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There is one thing that I’m really looking forward to on our trip to Morocco🇲🇦. For the first time ever, we will have a private guide for the whole trip. I’m usually the main driver when going on such a vacation. Now, I’ll be quietly sitting in the van and be free to take pictures while on the move. 📷
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I’m still slowly digesting Apple news of this week (think of a cow 🐄 in the field 🌿). About macOS Sonoma widgets 🖼️: it’s surprising that Apple is showing widgets to be perfectly aligned when they are dropped on the desktop background. According to some YouTuber’s early reviews, you can be messy with them and drop them wherever you want. People will get messy, for sure.
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RSS > Reddit. That is all. Think twice before telling me that I’m wrong. Spoiler alert: contribute to your own destiny instead of other corporations’ destiny.
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Watch Out Reddit
🤨 Because of recent Reddit behaviors towards their API consumption models, seeing Apollo go, just like that, plus similarities of behavior with Twitter, I may drop my cross posting to Reddit as a first step of protests. Then, stop manual posting (in /r/craftdocs for example). Ultimately, closing my account could become a possibility. 🫤
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I don’t know if it is because I’m getting older, but I have more and more trouble and aversion with high-velocity feeds coming from platforms like Mastodon (when following tags like #WWDC during the dub dub week). I prefer the slowness of Micro.blog’s feed or a simple articles reading session.
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😱I just realized that for the first time in quite a while, I’ll be following WWDC news outside of Twitter. I’m unsure if I’ll go on Mastodon or Bluesky to read the room temperature. I’ll see. Maybe I’ll just make up my own mind, too, which is a good thing. 🤔💭
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Here’s a short “life at the office” story. Our VP of sales never stops bragging about how ChatGPT is cool and how it works for him for many use cases. I’m uncomfortable with his stance on ChatGPT & generative AI in general. I think about it each time he sends an email that was obviously created with ChatGPT.
Why is it a problem for me? Who am I to judge him and his “new way of working”? I think I have found the root cause.
First, it’s not the results of his work. It’s the work of something else. He takes something “as is” without adding any value, any personal opinion, or a personal twist. Second, the fundamental problem is that he works in IT but is not a tech guy. He is a salesperson. He’s the type of guy who surfs on buzzwords a lot. Using ChatGPT makes him circumvent his lack of confidence because of a lack of IT knowledge and culture. He probably feels better and more “into the game” like most of my other colleagues, who studied computer science before getting to work in IT.
How many more people lack my colleague do the same, for the same reason?
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Reflecting on My Photo Processing Strategy
For my next trip, I will bring my Nikon D750 and my iPhone 13 Pro (of course!), and my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro. How am I going to process my images? Will I continue using Lightroom for images from my Nikon? I usually use the iPad to import my photos into the Lightroom catalogue. What about pictures on my iPhone, which should be mostly in RAW format and shot with Halide? I like Photomator a lot; it is nicer than Lr and more approachable too. However, using Photomator to process images from my Nikon poses a challenge in file management. I’ll need to import the .NEF files from my SD card into my iPad in an iCloud Drive folder so I can work on imported files from any device (iPad, MacBook Air or iPhone). I prefer using iCloud Photos Library instead of managing files manually. I guess this will be this combo: Photomator + Halide for my “shot on iPhone” images!
Just writing this blog post made things a little bit less fuzzy. I’ll take any suggestions!
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Getting ready for my trip to north west Africa. Halide FTW!
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365 Days Later
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.
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From the release notes of the May 30th version of Hazel:
Added missing arm64 support for certain auxiliary binaries. Not having these meant that certain specialized functions were being run using Rosetta on Apple Silicon Macs.
That is something so important on an 8GB MacBook Air like mine. The less memory consumed by system services like Rosetta, the better. And I applaud the developer for mentioning it in the release notes.
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And just like that, I discovered that my original Mastodon account is enabled and active. I didn’t know my account was finally made active after I submitted my request in Dec, 2019. Now I’m up to three Mastodon addresses. I wonder if I could drop my account at techhub.social and switch to the official Mastodon instance? And how should I do that, actually?🤔
What would you do?
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My morning so far. Just finished and shared my thoughts on iA Presenter. Got myself ready to watch the WWDC 23 keynote using this handy shortcut. I tried to set up a mail address for numericcitizen.me (something like hello@numericcitizen.me) using iCloud+ Mail custom domain feature. Sadly, I won’t be able to do so as my numericcitizen.me root domain needs to be aliasing Ghost hosting website for my blog to work. This is conflicting with iCloud+ Mail custom domain requirements. Oh well, nobody use emails these days, right, right? Any suggestion on this if you are reading this? Finally, updated my Ubiquity DreamMachine to the latest release of UniFi OS.
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Getting ready for WWDC keynote. This WWDC23 button on my Stream Deck mini triggers a screenshot of my Mac screen using Cleanshot X. Each file will be saved automatically and later processed by Hazel rules and moved to my Synology Photos library for future reference and use. 😎
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On Reddit API Access Pricing
So, apparently, just like Twitter, Reddit is entering into a “kill-third-party-apps” by charging an enormous amount of money to use their APIs. It looks like it. Apollo isn’t happy, and for good reasons. Unless there was a calculation error from the makers of Apollo, it just makes no sense for them to continue. Maybe Reddit made some calculation errors, too. Perhaps they fail to read the room’s temperature. But maybe they are entitled, to some degree, I guess, to charge for their APIs, right?
I’m tempted to make a parallel with Apple’s dreaded 15%-30% App Store commission. Is Apple’s stance on its App Store different from Reddit’s stance on its APIs? Is charging a commission to be on the App Store and take advantage of all Apple’s technology to get a chance to be distributed on hundreds of millions of iPhones similar to consuming a platform APIs? If not, what is different, actually? Is free API usage a dead end in today’s world? There are whole business models built around APIs these days. API speaks intellectual property in my book. Only companies with business models supported by massive ad distribution or expansive paid subscriptions can think of thriving by giving away their API access. It will be interesting to see how Reddit is reacting to third-party developers’ pushback.
Oh, and if they actually kill the third-party Reddit client ecosystem, unlike Twitter, Reddit platform alternatives are not obvious to me.
I guess it’s time to remember: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
