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Started working on a blog post today and had to actually go do some research to make sure I was right. This is a benefit of occasional long-form writing. It’s a way to refine how you feel about something, learning a bunch in the process.

Sunset Cliffs, II. San Diego, December 2024 #aowsimages #photography #blackandwhite

Mac mini port history

Window to America. San Francisco, September 2024 #aowsimages

Got a novel in you? Be it a thriller, romance or even your office Christmas speech, @ulyssesapp can help you write better and faster 📖⚡. MindNode and Ulysses support the TextBundle file format to exchange files, making it easy to brainstorm in MindNode and write in Ulysses ✍️ Let the creativity …

Giants of metal and glass, I. San Francisco, September 2024 #aowsimages

Consider this a soft launch for the website of my consulting business. It’s still not fully complete, but hopefully soon. Any feedback on content, style, etc., is welcome. Thanks to @mtt and @jsonbecker for suggesting GitHub + Netlify as a free option. Coding directly in HTML was…fun.

The EU vs US iPhone debate – Manu

Hey, ABC News, you should be embarrassed by how you allowed that man to yell about anything he wanted. One person said he got 9 extra minutes by butting in, and they wouldn’t cut his mic.

“The EU version of iOS is the most fun version of iOS!”

It just occurred to me that Apple (and other “gatekeepers”) are getting a bit of their own medicine with the DMA. Developers in the App Store have always had to live with unclear and changing rules, as well as the risk that Apple will effectively shut down your business with an absolute rejection. …

“The key is that the DMA is not a targeted attack on the App Store model. It’s a sweepingly broad attack on the entire idea of integration.” — I think the key missing here is that the DMA targets integration *at the scale of designated gatekeepers*. That’s an important distinction. It isn’t simply …

How writing can help you solve problems

I was excited about what I had heard about JPEGXL. But this sounds terrifying.

1950s and 1960s Motel Postcards https://atomic-chronoscaph.tumblr.com/post/749506698772905984/1950s-and-1960s-motel-postcards

https://www.tumblr.com/trailerpark2/758909331985121281?source=share

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 bankrupts me.) …

The problem I see with Apple today is that it is a Cargo Cult. Early 2000s Apple was not afraid to kill darlings — they were not scared of disruption, and best of all was to disrupt yourself. That's not true anymore. It's “And Jobs said there shall be a store, and thou shalt take 30%, and all will …

U.S. Considers Breaking Up Google as Antitrust Remedy

Introducing stoot for Micro.blog

Pluralistic: Apple vs the "free market" (15 Aug 2024)

Must-read blog post by Cory Doctorow, connecting enshittification to Apple and the legal agreements that give corporations power: Apple doesn’t oppose regulation; Apple loves regulation, so long as they’re the ones doing the regulating. They want to be able to shape and define the digital market, …

Forbidden Fruit

Microsoft has spent the better part of the 15 years trying to win back developers and users post Vista. Sometimes succeeding (VS Code, which is just good software), sometimes failing (Bing), often fumbling with bad decisions (Recall), but despite being THE platform for games, people use Steam, not …

The richest company in the world (congrats guys, you’re back on top) being fucking rent-seeking pieces of shit isn’t going to earn your precious services more $$$, it’s just going to convince a whole new generation of users to avoid the App Store for all payments and have a distaste towards your …

Already we see how these sorts of policies play out poorly for Apple: the Apple Vision Pro is so far, an expensive flop that has very few apps and has made its devs very little money (I’ve talked to many. Only a few have done “well”) and most are wholly unwilling to even build an app for it. These …

Like a lot of 90s kids, I grew up on Windows at home but used Macs at school and switched to Macs in college during the 2000s. We bought iPods, not Zunes. MacBooks, not Vista. iPhones, not Windows Phones (or Windows Mobile). iPads, not Android tablets. But 2010s kids have other options. And Apple’s …

