Harry McCracken
@harrymccracken
Fast Company global technology editor. Boy journalist. Bon vivant. Lefthander. Westcoastian. 🇺🇦 Sign up for my free Plugged In newsletter:
I’m working on an article on John C. Dvorak, the king of computer magazine columnists—RIP—but in the interim, here he is from February 1984 on Macworld and computer magazines in general.
The NY Post’s California Post is up and running and sharing misleading headlines like an old pro. It turns out Book Soup was spared damage and is hoping to reopen in a few days, which seems like good news? (My beloved Bullwinkle statue, also near the water main break, is also OK.)
Mooseface has sample faces you can edit, a Watch Preview feature that lets you see your face on real Apple Watches, and a Share with Harry feature that lets you send your creations to me (I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with).
You can move the time around and change its size, font, and color. You can add text, emoji, and shapes, put a frame around your creations, and use up to 14 layers.
Mooseface has extensive tools for painting and drawing with brushes, pencils, and pens. If you’ve got an iPad and Apple Pencil, it supports it, with pressure sensitivity. You can also import images or use the built-in search to find drawings and photos.
Tragically, my father never returned his claim check for his share of the Encyclopedia of Photography’s $99,500 giveaway, whose total, I assume, was based on some theory about unusual amounts of money being more exciting than obvious ones.
I captured the screen on the left and was going to praise the Times for the headline, but before I got around to it, they changed it.
How many influential accounts does Truth Social have? I can think of one. I can’t think of two.
Gemini just admitted to hallucinating a hallucination. Here’s hoping it wasn’t hallucinating a hallucination of a hallucination.
I sense that Gemini is about to make an embarrassing confession.
Good news, someone wants to give my semi-dormant tech blog millions of dollars. (I’m getting more spam lately that tries to make some sort of personal reference—presumably AI at work.)
@claudialamb.bsky.social Just came across this while looking for something totally unrelated.
Gemini does a fairly-good-to-uncanny job of making fake photos of early Apple products. Siri is either terrible or yanking my chain. It also seems like maybe it intentionally refuses to render current Apple products?
I should have shared these yesterday: highlights from the 2002 and 2003 Fourth of July parades in Solvang, California. Americana at its best. (Yes, that’s Efrem Zimbalist Jr.)
Here’s what I was doing 50 years ago this weekend. (By myself, unsupervised—12-year-olds could do anything back then.)
A little late, but not only did I just realize that Slate recently turned 30–I know the date because I still have the email announcing the site going live.
The email app I vibecoded for myself has a stats page, which finally lets me get hard numbers on just how much mail I get and what I do with it.
Apple Photos thoughtfully created a Memories album of the time I’ve spent with Tim Cook, which has mostly involved him being on a stage and me sitting in the audience. (I assume Apple is doing this for every user to mark its CEO transition.)
Mel Brooks factoid: You may not know that Max Bialystock’s office is decorated with posters for real Broadway flops, including my cousin Irene Kamp’s The Great Indoors, which ran for only 7 performances despite starring Geraldine Page, Curt Jurgens, and a pre-Mod Squad Clarence Williams III.
Thank you for the idea. I’m quite pleased with this, even though my wife’s instinctive question was “Does he blink?”
Latest vibecoding project: an app for making custom Apple Watch faces.
I visited the Haight’s miraculously surviving Fotomat yesterday. I’d missed the news that it now houses a radio station! (We need a database of extant Fotomats, and what happened to them.) https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/abandoned-sf-building-radio-22161965.php
Among Trump allies turned enemies with interesting mustaches who resemble Jay Ward characters, the one I can’t get over is Ty Cobb and Inspector Fenwick.