On Sunday, a few thousand people in Green Bay, Wisconsin, gathered to hear Elon Musk speak — and give away two giant cardboard checks for $1 million. Attendance at the event was limited to people who had added their names to a petition against “activist judges,” created by Musk’s America PAC. He has promised money and other “surprise announcements” to people who sign the petition, and the splashy million-dollar giveaway ratcheted up the stakes. After their names were announced, winners shuffled onstage to awkwardly accept the prop checks and pause for a photo op with Musk, who has poured tens of millions of dollars into the race for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court seat. 

The checks are Musk’s latest attempt to use his vast wealth to turn out voters ahead of Tuesday’s election. He has promised $100 to voters who sign the “activist judges petition” and micro-earnings for people who hold up a photo of Musk’s chosen candidate with a thumbs-up. The petition and the promises of money are a not-so-subtle way of collecting registered voter data.

It’s the same playbook Musk deployed ahead of the November presidential election that some elections experts say broke the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you (or someone you know) has hiked the Appalachian Trail since 1979, it’s likely that a photo of that person exists in the ATC’s online Hiker Photo Archive. Some folks in these photos have never seen them before & forgot they even exist.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

One of the features of Active Directory is known as FSMO, short for Flexible Single Master Operation. A now-retired colleague of mine shared that this was not the original name of the feature.

The original name for the feature was Floating Single Master Operation. My limited understanding of Active Directory tells me that the original name used the term floating because domain administrators could transfer roles that were covered by it between different domain controllers in the domain. Prior to this innovation, these roles were locked to the Primary Domain Controller.

When the team announced this new feature to their enterprise customers, those customers became very concerned. The word floating suggested that the role could flit capriciously from one domain controller to another like a balloon floating aimlessly around a room, and the customers didn’t like the idea of these roles moving around on their own without supervision.

My colleague went back through all of the settings, API names, group policies, etc, and found that none of them actually used the word floating. At best, they just used the abbreviation FSMO. So the team decided to change what the letter F stood for and renamed the feature from Floating Single Master Operation to Flexible Single Master Operation. The words have similar meanings, but the new word flexible more strongly suggests that you are in charge of where the role resides. It doesn’t “float around” randomly. Rather, you have the flexibility to choose where it goes. All the team had to do to effect this rename was some editing in the documentation (mostly a search-and-replace). No code had to change.

This new name was viewed by enterprise customers much more favorably and calmed their anxiety. Flexible Single Master Operation it is.

Bonus chatter: There was one place that the name could not be changed: The patent application.

The post The original name for Flexible Single Master Operations in Active Directory appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The folks at Iconfactory, which once made a wonderful Twitter client called Twitterrific, launched a new app on Tuesday. It’s called Tapestry, and it’s a cross between a social app and a news reader. The app can ingest feeds of all kinds: someone’s Bluesky posts, your favorite YouTube creator’s videos, a blog’s new posts, all your go-to podcasts. You add the feeds, and Tapestry shows them to you in chronological order. No recommendations, no algorithms, just what Iconfactory calls a “personal, unified timeline” of content you care about.

Tapestry has a bunch of clever ways to filter your content, too. You can pick keywords to “Muffle,” which will make their entry in Tapestry much smaller, or you can mute them and remove them from your timeline entirely. You can search across all your feeds at once, too, and create timelines within your timeline — I set one up for my podcast feeds, for instance, and now Tapestry is a passable podcast player. Tapestry syncs both your content and your place in the timeline across devices, and it gives you lots of control over how things look.

I’ve been using Tapestry in beta for a while, and I quite like the app. It’s fairly …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Two years ago, five national consumer advocacy organizations, including Consumer World and Consumer Reports, called on a dozen supermarket CEOs to stop digital discrimination and make digital coupons more accessible to less tech-savvy shoppers. There are significant numbers of seniors and lower income folks who do not use the internet or have smartphones and thus they they have been shut out of advertised digital-only offers.

Digital coupons like the one above generally have required shoppers to go to the coupon section of the store’s website or app, and then find and e-clip each particular coupon individually that they saw advertised in the weekly circular.

Now, one supermarket chain finally heard our call and took decisive action to fix this. Last week, Stop & Shop, the largest supermarket chain in the Northeast, announced it was rolling out “Savings Station” kiosks to the entire chain after successfully completing a one-year test of them in a handful of stores. Installation will be complete by the end of January.

The kiosk is essentially a freestanding screen and barcode reader located at the front of the store. All a customer has to do is scan their loyalty card or enter their phone number on the device, and then all that week’s advertised digital coupons are automatically loaded onto their card or account. It takes as little as five seconds! No more futsing with apps or the coupon section of the store’s website (except for manufacturers coupons). This is NOT a computer in the store where you have to go through all the steps of loading coupons as you would at home. [See earlier video demo.]

This should come as welcome news to the 70-percent of Consumer World readers who told us in a 2022 survey that they would prefer an easy offline in-store method to activate digital coupon savings. Frankly, even for those of us for whom doing stuff online comes more easily, this is a huge time saver.

Hat tip to EntryPoint, the company that developed these kiosks and has launched them in other chains like Food Lion and Winn Dixie also.

We applaud Stop & Shop for taking this innovative step to help digitally-disconnected shoppers finally be able to access digital discounts and to cut their ever-climbing grocery bill.

Now it’s time for other supermarket chains to follow Stop & Shop’s lead and help all their customers get easier access to digital discounts. Albertsons… hello? Kroger… hello?

Download video: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jk5hn1m89dfez6lhrk3e9/ss-kiosk4.mp4?rlkey=v3to3h9udh1ma5dmbv2xtpv6a&dl=0