All Publications by Numeric Citizen

It's Friday night. Work week is complete. Weekend begins. I'm happy with my work this week. I did well. I'm proud. 

Picture in picture.

1. Cloudy and gray expected today. It's not exactly the type of weather that I want to finish the week, especially if the weekend is expected to be the same.😑
2. Yesterday, I mentioned to my boss that my 2017 Intel MacBook Pro started to feel slow and that he should expect a replacement request sooner than later.
3. I expect to experiment with Adobe Bridge this weekend so that I can finalize my updated photo processing workflow. It's a free app, a rather powerful photo browser with integrated workflow building capabilities. Once completed, I should publish a new version of my photo processing workflow. 
4. I'm rather late this week to complete my weekly creative summary. Not enough reading, not enough video watching, I might try to fix that tonight.
5. Question: Would you like me to add a photo of mine in these posts? Let me know. 
6. Have a great day. 

Can you see the light?

1. I'm going to the office downtown today, and I'm bringing my camera with me. Rain is expected later in the afternoon.
2. Someone who's religiously reading these posts will get to know me better in my personal life.
3. I'll need to lower the price of my iPad Pro if I want to sell it, apparently. Very few requests for more information.
4. I can't wait for the next beta release of Craft, supposedly v2.8, which means a big upgrade.
5. I got my Grovemade tabletop shelf yesterday, and I did some rearrangements on my desk. I do feel my Apple Studio monitor to be quite higher than I thought. I hope I'll get used to it.
6. Have a great day, dear readers. ❤️

The House of Representatives are going to vote on separate bills for Ukraine and Israel aid this weekend. My fear is that aid for Israel gets a go but not Ukraine which would be devastating. This could be a turning point.

Went outside today for lunch and took my camera¹ with me. What a good idea it was. I like this a lot because it is an opportunity to take a mental break from work. When I’m coming back to work, I’m more enthusiastic.

Why on earth in 2024 a company like Checkpoint still ships 32-bit software like a MDR client for Windows Server 2019? I mean, come on!! It’s like shipping a parallel port on a MacBook Pro!

Why would you need Echofeed when using Micro.blog to syndicate to Mastodon et al.?

Shadows. #cemetery #spooky #spookyvibes #spookymood #blackandwhite #blackandwhitephotography

1. This one will be hard to write, as I have the feeling of having nothing special to say.
2. I write more often on Scribbles than Micro.blog and the better writing experience might be the cause.
3. Recently, I started to get the feeling that I have nothing worth to work on from a creativity perspective.
4. I wonder if Scribbles generates an RSS feed for each category. Do you know?
5. I think about my late parents every day, but my mental images of them when they were alive is getting more and more diffuse.
6. Something else that I think about every day if the war in Ukraine and how upset I am about the American political actors and the Russian dictatorship. The West is wasting precious time, I guess that's the price of democracy.

My wish list for Micro.blog is very long: 32 wishes and counting. There is so much that could be done with Micro.blog.

The Magic Is Gone - Initial Charge

The magic of Apple’s retail stores is gone.

Except when the new iPad Pro launches, which should be the case pretty soon.

Spending most of my upcoming afternoon doing technical writing at my job. I love it. My preferred part, even if I know that a majority of my client doesn't read what I'm writing! 🤪

On Micro.blog, Scribbles, And Multi-homing

It’s easier for me to do this using Scribbles editor. I don’t know why. Might be a combination of how the compose screen is styled and laid out, plus the use of a WYSIWYG editor. But whatever it is, it all combines into an experience where the words flow a little easier for me. That’s probably the only way I can describe it. There’s nothing really empirical about it all, but maybe that’s the point. It’s involves the emotional side of writing: the “look and feel”.

I prefer Scribbles editor to Micro.blog’s, too. There is something about Scribbles that makes the experience more enjoyable. But I’m still using Micro.blog for longer posts and Scribbles for short ones, except maybe the /Now posts. Well, it’s complicated. Anyhow, I think Micro.blog’s post editor needs some more love.

Some heavy HDR processing in here. #cemeteries #hdr #spooky #spookyvibes

1. It's the moment of the day when cloud colors offer beautiful shades as the sky slowly goes out of the horizon.
2. I enjoy the silence of the mornings. 
3. We booked a 7-day cruise yesterday for early May. This wasn't planned. It cost a lot of money. But we've got one life to live. We're going to do the French Riviera. Lots of photo opportunities. We will meet some of our long-time friends over there, too. I can't wait for that one.
4. Selling my iPad Pro is more challenging than originally thought.
5. Why do I feel that following Apple in recent months is showing a lack of some exciting news? The Apple Vision Pro thing seems to be fading away, already. 

Scribbles welcomes Categories! I like it! Two categories for now: Blips. Now. That's it. 

One more architecture-related photo before returning to darker moods... I like this retro style a lot. Art Deco I think. Somewhere in downtown Denver. #architecture

Curves and chaos. I love opposition. #blackandwhite #architecture #architecturephotography

1. The girl who said she wanted to buy my iPad Pro didn't show up and didn't give any reasons for that. She doesn't respond to my inquiries. WTF! I hate Facebook Marketplace with no boundaries because I get to see this behavior all the time.
2. A new Craft release today, version 2.7.9. I won't create a video release this time. My home improvement project is taking over my creative life!
3. I'm angry at Israel government when they say that they will retaliate to Iran's attack, which was in turn a response to Israel consulate attack in Damascus. Israel is to blame here, not Iran. Do we really want WWIII? Israel people must tell their government to show restraint.
4. "Categories" are coming to Scribbles and I can't wait for it!
5. Now heading to Micro.blog to see what's new! 🏃🏻‍♂️

A building close to my house. #blackandwhite #architecture #architecturephotography

Some strange architecture, in Spain, from Gaudi.

Funny that, reading a random post this morning, stumbled on that one. A year later and I found a use case for Bear.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

Went to the office today. This is my best. I think. #blackandwhite #architecture

Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 53 posts 😃
🏞️ 18 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 One YouTube video published 🙂

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I’m considering rewriting a portion of my bio to replace the “compulsive creator” expression with "compulsive contributor.” I like the idea of humbly contributing to the world through a small community. This reply on Micro.blog highly inspired me. 2️⃣ I’ve been on vacation for a week, and it made me feel eager to return to my creative and contributing journey. I think any creator should pause from time to time. This edition spans three weeks, from March 24th to April 13th. 3️⃣ I don’t watch movies in-flight. I don’t know why. I prefer playing with my iPad or iPhone and watching the flight map cycle through each view.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I’ve been reading my Nikon Zf manual and learned how to take advantage of it. I love the feeling of this camera body and the sensation of using an old camera in a modern way.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ This article from Manuel Moreale resonated with me. Writing is about accepting that, at some point, the product is good enough to share. Otherwise, there is a risk of not publishing. I should settle more often on “good enough” when writing. I have many unfinished writing projects on my hand. 2️⃣ Sadly, I didn't read much in the last few weeks. I should be more constant.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I think I'm finally settled on my use cases for Scribbles. One is to post a single thought with a single-word title. The other is a “Now” post with a few in-the-moment thoughts I share each morning. A few people are reading these posts because I get a few kudos. 2️⃣ I wrote and shared a very personal take on blogrolls and was afraid to share this with my readers. Blogrolls are bad triggers for me. The article generated quite a few responses and feedback. 3️⃣ On April 1, you got the monthly digest of my posts on my blog. But you also got an April Fools joke. Some people took it seriously, which was funny. 🙂🤣

“I don’t view myself as a “content creator” and recoil at that phrase. I keep a blog as a way to stay involved in the world. Simply put, my motivation is to write, share, read, engage, learn. My contribution is a drop in the ocean and irrelevant to me beyond it being my tiny contribution to the collective whole.”

“Back in the day, many of the early writing tools were called Word-something. WordStar, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect.” — Dave Winer

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Much of the week has been spent reading Nikon Z lens reviews to help me decide which lens to buy with the Nikon Zf. I'm undecided between a fixed lens and a zoom lens. I could use a 28-75mm or 20-120mm zoom lens. Depending on the day, I'm leaning toward the 28-75mm or a 50mm fixed lens. Decision, decision, decision. 2️⃣ The day before leaving for vacation, I decided to get the Nikon Zf with the 40mm lens. This lens is the closest to the natural human eye’s field of view. After a few hundred images, I can report that I'm super happy with my decision. 3️⃣ There was a solar eclipse on April 8th, and someone shot a photo using his iPhone. Great image. I wasn't prepared for this one-in-a-lifetime event and felt terrible about it. How come I didn't prepare myself better for this event? I mean, I'm a science guy, after all! I could have tried to take photos with my iPhone with the right filter in front of the camera. I could have driven to better places, directly on the path of the eclipse, because it was a two-hour drive instead of staying on the near edge of the path, which made the experience too short. Anyway. The next one is in 2100 or something. I'll be dead by that time.

“The decision to take a shot of a stranger usually has to be made in an incredible short amount of time.” — Lou Plummer

Bud Parr on Glass Photography Community

Bud Parr. Currently trying to get that film look by using film. Seriously though, I’m exploring formats and pushing myself to think and be a better photographer…

aows (@aows@mastodon.world)

Attached: 1 image Tree seeking light. England, October 2023 #aowsimages

Mastodon

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ I’m ready to write a review of my next iPad Pro as a comparison from the older model dating back to 2018. I've set up a template in Craft with the desire to write about a renewed iPad Pro experience based on significantly upgraded specs since I'm upgrading from an old 2018 edition of the iPad Pro. 2️⃣ Still, my current iPad for writing is more than enough. However, an OLED display would be transformative and revealing for image editing. After all, the 2018 iPad Pro screen has been the same for more than six years. Six years is a long time in technology. 3️⃣ I started cleaning up my iPad by removing apps and content to reduce space consumption. Many apps were offloaded, but their data is still on the device. One app that I forgot about caught my attention, and it is called “Graphic.” It was a great graphic design app for the iPad but wasn’t updated in ages. The website is still online. I found many documents that I’ll need to export in PDF before getting rid of this app once and for all.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I started working on a three-part course for Craft users using Zavala Outliner. This course will be sold through the Gumroad platform. Buyers will get a free three-month subscription to the Craft Bible. I think it's a great value for Craft users, not only for starters but also for more advanced users. I can't wait to start recording this. I hope to record the three parts back to back. I posted the course outline on Slack to gather feedback.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ After having an issue with Grammarly while writing a post on Scribbles, Maique on Micro.blog suggested looking at LanguageTool, an open-source equivalent. After a few minutes with it, I couldn't agree more; LanguageTool could probably replace Grammarly, but it isn't working with Craft. I need to copy the text into the LanguageTool app and then do the spell and grammar check before returning to Craft. It’s not optimal at all. Grammarly is due for renewal in August 2024, though. 2️⃣ Got the Readwise subscription renewed, and boy, this isn’t cheap. I wonder why there is no viable alternative to Readwise. 3️⃣ A guy beside me on the flight back home was using a device called AirFly to stream infotainment audio back to his AirPod. The device plugs into the USB-A plug and the audio jack. Cool device. 4️⃣ How many Apple fanboys can you find that beat Basic Apple Guy? This year's April Fool post edition is not only gorgeous and superbly executed, but it is also credible. Apple could (and should) bring special editions of the MacBook Air in glorious and colourful cases. 5️⃣ Finally, I got to sell my 2013 Mac Pro for $600 CAN. Now, I am looking to sell my 2018 iPad Pro with its Apple Magic Keyboard. 6️⃣ I shared my thoughts on the Arc Browser. Consider giving it a look; you might switch, too! 7️⃣ After posing my article about the Arc Browser, a reader pointed me to a browser extension that does exactly the same thing as Safari Reader mode. I'm super happy with that.

Why I’m Embracing the Arc Browser

The Arc Browser made some noise when it came out in July 2023. I only recently decided to embrace the change. I’m glad I made the switch, but not everything is perfect.

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ . To complement the next Craft release, version 2.7.7, I had to create a YouTube video to be made available simultaneously with the release of Craft. It took me about 90 minutes to produce, which is kind of a record. The video is 12m 47s long. 2️⃣ I watched a few more videos about street photographers. I learned a few things along the way and got inspired. That's the most important thing for me. See the exhibits section below for a few references.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ OpenAI’s Synthetic voices are mind-blowing. It is interesting to compare what OpenAI needs to achieve these results compared to Apple's method which requires reading out loud 150 different phrases. Apple's results aren't as convincing and require more extensive training: reading 150 sentences out loud.

Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Synthetic Voices

We’re sharing lessons from a small scale preview of Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I feel undecided about my travel journaling plans. I give myself until early June to make a final decison about if and how I'm going to do my travel journaling starting this summer. So far, I'm leaning torward reusing everything that I got instead of creating a new home. Tagging posts with the “travel” tag should suffice.

I wish you a great week!

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

MacBook April Fools’ Day Mockup — Basic Apple Guy

Teenie. Meanie. Mighty. Mac.

Basic Apple GuyBasicAppleGuy

aows (@aows@mastodon.world)

Attached: 1 image This sight may fade away from your memory over time, but you will never forget the way witnessing it made you feel.

Mastodon

One of the only picture I got from the totality as I was enjoying the eclipse yesterday

Stéphane Curzi on Glass

Toggl Dashboard

My two main problems with omg.lol: the branding is no-go and no free tier to try it out. I’m still pondering my options. For now, Scribbles FTW!

1. A great, sunny but rather cold spring day expected today. I should be able to work outside in the backyard.
2. I'm tempted by status.lol. I don't know if it would be redundant to blips here on Scribbles, which also supports integration with status.lol. @Maique? 🙂 I could open an account, it's free, and see for myself!
3. I just received a notification from Hey Calendar. I didn't know I had this set up. It was probably for testing purposes. I'm curious to know how many Hey mail users adopted Hey Calendar.
4. If things go well and as expected, I should be able to close the deal for selling my iPad Pro today. That's cool and will help me a lot to pay for my new one. Yeah!

A long time ago, around iOS 7, I played with my iPad to do some mockups, like this one: a redesigned Settings.app.

For the first time since its release¹, I’m using iCloud Shared Photo Library with my wife for the home improvement project. It’s really well done and fits perfectly my needs.

Now that I’m no longer in Adobe’s ecosystem for my photo processing needs, I depend on Photomator and Synology Photos. I need to create an optimized workflow: upload photos to Synology¹, browse and tag the pictures I want to process using Synology Photos tags, then edit them in Photomator. This is the last is a challenge: RAW images need to be converted to a DNG format², and then edited in Photomator before exporting the end results in JPEG. I need to download RAW images manually out of Synology Photos then import them in Photomator for processing. Processed images should then be imported into Apple Photos for easy access.

I miss MacDraw a lot these days. It was such a simple yet very effective tool for diagramming. What is replacing MacDraw simplicity today?

🚨 After a three-week pause, here comes the latest weekly creative summary, a day earlier. I hope you enjoy this edition. Coming later by email to my dear subscribers. ✌🏻

Can you imagine having spent $12,000 up-front for Tesla’s “full self driving” only to see it descoped to “supervised driving” and then price slashed to $99/mo? Congrats on being given the privilege of training Elon’s model for a huge fee!

Can you spell “class action lawsuit”?

1. Leafs are slowly showing up in the trees. Already.
2. It's a weekend with no creative plan in place. This is unsettling.
3. I prefer the Scribbles post editor to Micro.blog's, by a long shot.
4. I can't wait to write these posts on the balcony of our Airbnb in Croatia this summer. I expect quite a beautiful view instead of my backward.
5. I wonder if people still read these /now posts. Do you? What keeps you coming back? Thank you. 

