New York Magazine: Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden? How the coalition that defeated Donald Trump crumbled. – I don’t agree with the title of this post. I think that coalitions can be rebuilt to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, but there has been some “splintering” since January 2021.

OpenRss.com: Bluesky has launched RSS feeds – hmm, seems like old news, I wrote about it on December 22, 2023, but there is some screen captures on discovering the feed URL, and notes on how links are not embedded in the full text of the feed.

John Johnston: iPod podcasting nostalgia – John found an old iPod with a recording device that he used to make podcasts some time ago – and he made a podcast with it just this week – neat!

The end of podcasting, chapter 62

Well, I haven’t written on this topic for at least a month, but an interesting story appeared on Semafor (via Ben Werdmuller) called “The Incredible Shrinking Podcast Industry”. It seems that Apple releases download counts for shows for Apple Podcasts app users, and that they made a change in their app recently to stop automatic downloads of podcasts if the user had not been listening to a podcast within the last two weeks. This resulted in a big drop for many podcasts that use this data to track listener volume. I guess my comments in chapter 60 (and associated podcast) about Apple controlling the master list of podcasts were incorrect, that they ALSO control the way podcasts track download counts (for their app, which I GUESS is the most used app for listening to podcasts). To echo chapter 60 – WHO CARES!

This Semafor article also referenced the Hot Pod Newsletter from The Verge, which seems to be attempting to cover the “podcasting industry”, in addition to shilling for its own conference. I guess I’ll have to subscribe….yawn…

Nothing Is Simple: Using Org to track mushrooms!

Fugue: A CEO’s Guide to Emacs – An interesting “why Emacs?” tale, followed by some specific settings/enhancements – meaty, but not overwhelming – nice!

Des Moines Register (Iowa): Early call of Trump as winner of Iowa Caucuses stirs anger. Here’s why it happened – I watched NBC brake into their own West Coast newscast to announce this 45 minutes after the start of the caucus – come on people!

CNN: Iowa entrance poll: Most GOP caucus-goers don’t accept Biden’s 2020 win, say a conviction wouldn’t make Trump unfit for office – I did not know that “entrance polls” were a thing, I thought there were only “exit polls”…

Des Moines Register (Iowa): Final results from the 2024 Iowa Republican caucus. Looks like some guy named Ryan Binkley was running as well as the more familiar names….interesting…

Colin Walker points to Misu talking about writing consistently, and I love this quote from Colin: “if you don’t do the things you want to get better at then you never will and there’s no point moaning about it.”. I also needed to hear that!