Wonder if there’s any chance the lack of FireWire in macOS Tahoe is a bug or temporary limitation for the beta. I still have some old MiniDV tapes that I haven’t copied, and that is going to be much harder over time if FireWire goes away.

With Mastodon now rolling out phase one of their quote posts plan, I’ve reviewed my own blog post from February on this. My opinion hasn’t changed. I’ll make sure Micro.blog displays quote posts nicely when Mastodon finishes phase two, in the upcoming Mastodon 4.5 release. I...

For the last couple of days I’ve been rewriting Micro.blog’s GitHub backup feature. It’s looking good, and sets the foundation for doing much more in the future. The backup will also now run automatically every day instead of once a week! What’s this feature about? Here’s an...

Listening to Quiet Town by the Killers on repeat this morning. Great song. Haunting. When I travel, I sometimes think about the disconnect between rural and urban America, and what it’s cost us politically too.

Superficially, maybe it’s a win for Meta to have hired all these researchers away from Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Apple. I’m not so sure. The money is nice, but I expect most people doubt that Mark Zuckerberg cares deeply about AGI. Also it’ll take time for a team to gel after such disruption.

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac on Apple’s EU changes:

Apple says that it was the EU who dictated which features should be included in which tier. For example, the EU mandated that Apple move app discovery features to the second tier.

Something isn’t adding up here. If the EU is dictating anything, it should be a 0% fee tier in addition to the standard App Store paid tier. Why would the EU be moving features to the second tier? Either Apple isn’t communicating the full story, or negotiations between Apple and the EU are very dysfunctional.

All the President’s Men is a great movie. Sometimes I think about one particular line from it. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are feeling so much pressure to get the story right, attacked by the Nixon administration and questioned inside the Washington Post, because of all ...

I haven’t looked into the full context behind the quote in this post from @jasraj, but I do love this phrase:

when hatred presents itself as virtue, it becomes seductive

Sadly there are variations of this across ideologies. When fighting for what’s right steps over the line to extreme characterization of others, vilifying them. As regex fans know, now we’ve got two problems: the hatred in others and the hatred in ourselves.

Ben Thompson’s back from the summer break with an excellent rundown on AI and fair use. In a nutshell, LLMs are transformative and it’s so difficult to prove they affect an existing work or even a market, fair use for training will likely stand. If we don’t want that, there will have to be new laws.

This blog post from Robert Birming perfectly captures what Micro.blog is trying to do by leaving some features out.

Congrats to Stephen Hackett on 10 years indie! He’s written a great post with some of the history and priorities he brings to his work. Also love this part on the downsides:

Publishing endlessly can lead to burnout. Social media can poison your opinions. The Internet can be unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. Working virtually can become lonely. Relevance can fade.

That “poison” line is so true. When all you read is everyone else’s hot takes and a community’s growing consensus, it’s harder to have original, possibly more nuanced thoughts on popular topics.

“I know how to use a semicolon, ChatGPT. Don’t come for me.” 🤣 — from the Book Riot podcast

I used to really love the em dash. Now that ChatGPT also loves it, I’m using it a little less often. The bar is higher for when I feel like it really belongs.

Finished watching Long Way Home. I love these travel series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. The older ones are great too.

Fixed a couple bugs this morning and replied to a few emails. I think this is going to be a busy week. Also if anyone on Bluesky has feedback on my proposal for AT Protocol embeds, please let me know. I’ll be moving forward with it soon.

Dave Winer:

We’ve got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything.

Just noticed this nice styling that @birming has for “notes” on his blog, for example this post. Love how they stand out when on the home page along with full-length blog posts. I assume he’s using a custom Micro.blog theme with slightly different CSS based on the category.

I’ve missed a lot of really good work on Micro.blog plug-ins from the community recently. Just a few examples: Postlist has new options for embedding lists of blog posts, Open External Links makes links in blog posts open in a new tab, and Privacy-Friendly Google Maps is a shortcode for maps.

Got sidetracked looking at my old tweets, which years ago I had imported to my blog with Micro.blog. I left Twitter in 2012. Then later I cross-posted some blog posts to a separate account. The last blog post there was 2022, a post about Elon’s plans for Twitter. Holds up really well.

Just released the latest version of Micro.blog for Android, version 2.5.2. Full release notes over on the help forums. This has a bunch of fixes, UI tweaks, and better automatic accessibility text for photos.

Whenever our house comes close to flooding, or does flood, I think back to the time when I was at WWDC and my wife called me that there was water in the living room. It was during the old beer bash. Captured in a tweet from 2009.

The rain was not letting up, had to spend the last hour in the downpour, digging a channel on the side of the house to help relieve flooding next to the garage. Don’t think the house will flood. Water can be difficult… So many people are worse off.

Stunning, tragic photos out of Kerr County. Devastating especially for the kids at camp, some missing. Austin Monthly has links for how to help.

Last weekend I checked the weather because I was considering camping. I don’t even remember rain in the forecast. Now it’s the worst flooding in decades.

This will be shocking to my Kickstarter backers from 8 years ago: I did some more edits on the book this week. Updated some old things, new thoughts on Mastodon and Bluesky, added a new chapter. Print run will happen this year.

Minor nitpick in macOS Tahoe, the selected tab in Terminal is very subtle. Seems a usability step back from previous macOS releases. I might need to switch to a third-party terminal app again.

Rewatching the opening of the original Jurassic Park up through the Brachiosaurus. It really is an incredibly good sequence. Greatest dinosaur movie… after Land Before Time. 🙂

I like how in Jurassic World when they say, “we had to make the dinosaurs bigger and crazier because people were bored with regular dinosaurs,” they aren’t talking about the people in the movie. They’re talking about us, in the audience. Actually some beautiful scenes in this one, though. 🍿

iOS folks, if you’ve noticed that annoying Micro.blog app problem where the new reply pane isn’t tall enough, you may want to grab the latest TestFlight beta where we’re testing the fix. This is also in review for Android already. No risk to using TestFlight, it’s just sometimes a step ahead.

Today we’ve updated Micro.blog for macOS to version 3.5.8, fixing a couple problems. I’ve also improved the Logs window to color in green the lines for when a blog publish was finished. Just makes it a little easier to see when glancing at the window. Micro.blog keeps the l...

It’s a solemn July 4th. We’re on the wrong path. Yet if you have time off or are spending the weekend with family, enjoy it. We can choose to celebrate the good, such as the chance to correct some mistakes in 2026. 🇺🇸