We’re closing in on the weekend. Sadly, I have a lot to do, and it isn’t really creative work, but so many boring errands and stuff. I don’t see when this trend will reverse itself. We are preparing an home improvement project and I can see a lot that needs to be done if we want to meet our deadlines. Oh well. At least, there is a drink coming up soon.

1. I've been awake since 04h30. It was a bad night. I don't know why. This will be a long day.😴
2. Thunderstorms expected today. It's mid-April. WTF? 🤔⛈️
3. The Craft community on Circle is behind phased out and closed soon. What a shame. The way they made the announcement is brutal. A big🖕🏻if you ask me. Now we're stuck with Slack.😑
4. Apparently, Scribbles now offers the possibility to hide a post from the RSS feed. Not going to happen. Hello RSS feed readers!! 👋🏻
5. I ❤️ Scribbles. Have a great day. 

Ten years (oops, fourteen) years of iPad. This article, first published more than four years ago, takes another dimension on the eve of new iPad releases.

After my iPad Pro, my “old” 2020 Mac mini is next¹.

Switching to the Arc Browser on my Mac was probably one of the best decisions I made in quite some time. How could this be otherwise? The browser is my second most used app after Craft. But I would have laughed if you had asked me a few months ago if I would ever consider switching from Apple’s Safari to another browser based on the Chromium engine. And yet, here I am. This article details what I like about the ARC Browser and some of the implications of switching.

What's wrong with Apple Safari?

Let’s start with Apple Safari. I always liked Apple Safari because I felt my privacy was protected while browsing the web without feeding the data-hungry Google empire. But Safari is not aging well. It became apparent after spending just a few hours with the Arc Browser.

• The browser extension landscape is mostly geared toward supporting Chrome or Firefox. The stringent requirements to submit an app to the Mac App Store might explain why we don’t see that many browser extensions support Safari or are taking longer to be released while being available for Chrome for months.
• Safari feels bloated and gets more complex with each major release of macOS.
• Profiles are not intuitive to set up.
• Tab groups are not easy to manage.

I still prefer Safari to Chrome or Firefox, but there’s this new kid in town: the Arc Browser.

What is a web browser, actually?

Let’s ask ChatGPT 4:

An Internet browser, also known as a web browser, is a software application used to access and view websites on the Internet. It lets you visit web pages, watch videos, listen to music, shop online, and much more. Browsers send requests to web servers using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols, retrieving the web content and then displaying it on your device. Popular browsers include Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari (especially among Apple enthusiasts like yourself), and Microsoft Edge. They support various web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making the modern web interactive and dynamic.

Well, that’s right. Looking at the Arc Browser, I get this feeling: the browser disappears, letting me surf the internet without getting in my way. This is what the Arc Browser is all about. It’s not only because of its novelty; it’s because of its genuine ability to make me more efficient.

The Arc Browser is genuinely different and can prove to be hard to approach coming from Safari, but after a while, you get used to it.

What's great about the Arc Browser?

• The Arc Browser offers a much cleaner and lighter design built around a window with really thin bezels, maximizing the content area. The full webpage experience makes a website look like an app, and the browser seems to disappear.
• There are many small and nice touches all around the user interface. One example is the loading page progress indicator at the top of the window, which is subtly represented and feels more inspired than Apple’s version in the address bar.
• Keyboard shortcut cues are superbly designed and have some visual depth, which I miss in today’s user interfaces.
• It's a clever browser in so many ways. For example, when playing a video on YouTube, the browser will open a picture-in-picture video when switching to another tab. There is no need for an extension for this.
• The Arc Browser helps me organize my digital presence by allowing me to create areas for specific browsing needs called “Spaces.” I have one default space with all my folders and frequently used websites and another space for accessing my wireless router and Synology admin pages. It’s super handy.
• The Arc Browser adopts a left sidebar design, exposing many of the browser’s capabilities, such as opened tabs, tab groupings, and file downloads.
• Tabs are treated differently in Arc Browser. They remind me of to-dos sitting on the left sidebar. Open tabs expire after a user-defined delay.
• Chrome extensions are supported, which means there is a wider range of possibilities than Safari. It’s a big plus. I’m tired of always being left out.
• Copying a text selection on a web page as a linked quote is useful for saving references.
• Fun and informative release notes are provided with each release, right within the browser. Updates are more frequent, too. Releases are not tied to macOS.
• I feel that compatibility with web standards is better than the Safari web rendering engine. I didn’t perform a scientific test on this, but it’s based on my general impression.
• Side-by-side browsing within one big window is a quality-of-life improvement and provides a unique browsing experience.
• I prefer the way Arc Browser exposes extensions in the user interface (through a dropdown menu) compared to Safari (toolbar icons)
• Searching for actions using the CMD+T shortcut followed by a TAB brings a spotlight-like window where I can search for browser commands or settings. That’s for power users like me.
• You can browse a website using a smaller browser version called Little Arc. It’s handy for quickly visiting a website. Visited websites go into the archive for a configured period of time.
• Clicking on a link while browsing a webpage opens up a Little Arc window, like peeking at something that can be fully expanded. This is another great design choice.
• A quick website summary appears when hovering the mouse on a link while holding the shift key. This is done using the integration of generative AI. It’s quite useful.
• Max modules augment the browser's features set. They aren’t the same as extensions, though. They are offered as optional installable downloads.
• It was already a snappy browser, but they recently introduced support for Apple Metal for tab content rendering. It’s now even better and faster—it feels as fast as Safari.

The Arc Browser is a lightweight and very focused operating system designed to consume and interact with the web.

What's missing from the Arc Browser?

Not everything is perfect, and the Arc Browser is an example. However, the Arc Browser is still in its infancy; it was first released by The Browser Company in July 2023. Here are a few missing things.

• There is no reader mode, which I really like when visiting a busy website with Safari. It would be so lovely to have it.
• The Apple iCloud Keychain extension doesn’t work well, but it is Apple’s fault—their flaky and bare-minimum browser extension for non-Safari browsers requires some attention.
• Apple Shortcuts with Safari don’t work with the Arc Browser; there is no way to rewrite them. The sooner the Arc Browser supports Apple’s Shortcuts, the better. Because of this, my reading and content-sharing experience is partially broken, and I need to switch back to Safari if I want to create a link post for my Micro.blog website.
• It is not available on the iPhone or iPad. Arc Search is not a browser per se and is even controversial. However, I do use it from time to time to search for specific subjects that require summarization.
• Using Passkey with “Sign In with Apple” isn’t as smooth as using Safari. Each time I need to sign in, I need to scan a QR code on the screen from my iPhone to log in using a Passkey.
• User tracking is not as complete as in Safari, and privacy protection reports aren’t available. I depended on the StopTheMadness browser extension, which doesn’t support Chrome. I find this ironic.
• The Arc Browser isn’t available on the iPad or iPhone, and I don’t know if this will change soon. It might be when Apple opens up the operating system, like it is forced to do by the EU regulators.

Final remarks

Since its release, I’ve been a satisfied Safari user, preferring Apple’s approach to browsers even if it meant feeling left behind regarding browser extension availability. Privacy protection has always won over features—until now. While Apple does its homework to simplify Safari tabs management and group creation, I prefer using the Arc Browser, even if it means that I lose a bit of the Apple ecosystem integration flavour.

About Arc Search on iPhone

One more thing that I want to address: it’s about the Arc Search app on the iPhone. I have it installed on my iPhone, but I rarely use it. I understand that this app is controversial in its use of web content to generate summaries without giving credit to the sources. In my opinion, it’s not a great use of AI. The Arc Browser company can and should do better. They need to find a way to let users see the sources of the summary it generates. I don’t think it’s rocket science to achieve. They can do it. Meanwhile, I prefer DuckDuckGo and Kagi search engines.

1. Today, I'm finally sharing my thoughts on the Arc Browser (not Arc Search). I hope you take a few minutes to read them.
2. New in Ukraine are not great. I'm more vocal than usual these days about what's going on there. The West must reverse the trend and support Ukraine, or Russia will come at the door of Europe. Sad, very sad that after spending so much, but too little and too late.
3. I put my iPad Pro kit for sale yesterday. Got a few requests for more information.
4. Birds are coming back, and we can hear them more and more each morning when I'm writing these posts.

What if an Apple Vision Pro could be used as a remote to a mirrorless camera?

Jony Ive searching for funding to help develop a dedicated AI device. I hope he will succeed with his iPad.🤣

So, the US defence secretary doesn’t like this idea of Ukraine hitting oil refineries in Russia, because they are civilian targets and because it could affect the global oil market. How about Russia, who’s 99% of the time hitting civilian targets in Ukraine for more than two years? This position is not defendable. Imagine if Russia hit 1% of the US civilian targets. Imagine that.

Are the best moment for me to write. I love it so much. 

1. Thinking about the upcoming rainy days that are forecasted. Meh. 
2. I wonder how many words I wrote in my entire life. Yep, I have those questions in my head.
3. I'm still thinking about the under-graduate student who bought my Mac Pro yesterday. A nice guy studying in biochemistry. He asked if I could sell it for $500 instead of $600. I said no. When it was time to pay me, he took his money out of his pocket and started to count. He had $700 on him. 🤔 Funny guy.
4. I now have $1200 on hand, to help me finance my next iPad Pro. If I can sell my current iPad Pro gear for $900, I should be good to go for the new iPad with the new Magic Keyboard and 3gen Apple Pencil. I can't wait.
5. I should finish these posts with a question, isn't? I like receiving email and having a discussion by email. Hello, Lu P.! 👋🏻
6. Are you planning to buy the new iPad Pro? Let me know, I'm curious.

Another graffiti on the top of an abandoned building. #urbanexploration #urbex #urbexphotography #urbexboy #urbexworld #urbexexplorer

Sold my little Mac Pro trash can for $600 CAN¹. Not bad for a 1TB SDD, 128GB of RAM and the 12-core Xeon 2.7 GHz configuration. And the Thunderbolt 2 cable and TB 3 to TB2 adaptor. Not the keyboard or mouse, as they are still useful for me. Sometimes. 🙂

I’m seriously considering selling my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro, Apple Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil as a bundle, very cheap, before the new iPad Pro comes out, while dollars value is still reasonable. The thing is that I don’t want to setup my new iPad from an iCloud backup, these are slow and are missing quite a few pieces of data. The Migration Assistant method is so much more effective. I should decide this weekend. 🤔

1. Another sunny and warm spring day. Too bad I need to work. 
2. I wonder if these post should only be about the present, or if they could also include reference to the past. I'm thinking about yesterday solar eclipse. It was a great moment that lasted way less long than I was expecting. This is how the solar system works, there is nothing that we can do about it. For once. 
3. I have a hard time finishing an article about the Arc Browser. It's close to being done. Please, give me a little kick so that I can move forward with this one. 
4. I'm still planning on doing a three-part course about Craft which would sell for 99 CAN$ on Gumroad. I need some time to finish out the synopsis, though. I'm using Zavala to build the outline.
5. Now, going back to writing. 

I hate to put things like Apple gear for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Most people are rude, lacking any civility, and not trustworthy. Still looking for a serious buyer for my 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Grif graf. #urbanexploration #urbex #urbexphotography #urbexboy #urbexworld #urbexexplorer

This is how I felt when I watched the solar eclipse today. 

How many people today will get blind or partially blind for not having followed the rules to prevent such eye injuries while watching the solar eclipse? 🫣🌅🥴

1. It will be a hot spring day today with a high of 17 °C and a fully clear sky, just what the doctor ordered for the eclipse! Here in Montreal, I'll have about 1 min and 30 seconds to take a photo while the eclipse is in full swing.
2. I like those extraordinary events that aren't human-made, but nature-made. I feel excited, just like when I was a young teenager and was doing astronomical observation using a telescope that someone lent me for a few years.
3. The new iPad are closer than ever, and I can't wait to use one with an external monitor. This is something I was thinking about this past weekend.
4. I took a few hundred images yesterday with my new camera, and the wireless upload to my Synology NAS was fast and flawless. I could monitor the progress through Synology Photos as the images were automatically catalogued. Now, I can't wait to have the RAW image format be recognized by macOS.
5. I think I'm not going to add another website for my travelling journal. I'll use what I already have. I have met the inflection point of what I can't manage. Photos will go to Pixelfed / Glass. Text posts will go Micro.blog / Scribbles. 

Believe it or not, I’m still undecided about what to use for my summer travel journal. My options are 1) A new dedicated blog with Micro.blog, 2) Scribbles, 3) Pixelfed, 4) None of the above. I’m also undecided about how much effort I want to put into this. Micro.blog’s image handling concerns me¹. Scribbles is in a similar position². This leaves me with Pixelfed. Yet, this question is fundamental to my decision: it is more about images or words. It’s the former. I might end up with Pixelfed. Or with a bit of everything³. Decision. Decision. Decision.

Tomorrow, I'm going back to work. And I'm afraid of all the work waiting for me. 😱

If rumors are true that Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine when he returns to the Office is for both sides to save face. How do you achieve that if the rumoured plan is for Ukraine to cease Crimea and Donbas regions to Russia? How is Ukraine saving face here? What a motherfucker this guy is. This “plan” really reflects the way he conducted himself during is “business career” and as an acting president. I hope he goes to hell. 😡

Testing Micro.blog macOS app version 3.2. I should use it more often when I’m on a Mac, which is 95% of the time! Fun fact: If I understand Micro.blog premium subscription capabilities correctly, I have one more blog available in my five-blog allotment¹.🕺🏻👀🤔

❗Short announcement: I made some changes to my megafeed hosted on FeedPress by adding Blips RSS feed and this metablog RSS feed. If you want to get everything I share via a single RSS feed, this is what you need to subscribe to in your favourite browser. All updates to my digital presence are posted on this changelog page. Now, returning to normal programming. 📺

• Now returning to normal programming after a one-week vacation. I'm still not really sure what is coming next from a creativity perspective. Writing this post should help me clear things out in my head. 
• I have a few pictures taken at the airport and the hotel to upload from my new Nikon Zf, using wireless connection. This will be fun to test. 
• I didn't publish my weekly creative summary last week and probably won't this week either. I was rather idle in the last few days, so I don't have much to share. Nonetheless, I'm happy to get a few more subscribers each week to my newsletter. 
• I used my iPad in the plane for writing about my experience with the Arc Browser since I switched from Safari a few weeks ago. I don't know when I'm going to share that one, probably this week. 
• Tomorrow is the eclipse, right in the middle of the afternoon. I hope I don't have a meeting scheduled at the same time. Weather is expected to be perfect: no clouds, and 16C. I couldn't ask for more. The coming days will be full of eclipse photos all around the clock!
• But before tomorrow, today should be a great one too; I should probably take a bike ride and bring my camera with me!

I like HEY mail but I rarely use the client to read The Feed, which is a bit sad. There was no improvement to the reading experience since HEY release. Anyone with the same experience?

Title says it all. Still vacationing. 🤗✈️😎

I saw Maique sharing link posts yesterday and today under a "links" subdomain and found the idea interesting, so much so that I'm wondering about doing something similar but with Micro.blog. 

Here’s a more personal blog post than usual. It’s about blogrolls and my mental health. But before jumping into that, and in case you don’t know what blogrolls are, here is a definition coming right from ChatGPT:

Blogrolls are like shoutouts to other blogs within a blog. Back in the day, when personal blogs were super popular, bloggers used to have this section, usually on the sidebar, where they'd list their favourite blogs or sites. It was an excellent way to discover new content and show some love to fellow bloggers. Think of it as a blogger saying, "Hey, check these out; I think they're cool." It's less common now with social media and all, but some folks still keep the tradition alive.

Dave Winer wrote:

Blogrolls were a common feature in early websites. A list of blogs you follow. A checklist of places to look at. Advertising our web friendships. Blogrolls were the beginning of today's social web.

