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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I cannot stress enough how flabbergasted I am by the value Tinylytics is offering. Just finished configuring recently added options. What you see is my Blips analytics dashboard. Hat down to Vincent.
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I’m making quite a bit of progress with my Micro.blog UI frontend to the point where I’m wondering how much of the whole experience I could rebuild using Vercel and Claude Code. Challenge?
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I decided to try building a small website on GitHub Pages. I have no idea if I’ll ever make something useful out of it. Since I’m spending some time with GitHub, I have found some interesting side features.
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I saw many times people talking about Ghostty for Mac, a terminal emulator. My question: why use Ghostty instead of Apple Terminal? I just downloaded it and my first reactions are: less window chrome, bigger windows, split-window mode, better font and better default colors scheme. Adopted.
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MacUpdate Is Dead?
From MacUpdate website: Unfortunately MacUpdater 3’s promised lifetime of “until 2026-01-01” is now over. There will be no MacUpdater 4 or any continuation of the MacUpdater product from us. Our daily maintenance has been stopped and we don’t verify updates anymore. MacUpdater 3.5 is now unsupported but free-to-use including all previous “Pro” features. WTF?? 😩 Continue reading →
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In 2026, I’ll Keep an Eye On…
I’m already turning my attention to 2026, in no particular order: Ghost.org next moves, now that are a better Fediverse citizen. Plausible Analytics, which seems to be overkill for my needs but I might find a use for their service exposure via their APIs. Craft because they finished the year with a bang and I’m super anxious to learn what’s next. Apple because of Apple Intelligence and Siri promised updates. Will they deliver? Continue reading →
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In my piece this published this morning, I totally forgot to mention the possibility of enshittification of AI offerings by Anthropic and OpenAI, which could trigger some decisions on my part if this happens. For unknown reasons, I have better trust in Anthropic staying away of this for a longer time than OpenAI.
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I got a lot of positive reactions about my Micro.blog front end for writing and publishing posts in a simplified user experience. I wasn’t expecting that. To me, it might mean that it’s filling a small void in Micro.blog offerings. Thankfully, Micro.blog is an open “platform” which allows such experiments like mine.
Some people asked me to make my app open source. I’m hesitant. I don’t want to feel the pressure of having to support others in using my work but who would like to add their own touches. I think, for now, I’ll respectfully decline. I would rather encourage anyone to follow the same route that I did and experiment with the tooling. 👾
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I won’t write my predictions for 2026, but I want to write about how I envision using different AI offerings to support my creative journey next year.
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Craft & Inoreader in 2025
In 2025, two notable apps or services received numerous and meaningful updates: Craft and Inoreader. Craft received long-awaited tag support, with APIs and MCP support added. The latter two are quite transformative, and I expect 2026 to bring many new users to the app. Personally, I’m barely scratching the surface of Craft APIs. Craft is at the center of everything that I create, and I couldn’t think of a better app to support my creative journey. Continue reading →
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It’s fascinating how building things with Claude AI and Vercel made me forget about my desire to expand my knowledge and experience of Apple Shortcuts. I no longer see the need for that. My wish, though, would be to see Apple bring a way to build Shortcuts using Apple Intelligence.
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I see a lot of interest in my experiment with Vercel and Micro.blog if the reactions are any indication. I’m going to do a small write up about this. I didn’t expect my experiment to be successful. Can’t wait to share more details about this on meta.numericcitizen.me.
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One of the reasons for building my own web app for posting to Micro.blog: having the title field and categories shown by default 😁🤣
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And Now Microblog Poster Web App is Live!
It’s a web app (on Vercel) just for me to use so that I can write blog posts on the go with a clean UI. It’s my second web app on Vercel built entirely with Claude AI. Continue reading →
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When I’m hitting my Claude AI credits allotment, it’s time to do something else. 😅
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Moving from Apple Keynote to Freeform for my next content creation workflow diagram update. It’s a sneak peek. It was much easier to convert (a simple copy-and-paste was all that was needed to kick-start the process). I also made significant changes to the way certain things are presented.
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Who's Right?
Apparently, web analytics is not an exact science. Here are three web analytics versions of the same period: from November 23rd to December 23rd (Top: Ghost Analytics, Middle: Plausible Analytics, and Bottom: Tinylytics). Plausible feels conservative, with about half as many unique visitors as Ghost, while Tinylytics seems to overestimate. The patterns are barely the same, too. Who’s right? Continue reading →
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My wife and me quite extensively used a group conversation in ChatGPT to help us face some health-related issues. It was beneficial to a visit to the hospital and still is after the visit yesterday. It is so much more helpful than having to google things and try to figure out what is going on.
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Consuming AI Can Be Expensive
While experimenting with n8n and LLM services, I realize that using artificial intelligence can become a very costly hobby. The fact that the consumption of these services relies on two separate offerings — the subscription to the interactive service and on-demand billing for APIs — requires careful management and wise choices of providers. Currently, I use ChatGPT and Claude AI in interactive mode, but I also need a provider to access AI via APIs. Continue reading →