My quick 5-minute demo from FediForum is now on YouTube. I show off Micro.blog and fediverse integration. It’s a whirlwind tour of several different things including how we think about cross-posting. | Continue reading

Just published Core Intuition 578 about the MarsEdit 5.1 release, AI and copyright, software licensing, and more. Lots of good stuff in this episode I think. | Continue reading

Working more this weekend on the feature I teased about a few days ago. Work has accelerated and now I’m confident in the design and technical bits. The hardest part is pulling myself back every day to work on smaller fixes and improvements. | Continue reading

Castro is back online and Tiny is considering finding a new home for the app, via Rob Fahrni. For Micro.blog we host podcasts, and we have our Wavelength app, but we’ve thought about doing more. Kind of neat to imagine Castro in our suite of apps if we had a non-$0 acquisition bu … | Continue reading

Glass announced they are raising their prices for next year, but it looks like even with the change I would save money if I switched to the yearly plan. Interesting to see how different companies handle yearly discounts. 50% off is an unusually good deal. | Continue reading

December already! I still have 9 books left on my reading goal for the year. I’m halfway through a couple things already so I might hit it if I read more over the holidays. | Continue reading

Nice approach in iA Writer 7 for pasting ChatGPT output into your writing and tracking your edits to make it your own. There is also a Markdown extension for attribution in a range of text. However, I found this part of their blog post a little puzzling: While the format is open, … | Continue reading

Seems there aren’t many notes apps that are end-to-end encrypted. Obsidian is one, and there’s also Day One for journals. Wondering how important this is to folks. Personally, I like that Day One is encrypted but I would use it even if it wasn’t. And most of my notes are just on … | Continue reading

Putting on my sys admin hat this week, evaluating what we can improve. Our primary MySQL server has been running for over three years without a restart. Not bad! (Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it.) | Continue reading

One year ago today, ChatGPT was released. It’s not that often that products truly change things. Whether you think artificial general intelligence is just a few years off or that it will remain a pipe dream forever, there’s no question that some form of AI is going to be part of … | Continue reading

Not sure what to make of Elon Musk’s interview yesterday. It’s so easy to say he’s unhinged that I’m questioning whether I should dig deeper. Ultimately my core belief about huge social networks hasn’t changed in years: too much centralized power opens the door for user-hostile, … | Continue reading

MarsEdit 5.1 is out with support for posting to Mastodon and improvements for Micro.blog too, like attaching photos in the micropost window and updated character counts. Congrats @danielpunkass! | Continue reading

Usually I work on improvements to Micro.blog for a couple days or weeks and roll them out. Very rarely does something sit for months before customers see it. But sometimes very big features need a little more process and restraint… Working on something new off and on that will la … | Continue reading

Interesting conversation about web hosting and AI in this interview on Decoder with Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix. But this also stuck out to me: The developers, they just read a very fantastic post by somebody on how to do something in a much nicer or interesting way, and then th … | Continue reading

Playing around with Raindrop.io today. It’s really nicely done. I’ve added support for importing Raindrop.io bookmarks to Micro.blog bookmarks. There’s also an API, so maybe we’ll have more integration later. | Continue reading

There have been a bunch of “what apps am I using?” blog posts recently, inspired by an episode of Hemispheric Views. Robb Knight has a page with links to other people’s posts. Here’s my list: Mail Client: Hey Mail Server: Fastmail and Hey Notes: Ulysses ✅ To-Do: Basecamp, GitH … | Continue reading

I’ve been eyeing a specific domain name for several months. It’s a premium TLD and I can’t really justify the price. But every once in a while like today I come this close to grabbing it, then talk myself out of it. Whew. | Continue reading

Reminded by this post from Vincent that Arq exists. I used it years ago when I was frustrated with something from Backblaze, but I didn’t stick with it. Going back to it, backing up to S3 and skipping a backup subscription altogether. | Continue reading

Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch about Evernote’s experiments with a more limited free plan: …a pop-up message that informed them that unless they upgraded to a paid plan, they would now be limited to only 1 notebook and 50 notes. That change would dramatically limit the service … | Continue reading

Roomba vs. dog. It takes a lot for Ollie to move… Certainly more than a robot nudge. If he’s sitting in front of a door you want to open, for example, forget it. | Continue reading

Fixing one last thing after our server problems yesterday. I almost finished it last night but realized I was too tired to risk making a mistake restoring data. Much better in the morning with coffee and triple-checking backups and scripts. One day we’ll have a full-time sysadmin … | Continue reading

We talk about domain names as your web identity, how it’s more permanent and meaningful when you’re microblogging on your own site instead of someone else’s domain. Some social network is down? Shrug. Your web site is down? That feels personal. We’ve had good uptime but it’s gott … | Continue reading

Dealing with fallout from another server failure. We have pretty good redundancy most places, except ironically some of the most stable parts that always felt low on the list to prioritize because they never failed… until they did. Picking up the pieces, improving a few things fo … | Continue reading

