Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest
Numeric Citizen Blog
I’m experimenting with Claude for a month because I want to test MCP connections with Craft. ChatGPT does support MCP connections but the experience is not as mature as configuring an MCP connection with Claude. Claude is not cheap: pricing is similar to ChatGPT’s but plan usage limits are easy to reach.
2025-12-02 ∞I don’t like the idea that a service like ChatGPT tries to present itself as a friend, an agent, or a human. With instructions, I can ask it to avoid this type of behavior. But I like the service’s appearance to be warm. Perhaps that’s why I prefer Anthropic’s Claude. Claude, even though it’s a proper name, presents itself better; its visual style seems friendlier to me. I feel like this is a contradiction.
I asked Claude about this possible contradiction. Here’s what he responded:
“I don’t think it’s actually a contradiction. You’re distinguishing between two different things: false intimacy (an AI pretending to be your friend or a person) versus pleasant design (a warm, welcoming aesthetic and tone). Wanting the latter without the former is perfectly coherent—it’s the difference between a tool that’s agreeable to use and a tool that’s trying to deceive you about its nature.”
Thanks, Claude.
2025-12-03 ∞I believe in talents renewal and in new dynamics to favor new ideas, new ways at seeing problems and challenges. It’s a new opportunity even if the guy taking over has been at Apple for a long time. Bye bye Dye.
2025-12-03 ∞Me to my wife: “Big news today, Apple is losing their designer lead. He’s joining Meta.”
My wife: “WTF is there to design at Meta?”.
I love her. 😍
2025-12-03 ∞Think Different
I understand the enthusiasm for AI among certain groups of workers, especially in the field of information technology and more specifically software development. However, I believe that caution is necessary for most other categories of employment. Enthusiasm cannot simply be transferred systematically and literally to every domain, whether technological or not. Contexts differ greatly, professions are highly diverse, and even small variations in requirements can reduce the applicability of AI to nearly zero. We should remain critical of this overflow of passion and the promised revolution; by doing so, we might help avoid the potential bubble that increasingly seems to be forming right under our noses.
2025-12-04 ∞Louie Mantia on Steve Lemay:
I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.
What we’re going to see from Apple in the next twelve months is probably set in stone (except Siri or Apple Intelligence, maybe). I don’t expect a revolution in that short time frame.
2025-12-04 ∞I don’t really believe in vibe coding, especially the scaling of it for complex systems, even more for maintaining code. But I certainly wish I could use vibe coding to write Apple Shortcuts. Apple must do something about its Shortcuts editor. It’s cumbersome, buggy as hell. Having a textual representation, a la Apple Script, would be so cool.
2025-12-05 ∞Rant on. I’m judging on facts and acts, not with what someone says. Some people might defend web openness et al, but sharing on x.com in 2025 because it’s the place most people go is not an act of openness. It’s an act of contribution toward fascism. Stop pretending, people, don’t be lazy, stop taking shortcuts and leave x.com once and for all. Rant off.
2025-12-05 ∞On Tony Fadell For Apple's New CEO
Parker Ortolani on taking a chance of Tony Fadell to replace Tim Cook. At first, Tony Fadell seems like the obvious candidate, but I worry that we may be under the spell of a certain nostalgia in thinking he would be the perfect choice, as Parker points out. The world is no longer what it was in the days of Steve Jobs and his close collaborators. Apple is no longer what it once was either, and that is partly what many people criticize the company for. John Ternus is a product engineer, not a designer, and putting design back at the center of the process as it was in the Steve Jobs era may be a more restorative idea—and in that sense, yes, perhaps Fadell would be a good choice.
2025-12-06 ∞I spent the last few days putting together a workflow to help me write those year-in-review articles. As we get closer to the end of the year, it’s the right time to start working on this. I documented my workflow in this Craft document and submitted to the #winter_challenge on Slack. Hint: my first real use case for MCP.
2025-12-06 ∞Thinking out loud here: one way Apple could retain more talent could be to start innovating again, maybe? 1
-
Recent departures to OpenAI, a company working on a new class of devices might doing just that: trying to innovate for real. ↩
I always feel like I’m losing the time-saving benefits if I spend time improving an automation (an Apple Shortcut, for example). 🤦🏻♂️
2025-12-07 ∞Time to renew Kagi Search. I’m on the starter tier. Upon examination, I’m doing about 45 searches per month. The trend is decreasing. I use their Article Summarizer on the iPad and iPhone much more often. I want to support them because I believe we need diversity when it comes to searching the web. But it’s not cheap, and my search requests trend is going downward, thanks to AI. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Any Kagi users in the room?
