Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Festivitas — Now for iOS, Thanks to Widgets

Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

‘A Critter Carol’ — Apple’s 2025 Holiday Short Film

Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.

David Lerner, RIP

Sam Roberts: David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72. […] He […]

Secure Signal Backups

Jim O’Leary: Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form, refreshed every day; giving you the ability to restore your chats even if you lose access to your phone. Signal’s secure backups are opt-in and, of course, end-to-end encrypted. So if you don’t want to create a secure […]

EU Council Approves New “Chat Control” Mandate

Ken Macon (Hacker News): European governments have taken another step toward reviving the EU’s controversial Chat Control agenda, approving a new negotiating mandate for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation in a closed session of the Council of the European Union on November 26. The measure, presented as a tool for child protection, is once again […]