Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Chris Glass: I’d love to see the next version of macOS introduce some basic gestural controls that can be used when a camera is present. I’m talking easy stuff like scrolling, zooming, navigation… I’m sure they can throw on some visionOS gestures to boot. Click-through to his site to see a video he created showing how it would…
V.H. Belvadi: What we need is a notes app that looks and behaves like a rich text editor but saves in Markdown. And by this I do not mean the clunky ‘source editor mode’ or whatever Obsidian calls it, where the Markdown formatting characters appear and disappear constantly displacing the text on your screen; instead I mean proper formatting…
I’m going to keep this simple so that I actually end up publishing this prior to WWDC. Here is my list of wishes for this year across Apple’s operating systems. Add a Switcheroo-like profile picker to Safari to allow opening a specific profile when a link is clicked from outside of the browser. Completely ditch Siri – Keep…
Jeremy Keith, in his interview on Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series: I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself. I never write…
Andy Adams: For some reason, years ago, we all agreed to spend most of our online time looking at photography on a canvas smaller than a cocktail napkin. It’s awful when you think about it: Thoughtful appreciation is the whole point of looking at photographs. And most of us cannot truly appreciate an image as it’s screaming by…
My thanks to Steve Burge for inviting me on to The PublishPress Podcast. In this episode we chat about NerdPress, blogging, Hubbub, Hubbub's Save This feature, social media, and the importance for publishers to own their own audience. Honorable mentions are Flipboard and Mastodon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9zCDiiV0j8 Blogging is still very big business, with Colin Devroe At the end of…
Unsure of what vibe coding is? See Simon Willison's explanation of a term recently coined by Andrej Karpathy on X. It is a buzzword that is lighting the world in fire it seems. But I just want to quickly recommend; do not hire anyone (a person or an agency) that thinks vibe coding is a good idea for…
A few times over the last several decades I've unsubscribed from every social media account, RSS feed, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc. and started with a clean slate. My goal was, as I wrote about in 2012 on this blog, to break out of my echo chamber and hopefully expand my thinking. Slowly resubscribing to my interests is a…
The sun has returned! I mean, it has always been there. Relatively speaking in the same place it was over the last few months. But the Earth's tilt is such that as it revolves around the nearest star the portion on which I live (the northern hemisphere) is getting ever so slightly closer and faces it just long…
Gus Mueller argues that Apple needs to support developers running LLMs locally on the Mac, rather than simply try to catch up on their own. There isn't one specific quote that I can pull out of Gus' post that makes his point so do go and read his post. But he also said: So I can run models…
It has been a long, cold, mostly icy winter. I'm not sure if age makes this feeling more acute, but the data seem to show that this winter has been colder than average. I can't remember the last time I pined for spring this badly. But, just yesterday, as temperatures finally hit 50ºF, the garlic began pushing through…
I have my reservations about whether or not blogs (specifically my blog) should federate content via ActivityPub. Isn't RSS enough?
It used to be, that I was the first person in line to download new software. I'd sign up for beta access, email developers for early looks at what they were working on, or even install beta software on my daily devices. But as time went on, I valued my productivity more than having the latest software. I…
As you all know, I'm a big fan of a the Pomodoro Technique. Recently, while catching up on my backlog of Jack Cheng's excellent Sunday series, I came across a snippet in Sunday #434 regarding an interview Cheng did with author Linda Sue Park. In that interview, she mentions whittling away at the Pomodoro Technique until she ended…
(The following is a very quick mind dump. Unedited. Raw.) I prefer black and white over color film for most of my photographic work. I do shoot color film. I mostly like to capture personal memories on color film while reserving black and white for my more serious, thought out photography. I think black and white captures the…
Naz Hamid writes about how we should all keep social networks in their place; as methods of distribution rather than longterm means of connection or publication. He also contrasts that to how we could be thinking of our websites: "If you care about your creativity, and what you make and bring into the world, I'd suggest having your…
Cedric Raguenaud argues that.. "When we label our photographic pursuits as “work,” we unconsciously impose constraints and expectations that belong in the professional world. Suddenly, we feel pressured to maintain visibility, chase originality, and demonstrate creativity, not for our own satisfaction, but for an imagined audience or abstract standard of success." Many people, myself included, call some of…
My default web browser is set to Switcheroo – a custom-made macOS app by Zhenyi Tan (with some feedback and guidance from me). Whenever I click on a link a modal of sorts appears letting me choose which Safari profile I'd like to load the link within. Here is what that looks like. When that tab loads the…
Chris Armstrong, advocating for a digital garden over a blog structure: A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. Robin Rendle linked to Armstrong's post recently and reading it reminded me of my 2011 post The blog format is ready for disruption. In that post,…
This morning I checked in on Pixelfed, the ActivityPub-powered Instagram alternative. I had created a profile on an instance in 2021 and I check in from time-to-time to see how it is coming along. All told, the experience is fair. But I'm far more excited by how well it is connecting to other platforms. An iOS client app…
Every person and organization has to make their own decisions about which social platforms they will have an account on, publish their content to, engage with, and support (with use or contributions both time and financial). There is no right answer for everyone. And, to many that run an online business, hoping to capture the attention of just…
Update October 2025: I'm back to using Unmark which is being actively developed once again. No shade on Anybox (which is great) but I'm simply trying to use and contribute to more open source (like Signboard). Saving links to get back to at a later time is a problem with a million great solutions. I even helped create…
Simon Willison, from a clip I created of an episode of Around the Prompt: I love AI as an accelerant of personal productivity improvement. I plan on writing an update to my post from April 2023 about using ChatGPT as an accelerator where I'll say something similar. Here is the clip:
I look back at my first year at NerdPress, what we've accomplished so far, and that I'm very excited for what's next.