Longer posts

February 25, 2021 8:02am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

How many websites a blogger can have? Good question. I do have (too?) many, each filling their own niche. On that subject, something caught my attention yesterday in the public announcement of HEY’s experiment: “Hello, World!”. Jason Fried explaining why he never had a blog: “It was primarily because setting up a personal blog was just too much of a hassle. It felt formal, it required yet another tool, yet another place to write, yet another platform to pay for just one feature. Continue reading →

February 24, 2021 6:09pm

Numeric Citizen

Steve would have been 66 years old today. Even if I love what Apple has become over the years since he died, I miss him dearly. What a great picture of him. It is nice to see Apple and Tim Cook paying a small tribute each year. Continue reading →

February 23, 2021 6:43pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

Each day, it seems there is always something new happening in the world of newsletters. When it’s not someone famous who joins Substack, a company out of nowhere offers a brilliant idea built around supporting newsletters in one way or the other. I’m thinking of Hey in particular. “Email is the internet’s oldest instant self-publishing platform. Except you have to define a small audience every time you write. But what if you didn’t? Continue reading →

February 22, 2021 10:25pm

Numeric Citizen

9to5Mac published a nice comparison between the iPad Air and the 2020 iPad Pro. The latter still hold the crown with its 120Hz ProMotion display and LiDAR. Rumours are pointing to an update for the Pro line in March. The question that comes to my mind is: what’s missing from the iPad Pro, from the hardware point of view? I mean, speed, screen, form factor are just close to “perfect”. Continue reading →

February 22, 2021 9:56pm

Numeric Citizen

My go-to email client got an update today. Hey version 1.2 brings a few tweaks in the compose mode. In recent weeks, updates are more frequent as they finally delivered support for corporate email. Now, the other thing I’d like to see is a collapsible view in the feed view. I don’t see how pinch-to-zoom can be added without implementing the opposite to bring a collapsed view. Continue reading →

February 21, 2021 8:53pm

Numeric Citizen

In my quest to better understand the full potential of note taking application « Craft », I’ve come up to something different, a website about Apple’s related rumours. You can hit this link to have a look. You can leave comments, no registration required. Enjoy. Continue reading →

February 21, 2021 5:33pm

Numeric Citizen

In the last few months, on Twitter and on Micro.blog, I’ve been witnessing something that takes the shape of a small phenomenon: people are moving from one place to another in the digital space. Many are writing about their experience of moving from one hosting site to another. Some are leaving WordPress to return to Ghost. Others are proudly putting together their hosting solutions. The same happens in the newsletters hosting space: people are leaving Mailchimp to go to Substack or Revue. Continue reading →

February 21, 2021 9:13am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Numeric Citizen

So I started another experiment involving Blot.im. For those who don’t know Blot.im, it is a static web site generator that seems popular among the crowd here. On paper, the process of publishing is very simple: you drag and drop files on a specific folder on your computer and they get instantly published on the web. Sound great, right? That’s what I thought. My goal with Blot.im is to do some “meta blogging”; a place where I could write about the tools, services and my blogger workflow. Continue reading →

February 20, 2021 9:28am

Numeric Citizen

I’m still new to the Indieweb world. Today, I’m learning about webmentions. I like the idea of linking reactions back to the origin. So, after enabling a plugin on my main blog, I’m trying to link back to one of my recent post and see what happens. One day, I wrote “The Journey is the Reward”. I don’t post personal things very often. Thanks for your feedback. Continue reading →

February 19, 2021 8:09am

Numeric Citizen

I’m in love with Micro.blog. It’s simple, not too busy. Based on open web standards. But today, I’m a bit frustrated with the bad sad of being too simple. My most important grievance is the lack of design flexibility. Built-in themes are too basics and unappealing. You have to be a HTML and CSS expert to try to figure out how to make simple tweaks. This frustration is behind my recent desire to look elsewhere for hosting the whole thing. Continue reading →

February 18, 2021 8:22am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

It all started with the idea of tweaking my micro.blog visual theme. I don’t like it, but this is the best that I could find from the included themes. After reading for a while and seeing people writing about their blogger workflow, I found out that Micro.blog is using Hugo, a static website generator. Then I started to learn about Hugo by searching for introduction videos on YouTube. Then, I learned about Hugo themes and how they are constructed, and at the center of how a website is displayed. Continue reading →

