VioletPixel

Justin Michael's notions and miscellanea

📷 Photo of the Week: Autumn Leaves

I want to take more photos and do more journal-style writing, so I'm starting a new thing: Photo of the Week. This is the first of, hopefully, many to come.

A closeup photo of leaves at the end of a tree branch. The most promiment leaf in the foreground and the leaves immediately above it are green. The leaves below and to either side are either yellow or yellow at the bast with red at the ends. The background is of the rest of the tree out of focus, showing mostly yellow with patches of green, orange, and red. A small patch of gray street is visible in the lower right.

I took this with my iPhone while my partner and I were walking around our neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. It struck me as a great example of how different things are here than where I grew up.

I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, a place that doesn't really have traditional seasons, to say nothing of trees with leaves that do anything remotely like what's pictured above. There are a lot of palm trees, cacti, and shrubs, and most of them don't change dramatically in appearance throughout the year.

The weather in Phoenix right now is clear skies and you don't need a jacket. That's just static text, nothing live or dynamic or hooked up to a weather API, but it's still going to be accurate most of the time.

A lot of people vacation or retire in and around Phoenix. They love the consistent clear skies, they love the warm-to-hot-to-scorching weather, and I think a lot of them love the novelty of it. A desert is a strange and interesting place to be when you've spent most of your life elsewhere. That's why a lot of people find desert planets in science fiction—like Tatooine in Star Wars—fun and exotic.

Me? I'm over it. Tatooine never looked interesting or appealing to me. It looked like what I would see if I drove south for an hour.

Give me clouds. Give me rain. Give me moisture, moss, vines, and green everywhere. Give me a place where lush vegetation grows naturally. Give me a reason to check the weather because it might actually be different than it was yesterday, last week, or last month.

Give me life. Give me spiders that are beneficial instead of dangerous. Keep the scorpions and snakes. Give me a place with squirrels (gods, how I love the squirrels!). Give me an environment that isn't constantly trying to kill me.

Give me the opportunity to wear more layers than a thin short-sleeve t-shirt and feel comfortable. Put me in a hoodie. Put me in a sweater. Give me neighborhood walks. Give me a lot of people walking a lot of dogs. Give me little free libraries all over the place.

Give me leaves on almost every corner that warrant a smile, a pause, and a photo.

I love it here.

🛩️ Pinpoint a Location with Audio, Date, and Time

Colsto:

This video examines the amount of location information carried by inaudible background sounds, using the Doppler effect to locate a reference recording within ~100m, and only needing (in some cases) less 1-min of audio. This video raises awareness of these capabilities and closes by discussing preventative measures one could take.

They explain how they cross-reference public flight data with Doppler effect data to determine the location of a recording made anywhere in the US.

A fascinating and effective approach well-explained in just under half an hour.

⛓️‍💥 And Now a Critical Apache Vulnerability

The Apache Security team, regarding CVE-2026-119618:

Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization vulnerability in Apache HTTP Server's mod_http2 in assign_headers() can lead to RCE.

This issue affects Apache HTTP Server: from 2.4.55 through 2.4.70.

Affected releases of mod_h2 from GitHub: from 2.0.8 through 2.0.42.

Apache ranked this "Critical" according to their impact levels, which means it meets the following criteria:

A vulnerability rated with a Critical impact is one which could potentially be exploited by a remote attacker to get Apache to execute arbitrary code (either as the user the server is running as, or root). These are the sorts of vulnerabilities that could be exploited automatically by worms.

The patch was released two days ago. If you're running Apache anywhere, drop what you're doing and update now.

It hasn't been that long since the critical PHP vulnerabilities. And Microsoft should probably reconsider the "365" part of their product names. And all US flights were grounded today.

What will tomorrow bring?

🐻 Bear Turns 10

Shiny Frog:

Over the years, one thing we hear again and again is that Bear just feels good to use. So for this special occasion, we want to share the principles behind every design decision we make.

Bear is, by far, my favorite app for writing and taking notes. Every blog post I write is written in Bear; most of them on my Mac, some of them on my iPhone. It does, indeed, feel good to use on any device, and it's felt that way for many years now.

Regarding their process:

The feedback discussion can be brutal. “No” is a very welcome answer here, with one house rule: you have to give a reason. Wall of text and hour long slack huddles come and go, then the paring up buddies return to the improvement part and provide a second round, a third round, until we are all happy with it. There are lucky days that some ideas get a big yes on the first try. Others spark weeks and months of debate and never ship at all. We’d rather be a little stubborn about what feels like Bear than chase every trend.

