I often only finally get into a book at the end of a loan in Libby, hopelessly nowhere near finished with it. Wish there was a “just give me one extra day” button. For Kindle, turning off wifi works, but no good option for audiobooks. | Continue reading
Drove by a couple fire trucks protecting the shoulder for a car and a Cybertruck stopped on the side of the road. Probably a fender bender, didn’t look serious. But… two fire trucks? Maybe drama follows all Cybertrucks. | Continue reading
There’s a good analysis in Last Week in Fediverse about Twitter X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Just a small part: …if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere. | Continue reading
Manuel Moreale blogs about a more intentional, personal web: I’m talking about liberating yourself from all sorts of algorithmic grouping and filtering and getting back to experiencing and using the web in a much more deliberate and mindful way. I think it’s okay that “social web … | Continue reading
Just sad hearing about the news of 6 more hostages dead in Gaza. The closer we get to 1 year since the attack by Hamas, the more heartbreaking that there’s no deal. | Continue reading
Bluesky has added 1 million users in the past few days, largely from the Twitter X in Brazil fallout. Congrats to the team. Really impressive to keep servers humming along. | Continue reading
Ollie inspecting a new package, the SolarSaga 100 Prime. This is going to go on my car. | Continue reading
Just posted a new episode of Core Int: Reinventing the 90s. We use two new software releases (the Overcast rewrite and my own new Micro.blog text editor) to talk about how customers react to software changes and bugs. Also, is SwiftUI now the best way to start Mac apps? Spoiler: … | Continue reading
Ghost in their weekly update, joking about likes: Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am” — but it wasn’t until several years later when we started getting likes on Instagram that we collectively came to the realization that the meaning of life, in fact, revolves around … | Continue reading
Ramping up the search for our next home. For old neighborhoods, love doing a little background research on who developed the neighborhood. Doesn’t actually matter, but it’s fun to discover where it came from… Sometimes land originally granted by the Republic of Texas to veterans … | Continue reading
This story and art from Christine Mi for The Washington Post makes me want to book a train trip again. I’ve done Austin to Los Angeles, Austin to Chicago… So much more to see. | Continue reading
Still a few months away, but the Wind and Truth cover reveal makes the book feel like it’s even closer. Michael Whelan has had an incredible career. Love this “semi-retired” bit about the artist: Fifteen years ago, Whelan was semi-retired and considering a return to science ficti … | Continue reading
An update on Strata for Android. Getting closer to a release. We had a rejection, resubmitted. Pretty confident it’ll be approved and out today or early next week. | Continue reading
Tantek Çelik blogged about IndieWebCamp Portland: We wrapped up with our usual Create Day Demos session, live streamed for remote attendees to see as well. Lots of great demos of things people built, designed, removed, cleaned-up, documented, and blogged! Everyone still at the ca … | Continue reading
Setting up some more customer support email filters. It’s gotten to where I have so much spam waiting for me, I hate to check support email, which is really bad for everyone. 🙁 | Continue reading
I have a few upcoming camping reservations, part of my quest to visit all 88 state parks in Texas. Got this email the other day about one of the reservations: Select sites at Abilene State Park are closed due to hazardous trees. Hazardous trees! Luckily the park changed their min … | Continue reading
From The Wall Street Journal: Apple, Nvidia Are in Talks to Invest in OpenAI. This makes sense to me. Apple is obviously developing their own AI models, but I don’t think they care about AI as much as OpenAI, Anthropic, and others who live and breathe it. See more commentary from … | Continue reading
There are some interesting things going on with the new Patreon-like Sub Club for the fediverse. Presumably it can send members-only posts via ActivityPub because it knows which followers are paid subscribers. I’m puzzled by the payment inside third-party apps, though… I wonder h … | Continue reading
I like this post from Marty McGuire about the IndieWeb and how the indieweb.org wiki can sometimes be overwhelming for new users: That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory … | Continue reading
I joked yesterday that enabling the AI features in Micro.blog for everyone might bankrupt me. I didn’t seriously think that it would be out of control, but API usage is sometimes hard to predict, and bills usually only trend in one direction: up. Now with 24 hours usage, seems to … | Continue reading
Fountain at Cosmic on 4th. I should go here more often. ☕️ | Continue reading
You get an AI! You get an AI! Starting to enable automatic photo keywords and search for all paid customers, no longer requiring Micro.blog Premium. Check out the video on YouTube here, recorded a few months ago. Now available to everyone. (I reserve the right to tweak this if it … | Continue reading
Tumblr’s getting started on porting the backend to WordPress: We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that. We’re talking about ru … | Continue reading
Years ago, mostly by accident, I started using green for block quotes in Markdown. Screenshot below. It’s weird because I never use green in actual published blog themes or Micro.blog on the web. I did a quick survey of other Markdown apps for inspiration and can’t really find a … | Continue reading