Social networks mostly killed blogging and, with it, blogrolls. But the trend might be reversing. So, yeah, blogrolls are making a comeback. And they make me feel anxious. But why, you might ask? Well, let me tell you why.

One last thing before going to the next section: I find Dave Winer’s blogroll interesting because the recommendations list is sorted by the last publication date for each entry. It's a useful twist to this old concept.

Blogrolls and Micro.blog

Micro.blog recently added a blogroll feature, which I quickly adopted and started to populate with my “Hey, check these out; I think they’re cool” entries. It was an exciting and unexpected addition to Micro.blog. I think nobody really expected blogroll support to come to Micro.blog, but it was super well received by the user community. After all, it makes sense for Micro.blog to adopt such a landmark feature of what was so prevalent in the golden day of blogging, right?

So, other Micro.blog users quickly joined the movement. It was fun to see people sharing their new blogroll one after the other. Until it wasn’t. The first blogroll that I read was Manton’s. Then I went to browse others. And some more. And then I started to notice a few things. First, I saw similarities in recommendations. Many blogrolls mentioned the same bloggers. I won’t name any names here—no need for that. Second, sadly, I wasn’t part of any blogrolls. I know this is stupid. I shouldn’t take it personally. But I feel bad nonetheless. Why is that? Well, there are many reasons.

My problem with blogrolls

I put a lot of effort into my creative journey. I’m very active on Micro.blog and elsewhere. I do share a lot: words, images, videos, even audio tidbits. I don’t know how many people follow me on Micro.blog, but I do get many replies all the time. I have this feeling of contributing to a community, and in return, I do feel that I’m part of this community. Returning to the blogroll concept as defined earlier, the blogroll is this little tap on the shoulder. Blogroll is a different form of “like”. With this new blogroll feature, I wasn’t on any except for one, and I did get an email from a guy who pointed me to his blogroll with a link to my blog. And yet… none of my websites were recommended, even from people I thought were very appreciative and active followers.

Now, when I stumble upon a new blogroll, I get anxious. It’s a negative trigger, and I don’t like it—at all. So I stopped looking at them. I’m taking this personally, and I probably shouldn’t. But it is what it is.

I like Pratik’s question because it points to the blogroll’s fundamentals: What raw material should blogrolls be made of?

Regarding this notion of repetitive blogroll recommendations, I feel the same phenomenon occurs on traditional and toxic social networks: popularity contests. The lack of diversity is troubling because it can be a toxic pattern. And I’m getting intoxicated. I would argue that this trend is a failure demonstration. Blogrolls should be calling for greater diversity, searching for unknown gems, and calling the lesser known. So far, from what I’m seeing, they are failing to meet this goal of being a proponent of diversity.

My take on blogrolls

First, before creating my blogroll on Micro.blog, I created a new folder called “Blogroll” on Inoreader to put all the sites I intended to recommend. The list is the first set of RSS feeds that I read in the morning. Then, I started adding my recommendations, one by one, without much thought, except for the desire to share other people's blogs. The easy thing to do was to transcribe my current recommendations, which are currently on my main website, hosted on Ghost. Then, I added a few more. Seeing that my list was getting too long, I decided to create different blogrolls: general recommendations, Apple-related recommendations and photography-related recommendations.

Moreover, I decided to add the following prominent disclaimer:

This is my blogroll. This is a list of blogs I visit often for different reasons, but mostly because I like them. If you are a blogger and you don't see your blog in this list, don't be sad or offended. I want to say that I'm sorry if you feel that way. Now, why not get in touch with me and share about your blog? I love to discover new things. hello@numericcitizen.me

Plus, I created a special section in my blogroll called “The lesser-knowns,” which is positioned at the top of my always-evolving blogroll. I removed a few “usual suspects.” Again, I won’t give you a name here, but you get the idea. Consider this blogroll by Michal Zelazny. You’ll find one of the best lists that fits my criteria for what should be a great blogroll: a list of potential discoveries with an excellent summary for each entry. He puts a lot of effort into maintaining his blogroll. Kudos to him. And yes, he is on my blogroll. And yes, I am on his blogroll. Two happy nobodies are recommending each other. Yeah!

One final note that I want to share: blogrolls shouldn’t be permanently displayed on the blog’s main page, like this, unless the website's goal is to be a recommendations engine of some sort. A blogroll like this should be readily accessible from the site’s navigation element. It's probably a matter of personal taste rather than a design rule, but I don’t see the value of having less content on the main page to display a blogroll permanently.

One more thing. I’m not begging to be listed on someone else’s blogroll by writing and sharing this with you. I’m simply sharing my state of mind after visiting a bunch of blogrolls from people in my Micro.blog community to find that none of my stuff was barely included in people’s recommendations.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

Fly me to the moon. 🌖 #architecture #blackandwhite

Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 34 posts 😃
🏞️ 12 photo(s) shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I've been emotional recently for different reasons related to my blogging and writing hobby. I wrote about this and am close to sharing an article about it. This writing exercise was beneficial and proved that writing is a good thing in my daily life. 2️⃣ What is the point of telling people how many people are supporting your work? I'm genuinely curious. I might sound a bit harsh here, but I'm always double or triple-thinking before doing so myself. Does it serve a purpose? I talk about my website visitors' analytics from time to time. But why? For what reasons?

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I wanted to find a new use case for my aging 2013 Mac Pro (the infamous trashcan Mac), but my options are now very limited. When I tried to install updates from the Mac App Store, I was prompted to enter the password for my Apple ID, only to get a warning that I could not use my Apple ID on this Mac. That’s because macOS Monterey cannot work with my other devices with an Apple ID and Advanced Data Protection turned on. I have two choices: either disable ADP on my account and use my Mac Pro or sell my Mac Pro because I cannot find a good use for it and don't want to weaken my security posture. This Mac Pro adventure wasn't really worth it after all. I had big plans for it (see “Rebooting the SDDCbox Project”) and even recently thought that I could use it for work (see “New IT Rules Prompt Me to Reconsider Revisit My Mac Usage at Home”).

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I like those weekly reviews. I see a few of them each week coming from different bloggers on Micro.blog. As someone who has had a weekly newsletter since last year, I like to read other’s work. I often learn new things while getting new ideas after reading similar newsletters. 2️⃣ One thing that I was thinking about this week is the idea of reading past editions of my creative summary newsletter a few years from now. I expect to enjoy the experience of looking back at my discoveries and past tribulations surrounding my creative journey. This newsletter is like an open journal about my creative journey.

You’re all responsible for the worst that you do. That’s how it works. You vote. You lose. Things happen. You’re still responsible. Democracy is predicated upon a people engaged in the body politic and who take responsibility for the results. Only through that sense of shared responsibility a community grows. — Guy English on Mastodon

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ My blips are for ephemeral thoughts. Micro.blog is for more developed thoughts and comments. Still with me? Read all the details in « On Sharing My Writings — What Goes Where.» 2️⃣ This week, I wondered about my inline link writing style when I wrote On Writing Inline Links - Numeric Citizen Blog. Starting with the next edition of this newsletter, I'm going with version 2. 3️⃣ I shared my experience trying to find good use cases for my aging 2013 Mac Pro.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ On my way home last week from Ottawa, I wasn't driving, so I had some free time to experiment with photography with my iPhone. I tried experimenting with Spectre, a unique camera app dedicated to long-exposure shots. I tried shooting what I saw on my right: a constant stream of trees and uncovered brown and greyish fields of corn culture. What I got was so unexpected. 2️⃣ I wrote that I'm seriously considering getting a mirrorless camera: a Nikon Zf. This camera got a lot of praise, and you can look at some photos taken with this camera right here on Glass. 3️⃣ Glass updated its website so that more content is available for browsing even when you are not a subscriber. I think it's an excellent strategy to entice people to explore more and get hooked along the way. Glass is so proud of this change that they are Reintroducing Glass. 4️⃣ Thursday, after work, I went to a photography store near my office and spent some time experiencing the Nikon Zf camera. At first, I thought the body was much larger than I would have hoped. It’s a bit boxy but reminiscent of the golden days of Nikon camera designs. It's a solid camera body. I tried many interior shots using a 40mm f1.8 lens and was impressed by the general snappyness of the camera. Having those traditional dials on a modern, mirrorless digital camera is strange. It's a brand-new camera, and I'll have to relearn quite a lot to get comfortable with it. I plan to go to another photography store during the weekend and give it another try. It's a mixed-feelings experience so far. 5️⃣ It's Sunday, and I'm back from a second visit to a photography equipment store to see the Nikon Zf. I took much more time to experiment with the camera this time, and I think I'm completely in awe of this device. It's been such a step up since my D750, yet its retro-style design reminds me of my debut as an amateur photographer with the fully manual Minolta SRT-200 camera and traditional films. Now, the other thing to consider is which lens I should buy with it. I already have a 20mm Sigma lens and a 70-200mm zoom. Those are two big lenses, though. Something to think about in the next few weeks. 6️⃣ I’ve been sharing those short “before & after” clips recently. It is done using Photomator’s before & after view, which I record on the iPad while moving the line from right to left. See the exhibits section below for an example.

Squall. 80/366

Om Malik on Glass

Monthly Category Favorites — Mountain — Glass

Pack your hiking boots, we’re going far this month.

I started following this photographer on Glass. Some visual gems can be found there, mostly about street photography.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ New Apple Store openings often represent great new places to photograph. During this week, Apple opened the doors of a new store in Shanghai. The entrance is both humble and very impressive. Don’t miss this article from Michae Steeber, where he writes about this beautiful store and shares many more photos than what Apple share on their website. Apple official press release here. 2️⃣ If you use iCloud Drive, please read this article. Data loss might be waiting to happen in your case. 3️⃣ No new iPad Pro: Gurman: No iPad Announcement Planned for March 26 - MacRumors. 4️⃣ The US DOJ is suing Apple to bring their antitrust investigation to the next step. I’m far from an expert, and I wouldn’t say I like following this type of news. I'm guessing Apple will spend a LOT of money to defend itself and might win or not. Who knows, really? I'm also guessing that sometime in the future, our iPhone experience might be different from what we have right now. I'm not sure it will be the best ending for the end users. Anyway, it is what it is.

(…) a sense of mystery is conveyed through a dramatic architectural landmark that invites you to explore the store below.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ While browsing my RSS feeds, I spent some time on the Enthusiasms website by Christopher Curtis. He's a guy from the UK with many interests ranging from weather observations to gardening. His weather observation page is super cool and is based on WeatherCat software and some observation stations he has set up in his backward. After reading some of his posts detailing how this weather thing is built, I was discouraged because it involves web programming. Nonetheless, I would love to run this on my aging and rather useless 2013 Mac Pro sitting on my desk.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ I decided to subscribe to Timing, a time-tracking application for the Mac. It will eventually replace Timery + Toggl because it's cheaper, works offline, and does automated time-tracking. The migration should be completed by the end of this year when my other subscriptions expire. The bad side of this decision is that I won't be able to track my time on non-Mac devices, which Toggl and Timery could do. 2️⃣ I came across this photo processing app for the Mac called Nitro. Upon examination of the Mac App Store page and their website, I found an interesting photo editing app, but I prefer to stay with Photomator. But you know what? Maybe you would come to a different conclusion. 3️⃣ I've spent some time in Raycast trying to understand better some of its powerful features like AI integration and snippets creation. Raycast is really a powerful tool that I think any Mac user should install on their machine.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I didn’t create a new YouTube video this week, but I have many ideas for my following videos. One video will demonstrate how I'm using Craft to build a personal and private dashboard of my digital life. Another video would present a template for writing critical information pertaining to digital legacy management. That video could be part of a new template I could sell on my Gumroad page. This template would complement “A Guide for Preparing to Leave Your Numeric Legacy.”

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I started a new post series on my Blips website called “Now”. While the post title, which includes current weather conditions, might lead potential readers to think it's about weather forecasts, that couldn't be more wrong. These posts are snapshots of what I'm doing or plan to do in the short term, presented in a point-form format. They might also contain thoughts or observations from my current mental mood. See a sample below in the exhibits section.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I'm going for a one-week vacation soon. I'm going to take it easy for a while and pause my creative activities. 2️⃣ This creation pause should help me spend more time on upcoming projects, like the Craft Starter Kit three-part course that I'm considering doing. I didn't get any feedback so far from my posts on Slack and on Gumroad about this, but I'm giving myself some time for pondering. I might do it. I might drop it.

I wish you a great week!

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

John Keller (@johninparis@zx81.social)

Attached: 1 image Around the time that the TV show aired, I built a plastic model of the Hawk with my dad. The Hawk was a sleeker ship, like an outer-space version of a fighter jet. I don’t remember if I liked it better than the Eagle, or if it was simply the only Space: 1999 ship at the model shop. These Eagles are die-cast metal, and have an excellent build quality. Surprisingly, they’re not much larger than my old plastic Hawk model! I should bring it out of storage to display side-by-side with these Eagles.

zx81.social

United States of Wind — aows

<p>adrian vila is a spanish-american black and white photographer</p>

aowsUnited States of Wind

A picture that I like because it reflects the way I see the american society in general: highly and vastly degrading, just like this floating flag. Photography is about bringing emotions.

https://track.toggl.com/dashboard/f995ddd9-715d-4092-87de-68f1c58038a5

When I bought a Mac Pro last year, my initial use case was to run a homelab within VMware Fusion. Since VMware was bought by Broadcom, the free version of the VMware ESXi hypervisor is no longer available for download. Because of that, I’m left with a great machine that is not really useful. That is sad but also frustrating. But there is something even more frustrating that I wasn’t expecting.

My Mac Pro usually sits on my desk and is turned off. I recently tried to update apps on the Mac Pro and got this error.

According to this article, to regain the capability to update apps or download new ones, I would have to turn off Advanced Data Protection on my other devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.), which I’m unwilling to do. Now, I’m unable to keep this Mac up-to-date.

The only apps that can be installed are the ones that aren’t made available through the Mac App Store. This makes me wonder about the implications of Apple’s power on our devices.

Now what? Considering I already have a great NAS, a Synology 720+, I don’t need another one running with macOS. So, what else? I could run a media server but use InFuse on my Apple device for media consumption. Many apps that I depend on are coming from the Mac App Store. Maybe something like running a weather station app like WeatherCat would be a good candidate, but I would need to buy a weather station like this guy. I think it would be a bit gimmicky.

So, what’s next? It's increasingly clear: the future is the Apple Silicon Mac. There is no point in keeping an Intel-based Mac these days. I plan to sell my Mac Pro, upgrade to the upcoming M3-based Mac Studio, and keep the M1 Mac mini instead, which will fit perfectly on this Grovemade desk shelf. I could dedicate the Mac mini for office-only work, as I suggested in “New IT Rules at the Office Prompts Me to Revisit My Mac Usage at Home.”

Now it’s the time to write my next article in the “Remembering the Story Behind Every Apple Computer I Ever Owned” series. 😔 👨🏻‍💻

I recently got a few comments and questions from some followers on Micro.blog about my use of Scribbles versus Micro.blog blog hosting services. One guy couldn’t figure out why I was using Scribbles to write very short posts using a one-word title while I was using Micro.blog for longer posts, most of them without a title. I replied with a short answer, but I think I should elaborate for those who have been following me for some time or for those who just got here.

I use three distinct sites for posting written content. My main website (https://numericcitizen.me ), which came first, is currently hosted on Ghost. Next is my Micro.blog site (https://blog.numericcitizen.me), and, more recently, I added another small website hosted on Scribbles https://blips.numericcitizen.me. Let me explain each site’s purposes.

My main website is for posting longer articles like tech reviews (like “Five tools for efficient bloggers”) or for sharing long takes on a specific subject (like: “Five Steps for leaving Twitter”). My publication velocity is about one article per week. This is where my weekly creative summary newsletter gets published, thanks to Ghost’s built-in newsletter capabilities.

