What. The. Fuck.

This podcast example about a fake interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs is a blatant example of where some more thoughts should take place before putting high tech to work. What is the purpose of this? Is this a tech demo or some bad-taste proof-of-concept? It’s not hard to imagine how it could derail in the future when used in politically-heated contexts. Oh, and no, I didn’t waste my time listening to this garbage, and I won’t share the link to this podcast, either.

Image credits: generated using Dall-E with the following phrase: “an hand drawn Mac computer that never existed digital art”

Tweetbot hasn’t been updated for over 6 months, I thought a subscription was going to mean more frequent updates? Source: Letting my Glass and Tweetbot subscriptions expire – LJPUK:

This blog post triggered the following thoughts.

The movement to subscriptions in the software landscape is MASSIVE but is far from being a guarantee of more frequent updates from the developers. I’m utterly infuriated when I see a yearly subscription for a small utility with a limited scope when no “lifetime” options are offered with reasonable pricing. Many devs are lazy, and greedy and send you a big middle finger.

Telegram’s CEO, M. Pavel Durov, complains that Apple is making his life harder than necessary by having to wait for the review process to complete its job. When Apple finally accepts the update but requires him to remove the Telemoji package, he goes on to say:

… this will motivate Telegram to make Telemoji even more “unique and recognizable.”

He sounds like a whining baby. Thanks to Apple, Mr. Durov now gets the idea and his team will have to return to their drawing board and be more creative.

For many reasons that I’m aware of, I forgot that the iPad is the best device for reading and collecting information tidbits that are fueling my content creation workflow. The iPad enables me to effortlessly annotate and store content into Craft using a Shortcut. In fact, unsurprisingly, the iPad actually is a devide that invites reading sessions into my morning routine. I should use my iPad more often; I’ll probably read more consequently.

We’re currently experiencing a major and nationwide cellular network outage here in Canada 🇨🇦, thanks to Rogers telecommunication company. It’s been going on since early this morning. Everything seems affected in one way or another: phone calls, internet access, emergency calls via 911, travellers, banking services via Interac, and lots of public non-urgent services, just to name a few. We will need a few days to comprehend the ramifications of what happened. It’s a major event illustrating that big telco companies concentration like we endure here in Canada isn’t a good thing. Also a good (and sad) example of how badly we’re dependent on technologies for everything.

In a recent article from Josh Ginter for The Newsprint, If found the idea of having a separate computer for work and one for creative activities interesting and I’m close to feeling the same about my personal and work life. I do most of my work on an M1 Mac mini, while my creative work is done on an M1 MacBook Air. My iPad is used as a second screen on my Mac mini or for some photo processing stuff with Adobe Lightroom. The distinction between two worlds gets blurry when you consider how the cloud brings those two worlds closer to each other. If you are like me and use a single Apple ID for all your Apple services, as soon as you set up iCloud on both computers, you’ll get access to the same “virtual space and digital content” on both machines. This is where the idea of two separate computers becomes blurry and probably more of a theory.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

After spending some time cleanup my office this today, I found these in my drawers and other places. I no longer use these. Do you? I know some people here on Micro.blog do. I don’t which I find fascinating because I did a lot in my younger times. Before the computers.

On March 13th, in 2020, the world flipped, my world flipped. So many things are different now. This short blog post is about reflecting on the last two years and how they became the foundation for what is to come in my life.

Time flies and making judicious decisions is more important than ever. Working from home is important. I’ll never return full time at the office. Even if I move to another job, working from home is now a requirement. Visiting customers for the sake of shaking hands no longer make sense to me. There has to be more than this. The price is too high to pay: wasted time.

Traveling is more important than ever too; that’s the only way for me to do more photography. Something that I didn’t do much in the last two years. This visual work posted in April of 2020 was the trigger to write this blog post. I’m sad about this because photography is my most important source of inspiration and my biggest creativity playground after writing. Still on the travel subject, I can envision traveling abroad for more than two weeks now and splitting my time between leisure and remote work. Leaving for a month or more is now possible.

Speaking of writing, I’ll probably continue to write but probably not as much as in the last two years. A more balanced life is taking place and will take away some of my writing time. It’s ok. It’s also part of making better choices.

The last two years of COVID-19, the more and more frequent climate disturbances and the recent events in Europe are telling me this: the world is more than ever in a constant state of emergency. I better learn how to cope with this otherwise I’m not finished at being in constant consternation mood while reading the news.

Thanks for reading this. I know your time is precious too and you made the decision to read this short piece.

I asked for this since the beginning of the Ukrainian war (on Twitter: first here, then here, then here), and today Apple delivered. Apple’s products are no longer being sold through its online store. While the App Store is still working apparently, I’m ok with their decision. On top of that, Apple will donate money, twice the amount that employees will give to help Ukrainians. It’s a good move, the only move, without using real arms, to make an impact. It’s even more powerful when many companies are doing exactly the same.

Yep, finally.