🇺🇸 Hope
I keep going back to stare at the map shown above in Apple News. It's wonderful to see how dramatically most of the country shifted their stance in the recent election. Opening the News app and smiling is a strange sensation, but a welcome one!
Zooming in, look at this list of amazing things:
- Democrats will control both the House and the Senate
- Many states that have been run by Republicans for decades flipped significantly or entirely
- Most AI and crypto super PAC money was wasted on losing candidates
- Elon Musk spent about $224 million for a red Texas but it came out blue
- Data center construction measures met a huge backlash and failed almost everywhere they were on the ballot
- First openly-trans person elected to the House in Michigan: Joanna Whaley
- First openly-trans person elected to the House in Alabama: Allison Montgomery
- First openly-trans person elected to the House in Washington: Jaelynn Scott
- First openly-trans person elected to the House in Wisconsin: Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford
- First openly-trans person elected to public office in Florida: Quinnie Pérez
- First openly-nonbinary and first Japanese-American lawmaker in Georgia: Bentley Huggins
- First female senator in South Carolina: Annie Andrews
- First female governor in Ohio: Amy Acton
- First female governor in Minnesota: Amy Klobuchar
- First female governor in Tennessee: Marsha Blackburn
- First openly gay senator: Chris Pappas
- First openly gay member of Congress in Michigan: Jeremy Moss
- First Native American woman to become a senator: Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota
- First Native American woman elected to Congress: Claire Valdez
- First Native American female governor: Deb Haaland (she was also the first Native American in a U.S. Cabinet position prior to this latest win)
- First Muslim senator: Abdul El-Sayed
- First Muslim member of Congress in New Jersey: Adam Hamawy
- First Hispanic member of Congress in Nebraska: Denise Powell
- First Hispanic governor in Texas: Gina Hinojosa
- First Hispanic governor in California: Xavier Becerra
- First Black woman to become governor: Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia
- First Black governor in Wisconsin: David Crowley
- First Black governor in Nevada: Aaron Ford
- First Black governor in Maryland: Wes Moore
- First Black governor in Florida: Byron Donalds
- Illinois will be the first state represented by two women of color in the Senate with the election of Juliana Stratton (she joins Tammy Duckworth)
- This is the first time three Black women will serve as senators simultaneously
- Kansas will have it's first Democratic senator in 94 years: Adam Hamilton
- Texas will have it's first Democratic senator in 32 years: James Talaric
- South Carolina will have it's first Democratic senator in 28 years: Annie Andrews
- This will be the first time five Black governors serve simultaneously
- This will be the first time 17 (or more!) women will serve as state governors simultaneously
That's just the stuff I could find that's been confirmed the day after the midterms. There are probably many other noteworthy things I missed.
There are also lots of interesting things coming up:
Now, all of that said, things aren't going to get better immediately, and there's still a lot that didn't go well during these midterms. A few really disappointing things that stood out to me include several anti-trans measures being passed in various places, the billionaire tax in California doesn't look like it's going to pass, and it looks like most white men are still voting Republican despite the overall shifts we saw yesterday.
On top of that, Republicans have and will do many things to sabotage progress and further their own agenda at the expense of others. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) Republicans signed into law back in July of 2025 has many staggered beginning and end dates, and many of them were purposefully scheduled to happen after the midterms. A lot of these things were delayed to minimize the negative effect on the midterms (which, thankfully, didn't work) and, in the event of a redistribution of power, to make Democrats in office look powerless when these things take effect.
There's a long road ahead. It's going to take time for the folks elected yesterday to take office, and more time still for them to have a substantial impact. There's a big mess to clean up and a lot of hard work to do. The amazing shift we saw in these midterm elections was just one step—a huge step—on the journey to a better world. There are many steps that still need to be taken in the months, years, and decades ahead. Stay strong, stay focused, and keep moving forward.
But now, right now, let's enjoy the overall win. For the first time in a while, despite the lingering problems and issues, I have hope that this country can turn itself around and make some progress toward a better world.
🤬 Siri Recap and Live Rewind Now in Beta
Jason Snell at Six Colors:
With the release of the first developer beta of watchOS 27.3, Apple is unleashing the last of its Audio Intelligence features on the world: Siri Recap and Live Rewind join Sound Recognition and Music Recognition (a favorite watchOS 27 feature of mine).
These other two new features have been met with a lot of skepticism, as they walk right up to the edge of making your Apple Watch a device for covert recording.
