Author: Colin Devroe

  • TIL Vivaldi, in addition to building a browser chocked full of features like email, to do lists, contact management, and note taking, also has a blogging service and now a hosted Mastodon instance. Productive team!

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  • Poll, of sorts: How do you balance creation vs consumption? I often wrestle with myself on how much I read or watch compared to how much I write or make or create. My desired ratio is 90/10. Unfortunately it is more like 10/90.

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  • I’m at the age where I totally understand why Mister Rogers changed his sweater and shoes when entering his home.

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  • I wish Apple would transition away from using photos from Yelp in Maps. First, license the photos in such a way that we no longer need to navigate out of the Maps app. Allow people to submit their own photos to locations. Slowly remove Yelp altogether.

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  • Matthias Ott on publishing

    Matthias Ott: Longtime readers will recall Stop worrying, hit publish. Ott’s post is a great example of the point he is trying to make. In the post he is simply relaying a story he heard on a podcast. Of what value could that be? By sharing how that story moved him, he moved several others.…

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  • Skittish is closing down

    Andy Baio reflects on his decision to shutdown the quirky and cool Skittish: I always knew there would be risk building something like this during the pandemic. Fortunately, I built it in a way where nobody would be burned: we fully honored the terms of our grant funding, it never had investors, never took on…

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  • Wordle is showing a full cover nag screen and The NY Times is advertising the official board game in pre-roll ads on Twitter. They must be having trouble making that milly back.

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  • Any tips to achieve better focus when using a lens adapter? I picked up an adapter to use FD mounts on my 90D. The results are dreamy! But, I wouldn’t mind the ability to dial in focus.

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  • People seem to retweet things they disagree with, or they think is downright false, thus amplifying that which they think is wrong. 🤔

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  • Instagram is slowly turning into a worse version of YouTube and TikTok.

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  • If I were to direct a documentary about YouTube I would title it “Added to Watch Later”.

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  • I wonder if people that are banned on a social network know that they don’t have to spend millions or billions on acquiring a competitive social network — they can just start a blog for free. *shrugs*

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  • Stupid now supports Dark Mode. It automatically switches with your device settings. Keen eyes may notice a few accurate constellations fly by. Also, a new featured artist Daniel Howden.

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  • Untitled post 102

    A Day in the Life – Pennsylvania, USA. Fall and winter is hot tub time ‘round here.

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  • If you use Apple’s Podcasts app, be sure to check the Downloads section. You may have a ton of episodes downloaded unintentionally. And they take up space.

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  • Tolkien did an awful lot of work to create the world of middle-earth and its histories, peoples, languages, etc. And yet he kept the month names from the Gregorian calendar?

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  • LOL at Joey Sneddon’s write-up on Vivaldi. “Furthering its unstated, but much evident ambitions to replicate absolutely everything in existence inside itself, the latest version of the Vivaldi web browser comes with a new productivity feature.”

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  • I’m starting to like Elon’s plan for Twitter more and more. Just get it over with already.

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  • Stop relying on Google

    Slowly, over the last decade, I’ve been pulling myself away from using Google services. Over 10 years ago I tried Duck.com instead of Google Search. It took a few years, but once it stuck, I haven’t turned back. I bet the number of searches I make on Google per month is in the single digits.…

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  • I would like about 50% more money per year. I don’t need it. And, if I had that, I worry I’d want 50% more.

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  • NASA’s DART Mission was fun to watch last night. Waking up to impact observations from around the globe. So fun. Space stuff happens often now. It is great.

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  • I’m imaging the slide decks of cryptocurrency-related startups. Slide 1: Not a scam. Slide 2: Not hacked. Slide 3: Web3. Slide 4: Profit!

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  • Austin Mann’s iPhone 14 Pro camera review

    As usual, Austin Mann’s review of the latest iPhone camera system is excellent. Be sure to give it a read. In the review, he mentions something I’ve been wanting on iPhone for a long time; Night mode. Night mode with all-red display: After seeing the all-red Night mode on the new Apple Watch Ultra, I…

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  • 🟥🟩 Stupid 263 2/0/2 I hope everyone who plays is enjoying the daily games.

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  • Switching Stripe Transfer‘s email services from Hover to iCloud+. Too many messages ending up in spam folders using Hover.

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  • Listening to a proper football (soccer) game live while at work. My grandfather would be proud.

