While LED bulbs have pretty much become the standard, especially among smart bulbs, we can’t help but appreciate the retro look of a old-school filament bulb, so we think Sylvania’s new A19 Soft White Filament Light Bulb is a pretty cool solution if you’re looking for something different for your HomeKit lighting.

It’s been years since I could build the Frontier kernel — but I finally got it building.

It’s really a ’90s Mac app that’s been Carbonized just enough to run on MacOS, but it’s by no means modern: it uses QuickDraw and early Carbon APIs. It’s written entirely in C.

I got it building by installing MacOS 10.6.8 Server in VMWare. Installed Xcode 3.2.6. And now, finally, I can build and run it.

What is Frontier?

Frontier — as some of you know — was a UserLand Software product in the ’90s and 2000s. I worked there for about six years.

The app is a development environment and runtime: a persistent, hierarchical database with a scripting language and a GUI for browsing and editing the database and for writing, debugging, and running scripts.

The Nerd’s Guide to Frontier gives some idea of what it’s like, though it was written before many of the later advances.

Maybe you’ve never heard of it. But here’s the thing: it was in Frontier that the following were either invented or popularized and fleshed-out: scripted and templated websites, weblogs, hosted weblogs, web services over http, RSS, RSS readers, and OPML. (And things I’m forgetting.)

Those innovations were due to the person — Dave Winer — and to the times, the relatively early web days. But they were also in part due to the tool: Frontier was a fantastic tool for implementing and iterating quickly.

The Goal

The high-level goal is to make that tool available again, because I think we need it.

The plan is to turn it into a modern Mac app, a 64-bit Cocoa app, and then add new features that make sense these days. (There are so many!) But that first step is a big one.

The first part of the first step is simple, and it’s where I am now: mass deletions of code. Every reference to THINK_C and MPWC has to go. All references to the 68K and PPC versions must go. There was a Windows port, and all that code is getting tossed. And then I’ll see the scale of what needs to be done.

(Note: my repo is a fork, and it’s not even on the web yet. The code I’m deleting is never really gone.)

I’m doing a blog diary on it because it helps keep me focused. Otherwise I’m jumping around on my side projects. But if I have to write about it, then I’ll stay on target.

Ben Ubois, founder of Feedbin, writing about the service’s newest feature:

You can now receive email newsletters in Feedbin.

To use this feature, go to the settings page and find your secret Feedbin email address. Use this email address whenever you sign up for an email newsletter. Anything sent to it will show up as a feed in Feedbin, grouped by sender.

There’s been a recent trend of tech-focused weblogs publishing email newsletters with exclusive content. I’ve signed up for a few of them, but I don’t really read any of them. The problem is that my email app isn’t the environment where I want to read that type of long-form prose.

When I open Airmail (my new email client of choice), I just want to check for important messages, take action where necessary, and move on. I certainly don’t want to read a couple thousand words on the newest app release. I do want to read about it, but not in my email app.

And that’s why this new Feedbin feature is brilliant. It helps keep your email inbox clean and puts the well-crafted newsletters in an app that’s better suited for that type of text. And it’s also the sort of feature that has me thinking about switching.

My current RSS backend is a self-hosted installation of Fever, which I’ve been using for six or seven years. It works well enough, but it’s become painfully obvious that it isn’t going to be supported for much longer. The last update was released in September 2014 to add support for the latest iPhones’ screen size alongside a few bug fixes.

I still love Fever — its “Hot” category, which displays popular links based on how many of the feeds you follow have pointed to it, remains as one of my favorite RSS features of all time. But the truth is, I don’t interact directly with Fever much anymore. The vast majority of my time reading RSS feeds is from my iOS devices where Reeder is my app of choice. The only time I use Fever directly is when I’m on my Mac — which is a becoming a rarity — or when I’m subscribing to a new feed using Fever’s bookmarklet.

There isn’t much compelling me to use Fever anymore. I like the idea of self-hosting, but not if the software isn’t actively maintained. I like Fever’s Hot category, but rarely use it because of Reeder’s shoddy support for the feature. And other services offer modern user interfaces and newer, more advanced features — like support for email newsletters — that are beginning to pique my interest.

I don’t know if email newsletter support is the feature that will push me to sign up for Feedbin, but there’s definitely a chink in Fever’s armor. The software has fallen behind its competitors and the rise of native RSS client apps has obfuscated the web-based backend almost entirely.

Given that Reeder supports both Fever and Feedbin, I don’t even need to get used to a new user interface. Once I sign up for an account, upload my OPML file, and login on Reeder, I can continue on business as usual. I suppose the only place for me to go from here is to take a look at Feedbin’s other unique features to see if it’s actually worth making the switch.

The cool, refreshing taste of ginger soda just might be what you need at the table this holiday season (or not, whatever). But if the beverage you have in your cupboard came from Trader Joe’s, you might want to very carefully walk it to the trash bin outside, because that big ol’ bottle might just burst. 

Trader Joe’s announced Monday that it would recall — and remove from its shelves — all Triple Ginger Brew drinks over concerns that the bottles may explode.

The precautionary recall was initiated after the company received reports from customers of unopened bottles shattering or bursting.

Trader Joe’s says that the recall includes all lots of the 24.5-ounce drink sold nationwide between Nov.9 and Dec. 14. It’s unclear just how many bottles of the soda are affected; we’ve reached out to TJ’s and will update this post when we hear back.

“If you have any of this product, please handle it with extreme care and dispose of it immediately in an outside container,” the company said in a statement noting that bottle can be identified by the SKU 51857.

Customers who purchased the drink can receive a refund from the company. Those with questions are asked to call Trader Joe’s Customer Relations at 626-599-3817.

In a brief support document, Apple has acknowledged the reported problem of iPad Pro devices requiring a hard restart to resume functioning after an extended period on the charger. The company instructs users to force restart the device if it becomes unresponsive and notes that “Apple is aware of this issue and is investigating.” We at iLounge have yet to experience the problem despite more than a week of working with the tablet....