Apps & Services
I love apps and enjoy testing new services to improve my workflows. These posts discuss my experiences with them.
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For those who are curious, I just updated “my Micro-Workflows Explained” page to list all my ChatGPT and AI use cases. I’m not shy to expose when I’m using AI in my creative work1. The list of use cases is growing and reflects the relative invasion of AI in our digital landscape.
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Who’s shy of telling people about using Spell Checkers or Lightroom filters? 🤔 ↩︎
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In Search of Augmented Capabilities Using AI
I want to augment my creative capabilities1. I’m considering the best way to pay for Augmented Intelligence (AI) services2. I’m currently subscribing to MidJourney for imagery. ChatGPT with GPT-4 is not cheap at 20 $US a month, but I get Dall.E 3. Raycast enables GPT-4 for 8 $US on top of my 8 $US, totalling 16 $US monthly, but I don’t get Dall.E 3. I prefer MidJourney over Dall.E 3 as it seems to allow more diversity in requests. And there is the ChatGPT client to consider. Raycast is one of them. MacGPT is another one. Even Grammarly and Craft are ChatGPT clients3. I need to continue my analysis. Ideas? Suggestions?
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I wish Inoreader offered some form of article summarization via AI for some of my feeds…
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Looking for a Useful and Secure Search Engine
I’m fed up of Google’s search capabilities and business model. Search results quality has gone downhill in recent years. I don’t like the visual design of Google’s online products in general, especially Google Search results formatting. What search engine are you using? Are you willing to pay for using one, if yes, which one? 🤔
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👉🏻 I just finished updating my complete content creator toolset with recent changes in my workflows. Enjoy the ride!
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Since iOS 17.1 in Music.app, Favourite 🌟 replaced Love ❤️? What if I love a song but it is not one of my favourites? 🤔
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I spent some time on Bluesky this morning… found out that I have 6 invite codes. Is anyone looking for one of them? Let me know.
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A recent addition to Mailbrew made me discover Brief.news1. So far, I like what I’m seeing. News briefs are generated with AI (with LLM models, I’m guessing). It’s a great use case of AI, right here. The combination with Mailbrew makes perfect sense, too.
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It’s a free service for now. I wonder what is their business model? 🤔 ↩︎
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I’m a subscriber of Inoreader, but I read the feeds using Reeder 90% of the time. I only wish that Reeder could update the engagement stats on Inoreader. Is that even possible from a RSS client perspective? I highly doubt it. You’ve got an opinion on this subject? Let me know.
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Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17 by Timac:
Objective-C is still at the core of iOS and is used directly or indirectly by most apps
The adoption of Swift and SwiftUI continues to grow rapidly
The share of Objective-C, C and C++ continues to decrease
It’s a must-read for the curious around here.
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Why am I getting this on YouTube to watch one of my own videos? I’m using Safari and tried disabling ad blocker, NextDNS, StopTheMadness. Works fine on Firefox. 🤔 Help!
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There is a Midjourney plugin for Raycast… but man this is hard to configure and make it working. Moving on for now.
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For those on Craft, this is my release analysis for v2.5.18 that just came out.
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404 - Page Not Found
I have an issue with Short.io. I want to contact their support to find a solution to something that partially works, but no contact information is available in the /Support section. The /Blog section shows a small “Contact Us” button leading to a page not found error. There is no mail address either. They ask for $ 250 / year for a “Personal” subscription plan. How can I trust them if I cannot contact them for support?1🤔
The problem: not all links are leading to the destination page under the go.numericcitizen.me domain name. Why? This used to work for all links, but it’s no longer true. Why? Exhibit one: this link works. This one won’t.
Instead of 404 - Page Not Found, this should be 404 - Support Not Available 😔
Update: I got my answer after chatting with tech support through their chatbox on their website, which wasn’t initially showing because of content blocking in Safari. 🤦🏻♂️ All is fine now.
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Their Twitter account is a ghost town; the last tweet was posted in 2021. ↩︎
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A Definitive Solution to a Simple Problem
I finally found the right setup to definitively fix my audio record quality. The problem triggering this endless trial-and-error journey is that the Blue Yeti microphone can be too sensitive and pick up too much background noise1. On paper, the macOS Voice Isolation recording should fix this. However, ScreenFlow 10.0.9 has issues with audio recording from a USB microphone while Voice Isolation is active2.
The solution? Use Audio Highjack3 to record from the USB microphone with Voice Isolation active and output to the ScreenFlow audio capture driver. When recording, I start the Audio Hijack session, then switch to ScreenFlow and hit record. Voilà. I do use Adobe Podcast Audio Enhancer too. The results are quite good! You can hear it in my latest podcast episode. A screenshot of my Audio Hijack workflow is included so you can look at it4.
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People in the house don’t always pay attention when I’m recording my stuff. We could hear them quite easily. ↩︎
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The sound is highly distorted. It’s a known issue, apparently. ↩︎
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Audio Hijack is a superb piece of software if you ask me. ↩︎
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More tiles are included so I can make sure there are no lingering background noises after Voice Isolation makes its magic. ↩︎
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