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  • Take care of your blog

    Robin Rendle: There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm. Checks out. I blog a lot. I’ve blogged for decades. And…

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  • What I saw somewhat recently #96: September 9, 2022

    The end of a dry, busy summer Three months is a long time to go, even for me, without publishing a post in this series of links. But this summer has been extraordinarily busy at work – in a way that consumed a lot of my creative and just overall energies. But of course, I’ve…

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  • Spring ’83 – a fun internet protocol

    Robin Sloan: What follows is a narrative description of a protocol that I believe might open up some interesting new possibilities on the internet. My goal here isn’t to “sell you” on its design; rather, I just want to lay out my thinking as clearly as I can. I’m long, long overdue on reading Sloan’s proposal for a…

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  • Have you ever scrolled down to the bottom of an article on a local news website? Thar be dragons!

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  • The crazy summer of work is almost over. I am hoping for a less stressful fall.

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  • Glass observations – an update

    One year ago I wrote Glass observations, a post wherein I wrote about the state of sharing photos on the web, and what I thought about the photo sharing app Glass. This morning I read that post anew to see if my opinion still stands – it does. So if you missed it and were…

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  • Montaigne – Blog with Apple Notes

    Montaigne: Build a website, blog, or portfolio using nothing but Apple Notes. Pretty cool.

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  • Accidentally wrote some code that did 360 billion lookups against a database. Oops. My Mac processed it in 7 seconds. Computers are amazing.

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  • Apple One’s Family Plan should have more storage options. Currently you can purchase 200GB of extra storage for the entire family. Optionally, you can add additional iCloud+ Drive space for $9.99/month but that makes it more expensive than Apple One’s Premier Plan. 200GB for a family was enough in 2005. Today plans should start at…

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  • Moved all of my accounts from 1Password to, iCloud Passwords (is that what it is called? it isn’t KeyChain, is it?). Now to move Eliza’s and we’ll be done.

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  • Photographers be aware, WordPress may convert your JPEGs to WebP soon

    This isn’t a “the sky is falling” post. However, photographers that use WordPress should be well aware of upcoming changes regarding image file formats. Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern: WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for…

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  • WordPress mobile apps to be simplified

    Paul Von Schrottky on the Make WordPress Mobile blog: Over the years, the WordPress app has evolved to meet a diverse range of site administration needs and use cases. Features like Stats, Reader, and Notifications were introduced with the hope of meeting some of these needs. However, these features require the Jetpack plugin or a…

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  • There needs to be a dry cleaning service for AirPods.

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  • Does everyone feel more, less, or as anxious as I do all the time?

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  • I haven’t been blogging much. Work is super, super busy and that will likely continue through mid-August. And Stripe Transfer is busier than ever. No complaints! But I do miss my blog, shooting photographs, and making new projects. I shall return!

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  • I’m in a phase where I have an absolute ton of work to do and everything is working great on my computer. So, I don’t want any software to be updated for 60 days or so. I seem to hit this sweet spot about once a year.

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  • Twitter is down hard.

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  • I’ve been using Raindrop for several months. It is very good, aside from a glaring omission. But I think I’m going to export my bookmarks and go back to Unmark and start putting some time back into that project. I think I need to rebuild it from scratch though, the codebase is already 10 years…

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  • Davis Blocks

    Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern: WordPress theme author Anders Norén has remade his popular Davis theme to support full-site editing. The new theme, Davis Blocks, is sporting the same clean design as its predecessor, and can be used as a starter theme or a lightweight blog theme. I used Davis, Anders original theme for WordPress, for…

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  • Haruki Murakami is incredible. I finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and, although I have no clue how to rate the book, I can’t wait to start another Murakami book.

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  • Old man peeve: when posts begin “this is going to be a long one” (or, similar) and are only a few short paragraphs. A Tolstoy novel is “a long one”. A blog post is probably not.

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  • Stupid featured in Webcurios 24/06/22

    Matt @ Webcurios, describing my game Stupid: Sent to me by Curios reader Colin Devroe, who also created it, this is a nice twist on the Wordle format (I promised I wouldn’t keep including Wordle riffs, but I will make exceptions for ones that are fun or which are accompanied by a polite email) which…

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  • Humans, making things, and art

    Kevin Kelly: Humans are born to make stuff. We almost can’t help it. Place us in an empty flat plain and we’ll start building things. Put us on a dried lake bed in the middle of the desert and we’ll build things, take them down and build different stuff next year. We make tools, which make other tools,…

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  • I just added the generative art music project I’ve been working off and on for 6 months – Infinite Posters – to my portfolio. I’ll continue to add to it as the project progresses and I’m planning a behind-the-scenes blog post soon.

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