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Curiously Entering the World of DJing (#music #dj #mixing #electronicmusic)
Iām no musicien. I know barely nothing about music theory. Yet, I always wanted to do some form of music. Synthesizer would be my instrument if I was to do music. Yet, Iāve been fascinated by music, especially electronic music since I was a teenager. Iām a big listener of techno and house music. Recently, I started to use my iPad while exercising on the treadmill to play video on YouTube of DJ doing mixes. This got me curious about the equipments and software DJs are relying on. I downloaded Algoriddimās Djay app and stared to play with it on my iPad. I was really excited. I started to read more about the world of music mixing. So, I learned about DJ mixer, controllers, DJ software, music sources, digital record pools, file formats, MIDI, etc. Then, yesterday, unexpectedly, while visiting a music instruments store to see these equipments in person, I bought a Pioneer DDJ-400, a pair of small speakers, went home, enabled a trial of Djay Pro AI on my iPad Pro and started to plug all the pieces together. I feel like itās Christmas time. Will see where it goes from here. Expect more details on my endeavour soon.
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So, Pocket + Readwise for one year it will be. Expect a blog post about why I chose Pocket over Instapaper.
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šš» The next issue of the Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter is coming out tomorrow, while waiting for it, why not give a look at the previous issue! Please, don’t miss it! It’s something really different. š
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Good morning. There was a time, a long long time ago, I used to say Ā«Ā Good morningĀ Ā» on Twitter. I donāt know really why I did that. Oh well. Anyways, good morning. š
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Anyone using @Readwiseio here? My trial expired. A few thoughts: their app feels āstrangeā; like a big āwebviewā. Workflow not yet clear to me. No Safari Extension support. Not cheap. Seems popular. Youāre thoughts?
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Anyone here using Mastodon? If yes, why? Should I cross-post from here? Which one should I join? Tell me more. I’m not really aquainted with this platform.
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Hey, World (#hey #newsletters)
Each day, it seems there is always something new happening in the world of newsletters. When itās 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. Iām thinking of Hey in particular.
āEmail 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? What if you could just email the web to reach the world? Introducing the HEY World experimentā - Jason Fried from HEY
Yesterday, the company behind the popular HEY email client tentatively announced a new service for their customers. The idea behind is to allow any HEY users to create newsletters and publish them just by sending them to world@hey.com. The service would then post these newsletters on the web, complete with the authorās name. A simple static page, no tracking, no nothing more. I call this: simply brilliant.
The service is not currently available, only in some form of alpha-stage for internal use only. They announced it to read the room and see if there is some interest in something like this that could become some soft of hyper-distributed publishing platform.
Iām personally interested in this kind of service simply because it removes friction in the publishing process. What could be simpler than just writing the newsletter like we do with emails and then hit āsendā!? Simply brilliant. For the reader, they can subscribe by email or by using the available RSS feed.
You can read the announcement here. I like the simplicity of this implementation. Very clean. Very lean. Iām in love. Too bad this isnāt available ā yet.
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HEY, Hey just got updated (#hey)
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 Iād like to see is a collapsible view in the feed view. I donāt see how pinch-to-zoom can be added without implementing the opposite to bring a collapsed view.
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Learning Blot.im the hard way (#blot #selfhosting)
So I started another experiment involving Blot.im. For those who donāt 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? Thatās what I thought.
My goal with Blot.im is to do some āmeta bloggingā; a place where I could write about the tools, services and my blogger workflow. So I registered a new domain with GoDaddy: numericcitizen.io. Then, I opened my Blot.im account and stated experimenting. The initial setup is pretty simple. And then challenges pretty quickly started to emerge.
First, I wanted my new domain to point my Blot.im domain. Tried to follow the Blot.im instructions to make it work but all attempts failed. GoDaddy doesnāt support ALIAS DNS records as Blot.im ask me to create. I asked for help from Blot.im support. Still a work in progress.
Second, I chose to use Git as the āclientā to push content on the service because I donāt want to use Dropbox, a service I despise. By using Git, I need a Git client on my Mac. Iām tentatively settled on Nova. So far so good. After cloning the Git repo from Blot.im to my local machine, I can then use Ulysses to write my posts and push them with Nova. The workflow is very geeky: create .MD file in Ulysses, ācommitā within Nova then hit āpushā to publish. Not as seamless as I would like. But here another issue: inserting images with a Markdown file is not as easy as it seems. Again, trying to figure out instructions on Blot.im site doesnāt work. The other thing is that if you drop an image within a folder, it will trigger Blot.im to create its own blog post, something that I donāt want. Not cool. Again, Iām asking support to help me here with this supposedly trivial task.
