Matt Gemmell 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Software running on the user account of a minor should be prohibited from showing UI or messaging related to purchases, including trial functionality.

30 years ago today, on 13th March 1996, I was sixteen and at high school. It was a Wednesday. Half an hour up the road in Dunblane, a man called Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school gymnasium with 4 legally-owned handguns and 743 rounds. He killed 16 children aged between 5 and 6, the age my son is right now. He also killed a teacher, and injured 15 others, then killed himself. It was and is the deadliest mass (4+ casualties) shooting in UK history.

Mad scientist but with a retro Macintosh vibe.

Nine years.

And if you want to make genre/topic-specific (or otherwise filtered) books from Markdown-based content using my Pandoc Publish wrapper, I wrote up how I do that for my weekly stories: https://mattgemmell.scot/automating-novel-and-anthology-publishing/ @Unixbigot@aus.social @Unixbigot@aus.social

My 269th free weekly mini-story "Donkey" is out, and you can read it here: https://mattgemmell.scot/books/once-upon-a-time/stories/donkey/

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#amwriting #fiction #shortstory

Let’s all just try to be kind to people, and be sure to tell them it's because I told you to.

Latest reminder that the world must have complete independence from the USA, in every respect, as one of its primary policy goals. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-orders-diplomats-fight-data-sovereignty-initiatives-2026-02-25/

Another in the ever-continuing series of Two Kinds of People In The World: those who want to actually create things, and those who are basically OK with using the stolen work of countless others to marginally increase their own convenience.

I think the most emetic thing about the 1Password price increase for the family plan is that they refer to it as “updating” the pricing, noting that it had heretofore "remained largely unchanged". It bugged me, and I pondered why; I think it's because it contains the implication that an unpleasant (20%!) price increase ought to be accepted now because customers had graciously been excused some notional previous increases, as if there were an element of now-unsustainable charity involved.

My 268th free weekly mini-story "Exile" is out, and you can read it here: https://mattgemmell.scot/books/once-upon-a-time/stories/exile/

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Interesting that this time around they got to völkisch _after_ the camps instead of before. In the USA it’s currently 1937–38.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/fcc-asks-stations-for-pro-america-programming-like-daily-pledge-of-allegiance/

I think it would be quicker to list my acquaintances who haven't said some version of this.

It stands for UnSafe. The sheer number of people we know who have cancelled their planned holidays and even business trips there for the forseeable future.

Meanwhile, in NotAmerica…

Love this comment someone left on your post so much, @mjtsai@mastodon.social ! I think I’m going to put this bit on my profile and/or tombstone:

“Gemmell writes well, but he's a novelist. He has never shipped a single piece of Mac or iOS software of note.” 💜

Update to my #foss pandoc-publish* project: pretty footnotes in PDF/print output! Gathered sensibly on the page where the call occurs, and readily styled with CSS. Uses native Markdown footnotes syntax in the source documents.

* A wrapper for pandoc which lets Markdown-based writers quickly produce beautiful ePub and PDF versions of books, with front/back matter, parts, ToCs, indexes, annotated figures, and more. https://github.com/mattgemmell/pandoc-publish

RE: @verge@mastodon.social

It has been [5] months since (⚠️ US-based ⚠️, and ⚠️Google Cloud-backed ⚠️) Discord had a data breach which exposed users’ government IDs used for age verification, and now they want everyone to submit to a face scan or to present government ID to verify age? 🤡

My 266th free weekly mini-story "Underground" is out, and you can read it here: https://mattgemmell.scot/books/once-upon-a-time/stories/underground/

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#amwriting #fiction #shortstory

I think I become more of a #foss activist the longer my beard gets. And perhaps vice versa.

Very much liked this statement from Mario Campolargo at the EU #OpenSource Policy Summit:

👉 If the money is public, the code should be public. 👈

Unionise. 🤝💪🏼
Reject US Big Tech. 🚫🇺🇸
Eat your vegetables. 🥕🥦
Get a good night's sleep. 😴🛌
Destroy fascists. 👊🏼🍊
Not necessarily in that order.

Another painful one to write, given my life-long love of Apple.

The world must extricate itself from US big tech: https://mattgemmell.scot/liberty-as-resistance/