Cool driving by REI on Black Friday and seeing the store closed. Kudos for thinking of employees and customers before profit. On the other hand, we participated in the shopping craziness by getting a Roomba. Figured the vacuum robot tech must be well along by now. Mixed results i … | Continue reading

Super Mario Wonder is excellent on replay. I’m slowly finding all the levels I missed. Some of the levels are actually kind of difficult, which I love, and seems rare since the NES and SNES days. | Continue reading

The ads on TV for Humane’s pin are pretty effective. I don’t expect much success for the first version of the pin, but I do think they’re on to something if they can keep iterating. Best comparison is the Newton — a little ahead of its time. | Continue reading

Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃 I finished Mario Wonder. Great game, I’ve been playing a couple levels every day since its release. Missed a few things that I can still go back to, or play different characters. ️ | Continue reading

We just posted a new Core Intuition all about the chaos at OpenAI over the last several days, including the resolution with Sam Altman returning as CEO. The full episode is all on this, the relationship with Microsoft, the odd company structure of OpenAI, and the impact of AI on… … | Continue reading

Happy to keep growing the list of formats that Micro.blog can import to your blog. As of today: Twitter, WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Markdown, Substack, Goodreads, and Write.as. Plus cross-posting out of Micro.blog: Medium, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr … | Continue reading

Doing a little more tinkering with Stimulus. @vincent and I have talked about refactoring more of my clunky, old-school JavaScript to use Stimulus. It would at least provide a nice structure for all the code without feeling too abstracted and bloated. | Continue reading

Most companies would delay any product changes if they were in the middle of leadership chaos. Rolling out ChatGPT Voice to everyone this week says a lot about their confidence. Who is even CEO? Who cares, let’s ship it. | Continue reading

Pretty big deal that Spotify didn’t have to pay Google the usual in-app purchase fees. The inconsistencies across developers is just as unsustainable as the high 15% or 30% cut. As I’ve been saying forever, the ultimate solution is side-loading and external payments. Getting clos … | Continue reading

Marlin from Finding Nemo: I just can’t afford any more delays and you’re one of those fish that cause delays. And sometimes it’s a good thing. There’s a whole group of fish. They’re delay fish. I think about this when I’m trying to get something done and not making progress. What … | Continue reading

Catching up this morning on all the OpenAI and Microsoft news. Hard to overstate how dramatic a weekend this was for the tech world. As a (small) OpenAI customer, I’m not sure where this leaves me. One thing is clear: Satya Nadella is a really impactful CEO. He turned a crisis in … | Continue reading

Wanted to make my blog Creative Commons licensed again, so I created a little Micro.blog plug-in that adds a rel="license" tag. Defaults to “CC BY” but can be changed to another license in the settings. Not sure yet how licenses should interact with our future AI overlords, thoug … | Continue reading

Om Malik on the OpenAI news: …the big question is what this really means in the long term for the forward momentum of artificial intelligence and its impact on the broader technology ecosystem. While it might sound pessimistic, the past 24 hours have exposed a massive and obvious … | Continue reading

The latest Core Intuition has everything about my road trip, getting COVID, seeing U2 in Vegas, and then back to blog-related topics with the state of Tumblr under Automattic’s ownership. | Continue reading

I’ve been quite happy with OpenAI as a developer. We use their API to transcribe podcasts hosted on Micro.blog. It’s cheap enough that we can include the feature for everyone at no extra charge. I’ll admit I don’t know much about Sam Altman beyond the superficial, though. Ready f … | Continue reading

Friday bombshell, Sam Altman is gone from OpenAI: Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board … | Continue reading

Amazing that we’re only a month and a half away from Steamboat Willie being in the public domain. Hoping animators experiment with remixing it, within the limits of copyright. I think there’s a lot you could do. Probably won’t have time myself but maybe one day. | Continue reading

Lillihub is a new Micro.blog web client by @heyloura! It’s got a bunch of features and a really unique style compared to the other Micro.blog apps. Check it out if you’re looking for something new or just want to try a different browsing experience. | Continue reading

Very positive review of Coyote vs. Acme over at Cartoon Brew. This is the film that was finished but cancelled anyway as a tax write-off. Did the Warner CEO even watch it? When money comes before art, you’ve lost your way. (This is even worse than when Warner botched the marketin … | Continue reading

Good news from Bluesky that a public web interface is coming this month. They’ve had a “staging” web app, but it required signing in. Also: As a reminder, Bluesky is a public social network, so your posts, likes, etc. have always been publicly accessible through the API. We desig … | Continue reading

Great news that Apple will be adopting RCS, via 512 Pixels. iMessage is the biggest lock-in to Apple platforms for me. RCS won’t change that overnight, but if it makes Android interoperability better, I’m for it. | Continue reading

Kudos to Matt Mullenweg for making public the internal memo about the future of Tumblr. It seems they’ll pivot to a smaller team, acknowledging that maybe Tumblr can’t be competitive with other massive social networks, but could do just fine as a more niche platform: We are shift … | Continue reading