My second website is my daily blog, called “my blog,” and is where I post comments and thoughts about Apple, tech, photography, apps and services, and many other things. My blogging site is part of Micro.blog, there is a small community around it, thanks to Micro.blog fediverse support. Somehow, Micro.blog replaced Twitter for me, more than my presence on Mastodon did. I usually post around 10-20 weekly posts on Micro.blog. I like this place a lot for so many reasons.

I recently started using Scribbles, a small blog hosting service I like and want to support. I’m using this service to post short thoughts using a single-word title. These posts are then cross-posted to my Micro.blog timeline with a link going back to my Scribbles site. You can see an example of such a post appearing on my Micro.blog timeline in the following screenshot. Each post sports two emojis to help me spot them in my timeline. One thing I try to do is not to be too clickbait with my single-word title. The chosen word must be evocative or related to the post content.

The post on Scribbles gets cross-posted on my Micro.blog timeline by using one of the coolest features of Micro.blog: cross-posting of content coming from RSS feeds. This is shown in the following screenshot.

Micro.blog picks up posts from the Scribbles website RSS feed and will post content on my timeline, as well as cross-post it to Mastodon and Bluesky. This is POSSE in action. I’m a believer.

When I first thought about writing this article, I wasn’t sure where it would end up being shared. However, as the article grew in length and covered my blogging habits, it became obvious that it would go on my meta website, which is another one of my websites. There you have it.

👨🏻‍💻 26 posts 😃
🏞️ 10 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I'm feeling uninspired this week. I'm considering skipping this week’s edition. I feel I have nothing interesting to share, except maybe some photos. 2️⃣ I might visit Ottawa this weekend, which could shorten my time for reading or writing. 3️⃣ I'm on nobody's blogroll and feel sad about it. I know, it's stupid, but it is what it is. 4️⃣ This week's edition is a typical case of, oh my god, I don't think I have anything to share, but as the week goes on, I find a lot of stuff to talk about. I should trust the Internet better to stimulate my creativity. 5️⃣ Ok, ok, this week's edition is not bad at all. I hope you enjoy it.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I made a few photography-related discoveries this week, as shown in the exhibits section below. One is about a street photographer sharing her views about this important photography style. She used to be very shy, and it took her a few years to warm up and find her way to snap photos on the street and feel good about it. 2️⃣ I discovered that Whisper Transcription for Mac can record computer audio. This means I can play a YouTube video and ask Whisper Transcription to transcribe the audio into a text I can save into my reading notes in Bear 2! That's cool. It works great.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Lots of small and longer reading sessions this week allowed me to fully test my reading notes processing workflow. I'm slowly getting to a state that I think is where I want to be: the best app, simple steps, light and efficient workflow. I should probably post a video about this in the future.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ After a slow start early in the week, things started to change, and I could work on some upcoming feature articles. My writing pipeline is relatively low for now. I would expect to add my upgrade experience when the new iPad Pro are coming and when I upgrade my device. We’re a few weeks away from this. 2️⃣ Just the very same day where I wrote about my pipeline being low, I had this urgency to write about blogrolls and the effect they have on me and my mental health. I need to set some time aside for this personal writing project. My main ideas have already been written down in Craft.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ You don't do a lot of photography if you always stick to your screen. I should repeat this to myself more often. It seems that occasions for photography sessions come when I'm on vacation. I live in a relatively big city, Montreal, and I should go out more often. 2️⃣ I love my iPhone 15 Pro Max, but holding it to take a picture is different from holding a bigger camera. My Nikon D750 is a "real" camera, but it feels too big. I realize my desire to get a mirrorless camera is partly because they are usually smaller. Using a 50mm or something lens helps a lot, too. Leica cameras have great bodies that fit this idea of a smaller, but they are expensive. 3️⃣ The Nikon Zf camera, with its retro-style design, is very tempting and reminds me of my beginnings in photography. I spent some time watching video reviews and reading written reviews this week. Two things of note: the dedicated “BW” mode on one of the camera dials on the top, the cameras seem bigger than I would expect. On the latter, I will visit my local photo equipment dealer and see them in person. 4️⃣ The dedicated “BW” mode of the Nikon Zf is so cool that the iPhone camera app should have one readily accessible. You have to tap the top up-pointing arrow, then scroll to the right on the button tools band to get the different photo modes. There is the "Noir" style that I like a lot. See my picture in my home office in the exhibit section below.

Allison Kendall on Glass Photography Community

Allison Kendall. For the Love of Light⚡ Californian in Canada

Saugerties, NY - saving daylight II 677/730

Tom Picasso on Glass

saving daylight II 677/730 — Tom Picasso on Glass Photography Community

White Sands — aows

<p>adrian vila is a spanish-american black and white photographer</p>

aowsWhite Sands

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ No new iPad Pro this week, sadly. It's a slow Apple news week. 2️⃣ The Apple Vision Pro might soon be headed to Canada (and other countries)! All I want is a demo of this thing. Yet, it's becoming more apparent that I won't buy the headset, not in its first generation. I prefer to save some money to replace an aging iPad Pro that I use often or buy a new digital camera that I would use much more often without feeling or looking weird while wearing a pricey headset.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I'm still migrating my metablog content to Micro.blog. It's tedious work, and I'm unsure it is worth it. I find some old stuff that I don't think offers much value to my readers. Yet, I keep doing it. 2️⃣ I built a list of my favourite blogs to share them with my readers easily via a blogroll. It's another tedious task, and I want the content choice to result from my intentionality. So far, I have selected a few well-known bloggers, but I might change my selection to lesser-known ones. 3️⃣ I read about this One a Month club from Manuel Moreale and Jarrod and decided to make the jump myself. I spent time rebuilding my Ko-fi page and set up a few things. My Ki-fi page is available here.

One a Month Club

One a Month Club

Join Numeric Citizen’s Ko-fi Membership on Ko-fi

Support Numeric Citizen monthly on Ko-fi and get rewards.

Ko-fi

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Craft v2.7.6 is out with a few valuable changes. However, long-standing issues with the iPhone version since Craft Reloaded v2.7.0 was released have not been addressed. 2️⃣ Micro.blog, in a surprise move, introduced a new feature: blogrolls. I recreated my blogroll page using this new feature. It's pretty cool to have Micro.blog natively supports such a classic of the blogosphere. 3️⃣ I'm still learning to fully utilize the Arc Browser features and continue to gather my usage notes for a future article. 4️⃣ I think the developer behind Pixelfed is spreading himself too thin, as I wrote to him this week in response to his numerous announcements.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I decided not to acquire the Elgato Prompter for now, even if the reviews are generally very positive. It's not cheap, and I can make good videos without it. 2️⃣ I tweaked my recording setup in my last video: I tried using two cameras pointing at my face. When I'm talking to people watching the video, I use the front-facing camera, while I use the side-face camera when I'm demonstrating something. I think it provides an improvement. See the exhibits section below.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ A year ago, I completed migrating this website from WordPress to Ghost and wrote this announcement. Since then, I've been happy with my experience with Ghost. Did this migration have any impacts on my visitor’s analytics? I think so, but it might be because my content is more interesting than that of my hosting platform change. There has been an apparent uptick in the last few months related to my weekly creative summary newsletter introduction. Over 12 months, I saw 6000 more page views on Ghost than WordPress for the same period a year before. I have 128 subscribers to my website; a few are paying members! I'm pretty happy. 2️⃣ Still trying to figure out Feedland! I don't know if the time spent on this is worth it.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ Of course, I'm still looking ahead to the new iPad Pro! I'm also looking forward to seeing the Nikon Zf in person. Depending on the iPad Pro announcements and pricing, I will make a final decision in April.

I wish you a great week!

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

https://track.toggl.com/dashboard/f995ddd9-715d-4092-87de-68f1c58038a5

Writing is not easy for me. It takes time and effort. For my latest feature post, “Craft vs Notion From a Blogger’s Perspective”, I cannot stress enough how much effort it took me to get it out. Is it because English is not my first language? Is it because of the way I start my writing process, which is by putting unstructured thoughts and observations in a document? Who knows why?

For this piece, I had no choice but to make it a long process. My writing was dependent on my actual usage and experience with Craft. Each working session with Craft brought new details, new observations or facts. Those were carefully written in no particular order in a Craft document. Moreover, updates to Craft were released during my evaluation process, posing more challenges. Many of these updates address an issue or fill a void in a young and immature (but solid) application, which is Craft. My writing had to reflect these improvements.

Eventually, I had to build a storyline and reorganize it around it. Sections were needed, asking for even more thoughts on how I would write this long piece. Then came the idea of comparing Craft to Notion. Why? Because I was a big fan of Notion before Craft came into my numeric life. I still like Notion, but Craft took over. I had to explain why. It’s all in the details, and those require time to gather, organize and summarize. The best way to write about them was to show them in action, requiring even more effort. I created animated GIFs using the excellent ImgPlay app. I had to choose which detail was worth mentioning.

All in all, I'm happy with the resulting article bu, but it's now 2024, and I feel the need to revisit the original article or start over with a fresher and more actual take. Digital workflows do have many moving parts, and the writing context also changes. I might get a quite different article this time around.

This article was updated on 2024-03-17 and first published on 2021-03-12 on my metablog, now hosted on Micro.blog.

Have you ever searched the web for an article where you couldn’t see when it was published? It happens to me quite often. I don’t understand why such important information isn’t communicated to the readers.

In a fast-moving numeric world, the publishing date helps the reader gauge the content’s relevancy. I set the publication date on all my websites because it adds context to the content. When I created Numeric Citizen I/O, I used a post slug format that includes the publication date. The path to the webpage is shown in search results, which makes searching the web a more useful experience. Below are examples of URLs to my websites.

https://numericcitizen.micro.blog/2021/03/07/about-those-webp.html

https://numericcitizen.me/2021/02/27/porting-office-work-a-bad-idea/

Update 2022-11-15: Sadly, since moving to a Craft-based hosting solution, the URL can no longer include the publication date. If you are a business plan subscriber, the workaround is to set the document as a separate website individually.

Update 2024-03-15: I realized that when I moved from WordPress to Ghost, I lost this notion of date in the URL. All previous content is still accessible using the old URL format, but newly published content no longer contains the publication date in the article’s URL. We cannot have it all, I guess.

This article was first published on 2021-03-17.

I decided to disable cross-posting from my Glass feed to Bluesky and Pixelfed. This should fix the photo duplicates on your Micro.blog timeline each time I post a new image on Glass. Sorry for the inconvenience. The problem was simple: Let’s say I share an image on Glass, Micro.blog picks it up and cross post to Bluesky and Pixelfed. Micro.blog then detects a new photo from my Pixelfed feed and cross posts that to my Micro.blog timeline for the second time. Hence the duplicate.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

The greenhouse was so hot inside when we visited, it was probably 115F! #urbanexploration #abandoned #urbex #urbexphotography #urbexboy #urbexboy

Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 31 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 9 photo shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 One YouTube video published 🙂

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ Sometimes I wonder why I do all this. Who does it benefit? Me? My readers? I impose discipline on myself in this creation hobby that I don't even impose at work. It's surprising, really. But in the name of what exactly? Sometimes, I would like to take a vacation. 2️⃣ This week marked the two-year anniversary when my father passed away. 😔

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ . In this week's edition, it's exactly where I wish I had access to the Rewind content to see what I did and discovered. As a reminder, Rewind is a Mac app that records everything happening on the screen and recognizes characters so that we can search and ask questions using the built-in AI feature. I know I made a few discoveries this week, but I can't remember which one! That's too bad. The cost of running Rewind is too ask on a laptop to keep it running all the time.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I'm still trying to tweak my reading workflow within Omnivore. I posted my current reading workflow on my metablog. Two things are missing. When I save an article into Omnivore, I wish it would create a task in Things 3 with the link to the Omnivore article. The other thing is the possibility of downloading the full article from Omnivore with the accompanying notebook in a single and well-formatted Markdown file. I could then import that file into Bear 2. 2️⃣ Speaking of Bear 2, this is my second week with this app for storing my reading notes, and I like it. It's not an earth-shattering change to my workflow, but it’s worthwhile. 3️⃣ I like this take on Digital Gardens by Manuel Moreale. I used to maintain a digital garden but ultimately found it wasn't worth it. I prefer to see my online presence forming my digital garden, not only a specific website.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I submitted my candidature for the People & Blogs series by Manuel Moreale. I got a response. 2️⃣ I updated my Opal C1 webcam review with new information after testing it in a two-camera setup for my next YouTube recording. It's a pricey web camera, but I found a new use case. 3️⃣ I recently started a new writing process for some blog posts: I started my text in French and then asked for a translated version using ChatGPT. Why? Sometimes, it is easier for me to express my thoughts in French. The process is much more effective than if I started in English. 4️⃣ I'm an official supporter of Manuel Moreale by subscribing to the monthly subscription tier. I like what this guy is doing as a blogger. I think he merits some support.

Supporters – Manu

Several very generous people have found some value in what I do and have decided to support it financially. As I wrote in a previous post, I think …

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ One of my sons, who returned from a month-long trip to Asia, asked me if I could process some of his best photos taken during his trip. He used an iPhone 14, but the images were shot in HEIC format, not RAW. That’s too bad. I was limited in what I could do. I must say that his pictures are gorgeous from the start. There wasn’t much that I needed to do. I added some clarity and a bit more saturation and tried to balance highlights and contrast in the sky portion. When I sent him back the resulting images, he told me that he would print them. I was surprised as this generation is so digital; seeing that he would hang his photos on a wall was surprising. I think it’s cool. 2️⃣ If you want to learn about cameras and lenses, don't miss this guide from Bartosz Ciechanowski. It is such a jaw-dropping explanation full of text and animations. It's such a great use case of the web.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.

Bartosz Ciechanowski

P Aminou on Glass Photography Community

P Aminou.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Good news and bad news for Apple this week. Let's start with the bad news of this 2 billion fine by the EU thanks to Spotify. Ouch. The EU is really sending a sour message to Apple. The good news, or simply the news: updated MacBook Air with the M3 processor. The original MacBook Air that came out in 2020 is no more. It was a great machine. I upgraded to the M2 15-inch MacBook Air and am quite happy with it. I don't plan to upgrade to the M3 version, even if the new machine supports two external displays while the Mac lid is closed. 2️⃣ Rumors are pointing to an imminent release of a brand-new iPad Pro, and I'm excited about it, so much that I wrote an article. My 2018 iPad Pro is the oldest Apple device in use besides my original HomePod. 3️⃣ My plans to consider buying the Apple Vision Pro took a dive after reading this from Matt Birchler, who bought one. Using the Apple Vision Pro while others are sitting nearby is too weird. The headset is a totally solitary thing. I share his sentiments, and it probably puts another nail in the coffin. 4️⃣ While waiting for the next generation iPad Pro, why not go back in time and play with previous and old macOS, oops, MacOS versions, right from the comfort of your browser?

My Wishes for the Next iPad Pro

The iPad is an essential device in my digital landscape. Even if I use it less than 20% of the time compared to my MacBook Air or Mac mini, it fills many important use cases. This is why I’m excited about what comes next.

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ Manuel Moreale sent me the questions to answer for an upcoming edition of People & Blogs. I want to take my time to answer them. I want my answers to be interesting for people and those who have been following me for a while. I can't wait to share this. I spent the whole week writing this and perfecting my answers.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ I started testing a Mac utility called Transloader. This app allows me to download files on a specific Mac right from its companion app on the iPhone. Let's say I browse YouTube on my iPhone and find an interesting video. I can copy the link into the Transloader companion app and select which Mac I want the download to happen on. Next, a few seconds later, the download begins on the designated Mac. I find this to be super handy. I also use Play to save YouTube video links and can trigger the same process from the Play app. I love it. 2️⃣ Zavala, a great outline editor for the Mac and iPad, is still being updated. At some point, I thought this app was being abandoned by its developer, but it's not the case at all, as you can see on GitHub. I still use Zavala to create YouTube episode script outlines. It's useful to organize the episode structure.

