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.

There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.

As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when needed is the way to go.

I often only finally get into a book at the end of a loan in Libby, hopelessly nowhere near finished with it. Wish there was a “just give me one extra day” button. For Kindle, turning off wifi works, but no good option for audiobooks.

Drove by a couple fire trucks protecting the shoulder for a car and a Cybertruck stopped on the side of the road. Probably a fender bender, didn’t look serious. But… two fire trucks? Maybe drama follows all Cybertrucks.

There’s a good analysis in Last Week in Fediverse about Twitter X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Just a small part:

…if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere.

Manuel Moreale blogs about a more intentional, personal web:

I’m talking about liberating yourself from all sorts of algorithmic grouping and filtering and getting back to experiencing and using the web in a much more deliberate and mindful way.

I think it’s okay that “social web” or IndieWeb mean slightly different things to different people. All of those definitions still share in common a goal of openness and standards, not silos.

Just sad hearing about the news of 6 more hostages dead in Gaza. The closer we get to 1 year since the attack by Hamas, the more heartbreaking that there’s no deal.

Bluesky has added 1 million users in the past few days, largely from the Twitter X in Brazil fallout. Congrats to the team. Really impressive to keep servers humming along.

Ollie inspecting a new package, the SolarSaga 100 Prime. This is going to go on my car.

Just posted a new episode of Core Int: Reinventing the 90s. We use two new software releases (the Overcast rewrite and my own new Micro.blog text editor) to talk about how customers react to software changes and bugs. Also, is SwiftUI now the best way to start Mac apps? Spoiler: not sure.

Ghost in their weekly update, joking about likes:

Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am” — but it wasn’t until several years later when we started getting likes on Instagram that we collectively came to the realization that the meaning of life, in fact, revolves around a consistent stream of dopamine hits from the internet.

Micro.blog doesn’t have likes and for better or worse, I’m standing by that decision.

Ramping up the search for our next home. For old neighborhoods, love doing a little background research on who developed the neighborhood. Doesn’t actually matter, but it’s fun to discover where it came from… Sometimes land originally granted by the Republic of Texas to veterans and settlers.

This story and art from Christine Mi for The Washington Post makes me want to book a train trip again. I’ve done Austin to Los Angeles, Austin to Chicago… So much more to see.

Still a few months away, but the Wind and Truth cover reveal makes the book feel like it’s even closer. Michael Whelan has had an incredible career. Love this “semi-retired” bit about the artist:

Fifteen years ago, Whelan was semi-retired and considering a return to science fiction when he received the manuscript for The Way of Kings.

An update on Strata for Android. Getting closer to a release. We had a rejection, resubmitted. Pretty confident it’ll be approved and out today or early next week.

Tantek Çelik blogged about IndieWebCamp Portland:

We wrapped up with our usual Create Day Demos session, live streamed for remote attendees to see as well. Lots of great demos of things people built, designed, removed, cleaned-up, documented, and blogged! Everyone still at the camp showed something on their personal site!

I miss IndieWebCamp. Don’t think I’ve attended one since we hosted in Austin a couple weeks before COVID hit.

Setting up some more customer support email filters. It’s gotten to where I have so much spam waiting for me, I hate to check support email, which is really bad for everyone. 🙁

I have a few upcoming camping reservations, part of my quest to visit all 88 state parks in Texas. Got this email the other day about one of the reservations:

Select sites at Abilene State Park are closed due to hazardous trees.

Hazardous trees! Luckily the park changed their mind and will allow camping anyway. I’m more amused by the notice than worried, but still gonna try to avoid camping underneath any branches that look ready to fall.

From The Wall Street Journal: Apple, Nvidia Are in Talks to Invest in OpenAI. This makes sense to me. Apple is obviously developing their own AI models, but I don’t think they care about AI as much as OpenAI, Anthropic, and others who live and breathe it. See more commentary from M.G. Siegler.

There are some interesting things going on with the new Patreon-like Sub Club for the fediverse. Presumably it can send members-only posts via ActivityPub because it knows which followers are paid subscribers. I’m puzzled by the payment inside third-party apps, though… I wonder how that works.