Misc The RSS feed for Misc.

  • Bad News for Weather in Canada

    Yesterday, weather report summary for June in Canada was released and it is ugly. Much higher temperatures in the wrong places and at much earlier time this year. Many records broken by wide margin (since 1871). Lot’s of discrepancies in rain distribution with lack of rain in the north of Quebec which then allowed much widespread forests fire than usual.

    One month is not a trend but when you look far back, there are many worrying trends.

  • Annnnnnnnd… back home. 🛬 Feels good. 😃 But this jet lag… bleh.😒

  • Are We Ready for This Dystopian World?

    Warning: it’s not about the Apple Vision Pro headset, which many people think will bring a touch of a dystopian future to our life. Something else more serious will.

    I read this week somewhere that, to get climate back into the normality zone🌪️ to ensure the sustainability of the human race and life in general, everyone on earth would need to live in an oppressive world where everything would be controlled by laws and government all the time and for decades. From buying food to cars to travelling to entertainment services, we would be under constant quotas, which would bring our quality of life much lower than we currently enjoy. In fact, developed countries’ quality of life would join the much lower quality of life of the vast majority of the earth’s population in less developed countries. This would be the only way to get around this climate crisis. Not convinced? The COVID pandemic brought massive and repetitive confinements that weren’t enough to bend many climate change indicators downwards. It lasted two years, more or less. 😱

    Oh, and should we talk about forced birth control everywhere? Because we should, even if this is a taboo subject.

    Are we ready for this dystopian world? 😷

    I can see a great Vision Pro use case right here where people watch daylong movies about what used to be a much more enjoyable world in 3D. 😒

  • My blog theme was tweaked this morning to set a wider content area (from 40em to 60em). Since the content is resized according to the device screen, I don’t think it should create a problem.

  • Thanks to @Mtt & @rcrackley, I’m now using a different and quite nice Micro.blog theme for the first time in many years! I’m quite happy with the final results. Hope that you enjoy the change as much as I do!

    PS. There are a few things that I’d like to tweak, but that will be for another day!

  • 365 Days Later

    Thumbnails of my produced YouTube videos

    A year ago, I shared my first YouTube video on my YouTube channel. My initial goal was to share videos about using Craft, but later came videos about using Micro.blog. Here are some notable facts:

    • 52 videos about Craft were produced;
    • 5 videos about Micro.blog were produced;
    • All videos totalling more than 13.5 hours of watch time;
    • My YouTube channel has 813 subscribers as of now;
    • Two subscribers gave me money as a sign of appreciation.

    I feel I’m now on par with all the things I wanted to talk about regarding Craft. Future Craft videos will touch on new features and tweaked workflow. I still have much work to do for Micro.blog video series, though.

    At the initial pace of new subscribers, I set the goal of hitting a thousand subscribers in the first year, but I’m sad to report that I won’t make it. The pace of new subscribers has slowed quite a bit.

    This video production journey is full of learning and lessons. Over time, I settled on a production style I’m happy with. I finally found a way to get better sound quality. I recently added iA Presenter to get cue cards showing on my screen while recording (read “iA Presenter — A Different & Clever Take at Presentation Software”). My workflow is stable now and is supported by this Craft template (you can download and use it if you are a Craft user, BTW). Finally, I started using Play.app to gather all my video links in one place. This provides a quick way to refer to past videos whenever needed.

    I also produced videos about other apps like Capacities, Inoreader and Anybox. Some of these videos take the form of a 60 minutes session with the app as a first-time user. It’s fun as there is no script supporting those experiences.

    Today, I will record a video about the WWDC 23 conference. The video will complement my recently published article on the same subject. It will be my first foray into tech news and commentary. I’m not planning to do many of these, but WWDC is significant and needs some of my production time attention.

  • Mmmm, it seems that I’m unable to use my test blog on Micro.blog to post from Ulysses or Micro.blog.app. Am I missing something here?

  • I hate .webm files. There, I said it. Why? I don’t know.

  • YouTube reminds me every day why I hate algorithmic timelines. Suppose I open up YouTube and click on one video about long-range airplanes. The minute I’m done watching the video, my timeline becomes full of airplane-related videos. YouTube completely washes out my timeline with what the algorithm was programmed to show me based on my consumption behaviours (and probably based on some other weird and highly questionable factors). I hate it. One video and boom, my YouTube universe flips elsewhere. Disclaimer: I’m a paying subscriber so I never see an ad. This behaviour is infuriating.

  • I never share my food over here but god this was delicious: aspergus, lobster for a risotto! Nothing left on the table. Sorry.

  • Now there are 42 members (Micro.bloggers) on Wavelength! Keep joining if you want! Invite link.

  • Targeting the First Thousand YouTube Subscribers

    My goal when I started doing YouTube videos about Craft (and now Micro.blog) was to reach a thousand subscribers during the first year. At the current rate, I won’t make it. Am I sad about this? No. Is it nagging me? Yes. Why?

    I think there are a lot of Craft users out there, and I think they could benefit from watching a few of my videos. That’s the whole purpose and “raison d’être” for my YouTube channel which was (and still is) to help users get better at using Craft or learning about Craft if they are not currently using it. Is my absence from Twitter to promote my content making any difference? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.

    I still have some time left before June 6th, but I’m being realistic here.

  • Some housekeeping this morning: I made some changes to the navigation bar on my website so that FeedPress feeds are more prominent. Removed is the link to the monthly newsletter tag as I’m no longer publishing them.

  • As a fan of meteorology, I was fascinated today by this visible satellite imagery sequence of east North America. We can observe clouds at different levels in the atmosphere for the same geo area that travel in different directions. Just look at the cursor for where to observe the phenomena. This is not exceptional, but it is fascinating nonetheless.

  • I’ve got one Bluesky invite available. Just saying. 🙂

  • I finally completed and shared the last part of my story “Moving out of WordPress”, this time, it’s the DNS side of the story, where I explain the process of moving out of GoDaddy to CloudFlare so that I can keep using my root domain numericcitizen.me. Go on my Numeric Citizen I/O website for all the details if you’re curious.

  • My creative goals are all met, and it’s Monday. 😅 Maybe I wasn’t aiming high enough? 🤔

  • In my last two YouTube videos, I decided to stop using cross-fade between segments. It’s a bit visually harsh (I’m not getting used to that), but it seems like the general trend among YouTubers these days. Plus, when using bookmarks, thumbnails get a better preview.

  • I’m wondering how good MacWhisper will be at decoding my English with my accent. Will try for my next YouTube video ad I always wanted to add video captions.

  • Fun and interesting fact: I have four times more followers on Bluesky than on Mastodon, even though the latter has much more users like in the millions instead of in the thousands for the former. 🤔