Got this for the Apple Studio Display and iPhone 13 Pro. With macOS Ventura Camera Continuity, it works much better than I thought. It works great with Microsoft Teams. Best way to add Center Stage to Microsoft Teams (using the Control Center settings while the camera is on). No latency. Surprising how low the battery power consumption is. It would have been nice if the iPhone mount could also recharge the iPhone, though.
For the first time today, I diligently tested Micro.blog’s bookmarking feature. I don’t know if this is a popular feature among MB users, but I wonder if I should find a place for MB bookmarks in my workflow. Let’s see a typical workflow.
So, I start reading an article from my now favourite RSS reader: Inoreader. I decide to open the source website and use the bookmarklet to save the page into MB bookmarks. After a few minutes, MB diligently created a readable article archive stripped of all the noise. Think of it as an MB version of Instapaper.
I open the newly created archive and start my reading. I find an interesting or very valuable passage that I select in the browser. MB shows a very gentle overlay titled “Highlight”. I click on it, and sure enough, the text gets highlighted. But that’s not all.
MB can display a list of all my highlights. If I find a highlight that I want to create a linkpost for, I simply click the “New post” button underneath it. And voilà, I can start writing my linkpost right there.
Moreover, MB offers a simple way to save a bookmark by entering the article’s URL into the provided field at the top of the “Bookmarks” section on the MB website. Very handy.
Bookmarks can be embedded in a blog post too. Just click “Embed” underneath a specific bookmark.
The only downside, for now, is the lack of data portability: bookmarks and highlights can’t be saved or exported outside MB.
The bookmarking feature is part of the Premium subscription tier.
We now live in a world of multimodal communications, and how we communicate is changing. The omnipresence of devices in our lives — smartphones to computers, means most of our conversations and communications happen through text. We have replaced so much of our face-to-face interaction with the written word. Teams, Slack and Discords, are part of our daily lives now. As the volume of text in our lives increases, we need tools that help facilitate and perhaps improve how we write and how fast we write.
Am I alone in having the feeling that people no longer read?
Apple pays $12.1 mln fine for alleged app market abuse in Russia - Antimonopoly Service
U.S. tech giant Apple has paid a 906 million rouble ($12.12 million) fine in a Russian antitrust case alleging abuse of its dominance in the mobile apps market, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) said on Monday.
First, where is the money going once paid by Apple? The current situation in Ukraine mandates more scrutiny. Personally, I would have shut down the App Store altogether in this market. Plain and simple as well as give a middle finger instead of paying the fine. But that’s me.
Dear developers, be honest with us. In my usual morning rabbit hole digging, I stumbled on Flow, a Pomodoro app for the Mac. According to the website, Flow is free.
I click on the “Available on the App Store” link. Once in the App Store, I look at the app details.
Then, things start to look different. There is an “In-app purchases” tag. Scrolling down to the details, I get to see this.
Now, I go up and read the app description. 😠 The developer fooled me. I feel cheated when basic and core features are under the “Pro” plan (like a timer custom duration). It’s a stupid one-feature app, and the developer manages to put the core feature under the pro plan!! I skip the app and move on because I don’t feel the developer is honest in his approach. Yeah, I know it’s called “marketing”.
Will be spending the rest if the weekend trying to advance my (many) projects. One being to produce my next YouTube video about using Craft as a website publishing tool.
👨💻 I’ve been extensively testing Inoreader recently and I have to say that as much as I like the service, I find the support for third-party services seriously lacking.
Inoreader supports many third-party services like Blogger, Telegram, Buffer, Evernote, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Pocket, Google Drive, Instapaper, OneNote, Hatena Bookmarks and Dropbox.
It certainly a long list of services but the problem is that I don’t use any of them. I recently cancelled Buffer and Pocket. I’m surprised to see Blogger but not WordPress or Ghost. Who’s using Hootsuite these days?
I wish Raindrop.io or Notion would be supported, after all, both of these services support offer APIs. Too bad because with better integration often come more efficient workflows.
Building something around tags, IFTTT and RSS could unlock some form of automated workflow. For example, tagging an article would generate an article in a custom RSS feed built using Inoreader which would trigger an applet on IFTTT monitoring this RSS feed which in turn could create an entry in Things 3. The latter part is a challenge, though. IFTTT can’t talk to Things, but it can talk to Google Sheet.
Nothing is perfect I guess. 🤷🏻♂️
I rarely post my photography work here on Micro.blog, as I prefer to focus on dedicated photo-sharing services like Glass. But tonight, while doing some cleanup on my WordPress website, I stumbled on this post, “Confinement – A Visual Essay”, published on April 13th, 2020, in the early months of COVID-19. I almost instantly remembered and felt what it was like during these dire moments of confinement.
If pictures can trigger memories of challenging moments, I think they are good enough. This is why I am sharing this montage here tonight. Look carefully at each of them, they each contain a specific message.
I don’t know if it is a popular opinion or not, but Telegram is such a well-designed messaging app. It looks cool, and it has the right amount of gamification. Telegram.app feels native on all Apple platforms.
I use Telegram passively to subscribe to channels that publish news and information about the war in Ukraine essentially. Many of the publishers were on Twitter too, but I left this shitty platform. I don’t use Telegram for chatting with others.
I’m pondering about subscribing. there are things that I don’t like about Telegram (like insisting on getting access to my contacts and being owned by Pavel Durov). I don’t like the owner’s attitude toward Apple’s App store rules in general. He’s Russian with Ukrainian origins. Thankfully, is fled Moscow a long time ago to live in Dubai, a safe haven for many Russians these days. The fun fact is that Telegram is hugely popular in Ukraine and serves both sides in good and bad ways.
Are there any Telegram users here? Do you share my sentiment? Are you subscribing to the Premium tier?
