FeedCity

Every space has its own feeling. My bedroom feels like a place to rest. With that feeling of rest, I often find the comfort to write. I am writing this blog post while the fairy lights on the wall illuminate my room. I’m warm under the blankets. I feel comfortable. The offi...

I was speaking with someone this week for whom English is their second language. We started talking about mathematics. I mentioned the word “logarithms”. The person with whom I was talking then said they didn’t understand the word. This instantly reminded me of an almost iden...

A little thing I wrote in my notes recently: To push for things to stay the same means you miss out on all the richness that can come from novelty — to miss out on all the stories one could have lived. This very post is pushing to try something new; to share a note as yet undeveloped, with only the knowledge that I feel I will be reflecting on it for many years. As the years pass I appreciate the beauty of the changing seasons more, and all of the new-to-me things I see within each.

“From fear the plant was a weed to three beautiful pink blossoms. With each development – seeing the starting signs of a bud, the bud opening, blooming – I have felt joy.” I wrote in September 2023. My blog has become a de facto log for the pink flowers that grow outside. Whe...

There were two online HTML Day events yesterday, one for the Oceania timezone – which was in the morning for me here in the UK – and one in the evening for European timezones. I was determined to attend both, excited about the idea of spending my weekend making two new HTML p...

Really happy with the response to our new discount to make Micro.blog free for teachers and nurses. We’ve had some people take us up on the offer already.

Mark Gurman reports on a new team inside Apple developing a search engine and world knowledge model:

While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an “answer engine” — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions. A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.

Catching up on some posts from FediCon, which was held over the last couple of days in Vancouver. @bmann.ca has his talk slides and notes online.

A podcast about a podcast users' API.

On Thursday I wrote: "It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all suppo...

Reminder that we are improving things with Micro.blog all the time. You can see recent changes on news.micro.blog. If there’s a bug that needs attention, send us an email. The best way for us to prioritize what to work on is what we hear about.

It's always a good idea to get a second opinion with AI stuff. ChatGPT may give you a convoluted answer where Claude.ai gives you a concise one.

Created a new plug-in “Photos with months” that adds some date grouping to the default Photos page. May need additional changes, because it will conflict with some other photos page plug-ins. You can see it on my photos page.

I've been working on the top level of WordLand, and finally got to a place where navigation feels good, like this is the right track. So I took a snapshot so I can come back and look at this later, and I don't mind sharing with my blog readers with the look and feel of what might be coming.

A basic question I had about the ChatGPT agents that I can answer now that I have the feature, is whether or not the code you create that way can run on a server, where you can give it a URL and make it an endpoint other networked software can call. Or if it could run periodically, say once every five minutes for a function that was creating an RSS feed anyone could subscribe to. The answer is no -- it can't do either of these things. I'm sure they could do it at a technical level, but they don't want to host applications. But now I may understand better why they want to make a web browser, I bet you will be able to call these agents from apps that run in the browser. And in their case, they might not even have to support JavaScript? Heh. A wholly different programming model? Maybe I'm overestimating how much they're biting off?

One of the more depressing things in having so much code that I can easily search, is the number of times I've rewritten the same code without remembering I had written it before. Yesterday I did it knowingly, I wanted a function that could tell me if one of a set of categori...

As you get older your memory gets less reliable. It makes programming more of a challenge because as your software gets more features, there's more to remember and at the same time your codebase is getting bigger you are getting older. I wonder if there isn't some way to use ...

Drinking Sunday coffee in the hyper-normal

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival. The topic is colour. I think a lot about colour. I used to wear Hawaiian shirts almost every day. I like the colours, I thought to myself. Especially on a grey morning, colour makes all the difference. The colours made me...

Seems like we got some breaking news out of Bloomberg’s reporting on the Apple internal meeting. Apple had tried to update Siri with both the existing commands plus LLM-based functionality as a hybrid system, but it didn’t work well. The new Siri will be unified under a single new architecture.