I was hoping the new iPhone Pro would have 12 GB of RAM. Sticking with 8 GB is enough for small AI models, but doesn’t seem as future-proof as the new Google Pixel at 16 GB. Apples to oranges? Dunno, that’s a really big difference. | Continue reading
Wow, has it really been a full year since the last Epilogue release for Android? Today I’ve gathered up all the recent changes and shipped them on Android, available at Google Play here. Screenshots still out of date, but it’s got the new icon and mostly the same features as iOS. | Continue reading
Nice write-up from Chris Enns on using Micro.blog for hosting short podcasts and adding stats with OP3. | Continue reading
Working in Android and Google Play a bunch this week. It’s just similar enough to the Apple ecosystem to feel like I know what I’m doing, even when I get lost in the weeds of compiler errors and dependencies changing out from under me. | Continue reading
We’ve got a new minor update to Epilogue for iOS ready. This release focuses on the context menu in the book details screen. Many people didn’t know the menu was there. Now there’s an ellipsis button to make it more discoverable, plus a couple other additions to the menu. | Continue reading
Jack Smith knows what he’s doing. January 6th indictment reworked to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling: Prosecutors have not dropped any of the four charges that they initially brought against the former president. However, the newly retooled indictment has carved out some o … | Continue reading
Submitted on app update to Apple and now feel kind of in limbo, like I can’t do anything else until they approve it. Checking email… reload, reload. It’s not even a major update. | Continue reading
Claude’s Artifacts feature is really well done. I asked it to create a web page with various info, and it previews the page right next to the chat, with a toggle to go from HTML to rendered. ChatGPT is still my go-to AI helper but this is impressive. | Continue reading
Good news from The Verge, the Biden administration is providing $521 million to states to expand EV charging. Houston’s getting a bunch of cash. Also interesting: grants for tribes in Washington and Florida to install charging stations on reservations. But not New Mexico? I-40 co … | Continue reading
Rainy morning at Lazarus on Airport. The sun is starting to come out now and I want the rain back. ☕️ | Continue reading
Craig Hockenberry’s slop is good pairs well with John Gruber’s post I linked to yesterday about trusting sources in a web filled with AI-generated content. Craig: Search engines you can’t trust because they are cesspools of slop is hard to imagine. But that end feels inevitable a … | Continue reading
A small, probably unfair, book rant… When I start a fantasy book and discover it’s written in first person, I groan a little. It takes a unique story or very good author to pull it off. (Thinking of Robin Hobb.) Even great books would be a little better in third person, with mult … | Continue reading
Molly White after speaking at XOXO: I mentioned that I’ve been feeling this a lot over the last few years, even as I too am witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. Working outside of that rot pile, and perhaps motivated by it, there … | Continue reading
New AI-based Alexa set to launch in October, possibly as a $10 subscription: The revamp of the voice assistant, which documents say will include a daily AI-generated news summary, would come just weeks before the U.S. presidential election. I think this price will be a tough sell … | Continue reading
We’re starting to know more about Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest: Durov was being temporarily detained on suspicion of involvement with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime, according to a press statement released b … | Continue reading
John Gruber: Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever. This is it … | Continue reading
Updates from @Mtt for folks using these themes: I just pushed out updates for both Tiny Theme and Sumo Theme with some bug fixes. Nothing major, but a couple of things that needed to be worked out. It’s a good idea to stay current on themes. Nothing auto-updates, so just click on … | Continue reading
Joe Crawford blogs about open web themes at XOXO: During XOXO, Andy Baio said “Every one of you should have a home on the web not controlled by a billionaire.” Cabel Sasser recommended that we all “put up the dang portfolio.” Molly White asked us to think back to “when was the fi … | Continue reading
Wow, I hadn’t heard about this yet but can’t wait. War of the Rohirrim coming at the end of the year, trailer here on YouTube. Love an animated Lord of the Rings. | Continue reading
More on the fediverse stars symbol, this time from Manuel Moreale: I am no fediverse citizen but I do consider myself a good citizen of the web. I try my best to make it a better place and I try to encourage people to own their corners of the web. Am I excluded from your fancy cl … | Continue reading
Nice update to ChatGPT for Mac: option-space now brings up results in a small floating window. Good for quick answers, but can still be collapsed back into the main window. Whoever is working on the Mac app is doing good work. It’s like a case study in sticking with AppKit. | Continue reading
Finished reading: The Exchange by John Grisham. A sequel to The Firm. I usually try to find something positive to say about a book… I didn’t enjoy this after the first few chapters. But it’s short and I wanted to know how it ended. 📚 | Continue reading