2025-12-07 ∞I forced my wife to update her iPhone 16 Pro to iOS 26.1. She will probably kill me today. It was nice to meet you guys. 🫢
2025-12-07 ∞I added a new page to my “Where Apple’s Liquid Glass Crashes the User Experience” mini website called “Expectations might be too high”. You might take a look if you care about Apple.
2025-12-07 ∞Anyone from my dear followers reading my newsletter (the ephemeral scrapbook)? Thoughts? 🙏🏻
2025-12-07 ∞I’m trying something new this year for my year-in-review blog post. Using all my monthly post digests stored in Craft1, I’m using ChatGPT to look at those digests, take into account last year’s year-in-review article, plus this year’s document personal milestones to suggest ideas. This is now possible because Craft now supports MCP. Using the best ChatGPT models, I get a lot of material to consider but somehow I feel this is really overwhelming. I should be more directive like limiting the number of possible scenarios, their length, etc. I’m still exploring this workflow.
-
I subscribe to my own blog post digest newsletter for archival purposed. ↩
What a night & day difference between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5 models. The latter is much more effective at working through my MCP connection to Craft. But boy this baby consumes a lof of credits. 😅
2025-12-08 ∞I’m happy (and quite surprised) to have made it to third place in today’s Craft Winter Challenge — a.k.a. the hackathon — for my submission of the Year-in-Review Writing Assistant. It’s a 500 US$ prize! 😅
2025-12-10 ∞ChatGPT recently launched version 5.2, shortly after version 5.1. The update frequency remains consistent. Why hasn’t Apple upgraded the Apple Foundation Model behind Apple Intelligence? Shouldn’t they be able to push out updates to their models as well? Will this change in next year’s Siri?
2025-12-12 ∞Saved 50 Minutes
Realmac Software shared their latest dev talk video. The video title mentions conversations about future plans for Elements. I was curious because I want to know where they are going with the CMS and RSS. I headed to YouTube and asked AI the following question: did they mention CMS? In a few seconds, I got my answer: yes, and they also talked about better support for RSS, which is something I’ve been waiting for. I didn’t watch the video; I already had the information I wanted. I saved 50 minutes of my time.
Now, one question: how is this good for Google? We’re so accustomed to being manipulated by platforms designed to increase our engagement with them; with this AI feature, it’s the opposite—I’m less engaged. Is this another subversive move by Google, part of a master plan that escapes my awareness?
2025-12-12 ∞Tonight I’ve been testing something really cool: using Claude, Craft MCP connections, and Craft Agents to write a blog post to Scribbles. The blog post was written by Claude under my instructions but I could tweak the workflow to get the text of the blog post from a Craft Collection instead. Something to experiment during the upcoming Christmas holidays.
2025-12-12 ∞This morning I discovered that I could add RAM to my Synology DS720+, increasing it from 2 GB to 6 GB. This upgrade would make it possible to install an instance of n8n as a container and explore the creation of automations connected to Craft. But, memory prices aren’t cheap these days. 🤯 Trying to find alternatives source for memory purchase and Crucial is no longer selling memory that fit, than to AI data centers demand.
2025-12-13 ∞Seriously thinking of moving out of IFTTT to a self-hosted n8n instance on Digital Ocean. My IFTTT use case is simple: archiving RSS feed articles into Dayone. This seems quite possible to move this workflow into n8n automation.
2025-12-13 ∞Learning in the Age of AI
Between 2009 and 2013, in my spare time, I was an independent developer and had three applications in the App Store. I learned on the job, as they say, and it was an adventure that required a great deal of personal investment. I learned a lot, but it was arduous. Learning a new programming language (Objective-C), APIs, and a development lifecycle to make applications available for sale in a store like the App Store was a major challenge. At the time, to deal with problems, there was no artificial intelligence. Everything relied on Google searches and countless visits to Stack Overflow to find solutions.
Today, I have another project focused on automation with n8n, hosting an instance in the cloud, and consuming APIs and artificial intelligence services to build highly customized workflows. There are many things I don’t know, but knowing that I will be able to rely on artificial intelligence to help solve my learning challenges is very reassuring. Without these possibilities, I probably would not move forward with this project.
2025-12-14 ∞Just finished verifying my options for backing up my Synology NAS to the cloud and Synology C2 is still offers the cheapest option. Yet, it’s not cheap.
