After a rocky bit early in the year, I feel that Micro.blog is in a really good place right now. New users are joining and the features are the best they’ve ever been. So now I’m nervous that something else is about to go wrong. 🤪

New trailer for Project Hail Mary! This is going to be great. I’m going to try to re-read the book before the movie comes out.

Love this blog post from Ton Zijlstra about discovering a train ticket in an old book:

While the book is in excellent condition, not at all ‘well traveled’, it does make me wonder about its path through the world. From that 1991 train trip up the valley towards the St. Gotthard massif, to a bookshop in Galway, Ireland. And now to my bookshelves.

In 1999 when my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I left a book in a hostel in Italy. I wrote a note in it for the next reader. I still wonder where that book ended up.

Good episode of Dithering today, talking about the impending Gemini 3 release and why OpenAI will probably be fine even if their models fall behind the state of the art. It’s increasingly about products, not models, because all the models are quite good now.

Last week when I announced Micro.blog Studio — our new subscription plan with improved video hosting including up to 20-minute videos — I also mentioned we would be adding more features for podcasting. Today we have the first of those new features. Exclusively for Micro...

Wow, Eugen Rochko stepping down as Mastodon CEO. Congrats to him on all the success in helping the open web move forward! This part also resonated with me:

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources.

Watched: Frankenstein. I liked this more than I was expecting. Some visually great scenes… Wish I had seen it in the theater instead of Netflix. 🍿

Trail just east of I-35.

Good interview at Wired with Fidji Simo. I didn’t know she had an illness that forces her to work remotely most of the time:

I care a lot as part of my own mission about everybody realizing their full potential. I want a world where health conditions don’t get in the way. Either because we can cure them or because companies accommodate them. We can have technologies that make it easier.

I don’t think Disney live-action remakes really need to exist, but the new Moana could work well. Also, there are occasional new songs that I would love to see re-cut into the original animated versions: for Beauty and the Beast, take out Human Again and put in Evermore; for Aladdin, add Speechless.

Sometimes I drive the long way around, through old neighborhoods, imagining the people and buildings that used to be there. Time erases so much.

Great video on YouTube (via Matt Haughey) of old Pacific Electric Railway stations in Los Angeles. I would’ve loved to see some of these when they were active. 🚂

I’m excited to welcome Bonnie Rue to the Micro.blog team! She will be helping with new community-focused projects, leading curation of the Discover section, and working with me to respond to community issues.

We’ll keep improving our community guidelines and adapting to what the community needs. The social web is evolving quickly with new platforms. Micro.blog has always had a unique philosophy: content ownership through blogs, and a safe place to interact with others. As the social web becomes more connected, Micro.blog will stick to its mission while trying to balance the right set of tools to connect with people on other platforms.

I also want to thank the folks who were interested in this role at Micro.blog. I wish we could hire several people! Maybe one day we’ll be able to.

Watched: Being Eddie. Really enjoyed this. 🍿

I’ve updated Micro.blog with support for Day One journals. In the Mac app we’ve had a manual export to Day One for a while, and now the platform can automatically copy your blog posts to Day One. This uses Day One Premium’s “Email to journal” feature.

You can enable it on Micro.blog’s “Sources” page:

If you haven’t checked out our cross-posting options in a while, we have built-in support for over 10 different services, from Bluesky to PeerTube to Tumblr. I think our cross-posting features are unmatched by any other platform.

For more details about Day One, see this help page.

Good article in The New Yorker about water in Texas including the failure to build a seawater desalination plant. From a hearing in Corpus Christi with residents pushing back against it:

The hearing started around noon; by midnight, it was still under way, and three women in the audience, including a former mayoral candidate and a college professor, had been arrested for disorderly conduct.

Seems like a mistake not to be working on desalination. We’re going to need this eventually.

We had to run an errand out off 620, so stopped at the park at Mansfield Dam. Short video with a few clips.

From the Financial Times via The Verge:

According to the Financial Times, Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO as early as next year.

It’s time. Tim Cook should be proud of Apple’s success, but a few things like the App Store have gone in the wrong direction. Will be good to change things up.

Made a couple careless errors this morning. I probably need to step away from the computer. Sorry for the Micro.blog flakiness. Accidentally deployed some code before a huge db migration finished.

Interesting blog post from Tim Bray comparing a recent Bluesky suspension with the Mastodon moderation UI. Mastodon has done a lot of good, but one blind spot is moderator political bias. If someone is in a bubble because of their server, they may overlook hateful posts from people they agree with.

They lost by one point, but last night’s Spurs vs. Warriors game was still so good. Both loses this week took Steph Curry having a 45+ point game. Wemby is everywhere. Great basketball. 🏀

Nikita Prokopov blogs about the neediness of apps. I can especially relate to the notifications part:

Notifications are like email: to-do items that are forced on you by another party. Hey, it’s not my job to dismiss your notifications!

I still can’t wrap my head around the Apple developer news about so-called mini apps. Is this to capture 15% from web apps instead of the 0% Apple currently gets? Or is this an actual discount that will encourage more developers to turn native apps into mini apps?

Reviewing EU servers. Can’t believe it has been over half a year since we set those up. Adding a new server today. 🇪🇺

From earlier today, McKenna Park in Denton. 🌳

Finally got my local Android build setup working again. Had to nuke everything. This has been really holding me up on testing and bug fixes.

Now that I have two whole videos of me talking to the camera, time to make a Videos page for my blog. Having a place for anything is actually an encouragement to do more of that thing.

Neat cups at Communion Coffee with the Richardson water tower and skyline.

The new Nostr-based video app Devine also includes an archive of original Vine videos. Rabble spoke to TechCrunch about it:

“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”

Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas, for The Outsiders. Great show. First time I had seen it. 🎭