Finished reading: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. Mostly for kids, but I had already been looking forward to the upcoming movie and kept running across the book, so I bought it. Wonderful story. 📚 | Continue reading
Got my updated Covid shot. Going to lie low for the afternoon, just poke around a little with blogging and email. 💉 | Continue reading
Adrian Vila blogging about the lens choices on the iPhone 16: I said it a year ago, and I still think Apple made a mistake with the 120mm lens. The current lineup of 13mm, 24mm, and 120mm leaves a huge gap between the main and telephoto lenses, missing out on key and very useful … | Continue reading
“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” — Taylor Swift &# … | Continue reading
Nice job by the ABC moderators for some quick fact-checking and generally keeping things on track, with a little room for back and forth replies. No need for another debate, other than the VP debate. We’ve all seen enough. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Kamala Harris has a really clever approach to some answers where she talks about the actual question but then in the middle she inserts a quick jab at Trump — your father gave you money, or the world is laughing at you — and he can’t help but respond and get completely derailed i … | Continue reading
Kamala Harris off to a strong start, I think. Lots of policy but also layering in some bigger themes. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Finally cancelling iTunes Match. Created playlists in Music.app to find and download every track with cloud status “matched” or “uploaded” to my Mac. In the process, found a gold mine of old audio recordings off my MiniDisc, circa 2004-2006. | Continue reading
Online grocery prices dropped last month. More surprising, Adobe tracks these kind of prices as part of their enterprise products. Talk about losing focus… That business feels very far apart from Photoshop. | Continue reading
Some good notes from Jason Snell after attending the iPhone 16 event. On AI’s staggered rollout: They’re promoting a key feature of their new iPhone… that won’t be there if you order one for delivery on September 20. Maybe it’ll be there, in beta, a few weeks later. But only some … | Continue reading
Stephen Hackett blogging about the increasingly-complicated Apple product lineup: Sometimes, that means selling older products at discounted prices, but it feels like today’s event was a new chapter in that story. Some of the announcements today were hard to understand, even as s … | Continue reading
Not in a hurry to switch, but I will probably opt for the AirPods 4 to replace my AirPods Pro. The pros have never felt comfortable in my ears. It’s interesting that the 4s are split into a basic version and a “with noise cancellation” version, although the hardware appears ident … | Continue reading
Working on something to demo at FediForum later this week. Not entirely sure in what form it will actually ship, but could make for a good discussion. Thinking about the Mastodon API and its role in the fediverse. | Continue reading
Cohost is shutting down. From the staff account: …we’ve struggled to fill the revenue and morale gap. Colin and I have been doing this for five years, Aidan for three, Kara for nearly two. We’ve been at or over capacity on moderation, engineering, and general operations nearly th … | Continue reading
Finished reading: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Somehow I had never read this before now. Also my edition had an interesting afterward by her granddaughter with a history of the book and notes from earlier drafts. 📚 | Continue reading
Rest in peace, James Earl Jones. I wouldn’t have guessed he was 93 already. An incredible life. Love this quote from him in the AP: I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do. As a preacher, as a scholar, you c … | Continue reading
Solid updates from Apple as usual. They highlighted lots of health-related features, like hearing aids, sleep apnea, and satellite messaging. For environmental impact, I’m still curious if there will be a hit to their goals with the AI private cloud rollout. | Continue reading
Genuinely conflicted about this year’s iPhone Pro color lineup: black, white, silver, desert. I guess black? Need to see more photos to know where desert sits on the spectrum of subtle to Zune. | Continue reading
New Apple stuff is great and all, but hear me out… What if they integrated hardware, software, and services in a way that only Apple can do? 🤪 | Continue reading
I’m sorry to be bitter, but in the first half hour of the Apple event, my takeaways are: they really should move back to live presentations, and please stop saying “only Apple can do”… If you say it too much for everything, it loses its impact. (New products look good, though.) | Continue reading
Ben Thompson predicts a $100 price increase for the new iPhones today, bringing it over $1k for the first time. So I guess if the iPhone 16 Pro is $1100, the Max will be $1200. Ouch. 💰 | Continue reading
iPhone announcement day! As I talked about on @coreint, for the first time in years — maybe since the original iPhone? — I’m actually going to get a new phone right away. Not excited about the cost, but will be fun to play on the cutting edge a little. | Continue reading
The new iPhone announcement is just a couple days away, and on today’s Core Int we give our thoughts about the upcoming event, including a discussion about AI. | Continue reading
Looking up, at Beyond Van Gogh. In the old Austin-American Statesman building. | Continue reading
