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What, You Have a Blog? Really?
I overheard people at the office talking about their weekend activities. I wasn’t in the conversation, but I’m always prepared for those. I never talk about my writing hobby or the many websites I maintain. Most people would find this strange. They’d say things like, “What, you have a blog? Really?” Yes, that’s right. I prefer to skip all that and talk about a walk in the park, in the forest, and maybe about photography. Blogging is like people collecting stamps back in the day. Sad.
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According to MacRumors: New MacBook With A18 Pro Chip Spotted in Apple Code
That is interesting. I want Apple to be funky on this one with a unique design proposition. Obviously they are going after the Chromebook market here, if rumors are true.
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Having to immerse myself in a different digital ecosystem, specifically Microsoft’s, helps me appreciate the strengths of both Apple and Microsoft. Does this mean I should consider switching to Android? I’ll leave that for you to guess. 🤭
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One of the fun things when starting a new job with a new set of digital tools is to rethink old habits and change what was broken. Information classifications and tasks management are seeing a big rethink which is, of course, highly tied to Microsoft 365 tools (To Do, OneNote, Outlook and their tied integration).
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Under macOS Tahoe, I decided to remove any menu items that have a Control Center equivalent. Is this the start of a trend? I hope developers will add support for Control Center when it ships.
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This article points to an interesting prospect about the future of the Mac menu bar usage: we could see a possible migration of Mac utilities from menu bar items to the Control Center, thanks to the introduction of third-party Control Center applets. Provided developers add support for these, we will probably see a reduction on menu bar items, freeing much space in the menu bar. This might explain why Apple added the menu bar transparent mode.
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I’m starting to like Windows 11 and Office 365 more than I expected. Who knew? OneNote is a solid note-taking app, and Outlook Tasks is also solid.
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My new Windows PC laptop at the office makes me realize that the best Office 365 experience (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, OneNote) is on a PC, not on a Mac, which will always be a second citizen for Microsoft.
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With this year’s Apple OS releases, all Apple apps appear to have a similar look. Is this expected? Where’s the fun? Does everything need to be identical to be more approachable?
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I’m happy that, in Canada, we don’t have Apple Pay (yet?) because otherwise we would be flooded by ads in the Wallet app. 🤦🏻♂️
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☝🏻 Glass > Liquid Glass.
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My current tolerable settings in iOS 26 beta 2.
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Never take your Mac for granted. Did my first day at my new job and got my new Windows laptop. Quite a beefy one for that mather: 32 GB of RAM, 500 GB of NVMe SSD and an i5 Intel CPU, large display. Yet, running Windows 11, this thing can be so slow and battery life never gets past 1.5 hours. Less than two hours!!! What is this HPE Probook? About 25% of CPU is spend on security-related processes… AT ALL THE FUCKIN time!
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How many options and switches do we have today in Settings.app, on all platforms, because Apple had to step back… as a recent example, on macOS, we now have “Menu Bar \ Show Menu Bar Background” so that we can get our dear and readable menu bar… Settings is getting bloated with options that are the consequences of Apple’s indecision in UI design.
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On iOS 26, why is this panel not Glass, just like the notifications center?
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I can confirm that beta2 doesn’t bring much fixes, on the iPad, at least. In fact, it might be worse than beta1. Investigating… 😐😑
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Too stupid to wait, upgrading my iPhone 15 Pro Max to beta 2. 🫣
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Today, I tested my LG UltraFine 4K monitor on my wife’s Windows 11 laptop, but the monitor wouldn’t power up, and the Windows Device Manager also failed to recognize it. This means I’ll probably need a USB hub to go with my future work laptop if I want to use that monitor. I’ll probably buy a new monitor specially for my work laptop, since the company will be paying for it.
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Micro.blog Question Challenge
Jim Mitchell, on his blog:
As is customary after posting my own, I’m extending the challenge to Numeric Citizen (@numericcitizen) and David Johnson (@crossingthethreshold) to answer the same questions:
Here are my answers!
- Why did you start a blog in the first place? It was when Apple had iWeb, part of MobileMe. It was a family thing only. iWeb died, so did my blog. Eventually, I returned to blogging on Blogger, now part of Google, while developing iPhone apps in 2009. It lasted until 2013. Then it all died. I returned to blogging in 2015, using WordPress, then migrated to Ghost and Micro.blog; both serve different purposes. The rest is history.
- Have you blogged on other platforms before? Yes, all in all, I experimented with iWeb, Blogger, WordPress, Micro.blog, Write.as, Substack, Medium. Am I missing one? Oh yeah, Scribble.pages! Sorry, Vincent!
- Why did you choose Micro.blog? Back in 2018, when it launched. Initially, I wasn’t sure about it and viewed it as an experiment (I shared some thoughts about this). I went all in during COVID. Couldn’t be happier.
- Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another application? It depends. Most of the time, I wrote on the web editor, but with recent updates to the Mac app, I do it more and more on the Mac app. Oh, MarsEdit is also one app that I use, from time to time.
- When do you feel most inspired to write? All the time, mainly in the mornings when my head is still pristine (can’t tell if this is something we can write!)
- Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? Most of the time, I write and then publish, especially on Micro.blog. For longer posts, I let it simmer for a while.
- What’s your favorite post on your blog? So hard to tell because what I write is so short. The whole thing is what I’m most proud of: having the time and the gut to think and write about anything away from big platforms, it’s something to be proud of IMO.
- Any future plans for your blog? Since last year, I decided to focus more on what I already have. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So, Micro.blog forever! For now. I recently launched “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website with the idea to replace another website built using Craft. 🤭
Thanks for calling me out on that, @jimmitchell ! How about @abc ? Will he catch the call?
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I’m eagerly anticipating the release of beta 2 of iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 from Apple this week. I’m particularly interested in seeing how much the Liquid Glass feature will be toned down, if at all. I won’t lose faith until the public beta is available.