We’re close to Christmas and getting closer to new years eve. I hope Ukrainians can get a small break during the holidays. News about increased military activities by Russia in Belarus, north of Ukraine, close to the frontier, isn’t encouraging. It’s like when Russia was preparing to break Ukrainian borders last February. Who knows what they’re up to? We shouldn’t trust them. Are these military exercises like they said? My fingers are crossed.

If Russia tries to take Kyiv a second time, I hope the Ukrainian army is ready. They are probably exhausted by months of defensive combats on the south and eastern sides. How will the international community react if Belarus is again used to attack Ukraine?

Closing out my working session with my office for the holidays. What a year it was. Now is the time to finally get ready for Christmas and everything that comes with it. Next, on December 26th, we’re leaving Canada for Brasil and our first cruise trip in five years! 😅

The next victim of my "digital cleanup" will be my Medium account. Even though I stopped writing original content there a while ago, I currently get a few cents a month of revenue, maybe a few dollars when I’m lucky. It’s tough to expand the readership over there. My revenue used to be enough to pay for my Partner Program annual membership, but not anymore.  All in all, the time has come to move on.

I finally tested a FaceTime call with my iPhone 13 Pro and the Belkin iPhone mount with my M1 MacBook Air running macOS Ventura. The setup was easy. iPhone automatically detected as a possible camera source within FaceTime. The image quality was obviously top-notch. The sound was great too. The tabletop feature required a bit of tweaking but eventually led to good (but not “top-notch”) results.

The only problem is the weight of the combined iPhone 13 Pro with a case and the Belkin mount: the screen panel of my MacBook tends to move back during the call. Oops. 🤣

I receive more user feedback or interactions in a day here on Micro.blog than in an entire month on Twitter. On top of that, the quality is 100x higher too.

Think about that for a second.

Thank you guys!

Sometimes I wish I had started blogging fifteen or twenty years ago. It would be so cool to have this long stretch of writing at my disposal and reflect back at what I wrote. I guess I’ll do just that in ten or fifteen years from now… 🤷🏻‍♂️

🇺🇦Russian’s top brass are complaining that Zelensky and Biden didn’t have a single word about Russia’s demands and their “quest for peace”. Ukrainians continuously ask for more weapons to defend themselves against the invaders. They complain that it’s not enough.

Who started the war? Who’s hitting civilian structures 95% of the time? Who’s raping who? Who is stealing who? You tell me then I’ll make up my mind about who’s right to be complaining.

Starting from now: I no longer cross-post my original Micro.blog posts to Twitter. Curious to see how bad it will be for my visitors analytics.

Earlier this year, back in May I think, I started a subscription to Write.as. Why? I was curious about this platform for writers and there was a special for a five-year subscription. So, why not! Then I started to write about my reactions to the war in Ukraine. I wrote maybe a dozen of posts on this subject. I had to let go my feelings. Then I stopped. But I still follow the news about this senseless war. I’m still in state of mixed feelings ranging from feeling helpless, frustrated, desperate, raging, etc.

Now, I don’t know what to do. Should I continue writing on Write.as or move my written frustrations elsewhere? Here? I don’t know. Enabling posts import to my timeline from the Write.as RSS feed might be a good solution.

Tell me what you think about dilemma.

As per my current analysis and preparation for leaving Twitter, here’s what I’m going to lose.

• Access to product announcements, most of which I track because they are part of my workflows (Examples: Glass, Unsplash, Substack, Opal, Readwise, and 90 more). This could be hard to replace, not all websites support RSS feeds.
• Access to some public services status messages like special events or some type of alerts.
• Two of my Brews on Mailbrew that are entirely based on Twitter content will need to be deleted.
• Interaction with people following me who won’t leave Twitter to go elsewhere. I rarely get replies, though. Not a big loss.
• According to [my Plausible page](https://plausible.io/numericcitizen.micro.blog), 50% of visitors coming from non-direct sources are coming from Twitter. One way to mitigate this is by enabling RSS feeds and letting people no in advance other ways to get in touch.
• Quite a few of my published articles or blog posts refer to my tweets as links or embed. They won’t show up anymore when I turnoff public access to my tweets. That's not cool.

