It’s the time of the year where I start to think of my upcoming year from a content creation perspective and as someone who likes to try new things. Here are a few things that I’m going to explore. First, as a subscriber of SoundCloud, I’m finding it hard to find content for my DJ mixing experimentation. More often than not, those publishing content on SoundCloud wants you to buy  what's available on Beatport. Someone told me recently to use Beatport instead. I may switch from SoundCloud to Beatport for 2023. Second, I’ll continue my slow migration from Smugmug to my Exposure page. Smugmug was good but didn’t fit well with what I expected from a modern photo-sharing service. Third, I finally found a use case for recording videos with CleanShot. I’ll use it to add short video clips showing how to use specific features and tricks in Craft. Those clips will be added to The Craft Bible (a website dedicated to Craft, the document writing app) and will come as a complement to my YouTube channel. It’s fun to be full of projects.

Can you believe it? As an amateur photographer, I’m leaving my Nikon D750 home for my upcoming trip to Brasil. This trip certainly classifies itself as a once-in-a-lifetime event, yet I won’t bring my camera with me. There are a few reasons for this. First, I’ll be on a cruise ship for most of my twelve-day trip. Second, I don’t feel it’s secure to bring such gear to some parts of Rio or Sao Polo when we go off-board. Third, it’s tough to beat the convenience of an iPhone 13 Pro in the pocket. The Nikon bag with all my lenses feels quite heavy at times. I’ll see when I return home if I made the right decision.

Thanks to all who replied to my question regarding Mastodon. What a great community over here! Never had this in fifteen years on Twitter. 😊

Here are a few takeaways (many may be obvious, duh!). 

1. Just like for emails, one cannot "reserve" a username in the Mastodon-friendly world. Makes sense.
2. Registering with a specific instance (or server) is mandatory just like opening an account with an email provider. 
3. Using a custom domain that I own is something I should consider doing. 
4. I should probably go ahead with my custom domain name for Micro.blog before doing anything related to Mastodon. 
5. Setting my websites (I do have a few) to display my Mastodon username or profile is a good idea too. 
6. Setting my Mastodon profile to display my website is another good practice.
7. Finding an instance I can relate to is probably the most daunting task if my research is any indication. I didn’t find any so far. 
8. I still don’t understand how a Micro.blog compatible Mastodon name is helping in any of this. 
9. Having a registered account on a Mastodon won’t do much for me. I already get everything I want on Micro.blog. People can follow me from their Mastodon instance, and I can, too, from Micro.blog. 
10. Thinking about all this on Christmas day shows that I don’t have a life! LOL

Anyway, happy holidays to you all! 👋

I got a pleasant surprise under the tree for this Christmas🎄: AirPods Pro 2. Some observations: I would say the clicking sound when closing the lid is different, with a bit lower tonality. The setup experience is top-notch, of course. Sound quality is definitively upgraded with more present bass and deeper sound. Noise cancellation is better too. I’ll have to experience it in a noisy place like an airplane tomorrow. For my next trip, I will leave my AirPods Max behind (they are too big for sleeping on the plane) and use the new, much lighter ones and easier to travel with.

When I read articles like this one from The Washington Post about Elon Musk’s current tenure at Twitter, I think about Steve Jobs's tenure at Pixar. Both are quite different leaders, but I think Steve Jobs had a much more positive impact on Pixar than Musk on Twitter. My comparison comes from the belief that Steve could be seen as a jerk or be very hard on people. Elon is certainly seen and behaves like a real jerk. His leadership image is being tarnished every single day. 

This morning, I visited IFTTT and Zapier to turn off ten applets which were using Twitter. My About page was updated to remove references to my Twitter accounts. While at it, I removed all references to Medium and GetRevue since they are no longer used.

I still have to figure out how I will follow people on Twitter who are valuable (there are a few) but refuse to move elsewhere. I might use  News Explorer to follow them, cutting the noise because I refrain from using a Twitter client. It’s not a perfect solution because I would get all their replies which makes things noisy. Speaking of Twitter clients (Twitter & Tweetbot), these were removed from my devices too.

It is one of the most comprehensive digital cleanups I ever did since 2007. For the upcoming year: I’ll focus on the open web services and tools for publishing most of my content. There are a few exceptions: YouTube and WordPress.com.

I may sound a bit extremist.

Closing out my working session with my office for the holidays. What a year it was. Now is the time to finally get ready for Christmas and everything that comes with it. Next, on December 26th, we’re leaving Canada for Brasil and our first cruise trip in five years! 😅

The next victim of my "digital cleanup" will be my Medium account. Even though I stopped writing original content there a while ago, I currently get a few cents a month of revenue, maybe a few dollars when I’m lucky. It’s tough to expand the readership over there. My revenue used to be enough to pay for my Partner Program annual membership, but not anymore.  All in all, the time has come to move on.

I finally tested a FaceTime call with my iPhone 13 Pro and the Belkin iPhone mount with my M1 MacBook Air running macOS Ventura. The setup was easy. iPhone automatically detected as a possible camera source within FaceTime. The image quality was obviously top-notch. The sound was great too. The tabletop feature required a bit of tweaking but eventually led to good (but not “top-notch”) results.

The only problem is the weight of the combined iPhone 13 Pro with a case and the Belkin mount: the screen panel of my MacBook tends to move back during the call. Oops. 🤣

I receive more user feedback or interactions in a day here on Micro.blog than in an entire month on Twitter. On top of that, the quality is 100x higher too.

Think about that for a second.

Thank you guys!