People like me are too deep into the Apple ecosystem to ever reasonably leave. Until/unless they fully neuter macOS, I’m here for life. And I’ll realistically never use Android. But the next generation of users might use an iPhone, but they also rely on the web and services from other companies. …

I miss when Apple was the underdog. As someone who was a Mac user in the mid-90s, it was a thrill to watch them grow in the 2000s. But now every decision they make affects millions of people. It’s just not possible to make everybody happy, and every little flaw is magnified. At this point it feels …

Church of Light, I. Galicia, May 2023 #aowsimages

I signed up to all my Patreon subscriptions on their website years ago. They don’t /need/ an iOS app. I never use the iOS app. I’ve tried it but it offers nothing and takes 30%. Just go all-in on your website, Patreon. Tell Apple to fuck off. Let the open web win again.

Bffr Apple, this is so anti-user for absolutely no reason. MacOS is still the best desktop operating system but Apple seems content on trying to change that every year as they make decisions that are bad and also diametrically opposed to anything a pro user would actually want. …

OpenAI model safety, societal impact manton.org

iPhone 15 Pro Nutrition Label

What the "can't do real work on an iPad" narrative is really about

Cookie banners show everything that's wrong with the EU

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers https://www.404media.co/email/87e0e07a-7d24-4788-b417-1821b40c8c1d/

PSA The Verge has 2 main RSS feeds, one which is truncated and another that has full text of all posts. Per Inoreader’s stats, most people subscribe to the truncated version. Maybe even you! Here’s the full text feed if you wanted it. https://www.theverge.com/rss/front-page/index.xml …

https://stevejobsarchive.com/exhibits/objects-of-our-life stevejobsarchive.com

The AT&T Data Breach Shows Why RCS Can’t Be Trusted and the Downside of Apple Adding Support for It in iOS 18

Got mad about Apple's new privacy ad so I wrote about it. Points for the creative mashup, though. #Apple #Google #Safari #privacy https://www.finertech.com/2024/07/16/flock-must-be-one-of-apples-most-disingenuous-ads-in-a-long-time/

Google Chrome, Along With Other Popular Chromium Browsers, Grants System Monitoring Privileges to *.google.com Domains

Another service that only offers a login option of “email me a magic link!” instead of a proper password field Another chunk of time wasted switching to an app I didn’t want to open or deal with, refreshing my inbox, refreshing my inbox, checking spam, and also by the way refreshing my inbox and …

🔥🎙️ Jony Ive talks his childhood, learning to craft, coming to Apple before Steve Jobs came back, and then meeting Steve for the first time, lots more. Wonderful podcast episode. 36 minutes well-invested. …

@numericcitizen Yes, I'm pretty much siding with this, and it seems similar for each and every technology established within, say, the last two decades: We didn't have enough time so far to comprehend most of the implications of using these tools, the pitfalls and threats, the side-effects and …

@John @ianb @dave You're under the mistaken belief that the aspects of the DMA pertaining to Apple are primarily about the App Store and app distribution. Those are significant issues, no question, but the existential threat the DMA poses to Apple is that it forbids vertical integration. The DMA …

Perfectly encapsulated: "The “public” in “public web” means free to access; it does not mean it's free to use." https://lmnt.me/blog/training-ai.html

"Welcome to Tiny Awards 2024. Last year, we decided to launch Tiny Awards, a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be." #web #smallWeb 🍜 Tiny Awards 2024 https://tinyawards.net/ …

As of today, MacStories is disallowing all known AI crawlers, including ChatGPT and Applebot. If you want to read our site, you should use a web browser or RSS. ✌️

From a dozen friends & developers who had their apps Sherlocked, to Apple not addressing the ethical and environmental impact of integrating AI at the system level, and solutions to problems that do not actually exist, that was the worst keynote I’ve ever witnessed. In many ways, I get it. Apple …

Speaking of AI at WWDC24: Apple originally missed the mp3 wave. Came late to CD burning. Was a reluctant adopter of streaming. Declared “Blu-ray is a bag of hurt.” Fell behind in Network Computers and 5G. (Yes, in tech business timing is everything.)

