Early voting started today! We went to our location but the line was insanely long. Gonna try again tomorrow. Hopefully a good sign for turnout. 🇺🇸

I’m using iOS App Intents for the first time as a developer. My gut feeling when this was all introduced was that it was way too limited to create an extensible, universal Siri that works in lots of contexts. I still believe that. Some cool things are possible, though.

When I get a questionable notification summary in the iOS 18.1 beta, I run the original text through OpenAI to compare. It’s usually better. Certainly not a deal-breaker, but the thing about AI is it needs to actually be good or you lose the illusion.

WNBA finals, game 5, a minute and a half left, tied game… This is what it’s all about. 🏀

Ben Werdmuller has several ideas for building on the fediverse, including add-on services, SDKs, rebuilding his platform Known, and a “fediverse VIP” for professionals.

Sunny day in Austin. Finally got the adapter for my new solar panel so I can actually test everything. Getting about 60 watts. Not a lot but plenty to keep my Jackery in the car topped off for charging gadgets.

Love this episode of The Vergecast about a YouTuber opening a coffee shop. I would also like to open a coffee shop / bookstore one day… I browse commercial real estate listing way too often.

Mimi Uploader is now free for the rest of the year. Great opportunity to do more photo-blogging on Micro.blog.

Updated my Texas state parks page, now up to 17 out of 88 parks. Need to get back on schedule to have any hope of finishing this challenge within a few years.

Eisenhower State Park near my campsite this morning. I had so much fun last night for the Honda Element meetup! Lots of cool cars, all different.

Posted a new Core Intuition. This week we talk about trademarks… with Micro.blog, not WordPress. When to call a lawyer and other decisions of running a small business.

Traveling today, but carved out a nice morning in Dallas to fix and deploy several bugs. Loving this weather too.

Great post from Cory Doctorow on using RSS:

Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

It’s weird that we still have to tell people about RSS in 2024, but that’s just how it is.

I ported another Hugo theme over to Micro.blog. It’s called Soho, based on the Hyde theme. Just needed a little adapting for microblog posts. Available for previewing in the plug-in directory.

I’m less than a week into using Arc on the Mac, and already I’m so used to it that when I hop into Safari, everything is a little off.

The new color Kindle looks really nice. I don’t read comics on the Kindle or make highlights much, so the only advantage for color would be book covers… Almost worth it. I bet those look great.

I missed the beginning of the Texas debate but from what I saw in the second half, Colin Allred did really well. Ted Cruz is so obnoxious. Always a tough race here, though. 🇺🇸

I recorded a quick video demo of the new theme preview in Micro.blog. This is such an obvious feature but it was sort of tricky to do before because of how Micro.blog is architected with static-site generation. Working pretty well so far!

Good glass-half-full analysis from Jason Snell about the new iPad mini with A17 Pro:

…this model feels more like a holding action that gets the iPad mini onto Apple Intelligence… while also using up some amount of chip excess. If I had to predict when we’ll see a next-next-generation iPad mini, I think I’d guess that it will probably be sooner than three years from now.

Things have accelerated since my post about Automattic and WP Engine a couple weeks ago. I’m writing this follow-up post not to pick sides, but because it feels right to blog about something this significant happening in the website hosting world. Banning WP Engine from Word...

A few more notes about the new theme preview feature at the help site.

New iPad Mini with the A17 Pro and AI looks good. At first I was surprised by the $500 price, thought for sure the previous model was less expensive, but no. I’m still enjoying the iPhone Pro Max as a mini mini iPad, but I’m already used to the iPhone size, so it no longer feels very big.

New way to preview themes, from the news blog:

Added new Preview button for themes in the plug-in directory. This will create a special preview version of your blog to try out the theme. Also improved the tab bar and navigation around plug-ins.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2024/10/15/added-new-preview.html

I’m going to try to record a video demo of this later. It’s a big change.

Working with the Stripe API this morning, trying to make things a little better. It hurts to look at the dashboard and see all the failed payments. MRR is so much higher than actual revenue. 💔

Jeremy Keith built a static archive of his site The Session:

I wanted to reduce the dependencies on each page to as close to zero as I could. All the CSS is embedded in the the page. Likewise with most of the JavaScript (you’ll still need an internet connection to get audio playback and dynamic maps). This keeps the individual pages nice and self-contained. That means they can be shared around (as an email attachment, for example).

Not everyone can code something like this, so more web platforms should have this as a built-in feature. Micro.blog has multiple exports with just plain HTML.

Om Malik:

Pure blogging is “blogging” because you have something to say. To me, that is a pure blogger. Any other explanation of blogging “is just the traditional idea of media,” meant for an audience and for reach.

Jamie Zawinski on the 30-year anniversary of the Netscape 0.9 release:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar.

Tuned in to the SpaceX livestream in time to see the Starship splashdown. Watched the recap of catching the booster too. Incredible. Looks like something that might be an AI-generated video, but it’s real. 🚀

Bennu Coffee might be too serious about their wi-fi passwords. ☕️

It’s time for another update in my Honda Element blog post series. After my last road trip, I decided to scrap the rooftop box. Even though the extra storage was great, I was suspicious it was dragging too much on the highway and killing my gas milage. In its place I’ve moun...