But, I'll gain other things too. That's for another post.

Write.as and Fediverse support (or lack of):

Write.as doesn't render the URLs of both the toot and the PeerTube video. The HTML embedding code does work, but the rendered video is not responsive and doesn't blend well with the page on mobile.

My guess is that we will see changes to Write.as to make it more Fediverse friendly.

Updated my last Mac to macOS Ventura and discovered something super useful when using Stage Manager. If you want to have an application always visible, make sure to select “Assign To: All Desktops” from the application icon in the Dock. This is particularly useful with the Finder so we can easily do drag & drop of a file into the active window; the Finder needs to always be available for this to be possible.

Found a great place for my Tidbyt.

The trend is clear: people are leaving Twitter. This is my follower count since June of 2022. If there was any doubt left about my decision to quit Twitter, no more.

I think it is essential to elaborate on why I will close my Twitter accounts in 2023. This is not something to do lightly. So, after much thought, here are my five main reasons.

1. I disagree with the values and views as they are expressed by its new owner: Elon Musk. Even if he resigns, it won’t matter much. Elon Musk has broken too many things since he became the owner. Twitter is a broken platform and cannot be trusted.
2. I no longer want to feed the beast (user tracking, advertising networks, algorithm-based timelines). I won’t pay to get rid of 50% of the ads or whatever Musk decides to ask for.
3. I no longer trust Twitter’s sustainability and ability to thrive in the future. Twitter has become a loser in my digital landscape. If anything, Twitter has become the other wake-up call for the toxicity of a centralized web. The time has come for decentralizing the Internet.
4. Twitter doesn’t add significant unique value to my digital life anyway. Most of what I’m getting from Twitter can be found elsewhere.
5. Before I decided to close my accounts, I wanted to focus on one of my two accounts anyway (numericcitizen) instead of apple_observer, but it doesn’t have enough traction to warrant the efforts for the change.

What are your reasons?

I just spent part of my morning installing Windows 10 version 22H2 on a virtual machine with VMware Fusion 12 on my recently acquired 2013 Mac Pro. God, it’s been a long time since I experienced the Windows installation process. It is so freaking slow (way faster to install a Linux machine, BTW) and with so many reboots. I still prefer Apple’s macOS in that respect.

After six weeks of waiting, I finally got this little LED-based display called “Tidbyt”, a reference, I guess, to the old Lite-Brite game which came out in 1967 (I had one when I was a child).

Tidbyt is an intelligent wireless LED-based panel that displays content configured from the Tidbyt app available on a smartphone. Physically, the device feels high quality and well-designed and is framed with real wood, reminiscent of mid-century furniture.

Content is configured using applets that you put together on a canvas. The display content will switch from one applet to another in the order defined on the canvas. Applets can be set to display only on a specific schedule, but the scheduling options are rather limited. It’s very simple to set this up.

Once the display is plugged into power via its USB-C cable, it will wait for the configuration to be done from the smartphone, a six-step process. Bluetooth is required to detect the display, and a Wifi network is required for the display to get its data from the Internet.

The applets catalogue is growing but still is relatively limited. Thanks to an SDK and open APIs, developers constantly add new ones. The display is bright and can be adjusted according to a manual setting or time of the day. There is a night mode, too, if you want to put the device in one bedroom.

The screen resolution seemed low at first, but from a distance, it is surprisingly good, enough to display small images.

All in all, the Tidbyt makes a great addition to my home office, and people at work have already noticed it during Teams meetings and are asking questions about this little thing sitting on the shelf behind me.

So what do have here… quick and dirty review coming soon. 🤓🤗

I get way better interactions here on Micro.blog (more often, better quality) than on any other platforms I ever spent time on. Just a not-so-random thought.

On Twitter, you can get notified when someone starts following you. Sounds great until it isn’t. You know, many people will start following others to get attention about their existence, hoping to get a follow back. It’s easy to know they are seeking your attention because after a few days they will unfollow you. I always despised this behaviour. For this reason, I prefer Micro.blog’s lack of notifications when someone starts to follow me. I don’t pay attention.