Transloader for Mac, iPhone and iPad

Start downloads on your Macs - remotely from your iPhone, iPad, or other Macs.

Eternal Storms Software - Transloader for Mac, iPhone and iPad

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I wanted to produce two videos last weekend but could only finish one. I think it's the best I can do. I'll take this as a gift if I ever produce more than one video. There is so much needed to prepare for recording and making the montage. 2️⃣ This week, I made another video about Craft and my reading notes management. In short, I'm explaining why I'm no longer using Craft to help me manage my reading notes, as I prefer to use Bear 2 for this. I explain how I migrated my notes from Craft to Bear 2. 3️⃣ I’ve started contemplating buying a teleprompter for my video recording. There is this one from Elgato called the Prompter, which is not exactly cheap but seems to get great reviews. I'm considering this because I want better eye contact with the camera when I'm recording. With the Elgato Prompter, since it is acting as a second screen, I could drag any window into the Prompter and appear to be speaking directly to the people while I would be, in fact, looking at the screen content. I do have some hesitations: using a prompter means preparing extensive episode scripts so that I can read them. Writing scripts can be task-consuming and make the presentation delivery less natural. As of now, when I record, I'm more or less improvising. It takes less time to produce a video, but maybe the Prompter will help me elevate the production quality. I'll keep thinking about this.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I played with ChatGPT to create an article summarizer. For some reason, it often cannot do the summarization because of the required authorization. I wonder if this is because the site owner uses the robots.txt file to block access from the AI bot. 2️⃣ I'm a proud supporter of Scribbles. Pricing is out for one-time supporters, and I went ahead with the 99 CAN$. It's the best I can do to show my support for people who try different things and help diversify the technical landscape of content publishing platforms.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I hope Apple will announce a new iPad Pro this coming Monday. Last week was about the M3 MacBook Air, some iPhone cases and bands. Now, please, bring the new iPad Pro generation because I’m in for an upgrade. 2️⃣ I think I decided on the look of my travels journal blog on Micro.blog. I'll use the same visual theme for my hub.numericcitizen.me. As a reminder, I plan to create a travel journal for my next summer vacation in Croatia.

I wish you a great week!

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

1070 ft / 326 m

Burton Rast on Glass

Infinite Mac

A classic Mac loaded with everything you’d want.

The Toggl Dashboard

If you want a peak at my current reading notes management workflow, you might find this video interesting (Craft, Bear 2, Omnivore, Readwise).

The new iPad Pro is just around the corner. After over a year, the 4th generation 11-inch iPad Pro came out in October 2022; the Pro line might be on the verge of the most crucial change since the Magic Keyboard and the second-gen Apple Pencil introduction. Here is what, as a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro owner wishing for an upgrade, I’m looking forward to:

• The iPad is a slab of glass. It’s a touch screen for the most part. I want the best screen quality available. I love editing photos on the iPad, and the screen quality is critical. The 12.9-inch iPad Pro screen quality is ludicrous. I want something like this one but on a lower-sized iPad Pro. OLED or not.
• I want TouchID on the power button, just like on the iPad Air. But I also want FaceID. Can we have both? It’s a Pro iPad, after all.
• I want a bigger screen in the same device dimension, which means smaller bezels. I would love a few more millimetres of display space all around.
• I want the same finish as my iPhone 15 Pro Max, with brushed metal and rounded edges. Does it need to be Titanium? Oh, and please, no glass back.
• I want a lighter iPad. Holding the device with one hand for an extended period is hard on the wrist.
• I want a bigger trackpad on the next-generation Magic Keyboard, which I also hope will be lighter.
• I want longer battery life when using my new iPad Pro with my new Magic Keyboard.
• I hope for a better way to attach the Apple Pencil to the device. Is a stringer magnet enough? Since 2018, I have lost one Apple Pencil, and my wife, who uses the same iPad model, has lost one, too. Could there be a way to integrate the pencil holder into a new smart folio case? If this case is called “smart,” let it hold the Apple Pencil, too!
• I want two USB-C ports, yes, TWO. It’s the iPad PRO line, after all.
• I’m okay with an M2 processor to keep prices low. The iPad is no computer replacement for serious workloads. Why bother putting the same CPU as in the MacBook Pro? The M2 should suffice.
• Oh, if Apple bothers to include an M3, then I want the possibility to run a macOS virtual machine on it. Or why not reintroduce boot camp so I can use the iPad with macOS when I need it? Be wild here, Apple, be wild!
• I would love more than system memory 8 GB for 512 GB of RAM configuration.
• I want the FaceTime camera to be on the top while in landscape mode.
• Can you make a black or dark colour version, just like for the MacBook Air? Please!
• Bonus if Apple brings an always-on display to this iPad! One can dream, right?

As you can see, I have (too) many wishes for the next iPad Pro. I know Apple won’t provide a positive answer to each of them, but they are my wishes nonetheless. I can’t wait for the next iPad Pro chapter.

In summary

Compared to my current iPad Pro, the next iPad Pro will at least get the following upgraded or improved features:

• Much Better CPU/GPU performance (A12X to M2/M3)
• Updated camera sub-system
• New microphone system
• Lidar support
• Wifi 6E
• 8 GB of RAM at 100 GB / S throughput
• M2 CPU, best iPadOS 17 experience, best iPadOS 17 external monitor support
• Thunderbolt support on the USB 4 port
• OLED screen
• Updated design

This article was composed and edited on my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro. 🤓

🔗 Mobivention announces its own iOS App Marketplace

As detailed by the company in a press release, mobivention’s App Marketplace will let developers distribute B2B and B2C apps to their customers outside the iOS App Store. “The mobivention App marketplace is primarily aimed at business customers who are looking for an alternative solution for distributing their apps,” mobivention explains.

Tired: there is an app for that. Wired: There is a marketplace for that. 🤓

Let’s say I stumble on an article I wish to read and process. I’ll follow the following steps, covering the collection and archival stages.

1. Save the article in Omnivore¹,².
2. Set tags in Omnivore.
3. Read the article, highlight text as needed and write comments if required.
4. Summarize the article using Raycast AI. I have a Keyboard Maestro macro for that.
5. Copy and paste the summary into the Omnivore notebook accompanying the article.
6. Archive the article in Omnivore.
7. Export the Readwise highlights (done automatically from Omnivore syncing).
8. Import the created markdown files into Bear.
9. Adjust tags if required.

I realize this workflow is essentially for the Mac. Nothing like this can be done on the iPad without a major tweak or two.

You can find this article on the “My Micro-Workflows Explained” website.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

When I saw that broken chair, I saw a grand-ma that used to sit there, contemplating life.

Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 30 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 11 photos shared 🙂
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 1 YouTube videos published 🙂

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ I feel guilty. This week was a busy one, like the one before it. There is so much to do at work. But also so many ideas for my creative hobby. I feel guilty because I could use some of my personal time to learn new things for work. I feel a bit outdated on some technical subjects. The problem is that when the weekend comes, I want to disconnect from my office and switch my brain to create mode. Not that I'm not being creative at work, far from it, but it's a different kind of creativity. But this intentional act of leaving my work behind is an act of mental survival and mental health.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ After reading Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking by Robert Breen, I decided to give Bear 2 a try. I have a 14-day trial where I'll check Bear's capabilities and see if it can affect my creative workflow. Bear’s file import and web clipper caught my attention in the article. I use the Markownload web clipper browser plugin to import web pages into Craft when needed, but it isn't perfect. Craft users have been asking for a web clipper for ages. Someone created an Apple Shortcut for this, but it’s far from optimal. But what seems to stand out compared to Craft is Bear's search capabilities, which beat hands down Craft's. I import Readwise highlights in Craft regularly, but searching in Craft is inefficient. What if I could use Bear to store web clips and Readwise highlights and be able to search them when needed efficiently?

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I started following this blog after reading this other blog post from Manuel Moreale. I like to add some new blog feeds from time to time. Cassidy's blog is fun and interesting. 2️⃣ I'm considering subscribing to the famous https://kottke.org/ website. I subscribed to the newsletter and will decide if I become a subscriber. It might become a good source of writing triggers. 3️⃣ If you are curious about the IndieWeb like I am, you might be interested in this IndieWeb website. For some reason, glancing at the website shows that IndieWeb is popular in Europe.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. — Steve Jobs

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ My blog’s monthly digest for February is out. Why not use ChatGPT to summarize it? I tried it for you and here how it goes. I find it to be too generic and high-level. 🤖
The webpage is a monthly digest from the Numeric Citizen Blog, discussing various topics related to Apple technology, personal reflections, and opinions on current events. The author shares thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro, its potential as a VR headset, personal anticipation for its release in Canada, and the broader implications for technology and creativity. The blog also touches on the use of different apps for personal and professional tasks, opinions on political matters, and reflections on digital and creative life, including the use of platforms like Micro.blog and Craft. For more details, you can visit the Numeric Citizen Blog.

Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest - Numeric Citizen Blog

Numeric Citizen Blog Basic Apple Guy writing about the Apple Vision Pro: For now, Vision Pro remains a very exclusive playground for developers and enthusiasts, …

Numeric Citizen Blog

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I have hit the 500 followers mark on Pixelfed, which I could never achieve on any platform. The proximity of Pixelfed with the rest of the fediverse might help explain the results. I'm super grateful to have so many people who can see my work as an amateur photographer. 2️⃣ Om Malik continues to impress me and create emotions with his beautiful black and white photos, as this one found on my Glass timeline. 3️⃣ I often think of buying a mirrorless camera, thinking it would be my last. It could represent the ultimate evolution point to a long journey with digital cameras that started around 2003 with a Canon Powershot A40 point-and-shoot camera. This would mark the end of a thirty-year journey. One camera that I’m looking at is the Nikon Zf retro-style. What a piece of art. And a good camera, too. 4️⃣ Started to follow this guy on Glass. Great images. 5️⃣ A few recommendations for photography-related things to appreciate.

Alaska is always on my mind. 55/366

Om Malik on Glass

Nikon Zf product images

View Nikon Zf product images from DPReview.

DPReview

Rolf Venema on Glass Photography Community

Rolf Venema. Nature, architecture and live music.

Cami Turpin on Glass Photography Community

Cami Turpin. Analog film artist and portrait photographer.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Apparently, the Apple Car project has been killed by Apple after spending 10 billion dollars on it. Ouch. Not all is lost. Many engineers working on AI are joining other AI teams. During the annual shareholders meeting, Tim Cook said Apple will break new ground in AI this year—more details to come soon. We should remember that Apple is already a big player in AI. Apple applied machine learning to many aspects of our devices: photography, writing recognition, voice recognition, form recognition, etc. But in generative AI, Apple looks to be way behind. To my knowledge, nothing comes close to generative AI in Apple's ecosystem. I guess Tim Cook refers to this when he speaks of breaking ground. It's hard to tell how Siri will evolve with generative AI. Are they building a new Siri, or are they trying to “fix" Siri so it can rely on generative AI when "here's what I have found on the web” seems the catch-all answer when Siri doesn't know what to do? They might also go the “Microsoft Copilot” route. From my experience with Copilot at work, I'm not impressed so far. This is where Apple could bring its usual touch: improving what others try to achieve in meaningful ways but fail to be helpful to the user. It will be exciting to see how Apple takes advantage of generative AI. 2️⃣ Whatever Apple chooses to do, it must watch its back and avoid Google Gemini's problems. It will also be interesting to see how Apple "controls" AI hallucinations.

“We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products, if we don’t live it?” — An Apple Employee talking about Apple’s policy to returning to office for work
“Or as Steve said: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Here we are, the smart people that you hired, and we are telling you what to do: Please get out of our way, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, let us decide how we work best, and let us do the best work of our lives.” — Another Apple employee

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I've been actively working on porting a portion of my metablog content from Craft to Micro.blog. I'll keep the Craft version, but I wanted to make my posts (and future posts) available on Micro.blog for added functionality: RSS feed support and POSSE support, to name a few. I expect the porting to be completed in the next few months. I wonder why I spent so much time migrating my stuff (hence my Digital nomad surname). I think it's because the work I published in the past defines me who I am today as a compulsive creator. Reading past content and seeing how things evolved is fun. The journey is the reward, not the destination. So, I made a small announcement. 2️⃣ Testing Bear 2 content import capabilities is a priority now. As mentioned in the Discoveries section, I like what I have seen. I love it so much that I decided to move all of my reading notes out of Craft to import them into Bear 2. It was straightforward and fast to export all reading highlights from Readwise and import the resulting markdown files into Bear 2. I'll do a YouTube video about this.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ I'm using Bear 2 every day, and while I like my experience in general, there is one thing that bugs me: writing and editing tags is surprisingly selective. I find this surprising because I expect a more polished experience for an app that focuses so much on tags. The worst is when editing a list of tags. When importing an article into Bear, I use the Raycast AI summarization feature to insert the summary at the beginning of the article, as shown below. It's great. 2️⃣ I created a Keyboard Maestro automation to generate a summary using Raycast AI. Inserting it at the beginning of the selected article takes a few seconds. It's a pretty clever way to save some time!

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ To coincide with the release of Craft v2.7.4, I published a video showcasing the star of this release: whiteboards. This video also came out at the same time as the release of my analysis report, exclusively available to the Craft Bible 2.0 subscribers. Want to look? 2️⃣ Each release of Craft triggers a lot of work for me: create a YouTube video, prepare a new update to the Craft Bible and write a Craft release highlights report. Thanks to an optimized workflow, I quickly go through all of this. 3️⃣ Releasing videos timed with Craft releases is a good idea. I get way more views than usual.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I made a few changes this week in my digital publishing space. First, I added a changelog file to my metablog. The goal is to document all changes made to my publishing workflow. Second, now that the Toggl dashboard is finally publicly available, you can view my Toggl dashboard for the current week. This gives you a summary of how I'm spending my time on creative hobbies. It more or less the same at the Timery screenshot below in the exhibits section.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I started thinking about my upcoming trip to Croatia this summer. I want to give you another chance to maintain a travelling journal. Until this week, I wondered what web service I would use. Pixelfed would be a great place to share my photos, but what about my blog posts? This blog post is about starting a travelling journal on Micro.blog. It was enough to convince me to do the same. Thanks to Micro.blog's multiple blogs support was recently introduced, and I decided to use Micro.blog for that purpose. I plan to use Micro.blog to complement my Pixelfed posts. Now, I must decide on the subdomain name: travels.numericcitizen.me or trips.numericcitizen.me. After that, the decision about the visual theme will come. This will be a difficult call because Micro.blog's theme gallery is limited to a travelling journal.

I wish you a great week!

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

Venice, Italy.

Nick Bilton on Glass

The Toggl Dashboard

Each week, I use this template in Things 3 to help me out with my planning. Each Sunday, I duplicate the whole project and rename it accordingly. I love Things 3[^1]. [^1] I tried to do this in Apple Reminders but I prefer Things 3 experience.

Today I added a new global changelog¹ page to my metablog. The changelog will cover all the changes applied to my digital publishing space.

I encountered my first few hurdles in transposing my content from a Craft document to a Micro.blog. Craft enables rich document content and supports block types like JSON output or command line examples. Posts containing these need special Markdown attention. Thanks to some help¹, I figured that out, so the output looks ok. Next up are documents with images like screenshots. When exporting from Craft to Ulysses, images are inserted in Ulysses as references to Craft’s backend storage. When posting on Micro.blog, the images are not uploaded on Micro.blog’s backend. I need to manually download each image and insert them in Ulysses so they get uploaded to Micro.blog and be self-contained there. If I ever drop Craft, I want the images in my post to stay valid and display correctly.

