Fun fact: “at Threads” is available on Micro.blog. 🤪

With the future demise of Vanmoof, I decided to look elsewhere for my ebike. I found it. And bought it. My first new bike in more than thirty years. It’s probably my last one, too. Today, a perfect bike day in Montreal, I ran for more than 28 km for my first test drive. 🚲🚴🏻‍♂️😎😅😊

I was six years old. In my early days with computers, I was exposed to some of that stuff: fast line printers, disk packs, and punch card readers.

Surprising how many Reddit posts about Notion never get an answer. It’s the vast majority in seems (3 out of 4 questions). This /r/Notion is super popular, with many subscribers (292K)! Weird.

No Friday Notes post this week. I have a few ideas but didn’t have time to expand on them and write the article. Hint: it’s about photo sharing in the age of content abundance. Oh well. 😔

Poof Vanmoof!

July 17, 2023: “VanMoof was declared bankrupt in the Netherlands on Monday by the Amsterdam District Court, following the company's pandemic-time boom”

Sept 1, 2021: ↓

Read: mastodon.social

Too bad for them. It was THE electric bike I was looking for since I heard about them. Sadly, they never expanded in North America. They don’t do business with partners. I always regarded Vanmoof as the Apple of the ebike.

This is the Discover tab with the focus on “people to discover” on the @pixelfed@mastodon.social official app (still in beta). The problem with this “selection”: how is this list built? The same can be said of Micro.blog discover feature. Why is the criteria never or rarely explained? Why is this list mostly static? The open web should be about absolute transparency too. Cc @manton

I learned to use GitHub for the repo of my Blot website last year (read more about my experience with Blot here). I didn’t want to use Dropbox. I’m no longer using Blot, but I’m still visiting Github occasionally to keep track of project development like Plausible, but more recently for Pixelfed and a few plugins for Micro.blog. Peeking at change logs, commit comments, files changed, etc. offers an intimate look at software development. It’s also a great way to learn something.

YouTube put this video suggestion in my feed this morning. I was curious and watched it. Then, I realized that without knowing it, I’m actually using the PARA approach in Craft. Now I’m wondering if I should rearrange and rename a few things in there to better align with the PARA naming convention. 🤔

How it started, how it ended. That was yesterday. 88mm of rain in two hours. Oh, and one tornado touchdown. Two others possible.

Wow, we are just in the last moments of a “three-wave” storm with heavy rain, winds and lighting. I guess we got between 50mm - 100mm of rain in three hours. Power failures all around are reported. One might say: well, it’s summer; it is expected. Yeah, but when you look at the trend this summer, we got way too much rain, too fast compared to the average rainfall.

Tornado warning. We mostly never get those in our region. WTF?

Am I the only one here on Micro.blog who feels satisfactory feelings when I upgrade one of my plug-ins to a newer version? Is there a cure for that? I’m asking because it was the same feeling when I was on WordPress… and god knows that you can have many more plug-ins on WordPress.

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.😒

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!

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?