I’ve been running macOS in “Increase contrast” mode for nearly a year. Yesterday’s WWDC keynote, which debuted the Liquid Glass design across all of Apple’s OSes, reminded me to look at my settings again. Toggling that off again is an entirely new experience using macOS. It is li … | Continue reading
Craig Mod, writing for Literary Hub: When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music … | Continue reading
Chris Glass: I’d love to see the next version of macOS introduce some basic gestural controls that can be used when a camera is present. I’m talking easy stuff like scrolling, zooming, navigation… I’m sure they can throw on some visionOS gestures to boot. Click-through to his sit … | Continue reading
V.H. Belvadi: What we need is a notes app that looks and behaves like a rich text editor but saves in Markdown. And by this I do not mean the clunky ‘source editor mode’ or whatever Obsidian calls it, where the Markdown formatting characters appear and disappear constantly displa … | Continue reading
So, this happened. 😄 🐶 I hadn’t posted about our new family member Kona Barkley because several in the blogging community have lost their special pets recently. For the past two months, Eliza and I have been chasing this little guy around, cleaning up after him, t … | Continue reading
I’m going to keep this simple so that I actually end up publishing this prior to WWDc. Here is my list of wishes for this year across Apple’s operating systems. | Continue reading
Purchased a few new-to-me audio goodies over on Bandcamp including Somebody by Stefan Bohacek and FLOW by Mr Jennings. | Continue reading
Purchased Under Tangled Silence by Djrum at Simon Collison’s suggestion. I suggest you consider doing the same (that is, follow Simon’s advice on all music). | Continue reading
Jeremy Keith, in his interview on Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series: I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself … | Continue reading
TIL that when people said they read a book they sometimes mean they listened to a book. Ok, it wasn’t today that I learned this but I am hearing it a lot more often. | Continue reading
After over 8 years my Logitech MX Master 2S had a button jam. It was a fantastic mouse and I’m very happy with the life it had. So I immediately purchased the 3S which is better in a number of ways; USB-C, better buttons, better wheel. The Logi Options+ application, which Logitec … | Continue reading
Andy Adams: For some reason, years ago, we all agreed to spend most of our online time looking at photography on a canvas smaller than a cocktail napkin. It’s awful when you think about it: Thoughtful appreciation is the whole point of looking at photographs. And most of us canno … | Continue reading
My thanks to Steve Burge for inviting me on to The PublishPress Podcast. In this episode we chat about NerdPress, blogging, Hubbub, Hubbub’s Save This feature, social media, and the importance for publishers to own their own audience. Honorable mentions are Flipboard and Mastodon … | Continue reading
Unsure of what vibe coding is? See Simon Willison’s explanation of a term recently coined by Andrej Karpathy on X. It is a buzzword that is lighting the world in fire it seems. But I just want to quickly recommend; do not hire anyone (a person or an agency) that thinks vibe codin … | Continue reading
A few times over the last several decades I’ve unsubscribed from every social media account, RSS feed, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc. and started with a clean slate. My goal was, as I wrote about in 2012 on this blog, to break out of my echo chamber and hopefully expand my thi … | Continue reading
The sun has returned! I mean, it has always been there. Relatively speaking in the same place it was over the last few months. But the Earth’s tilt is such that as it revolves around the nearest star the portion on which I live (the northern hemisphere) is getting ever so slightl … | Continue reading
Gus Mueller argues that Apple needs to support developers running LLMs locally on the Mac, rather than simply try to catch up on their own. There isn’t one specific quote that I can pull out of Gus’ post that makes his point so do go and read his post. But he also said: So I […] | Continue reading
My personal OneDrive has seemingly gone off the rails. It reported that I had deleted thousands of files when I hadn’t. I’m also seeing many duplicated files for no known reason. Stranger still, my 2021 blog post about resetting OneDrive was my most popular post last week. Coinci … | Continue reading
It has been a long, cold, mostly icy winter. I’m not sure if age makes this feeling more acute, but the data seem to show that this winter has been colder than average. I can’t remember the last time I pined for spring this badly. But, just yesterday, as temperatures finally hit … | Continue reading
I have my reservations about whether or not blogs (specifically my blog) should federate content via ActivityPub. Isn't RSS enough? | Continue reading
It used to be, that I was the first person in line to download new software. I’d sign up for beta access, email developers for early looks at what they were working on, or even install beta software on my daily devices. But as time went on, I valued my productivity more than havi … | Continue reading
As you all know, I’m a big fan of a the Pomodoro Technique. Recently, while catching up on my backlog of Jack Cheng’s excellent Sunday series, I came across a snippet in Sunday #434 regarding an interview Cheng did with author Linda Sue Park. In that interview, she mentions whitt … | Continue reading