2023-02-19 Seriously, what’s wrong with me? 🤔
2023-02-19 I’m still pondering about cross-posting everything from MB to my @numericcitizen@techhub.social mastodon account. Why should I, why shouldn’t I?
Hint: I don’t want to de-focus from Micro.blog as my hub for feeling part of the larger fediverse microcosm.
2023-02-19
Attorney General Ashley Moody:
“We must ensure that consumers have the information needed to make informed decisions about their data privacy and security. The existing lack of transparency in app stores can create a significant risk for American citizens, and could cause their personal information to be exploited by foreign entities of concern. That is why I am calling on Apple and Google to bring more transparency to their app stores—so consumers know what products are owned or developed by nations that may pose a national security risk.”
I think this is a great idea. In challenging times, I want to know if an app is created or owned by someone who brings money into bad actor pockets. I do have internal debate about this issue from time to time, having such labeling in the App Store would certainly help in my buying or subscription decisions.
And here we go again with the new Mac Pro “problem”. Jason Snell writing about the challenges Apple is facing with the unfinished Apple Silicon transition of its Mac line:
And all that custom work, all those distortions to what makes Apple silicon so successful, would be done for a product that’s a niche of a niche–and it’s work that Apple’s chip design team could have spent on a next-generation chip for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Remember the Trashcan Mac? The black cylinder Mac Pro was a closed system with very limited internal expandability beyond memory and SSD drive. Criticism from pro users lasted so long that Apple reverted his take on the Mac Pro with the return of the expandable machine in 2019. Pro users rejoiced as they could again add the PCI cards of their choices as well as adding as much memory they could afford. Problems fixed? Think again.
Now, enter the Apple Silicon chip: a highly regarded and efficient system-on-a-chip design with fixed amount of RAM and GPU (except for Pro, Max, Ultra flavours). A Mac Pro built around this chip would go against having 1 TB of RAM or external GPU without sacrificing latency and performance with support for RAM or eGPU. Apple Silicon makes the Mac a more closed system, just like the 2013 Trashcan Mac was. How ironic this is.
Glass introduces “Highlights”. Oh I like this a lot. They keep adding more and more dimensions to an already solid, simple, honest, photo-sharing service. I’m glad to be supporting them.
👉🏻 Day One, now available on the web. Woah! This is cool.
I’m a big fan of Day One. I use it 99% of time for documenting my numeric life (details here if you are curious). When Automattic bought them a while back, I was curious to see how it would influence its future. Now we get a much better idea. The web access maybe was an obvious “next step”, but they did a superb job of transposing most of the Day One experience on the web.
What could be the next step for Day One? Well, what about being able to blog from Day One? A dedicated “public” journal could be created and any entry saved into that journal would go online. Boom.
Now, if only I could spend more time writing personal thoughts in it.😒
A Typical Morning Rabbit Hole
I’m heading to Micro.blog and start reading on my timeline, I read someone’s post about note taking apps, mentioning how Bear Notes is great. I switch to Bear Notes website. After watching the introduction video, I head to the website’s blog section. Bear Notes certainly looks great. This particular blog post looks at how Bear Notes can work with other apps like Things 3 and Readwise. I wonder how I could use Brea Notes for my workflow. I’m reminded that we can export Readwise highlights in markdown files. I head to Readwise website and give it a try. I play with the export options for a while and export all my highlights, more than 1400 in total. Easy and quick. Next I wonder if I could import them in Craft. Yes I can. What about importing them in Ulysses. Yes I could. Then I remember that Ulysses, my go-to writing app, is great. And forget about Bear Notes.
Written and posted using Ulysses on my M1 MacBook Air.
Tonight, following one of my year’s goals of focusing on and reducing my digital footprint, I deleted my Tumblr account, where each post was cross-posted from Micro.blog ➡️ Tumblr. This platform seems like a ghost town.
I’m also testing the new “Show cross-posting” feature to push this post on my Mastodon instance. Zoom zip and hop to @numericcitizen@techhub.social!
2023-02-24
👉 It’s Friday, and it is time for another quick experiment. For the next few days, I will cross-post from the Micro.blog to my Mastodon account and see how it goes. I’m unsure if I will add more confusion than anything else.
2023-02-24
AI Comes to WordPress… Who Knew
The pervasiveness of AI is starting to look troubling at best. This week as I was heading to my WordPress admin page, I got this message at the top.
Who knew? I was curious so I read the official “AI Engine” plugin page on WordPress.org. Here’s something that I found dubious.
Five stars reviews only so far. I won’t have the pleasure to test this plugin or implement any of this on my website as I’m getting ready to move out of WordPress this year. Now, who’s next, Ghost?
The official plugin page can be found here.
Since last June I’ve been producing YouTube videos about Craft (the note taking app, not the game! 😜). I’m closing in to having fifty videos done. I like doing this quite a lot actually.
Now I’m looking for the next product or service to talk about. 🧐
It seems there is a lot to talk about with Micro.blog, don’t you think? 🤓
2023-02-25
The funny thing about posting ideas on Friday nights, writing out loud ideas, it goes out unnoticed; nobody is paying attention. Everyone is too busy enjoying their weekend!
2023-02-25
👉✅ I’m running a quick poll on my YouTube Channel, in the community section! I’m curious about your interest in “how-to” videos about Micro.blog. Thanks for taking the time to vote! 🙏🏻
2023-02-25
👉✅ I’m running a quick poll on my YouTube Channel, in the community section! I’m curious about your interest in “how-to” videos about Micro.blog. Thanks for taking the time to vote! 🙏🏻
The funny thing about posting ideas on Friday nights, writing out loud ideas, it goes out unnoticed; nobody is paying attention. Everyone is too busy enjoying their weekend!
