Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest
Numeric Citizen Blog
I'm moving to a new (temporary) apartment in two days. It's the first time in 17 years that I'm changing places. It's crazy how much we gather over the years. We're giving out a lot of stuff (also selling on FB Marketplace). It's like spring-cleaning, right in the middle of winter!
2025-01-01 ∞Thought and sentiment of the moment: my sheer physical exhaustion makes my mental exhaustion more bearable.
2025-01-03 ∞My cellular service provider offers me, via their iPhone app, to convert from a physical SIM to an eSIM. Traveling abroad a few times a year and as a big fan of Airalo, I wonder if I should go all in with eSIM… thoughts?
2025-01-03 ∞This article from 9to5Mac is a reminder that Apple Intelligence is not free.
as more Apple Intelligence features continue arriving, on-device storage is going to become more in-demand than ever before.
That's why I went with the 512GB storage tier for my iPhone 15 Pro Max and 11-inch iPad Pro last year. Consider doing the same for your next upgrade.
2025-01-04 ∞And we're finally settled in our temporary apartment. Now, it’s time to explore the surroundings, including marking coffee shops and restaurants that I plan to try over the course of the next three months. I started using Apple Maps Guides for this. Not super intuitive but it does the job. I shared the guide with my wife.
2025-01-04 ∞My new home office for the next three months. Not bad at all. 
Where The Social Web Fails
Dislike buttons on YouTube, or elsewhere for that matter, should come with a mandatory "here's why I don't like this" explanation text field. In this specific case, 2 people out of 18 didn't like my video. Why? How can I improve myself if you don't tell me what's wrong? This is the part of social web that I feel doesn't work. 
The cool thing about our new (and temporary) apartment is that, both my wife and me, have the feeling of being traveling somewhere in the world1. We stay right beside a beautiful park with a lot of mature trees. I already see myself going out to do some photography. Too bad it's winter time, though. 🤷🏻♂️
We often travel to places, rent an Airbnb for a week, so that we can feel being part of a small community. It's really a nice feeling making the whole thing more bearable.
-
We are 1km from our house! ↩
I’m Getting Old Apparently
I old enough to be one of those who witnessed the birth of MTV and music videos… but I rarely watch those these days… but today, I decided to spend some time watching what’s « hot ». A few observations are in order: video duration is short (less than 3 min), hyper-short scenes abuse (less than two seconds in duration), 4:3 screen ratio is strange (is this a thing now?)… I barely can stand this shit now. I’m getting old, I guess.
2025-01-04 ∞Dear Mr. Siegler, I don't buy it either. This is beyond ridiculous. One question: who is stupid here, people looking to build relationships with AI bots or advertisers willing to pay for ads placement in this crappy digital world? 🤦🏻♂️
2025-01-05 ∞Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text
the longer and more detailed you prompt, the higher quality the output will be (that was from Claude 3.5 Sonnet). But you start to run into diminishing returns, because if you are spending so much time writing a detailed prompt, couldn’t you write the email yourself? I think so.
We should give a name to this inflection point.
2025-01-06 ∞Microsoft is putting the "Copilot" tag everywhere... even on Microsoft 365 which will become Microsoft 365 Copilot. It's fascinating to see a company like to playing with the branding of its services. 
Returning to work this morning is really hard and cumbersome after two weeks of intense personal life. I really disconnected from work. So, I mostly forgot about my passwords, my pending items when I left back in late December. Is this what we call "work & life balance"?
2025-01-06 ∞The LG UltraFine 6K: this is such a nice-looking monitor. Perfect for a M4 Mac mini. Look at me, no bezels! 🤩
2025-01-06 ∞Who's Right? Apple Intelligence or Grammarly
While working on the next edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter, I wanted to proofread and rewrite some text portions. I first started with Apple Intelligence Writing Tools then pasted the results into Craft. Grammarly instantly took the ball and verified the pasted text, highlighting everything wrong that needed some attention. Is Apple Writing Tools sloppy or Grammarly too picky? Writing in English is not an easy thing for me to do. And it's not easy for generative AI either, apparently. From what I understand, Grammarly tries to be less wordy and is very iterative in its text proofing execution.