Third, I would like to use Github as the source of truth. Setting up a new repo is simple and cloning it to my local machine too. But, now, how do I make Blot.im to use the Github repo as the source of content? Again, trying to figure out Blot.im instructions but failing to make it work. Still trying to figure that out.
Fourth, tweaking the visual appearance is not as easy as I would have liked. There is a theme editor and I still need to be pretty knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. I did fork one of the theme to make it mine and started to do some tweak but it is a painful trial-and-error process.
All in all, Iām far from positive about Blot.im right now. I spent way too much time on these issues. Iām not sure where this is all going. If you are using Blot.im, please, do me a favour and chime in!
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Testing, testing, 1.2.3. (#webmention #indieweb #openweb)
Iām still new to the Indieweb world. Today, Iām learning about webmentions. I like the idea of linking reactions back to the origin. So, after enabling a plugin on my main blog, Iām trying to link back to one of my recent post and see what happens. One day, I wrote āThe Journey is the Rewardā. I donāt post personal things very often. Thanks for your feedback.
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Dear Micro.blog, where do you plan to go next? (#microblogging #microblog)
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.
So, where is Micro.blog heading? In particular, how do you plan to expand on themes support and customizability? Why the web editor doesn’t allow support for Grammarly? Do you plan an opt-in option to see how many followers a user have? Those are just a few questions that I have regarding Micro.blog future plans. Thanks in advance.
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Bye Bye Spend Stack - I barely knew you (#apps)
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 canāt rely on ephemeral applications even for simple things.
Sadly, this is something that happens all the time these days. Some developers are building great stuff but on the wrong business model. Others are just finding new priorities in their life which have side effects on their personal development projects.
Iām back to Appleās Numbers and a simple spreadsheet. Sometimes, the best is still in the most basic form and function.
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Looking for Micro.blog friends (#microblog #socialnetwork)
Yes, the title says it all: Iām 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, Iām looking for friend suggestions. Letās call this āthe community-fed referrals day!ā. To help you make such referrals, please do remember about my passions: Apple, photography, privacy protection and climate change.
This brings me to something that Iād like to see improved about Micro.blog: discoverability. When looking to discover new people to follow, we do see a posts count on each user profile, but we donāt know Ā«Ā how recentĀ Ā» the last post is. We know about stale accounts on Twitter, I donāt want to follow stale accounts here. Next, Iād like to see some kind of Ā«Ā behind the sceneĀ Ā» analysis of how someone could be interesting for me. I do understand that this is entering a dangerous territory of Ā«Ā algorithm fedĀ realityĀ Ā». I guess it is har to strike a balance in that respect. Finally, the categories are lacking a bit of breath. Where is āTechā or āPrivacyā or āClimateā?
So, Iām waiting for your referrals. Thanks for taking some of your time to do so. š
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What happened to my Twitter usage? (#twitter)
I donāt know what happened to my Twitter usage. It fell off the cliff recently. Since Iāve completed my Twitter experience transformation as fully documented here, I barely open Twitter once a day. Do I miss it? Nope. Why? Probably because Iām getting a distant view by using Mailbrew which draws the most relevant tweets for me on a daily basis.
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I think he meant that PopClip should be part of macOS! Instant buy for me!As far as Iām concerned, PopClip is part of macOS.
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Woah, I didn’t know we could have a test blog on Micro.blog. It’s free! Thanks to https://custom.micro.blog, I’m starting to learn more about CSS and how MB works to make its magic!
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I could play with this forever (#snowflakegenerator)
Please, do yourself a favour and go to this website, a snowflake generator. If you like winter, it will make you smile a bit.
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On Tweetbot 6 update (@tweetbot #update #subscription)
Really nice update (and unexpected) to my preferred Twitter client. Tweetbot version 6 received a refreshed design, full support for Twitter APIs v2 and cleans up unsupported features with latest APIs. Tweetbot startup is much faster than Twitterās client and exposes a few features that arenāt available otherwise. Design-wise, Tweetbot contains a lot of nice touches throughout the app. Compared to that, Twitterās own client feels uninspired.
Like a growing number of apps recently introduced or updated, Tweetbot 6 now is subscription-based. I expect a few angry users but Iām not one of them. I find the pricing quite reasonable. I chose to go with the yearly subscription at 50% price reduction, a no brainer to me.
Tweetbot has recently returned as my go to Twitter client during my recent Twitter reset and Iām very happy with it.
