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Long Day Spent Visiting The Big Medina of Fez
Date: June 21, 2023 at 5:54:55 PM GMT+1 Weather: 29°C Mostly Clear Location: Derb Salaj, Fes, Fès-Meknès, MoroccoWhat a strange, busy, surprising place. Strangely, I didn’t take as many pictures as I could. I guess I was too busy looking around me, up, down, everywhere. 🤯
Visiting this Medina was like reliving the past, like going back in 800. Our guide told us that not that many things has changed since the early years. But man, everything is so coupled with the Islamic religion. I’m not used to that.
The Medina is a city in a city. You’ll find everything from food, clothes, and fake Apple gear (a lot). Oh, and, the young generation of sellers are all tied to their smartphone, all the time. I’m not sure this helps do good business. 🤔
Oh and boy we eat too much in Morocco.
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Leaving Rabat
Date: June 18, 2023 at 7:28:55 AM GMT+1 Weather: 22°C Mostly Cloudy Location: Rue Jamaa Mourino, Rabat, Rabat-Salé-Kénitra, MoroccoGreat city. Many photo opportunities. Like this wall and door. Unprocessed image.
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I’m really looking forward for this trip...
Date: June 16, 2023 at 8:05:30 PM EDT Weather: 20°C Rain Location: Aéroport International de Montréal-Trudeau, Dorval, QC, CanadaFrom a photography experience perspective… My backpack 🎒 is so heavy with this camera and “only” two lenses. My hope is to use my big camera as much as my iPhone, so that I don’t think that I brought this with me for nothing. 😜
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Are We Ready for This Dystopian World?
Warning: it’s not about the Apple Vision Pro headset, which many people think will bring a touch of a dystopian future to our life. Something else more serious will.
I read this week somewhere that, to get climate back into the normality zone🌪️ to ensure the sustainability of the human race and life in general, everyone on earth would need to live in an oppressive world where everything would be controlled by laws and government all the time and for decades. From buying food to cars to travelling to entertainment services, we would be under constant quotas, which would bring our quality of life much lower than we currently enjoy. In fact, developed countries’ quality of life would join the much lower quality of life of the vast majority of the earth’s population in less developed countries. This would be the only way to get around this climate crisis. Not convinced? The COVID pandemic brought massive and repetitive confinements that weren’t enough to bend many climate change indicators downwards. It lasted two years, more or less. 😱
Oh, and should we talk about forced birth control everywhere? Because we should, even if this is a taboo subject.
Are we ready for this dystopian world? 😷
I can see a great Vision Pro use case right here where people watch daylong movies about what used to be a much more enjoyable world in 3D. 😒
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Building a CRM in ... Notion? Really?
💡I’m trying to build my own CRM with Notion for my daytime job. After a few hours today building the data model using Notion tables and relations, I concluded that I underestimated Notion for such use case. It’s impressive and very flexible. It has a lot of potential. I’m pretty happy with my current work. I sometimes find it a bit laggy, but let’s keep the experiment running for a few months.😃
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On 15-inch MacBook Air: Is It Too Big?
When the 15-inch MacBook Air 💻 was officially announced, I was excited and knew it would replace my M1 MacBook Air. Since then, I read many reviews and watched many unboxing videos. People seem to enjoy the new bigger MBA, and all is good, right? But, is it?
Nobody talks about the device’s size when you use it on your lap like I do with my MBA right now as I write this post. It’s an important factor to consider for such laptop category which the MBA is targeting. Are 15 inches too wide? Is it still comfortable? For some reason, I have a few doubts. This 15-inch MacBook Air is… big, but is it too big for me? 🤔
When I come back from vacation, a visit to the Apple Store will help me decide once and for all.
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In Photography, the iPhone Can Be a Killer
My nephew, a semi-pro photographer, recently sold 90% of his photography gear (Canon). He only kept one body and one 50mm lens. 😱 He upgraded his phone to the iPhone 14 Pro. 😏He couldn’t be happier, he told me. Even with the iPhone, he essentially kept his photo-processing workflow as-is (Adobe Lightroom). This makes me pause a bit. Sure, he spends much less time doing professional photography work, but still. I call this the iPhone-photography killer effect.
He got his first exposure (pun intended) to the art of photography with me when he was still a child, more than thirty years ago, when he accompanied me for a short photowalk. He demonstrated that he could be a photographer, even at this young age, just by his numerous questions and suggestions.
I’ll bring my small (but heavy) camera gear (Nikon) on my trip to Morocco and when I visit the Canary Islands later this summer. Will these trips be the last ones where I use the big one? 🤔 I know that I’m going to upgrade my iPhone 13 Pro to the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro Max later this fall. This could trigger a similar fate to my camera bag.
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I’m Testing Day One for My Travel Journal Experiment
Date: June 9, 2023 at 5:25:24 PM EDT Weather: 18°C Mostly Cloudy Location: Montréal, QC, CanadaI’ll be going to Morocco a week from now. I plan to use Day One to document my trip there. It will be the first time since I’m a Day One user. I don’t know how I could not think of this before. I’ve been a big fan of Day One forever. It’s such a rich journaling app for the Mac, the iPad and the iPhone. I can wait to use it on my iPhone to create rich journal entries as my vacation progresses.