For developers, the temptation to add features is strong, and the discipline required to only add things sparingly and with conviction is rare. In most apps, new features tend to diminish simplicity, harm usability, and contribute to bloat.

Bear is not bloated. It remains simple, usable, and delightful. I applaud Shiny Frog for their restraint and careful consideration, and look forward to using Bear for many more years to come.

🌬️ Healthy Air May Help Prevent Diabetes

Julia Musto writing at The Independent:

Using air purifiers for a month helped cut levels of harmful air pollution tied to spikes in blood sugar and developing diabetes by 36 percent, according to the study presented last month at a conference of the American Heart Association.

The study involved 75 New Yorkers with prediabetes, a condition in which blood sugar levels are higher than normal. It found those who slept in rooms with the machines saw an 8 percent drop in daily blood sugar spikes. A similar drop was also seen among those in the study who ate breakfast.

The cleaner we can make our air, the better.

And who doesn't love a good breakfast?

📕 Steal Like a Human

About a week ago we drove to the Oregon coast and spent a little time in Manzanita. While we were there we stopped by a charming little bookstore called Cloud & Leaf. Nothing initially caught my eye, but on the way out I noticed a 10th anniversary edition of Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. I've always wanted to read it, so I picked it up.

Tonight I sat down and read it cover to cover (that's not a boast; it's a short book and easy to get through in a single sitting). It's quite good, and I recommend it.

The book was originally published in 2012, and 14 years later it's anything but out of date. There are some offhand references to how the Internet worked back then which no longer bear any resemblance to reality, but it's nothing that detracts from the material in any way (although a mention of Google Reader made me pine a little for a particular time online that will never come again).

Many of the thoughts and ideas in the book weren't new to me, and likely wouldn't be new to you, but it's nice to have them so succulently and expertly packaged into a single, handy tome. The book serves as a good reminder of the ingredients required for a solid creative foundation. The book is full of things I needed to hear—things I needed to be reminded of—and I imagine the same is probably true for you as well.

Looking through the lens of our present moment, one thing in particular caught my eye:

A picture of a page from Steal Like an Artist which has a hand-drawn two column table. The left column's header is, 'Good Theft,' and it contains the following items: honor, study, steal from many, credit, transform, remix. The right column's header is, 'Bad Theft,' and it contains the following items: degrade, skim, steal from one, plaiarize, imitate, rip off.

It's interesting that generative AI takes almost everything from the "bad theft" column and only one thing from the "good theft" column.

A few pages earlier, Austin writes:

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.

The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That's what you really want—to internalize their way of looking at the world. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Today the effort required to mimic the surface of others' work is close to zero. The flood of knockoffs is unprecedented. So much is so shallow. The seemingly-pervasive disregard so many people have for ethics, honor, and credit is suffocating and disheartening (to say nothing of the other small, tiny, inconsequential issues like, say, the environment and a massive consolidation of power).

Despite the state of the world, this book reminded me that the journey—our personal creative journey—is replete with rewards that will never be realized if we take shortcuts. I knew that before I read this, in both my head and my heart, but having a physical artifact harmonize with those thoughts and feelings is comforting and delightful.

This is a tough time, but there's hope. The only way out is through.

🥧 Lo-Fi Pi

Russell Samora and Kevin Litman-Navarro created lo-pi radio:

Live lo-fi beats from the digits of pi, forever.

A little bit more about how it works (press the ? button on the site for more details):

How the sound works: Every note of the melody you hear is the next digit of pi, in order. Each digit is a note in the Fmaj scale. 0 and 9 are rests (silence). Digits are not skipped or changed, but we've created a set of simple rules (and some fiddly ones that aren't worth explaining) that decide when each note plays and how long it lasts to best match the underlying progression.

Surprisingly good background music!

🇺🇸 Hope

A screenshot from Apple News with the title, 'How the nation shifted from 2024,' followed by a map of the United States that shows the percentage-point change in margin between the 2026 House races and the 2024 presidential election by county. Each county is represented by etther a blue arrow pointing up and to the left or a red arrow pointing up and to the right for Democratic and Republican shifts, respectfully. The length of each arrow represents the change in margin (longer means more change) and the thickness of the arrow indicates total votes. The map is overwhelmingly covered in blue arrows, with only a few small red arrows peeking through here and there (with one long, solitary red arrow in Alaska being the exception).

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:

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.

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