FeedCity

Solid updates from Apple as usual. They highlighted lots of health-related features, like hearing aids, sleep apnea, and satellite messaging. For environmental impact, I’m still curious if there will be a hit to their goals with the AI private cloud rollout.

Genuinely conflicted about this year’s iPhone Pro color lineup: black, white, silver, desert. I guess black? Need to see more photos to know where desert sits on the spectrum of subtle to Zune.

New Apple stuff is great and all, but hear me out… What if they integrated hardware, software, and services in a way that only Apple can do? 🤪

I’m sorry to be bitter, but in the first half hour of the Apple event, my takeaways are: they really should move back to live presentations, and please stop saying “only Apple can do”… If you say it too much for everything, it loses its impact. (New products look good, though.)

Ben Thompson predicts a $100 price increase for the new iPhones today, bringing it over $1k for the first time. So I guess if the iPhone 16 Pro is $1100, the Max will be $1200. Ouch. 💰

iPhone announcement day! As I talked about on @coreint, for the first time in years — maybe since the original iPhone? — I’m actually going to get a new phone right away. Not excited about the cost, but will be fun to play on the cutting edge a little.

The new iPhone announcement is just a couple days away, and on today’s Core Int we give our thoughts about the upcoming event, including a discussion about AI.

Looking up, at Beyond Van Gogh. In the old Austin-American Statesman building.

This post about Marissa Mayer’s company Sunshine on Platformer is several months old, but I saw it linked again this week and wanted to highlight something:

Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate shifts frequently as Mayer changes priorities.

This sounds exactly like how I run Micro.blog, actually. Founder mode, I guess? It sounds chaotic and “bad” but it’s also a strength of a very small team to change our minds quickly.

Good news, everyone. Accidentally left the garage door open and someone stole a couple random things — looks like mostly power tools that are easy to replace — but they left the Power Mac 7500 and Power Mac G5. Suckers! They have no sense of quality and value. 🤪

Talking to Daniel today for the next podcast episode, about AI, and afterwards I was thinking about why I find ChatGPT so effective instead of Google search. It’s not just the “here’s the answer” but also the very fast, clean results. Imagine a web search with 5-10 results that was as simple.

John Gruber has a long take-down on the DMA. There is plenty to think about in this, but a quick comment on his point about Chrome:

My guess is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the single biggest beneficiary of this mandatory browser choice screen will be Google Chrome, which I consider the single most dominant software monopoly in the world today.

This rings true. Google puts Chrome in your face everywhere. Perhaps one side effect of this is that Apple is going to need to do actual marketing for Safari.

I feel that I’ve been overpaying for sending email for years. Making another attempt at migrating to Amazon SES with a dedicated IP. Should cut my bill in half and hopefully fix some reliability problems. (If anything bounced at SendGrid, it would stop sending emails until reset… Not great.)

People worry that AI will take over what humans should be doing. It’s more profound than that. Using AI has helped me understand what actually makes us uniquely human. Love, creativity, leadership, fear, individualism, beauty. Let’s lean in to what only we can do and let that drive everything else.

Taking a short break from Threads and Bluesky. Nothing against those services, but I started over-thinking the post length differences. I need to focus on work and blogging first. Because my blog natively uses ActivityPub, Mastodon folks will still see my posts.

In my blog post series for upgrades to my Honda Element, this post is a little different. It’s not an actual change to the car like the posts about CarPlay, the WeBoost, or my bed platform.

It is usually too hot to camp in Texas during the summer. To help beat the heat, I’m currently using a few portable fans and a water-cooled fan, the Evapolar evaCHILL. It doesn’t blow cold air, but it does blow cool-ish air. Every little bit helps. It also draws very little energy, about 10W from my Jackery.

I also swear by these simple fans by Dorobeen. They charge via USB-C and double as batteries that can charge a phone.

I’m still considering a “real” air conditioning unit like the EcoFlow Wave or Zero Breeze, but they are a lot bigger. I don’t think it’s currently worth the trouble.

While Micro.blog avoids viral features, making misinformation less likely to spread quickly, we still have a 30-day free trial that content spammers sometimes try to use. Thinking about going paid-only without a trial until after the election, to remove another potential source of problems.

Congrats to @rizzi@gloria.social on the release of the new Reeder! It’s a huge redesign, refocusing the app around timelines, viewing conversations, and more. Great integration with Micro.blog too.

“I’d run the risk of losing everything.
Sell all my things, become nomadic.”
— Clairo

My number one use case for AR glasses is when on a road trip and can’t stop to take pictures. Old buildings in forgotten towns, long abandoned, that were once beautiful.

Cloudy morning at Brazos Bend State Park, from the observation tower. Unlike any other state park I’ve been to. Didn’t see any alligators.

Seeing the “luxurious” headline on this review at The Verge for the new reMarkable Paper Pro, I was expecting it to be more expensive than $579. Looks really nice. And it makes sense to go for the high-end. The super low-end is well served by Kindles and paper notebooks.

I’ve always been a mosquito magnet. They go for me before anyone else, and leave several bites before I notice. This morning waiting for my coffee order outside, just got bit, and thanks to sensationalist “the sky is always falling” 24-hour news, now I can only think of EEE and other viruses. 🦟

I think I first heard about xAI’s plans in Memphis from Stephen Hackett’s blog. He collected a few posts about the upcoming project back in June: The Daily Memphian reports that the deal came together very quickly, and that the location is an old Electrolux oven factory, wh...

The Verge writing about VW’s in-car AI:

Volkswagen says that OpenAI’s chatbot along with a “multitude” of other models are provided by automotive chatbot company Cerence, which will take over for IDA when requests are more complex than tweaking your air conditioning settings. For instance, the company says when drivers ask for things like restaurant recommendations or for the chatbot to tell you a story, that will go to the cloud.

I’ve long wanted something like this for road trips. I want to be able to ask it about nearby historical markers, towns, mountains, etc.

Congrats to Tapbots on the Ivory 2.2 release. However, to comment on their announcement post:

Ivory 2.2 for iOS/iPadOS is now available on the App Store! Release notes in the ALT text of the image or on the App Store.

This is not what alt text is for. With social platforms often showing alt text everywhere, effectively collapsing HTML alt and title attributes to be the same thing, this is increasingly misused. If the accessibility text does not match what’s in the image, it’s worse for folks who are visually impaired.

Speaking of Micro.blog apps, the new version of Mimi Uploader can batch generate alt text for multiple photos at once. Very cool.

Happy to announce that our companion app for notes, Strata, is now available for Android. Notes syncing and sharing is a feature for all Micro.blog paid subscribers. Get started on the web first, then you can copy your secret key over to Android.

Nice web utility from @mary.my.id that archives your Bluesky posts as HTML. Always a good idea to have multiple formats of everything.

Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market.