Here is the final tweaked version:
2025-01-07 ∞1️⃣ First and foremost, I want to extend my warmest wishes for a prosperous and fulfilling new year. I genuinely hope you find success and happiness in your professional and personal endeavors. 2️⃣ Secondly, this marks the inaugural edition of this newsletter for 2025, and I’ve decided to introduce a few changes. Firstly, I’ve decided to eliminate the summary at the beginning of each newsletter. This section provided an overview of the number of blog posts, photos, and other content I’ve shared since the previous edition. While I appreciate the interest in these statistics, I believe it’s unnecessary to brag about them, and it takes a significant amount of time to maintain and update this information. I’ve also officially decided to retire the podcasts section from my newsletter. While I enjoy podcasts, I don’t find them particularly relevant to my current content creation schedule, and I believe it’s not worth dedicating time and resources to them.
How long before we see something like this on LinkedIn "Prompt Engineer with 15 years of experience"?
2025-01-07 ∞Dear David (aka DHH), I fully disagree with you, and your blog post, again.
2025-01-07 ∞After finding an old document in Notion where my text highlights from Matter were saved, I was curious about Matter, the reader-later service that I once used a while back before trying Omnivore. Their website still refers to "Twitter", not "X", their last post on their X account dates back to 2023. I cannot find a Mastodon account. KI can't find a changelog either. Is this thing still alive?
2025-01-08 ∞Why do I have the impression that we talk too much about facts checking and not enough (far not enough) about algorithm-based timelines, reality and people manipulation through these algorithms? Who's checking Facebook or Meta in general?
2025-01-09 ∞Starting Up... RealMac software Elements beta. I paid for it, to show support for the team. I have three websites that I want to build with this thing eventually. Stay tuned. It's a 2025 and beyond adventure1.
-
I always need something new to try and experiment with. ↩
Can you figure out what’s this? It’s a macro photo of an old maple syrup bottle where we could see those crystals forming at the bottom. Shot on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Fascinating.
Update: for some reason, the original post didn’t include the actual image. 
Since moving into our temporary apartment, we've been relying entirely on the Apple TV for our "TV content" consumption. One takeaway is the realization that more than ever the TV experience is utterly fragmented, hence de proliferation of "TV" apps. 
I'm always positively surprised to read my Bluesky replies here on Micro.blog. I mean, this is the modern and open where that we should continue to promote and defend. For me, and I wish it was the case for more people, it is priceless, but the value is not as tangible as I would like.
2025-01-11 ∞The first edition of 2025 of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter is out. I'm curious if some of you look into these. Let me know.
2025-01-12 ∞Putting Something Out There
I'm about to start a recording session for my next video about Craft and the PARA method. I wonder: why am I doing this? Is it because it might help Craft users to better take advantage of the app features? Is it because I just like being in a creative process? Is it because I love working on the Mac using different apps together to put something out there? Is it all the reasons above? Or is it simply because it provides a subtle reminder of being human is being creative and putting something out there? Maybe I'm asking myself too many questions.
2025-01-12 ∞The Medium Mirage
Medium seems to suffer from another problem: AI-generated content and fake account for fake engagement to generate revenues. According to their recent article (Paywall might be enforced to read this), many accounts under the Partner Program were suspended recently to stop this fraud.
I've returned to Medium last fall (read my comments about the reading and writing experience over there) and found that content quality has gone down compared to what we used to read there. The revenue program is much less generous than it used to be. I published 18 stories since my return and earned less than a dollar! We don't know how these revenues are calculated, but it is a bit insulting or at least discouraging. At this rate, I won't recover the Partner Program subscription cost in the first year which makes my presence there questionable. This should have been a no-cost journey which it's not. Still seven months to go...
2025-01-13 ∞I'm seeing more and more online stores using Shop.app for shipment tracking. It's great to have a consolidated view of all the shipments (better than Parcel? Or what used to be Delivery?). I wish Apple would go further in that space, even including buying receipts to be standardized and electronics-only.