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Watch Out Reddit
🤨 Because of recent Reddit behaviors towards their API consumption models, seeing Apollo go, just like that, plus similarities of behavior with Twitter, I may drop my cross posting to Reddit as a first step of protests. Then, stop manual posting (in /r/craftdocs for example). Ultimately, closing my account could become a possibility. 🫤
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A Few Last-Minute Questions for WWDC2023
It’s Apple keynote day, and it is exciting but also stressful! Here are last-minute questions.
- Will the headset pricing be announced today?
- Will the headset be like the Apple Watch and be running apps, or will it be more like CarPlay, with some additional viewport from the iPhone? Or a combination?
- Is the headset unveiled with a “one more thing” segment?
- When the iPad was announced, Steve Jobs spent some time explaining its relative position within the use cases spectrum of our computing devices. Where does the headset fit?
- Will the headset announcement overshadow Apple’s timid foray into generative AI?
- Is Xcode finally coming to the iPad?
- Can we infer something about the rumors setting the price 1999$ when we compare that to the AirPods Max price?
- Tim Cook’s air time has decreased in recent events, is the trend continuing today?
- Can we expect another meme moment from Craig Federighi?
- Who’s going to present the headset? Jeff Williams, just like for the Apple Watch Ultra?
- Can any of the announcements today affect my Apple hardware upgrade plan?
For someone who’s not interested in the headset, I have far too many questions about it. I’ll return to this post once the event is complete to fill in the answers!
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Reflecting on My Photo Processing Strategy
For my next trip, I will bring my Nikon D750 and my iPhone 13 Pro (of course!), and my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro. How am I going to process my images? Will I continue using Lightroom for images from my Nikon? I usually use the iPad to import my photos into the Lightroom catalogue. What about pictures on my iPhone, which should be mostly in RAW format and shot with Halide? I like Photomator a lot; it is nicer than Lr and more approachable too. However, using Photomator to process images from my Nikon poses a challenge in file management. I’ll need to import the .NEF files from my SD card into my iPad in an iCloud Drive folder so I can work on imported files from any device (iPad, MacBook Air or iPhone). I prefer using iCloud Photos Library instead of managing files manually. I guess this will be this combo: Photomator + Halide for my “shot on iPhone” images!
Just writing this blog post made things a little bit less fuzzy. I’ll take any suggestions!
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365 Days Later
A year ago, I shared my first YouTube video on my YouTube channel. My initial goal was to share videos about using Craft, but later came videos about using Micro.blog. Here are some notable facts:
- 52 videos about Craft were produced;
- 5 videos about Micro.blog were produced;
- All videos totalling more than 13.5 hours of watch time;
- My YouTube channel has 813 subscribers as of now;
- Two subscribers gave me money as a sign of appreciation.
I feel I’m now on par with all the things I wanted to talk about regarding Craft. Future Craft videos will touch on new features and tweaked workflow. I still have much work to do for Micro.blog video series, though.
At the initial pace of new subscribers, I set the goal of hitting a thousand subscribers in the first year, but I’m sad to report that I won’t make it. The pace of new subscribers has slowed quite a bit.
This video production journey is full of learning and lessons. Over time, I settled on a production style I’m happy with. I finally found a way to get better sound quality. I recently added iA Presenter to get cue cards showing on my screen while recording (read “iA Presenter — A Different & Clever Take at Presentation Software”). My workflow is stable now and is supported by this Craft template (you can download and use it if you are a Craft user, BTW). Finally, I started using Play.app to gather all my video links in one place. This provides a quick way to refer to past videos whenever needed.
I also produced videos about other apps like Capacities, Inoreader and Anybox. Some of these videos take the form of a 60 minutes session with the app as a first-time user. It’s fun as there is no script supporting those experiences.
Today, I will record a video about the WWDC 23 conference. The video will complement my recently published article on the same subject. It will be my first foray into tech news and commentary. I’m not planning to do many of these, but WWDC is significant and needs some of my production time attention.
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On Reddit API Access Pricing
So, apparently, just like Twitter, Reddit is entering into a “kill-third-party-apps” by charging an enormous amount of money to use their APIs. It looks like it. Apollo isn’t happy, and for good reasons. Unless there was a calculation error from the makers of Apollo, it just makes no sense for them to continue. Maybe Reddit made some calculation errors, too. Perhaps they fail to read the room’s temperature. But maybe they are entitled, to some degree, I guess, to charge for their APIs, right?
I’m tempted to make a parallel with Apple’s dreaded 15%-30% App Store commission. Is Apple’s stance on its App Store different from Reddit’s stance on its APIs? Is charging a commission to be on the App Store and take advantage of all Apple’s technology to get a chance to be distributed on hundreds of millions of iPhones similar to consuming a platform APIs? If not, what is different, actually? Is free API usage a dead end in today’s world? There are whole business models built around APIs these days. API speaks intellectual property in my book. Only companies with business models supported by massive ad distribution or expansive paid subscriptions can think of thriving by giving away their API access. It will be interesting to see how Reddit is reacting to third-party developers’ pushback.
