Brent Simmons

New single-page site from Brent Simmons: No Learnings.

Retirement day! inessential.com/2025/06/06/r...

Tonight I’m presenting “The Best of 1985.”

With releases by New Order, Kate Bush, INXS, Tears For Fears, REM, The Cure, The Smiths, The Cult, Replacements & The Jesus & Mary Chain alone, there will be no lack of stellar content!

Live at 8pm central here: twitch.tv/djjakerudh

Starting at 8pm central tonight, I’m hosting ‘The Best of 1984’ in sound & vision via my Twitch channel at twitch.tv/djjakerudh.

5+ hours of Depeche Mode, The Cure, Bunnymen, REM, Replacements, Psychedelic Furs, Cocteau Twins, New Order, Talk Talk, Smiths, Siouxsie & more.

My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers:

inessential.com/2025/05/23/l...

I’ll have lots more time for NetNewsWire (and perhaps other apps)!

Things are getting worse.

Apple developer community has a responsibility to respond and WWDC is our opportunity.

www.massicotte.org/resolve

Donate to Support Rosyna's Journey to Stability, organized by Rosyna Keller Hello, my name is Rosyna Keller. Then end of May is coming up and I have absolutel… Rosyna Keller needs your support for Support Rosyna's Journey to Stability

It’s come to me desperately asking for help via a GoFundMe. I have no money for health insurance, rent, or medication. I’m screwed as of June 1st without help. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. gofund.me/5dfd5a7b

Going live now via my Twitch channel at twitch.tv/djjakerudh presenting ‘The Best of 1982’ and the 5th anniversary of the channel!

The Cure, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, XTC, Simple Minds, Yaz, The Clash, Siouxsie & the Banshees, INXS, Roxy Music, Talk Talk, The Jam, Devo, Bauhaus, etc

I’ve been doing some C programming lately — not NetNewsWire, don’t worry! (it’s a personal project) — and just last night I learned about pthread_once and I’m over the moon. What a wonderful thing!

(I used to use dispatch_once frequently in Objective-C code. I assume it uses pthread_once.)

Just today I learned about Codeberg, “a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”

I have open source projects, and plan to have more, and getting away ... https://micro.inessential.com/2025/02/17/just-today-i-learned-about.html

We’re 22 years old today! Shipped 1.0 on this day in 2003.

Happy that the best years are still ahead! 🐣🎩🎸

I hadn’t looked at my Safari Privacy Report in a while.

Wow Google! Holding the top five spots. Amazing work!

To be clear about the multiple windows thing — there are several ways on iPad (split view, Stage Manager, etc.) to create multiple windows for apps that support multiple windows.

Which NetNewsWire does. But we think maybe nobody ever uses this feature with NetNewsWire.

Do people use the feature on iOS where you can create multiple NetNewsWire windows at a time?

This feature adds complexity to the app that we’d like to remove — but not if people are using it!

Every time I saw Tom at some or another conference, he always seemed so happy to see me — and I loved that, and I was so happy to see him. (Both of you, often.)

He was always such a rock-steady good person, one of those people I wanted to learn to be like. I miss him, miss knowing he’s around.

Engineers — new rule — pay attention: whenever you hear or read the word learnings, as said or written by someone in your company, you have to take the rest of the day off.

Are we ready to make January 4th a holiday yet?

Happy birthday to:

New Order’s Bernard Sumner ‘56

REM’s Michael Stipe ‘60

Cocteau Twins Robin Guthrie ‘62

Prefab Sprout’s Martin McAloon ‘62

Portishead’s Beth Gibbons ‘65

The Pogues Cait O'Riordan ‘65

RIP Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis (1955 - 2019)

A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias. This Is What He Found. Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends....

…Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.” 😬

Read the whole thing. www.propublica.org/article/ap3-...

Starting at 8pm central tonight, I’m hosting 5+ hours of classic new wave and alternative music videos from the ‘70s, ‘80s & ‘90s.

Simply click twitch.tv/djjakerudh then and enjoy the show worldwide cover free.

Research. Trial and error. Finally these two lines in .tcshrc:

alias __git_current_branch 'git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD >& /dev/null && echo "(`git rev-parse -- abbrev-ref HEAD`)"'
86

alias precmd 'set prompt="[%m:%{\e[34m%}%c2%{\e[0m%}]%{\e[31m%}`__git_current_branch`%{\e[0m%} "'

Screenshot showing prompt in Terminal with current path and git branch — with path in blue and branch in red.

This has been the greatest long-term technical challenge of my life, off and on for years — but I finally figured out how to get my shell prompt to 1) show me the current git branch 2) in color. Whew!

I gave the path a color too, since I was on a roll. Extra credit, gold star for me. 🐥

NetNewsWire 6.1.7 for Mac: https://netnewswire.blog/2024/12/16/netnewswire-for-mac.html

NetNewsWire 6.1.5 for iOS TestFlight: https://netnewswire.blog/2024/12/07/netnewswire-for-ios.html

I haven’t written one, and I don’t remember if anyone else has. I would like to read that post!

I get that “stop doing Combine!” sounds like an old guy thing to say — but I’m in on Swift structured concurrency and SwiftUI.

My argument is the opposite of curmudgeonly — Combine is not the future, and we want to use future things.

But I get that Combine tastes like honey and sparkles.

I keep telling the younger developers “stop doing Combine!” and… they keep doing Combine.

To be fair, though — and I mean this sincerely — they’re all smarter than me. :)

Are there any Bluesky client apps that preserve my reading position in the timeline? I’ve tried the official app, Skeets, and Openvibe, none of which seem to know that reading position is even a thing. A fresh launch of the app puts me at the very top of the timeline every time.

Starting live now at www.twitch.tv/djjakerudh, I present 5+ hours of new wave, post-punk and classic alternative music videos.

Beginning in 1980, I'll play four songs from every year that represented "alternative" music and move up through the years until we run out of time.

Dave Gahan and Annie Lennox backstage after a recent gig.