2025-01-13 ∞Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/13/meta-pixelfed-links
Meta is acting more and more like Russia.
2025-01-13 ∞That is why not only ads are infecting everything online, the data brokers behind them is an even worst idea. Data Broker Hack Exposes Location Info From Millions of iPhone Users - MacRumors
2025-01-13 ∞Micro.one is the seed for something bigger
Today, I think I finally found a real use case for Micro.one. I bought my domain and set up my account. It was rather quick and easy. If I had let Micro.one set up my domain name for me, it would have been even easier.
I think the ingredients of Micro.one are all there for an accessible solution for those who want to get out of Meta or other silos and start owning their little space on the web, free of tracking, free of ads, and built on open software technologies. Of course, Micro.one isn’t the only service of its kind. But it does offer the right feature set to be an open and federated web citizen.
I feel an overwhelming desire to explore and savor this type of web content even further. I believe that sharing my passion for this subject matter could potentially ignite a similar level of enthusiasm in those around me. Even if it doesn’t, if people are genuinely curious enough to inquire about the reasons behind my enthusiasm, it’s a positive development, potentially marking the beginning of something more substantial. After all, who knows what the future holds?
I’ll share more in the near future.
2025-01-14 ∞Using ChatGPT latest feature: scheduled tasks, you can schedule a daily summarization of an RSS feed content each morning. That’s cool and actually useful.
2025-01-15 ∞Pixelfed finally gets the attention from the public. The release of their mobile app and the general negative sentiment toward Meta's offerings are two key factors here. I hope they can keep up with the load.
2025-01-16 ∞I'm at the office today, first time in 2025. I'm one of those who is fortunate enough to work for a company that doesn't care too much about who's in and out of the downtown office, they care about the results and how efficient we are to get those. I find it rather sad that the discussions around people returning to the office or not never or seldomly revolve around the idea that working from home might be one of the ways to combat climate change by limiting those in and out and commute time to go to the office. We don't learn or we're afraid of accepting that we need to change, for real this time.
2025-01-16 ∞I don't support any peace plan projects for Ukraine until Russia is defeated or on their knees. Here is why (Bluesky post).
2025-01-17 ∞Raycast Focus is nice until you realize that it doesn't integrate with macOS Focus modes and can't start an automation like a shortcut to turn off other things so that we can really be focusing. 🤷🏻♂️
2025-01-18 ∞Dear, Will You Read My Blog?
Me: "My new French blog is nearly ready to go live. Will you read it?"
Her: "Well, yeah, sure, but how will I know there is something new to read?"
Me: "Well, you just have to go to the website, just like you read the news."
Her: "Mmm, but it's not the same. I have to remember the website's address. Can you send notifications instead?"
Me: "Well, I'm not sure this would fit the idea of a blog, but you just need to save it as a bookmark. Also, I can show you a great RSS reader?"
Her: "🤔"
Me: "It's an app where you can read blog posts. There are many great ones for your iPhone or iPad."
Her: "Well, yeah, but I must remember to open it just to see if something is new?"
Me: "Yes, exactly, just like when you open up your favourite news website or when you just tap on the Facebook icon on your iPad..."
Her: "🤨"
Me: "If there was a weekly newsletter, would it be ok for you to read it?"
Her: "That would be better, for sure, but... you know... I already get so many emails!"
Me: "M'ok, but my hosting service doesn't provide a newsletter feature. Maybe I could just tell you: there is something new on my blog that you might find interesting because I wrote a story about you."
Her: "👩🏻💻"
The challenges a blogger may face can be unpredictable.
2025-01-18 ∞TikTok is a modern digital plague. Good riddance. To those who were depending solely on it, it’s a lesson: diversity is the key.
2025-01-18 ∞“Blogging or not? A game caught my attention. A personal letter to Zuck. I like poems. Pixelfed, Pixelfed, Pixelfed! Apple is clever about Severance. I bought a keyboard. And so much more.” - The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-02 is out! The email version coming later today.