I still think Siri Recap and Live Rewind shouldn't exist, and I maintain that Apple's privacy-forward approach doesn't go nearly far enough. I was holding out a tiny hope that they would cancel these features before the beta, but here we are.
Apple could still decide to cancel these features before they're fully released, but I doubt that will happen. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that.
🗳️ Please Vote
The only way things get better is if we exercise the power we have, and one of the greatest powers we have is our ability to vote.
I know, the choices aren't perfect. The system isn't perfect. Sometimes it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. It can feel bad or wrong to participate in a system you don't agree with, or select a candidate you don't fully align with. Still, it's the system we've got. Not voting isn't an act of protest, it's a choice to not change anything. A choice to not make things better.
If every eligible citizen voted, things would be very different. We're not going to get to that point overnight, but you can help us get one step closer.
Please vote. Encourage others to vote. Help us all collectively make a difference.
🔙 Dave Shea is Back!
I was delighted to see one of my archived RSS feeds light up with a new post:
Creating a new personal website in 2026 is certainly a choice.
The commercial web is a disaster of privacy invasion, pop up annoyances, and ads that drown out content. Most social media is a dumpster fire best left in the rearview. Bots outnumber people while siphoning up every thought you or I publish. Minor algorithm tweaks by a major tech company can wipe out small businesses at the drop of a hat. Corporate earnings growth has seen to wringing out every last cent that can be made from exploiting the wreckage of what was once a free and open sphere of information sharing.
But, a human-centric internet can still exist if we want it to. I want to add my voice back with those keeping craft and humanity alive on this place we all used to love. Why not get back to my roots and revive some not-quite-forgotten skills that have languished for years, and just have some fun again? Those of us who were there still remember what this place used to be, here’s my small part in bringing it back.
That's exactly what I've been doing with this site. The more the merrier! Welcome back, Dave.
🚀 Space Shuttle Discovery's Starboard 's' is Upside Down
Jason Snell on Six Colors links to Jason Torchinsky at The Autopian (which he found via Paul Lukas’s Inconspicuous Consumption) who writes about a Threads post by Sin Or Gospel that points out the typographical error:
On the space shuttle Discovery, the S in Discovery is upside down.
As a typography obsessive this gives me an odd thrill.
Wild.
⛔️ How to Remove Slack's New Menu Bar Icon on the Mac
Speaking of annoying things that are difficult or unintuitive to remove, I noticed Slack added a new icon to the menu bar on my Mac today. I immediately went looking through Slack's settings for a way to turn it off, but came up empty.
Then I remembered you can remove most menu bar icons by holding Command while you drag them off the menu bar (keep holding until the little "Remove" popup appears, then let go).
That worked fine for now, but we'll see if Slack tries to add it back again later.
🚫 RemoveMacAI: Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27
Om Lahore:
RemoveMacAI turns off Apple Intelligence and deletes its models. It also switches off Mac Analytics and personalized ads, fixes small things like the wallpaper click that hides every window, and clears out old installers and caches. You see each change before it happens and can undo it later.
On my partner's MacBook Neo, Siri AI somehow turned itself on and she was understandably upset about it. This got it turned back off.
I particularly like that this app doesn't require you to turn System Integrity Protection off, and disabling Siri AI didn't even require a restart. Nice.
🌈 Magic Color-Changing Roman Glass
Dalya Alberge at The Guardian:
Depending on where a light source is positioned, the Lycurgus Cup changes colour, from jade green under normal lighting to ruby red when lit from behind – an astonishing feat of optical engineering that has confounded historians and glass-makers for centuries.
Now scientists from the University of Sheffield have replicated its remarkable optical behaviour, using an ancient recipe derived from a fragment of the Roman “dichroic” (two-coloured) original.
Don't miss the video embedded in the article. The extent to which the colors change is remarkable, and it's quite beautiful.
🖼️ TitleArt: A Retro WordArt Editor
Look at this wonderful web app Davey Barker made:
It's called TitleArt. Give it a try, and make sure you hit the little play button at the end of the toolbar.
🌠 The When of Starry Night
Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, Suna Kang, Jungwoo Song, and Ho Jin in The actual sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a multidisciplinary reconstruction:
At dawn around 22 July 1889, the waning-crescent Moon, Venus, and the Hyades cluster gather within that narrow frame, while the asterism’s geometry, contemporary weather records, and the letters independently converge on the same date. These findings suggest that the night sky in The Starry Night originated from observation of a specific celestial arrangement, and call for reconsidering the June dating. This framework can extend to historical night paintings as a reproducible scientific art history.
Some serious research and facinating detective work.
