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The Real Cost of Crypto
The real cost of Crypto. We need to stop buying into this shit and fast. Why is it so hard to think about these “side effects” when creating new technologies? I recently wrote about not getting into Crypto, NFTs, web3 because I’m probably just getting old. I know just enough to understand the costs of the technology behind and how bad it is for the planet.
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A New Project for 2022 ā Every Apple Computersā¦
What if I documented all Apple computers I ever actively used or owned? For each of them, there is a story worth remembering and to write (like this one from 1986), the general context of its use, what software did I use on it at the time, how I bought it, how long did I own it and which new computer replaced it? There is even a ten-years pause where I left the Apple bandwagon to switch to the other side. What happened? Why?
Using the excellent and must-have utility, MacTracker, which I should have included in my post āThe Perfect Apple Enthusiast ā Find Out Where You Standā, I started to process of going back in times. It wonāt be easy to go back forty years back, but itās worth it. I want this article to be as complete as possible and fun to read, full of high-quality pictures. Be patient, it will be a long journey.
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He says "Hi!"
For no apparent reason, I started a photo series of this little guy in all sorts of visual contexts. I’m using an album to store them all. I’m currently at 23 photos of him. He’s so cute, isn’t he? I got my inspiration from someone here on Micro.blog who did the same in recent months. I can’t remember who, though. So who knows where this is headed. It’s the time of the year for frivolous projects. š
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Completed The Servant Season 2 - At Long Last!
Finally was able to finish season 2 of The Servant on Apple TV+ yesterday, just in time for the third season. What a weird story. The only occasion I can spend time watching TV series is during the holidays. Using AirPods Max for the listening experience is pure magic; nobody in the living gets distracted by the TV, and the sound quality is impressive. Now, I should finish For All Mankind Season 2.
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A Message for Christmas
To all of you, even though I donāt know you personally, since I spend quite some time here all year long reading your posts, I kind of feel familiarity. Itās like being part of a small community. I like this a lot. Itās something not possible on Twitter. So, I want to wish you a merry Christmas to all of you. Take care of you, of your family and your friends. š
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Doing Nothing Useful and Feeling Guilty About It
First day of holiday vacations. I’m not into Christmas at all this year. It’s the kind of day where I should work on my many writing projects or even do some photo processing! Yet, I feel in a lethargic state. I’m barely able to finish my newsletter. I’m unable to organize myself. Reading seems the best option. Or Netflix. I feel guilty for doing nothing useful. At least, I was able to express myself on this. š¤·š»āāļø
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Phasing Out My Vimeo Account
Well, Iām not a video guy. I prefer photography. My experience with Vimeo is coming to an end. I wonāt renew my subscription. Iāll keep my account but returning to the free tier will remove many of my previously published content. This prompts me to remove some content from my main blog too. Deleting content is something that I donāt like to do. Itās like putting hard work, countless hours of work down the drain. š
You can have a look at my Vimeo profile if you are curious.
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Glass ā Maybe We Need to Be Patient?
Matt Birchler blog post about his interest for Glassās fading out:
I was very high on Glass, a new photo sharing app this summer, but my enthusiasm for it has dropped in perfect sync with the temperature dropping here in the Midwest since then.
Lee Peterson blog post about his interest is so low that he canceled his Glass subscription:
I still feel it was a bad slope to start down by adding appreciation and Iāve cancelled my subscription.
Finally, Andy Nicolaides on Twitter thinking out loud about the introduction of āappreciationā (a term used instead of ālikesā):
Iām not one of the folks that wasnāt a big fit of Glass adding the likes / appreciation function, but Iāll tell you this much, in my small case study of one, itās completely killed off any comments I used to receive.
Letās be honest: Glass has been alive for less than four months. They kept updating the service since the beginning to improve the experience and discoverability. They didnāt fall in the āme tooā trap yet. Arenāt we expecting too much too soon from such a small organization? Should we expect them to come out with the right recipe on day one? Could this be much more difficult to be different and yet familiar in the crowded space of on-line photo sharing? I would argue that your feed is as good as the people you follow. Sure, Glass needs to attract great photographers. I suspect they are working on it as I write this. People are busy. Living in a pandemic put a lot of stress on everybody and cancelled so many opportunities for doing photography, but it created others too. It wasnāt the best moment to launch such a service, and yet, theyāve done a great job so far.
I do have a subscription to Glass (my profile page here) and Iām willing to be patient here. I have a goal of posting at least one picture a week, even though I have another place to do so, on Smugmug (my profile page here).
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An idea. The iPad. A Brainstorming Session. Another Article in the Works.
