Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

The Making of the Trek Conventions by Joan Winston

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Book 47 of 2026: The Making of the Trek Conventions by Joan Winston.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Sits right in the center of a Venn diagram with “Star Trek Fans” and “Convention Goers/Conrunners”, which just so happens to be right where I sit too, so…yeah, this was fun. A breezy memoir of the earliest Star Trek fan conventions (except for the first, which is discussed in Star Trek Lives!), with lots of fun details of the behind-the-scenes adventures in putting on the conventions. All long before my convention going time (these cons were held between 1973 and 1976, and I was born in 1973), but even if time and technologies have changed, a lot of the conrunning shenanigans sounded very familiar. Anecdotes about the various Trek stars and other personalities who were the guests of the con mix in, and the whole thing is quite enjoyable.

Me holding The Making of the Trek Conventions.

Done with Daring Fireball

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I can’t really imagine he’ll care, but after literal decades of reading John Gruber’s Daring Fireball (I even had two different DF t-shirts back from when I thought he was worth supporting monetarily), the time has come to unsubscribe. (By which I mean, I’m dropping him from my RSS reader. He wasn’t getting money from me.)

I’d been on the fence for a while, thanks to his occasional casual ableism (called out here, and then again here). But it was his recent “actually, hanging out in a nazi bar (X) is fine, actually” post and subsequent “but if I had principles, I wouldn’t have any entertainment” whining (“The Ellisons aren’t much better than Musk. Should I stop watching Warner Bros and Paramount movies, HBO, CBS, and CNN?” and “The principled man has nothing to watch.”) that finally pushed me over the edge.

I’m often disappointed that so many high-profile people and businesses, including many of those that Gruber cites as reasons to be on X, are still (or again) posting there. But if someone I liked in the real world decided they wanted to go hang out with a crowd that I found morally, ethically, politically, and in many other ways reprehensible, that’d be their bad decision, and not only would I not join them, but I wouldn’t see much reason to hang out with them, either. It’s easy enough to do that in the virtual world, too.

There are plenty of other people to read and sources of Apple and wider tech commentary and opinion.

Kudos to the many people who have been pushing back against Gruber’s post, including higher profile names more likely to influence Gruber’s thinking (maybe, hopefully, but I’m not optimistic about it) than I am, like Anil Dash over on Bluesky (first thread, second thread, third thread), Lex Friedman on his blog and with a followup, and a few others I saw pass through my reading but can’t remember exactly who and where at this moment.

I’ve been off X/Twitter for almost exactly four years now, since November 20, 2022, and I haven’t missed it. It’s really not difficult to not hang out with racists, nazis, and pedophiles. At least, it isn’t for me. I wish it were that easy for more people.

Updates:

  • Gavin Anderegg, John Gruber on X: “I’m not angry, John, I’m just so very tired.” (This led me to the following two.)
  • Ernie Smith, The X is Off-Target: “…X is not a welcoming place anymore and in fact comes with more brand harms than brand goods.”
  • Dan Sinker, An Open Letter To The People Writing Lengthy Posts About ‘Why I’m Going Back to Twitter’: “What the fuck are you doing?”
  • Watts Martin, Checking Prior Assumptions: “Prior assumptions checked. You know what? I’m feeling pretty good about them.”
  • Warner Crocker, John Gruber Thinks I’ve Lost My Mind: “…whether you pay for X or just lurk and scroll, you’re giving Musk money to do what he does.”
  • Cesare Forelli: “Picking the week in which the owner of Twitter spent 276 millions to help Republicans – just days after the US president abandoned Ukraine to lend a saving hand to Putin – to write some sort of love letter for Twitter is definitely a choice.”
  • Jeff Johnson: “Gruber’s post, mere weeks before the midterms, with democracy itself under threat from Trump, doesn’t even mention the moral dilemma of supporting the political propaganda machine of the man who paid $250 million to elect Trump, took a chainsaw to our government, and continues to be the biggest right-wing funder in history.”
  • Karl Bode, Casey Newton And John Gruber Slink Back To Elon Musk’s Right-Wing Propaganda Machine: “Tech journalism mainstays are feebly rationalizing their return to a broken, billionaire-run right-wing propaganda website.”
  • Tim Bray, I Wasted an Hour on X: “I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out.”

Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide by Nandita Gupta and Rachel Grossman-Kahn

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Book 46 of 2026: Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide by Nandita Gupta and Rachel Grossman-Kahn.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: An excellent (and cute) introduction to digital accessibility; less of a detailed “how to” than a good “here’s what to think about and why” starting point. While there wasn’t much new for me, a refresher is never a bad thing, and it’s always good to see how other people explain and convey the concepts and to think about how I do the same and what I might want to adjust in my work.

Me holding Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide.

More Beautiful Than Death by David Mack

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Book 45 of 2026: More Beautiful Than Death by David Mack.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Reading a Trek novel set in the Kelvin universe is…weird. I was curious about that when I started, as to whether the characters would feel like their Kelvinverse incarnations, or whether this would be your basic Trek adventure with different cover art. To Mack’s credit, the characters do seem to match with their Kelvinverse interpretations, particularly Kirk’s younger, less focused brashness and Spock’s less controlled self (McCoy is McCoy, thanks to the first Kelvin film’s writers and Urban’s performance). The “A plot” adventure is pretty standard Trek adventure, while the “B plot” storyline is more of a direct offshoot of the particular dynamics of the Kelvin universe, even bringing in a key character we never saw in the films. A decent read, but definitely feels a bit off compared to other Trek novels, but that’s likely just as it was meant to be. (It was probably an interesting exercise for Mack as well.)

