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 just updated my Numeric Citizen I/O website to summarize the last few weeks of change to my blogging setup if you are curious to know more.
This post is required because Craft’s shared documents don’t support RSS feeds, sadly. 😔
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👉🏻 Well, that was fast: @numericcitizen@techhub.social 😎
Reasons why I joined this Mastodon instance. 1) I like the name “techhub.social”. 2) It’s operated by a Canadian. 3) He speaks french and has a Ukrainian flag on his profile.. 4) I’ll be able to see the interaction between Micro.blog and a Mastodon instance.
Micro.blog will stay my home, but I’ll experiment with Mastodon, even though I said and wrote that I would focus this year. Damn.
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What's Really Behind a Subscription Fee?
This video from birchtree@mastodon.social resonated greatly with me today. Here’s why. First, someone is finally calling out something about software subscriptions that I always wanted to call out myself. Every developer seems entitled to charge a subscription for whatever reason. Matt brilliantly illustrates that some subscriptions are ok, some are borderline ok, but others are not. For applications like Notion or Craft, developers must pay costs for hosting the backend. For example, Craft’s backend seems to be on the AWS cloud. Continue reading →
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Something will have to happen in 2023 in the Mastodon world. I would love to join (even though I said I wouldn’t). Now that I’m starting to get it, to understand all this is about, I fail miserably at finding an instance that I can join and fit my content publishing desires.
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I really like how Substack is evolving as a platform for content creators, especially for writers. I kept my account open after moving from Substack to Ghost.org. You may disagree with the fact that you don’t really own the content or whatever, but Substack is evolving quite a bit. If I compare the features set when it started and today, it is night and day. They are really killing it. As a member of Substack (free) and Ghost (paid), I would say Substack > Ghost.
I would really like to find a niche use case for Substack. And I thought that 2023 was the year of focusing more.
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Thought of the day: airports are probably the most user hostile commercial environment that we can think of. Bad UX. Wrong expectations management in general. Badly designed physical areas. The list goes on and on. Convince me of the opposite. 🫤
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Thinking About 2023 and My Future Creative Projects or Experimentation
It’s the time of the year where I start to think of my upcoming year from a content creation perspective and as someone who likes to try new things. Here are a few things that I’m going to explore. First, as a subscriber of SoundCloud, I’m finding it hard to find content for my DJ mixing experimentation. More often than not, those publishing content on SoundCloud wants you to buy what's available on Beatport. Continue reading →
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A Few Takeaways About My Mastodon-Related Questions Today
Thanks to all who replied to my question regarding Mastodon. What a great community over here! Never had this in fifteen years on Twitter. 😊 Here are a few takeaways (many may be obvious, duh!). Just like for emails, one cannot "reserve" a username in the Mastodon-friendly world. Makes sense. Registering with a specific instance (or server) is mandatory just like opening an account with an email provider. Using a custom domain that I own is something I should consider doing. Continue reading →
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Any Mastodon experts in the room? One quick question: how do I proceed to “reserve” my content creator name “numericcitizen” in the Mastodon world? I understand that I need to select a Mastondon server first where the account would be created, am I right? Then, what else?
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Rewind: Thanks but No Thanks
After watching a recent video from Matt Birchler about Rewind, a constant screen recording utility for the Mac, I was excited to give my email address and get onboard the waiting list for early access to the app. I got my invite a few days ago. As much as I would like to test this app, here's this deal-breaker for me: 20 US$ per month to get on the early access program, no thank you. Continue reading →
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The Cost of Twitter
I could save more than a whopping 400$ annually by shutting down my Twitter accounts. Thanks to the potential removal of a few service subscriptions from my workflow and potentially unjustified without Twitter in my digital life: Buffer, Typefully, Mailbrew. It’s incredible how thinking about my Twitter reliance makes me realize so many things on so many levels in my content creation workflow. Continue reading →
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Mailbrew, Typefully and Twitter
I finally found how to reconfigure my Mailbrew account to log in without using Twitter. Good thing. I don’t log in often in Mailbrew, but this morning I learned that I’d need to adjust many things when I close my Twitter account. As an example, this newsletter setup will need to be revisited to remove any references to Twitter as a data source. Mailbrew is an excellent tool for generating newsletters, but it hasn’t been updated for quite a while (October of 2021, according to the change log). Continue reading →
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Matter to begin offering a subscription early next year. It was bound to happen. I’ll have to take a position and choose sooner than I originally thought. 🤦🏻♂️🫤
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Twitter’s Essentials
I read about so many people flocking to Mastodon, leaving Twitter behind. I actually started to see a definitive decline in my followers number. Something is really going on. I myself started to think about the possibility of leaving the platform too. Just like I did with Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr, only to leave a place where my content is simply cross-posted from another source without a real and active presence of mine. Continue reading →
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How fast do you need your internet to be?
A recent post from MereCivilian about subscribing to a fast Internet service triggered this one. Here are a few reasons for having fast Internet at home: 1. You’re many people (four or more) living under the same roof who are active Internet users; 2. You’re many users who are doing streaming at the same time; 3. You’re downloading or uploading really big files all the time; 4. You’re playing online games; Other than that, high-speed internet is useless as each micro-transaction (small HTTPS requests) won’t benefit from the bandwidth available. Continue reading →
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As much as I like #Ghost as a hosting service for my monthly and weekly newsletters, the lack of community, commenting, and recommendations by other readers make me wonder if I made the right move when I left #Substack.
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When Uber is Being Rude
I recently came back from a one-week vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The first thing I did before leaving the airport to go home was to call an Uber taxi. My last experience with Uber went well, but it was quite a while. Boy, this time it was a surprising and unexpected experience. After ordering the car, I was met with a plethora of notifications and ads within the application and via Uber Eat to order food on the go or before arriving at home. Continue reading →
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On Time Machine Backups Over Network
If you own a desktop Mac, you probably use an external drive for Time Machine. If you use a portable Mac, most likely not, and according to the Tidbits article, you’re not alone. The portability of the Mac is hindered by having an external drive hooked permanently. I, personally, have a different strategy: I use a Synology NAS DS720+ with Time Machine enabled to do my backups over the wireless network. Continue reading →
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On Carrot Weather — Is It That Cool?
Why is Carrot Weather so popular? I’m a weather enthusiast and I like trying new weather-related applications. I use many all year long, but Carrot Weather is not part of my application arsenal. They recently introduced updated weather maps, but to get a sense of them, I would need to subscribe for a year subscription. Most of the interesting features are available in the premium tier. I like the maps feature, but I wonder how better they will get compared to the ones that I’m already using in MyRadar. Continue reading →