I love the iPad. Appleās Notes.app in dark mode is š. Youāre currently seeing a brainstorm of ideas for an upcoming blog post in early 2022. The subject? Can you tell just by looking at my notes? Hint: Itās a meta blog post. Another hint: https://numericcitizen.io.
Yes, I know, my handwriting sucks. š¤¦š»āāļøšš
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The Enigmatic Snapseed from Google
Surprising to see Snapseed being updated since it is owned by Google. I use this photo processing application to create the posts in the Perfect Imperfection Series on my Smugmug account. If Google was to kill this app, it would probably put an end to my photo series. I tried to find other apps to replace Snapseed but failed to find something that comes close. Now, why is Google even bother maintaining Snapseed? How does it fit their business model?
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Is The iPad Still Exciting ā It Depends
I want to chime in on a series of posts by Matt Birchler (on his YouTube channel) and Andy Nicolaides (on his The Dent website) regarding the iPad. The question is clear: is the iPad still exciting?
It all depends on the use case. I came to realize in 2021 that the iPad (even in its Pro incarnation) cannot be as powerful and effective in my workflow as the MacBook Air. Besides creating content, is the iPad Pro still relevant? You bet! There is nothing beating the feeling of tearing the iPad from its Magic Keyboard and sitting on the couch for reading or browsing the web. Every single time, I enjoy the experience in all its glory, if such a thing can be said. The other use case that I came to appreciate is Sidecar. The iPad Pro, even in its 11ā size, proves to be a superb and useful second screen to my Mac mini. And using the iPad with its Magic Keyboard, when Iām on the go, is still a superb experience, as long as I set my expectations accordingly.
With iPadOS 15, Apple did address a few more low-hanging fruits from a software perspective. There is still a lot to accomplish, but more than ever I feel Apple is giving the iPad the attention it deserves.
In summary, the iPad can be super exciting, it all comes down to its use case. For me, it still is, when I use it.
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I Just Paid $50 to Wikipedia
I think itās worth it and itās important. The transaction was easy (Apple Pay), which makes a big difference. Consider this an impulsive buy.
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Currently Working On ā A Teaser
Directly from Craft, a peek at four articles that Iām currently working on, almost ready for publication! ššØš»āš»
I dare you to meet me in my Digital Garden! š”
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On iOS 15ās Legacy Contacts
I remember working on āA Guide for Preparing to Leave Your Numeric Legacyā, one of the cited challenges was to get access to the deceased personās online data. I provided ways and a methodology to get ready for their numeric legacy. With iOS 15ās Legacy Contacts, Apple is making it much easier. The setup process takes less than 2 minutes to complete. An access key and a death certificate are required to ask Apple to let the legacy contacts to gain access to the online data. At long last, big tech companies now consider important to let people surviving people to keep access to deceased people in a simple and secure way. I can see countless headaches being prevented with this feature, first promised at WWDC last June. Bravo to Apple.
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iOS 15.2 & iPadOS 15.2 are OUT ā A Few Thoughts
The previous screenshots show the release notes, as seen on an iPhone. I just canāt believe Apple cannot fix the font size. Itās been like this life forever. Itās all in the details, Apple, in the details. Gosh.
The most interesting thing for me is the App Privacy Report, which I love. As an IT guy in my professional life, I like to see whatās going on in my devices. App Privacy Report is a great way to show this to me.
Notifications Summary has a refined design. The summary goes edge-to-edge with the screen. Itās a bit weird. I donāt know if this is a bug or a feature. Yet, I like to see more information in the summary as each notification offers expanded content.
As a side note, apparently, Apple wonāt release Universal Control this year. I couldnāt care less because I donāt see this as useful in my current workflow. Maybe there is something to Universal Control that I donāt get.
Wallpaper by Basic Apple Guy.
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Being Unsplashed ā Take 2
If youāve been reading my blogs for a while, you probably know by now that Iām a big fan of Unsplash (āMy Growing Love Affair with Unsplashā). Iāve been using Unsplash constantly to find and use pictures in many of my posts (when I cannot find one of mines that fit the post subject). My contributions slowed a bit in the last year because I spend more time building my online presence on Smugmug (my Smugmug page) and more recently on Glass (my profile on Glass).
This week, the picture above has been selected to be featured in the architecture category. Iām honoured. You can see my featured photo in the architecture category right now. The last time that Iāve been unsplashed was less than a year ago, I wrote about it on my main blog: OMG ā Iāve Been Unsplashed!.