2025-01-19 ∞Ghost 6 to include ActivityPub, later this year. I can't wait for that, and I'm even happier of having left WordPress last year for Ghost. There is still a lot of work to be done, for sure, but I'm patient for that one.
2025-01-19 ∞The first thing to do when visiting a new coffee shop after ordering and sitting at your place? Connecting to Wi-Fi and testing its speed. Only after you can taste the coffee. That is my way of living. ☕👨🏻💻
2025-01-19 ∞Here is a funny one: the Get Info box for an exported image from Apple Photos. The image was indeed touched up with Apple Intelligence's Cleanup tool. 🤫 
So, Trump restored TikTok? What an achievement, and he is still not in the Office. I can't wait for the next four years. #not
2025-01-19 ∞I initially thought Micro.one would be a suitable platform for my new French blog, but after spending the entire weekend experimenting with it, I’ve already realized that I miss two essential features from the full Micro.blog experience: personal notes and support for newsletters. 🤦🏻♂️
2025-01-19 ∞Eighteen months ago, in July 2023, I wrote an article about migrating from Instagram to Pixelfed. It was well received, but something is happening right now for sure, if this graph from Plausible Analytics is any indication. People are massively looking at Pixelfed as an alternative, and I think it's a good sign. 
No one will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later.
Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.
But, asking for my wife here1, once you've got your little HTML island right in the middle of the digital ocean, how do you get noticed? How do you build a business, even the smallest one, from this island?
-
For real, i had a serious debate about all this today with her. ↩
OMFG! Not going to the US until after this clown is out! Fuck him!
2025-01-20 ∞Got my new Keychron K2 HE mechanical keyboard today. It's so nice, cool, different, unique. I'm loving it, so far. My wife told be: wow, it looks like a Commodore 64 keyboard! She couldn't be more right! 
The popular RSS feeds consolidator and reader, Inoreader, released version 6 of their browser extension, available on Chrome, Edge, Firefox... but not on Safari. Grrr. Another reason to use the ARC Browser.
2025-01-21 ∞Use Disable Delete - Bye
I tend to disable my accounts instead of deleting them permanently. It’s the case with Facebook and Twitter. This weekend, I’m going to say goodbye to Twitter for real by deleting it. I imported my tweets archive a long time ago, thanks to Micro.blog’s import capabilities. I’m not sure why I kept it for so long… because when I see someone who’s sharing something on X, I simply ignore that. Oh well. Time to move on for real this time.
2025-01-22 ∞One of my past colleague is now a system administrator of a few IBM Z Series mainframes1. He is 58 and is the youngest of the team managing this stuff, the other team members are 62 and 72(!). It's very hard to find people who knows about CICS, IDMS, Ctrl-M, all running on mainframes these days. I started my IT career on an IBM TN3270 connected to a mainframe running MVS. Good memories.
-
Yep, the world still runs mainframes. ↩
Voting With My Money
Three reasons why I might not upgrade my iPhone 15 Pro Max this year, as expected.
- If Donald Trump imposes tariffs on Canadian goods. I'm questioning my support of an American company like Apple.
- Because of Tim Cook's contribution to Donald Trump inauguration which is in contradiction to many Apple values and Tim Cook's personal stance on some social issues.
- If Apple makes a single change to their support for DEI program, following Trump's executive orders.
Tim Cook might be the biggest public figure of Apple, but for this publicity stunt for Severance where he is visiting "Lumon Industries" headquarters, I wish it was Craig Federighi, instead. He would have done a better job.
2025-01-24 ∞I understand those out there who didn't vote for Trump decided not to pay attention to what is coming in the next four years, because it will be a pain to watch, but I think this is a mistake, a real big one. People not only should care, but they should continue voicing their outrage and concerns to send a clear message of "resistance". All people's voices are important. All the time.
2025-01-24 ∞Artists, stop marketing on social media. Just be yourself. Show your work. Share your ideas. Meet new people. Think in public. Have fun. The rest will follow.
