For the first two years of the COVID19 pandemic Australia isolated itself from the world, so I had only ever met my partner’s family over Zoom. For Christmas 2022 we headed to Austin and spent time with them, the first time she’d seen them for about 4 years.

We had great fun walking around Austin seeing the sights, visited the capitol, went two stepping at Sagebrush, saw a couple of bands at The Far Out Lounge & Stage, went go-carting at the Circuit of the Americas, drank coffee at Two Hands, Jo’s, and Cosmic Garage, ate Bagels from Big City Bagels and Subs, and had a great Christmas eating, drinking, playing games, and hanging out.

Oh, and we braved that insane cold snap that saw the temperature drop about 40º in two hours.

We ate BBQ. A lot of BBQ. Rudy’s was my favourite.

And checked out some local vistas.

It was fantastic. Great food, great music, great people, and best of all, I gained a whole new family. Three new sisters, their partners, and my partner’s parents.

I can’t wait to visit them all again. ♥️

For a decade and half I used Twitter. Every day. Occassionaly via the website or first party apps, but for me it was always defined by third party apps.

Hell, third party apps and the community gave us the very word tweet, let alone the blue bird logo, mentions, retweets, and hashtags!

I started with the first version of Twitterrific on macOS and iOS, I used Birdhouse before drafts were ubiquitous, Tweetie before Twitter bought it, and of course Tweetbot.

I’ve had both Twitterrific and Tweetbot installed on my devices for as long as they’ve existed.

I stopped using Twitter a few months back when a grifter acquired and rapdily destroyed it. This week he cut off every significant third party app, all but scuttling several businesses, without a word or reason.

Cowardly.

The Iconfactory have now discontinued Twitterrific and Tapbots are hard at work on Ivory¹ for Mastodon.

Good luck and thanks. I look foward to seeing and using what you’re up to next.

If you’re trying to set up DeviceCheck access, I suggest ignoring Apple’s certificate set up instructions at the start of the DeviceCheck docs. They’re garbage. So bad they’re not even wrong.

Instead:

1. Go to Certificates, Identifier & Profiles in the Dev Portal
2. Go to the Keys tab
3. Create a DeviceCheck key

Now you can continue reading the docs.

NB: You’ll need your Team ID from the portal, and the 10 character identifier attached to the Key you just created (which is in the portal, and the Key’s filename), for the JSON object you’ll be creating.