Yup, this is the issue. It's a high-trust sort of app, and it doesn't take too much to lose that trust. I just uninstalled the app myself. Fortunately, I made a video about Hidden Bar a few months ago so I just opened that again and am back in business. …

@numericcitizen Not sure if that's possible. Clicking an icon copies the SVG code to create a vector. There may be a way to generate/convert to PNG, but I didn't see that option on the site.

This is a great example of the kind of hoops that iPad users have to jump through to do do something as basic as manage two windows. The iPad doesn't have to become the Mac, but something this basic shouldn't be so hard. …

Tomorrow’s headlines today: “GPT-4o as a smartphone app will slaughter Ai Pin and R1 as dedicated AI devices.”

After WWDC 2022 Federico Viticci was very loud in his advocacy that Stage Manager should be optimized to run on older iPads many of which had only 4 to 6GB of memory. In his recent post about Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right - MacStories he’s complaining that Stage Manager should do …

Having read and watched through all the iPad coverage, it really seems like a lot of people are aligned on the top items where iPad falls down • The Files app infrastructure • The too-restrictive audio system • Background processing • Multiple user support "Just put macOS on it” is the fallback for …

The iPad Pro is like a drag racing car - it's all engine. Massive over-powered, but somehow still not usable as a regular car.

#AppleEvent roundup: - New iPad Pro models ✅ - Redesigned magic trackpad ✅ - FaceTime camera moved to the long edge of the iPad ✅ - New 12.9'' iPad Air ✅ - New Apple Pencil Pro ✅ #iPad #iPadOS #ApplePencilPro #M4

Add depth of field to your screenshots/images: - Take a screenshot, upload it (link below), - Drag it around, scroll to zoom in/out - Click to focus Pretty cool idea. Free. https://www.blurmatic.com #photography #Editing #Screenshot

Thanks @vladcampos for having me as a guest on his show this week! Here’s a link to the video on YouTube. We talked about blogging, where Micro.blog came from, my book, and much more about the social web.

The problem is not "using the phone". It's that we do nothing but loading ourselves with bad emotion. There is nothing wrong with phones if you use your phone to read good books and connect with intelligent minds through space and time. (Normal books will do as well.) There is nothing wrong with …

The Magic Is Gone

On Micro.blog, Scribbles, And Multi-homing

@numericcitizen yes, it’s dedicated to the photoblogging challenge, but it could be adapted for travel photoblogging. Although there might be better shortcuts for that purpose if you’re using the Tiny Theme. Something like @Mtt’s Adaptive Photo Layout paired with a travel post template maybe. We …

I just updated my ‘MB Photoblogger’ shortcut to version 1.2: Adjusted the composition of the final text to display better in Mastodon clients (image on the bottom, thanks @burk) Split up the RSS results to make it easier to determine the day’s prompt, and double-check that it’s for the correct day …

Find the Mac Pro 🔎

Nice new blogroll from Molly White. I love this part of the web… Sharing links to interesting blogs, discovering new writers, seeing how people shape their space on the web. That’s what it’s about.

I added a new app to my wish list today, Rond Life Mapper and added some details on this Scribbles post. It’s one of those apps that logs your location and activities, but this one, unlike many has a good privacy policy and promises not to be a battery hog. https://scribbles.page/write/2480 …

The process of any AI product is by definition thoughtless, careless, meaningless. A lot has been said about the lack of respect of AI industry recycling creative work asif they owned it. It's not nice that creatives are cut out financially. What annoys me more is that cutting human thought out of …

Every designer knows this thought: "Everything made around me has a form and a function. So everything had to be shaped by a designer. But who are they? Where are they? And why—if they really were designers—why were they so careless?" Seeing the rise and fall of the interaction design industry I am …