This post about Marissa Mayer’s company Sunshine on Platformer is several months old, but I saw it linked again this week and wanted to highlight something: Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate … | Continue reading
Good news, everyone. Accidentally left the garage door open and someone stole a couple random things — looks like mostly power tools that are easy to replace — but they left the Power Mac 7500 and Power Mac G5. Suckers! They have no sense of quality and value. 🤪 | Continue reading
Talking to Daniel today for the next podcast episode, about AI, and afterwards I was thinking about why I find ChatGPT so effective instead of Google search. It’s not just the “here’s the answer” but also the very fast, clean results. Imagine a web search with 5-10 results that w … | Continue reading
John Gruber has a long take-down on the DMA. There is plenty to think about in this, but a quick comment on his point about Chrome: My guess is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the single biggest beneficiary of this mandatory browser choice screen will be Google Chrome, which I … | Continue reading
I feel that I’ve been overpaying for sending email for years. Making another attempt at migrating to Amazon SES with a dedicated IP. Should cut my bill in half and hopefully fix some reliability problems. (If anything bounced at SendGrid, it would stop sending emails until reset… … | Continue reading
People worry that AI will take over what humans should be doing. It’s more profound than that. Using AI has helped me understand what actually makes us uniquely human. Love, creativity, leadership, fear, individualism, beauty. Let’s lean in to what only we can do and let that dri … | Continue reading
Taking a short break from Threads and Bluesky. Nothing against those services, but I started over-thinking the post length differences. I need to focus on work and blogging first. Because my blog natively uses ActivityPub, Mastodon folks will still see my posts. | Continue reading
In my blog post series for upgrades to my Honda Element, this post is a little different. It’s not an actual change to the car like the posts about CarPlay, the WeBoost, or my bed platform. It is usually too hot to camp in Texas during the summer. To help beat the heat, I’m curre … | Continue reading
While Micro.blog avoids viral features, making misinformation less likely to spread quickly, we still have a 30-day free trial that content spammers sometimes try to use. Thinking about going paid-only without a trial until after the election, to remove another potential source o … | Continue reading
Congrats to @rizzi@gloria.social on the release of the new Reeder! It’s a huge redesign, refocusing the app around timelines, viewing conversations, and more. Great integration with Micro.blog too. | Continue reading
“I’d run the risk of losing everything. Sell all my things, become nomadic.” — Clairo | Continue reading
My number one use case for AR glasses is when on a road trip and can’t stop to take pictures. Old buildings in forgotten towns, long abandoned, that were once beautiful. | Continue reading
Cloudy morning at Brazos Bend State Park, from the observation tower. Unlike any other state park I’ve been to. Didn’t see any alligators. | Continue reading
Seeing the “luxurious” headline on this review at The Verge for the new reMarkable Paper Pro, I was expecting it to be more expensive than $579. Looks really nice. And it makes sense to go for the high-end. The super low-end is well served by Kindles and paper notebooks. | Continue reading
I’ve always been a mosquito magnet. They go for me before anyone else, and leave several bites before I notice. This morning waiting for my coffee order outside, just got bit, and thanks to sensationalist “the sky is always falling” 24-hour news, now I can only think of EEE and o … | Continue reading
I think I first heard about xAI’s plans in Memphis from Stephen Hackett’s blog. He collected a few posts about the upcoming project back in June: The Daily Memphian reports that the deal came together very quickly, and that the location is an old Electrolux oven factory, which ha … | Continue reading
The Verge writing about VW’s in-car AI: Volkswagen says that OpenAI’s chatbot along with a “multitude” of other models are provided by automotive chatbot company Cerence, which will take over for IDA when requests are more complex than tweaking your air conditioning settings. For … | Continue reading
Congrats to Tapbots on the Ivory 2.2 release. However, to comment on their announcement post: Ivory 2.2 for iOS/iPadOS is now available on the App Store! Release notes in the ALT text of the image or on the App Store. This is not what alt text is for. With social platforms often … | Continue reading
Speaking of Micro.blog apps, the new version of Mimi Uploader can batch generate alt text for multiple photos at once. Very cool. | Continue reading
Happy to announce that our companion app for notes, Strata, is now available for Android. Notes syncing and sharing is a feature for all Micro.blog paid subscribers. Get started on the web first, then you can copy your secret key over to Android. | Continue reading
Nice web utility from @mary.my.id that archives your Bluesky posts as HTML. Always a good idea to have multiple formats of everything. | Continue reading
Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market. | Continue reading
There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right. | Continue reading
As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when need … | Continue reading