Three reasons why I might not upgrade my iPhone 15 Pro Max this year, as expected. If Donald Trump imposes tariffs on Canadian goods. I'm questioning my support of an American company like Apple. Because of Tim Cook's contribution to Donald Trump inauguration which is in contradiction to many Apple values and Tim Cook's personal stance on some social issues. If Apple makes a single change to their support for DEI program, following Trump's executive orders. Continue reading →

I tend to disable my accounts instead of deleting them permanently. It’s the case with Facebook and Twitter. This weekend, I’m going to say goodbye to Twitter for real by deleting it. I imported my tweets archive a long time ago, thanks to Micro.blog’s import capabilities. I’m not sure why I kept it for so long… because when I see someone who’s sharing something on X, I simply ignore that. Oh well. Continue reading →

Me: “My new French blog is nearly ready to go live. Will you read it?" Her: “Well, yeah, sure, but how will I know there is something new to read?" Me: “Well, you just have to go to the website, just like you read the news." Her: “Mmm, but it’s not the same. I have to remember the website’s address. Can you send notifications instead?" Me: “Well, I’m not sure this would fit the idea of a blog, but you just need to save it as a bookmark. Continue reading →

Today, I think I finally found a real use case for Micro.one. I bought my domain and set up my account. It was rather quick and easy. If I had let Micro.one set up my domain name for me, it would have been even easier. I think the ingredients of Micro.one are all there for an accessible solution for those who want to get out of Meta or other silos and start owning their little space on the web, free of tracking, free of ads, and built on open software technologies. Continue reading →

Medium seems to suffer from another problem: AI-generated content and fake account for fake engagement to generate revenues. According to their recent article (Paywall might be enforced to read this), many accounts under the Partner Program were suspended recently to stop this fraud. I’ve returned to Medium last fall (read my comments about the reading and writing experience over there) and found that content quality has gone down compared to what we used to read there. Continue reading →

I’m about to start a recording session for my next video about Craft and the PARA method. I wonder: why am I doing this? Is it because it might help Craft users to better take advantage of the app features? Is it because I just like being in a creative process? Is it because I love working on the Mac using different apps together to put something out there? Is it all the reasons above? Continue reading →

I don’t want to offend anyone here, but what is happening right now in Los Angeles is certainly devastating. It’s really looking like hell on earth. At the same time, we can easily find the exact same hell in Ukraine and many more people are displaced or killed by a totalitarian and evil regime. It’s hard to fight climate change, but we can and must fight what Russia1 in its current form and to for what it brings to this world. Continue reading →

While working on the next edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter, I wanted to proofread and rewrite some text portions. I first started with Apple Intelligence Writing Tools then pasted the results into Craft. Grammarly instantly took the ball and verified the pasted text, highlighting everything wrong that needed some attention. Is Apple Writing Tools sloppy or Grammarly too picky? Writing in English is not an easy thing for me to do. Continue reading →

I old enough to be one of those who witnessed the birth of MTV and music videos… but I rarely watch those these days… but today, I decided to spend some time watching what’s « hot ». A few observations are in order: video duration is short (less than 3 min), hyper-short scenes abuse (less than two seconds in duration), 4:3 screen ratio is strange (is this a thing now?)… I barely can stand this shit now. Continue reading →

Dislike buttons on YouTube, or elsewhere for that matter, should come with a mandatory “here’s why I don’t like this” explanation text field. In this specific case, 2 people out of 18 didn’t like my video. Why? How can I improve myself if you don’t tell me what’s wrong? This is the part of social web that I feel doesn’t work. Continue reading →

Manuel Moreale link posting on the subject of header images on blog posts: “I’ll go one step further Nelson, I have a growing hatred towards pointless images in blog posts in general, I don’t even care if they’re AI-generated or not. If they’re there as part of the content then by all means use them but if you’re just adding a stock image from unsplash to make the page “feel” more interesting then you’re just part of the broader problem that’s plaguing the web. Continue reading →

I’ve played a bit with my wife’s iPhone 16 Pro Camera Control. I think it is cool but not practical. It is the best case of feature or functions overloading on a single control. I think it’s hard to compete against discrete on-screen camera controls because these are much quicker to invoke and the error rate is low. I don’t see the Camera Control to live for a long time as I can’t see a single way of improving it and fixing this usability issue. Continue reading →

I’be been trying to build a small business around Craft using Gumroad in the last 18 months. So far, it’s a hit or miss. I’m currently having paying 20 subscribers for The Craft Bible1. I sold quite a few Craft templates, too. I have many more ideas for 2025 to continue to grow this offering. Yet, it won’t replace my day job. I like Gumroad as a selling platform but also for writing articles and sharing them with my customers. Continue reading →

My experience with Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools is mixed. One significant issue is the absence of a feature to compare the original text with the revised version. In contrast, Grammarly excels in this regard, as its suggestions are contextual. Additionally, the constant need to select text to “feed” the Writing Tools becomes tedious. Another challenge arises when using Writing Tools with markdown content or links. These get mangled in the revised version. Continue reading →

Here is a thought about recent tweaks to RSS importer on Micro.blog. For example, now it’s possible to import photos in the RSS feed published by Glass. With this, when I publish a photo on Glass, it gets posted on my blog too. The same photo on two platforms. As much as I like the POSSE principle for writing, it doesn’t fit well with my desire to share photos on special places, like a photo-dedicated service. Continue reading →

So I put my M1 Mac mini for sale this weekend on Facebook Marketplace. 🤢 Got an offer for 50% of my asking price. I said, no, nice try . Got a second offer from someone else with a slightly reduced priced. I said ok. I went poking his Facebook profile page just to see if I’m being scammed👀🤨🧐. From the buyer’s profile and posts I can infer the following: he believes in conspiracies, he is an anti-vaccine, he is a proud pro-Trump, and the icing on the cake: he is pro-Russian. Continue reading →

Got my M4 Mac mini yesterday and completed the migration off the old M1 Mac mini. The process took me about 2.5 hours, where about 1.25 hours for data migration only using the Apple Migration Assistant1. Upon first login, I got only a handful of security-related popups, much less than I was expecting. Many apps like Microsoft OneDrive, Synology Drive client, worked perfectly with minimum reconfiguration, which was a pleasant surprise. Continue reading →

Paying to be a beta tester: is this a new trend? Glass Series was available to patron subscribers only while being in beta testing. RealMac Software offers Elements in beta as a subscription but at a reduced price. Active beta testers are actually paying of their time to use a software still being debugged and refined. Isn’t that enough? I understand that building software is hard and requires resources… but paying to be a beta tester seems to cross a line here. Continue reading →

Omnivore’s future is not looking good, following the announcement received by email yesterday night, by one of the founder himself. Omnivore was the best read-later service after Matter and Pocket, two services I didn’t really like or were too expansive. But now, with Omnivore’s future and slow demise, I’m getting fed up with those one-man-shop open-source projects. Pixelfed is another one that I’m getting tired of1. So, I’m going to refocus on Inoreader for read-later functionality and text highlights. Continue reading →

I’ve finally completed the arduous migration from 1Password and canceled my subscription. I didn’t encounter any issues with 1Password transitioning to an Electron-based application. While it was an excellent and overkill solution for managing my passwords and secrets, I generally prefer integrated solutions for fundamental products or features like password management. Is Apple Passwords the perfect solution? No, but it’s more than adequate for my needs. One positive outcome of this migration is an enhanced security posture, as I had to revisit many credentials and enable two-factor authentication for numerous services. Continue reading →