@manton @pratik For months I have wanted a mashup of Micro.blog and Mastodon. Some way to combine the two so that I can have my boosts and Mastodon timeline while still retaining Micro.blog's focus. I haven't even got a precise vision of what that would look like and even if I did have that vision I …

@numericcitizen I'm glad it's been added as a feature but I don't go out of my way to look. If I click through to an interesting post I'll usually check to see if they have added a blogroll and then I'll look. But too often I just see the repetition of bigger name bloggers in which case it's not a …

Hey @gruber , I can't really put my finger on it exactly, but your commentary recently has irked me. You don’t seem to bother trying to understand cultural context when talking about anything that isn't happening in the context of the US. Especially your commentary on the DMA seems narrow-minded …

🥕 I was a very loyal user of Carrot Weather for many years. Like many, I tried other apps. None stuck, until Mercury came along. Today it hit me: I haven’t launched Carrot in a (very long) while. 

I am supportive of good legislation in tech (especially for privacy and user rights) but this Apple DOJ complaint is everything that can be bad about government tech regulation: an ignorant, pointless exercise which will likely hamper making meaningful laws that help us as users. …

This new video for Humane’s pin is by far the most effective pitch they’ve made for their device. They hide the latency well by talking too. I’m sure they want it to be faster and whoever can crack AI performance is going to succeed.

I stumbled upon this YouTube video on 5 ways to start journaling. As an avid journaler, I’m impressed and highly recommend that everyone watch it. youtube.com/...

@tbridge @gruber Bullshit. You’re all responsible for the worst that you do. That’s how it works. You vote. You lose. Things happen. You’re still responsible. Democracy is predicated upon a people engaged in the body politic and who take responsibility for the results. Only through that sense of …

I really like this one.

"Banning TikTok, rather than passing comprehensive federal privacy legislation, is nothing but xenophobic theater. China can (and does) already buy a ton of data on Americans because we refuse to pass any regulation regarding data brokers who make this data available..." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ …

I just updated my ‘Publish to Micro.blog’ shortcut to version 1.1: Added a setup step to specify your microblog’s ID number so that posts always get sent to the right blog. (Handy if you accidentally leave Micro.blog set to one of your other blogs.) If left blank, it will default to the last blog …

@numericcitizen Fabric Internet OS is something I would've thought you'd already have dipped a toe in... Glad to introduce you to something new!

The Writer Forte: first impressions

Added option for monthly email newsletters to collect posts from any category. Added support for converting hashtags in blog posts to Bluesky hashtags in cross-posting.

As I transition to stricter separation between business and personal, is there a good modern KVM? I would like to easily swap between my Mac Mini and MacBook Pro. I’m using a Studio Display and pretty much all USB-C. I realize the answer may be, “USB-C dock, and plug and unplug”.

Incredibly heavy, dark, and fascinating. Sound on. No spoilers... http://apps.frontline.org/inheritance/

Rules for my personal blogging

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two

Almost every comparison of two technologies that nominally solve the same problem falls into the same fallacy. We judge one technology on the design goals of the other and then claim supremacy because of intentional differences in trade-offs made to achieve different ends.

Nazis are openly mingling and making friends at the CPAC conference, Trump is getting cheers for a speech where he promises his “ultimate and absolute revenge” and another speaker got big cheers when he promised an “end to democracy.” This is fine. …

Simplified pricing in Micro.blog manton.org

Technology Report Card 2023

I think I’m Weird Online: I don’t feel the need to catch up. I don’t feel the desire to “debate for good”. I don’t require Likes and Algorithms. I don’t assume all technological advancements are good. I don’t believe anyone has a right to tell others how to spend their time, especially online. …

Apple is twisting the truth manton.org

We ❤️ @bonfire If you haven't had a chance to check it out, here is a great article by @deadsuperhero https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/bonfire-nextgen-framework/ #bonfire #fediverse #weDistribute

Size of an Apple Vision Pro display panel compared to an iPhone 15 Pro & Apple Watch Ultra.

@numericcitizen No comment. Pretend you didn't see that. 🙂