I wasn’t going to announce this until later, but today feels right… Earlier this week, I hired someone to fill the role of community manager at Micro.blog. I’ll be officially welcoming her in a couple weeks. Thanks everyone for your patience while we figured this out!

I’m exhausted of the attacks. After a nice morning with friends, I had to rush back to my mom’s bedside at rehab to hold her hand, talking to the doctor, all while people online were again questioning my integrity. I’ve said this before: you don’t know what people are going through. Give them space.

Lake Austin from Mozart’s. ☕️

Paul Kafasis with a single-sentence blog post that says everything about Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store:

Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.

Really liking The Life of a Showgirl so far. Not through the whole album yet, but it starts great. 🎶

Apparently there was some drama on Bluesky, but to be honest I can’t quite unravel the full extent of it. Just a quick shout-out to the CEO and CTO, who I have a lot of respect for. Strong principles and vision. There will be occasionally missteps because we’re all human. Keep moving forward.

After we added books and bookshelves to Micro.blog, there was a lot of good feedback about expanding it to movies, video games, music, and other collections of media. I think I have a good next step: make it easy to simply search for a movie and blog about it. Planning to wire things up via TMDB. 🍿

WordPress has also added support for Mastodon quote posts. Micro.blog’s support is generally working well — I blogged about it here — but I noticed a couple glitches today adapting for quoted WordPress posts, so I’m fixing those now.

Mark Gurman on Apple shifting resources away from a lighter Vision Pro:

The company had been preparing a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset — code-named N100 — for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week that it’s moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

They should do both. I’ve been skeptical of Vision Pro all along, but it does need a “Vision Air” hardware update, unless they plan to abandon it. See also: Casey Neistat’s latest video.

Had a weird dream where I was at some kind of festival and ran into other Mac developer bloggers and… Sam Altman. Tried to convince him that Sora borrowed too much from TikTok and other addictive social networks. It’s technically amazing but I think is the wrong product to build, in this form.

Had no idea about this secret album from Mariah Carey, produced with her friend Clarissa Dane. Gina Trapani blogs:

To blow off steam, she writes a grunge rock album inspired by alt-rock bands like Garbage, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. She records it at night with the band after the Daydream sessions, channeling her frustrations into the music, and picks the most perfect name for such a project: Someone’s Ugly Daughter.

Love this. 🎶

Last month I blogged about the yogurt shop murders. Now they solved it, further exonerating the suspects who were wrongfully charged. One of them was even sentenced to death… What a tragedy upon tragedies if we had accidentally executed an innocent man. Hope the parents and friends find some peace.

Because it’s now in the public domain, I can test video uploads with Steamboat Willie posted to a page on my own blog. Almost 100 years old. Still good.

Really good series. Aces to the finals, but the Fever kept getting back in the game over and over. Fitting to end in OT. 🏀

Congrats to the Iconfactory on releasing Tapestry 1.3. Nice to explore their take on adopting Liquid Glass. Most apps I use haven’t updated yet.

Since I mused last week about expanding the video hosting in Micro.blog, I’ve been working on some behind the scenes changes to make that happen. I’ll post more about it this week. But already in early testing I’m happy to say it is dramatically better.

Sora 2 is invite-only, so not entirely sure the scope of it, but I’m getting the feeling that it’s much more of a move into social than Sora 1. Sam Altman writing on his blog:

Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.

The OpenAI team deepfaked themselves in the announcement videos. Bizarre!

The sky and clouds while walking yesterday.

Kagi launches Kagi News. I love this approach of having a single, daily update:

We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.

I usually have a few books I’m trying to read and switch between them. This new Kindle feature “Story So Far” seems genuinely useful if a long time has passed since putting a book down. From The Verge:

There will be new AI-assisted reading tools, too, including a feature called Story So Far that generates a spoiler-free recap of a book up to the point you’ve read

I care a lot about personal domain names and blogging, of course, and that bleeds into how we approach URLs in Micro.blog. Trying to keep the simplicity of short, readable CDN URLs as we expand to support longer videos, which are more complicated to host.

Typepad is shutting down today. That deadline came up quickly. It’s the last day to export any content. Micro.blog and WordPress both support importing Typepad archives.

From the “this would be a good blog post” department, Kevin Rose has thoughts about ChatGPT Pulse that he posted on Twitter / X:

It’s an agent that continuously researches on your behalf, building on topics from your recent conversations. I’m really having a hard time wrapping my head around this paradigm, because it’s truly unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It’s like having a knowledge partner that follows you around, deepening your understanding of whatever you’re curious about.

I blogged over the weekend about Pulse. I’m a few more days in now and it’s still good.

Reading through this great 3-part blog post series from Stephanie Booth about rebooting the blogosphere:

from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication and start writing something new

A key point in Micro.blog from the beginning was to unify reading, blogging, and replying. A little-understood feature in Micro.blog is you can follow any blog, for example search “climbtothestars.org” to follow Stephanie’s blog. Need to keep improving that.

The New Yorker has a long profile of Tim Berners-Lee:

Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain.

Wait, how did I not know that he loves model trains? 🚂 Looking forward to his memoir: This Is For Everyone. 📚

New book: Adventures in Animation. We were at Alamo recently and before the movie there were the usual shorts and old commercials. One struck me immediately and I thought: that looks like Richard Williams. It was.

Doing some more work with FFmpeg. It’s amazing how far video and audio tools have come. Ages ago when I was working on my app Wii Transfer, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. Although that was in the Flash days before HTML 5 video.

Enjoying the WNBA playoffs. Today is Aces / Fever game 4. And the NBA preseason starts on Thursday! 🏀

I temporarily upgraded to ChatGPT Pro so I could try out Pulse. I know, Pro is expensive. While it’s a “business expense”, I don’t plan to keep the subscription. I’m trying to cut expenses and raise revenue, not the opposite! ChatGPT Pulse takes your AI chat history, optiona...

Asked Codex for a simple fix to something, and it went way off in the weeds and wrote its own Ruby and Python shell scripts to test its theory about the bug. Too thorough! Sometimes I really do just want the quick, possibly wrong answer that I can then tweak myself. 🤪