Compounding the off-kilter feeling is that all this would have been odd enough if the book had been released and I’d read it back when the Kelvinverse was still an active thing. But to be reading it now, when I also have the DIS/SNW versions of Spock, Kirk, Uhura, and Scotty front and center in my mind makes it even weirder. My mental images of the characters kept shifting among their various on-screen presentations. Definitely a little bizarre — similar to reading some of the earliest Trek fiction, actually, from before there as any real oversight of the books and authors (sometimes coming out of the early fanfic communities) were taking some real wild swings at the characters.

Me holding More Beautiful Than Death.

Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry

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Book 44 of 2026: Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry.

⭐️⭐️: I picked this (and its first two sequels) up at the local library book sale a while ago on a whim, as cheesy urban fantasy set in Seattle sounded amusing. Finally got around to reading this one, and it will be going right into the donate pile, along with the next two (still unread). It’s not nearly as funny as it wants to think it is, the plot meanders and gets frequently sidetracked, none of the characters are all that interesting or likable, and there are far too many instances of miss-used commas, the r-slur, fatphobia, and casual transphobia. The highlights were the occasional playlists; if nothing else, the author does at least seem to have decent taste in music.

Me holding Happy Hour of the Damned

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film by John and Maria Jose Tenuto

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Book 43 of 2026: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film by John and Maria Jose Tenuto.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Another good entry in the Tenutos’ series of “making of” books for the Star Trek films, now covering the “Genesis trilogy” of films II-IV. The same coffee table book style, with lots of photos and interviews throughout. This one features an introduction by Kirk Thatcher (the punk on the bus), and I particularly appreciated the chapter looking at matte paintings and the artists behind them. Books like this always make me a little sad that today’s computer effects mean that so much of this physical artistry has gone by the wayside.

Me holding Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film

macOS Golden Gate Music app still crap

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The latest thing in my “Apple really needs to get their shit together with the macOS Music (iTunes) app” file:

If you have a compilation album where the tracks aren’t numbered (common for things like mashup compilations), the tracks display and play in alphabetical order…but they display alphabetically by track title, and they play alphabetically by artist.

Screenshot of Apple's Music app showing a 'Bootie Mashup Top 10 September 2026' album. The tracks are listed alphabetically by track title, but red arrows show how they play alphabetically by artist.
In a sane world, the tracks would be played in the order they’re displayed. Apple’s Music app hasn’t existed in a sane world for years.
Also still broken: Shuffle by album. (See my post from almost exactly a year ago about this issue in macOS Tahoe.)

In Album view, check Controls > Shuffle, and make sure that Shuffle is set to on and by albums. Double-click the Albums option in the Library section of the sidebar to start audio playing. The first track of the first album by the alphabetically first artist (in my case, A-Ha) starts playing, and the “shuffle” option gets turned off (both in the menu and in the control toolbar).

Same behavior when starting from Songs view.

I’m not sure if there’s even a way to get shuffle by album working in any context at this point.

Also, you used to be able to use a modifier key (I can’t remember if it was option or command, but I think option) to skip to the next album rather than the next track (or to jump the start of the current album). That functionality seems to be gone as well.

I have a large collection (> 43K tracks, 142 days, or 330 GB) of music that lives on my computer. I often like to listen to albums, instead of individual tracks. The combination of those two factors means that “shuffle by album” (and “skip to the next album” or “start this album over”) were some of my more frequently used features of Music/iTunes. And it’s been pissing me off for years now that these seemingly simple ways to listen to music are broken.

I’ve looked at other music players, some of which are album centric, but…

  • Most of them are built to tie into Music (the streaming service), not Music (the app/iTunes) playing local files.

  • Those that do work with local files don’t have the ability to work with the Music/iTunes “Music Library” file, which means they can’t update play counts, dates, ratings, or any of the other metadata.

  • Because I have far more music than I can (or want to) keep on my iPhone, I have lots of smart playlists set up in Music/iTunes that control what music is on my iPhone at any given time.

  • Because non-Apple music apps can’t update the Music Library file, play counts and dates don’t get updated, and the smart playlists never update. So if I want the smart playlists to update so that the music selection on my iPhone updates, I’m locked in to using Apple’s Music app(s).

If Apple would…

  • get their shit together for music lovers who prefer to own their music rather than stream everything and make Music/iTunes a first-class local audio player again, or
  • allow third-party music apps to update track metadata in the Music Library file,

…then I’d probably be fine. Either option would work — but both would be best, because then Apple’s software would suck less, and third-party developers would be able to do more.

Sadly, I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, if ever.

(This rant originally a Mastodon thread.)

The City and The City by China Miéville

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Book 42 of 2026: The City and The City by China Miéville. 2010 Hugo Best Novel winner (tied with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl).

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Mostly a crime noir, but set in two cities that share the same physical space but do not interact. The crime novel part is a good mystery; the setting itself is fascinating and has me looking at the spaces I live in differently.

Absolutely baffled that this tied with The Windup Girl, which I gave one star and was sorely tempted not to finish. What was up with the Hugo voters in 2010?

Me holding The City and The City.