FeedCity

Did you know that you can open Bluesky starter packs in Micro.blog and follow people directly? I’d like to work on expanding this soon. Some more details and an example in this post last year. Micro.blog is small so it’s a good way to branch out.

A little surprising, Meta is expanding the Threads API. Might be time to consider doing more with it. Micro.blog can cross-post but only retrieve posts if the fediverse is enabled. Downside of doing more is jumping through the hoops of Meta’s approval machine.

Mac folks, any bugs you’ve noticed recently in the Micro.blog app? Fixing a couple little things for macOS 26 Tahoe beta.

Congrats to Manu Moreale on the 100th interview in his People and Blogs series! This one features Marisabel Munoz, who writes about her process of starting long-form blog posts by hand:

I use Moleskines (I prefer it due to the lines) and fountain pens—the ink’s flow slows my thoughts, helping me process them. Then comes the sculpting: what stays, what expands, what’s cut. It’s like editing, but not quite… more of a second draft.

I think I was subconsciously inspired by Federico Viticci’s post when I tried this prompt with ChatGPT Agent last night: I created book.micro.blog and www.manton.org. I want to look through longer blog posts (at least a couple paragraphs) on my blog that are about social me...

Big fan of Internet Archive. I’ve also been occasionally using archive.is. Handy for grabbing a snapshot of an article, even in some cases behind a paywall. I do pay for a few magazines and websites, but not everything on the web!

Jason Snell has a first look at iPadOS 26:

It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode, or via a single tap it can turn into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads.

Enormous piles of money just sound crazy. Google spending $85 billion on capital expenditures this year, or about double what Twitter was sold for. Those AI data centers aren’t going to build themselves! Meanwhile, the scale of the OpenAI’s infrastructure in Abilene is starting to come into focus.

Upgraded to the latest Tahoe beta and now a couple of apps seem to be confused. Nova thinks it’s expired. I have an older serial number, but they should work forever just without updates. I think something might be weird with the system keychain.

Lupe Tortilla. 🌮

Mastodon will experiment with donation banners:

The initial campaign will appear via a banner to people that use our Android and iOS apps, if they are signed-in to an account on one of our instances, and only if their account has existed for four weeks or more. The banner will be easy to dismiss, of course, and we will not continually prompt users to donate.

Patron supporters have declined over the last couple of years, so they’ve had to rely on larger donations. Makes sense to rebalance to lots of smaller donations.

Meanwhile, sticking to paid subscriptions for Micro.blog. It’s more stable.

I hate to add to the noise and news overload, but this article by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic is a good summary of Trump’s crazy rants over the weekend, posting dozens of times in just one day:

Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

He’s obviously unwell. Eventually he’ll be gone and we can start to pick up the pieces left by failed, vengeful administration. 🇺🇸

Losing my mind again debugging HTTP signatures. So easy to have flakiness between implementations.

Excellent discussion on the latest ATP about Cloudflare. Very much in line with my thoughts from earlier this month.

Once again I’m alternating between reading three different books and can’t seem to make progress in any of them. Going to prioritize finishing Isles of the Emberdark since I’m starting to see video reviews pop up online. 📚

Walking around and noticing all the crepe myrtles today.

Lies do the most damage when there’s also a tiny bit of something real in them. Like 5% truth, 95% bullshit. It gives those spreading misinformation something to hold on to justify their actions. Maybe fanaticism is when we can no longer see anything except the 5%.

Didn’t notice until today that Kagi has a translation service. Simple, works well. This’ll be my new default instead of Google.

Sad to hear about Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Got lost for a while reading about his later work and looking for the lyrics to his spoken word album Hiding in Plain View. Just some of it:

It’s like life is one big masquerade party with cute masks
to mask unshapen identities made by us
to make us feel safe in the face of uncertainty,
but when we hide ourselves to please
we place a piece of our souls on hold
and the safety of that space eventually becomes
a poisonous pit of unexpressed feelings
and untended quirks that never quite get worked out

Rest in peace.

I posted a quick video to YouTube showing recent improvements in Micro.blog for Mac with notes, including shared notes and the new versions dialog for restoring an old note.

Fidji Simo’s blog post on joining OpenAI reads like an updated mission statement. This was a very good hire. She will be in charge of applications.

The standard Micro.blog subscription is such a good value that I think Micro.blog Premium gets overlooked. Updated some of the docs today. In addition to email newsletters and bookmark features, Premium gets you 5 blogs, unlimited single-page websites, domain aliases, more. Consider upgrading! 🙂

Tweaked a few things with the new “Archive with months” Micro.blog plug-in. Pretty happy with it. Might still integrate search as an option later.

ChatGPT agent looks impressive. I’m noticing a pattern when these kind of new tools come out, where initially I’m not sure what to do with them. This example from Federico Viticci is great, though: I asked ChatGPT agent to process hundreds of issues of MacStories Weekly on ...

Went to see Eddington today. Holy shit. It’s intense, somehow both unsatisfying and brilliant. Went in knowing next to nothing and left still unsure that enough time has passed since 2020 to fully appreciate it. 🍿

Finished the first pass at a new Micro.blog plug-in with the boring name “Archive with months”, which groups blog posts by year and month. It also has a setting to include the first photo thumbnail in a post if there is one. You can see this on my archive page.

I saw a Waymo with a human driver on 183 today, presumably testing for a new route. First time I’ve seen them on a highway. They expanded farther north in Austin last week too.

Ava blogs about what the IndieWeb might need right now, including some thoughts on social media and Mastodon:

…I personally don’t consider Mastodon instances to be included in the Indieweb; adjacent, for sure, as you have more control over your data in a way and escape big socials and can POSSE. But in the end, it will always remain a Twitter clone that still embodies the worst of social media and is not a personal website.

There are a lot of good thoughts in this post. And some overlap with the goals of Micro.blog too.

Waitress at Zach Scott was fantastic. What a perfect setting for it. In anticipation today we picked up Tiny Pies too.

Know your bananas. 🍌