagram maker, animator, calendar, trip planner) that stores the docs in your URL. tinylittleoffice.com?c=hgmcggn#/v...

This Link Is This Document

QR code:…

tinylittleoffice.com

I made your old iPhone apps work again, it's a Christmas miracle. Legacy Store brings back the 2010 App Store: 60,000+ apps your old iPhone or iPod touch can install over the air. And if the iPhone’s long gone, Light Touch runs an emulated iPod on your Mac. www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_4z...

Your old iPhone apps work again

YouTube video by sam henri gold

youtube.com

Well, well, well. Look what we have here on this Monday morning

📝 Next time somebody asks me what I’d do with an insane amount of wealth, I now have my answer: I’d become a “domainer”. Thanks for the insider jargon @petemillspaugh.com blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/domains...

Soon, hundreds of new top-level domains, including .meow and .fart, could be added to the internet. WIRED goes inside the backroom shenanigans of ICANN, the organization at the helm.

The Internet Runs on Cats and Porn. It’s About to Get Cattier and Pornier

Soon, hundreds of new top-level domains, including .meow and .fart, could be added to the internet. WIRED goes inside the backroom shenanigans of ICANN, the organization at the helm.

buff.ly

If you're curious how all those newfangled domain names come to be -- I wrote a feature for WIRED on top-level domains and the people who make them I thoroughly enjoyed meeting all the kind and fascinating people in this wacky domain world. (And I promise it has nothing to do with cat thongs.)

WIRED@wired.com · 3w ago

Soon, hundreds of new top-level domains, including .meow and .fart, could be added to the internet. WIRED goes inside the backroom shenanigans of ICANN, the organization at the helm.

Really agree with @jim-nielsen.com on making things we want to exist. Using KK Sans on my own site keeps giving me reasons to improve it; I'd like any money it made to help me keep doing that. karlkoch.me/writing/on-w...

Maybe because of the nature of the economic bubble they've created around it, and/or their own ideological biases towards its"inevitability," they appear to instead believe that if they just push as fast as possible, harms be damned, we'll all just be stuck with it, whatever happens.

📝 Really enjoyed this talk. Alex covers lots of great topics, like - When did “modernize” come to mean updating something that’s only ~5 years old? - Do technological choices have values tied to them? (Spoiler: they do) - HTML is amazing. My notes here: blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/talk-no...

Free app idea: It’s a timer. When you write blog posts, it adds time. When you code your blog, it subtracts time - at 2x the rate! If you’re out of time, your codebase is locked and you can’t work on it until you’ve poured more time into writing. I’d hate it & I’d be your first subscriber lol

How it’s going: the new ChatGPT app for macOS

Presenting... Talk of the Town, October 2026 edition *Playing with Jev & home-cooked transit dev* feat. @jim-nielsen.com, @nicobaier.com, @mootari.social, @paulchinjr.bsky.social, @marianoguerra.org, @cheersderek.com, @puf.io, @stevekrouse.com, @petemillspaugh.com, and dozens more

Talk of the Town - October 2026

Playing with Jev & home-cooked transit dev

blog.val.town

I was searching for a super simple interval timer to use when I jump rope. No nonsense. Minimal config. Set work, rest, and rounds, then have at it. Use it on the web. Save it to the home screen. Use it offline. Keep screen awake for the active duration. Maybe sprinkle in some web audio noises?

📝 Reading Louie Mantia’s post made me think of the squircle jail as Apple’s HOA for macOS: it raises the floor, but also lowers the ceiling. blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/app-ico...

Apple’s App Icon HOA

Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS. His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering…

blog.jim-nielsen.com

lol illuminating back-and-forth conversation on HN

Unsolicited redesign for the github status page: remove the custom illustration and just display random devops memes.

“I’m Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry” blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/embarra... Relatable piece by @jim-nielsen.com

Saw this fence while hiking this weekend. Will leave it up to the reader to discern the parallels to security.