February 17, 2021 8:17am

Numeric Citizen

Thought of the day for @manton and @jean: there is something that could be improved regarding micro.blog: opening up the evolution and improvement roadmap of the platform. I do appreciate when a service do put out their roadmaps so the community get a better look at where things will be going in the future. Mailbrew, Plausible and Craft are very vocal about their future plans, you just have to find the place where they talk about it. Continue reading →

February 17, 2021 8:03am

Numeric Citizen

As much as you can like to work on the iPad, there are edge cases where the iPad falls short. Since I got an Apple Silicon powered Mac, and thanks to many nifty Mac utilities, I rediscovered what it really means to be productive and efficient on a computer platform. This blog post by Matt Birchler is an example of an edge case being better served by a traditional yet powerful computer. Continue reading →

February 15, 2021 10:15pm

Numeric Citizen

As reported by MacRumors, the next major revision of the iPhone looks promising for me: “Weinbach claims that the always-on display will look like a “toned down Lock screen,” where the clock and battery charge are always visible, and past notifications are shown through “a bar and icons.” When users receive a notification, the notification will “pop up normally except that the screen will not entirely light up.” Instead, “it will display it just like you’re used to right now, except dimmed down and only temporarily,” according to the leaker. Continue reading →

February 14, 2021 8:50pm

Numeric Citizen

Here are two simple but very useful tricks using an iPhone with a U1 chip, iOS 14.4 and an HomePod mini. Trick #1: set a timer with Siri on your HomePod mini to, let’s say, 10 minutes. Then, bring your iPhone close to the HomePod mini, the iPhone will show how much time is left on the timer (make sure the iPhone screen is on). Trick #2: let’s say music is playing on your HomePod mini, and that you want to, silently, see what’s playing. Continue reading →

February 14, 2021 4:10pm

Numeric Citizen

It is a bit of a sad day: I decided to delete the excellent expense tracking app Spend Stack from my devices and revert to using a simple Numbers spreadsheet to track my subscriptions. Why did I delete this app? First, the developer sold the app to somebody else. Since last September, no more updates. Second, there is no clear roadmap announcements by the new owner. Nothing. I can’t rely on ephemeral applications even for simple things. Continue reading →

February 14, 2021 9:36am

Numeric Citizen

I dug out my ancient Inside Macintosh reference books from storage. Remember when Apple’s developer documentation came as paper books? Volumes I-III on the original Mac APIs, IV on Mac Plus, V on color Macs, and the truly massive volume VI on System 7. 📚 David Sinclair https://dejus.com/2020/12/21/0927/ I did some 68000 assembly using my 512Ke Mac back in the days. Can't remember what was the development environment, though. And I remember these Inside Apple Macintosh books so well. Continue reading →

February 14, 2021 9:17am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

Yes, the title says it all: I’m looking for new friends to follow on Micro.blog. After my big Twitter cleanup, the noise in my numeric life has dramatically decreased. I feel zen and I think this is what Micro.blog is all about: a zen place to meet virtual friends sharing the same passions. So, I’m looking for friend suggestions. Let’s call this “the community-fed referrals day!”. To help you make such referrals, please do remember about my passions: Apple, photography, privacy protection and climate change. Continue reading →

February 13, 2021 9:56am

Numeric Citizen

I don’t know what happened to my Twitter usage. It fell off the cliff recently. Since I’ve completed my Twitter experience transformation as fully documented here, I barely open Twitter once a day. Do I miss it? Nope. Why? Probably because I’m getting a distant view by using Mailbrew which draws the most relevant tweets for me on a daily basis. Continue reading →

February 12, 2021 8:01am

Numeric Citizen

Here is a simple one: Apple, please, no. I don’t get the idea of such product. The audience for this seems to be too small for Apple. I do understand that Apple research in VR can have broader ramifications, but to build such a limited appeal product for the mass, I don’t get it. I think Apple’s interests has much more potential in augmented reality products, services or features. Their work is already bearing fruit with AirPods spatial audio and transparency mode. Continue reading →