Circumventing Ghost’s limited posts management capabilities.

I recently decided to spend some time editing past articles published on my Numeric Citizen Space website. I first thought that by going to my Ghost admin page, I could quickly browse past published articles by month. I couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, Ghost offers limited post management capabilities, thanks to its limited content browsing capabilities. I cannot go back, say, list articles published early in 2023. I can sort by ascending or descending order, but from there, I have to scroll through a long, dynamically created list of posts. It’s not very effective for a website with 600-plus posts. I had to find a different option to locate a post for an update. This is where Ghost’s content APIs come into play.

The following API request doesn’t do the job (API key voluntarily removed!):

curl -H "Accept-Version: v5.0" "https://numeric-citizen-introspection.ghost.io/ghost/api/content/posts/?key={APIkeygoeshere}&fields=title,url,published_at,updated_at&filter=published_at:>2024-01-01%2Bpublished_at:<2024-02-01" | json_pp

Let me explain what is this API request.

First, I’m going to the request using the macOS command line, hence the curl command. Next, the whole query follows in quotes. I query the content/posts API endpoint. Next, I pass my API key, followed by a field selection (&fields), and next with the filter using the published date between two dates. Finally, I pipe the results in the pretty JSON print macro (is this a macro?) so the output looks like this:

jfm@CraftingMAChine ~ % curl -H "Accept-Version: v5.0" "https://numeric-citizen-introspection.ghost.io/ghost/api/content/posts/?key={API-key-goes-here}&fields=title,id,url,published_at,updated_at&filter=published_at:>2024-01-01%2Bpublished_at:<2024-02-01" | json_pp
{
   "meta" : {
      "pagination" : {
         "limit" : 15,
         "next" : null,
         "page" : 1,
         "pages" : 1,
         "prev" : null,
         "total" : 9
      }
   },
   "posts" : [
      {
         "id" : "65b6a09840566000015b0d37",
         "published_at" : "2024-01-28T13:50:19.000-05:00",
         "title" : "My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024/03",
         "updated_at" : "2024-01-28T13:50:19.000-05:00",
         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/my-weekly-creative-summary-for-the-week-of-2024-03/"
      },
      {
         "id" : "65b6540640566000015b0cf7",
         "published_at" : "2024-01-28T08:23:26.000-05:00",
         "title" : "Special Message to Paying Subscribers",
         "updated_at" : "2024-01-28T08:23:26.000-05:00",
         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/special-message-to-paying-subscribers/"
      },
      {
         "id" : "65b16e25bc7fde0001314ccb",
         "published_at" : "2024-01-24T15:09:24.000-05:00",
         "title" : "The Mac Turns 40",
         "updated_at" : "2024-01-24T15:09:24.000-05:00",
         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/the-mac-turns-40/"
      },
      {
         "id" : "65ad35418532ae000169ddd2",
         "published_at" : "2024-01-21T10:22:33.000-05:00",
         "title" : "My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week 2024/02",
         "updated_at" : "2024-01-21T10:22:33.000-05:00",
         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/my-weekly-creative-summary-for-the-week-2024-02/"
      },
   ]
}

Next, I copy the post ID of one article and paste it my browser for edition using this special URL:

https://numeric-citizen-introspection.ghost.io/ghost/#/editor/post/652e6eedb8a2650001ad9c5b

This URL brings me directly into the Ghost editor, provided that i was already authenticated with my account. That’s pretty much it. It could be much simpler. For this, I miss WordPress.

You can find the Ghost API document right here.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

We can find big surprises when going to the attic! #urbanexploration #abandoned #urbex #urbexphotography #urbexboy #urbexboy

Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 32 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 15 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ I've been quite busy at work in the last two weeks. So much that I had to do some overtime, which I hate to do for many reasons. I'm stuck with a project that is getting started, and I’m deeply involved in this. I hope that before early March, everything will be fine, and I will move on to something else.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ Walknotes is an interesting blog that I discovered through the ooh.directory. A guy takes notes while doing his daily walks in south London, UK, and posts them weekly. Occasionally, I visit the ooh.directory to discover new blogs. Sometimes, I make great discoveries like this one.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Here is a great read for someone like me who builds this weekly newsletter: “How to Plan Your Week’. I’m happy to report that I'm pretty much in line with all the recommendations in the article. Each Sunday, I conclude my weekly creative summary, giving me a sense of accomplishment, next I prepare the next week using a template in Things 3 and set three main goals for the week. It's a very simple workflow but an effective one for me. 2️⃣ A very touching read that came out of nowhere. I didn’t expect this. I'm still searching as to why. I wrote and sent him an email. He responded. Is this the beginning of a digital relationship?
The goal is to spend as much time as possible helping people, ditching social media and going online with personal websites. — Manual Moreale

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I unexpectedly spent some time writing a new article for the numericcitizen.me blog. The subject? My version of the Apple Performance card, edition 2023. It's my first edition, written in response of not being invited to answer the official questionaire sent to more popular Apple pundits. This writing project wasn't planned for the week and it took me less time that I would normally expect.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I play a game with Glass from time to time, mainly during the weekends. I go to the website and start browsing photographers. Whenever I find great images, I show appreciation and subscribe to their feed. It's fun. Glass is full of great photographers. I'm impressed each time I do this. 2️⃣ Photomator 3.3 with an integrated file browser is now out. This update is a major one for me because since leaving Adobe Lightroom, the only support for editing photos was Photomator with Apple iCloud Photos Library. Now, I can directly edit with images stored on my Synology NAS or an SD card from my Nikon camera. Pixelmator Pro has also been updated to support the new Photomator release.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ The SixColors Report Card for 2023 is out. It's a lengthy report about Apple’s performance in many areas (hardware, software, services, corporate citizenship, etc.). The iPad and the Watch, lacking meaningful updates in over a year, have a declining sentiment. Hardware quality and reliability are top-notch. 2️⃣ I wrote my performance report, too.

Apple in 2023: The Numeric Citizen Report Card

Spoiler alert: I have mostly positive feelings about Apple’s performance for 2023.

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

“The iMessage service is not so good that it makes the iPhone more attractive to customers. It’s the iPhone that makes _iMessage_attractive. The iPhone gives iMessage its cachet, not the other way around.” — John Siracusa

“Apple needs to get serious about the iPad again in 2024 with both hardware and software, and I hope they will deliver on this front.” — Federico Viticci in SixColors Report Card for 2023

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ A few years ago, I tried tracking my time at the office using the Timing app. It wasn't something imposed by the office but a personal initiative. I wanted to know where I spent my time, and it helped me fill out the official time sheet. Timing was an excellent app for doing detailed tracking. I was impressed by its capabilities. But eventually, I left that job and stopped using Timing. I kept receiving promotional emails from time to time. It happened this week. It occurred to me that I could explore the possibility of restarting tracking my time with the app for my creative hobbies. I started a 30-day trial to experiment with it. It's pretty different than Timery with Toggl, and the goal of this trial will be to determine if I could replace them altogether. The one downside would be that I would only track my time when I use devices other than my Mac, which I do pretty often (about 10%-20% of the time, according to the following graph. Tracked time is much more granular with Timing (it is fundamentally based on the app I'm using). Tracking of tasks and projects is a semi-manual process. It doesn't mean that I don't like it, but suffice to say that I would have to adapt my tracking habits. One main benefit would be having a much more precise tracking overall, something I want if I ever switch. My current subscription to Toggl is valid until September, which is quite far. I'll see how it goes and report here as necessary. For this 30-day trial, I'll keep using both methods.

Time tracking results for the current week using Timing.app. It’s quite different tha tracking my time with Timery. It’s more refined yet less telling about my writing activities. For example, I spent more than five hours in Craft during the week, mostly for writing this creative summary newsletter edition but using Timery, this task is specifically tracked because it’s a manual process. Timing doesn’t know what I’m doing, only the apps I’m using.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ iA Presenter 1.2 came out with a slew of fixes and additions. I don’t use this app as much as I should. I did a few times while recording YouTube videos to act as cue cards. An iPad version is coming out soon. All the release details are here. 2️⃣ Updating old content is a good idea when conditions that lead to writing an article change. This is the case with my article about choosing which app to use and the considerations that go into application selection. Consider the case of Raindrop.io. I decided to stop using it because of the maker's ties with Russia. Since then, I saw a comment on my blog post from the developer asking me to consider updating my post since he no longer lives in Russia and his business has since moved out of Russia, too. I updated my article accordingly.

When War in Ukraine Influences My Application Choices

The war in Ukraine has unsuspected side effects.

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I'm working on a new video to go with the next release of Craft, but I cannot share it yet. Stay tuned. 2️⃣ I'm postponing my next video about Micro.blog until early March until the month of February is complete. Many things were announced, and I need to prepare my video accordingly. Again, stay tuned for that one too.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I watched the documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop” on Netflix, which offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the making of the “We Are The World” song. I highly recommend this documentary if you are an avid fan of the eighties. This newsletter is about creative work and the tribulations that lie around it. This documentary goes to great lengths to show what it was like to reunite a bunch of big stars around a creative project like this. Lionel Richie was animating the American Music Awards that day and then recorded the song during the whole night after the AMA. Many were obviously exhausted after this. It’s fascinating. Many artists are no longer with us (Prince, who didn't show up, Micheal Jackson, Ray Charles, etc.). So many talented people.

“We Are the World” Assembled Some of the Most Iconic Moments in Music History

“By 7 o’clock in the morning, we became a family,” says The Greatest Night in Pop producer Lionel Richie.

Netflix Tudum

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ On Wednesday, Micro.blog introduced a complete rework of their subscription plans. As the announcement explains, premium subscribers can now have up to five blogs. This announcement made me consider moving my metablog hosted via Craft shared documents to a new blog hosted on Micro.blog. This way, I could lower my Craft subscription costs while consolidating under one platform. The other benefit would be the addition of RSS feed support, which my current meta blog doesn’t provide. I would move my data by exporting individual documents to Micro.blog. But the problem is each document would instantly create and appear as a new post. Not ideal. I could silently migrate my content, and once completed, I could redirect my domain name to point to the newly migrated content and start sharing from there. There is a lot to think about, and I’m looking forward to doing this in the upcoming months. 2️⃣ Using Ulysses, I did a dry run of the export, import and edit process. It works, but it is tedious. I guess it would also be the right time to update my content. There is a markdown files import option on Micro.blog, but I haven't tested this option yet. I prefer the manual workflow as I have more control over it. 3️⃣ This summer I'm going to Croatia for the first time. It's a three-week trip that I'm really looking forward to. I'm wondering about possibly creating a travel journal like I did for my trip to Italy. I won’t use Craft this time if I proceed with this project. But what else can I use then?

Summer Vacation in Italy — a Photo Diary Project Built Using Craft

I wish you a great week!

My Creative Week Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

A walk in the park.

Hans G Andersson on Glass

This blog is a Micro.blog hosted version of the Craft-hosted version. I’m currently in the slow process of copying my content over here.

My scores

It’s the time of the year when SixColors comes out with their Apple performance report for the previous year. As usual, there is a lot to cover in this edition. I wasn’t invited to contribute this year (and the years before, for that matter), but I decided to write my take (just like him and him). I'll use the order of relative devices’ importance to me.

HW reliability (5/5): Apple is at the top of its game when building high-quality devices. I can’t remember when I had a hardware-related issue with my Apple devices besides aging batteries. It’s one of the many ways to be environmentally friendly.

SW Quality (4/5): Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Was 2023 a good year? It depends. Apple is undergoing a massive development effort each year by releasing many operating system updates in sync for all their devices. It is a significant feat in itself. But what about the quality of those releases? Is the ecosystem becoming too complex, introducing new and hard-to-fix bugs? For example, on my iPad, I see more and more visual weirdness in iPadOS 17, much less on my iPhone. My iPad can’t always keep up with the animations and drops many frames here and there. I suspect AutoLayout issues when rotating the device. It is not as smooth as it once was. On the Mac, macOS Sonoma is one of the most stable releases in recent times. I’m not a developer or doing advanced research work but a power user. On the Watch, watchOS is a less positive experience. WatchOS got too complex to interact with when Apple removed force touch as an input trigger.

iPhone (5/5): The year 2023 was one for an iPhone upgrade for me, coming from the iPhone 13 Pro. I’m enjoying the iPhone 15 Pro Max a lot. Battery life isn’t what I expected, though. But for the rest, with the Titanium finish and rounded edges, it’s one of the best iPhone designs since the iPhone 5. Oh, did I forget to mention USB-C? Besides replacing a few accessories, I'm happy to see the convergence happening on the iPhone, too.

Mac (5/5): I think the Mac has never been in better shape in hardware and software. Sonoma is my favourite release in a long time. Thanks to Apple Silicon's apparent endless power, I’m in a constant mood of wanting to upgrade to something more powerful. I'm currently using a M1 Mac mini and a 15-inch M2 MacBook Air, and I'm pretty happy. If I had to make an upgrade this year, I would probably go with the Mac Studio once it gets the M3 treatment. An M3 base model would be a major upgrade compared to my 2020 Mac mini.

iPad (3/5): I no longer understand the iPad product line. It is way too crowded. It looks like it is in a permanent state of transition. The lack of compatibility between models and accessories is surprising. I have the feeling the iPad Pro needs a better differentiation factor. An M3 version won’t fix the iPad Pro differentiation. The software will be if Apple is willing to be slightly more adventurous. What about having the possibility of running macOS on the iPad Pro? One can dream. I know my Magic Keyboard won’t fit the new iPad Pro casing. I'm due for an upgrade for my aging 2018 11-inch iPad Pro. Will the upcoming iPad Pro be cheap enough and worth every penny for me to upgrade? Time will tell.

Wearables (3/5): I still love my AirPods Pro 2. I use them for music and for conference calls at work. I also have AirPods Max, which I use for music listening and on long-distance flights. I feel my AirPods Max could be lighter. I would buy a lighter pair with USB-C and improved noise cancellation. But now we have the Apple Vision Pro. It is a technological marvel. I’m playing the wait-and-see game for the Apple Vision Pro. I think the latter is a major technical achievement, but a demo at the Apple Store will be the first step in deciding what I will do.

Watch (3/5): All in all, it was a slow year for Apple in this space. I wear an Apple Watch Series 8. I didn't find the Series 9 worth an upgrade. The Ultra is not for me, and I'm not too fond of its design. I still like the Series 8 design, but it is due for an overhaul, similar to what we got with the iPhone X. Will Apple make the watch exciting again in 2024? Maybe I could upgrade with the rumoured Series X, marking a two-year cycle.

Environment/Social (4/5): Apple is showing the lead here while playing the marketing game. Some cynics will say that Apple doesn't care. I would argue quite the opposite and that their actions are concrete and worth their efforts. It’s better than nothing.

Services (3.5/5): What can I say? I’m an Apple One subscriber. I heavily depend on Apple services in general and iCloud in particular (for photos, mail, private relay, email aliases, etc.). I don't read much Apple News or play games on Apple Arcades. I think Apple has been too pushy for subscriptions in recent years, and 2023 was no exception. I hope they don't go ahead with ads-based services; that would be anti-Apple (imagine ads in Maps! Sounds awful, right?). I wouldn't be surprised to see Siri+ this year.

Developers relations (2/5): I’m not a developer but depend on developers to build great software to power great hardware devices. Apple is playing with fire here with its developers. It's time for an attitude reversal toward the developer’s base and governments. If 2023 is any indication, 2024 might be challenging for Apple, especially in Europe.