2025-12-14 ∞Are we getting Apple OS 26.3 this week? If the pattern repeats itself, yes.
2025-12-15 ∞After testing Claude AI, agentic workflows and Craft this weekend, I’m genuinely thrilled about certain aspects of AI—it’s a level of excitement I haven’t felt since I first explored the web and started using the iPhone.
2025-12-15 ∞The year 2025 according to ChatGPT newest image generation tool — a concise snapshot of where AI actually stands in 2025. That is all. 🤣
2025-12-16 ∞ Goodbye, IFTTT
It was a memorable, long journey. I officially shut down my IFTTT account tonight after over five years of use. It wasn’t costly, but I have the feeling that IFTTT started to trail behind competitive offerings like Zapier, Make and now n8n. It wasn’t the most user-friendly for debugging issues. Now, I’m turning my focus towards n8n. In the coming days and weeks, it will be my next digital playground for experimentation.
2025-12-17 ∞I knew I could build my Discord server, but didn’t really pay attention to it and couldn’t figure out what purpose it served. Now I do. So I created one so that, among my many use cases for this, it can receive a webhook call when one of my websites is down, thanks to Tinylytics’ webhook support.
2025-12-18 ∞For the first time ever, I applied decals to a device. 🙈
2025-12-19 ∞
Started learning more about Vercel. I see a lot of people using it for many different things. Seems quite capable even on the free tier. I might need it for some projects involving Craft. 🤓 Anyone using Vercel here? Thoughts?
2025-12-19 ∞Got my first n8n instance up and running on DigitalOcean. Running 2.0.3. That was easy. Enough for tonight.
2025-12-19 ∞
Just completed a one-hour WordPress+Email issue-debugging session with my daughter-in-law. It was a harsh reminder of how much I hate WordPress.
2025-12-20 ∞My Learning Approach
Still exploring n8n, slowly but systematically. Because I’ll be using all sorts of external services like Craft, Micro.blog, Ghost, Inoreader, my strategy is to do individual integration tests instead of trying to build a biggy workflow and find all sorts of errors. Each of these micro experiments is forming the building blocks of something bigger. This approach is not different from the one I used for building iPhone apps and learning Objective-C and Interface Builder back in the day. I guess I’m a bottom-up kind of guy when it comes to understanding this kind of stuff.
2025-12-20 ∞
Woke up this morning and appreciated the results of my first n8n automation: a Craft Daily note with a list of topics for the day automagically created for the current day. I did use Craft Templates before, but I prefer the programmatic route because it enables much more powerful content creation by consuming different sources via APIs. For now, my automation doesn’t, but I’ll iterate on that.
2025-12-21 ∞ Consuming AI Can Be Expensive
While experimenting with n8n and LLM services, I realize that using artificial intelligence can become a very costly hobby. The fact that the consumption of these services relies on two separate offerings — the subscription to the interactive service and on-demand billing for APIs — requires careful management and wise choices of providers.
Currently, I use ChatGPT and Claude AI in interactive mode, but I also need a provider to access AI via APIs. This latter mode of consumption is particularly expensive if you’re not careful.
2025-12-21 ∞Keeping track of all those services API keys, authorization tokens, API and MCP endpoints, their respective level of authorization is starting to feel cumbersome. 🥴
2025-12-21 ∞My wife and me quite extensively used a group conversation in ChatGPT to help us face some health-related issues. It was beneficial to a visit to the hospital and still is after the visit yesterday. It is so much more helpful than having to google things and try to figure out what is going on.
2025-12-22 ∞Who's Right?
Apparently, web analytics is not an exact science. Here are three web analytics versions of the same period: from November 23rd to December 23rd (Top: Ghost Analytics, Middle: Plausible Analytics, and Bottom: Tinylytics). Plausible feels conservative, with about half as many unique visitors as Ghost, while Tinylytics seems to overestimate. The patterns are barely the same, too. Who’s right?
2025-12-23 ∞
Moving from Apple Keynote to Freeform for my next content creation workflow diagram update. It’s a sneak peek. It was much easier to convert (a simple copy-and-paste was all that was needed to kick-start the process). I also made significant changes to the way certain things are presented.
2025-12-23 ∞
My n8n exploration continues: now I have both an n8n MCP endpoint and an API endpoint enabled. I can talk to my n8n instance from Claude via either my MCP connection or an API. I can trigger an n8n workflow via the Claude AI MCP connection. Endless possibilities. 🤯
2025-12-25 ∞When I’m hitting my Claude AI credits allotment, it’s time to do something else. 😅
2025-12-26 ∞
I’m done with the 2025 editions of The Ephemeral Scrapbook (all editions in one place!). It’s my free newsletter built with care and love and hosted on Ghost. Looking forward to 2026.