(The following is a very quick mind dump. Unedited. Raw.) I prefer black and white over color film for most of my photographic work. I do shoot color film. I mostly like to capture personal memories on color film while reserving black and white for my more serious, thought out ph … | Continue reading
Naz Hamid writes about how we should all keep social networks in their place; as methods of distribution rather than longterm means of connection or publication. He also contrasts that to how we could be thinking of our websites: “If you care about your creativity, and what you m … | Continue reading
Cedric Raguenaud argues that.. “When we label our photographic pursuits as “work,” we unconsciously impose constraints and expectations that belong in the professional world. Suddenly, we feel pressured to maintain visibility, chase originality, and demonstrate creativity, not fo … | Continue reading
My default web browser is set to Switcheroo – a custom-made macOS app by Zhenyi Tan (with some feedback and guidance from me). Whenever I click on a link a modal of sorts appears letting me choose which Safari profile I’d like to load the link within. Here is what that looks like … | Continue reading
Chris Armstrong, advocating for a digital garden over a blog structure: A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. Robin Rendle linked to Armstrong’s post recently and reading it reminded me of my … | Continue reading
This morning I checked in on Pixelfed, the ActivityPub-powered Instagram alternative. I had created a profile on an instance in 2021 and I check in from time-to-time to see how it is coming along. All told, the experience is fair. But I’m far more excited by how well it is connec … | Continue reading
Every person and organization has to make their own decisions about which social platforms they will have an account on, publish their content to, engage with, and support (with use or contributions both time and financial). There is no right answer for everyone. And, to many tha … | Continue reading
After purchasing the new MacBook Pro with a matte display (and loving it), this weekend I converted all of my devices to matte using screen protectors. | Continue reading
TIL about the iOS Camera app’s QuickTake video feature. | Continue reading
Saving links to get back to at a later time is a problem with a million great solutions. I even helped create an open source one that is still chugging along, works great, but hasn’t been updated in far too long. My current solution to this problem is an app called Anybox. I’ve b … | Continue reading
Thanks to Jack Cheng TIL what a digital mending circle is. | Continue reading
I feel like computer hardware (processing units, graphics/neural processors, memory, storage) has gotten mind bending fast while at the same time the software we run day-to-day has gotten noticeably poorer. I often think “what if the software engineers of the early days were to d … | Continue reading
I had no idea Anthony Bourdain had a Reddit account. I’ve only just recently begun to be able to start watching / reading his work again. /via Mia Quagliarello via Rolling Stone. | Continue reading
It turns out The Browser Company is just a company that is going to continue to build new web browsers ad infinitum. I suppose I should have known. | Continue reading
Simon Willison, from a clip I created of an episode of Around the Prompt: I love AI as an accelerant of personal productivity improvement. I plan on writing an update to my post from April 2023 about using ChatGPT as an accelerator where I’ll say something similar. Here is the cl … | Continue reading
I look back at my first year at NerdPress, what we've accomplished so far, and that I'm very excited for what's next. | Continue reading
A summary of some travel, the addition, the new laptop, and ActivityPub trials. | Continue reading
Manuel Moreale helps remove a new blogger's fear of having no readers by committing to be the first. Count me in too. | Continue reading
We now live in a time where many smaller social networks exist, some of them will likely exist for decades to come, and most of them may never reach hundreds of millions of monthly active users and that is a very good thing for the web. It is a bit messy, somewhat confusing, and … | Continue reading
TIL That in macOS Sequoia you can connect to your iPhone wirelessly to use as a camera for Zoom, etc. Perhaps this was always the case? But I have been plugging it into my Mac this whole time! | Continue reading
Switcheroo, the small open source macOS app I use as my default browser to recreate a feature I miss from Little Arc, has reached 1.0.1 and has a new icon! Thanks to Zhenyi Tan for continuing to contribute updates. (See also) | Continue reading
TIL The Apple News app has a setting to only show stories from channels I’m subscribed to. I wish I had known this sooner! | Continue reading
This morning I strolled into the darkroom fully planning to mix a fresh batch of color film chemistry to develop some film tomorrow. I was certain I had at least one fresh pack. I’m all out! And, most places I purchase chemistry is out of stock. I guess I’ll use tomorrow to make … | Continue reading
The pro move when updating to a new Mac (or, new iPhone, iPad or updating to a new OS version) is to leave the device plugged in for nearly an entire day while all of the indexes are being rebuilt. This may be especially true now with Apple Intelligence. | Continue reading