Oh, and if they actually kill the third-party Reddit client ecosystem, unlike Twitter, Reddit platform alternatives are not obvious to me.
I guess it’s time to remember: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
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Where I’ve Been
To follow the trend started with Manton from Micro.blog, here’s my list of countries I visited.
- 🇺🇸 United States
- 🇲🇽 Mexico
- 🇨🇺 Cuba
- 🇩🇴 Republic Dominica
- 🇯🇲 Jamaica
- 🇦🇷 Argentina
- 🇧🇷 Brazil
- 🇺🇾 Uruguay
- 🇫🇷 France
- 🇪🇸 Spain
- 🇵🇹 Portugal
- 🇦🇹 Austria
- 🇨🇿 Czechia
- 🇳🇱 Netherland
- 🇬🇧 England
- 🇮🇸 Iceland
- 🇦🇪 UAE
- 🇮🇹 Italy
- 🇧🇪 Belgium
- 🇸🇪 Sweden
- 🇩🇪 Germany
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland
- 🇬🇷 Greece
- soon 🇲🇦 Morocco
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My Morning So Far
What an intense morning.
I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home.
I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the idea of reliving my life as is. Over and over again.
Thanks to this superb article about Fediverse from Glenn Fleishman for Tidbits, I learned that we could follow anyone on Mastodon using an RSS feed, which we could do with Twitter. I’ll be able to re-add accounts to Inoreader to get news in one place, just as I was doing when I was on Twitter. Cool.
All this because I was searching for ideas to write a few linkposts. I wrote none except this post, but I learned quite a lot. I updated my Digital Garden accordingly.
As reported by Om Malik, automation is the next evolution step for fast food chains. Should I care?
Am I missing anything? I think so, and this is where Rewind could help me a lot.
What about your morning?
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On AI & Content Creators — So many Questions — So Few Answers
Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI training, just like we can opt out of search engines when posting content online?
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On Slowing Down AI To Stay in Control
I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations.
The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in tools like ChatGPT, the more I think we will eventually need some regulation. For example, one thing we discussed (and on which we couldn’t agree) is the introduction of a delay in AI training. What I’d like to see is that AI companies are imposed a 2 or 3 years delay for their model training. And why would this be necessary? How would it change the game?
Remember that current training is lagging simply because we lack the processing power to digest all the digital information produced daily. But, eventually, it will come, just like Google replaced Yahoo when index content was initially entered manually by a group of people and then by a community. Sooner or later, ChatGPT or similar tools will digest the web in near real-time. And this is where this is going to be even more scary and could really get out of control.
Imposing delay on models training would help public knowledge and content to settle down and let consensus emerge in any research field, for example. Short-term noise would be reduced. In my opinion, it would be more challenging for ChatGPT to be infected by bad actors who will eventually try to influence results with toxic data.
My wife and I couldn’t agree on the effectiveness of this simple measure. She thinks that it would make ChatGPT useless or less relevant. My take goes the opposite side where, like in real life, things like encyclopedias are still helpful even though they were written and got frozen as soon as they were printed. So there is a need for them, like there is a need for more dynamic knowledge content like Wikipedia.
More than ever, we need to define what makes us unique, how we protect how uniqueness and consider slowing things down a bit, so we can have more time to understand what is going on and where things could go if we let things go without proper framing.
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Targeting the First Thousand YouTube Subscribers
My goal when I started doing YouTube videos about Craft (and now Micro.blog) was to reach a thousand subscribers during the first year. At the current rate, I won’t make it. Am I sad about this? No. Is it nagging me? Yes. Why?
I think there are a lot of Craft users out there, and I think they could benefit from watching a few of my videos. That’s the whole purpose and “raison d’être” for my YouTube channel which was (and still is) to help users get better at using Craft or learning about Craft if they are not currently using it. Is my absence from Twitter to promote my content making any difference? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.
I still have some time left before June 6th, but I’m being realistic here.
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From Weekly to Monthly Digest
Following the announcement of the tweaked Micro.blog newsletter functionality, I’m switching to a monthly digest instead with a specific category as the sole source for its content. Three reasons for this change: first, the digest will become a more intentional set of creative gestures instead of being the result of a weekly and automatic content spit out without any distinction. Second, monthly means less noisy than weekly. Third, less is more. Let’s try that. 🙂
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Thoughts On FCP for iPad vs Screenflow
I’m more inclined and attracted by the idea of testing (and actually using) FCP on iPad than the Mac version. Without being an iMovie on steroids (something that I don’t want), I wish FCP for iPad to be a simpler (but not simplistic) version of FCP on the Mac.
The problem: all my videos are all done with Screenflow for Mac because It’s all about Mac screen recording. What value would bring another app like FCP for the iPad? I see a more complex workflow because I would need to “export” from Mac then import into FCP on iPad then do the actual montage on a less capable device (two different device paradigms, little added value).
Thoughts?
PS: My 2018 iPad Pro isn’t capable enough for my 4K screen recordings. But let’s imagine that I’m on an M1 or M2 iPad Pro.
