FeedCity

Released a minor update to Micro.blog for Mac today. Little tweaks mostly for the new macOS beta. For better or worse, I’m doing all my work and testing on Tahoe now, and I expect it to be widely adopted in the fall.

Everything in ChatGPT is so nice. I just asked it about a random plant I got as a gift, and it gave me a beautiful one pager with everything I would have had to spend time searching for all right there, beautifully laid out, and all the fine UI touches you might think of already in. It's studying us and learning, and picking out the good stuff, at least so far. The web was like this too in the beginning, mind-exploding inventions every day. We called them mind bombs. The journalists and social media influencers all just complain, while there is a revolution happening, progress that had slowed to a snail pace, or very often went in reverse, is now coming at breakneck speed. This is as transformative innovation as there has ever been, not that I have much perspective on those that happened before I was invented, but it's as big as the Beatles, the PC, web, mobile.

I don’t agree with much of Casey Handmer’s politics, but I do like his fantastical vision of new cities. I’ve bought into the idea of using cheap solar for water desalination. It could transform areas of the world that don’t have enough water. We need to think bigger.

Cool to see expanded book management options in the next Micro Social beta.

Why I need WordLand. I’m primarily a writer, my podcasts reflect that, so most of the work I do on each podcast is in writing the show notes. I have a template the writing and audio flow through. Here's an example of a page rendered through that template. We’re doing similar things with WordPress using themes. The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, then flow my writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools. I understand WordPress so far has a steady workflow thru the block editor, but their are workflows for designers and writers. WordLand is the flow for writers.

Reading Doggerland by Ben Smith.

With four weeks of July behind me, this second month-long summer experiment has come to an end. A lot less interesting than June’s experiment, but still worth doing. The data from this final week is a bit all over the place for a variety of reasons, but let me dump some numb...

The Level Up is an indie improv showcase. Join us as we watch amazing New York indie improv talents gain XP on the Magnet stage, unlock new achievements, and reach new milestones. Or do comedy.

Come support Michael as he dons his hosting-duties cap for three exciting indie teams!

• Fleischwunde
• Mothra
• Hoopty

I’ll be playing in with Michael and the rest of the Level Up!

Looking forward to it! And to seeing you there!! (Yes, you. Come on out!!!)

Saturday day July 26th, 2025 @ 10:30pm
Magnet Theater
254 West 29th St (btwn 7th and 8th Ave.)
New York City, NY 10001
Tickets $10: https://magnettheater.com/show/tickets/59691/

For those looking to delve in deeper to gutting books, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren go into greater depth in How to Read a Book (Touchstone, 1972, 2011) in which they discuss various levels of reading books with which many students are less familiar. They break reading down into various modes including inspectional … Continue reading

Dervish in the Ulster Hall

Checked in at Ulster Hall for NOTIFY, Dervish, Cormac McCarthy, MGCE Concert Orchestra, and 5 more…. Dervish!

One of my favorite features in the newest version of Bingeworthy is that it can generate a ChatGPT review of a program. Screen shot. I wouldn't have opened this up before because of that would let in the weirdness of the internets. This way we can find out what people thought, as sanitized by ChatGPT. BTW do you think the root of sanitized is sane? As the root of ignorant is ignore? Of course Our Friend has the answer. One is and the other isn't.

Finished reading: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson. I read the e-book, but I also got the print edition in the mail yesterday. Half of the book is white text on black pages! I’ve never seen this before in a novel. 📚

After hours of downtime with our primary photo storage, I’ve given up on Linode and started restoring failed uploads and switching to our S3 backup. Very disappointing. I’ll post a final update to @news when everything is back online. I also learned some new things to make this more robust.

I wasn't planning on this, but there was a report that there was a problem with BingeWorthy, and I looked into it and was able to fix it.

When I added a feature that lets you ask ChatGPT to review the program you're looking at, I broke the ability to add a new program to the database. It took about 15 minutes to track down and verify and fix -- and now that very important function works again.

As long as I was in there working around, I updated the Bingeworthy RSS feed to only report program additions. The other events it was reporting just weren't as interesting.

I also added that feed to my blogroll on scripting.com.

I'd say it works a lot better now.

Sunday afternoon session in Belfast

Feels like every day for a month I’ve been waking up to one emergency or another — some real, some fabricated. This morning, there was a power outage at a Linode data center that is affecting our photo hosting. Blah.

Going to Belfast. brb

The new Billy Joel documentary — And So It Goes — on HBO was great. They had so much time to go deep on a lot of things. I actually knew next to nothing about him except the songs.