Due to the rising costs of memory and storage, a standard Micro.blog subscription will remain $5 for the foreseeable future. 🙂

Settled into a perfect routine while away on vacation over the last week: walk or bike for coffee, work a couple hours, picnic at the beach with family, lots of book reading, nice dinner out. 🏖️ Working a little each day actually makes me more relaxed. Got updates to Epilogue and Inkwell ready.

Apple price increases are significant. Now that I see them, it does make sense to change the prices for all the Macs and iPads at the same time. It would feel out of balance to have e.g. the Air stay low and the Neo increase.

I have a nice M3 MacBook Pro and plan to keep it for a couple more years.

I prefer more open systems, so of course I lean toward supporting the EU’s DMA. Third-party marketplaces on iOS represent real progress that wouldn’t have happened without regulation. But what about Siri AI? It is not coming to the EU because Apple doesn’t trust other develo...

Love that this bookstore (Sundog Books) had too many books to fit properly on the shelves. 📚

It took a week and a half on the waitlist, but I’ve now got new Siri AI enabled on my phone. Seems to work so far. Not totally sure what to use it for yet.

Updated the Inkwell app for Mac this morning. If you haven’t tried it yet, I think it’s a very nice version of our Inkwell feed reader. Includes subscribing to blogs, of course, but also making text highlights, viewing conversations, and replying to Micro.blog posts.

I still have “wow” moments with AI. Codex Security was one of those… It reviews the Micro.blog backend source regularly and not only flags potential bugs but also drafts patches. Today another one: I asked for a draft of release notes and it guessed to put them directly in the edited appcast XML.

As we get closer (next year) to the 10th anniversary of Micro.blog, I’m thinking about whether our strategy with indie blogging is still relevant for the next decade. What is true now that will continue to be true years from now? Some thoughts… While there will be a lot of ...

Vacation is winding down.

There’s a new iOS app for Micro.blog! MicroSphere from @marc0janssen. Looks great, I’m playing around with it today.

Black Bear Bread Co. ☕️

Ben Thompson closing out today’s post:

The only possible way to curb Apple’s dominance is through competition, and if Apple wants to open up a vector for competitive hardware to arise, that’s fine! And, if in response to competition, they open up their platform, that’s great too.

AI is the best opportunity to compete with Apple and Google since the launch of the iPhone. And yet hardly anyone is going for it. It’s easy to complain that Apple fumbled around with AI for a couple years, but no potential new competitors capitalized on it.

Submitted the new Epilogue to Google for review this morning. Apple approved it really quickly yesterday. A few more quick reviews will almost make up for Apple holding up the Inkwell release for a month. 🤪

Seaside, Florida. Burgers outside at Pickles. 🍔

Got a whole bunch of little things finished this morning for the next release of Epilogue. Finally showing a checkmark for the current bookshelf, and a new default for the Movies tab to show movies and TV shows people are blogging about. Just submitting to Apple for review.

Having so many apps, the context switch between code bases is starting to become a problem. Thinking about how we can improve this going forward. Ideally each major app or platform would have someone leading it.

Matt Mullenweg blogged about the surprising twist with Midjourney Medical:

David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultrasound scanner that can give you incredible visibility in 60 seconds.

Watched: The Truman Show. So good. Haven’t seen it in years and it holds up perfectly. 🍿

Finished reading: The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. Fantastic. Great world-building, viewpoint switch, and just the right plot surprises. 📚

Love the detail of using these bricks instead of just white paint. The workers put a lot of extra time into cutting everything just right.

Manu Moreale blogs that he’s tired of all the crap: The problem is that there’s also an infinite amount of depressing and/or enraging shit out there on the web, and even though I’m not on any social media platform of any kind, I’m still exposed to that crap. And I’m tired o...

Daveigh Chase has passed away. She was Lilo in Lilo & Stitch, Chihiro in Spirited Away, and also in Donnie Darko. Andreas Deja blogged about working with her:

Working on the character of Lilo was a profoundly moving experience for me as an animator. Daveigh’s voice performance was utterly unique and inspired, presenting a brand-new challenge and the perfect opportunity to bring an unorthodox Disney girl to life.

It’s hard to imagine how someone went from that experience — a movie that will be remembered for a hundred years — to such a low point of personal struggles, even homelessness.

Kevin Roose blogged today about his history with The New York Times and the decision to end the Hard Fork podcast:

The Times has been a great home for Hard Fork — and a great home for me, for many years before that — but as Casey and I discussed the future of the show, we realized that what we really wanted was to start a company together, and build something we would own.

Looking forward to what they do next!

Cloudy and breezy evening on the gulf.

Thinking about the new Mastodon collections, it reminded me that we have blogrolls on Micro.blog that don’t get enough attention. Today I improved a few things with adding blog recommendations, including a search across other platforms if you don’t have the URL for someone handy.

A rare selfie for the blog… Enjoying some time with family in Rosemary Beach, Florida. Found this Eadweard Muybridge shirt randomly last month at a Goodwill and had to get it.

Flowers growing through the fence.

Apple opens up app distribution for Brazil:

Beginning with iOS 26.5, developers can distribute apps on alternative app marketplaces, operate alternative app marketplaces, process app payments for digital goods and services outside of Apple In-App Purchase in iOS, and more.

So we’ve got the EU, Japan, Brazil, and partially South Korea. Slow progress, but still progress.

I’m curious what model Codex cloud (that can automatically check GitHub PRs) is using. It often catches bugs that regular GPT-5.5 misses. Perhaps just a different, more comprehensive prompt.