Common Grounds Coffeehouse in Brownwood, Texas. ☕️

Rained off and on through the night at Abilene State Park. Went for a short hike in the morning.

Between Oklahoma City and Dallas there’s a surprisingly high number of Trump “2020” billboards. Expect these might stay up for another decade until they’ve faded away. 🇺🇸

Oklahoma City loves this team. Thunder are really good right now. Still excited for the Spurs this season, just a little overmatched tonight. 🏀

Spurs vs. Thunder. Wemby warming up from the 3-point line. 🏀

Trees and remains of the wall of the federal building, at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial.

Micro.blog t-shirts! Jim Mitchell realized I was never going to get around to making t-shirts, so with my blessing he’s done it: the unofficial official Micro.blog t-shirt. Just ordered one for myself. There’s a phone case too.

Here’s a silly thing I created for Halloween, a new domain name: micro.boo! 👻 It just collects posts that mention Halloween or use emoji, from Micro.blog and other sources connected to Micro.blog. Sort of a random Halloween-themed timeline. 🎃

The pandemic started to hit America in earnest just as we were wrapping up IndieWebCamp Austin 2020. If the event had been scheduled for even a couple weeks later, it would’ve been cancelled, as everything moved online to Zoom meetings. Years have passed since then. It now f...

Finished reading: Boom Town by Sam Anderson. Could not ask for a more perfect book to finish before driving up to Oklahoma City. Great mix of basketball and the history of the city going back to the founding. 📚

Turquoise Coffee Stop. Neat little coffee shop in the very small town of Chillicothe, with a sort of museum inside that reflects the memorabilia and politics of its owners.

Sunrise at Copper Breaks State Park.

Old and new energy capture in Texas.

My plan for not losing my mind as we head into election day:

1. Travel this week.
2. Watch basketball instead of the news.
3. Call voters on election day.

🇺🇸

On the road this week. Stopped for a quick lunch and coffee at 8th Street Coffee House in Wichita Falls.

Bluesky comes up in the latest ActivityPub newsletter update from Ghost:

Another cool thing that happened last week was that we enabled a bridge to BlueSky — an alternative decentralized social network which doesn’t use ActivityPub, but instead uses its own alternative protocol.

I was confused on my first reading of this. They’ve enabled Brid.gy, not built anything specific for Ghost. Also, I’m sorry this is so nitpicky, but no one in the fediverse seems to be able to spell Bluesky correctly.

On the latest episode of Core Int, we talk about updates we might see to MacBooks, the recent funding and growth of Bluesky, and what it means to be rich.

At first I wasn’t going to cancel my Washington Post subscription… but I did. There’s not really a better way to send a message to Jeff Bezos that this was a bad call so close to the election. It’s not like a small company where you can send an email and have your voice heard. 🇺🇸

I voted today. Triple-checked my ballot. Still nervous but feels good to have the end of the election in sight. This is one for the history books. 🇺🇸

Buzz Mill Coffee. ☕️

From an article and discussion with the Humane founders, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, from Om Malik’s new site Crazy Stupid Tech:

“We had to stand up and accept the critique and feedback in front of our team, in front of the public, and just continue to push forward every single day,” Bongiorno said. “And it was really hard. Hard and painful. You’re right, it is really hard to get a second chance.”

I still think the Ai Pin was too ambitious for 1.0. I’d like to see a slimmed down version, no laser, just solve a couple small problems with voice.

Got a really nice response to our quick one-day sale, 25% off for a year if you upgrade to Micro.blog Premium or Micro.blog Family. I’m going to keep the sale for another 24 hours for folks in other time zones who missed it. 🏷️

Micro.blog will not endorse a candidate for president. But I will, because these are the kind of things I post on my blog. Kamala Harris, for the people. 🇺🇸

I don’t know what’s going on over at The Washington Post but the timing is terrible. We do not need any last-minute distractions. 📰

Ben Thompson’s interview with Marc Benioff is kind of wild. I had mostly ignored Salesforce until now. Worth a listen.

Not sure what to think about this video from Josh Miller about Arc not going anywhere. I just started using it a couple weeks ago! Confused messaging because now the app feels obsoleted, which I don’t think is their intention.

Sale! Today only, upgrade to the Micro.blog Premium or Family plan and get 25% off for the next year. Create up to 5 blogs, video hosting, and more. 🏷️

It’s odd how many developers in the fediverse don’t know how Bluesky works. I’ve made it my business to understand a little bit about all platforms, going back 30 years of building for the web. Product design is then finding the right way to put the pieces together.

OpenAI’s Orion model may be released before the end of the year, according to The Verge:

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

My first reading of this is that the model is too powerful to just let anyone use right now. But maybe it’s also too expensive. I wonder if it’ll be available from the API.

Added a help page to describe how configuring Bluesky handles in Micro.blog works. Super easy, almost nothing to do.

It’s probably not well known that when you enable Bluesky in Micro.blog, it also enables your blog domain name to be used as your Bluesky handle. In fact it’s so hidden a feature that I forgot if I had ever implemented this and had to double-check today.