Apple TV (4/5): I use the Apple TV quite often, but as a TV, so it's an invisible device. I don't play games on it. It's small enough, fast enough, but not cheap enough. I'm not too fond of the tvOS 17 navigation sidebar. I don't navigate content much, but everything needs more clicks now.

HomeKit (3/5): I use a few HomeKit devices and Siri to turn the lights on or off. I also have a camera that I use when I'm away from home to peek inside my house if necessary. That's pretty much it.

The Apple Health Index

Finally, I have built a table of indicators that try to convey the current state of Apple. They cover the products, our expectations, the market landscape and finance. It’s purely arbitrary (choice of criteria) and subjective (score attribution).

Overall, Apple’s performance in 2023 can be seen as a mixed bag. While the hardware remains top-notch and the iPhone and Mac lines continue to impress, areas like the iPad and wearables could be improved. The company’s commitment to the environment and social responsibility is commendable, but some may argue that more could be done. Services have been a strong point for Apple, but the aggressive push for subscriptions may not sit well with everyone. Developers' relations appear to be strained, and it’s something that Apple needs to address. The Apple TV and HomeKit are useful, but minor issues could be worked on. As we move into 2024, it will be interesting to see how Apple addresses these areas and continues innovating in the tech world.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

“Let me out, please” #urbanexploration #abandoned #urbex #urbexphotography #urbexboy #urbexboy

Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 39 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 9 photo(s) shared 🙂
🎙️ No podcast episode(s) published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ More than ever, my creative hobbies pay off at work at many levels. I do try to be creative when talking to clients. I do diagramming for specific projects, and people usually like my work. Writing is a big part of my job; I'm pretty good at it. I'm not sure all my clients read everything I write for them (I'm paid to do reports!). But I take great pleasure in writing for the IT field. 2️⃣ Speaking of work, this week wasn't easy. I'm involved in a complex migration-to-the-cloud project, and we are hitting significant roadblocks. I rarely find myself in such a state, and I wouldn’t say I like that. I need to work overtime to overcome challenges I don't like. I had to work this weekend, and I had much less time than usual to do other things like writing this newsletter! 3️⃣ Not all is bad, though. I had to do diagrams using LucidChart, which I consider the best diagramming. Still, I wouldn't say I like Visio, and I cannot understand why Visio is so prevalent in IT. That being said, I prepare some rough versions of the diagrams before jumping into LucidChart. I feel less friction doing so. When I switch to LucidChart, I already know how to layout the content. Diagramming is a creative process, and I like it.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I discovered Shoutouts, a simple web service for building shoutout embeds that can be displayed on another website. It's easy to set up and fun overall. I'm using it on my blog! Visit a blog post and look at the bottom of the post to see this in action. So far, I have seven shoutouts configured randomly displayed on my blog. Fun.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Not everything goes according to plans and inspiration. This story about the demise of the “Muse" app is very telling and a fascinating read. It's not wasy to build software. It's even harder to build platforms in the collaborative space.

Read-it-later services are the digital version of that stack of books on your nightstand that you’re never going to read, but with less clutter. — Angelo Stavrow

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ This week, I’m starting to do something different: reworking past content on numericcitizen.me. There are many reasons for doing this, as explained in this article. There is a checklist that is worth keeping close to me when doing these updates. Forget about SEO; it's about adding value or keeping the content relevant. Adding an abstract, updating the header image or using ChatGPT to rewrite a portion of an article are possible changes. 2️⃣ The first edit operation was done on this post about Micro.blog. I added an image, reworked the text with Grammarly, rearranged tags, and added a small call-out at the end to let people know the article was updated. I tested a new title with ChatGPT but wasn't satisfied with the results. The title stayed the same. The one challenge I'm seeing is how to browse past content I wrote one year or two years ago. Ghost doesn't provide an easy way for this. 3️⃣ I'm not currently working on long articles. I have a few started, but I'm not working actively on them. I feel that I'm in a writing lull.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Can we edit photos using the Apple Vision Pro? According to this guy, the answer is mostly yes. 2️⃣ Glass 3.6.1 is a new iPhone and iPad app release. Better share sheet and speed are the highlights of this release. This app was already fast enough. I guess faster is even better! 3️⃣ I shared the 600th photo on my Pixelfed account early Sunday morning. I'm still enjoying the ride on Pixelfed while I continue to use Glass. Both are great for sharing content and getting some feedback.

JF Martin (@numericcitizen@pixelfed.social)

This is post #600. Already. Time flies. I hope you enjoy the ride because there are many more to go. #urbanexploration #abandoned #urbex #urbexphotography #urbexboy #urbexboy

Pixelfed

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ The general buzz around the Apple Vision Pro makes me reconsider my upgrade plans for this year. I think a visit to the Apple Store for a 30-minute demo of the Apple Vision Pro will help a lot in deciding. Before the Vision Pro, the iPad Pro was the next I considered upgrading. But now, I'm not so sure anymore, especially since I don't use my iPad enough to warrant the upgrade of my aging device. See the table in the exhibits section below for the summary. 2️⃣ Apple has been planting the seeds of generative AI in their mainstream products for a while now. Here's an example on GitHub. They've been doing that with their Apple Vision Pro, inventing all sorts of tech spread into their numerous products only to find the culminant point where everything is crammed into a single platform. Wait for this year's WWDC conference to see generative AI available everywhere. They are busy putting the pieces together.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ Now I know that Ghost CMS isn't good for helping me manage the content once it has been published. [The problem](2024-02-12 7:21 am) will require some of my time investment to be fixed. I'll have to use Ghost Content API to get around their minimalistic posts management UI. I don't expect this to be overly complicated, though. Skimming through the online documentation, it seems to be an easy-to-understand API. It's now on my to-do list. Meanwhile, here is a full announcement by Manton himself. 2️⃣ My next project is constructing an API request using Ghost Content API. I’m close, but I have problems with the date range. 3️⃣ I finally completed the visual design of my blog after switching themes a few weeks ago. Day and Night, my blog will use a dark theme because it is visually closer to my avatar image, which is also relatively dark. I wrote this article to document the process.

🆕 Browsing Past Published Articles on Ghost

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Micro.blog finally introduced a new feature for premium subscription users: Notes. With notes, users can create private documents that can be shared using a private link. Notes can serve many purposes: drafting a new post, gathering notes, a pastebin, etc. I’m still trying to figure out what I will use it for. Some community members think of using this for journaling. For now, I don’t see an obvious use case for me. The service comes with a new iPhone and iPad app, Strata. Very simple and effective. I’ll cover this in an upcoming YouTube video. 2️⃣ I subscribed to a fun web service called Shoutouts and added the integration to my blog. A shoutout is displayed at the post's footer when you visit a blog post like this one. Refresh the page to get a different one. I'll be using this to show what I really like. Eventually, there will be affiliate links. 3️⃣ Inoreader 7.7 was released with a useful addition: offline mode for specific feeds or folders. 4️⃣ Maique’s experience with Micro.blog wasn't good at all this week—poor guy. Scroll down to the article for that. 5️⃣ It's been a long time since Ghost introduced new features. The last time it was Nov 16th, 2023. 🤔 6️⃣ Something rather big is coming to Craft. Stay tuned.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Sadly, I wasn't able to create a video this week. When I have too much on my plate, doing videos is the one to drop first. Hopefully, I’ll be in a better position next week. I must prepare for what will happen the week after... stay tuned.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ OpenAI Sora. 👀 Mind blown. They start with one-minute videos; how long before we can ask AI to generate a feature film from a few prompts? AI is going way too fast; we don't have enough time to comprehend what is happening.

Sora: Creating video from text

I wish you a great week!

My Creative Week Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀

Incredible demonstrations of OpenAI Sora capabilities.

There is always something new, something different, something unexpected that I need to write about. This week is no exception. Lot’s of new stuff. Enjoy the ride!

👨🏻‍💻 40 articles posted 😃 (now including Blips!)
🏞️ 5 photos shared 😔
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 1 YouTube video published 😃

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ This week, I'll be out of town starting Friday afternoon and return on Sunday afternoon. This means much less time to write this newsletter. I’m getting anxious about it because most of the work usually happens on the weekend. Hopefully, I'll have most of the work done by Thursday night. 2️⃣ Thursday morning, and the newsletter will be 95% completed! Yes!

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ There is a new app called Feeeed, which acts as an information sources aggregator. Feeeed is a unique feed reader app for iOS that allows users to combine various sources, including RSS feeds, newsletters, social media platforms, and more. It also offers personalization options such as photos from your library, step count updates, and reminders. The app's main tab is a mix of recent and older updates, presented in a curated and distraction-free manner. It also has a customizable widget and an "Explore" tab for discovering new sources. The app is free and available on the App Store for iOS and iPadOS, with a native Mac app in the works. This makes me think about the recently launched Kickstarter project for Tapestry. I will test Feeeed for a while and see how it goes.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Micro.blog announced a new feature this week: bookmark summary. Now, when saving a bookmark to Micro.blog, a summary will be automatically generated using ChatGPT, provided the site doesn't block ChatGPT crawling. As of now, when saving a bookmark to Micro.blog, you can also set tags, read an archived copy of the article and highlight some text while doing so. What's missing to make Micro.blog a serious read-later service?

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ Most of my writings go to my blog. One reason is that I tend to share small comments or thoughts, which is where they go. But from time to time, a post becomes longer and deeper as I'm writing it. This is why I decide to promote it and publish it on this website instead. It's called Numeric Citizen Space. It doesn't happen often. This is because I want to separate low content velocity from the most busy and noisy content. So far, it served me well. 2️⃣ While searching for an old article about Micro.blog, I found some other posts that needed some content updates. I decided to set a weekly task of reworking my previously published content on my website. Some articles will be updated with new information; others might be fully reworked, and some might get deleted. The idea here is to find new triggers for more writing project ideas. 3️⃣ I officially started and announced “Blips” in the middle of the week. It results from an impulsive decision to test Scribbles, a new blogging service still in beta. Blips is at the other end of the writing spectrum: the shortest form of writing. That's why it is called “Blips".

Numeric Citizen Blips 📡✨

Compulsive creator. Digital nomad. Noisy. Why Blips?

Scribbles

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ My preferred photo-sharing paid service, Glass, is announcing a new feature: Series. With Series, people can share a group of images in a single post. Series can live for a long time and users can add photos to them as they see fit. I do like the possibility of grouping related photos. I recently tried a similar feature on Pixelfed where you can select a group of up to ten images, but the user experience is far from optimal. According to the Glass announcement, the upload experience seems far better and more refined and yet familar. The feature should arrive this spring for Patreon-supporting users (like me) and later in the summer for everyone else. 2️⃣ I have a few photo series in mind for Glass's upcoming Series feature. On Exposure, I had a four-part macro-photography series; each season had a set of photos. I'll re-publish them on Glass, since I closed my Exposure account.

A Look at Series

Our biggest release, coming soon.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ This is the second week of full availability of the Apple Vision Pro. I'm seeing a change in tone about the Apple handset. It's like people are slowly integrating what it means in their digital life to wear and use this headset. People are slowly but surely accepting this idea that, after all, it's not that bad, thanks to some newfound use cases…

"It feels like this success has inflated Apple’s view of themselves, twisting their perspective of what matters.” — Manton Reece

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I expect an update to the Cards theme for Micro.blog, and I'll spend some time tweaking my blog website. The developer behind it often works on it if Github is any indication. If you follow current issues discussed on Gitbub, I'm not out of the woods with this, but things are improving. 2️⃣ URL as a sentence is a great idea. They probably help to move the SEO needle, too. As reported in the article, the author registered a domain name which ends with “.IS". The full domain is the author's name. Each article published contains the whole sentence, which always translates into the article's URL. I wish I could do the same: “numericcizen.is/always-thinking-about-something-new-to-create.html". It's clever. The problem is that this top-level domain is reserved for Iceland and cannot be renewed forever (here's why). Too bad. 3️⃣ Creating a new blog using Scribbles took me less than an hour. It was fun. The project didn't take too much of my time. It was fun.

Neatnik Notes · URL as a sentence

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ On my MacBook Air, I made the Arc Browser the default browser (but not on my Mac mini, here is why). After testing it for a few days, I'm totally in love with it. It is a simple browser but not a simplistic one. It has nice design touches all over. I have a few extensions installed to complement its features: AnyBox, Omnivore, ReadWise, Markdown load, and Inoreader. The focus of Arc Browser is content; everything is cleverly hidden but not at the price of making it difficult to recall. 2️⃣ Craft v.2.7.0 came out on Monday and made a big positive splash! For the first time, I could release a “what's a new video" right at the same time, thanks to the collaboration of the Craft team, who let me beta-test this release a week in advance. See the next section. 3️⃣ Zavala version 2.3 came out, too, with a bunch of improvements. 4️⃣ Another interesting discovery in the Arc Browser: I can quickly create a linked quote like the one below. When shared on social networks like Mastodon or over iMessage, I get a nice preview. Clicking on the link brings the user to the website, positioned at the exact place of the highlighted text.

Quote from “Popularity contests · Indie Microblogging”

A Proposal For Bringing Social Indicators to Micro.blog

Is there a taboo on Micro.blog? It depends to who you ask. Here’s a proposal.

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Early in the week, I shared a video about the latest release of Craft, version 2.7.0. This release is a major one in the short Craft history. I had the chance to test the beta a week before its release and get in touch with one of the developers at Craft. For this release, I asked if my video could be part of their release notes or at least refer to it. He couldn't commit on it. The goal for me was to get the most exposure and help the users community to transition easily to this new release. So far, this is on track to become my most watched video of all time.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Someone on Reddit posted a diagram of a productivity system based on Notion and Readwise. I always like those diagrams and posts because they give a peek at someone's workflow. I’m a bit jealous because I know that the system presented works better than mine. I depend on Craft a lot, and many things are missing in Craft that block me from using a similar workflow: APIs are one of those things. 2️⃣ In a recent video from Manton Reece showing the bookmarks-related features, I noticed an addition in the left sidebar of the Micro.blog website: Notes. I think this “leak" was not intentional. But I noticed it and went ahead sharing it on my blog. Manton's reaction was funny. What does a “Notes' feature mean for Micro.blog users? Soon, we will be able to store notes using a dedicated app on our phones. Only text? Audio notes? How would I use this new feature? For which new use case? So many questions, so few answers.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ A new app from the maker of Reeder is in the works and looks interesting. It seems to be similar to Feeeed and Tapestry but with the look and feel of Reeder. It's interesting to see what appears to be the emergence of a new type of app for consuming content spread across many heterogeneous timelines. Could this be the consequence of the massive movement off Twitter to Mastodon, because of the Fediverse, Bluesky or, more which enables such decentralization? It could be.

Silvio Rizzi (@rizzi@gloria.social)

Attached: 1 image I guess it’s time for an update on what I’ve been working on over the last year: A new app, completely rebuilt and rethought from the ground up. This probably won’t replace the current Reeder (not going away) for a lot of users. It’s not just an RSS reader. The app allows you to access content from various other sources like Podcasts, YouTube, Mastodon, and more. It won’t sync everything, only your saved items (favorites etc). No more unread counts, it remembers the scroll positions instead.

Gloria

I wish you a great week!

Exhibits 👀

Image generated with Dall-E.

Micro.blog is built on principles and values of its founder, Manton Reece, which have been abundantly documented and are reflected in his book here. If I understand correctly, one of those principles is to refrain from promoting the use of what I would call “social indicators” (like, reblog, followers count). According to Manton:

“Micro.blog is not a popularity contest.”.

On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter / X, likes, retweets and follower counts are indicators of someone’s relative popularity. Most “heavy-engagement” platforms voluntarily offer these on purpose for others to see. Not only that, but timeline-building algorithms are taking these indicators as input. Together, algorithms and indicators form a system where maximizing user engagement is the ultimate goal. This is not the case on Micro.blog, hence the quote “Micro.blog is not a popularity contest”. It doesn’t mean these matters aren’t discussed within the community; they are in many interesting and useful debates, like in this example.