I hate the idea of depending on social media for everything.
2025-01-25 ∞So I launched my personal website in French yesterday by writing a very short post on my Facebook account. Many people visited the blog for sure, and got one message via Messenger from a guy that I barely know. A few of my closest friends wrote to me, those I selected to a get a peek before the "official" launch. It's fun to connect without all the usual noise.
On a different note, I spend 2 minutes looking at my Facebook timeline and boy this is junk. I don't understand why people are still paying attention to Facebook. What a cancer.
2025-01-25 ∞I love the Severance Apple TV+ series and I thought I understood most of it, but this episode of ScreenCrush tells me that I didn't at all. I'm probably too old for this, but I love the vibe of Severance. I'll probably have to rewatch season one. Oh well...
2025-01-26 ∞I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about our respective hobbies as content creators. He’s quite into YouTube, while I’m more into writing. At one point, we discussed the importance of being transparent with our employers about our hobbies. Since we share our content publicly, we should consider informing our HR department, at least according to him. I’m not entirely convinced about this, though. Nobody really knows about what I'm doing online with my blogs and YouTube channel. According to my friend, it might be a positive thing that my HR department is aware of what I'm doing because this puts me in a different class of employee, even my boss should know.
I’m still contemplating whether this is a requirement or not. After all, my hobbies don’t negatively affect my job, so why should I discuss my personal pursuits when I’m not working?
2025-01-27 ∞DeekSeek or DeepSink? It might be ugly today on the markets. #deepseek
2025-01-27 ∞DeekSeek being open source, some people might wish that open source wasn't a thing. But it is! 😂 #deepseek
2025-01-27 ∞We are solely responsible for the concentration of power in the hands of a few large tech companies. As individuals, we granted all that power to these megacorporations, which, at one point, were not yet large corporations. Thinking otherwise is ludicrous. Laws are a band-aid, we, the individual by our own choices must take back that power. We need to undo the last 15 years to some degree of equilibrium.
2025-01-27 ∞In Support of Greg Morris' Micro Social App
I just realized that my face was on a few screenshots of Micro Social, an app currently being developed by Greg Morris. He shared an article today on his blog where he talks about the timeline feature. That's cool. What is even cooler is that I decided to support him with a $1 a month subscription via his "Buy me a coffee" page. Can't wait to test this myself.
2025-01-27 ∞Today, I decided to let go a few writing ideas from my “idea pipeline.” I realized that sometimes, the words we choose not to write are just as significant as the ones we do.
2025-01-28 ∞An upcoming version of Craft will incorporate an embedded DeepSeek R1 model to enable fully disconnected prompts answering. I'm not aware of other apps which include LLM. Beta is expected this week to a few early birds willing to test. I'm wondering how well will we be able to query our Craft content. It's a potentially exciting twist.
2025-01-29 ∞I think that every single day that I'm working on a Mac I tell myself: "What a joy is this working with this".
2025-01-30 ∞Great article from Adam Engst comparing Grammarly to Apple Intelligence Writing tools. It's ironic that a third-party software brings better integration, less friction to the writing experience than Apple's first-party offering.
2025-01-31 ∞Where Tapestry and Reeder Fail
Thought on the morning: I think that apps like Tapestry and Reeder1 are failing at one thing: a single timeline where content converge is enough. It isn't. I came to realize that the world is complex and requires many angles of content consumption. Another problem is the diversity in feed velocity. If one feed takes over the timeline, it's crash the whole thing. Until they add multi-timelines and find a way to moderate high-volume feeds, I'll refrain from adding these apps into my daily routine.
Update #1: I stand corrected by one of the founders of the Iconfactory: you can have multiple timelines within the app and switch across them at will. As a backup of Tapestry on Kickstarter, I should have known better. Sorry about that one.
-
The new generation, not the old one. ↩
I understand that people, particularly my colleagues, are using ChatGPT much more than they are willing to admit, as evidenced by my conversations with a few of them this morning.
2025-01-31 ∞