2025-12-27 ∞I made my first Vercel app: a simple form for posting to Scribbles.page. Super lean, super clean. I do have coding experience, but not with Next.js. Claude AI helped me out. Here is the final form. Next up: same thing but for Micro.blog. This time, the title field, the categories will be shown by default! 😅
And Now Microblog Poster Web App is Live!
It’s a web app (on Vercel) just for me to use so that I can write blog posts on the go with a clean UI. It’s my second web app on Vercel built entirely with Claude AI.
2025-12-28 ∞One of the reasons for building my own web app for posting to Micro.blog: having the title field and categories shown by default 😁🤣
2025-12-28 ∞I see a lot of interest in my experiment with Vercel and Micro.blog if the reactions are any indication. I’m going to do a small write up about this. I didn’t expect my experiment to be successful. Can’t wait to share more details about this on meta.numericcitizen.me.
2025-12-28 ∞It’s fascinating how building things with Claude AI and Vercel made me forget about my desire to expand my knowledge and experience of Apple Shortcuts. I no longer see the need for that. My wish, though, would be to see Apple bring a way to build Shortcuts using Apple Intelligence.
2025-12-28 ∞Craft & Inoreader in 2025
In 2025, two notable apps or services received numerous and meaningful updates: Craft and Inoreader.
Craft received long-awaited tag support, with APIs and MCP support added. The latter two are quite transformative, and I expect 2026 to bring many new users to the app. Personally, I’m barely scratching the surface of Craft APIs. Craft is at the center of everything that I create, and I couldn’t think of a better app to support my creative journey.
Inoreader also got a bunch of updates, many of them focused on AI-based empowerment (article summaries, podcast and video transcriptions, tag suggestions, etc.). More than ever, Inoreader is an essential part of my digital toolset.
2025-12-29 ∞I won’t write my predictions for 2026, but I want to write about how I envision using different AI offerings to support my creative journey next year.
2025-12-29 ∞Wow, the UniFi Travel Router is already sold out! I bought one this morning. I hope to get it before I visit Egypt later in January.
2025-12-29 ∞I got a lot of positive reactions about my Micro.blog front end for writing and publishing posts in a simplified user experience. I wasn’t expecting that. To me, it might mean that it’s filling a small void in Micro.blog offerings. Thankfully, Micro.blog is an open “platform” which allows such experiments like mine.
Some people asked me to make my app open source. I’m hesitant. I don’t want to feel the pressure of having to support others in using my work but who would like to add their own touches. I think, for now, I’ll respectfully decline. I would rather encourage anyone to follow the same route that I did and experiment with the tooling. 👾
2025-12-30 ∞In my piece this published this morning, I totally forgot to mention the possibility of enshittification of AI offerings by Anthropic and OpenAI, which could trigger some decisions on my part if this happens. For unknown reasons, I have better trust in Anthropic staying away of this for a longer time than OpenAI.
2025-12-30 ∞In 2026, I’ll Keep an Eye On…
I’m already turning my attention to 2026, in no particular order:
- Ghost.org next moves, now that are a better Fediverse citizen.
- Plausible Analytics, which seems to be overkill for my needs but I might find a use for their service exposure via their APIs.
- Craft because they finished the year with a bang and I’m super anxious to learn what’s next.
- Apple because of Apple Intelligence and Siri promised updates. Will they deliver? They are the underdog right now but it could serve them well in the end. Remember the Mp3 players market before the iPod? I do. I don’t want another features rush but a bug-fix bonanza. Will they deliver? I have my doubts. What’s next for Photomator and Pixelmator?
- Micro.blog might also surprise me with features like RSS reader integration. Who knows.
- Anthropic and OpenAI offerings… will they keep the pace? Will they slow down? Will they surprise us? Will they crash? Is enshittification on our way?
- Inoreader is also evolving at a steady pace and I wonder if it will continue in 2026.
- Things to-do manager: will it turn to version 4?
So much fun is awaiting, I’m sure.
2025-12-30 ∞My biggest challenge so far in building automation workflows in n8n is data manipulation (arrays, JSON, data bits extraction, etc.) It’s not fun at all, but when it works, it’s rewarding.
2025-12-31 ∞