To see all of my contributions to Unsplash, visit my profile page. The expression of ābeing Unsplashā is a creation of mine. š
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On #Glass Appreciation
Surprise! Today, Glass introduced something I thought would never come: Like! Oops, Appreciation (Announcement on Twitter)! In summary: they are private. They are note at the forefront of the experience. They donāt propels algorithms. They arenāt used to sell targeted ads. They are merely a check box in a database. They are gentle. They are a gift. The team behind Glass is showing sign of lucidity. I like whatās Iām seeing since the start of this special place.
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Micro.blog Officially Launches Support for Newsletters
So, as expected, yesterday Micro.blog introduced support for newsletters in the premium subscription tier. The official announcement follows:
Today weāre announcing a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: email newsletters. Micro.blog can now manage, letting readers subscribe to your blog and receive emails for new blog posts. Itās deeply integrated into Micro.blog and works great for collecting multiple microblog posts together automatically.
Here is why I upgraded my subscription plan almost instantly after the news came out.
First, Iām a big fan of Micro.blog as a publishing platform and also of its foundational principles. Iām totally ok with paying a monthly fee of $10 to support the team behindāI want the platform to thrive. Second, adding support for newsletters is a great idea. Not everyone is using an RSS feed reader or like to read content through a browser. Everyone uses email clients! Itās important to provide different ways of communicating content to the readers. Newsletters are making a comeback.
Enabling newsletter is dead simple as shown below. I chose the weekly newsletter containing all the posts for the past week. Email go out at 9AM, local time, each Saturday morning. Itās a good way to start the weekend, isnāt it?
As you can see, the settings are quite simple. There is no formatting option (yet). Having a choice between all text vs excerpt would be a useful one. Speaking of formatting, one thing that I’m curious about, though: how does one newsletter look like? I couldn’t find an example in the documentation. Furthermore, how can we preview the next newsletter issue? It seems that, in case the first option is selected (one email for each post), the author has 30 minutes after posting to preview the email as explained here:
@timapple The preview works the same for the weekly and monthly option except it only creates it 30 minutes before it’s ready to send. Micro.blog will send you a preview email automatically with a link to edit it then. ā Manton Reece https://micro.blog/manton/12238527
How does Micro.blog newsletter feature fit in my workflow? Micro.blog newsletter joins two other services that I depend on: Mailbrew to create something very similar in nature to Micro.blog offering and Ghost for my monthly newsletter (previously on Substack). On Mailbrew though, my summary newsletter also brings in content published on other platforms (WordPress, Blot, Ghost, Smugmug, etc.). Itās the ultimate weekly posts summary newsletter. Ghost, for my introspection newsletter, is like Substack, but better. I see Micro.blog offering as being a convenient way for my readers to get my content into their mailbox. It wonāt replace Mailbrew or Ghost, obviously.
By subscribing to the premium tier, I also get a few goodies that could prove to be useful: bookmarking archiving and highlighting. The former allows for the bookmarking of a post on my timeline. The latter allows me to highlight some text while reading a bookmarked post or URL. Highlighted text can be conveniently used to create a link post easily. One thing that I would love to see is a browser extension for selecting text in any website. Iām not holding my breath, though.
All in all, Iām pretty happy with this addition to an already great service for content creators like me. Oh, and donāt forget to subscribe to the weekly digest! So, to those who subscribe, I guess this post is the first to get through the newsletter feature of Micro.blog!
Donāt miss the YouTube video explaining the feature.
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About Micro.blog Upcoming Update ā Newsletter Support
Apparently, it looks like tomorrow, Micro.blog is going to add support for newsletters. A few weeks ago, I canāt remember exactly, Manton posted a screenshot (which I can no longer find) where a ānewsletterā item was shown on the left sidebar on the Micro.blog main site.
Iām very curious about Micro.blog take on newsletter. Micro.blog is all about simplicity without being too simplistic. If the feature is available to entry-level paid tier, Iām might enable it and use it myself. Right now, Iām using Mailbrew to gather all my published posts via the RSS feed to generate a newsletter. There is one thing though, are we starting to feel a bit of newsletters fatigue?
Canāt wait for tomorrow.
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On My Photographic Style
The photo thumbnails are from a personal trip to Austria in 1998. When I look back at these photos, I have to come to a conclusion that my photographic style didnāt really change in 30 years. It feels a bit depressing. It is basically revolving about architecture, nature. Very rarely about people, these are too hard to capture; I donāt have a good sense of timing, and Iām shy. Iām rarely doing street photography. The only addition to my subjects in recent years is urban exploration. Do we come into this world with a pre-determined photographic style?
Here is my Glass page.
And my SmugMug page.
Oh and my Unsplash page!
