🔗 Amit Gawande

Micro posts don’t sit well on the platform, either. For all that, there’s no better platform than Micro.blog.

I’m afraid I have to disagree. I found a great use case, for me, for Scribbles. Blips. I recently discovered that posts without titles are no longer shown in the Explore section of Scribbles. Sad. Yet, I’m a big supporter of Scribbles.

One Big Regret of My Digital Life

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.

  1. It’s not exactly true. I used to have and maintain a website about a subject that I still find fascinating: meteorology, circa 1994. ↩︎

I spent part of my morning testing the creation of a GPT that has the function of producing a summary of the article referenced by a URL. The summary must be divided into three parts: a paragraph, a list of key elements, and finally a list of keywords. It’s easy to use and the results are usually excellent. However, to my surprise, many authors block access to engines like ChatGPT. This GPT will be used with Omnivore but integration is not possible. I need to copy and paste the article’s original URL into the GPT.

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

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. 👀🤔

On Single-Purpose Device Attractiveness

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. And I think the same would be true for a note-taking tablet.