I just spent part of my morning installing Windows 10 version 22H2 on a virtual machine with VMware Fusion 12 on my recently acquired 2013 Mac Pro. God, it’s been a long time since I experienced the Windows installation process. It is so freaking slow (way faster to install a Linux machine, BTW) and with so many reboots. I still prefer Apple’s macOS in that respect.

After six weeks of waiting, I finally got this little LED-based display called “Tidbyt”, a reference, I guess, to the old Lite-Brite game which came out in 1967 (I had one when I was a child).

Tidbyt is an intelligent wireless LED-based panel that displays content configured from the Tidbyt app available on a smartphone. Physically, the device feels high quality and well-designed and is framed with real wood, reminiscent of mid-century furniture.

Content is configured using applets that you put together on a canvas. The display content will switch from one applet to another in the order defined on the canvas. Applets can be set to display only on a specific schedule, but the scheduling options are rather limited. It’s very simple to set this up.

Once the display is plugged into power via its USB-C cable, it will wait for the configuration to be done from the smartphone, a six-step process. Bluetooth is required to detect the display, and a Wifi network is required for the display to get its data from the Internet.

The applets catalogue is growing but still is relatively limited. Thanks to an SDK and open APIs, developers constantly add new ones. The display is bright and can be adjusted according to a manual setting or time of the day. There is a night mode, too, if you want to put the device in one bedroom.

The screen resolution seemed low at first, but from a distance, it is surprisingly good, enough to display small images.

All in all, the Tidbyt makes a great addition to my home office, and people at work have already noticed it during Teams meetings and are asking questions about this little thing sitting on the shelf behind me.

On Twitter, you can get notified when someone starts following you. Sounds great until it isn’t. You know, many people will start following others to get attention about their existence, hoping to get a follow back. It’s easy to know they are seeking your attention because after a few days they will unfollow you. I always despised this behaviour. For this reason, I prefer Micro.blog’s lack of notifications when someone starts to follow me. I don’t pay attention.

After watching a recent video from Matt Birchler about Rewind, a constant screen recording utility for the Mac, I was excited to give my email address and get onboard the waiting list for early access to the app. I got my invite a few days ago. As much as I would like to test this app, here's this deal-breaker for me: 20 US$ per month to get on the early access program, no thank you. Why?

I understand Rewind is still in beta, but the developer wants me to pay for testing the application. Shouldn’t it be the other way around so I get a rebate when the app goes out of beta? I mean, even with a 30-day “trial” I still can’t get over this. If it’s 20 US$ a month now for the early access, what will be the price of the final product then? Even more expansive?

Rewind makes me think of CleanShot, and I find Rewind’s pricing overly expansive if I think about the scope of both apps. 

Rewind is a great idea, even if it pauses many security risks, but I’ll pass for now.

I could save more than a whopping 400$ annually by shutting down my Twitter accounts. Thanks to the potential removal of a few service subscriptions from my workflow and potentially unjustified without Twitter in my digital life: Buffer, Typefully, Mailbrew. 

It’s incredible how thinking about my Twitter reliance makes me realize so many things on so many levels in my content creation workflow.

The longer you’ve been on Twitter (I joined in 2007), the more likely that most of your followers are inactive accounts. My guesstimate would be that less than 1% of my followers are actually active, and even fewer actually care about what I’m saying or posting. So why on earth, give a damn?

I’m in violation of Twitter’s guidelines because I do promote content coming from other social platforms. I do use Linktree and have my Linktr.ee URL set on @numericcitizen.

This new "Promotion of alternative social platforms policy" on Twitter deserves memorializing for the pure idiocy of it.

"Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended.".

I would love @manton to speak out about how the current Twitter turmoils, people flocking to Mastodon, and the ability to follow people over there right from my Micro.blog feed is increasing Micro.blog engagement, subscriptions and general usage. Personally, I’m much more active than before.

Is this true?

12 years ago, Twitter’s office used a Mac Mini to tunnel into the servers. One day, an IT guy found it in the closet.

“Anyone know who owns this?”

“Unplug it. Someone will show up.”

Everyone lost access to servers. Huge crisis. It became known as the “Load Bearing Mac Mini.”

I finally found how to reconfigure my Mailbrew account to log in without using Twitter. Good thing. I don’t log in often in Mailbrew, but this morning I learned that I’d need to adjust many things when I close my Twitter account. As an example, this newsletter setup will need to be revisited to remove any references to Twitter as a data source.

Mailbrew is an excellent tool for generating newsletters, but it hasn’t been updated for quite a while (October of 2021, according to the change log). The developers behind Mailbrew are too busy working on their other product: Typefully, a web service for writing Twitter threads. I’m subscribing to both services. Typefully was cool when it launched but being entirely dependent on Twitter puts them in danger IMHO. I don’t use Typefully much, preferring Buffer for scheduling cross-posted content to Twitter, something Typefully doesn’t support. 

It’s sad to see Mailbrew coming to a halt. Typefully will go down the drain with my Twitter account closure next year.