One of the things I regret the most is not having had the idea of creating a blog in the 90s (and keeping it until today). Surprisingly, I learned about HTML, web servers like Apache and Netscape when it became popular1. I didn’t click with the idea of owning a small portion of the Internet to share what I was becoming at that time. What a missed opportunity. It’s not exactly true. Continue reading →

For Micro.blog lovers and enthusiasts, I made a video summarizing February improvements and additions. Enjoy.

Week number eight is complete. You can read my weekly creative summary right HERE! Coming up later for newsletter subscribers. Thanks for reading about my work. 🙏🏻

I made a big cleanup in my Shortcuts this morning. Boy, do I feel this app needs so much more work to be enjoyable to use. Can Apple fix this mess? Editing a long shortcut is not optimal. There should be a compressed or text-only mode with inline hyperlinks for variables and actions. Syncing is broken—no debugging option. There should be a way to turn off a shortcut so it doesn’t appear in places like share sheets. I wish Apple spent more time on Shortcuts than they do on Swift Playground. Oh, is Apple going to enable creating Shortcuts using GenAI? That would be really cool. 👀🤔

This week during a work meeting with my office colleagues, one of them was using a “remarkable” tablet to take notes. I was sitting right next to him and could see the tablet in action. I must say I was impressed. It’s certain that a “remarkable” tablet offers very limited functionality compared to an iPad, but it raises the following question: Should Apple consider going back to creating single-purpose devices? For example, the iPhone killed the iPod, but I think if Apple re-entered the market with a new line of iPods, it would be very popular. Continue reading →

Lots of meetings today at the office. Used my iPad Pro all the time for note-taking. It’s such a wonderful and mighty device for that purpose. Even with iPadOS limitations. I’m excited for the next iteration. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next to this platform.

Yesterday, while writing and editing a report for one of our clients, I used ChatGPT for two different use cases. One use case was to ask for a summarization of what “firmware” is and how critical it is. The second use case is to define the pillars of a data management and governance policy in the enterprise. On that one, I asked for more details about managing unstructured data. The ChatGPT results were mind-blowing. I know a lot about this specific IT field, and I could validate the correctness of the answers. I saved a lot of time because of ChatGPT.

But what about my ethics?

Should I write a disclaimer in this report that says GenAI was used to put together some portions of this report? Is the client ready and mature enough to read this disclaimer? Will he understand that ChatGPT is in fact like an assistant to whom I asked to summarize what a data governance policy is? How do I cite my sources?

Today is the kind of day where I feel that I’m in a constantly moving mode: from Craft to Micro.blog or Bear 2. Closing this subscription, starting a new one. And all this for what? Content preservation? Data silos fighting? It’s exhausting.

This whole Apple Car didn’t make any sense to me. It’s not Apple. A car is not a personal device. A personal device is a phone. A computer. Or a bike. One positive byproduct of this car journey is probably the birth of CarPlay 2.0, which was probably worked within the Apple Car project. But then, what else? AI? Maybe. I’m reading that the AI portion of the project will be folded into the other AI team(s) within Apple. Continue reading →

The Craft team is introducing collaborative whiteboards to Craft. I tested the feature and made a video about it.

💡 Today, I want to share the newest addition to my digital publishing space: my metablog, hosted on Micro.blog. This isn’t entirely new; another version is already in place, but it is hosted as a series of Craft-shared documents. What I’m sharing today is hosted on Micro.blog using the recently introduced increase in the number of blogs you can have with a single premium account1. From this migration, my metablog will gain RSS feed support, enable POSSE, and be closer to my online community here on Micro. Continue reading →

Thought of the day: Micro.blog is probably the most fun and flexible thing on the open web these days that I can play with. It is approachable which in itself is a great quality. It is a creativity “unleasher”. When something is fun, I want more of it. I want to spread the word and share my excitement. 👊🏻

It’s Sunday, and you know the drill: it’s time to share my latest edition of the weekly creative summary. It’s mostly complete, so this week’s edition partially follows the “build in public” movement. I wonder if I should start sharing the document at the beginning of the process so that you can see the whole creation process as I’m working on the current edition. What do you think? I’ve been doing these summaries since last September and enjoy putting them together. Continue reading →

After much thinking, I decided not to create exclusive content for paying subscribers of numericcitizen.me. Reason #1: I don’t publish often enough to warrant such a decision. Reason #2: I don’t have the time to create such content and don’t want to feel the pressure. Reason #3: I prefer asking for support for my whole creative journey. In a sense, someone subscribing encourages the pursuit of my journey by saying: can’t wait to read what’s coming! Are you one of those? 🙂

I’m still looking into new use cases for using Micro.blog’s new blog limits¹. Porting a portion of my meta blog is one such use case, but porting this portion would be really difficult. I might go ahead with a dual publication: I keep the Craft version because it is richer and faster to publish but also publish on Micro.blog because of RSS support and better integration with my Micro.blog digital community.

Yesterday I did a 20-min presentation on how to take advantage of ChatGPT and GenAI tools at work, for my colleagues. Many of them didn’t learn anything because they already experimented with these tools. For others, they learned quite a bit and I saw their enchantment in their eyes. This reminds of 1993 when I gave a similar presentation about tools like Netscape, Newsgroups, Gopher, and Mail and how to use http requests. Today, we need to learn how to create effective “prompts”.

🔗 Elon Musk nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Billionaire Elon Musk — whose businesses range from satellites to social media — was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian lawmaker who praised the X owner as a “stout proponent for free speech.”

You must be kidding me! While at it, why not nominate Putin for his fight against nazis in Ukraine. Beyond ridiculous.

Apple Journals is iPhone only. Apple Sports is iPhone only¹. Apple Classical is iPhone only. Did Apple forget about the iPad? What should we conclude from this? Will it take years to come to the iPad, just like the Health app? Isn’t that easy to make an iPad version of an app?

Apple Vision Pro Returns https://initialcharge.net/2024/02/gurman-vision-pro-returns/

I wonder, sometimes, about the Apple Vision Pro ending up in the drawer, just like pre-iPod era MP3 players. Time will tell.

I wasn’t invited to share my thoughts on this year’s SixColors Apple performance performance report, So I’m writing my own performance report. 😛