Clicking around on Peter Steinberger’s release.bar. Interesting repo summaries. Because all the Micro.blog apps are open source, looking at my account provides a snapshot of recent changes.

I know it’s a temporary icon but every day I think about switching back to Apple Music just because of the Spotify disco ball. 🤪

I’m too slow finishing a book I checked out on Libby, so had to put the Kindle in airplane mode so it doesn’t expire. I do this a lot. But then they’ll be another book I’d like to get into at the same time and now can’t sync it. I hate to DNF books I’m 3/4 of the way through, just losing steam. 📚

Only just learned about Null Island. Love the name. There’s a CNN article today about cruise ships stopping there:

Just a few weeks ago, Holland America announced plans to include Null Island as a stop on its 129-day round-the-world voyage in 2028, following an earlier stop on its 2024 trip.

Amazing and fitting considering how GPS has changed so many things. 🗺️

I don’t use Plex, but I’ve seen a couple people mention this lifetime plan pricing increase. Mike Rockwell blogs:

But $750 feels insane. That’s more than ten times the price of the annual subscription. That feels like too high of a multiple to me.

That’s a lot to pay all at once. I’m not sure lifetime plans are workable for some types of hosted software anyway. I have plenty of server costs each month to run Micro.blog, and the subscriptions sustain that. If I want to keep running Micro.blog for let’s say 20 more years, it’s risky to have too much revenue upfront instead of later.

I was feeling good with that 15-0 start to the game, but this third quarter had been tough. Lots of fouls, not enough shots going in for the Spurs. 🏀

Watched the first part of the Starship v3 launch live, then the final minutes later. Never gets old. Extraordinary views. 🚀

Okay. 📷

Most users probably don’t use Micro.blog notes as much as I do, but still feels great to ship this latest bug fix update for Mac with much faster notes sync. The clunkiness had been bugging me for a while even though I use it all the time.

I don’t have AI start a draft of anything for me except photo accessibility text. But I do often have it check posts for grammar problems or confusing phrases. Super useful. I think my writing is at least slightly better because of it, but it’s still mine.

Everyone can choose to have AI help them write or not, but we’re past the point of needing to be lectured about it. When I’m at the store and see someone buying a greeting card with a poetic message that someone else wrote for them, I don’t give them a hard time. It’s fine.

After a full month of Apple rejections, the iOS version of Inkwell has been approved. Before I get to that, there is one additional update from Apple, this time from their trademarks team who I reached out to. This is part of the response I got this week: As we are sure you...

Loved the way they wrapped up the last episode of The Late Show. Nicely done. Heck of a run and good way to go out on top. 📺

The automatic backups introduced in Micro.blog for Mac earlier this month are working pretty well for me. But I’m going to adjust how many backups are stored from 5 to 3, or maybe configurable, because for blogs with thousands of photos the backup files can get pretty big.

Just some bedtime reading of the appeals court decision from December in Epic vs. Apple. I really hope we’re almost at the end of this mess. It has dragged on way too long.

Om Malik with a little late-night reading of the SpaceX prospectus:

The SpaceX IPO is a masterpiece of financial engineering. The prospectus is a perfect blend of reality, sci-fi, and skullduggery.

Along with other improvements today, I updated the home page for Inkwell so it’s a little less plain. Now includes a screenshot and download links for all the platforms. For iOS, still linking to the TestFlight version while we wait for Apple.

“No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.”

Last night’s game 2, quick thoughts. I could blame all the blatant fouling with the Thunder holding Wemby every possession, which also contributed to the Thunder getting offensive rebounds, but really it’s the turnovers. Gotta clean that up, hopefully with De’Aaron Fox and Dylan Harper back soon. 🏀

From the SpaceX filing, we learned that Anthropic will be paying xAI $1.25 billion per month to host Claude. And Tom Brown of Anthropic posted on X that they’ll also expand into Colossus 2:

Appreciate elonmusk and the team helping us find good homes for the Claudes.

Strange partnership. Only a couple months ago, Dario Amodei griped about Greg Brockman donating money to Trump, although to his credit he walked it back. Now Anthropic is putting Claude’s future into the hands of Elon Musk, with all of Elon’s political baggage.

As companies get bigger, maybe there are market forces that take over from stated principles. Or maybe we ascribe values to companies that were never really there. To be fair, though, I was also just considering giving X money to re-enable tweet cross-posting for my users. Micro.blog is so small, I can choose not to.

Big update to Inkwell for Mac today, version 1.4. It adds saving and editing draft blog posts, fixes glitches in the text editor, and improves a few other little things in the UI. Getting closer to a unified platform for reading and writing blog posts.

I published Indie Microblogging on the web a few years ago, continued to tweak it a little, but I had to solve a couple layout issues before I could print it and send to backers. The book includes 400+ links, which I’ve converted to footnotes for print. Here’s an example page.

Google announced a million things at Google I/O yesterday. I thought it was interesting that Demis Hassabis closed the keynote, putting everything in context. A small part of it:

AGI is now on the horizon, and it will be the most profound and impactful technology ever invented. If built right, it could propel human progress and flourishing beyond our imaginations. We’re in a moment of immense promise, but also enormous responsibility. […] When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.

Love to see another OT game! Knicks come back big in the 4th quarter. I thought they were toast. 🏀

I’m coming around to not wanting any Tahoe-style icons in my menu items. Not sure yet if it should be a preference for my Mac apps, or always hide them in the way that Brent Simmons and Rogue Amoeba have done.

I’m fine with unified Mac toolbars that have a few buttons in the title bar, but some apps take this too far, introducing friction in just figuring out how to drag a window around. There should probably be at least 50% of the window title bar available in the middle for average-width window sizes.

Sometimes I’ll switch Codex to Extra High and /fast. Yesterday for a long-running task (45 minutes) I came the closest to depleting tokens, hitting about 40% remaining for the first time. Must’ve been how Claude users feel, living on the edge all the time. 🤪

I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on. What’s the hold up? I’ve hinted a...

Fortnite is back in the App Store. From Tim Sweeney on X:

This is a critical moment in the battle against the App Store empire to win freedom for all developers and consumers, and we’ll continue the fight in every jurisdiction worldwide until competition is restored to digital stores and payment markets everywhere.

Upcoming accessibility improvements from Apple sound good. A natural use of LLMs. From MacStories:

Rather than requiring a defined set of commands that need to be memorized to control a device, the feature will allow users to invoke actions with natural language, such as, “Tap the orange folder.”