As a heavy and passionate user of Micro.blog, this discussion made me think and reflect on my position in this debate and ask myself these questions: what is my position regarding these principles? Do I agree? Is there some middle ground where principles could be relaxed a bit? Let’s see.

Back in 2018, I wrote this article: “The End of my Micro.blog Experiment”:

It is impossible to see who’s popular and attracting a lot of people. I don’t even know how many people are following me. Why this obscured view? I think these design decisions are part of the problem on this platform. It makes it look like a communist party.

Ouch. 🫢

I’ve been blogging for quite some time and participated in many social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, etc. I’ve seen them all. I am no longer on these social networks. I don’t think about Micro.blog as a social network but as a community. That being said, I’d like some indicators for my own curiosity. For example, I subscribe to Plausible and Tinylytics and both are enabled for my blog. I don’t expect Micro.blog to add built in analytics time soon, but I do like the possibility of using these services with my blog. What about other metrics? As a blog owner, I wish I knew how many people follow me. I don’t want to brag about it; I just want to know because I’m curious about these things.

As I wrote in the previously mentioned thread, and for writing this small reflection, I gave some thoughts to this and I think these popularity indicators should be “regulated” in some specific ways:

1. They should be enabled or disabled on author’s request. But enabling them wouldn’t make the indicators visible to the author just yet;
2. If enabled, they should be made available to the content owner upon request, just like the content itself;
3. The author should decide to make them publicly available on an individual basis;
4. Most importantly, they shall never be used as part of an algorithm that aims to increase user engagement with the platform or any other means without the author’s consent.

Regarding statement number 1, I think the platform shouldn’t gather this data by default. Once activated, the author might want to get access to it or disable it while the data is still available and updated. People joining Micro.blog should know that by default, no followers or likes data is gathered. For some people, this is important and might be part of their decision to join and subscribe to the service.

One last thought. I’m fond of Glass’s approach with likes. They weren’t part of the service’s initial launch. Nobody can see an appreciation count on a photo, but only written comments. After their introduction, I saw a drop in written comments on my photos. It may be anecdotal. Both are feedback, and I’m appreciative of those. Do I want these appreciation marks to be public? No. Just like Glass’ appreciations, likes are another form of feedback indicator that should be under the full control of the author. This is where I draw the line between a possible addition to Micro.blog and what we get with traditional social media platforms.

If I think my followers might be interested in seeing a post, I’ll retweet it. A like is just an acknowledgment or show of support. Nobody needs to see that but the recipient. — Mitch Wagner on help.micro.com

I couldn’t agree more.

In summary, as I recently shared, I always think appreciation, likes, reactions, and follower count should be made available privately to the content owner. Making them public should be an opt-in decision, if at all possible.

One final idea: if Micro.blog ever decides to enable followers to count, it should consider only “active” accounts. Accounts without activity for over a few months shouldn’t be considered as active followers. This means possible variance over time as a blog can become active after a period of silence.

It occurs to me that social indicators implemented this way should, in fact, be called feedback indicators.

My goal with this article is to help move the debate and possibly influence Micro.blog future, even if in a small way. Let me know about your view on this. I’m genuinely curious.

Editing new content from the iPad for this blog poses some challenges.

I started writing this post using my iPad, Working Copy and Textastic¹. The file was initially created within Working Copy’s sandbox, but I fetched content from the Blot Git repo to store the most recent changes locally on my iPad.

As with every app on the iPad, Working Copy runs within its sandbox. When cloning the Blot repo locally, files were placed in the application’s sandbox, which is inaccessible outside the iPad². Ulysses uses external folders, so I can point it to my iCloud Drive, where I stored the cloned repo with Nova. Only Textastic can edit files with Working Copy’s sandbox.

Writing with Textastic and publishing with Working Copy feels geeky compared to a workflow based solely on Ulysses. It is geeky because I have to think about what I’m doing in regard to my local repo being up to date with the remote one. I must remember that after pushing this article on Blot, I’ll have to do a fetch when I go back to editing on the Mac. I’m not certain that I like this dance. Textastic is good, but not as a writing application like Ulysses. The former is more directed to developers, while the latter is for writers.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a review of Working Copy. Read this excellent review from MacStories instead. MacStories likes it because it enables better group collaboration. It sounds overkill for me since I’m alone editing my website. Working Copy can work in conjunction with Textastic. After re-reading their review of Working Copy³, I found out that, in fact, I could have replicated a similar setup to the one on my Mac: using Working Copy to edit the local repo of this blog sitting on iCloud Drive (instead of Working Copy’s sandbox)⁴. In that case, I would use Ulysses to edit files as usual, and Working Copy, you see them as uncommitted changes.

If I don’t redo my setup on the iPad⁵, compared to using Nova on the Mac, I find this to be much less intuitive. Maybe I should focus on using Ulysses everywhere for my writing needs and use the Mac to push content on my Blot blog. It’s not a big deal, and Numeric Citizen I/O is not a place where I’ll publish as often as on, say, Micro.blog. Having to sit in front of the Mac for the final posting isn’t a big deal.

One last thing: Working Copy wouldn’t be needed if my Git usage was limited to GitHub. Blot, on which Numeric Citizen I/O is hosted, uses its Git server, which requires me to use a Git client capable of connecting to it. I didn’t find a way to do this with the official GitHub client.

I’m still undecided about what to do to enable my iPad to edit this blog. My mobile needs are quite low as the pandemic continues, limiting our travel possibilities.

Thinking about text editor apps. Following a recent article from Jason Snell about finding the best markdown editor for the iPad, I started thinking about using Ulysses for all my text editing needs. Is it the best tool for all use cases? Probably not. But it is cross-platform, and for me, it’s a must. As I write this blog post, I’m using Nova text editor on my Mac to start editing, finishing in Ulysses. It depends. I’m unsure how my text editor selection happens when I start writing a new blog post. Maybe I should do the same as Mr. Snell, build a table of much-needed features, and see if Ulysses still fits my needs. On my to-do list, I plan to write a blog post about GIT clients for the iPad. Working Copy is a very popular one and includes a text editor. Jason Snell’s article refers to Textastic too. They compete against Ulysses, but the latter doesn’t do Git stuff. Like many blogs, it may be okay to use a different text editor, depending on the platform. I could use iA Writer on the iPad for this blog and Ulysses for the rest. Or maybe Working Copy would be a better choice because I’ll need to use it to push updates here anyway? As you can see, I’m constantly reflecting on the tools I use or plan to use and my workflow. It’s a never-ending process. Back to Ulysses. For now. Update #1: I’m not alone in rethinking my text editor choices. Chris Hannah, too.

You can leave a comment on each blog post, thanks to Commento, you’re not being tracked.

When I created the Numeric Citizen I/O blog, I thought it would need a way for visitors to be able to leave comments as they see fit. I decided to go the Commento route because of its tight integration with Blot, but also for a more profound reason: privacy protection. According to Commento’s website:

Commento is more than just a comments widget you can embed — it’s a return to the roots of the internet. An internet without the tracking and invasions of privacy. An internet that is simple and lightweight. An internet that is focused on interesting discussions, not ads. A better internet.

There are no ads with Commento, so there is no need to track users. The weight of the script needed to add Commento support is light. Commento is easy to use for end-users and doesn’t require an account to publish a comment. But, if you prefer, you can use your Twitter account, your Google account, your Github account, etc, to identify yourself with the service before posting your comments. The design is nice and simple. Commento is not a free service, but I’m paying $99/year for it. That’s the price that I’m willing to pay so my readers aren’t tracked.

Do you want to try the end-user experience? Please respond to this blog post; you’ll see. Thanks in advance.

Update: 2022-11-15: Since this blog is no longer hosted on Blot.im, comments are handled “automagically” by Craft as a Craft-based document. Update: 2024-04-10: This content is now hosted on Micro.blog. You can reply to this post by using the provided buttons, below.

Testing a web-based blog post publishing tool for posting directly to Blot from a webpage.

I’m currently testing a straightforward blog post publishing tool running on a webpage. The tool is accessible at https://wall.blot.im. I wrote a front matter; I guess Blot will process it as usual. The editor provides a character count, a word count, and a way to export the current blog post or publish it directly on my Blot website. Once published, I guess that I’ll have to do a “pull” from my Git client to sync the newly published content with my local repo clone. Let’s try this. Nope. It won’t work unless I use Dropbox, not Git. Too bad. Returning to normal programming in 3, 2, 1.

I made a few layout changes to my archives page.

Someone on Micro.blog posted something from its Blot website and I noticed he was using an unknown meta tag in the post’s front matter: metadata.icon. He used a tag to add an icon to each of its blog post. I wanted to know how Blot actually used this tag to format the blog post, so I asked the guy. His answer made me look deeper into Blot processing of meta tags. After some readings, I decided to change the content of the archives page to use the “summary” tag after each blog post title. It is super easy to edit Blot templates. In that case, it was a matter of adding a {{summary}} tag like this:

Using Git instead of Dropbox for Blot content syncing provides an unexpected benefit.

As I recently wrote, Blot supports two mechanisms for synchronizing content from my Mac to the web: Dropbox or Git. I chose Git. As I write this, I’m still testing Nova as the Git front-end (I’m a GUI type of guy). One of the great benefits of using Git is the built-in history of commits that is at the core of any Git repo. As shown below, as I push updates to my Blot-based website, I make sure to write a short comment in the commit action to document the commit action. I think this is an important asset in managing a blog and owning its content.

A better view at the GIT panel in Nova:

Micro.blog allows for archiving all content to GitHub. Here is why I did it.

This blog post is about explaining a Micro.blog allowing me to archive all my blog posts, including images and why I do it.

First, you must know that Micro.blog already provides an archiving feature of all blog posts to the Internet web archive. You can find mine here. I think it is important because in our society, the durability of the numerical artifacts we create is far from guaranteed. Saving my blog posts outside of Micro.blog is one way to prevent my content from vanishing if something really bad happens to Micro.blog.

Micro.blog feature to archive my blog posts to a GitHub repo

I wanted to go further, though. This is where Github comes in. First, I needed to create a new repo: numericcitizien-archives. Next, by using the built-in feature of Micro.blog to archive blog posts to the newly created GitHub repo. Enabling it is super simple from the design page settings. Once done and after waiting for about a week, I could see my content from my GitHub account. You can find it here: https://github.com/jfmartin67/numericcitizen-archives.

Now that my Github repo has a copy of my blog content hosted on Micro.blog, I can use a Git client like Nova on the Mac to clone this repo to my local machine. The archive feature of Micro.blog creates a big index file in HTML format that I can then open in Safari. It’s really nice.

Setting up this blog with Blot was pretty straightforward.

It all started as an experiment. But now, it’s not. It’s something permanent¹. In less than a day, everything was set up and running. From the setup of the domain name (with GoDaddy) to having an actual site available for browsing. This is the very short story behind setting up the Numeric Citizen I/O website with Blot.

My interest in Blot came from the desire to have better control over the visual appearance of my microblog, which is hosted on Micro.blog. Micro.blog supports some customization but it’s too demanding as you have to have some knowledge of HTML, CSS and Hugo templates inner working. Another goal was to own my content.

Blot is a nice solution to my objectives: owning the content, easy visual styling, and easy publishing. Blot allows me to keep using my current applications like Craft for initial post writing Ulysses on the Mac, which supports Markdown files for editing. I had to select a GIT client to complete my workflow for publishing blog posts.

Opening my account on Blot was super easy. Before going further with any of the Blot settings, configuring my GIT client was mandatory. Cloning the Blot repo on my machine was quick and easy, too. Any non-fixable issues at this stage would have jeopardized the whole initiative.

Next up: setting up analytics, page structure, support for commenting blog posts, and closing a link format. All of this was dead simple to set up. But I wasn’t done yet. The next step was to select a visual theme. I wasn’t satisfied with the available themes, so I asked for support for help as I knew there were other themes available. After describing what I was looking for, the guy behind Blot agreed to bring back one of the decommissioned themes (for an unknown reason). In fact, it was the previously available default one. This closed the loop. I’m a happy camper now. I like this theme because it gives this blog a “scientific paper” look, and I love it; it aligns with the blog’s purposes.

Selecting a GIT client for the Mac is a bit harder than I thought. When I decided to create this blog using Blot.im, I had to select the synchronization mechanism between my Mac and the Blot.im service. Blot.im offers two choices: Dropbox (easy, seamless, but too invasive and bloated software) or GIT. I decided to use GIT, for a few reasons.

First, GIT is geeky. I like geeky stuff. This blog is about being geeky, so why not! More seriously, using GIT means that I have to select a GIT client on my Mac (and eventually on the iPad, too, for on-the-go publishing). The leanest way to manage content sync could have been to settle for the command line only. It is super easy to install GIT in the command line on the Mac. But, now, that’s too geeky to my taste. I prefer going GUI, being able to preview commits, file content, etc.

Here is a list of GIT clients for the Mac that I more or less tested with my impressions for each.

• GITHUB Desktop Client. I think this one is mandatory as it is the official Github client. Works fine as a GitHub client. Super easy to use but limited in editing functionalities, but I can configure it to open files in Nova¹. But it cannot connect to Blot.im GIT remote repo. Yet, it’s a keeper because of Github. It’s free.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code. This one is impressive but also overwhelming. Do I need this complexity? Probably not. I don’t like its look and feel either: too Microsoft, not enough Apple-like. It’s still not optimized for my M1-based Mac mini, which is not good! It’s free. I will probably delete it from my machine.
• Tower. This one was mentioned by someone I follow on Micro.blog. It’s not free. I like the look and feel of this app. It’s clean. Works great on macOS Big Sur. But somehow, I find it less intuitive compared to Nova. It’s a fully native application (not Electron-based). Will be deleted.
• Sourcetree. Another GIT client but for Gitlab only (could not find a way to connect to Blot.im GIT repo). Still Intel only, not optimized for M1-based machines. No go. Deleted. Thanks to App Cleaner.
• Atom. It’s still Intel-only, sadly. It looks good, but I cannot connect to Blot.im GIT repo. It only supports Github.
• Nova. This app is well-known in the Mac community. They recently released version 5.0. It looks great: a tad busier and crowded interface and costs more than Tower. It comes with a local web server, so I can preview my Markdown file edits effortlessly. It also supports many file types (HTML, CSS, to name a few). It does support extensions to augment its features which is cool. I installed a few of them (Prettier, for example). Finally, Nova supports connecting to many types of servers (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, etc.). I feel Nova will serve me better in my blogger workflow in the long run or could be used if I ever want to test a local installation of Hugo. Who knows.

As I write this blog post, I choose to settle on Nova for now. I’m still on the trial period. I have 18 days left. I can still change my mind. Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions, feel free to post a comment at the end of this blog post (not from the main page but by hitting the date & time of the post, which will bring you to the post page where you can comment).

In a future post, I’ll explore GIT clients for the iPad. WorkingCopy seems pretty popular.

I’ve been a user of Micro.blog since 2018. At first, I wasn’t sure I would like the place. Eventually, it grew on me because it is such a quiet place¹, with more engagement from the community members and with much more respect. There is something that I don’t like about Micro.blog, though. It’s the lack of easy control over the visual appearance of my blog.

Micro.blog is based on Hugo, a static site generator. It’s pretty flexible, fast and open-source. My current understanding of Micro.blog is that it doesn’t expose all of Hugo’s controls, only a subset of them. I’m ok with this, as Hugo is not for the faint of heart. Yet, I’m not ok with the look of my microblog. I want to make it more personal, less like a generic website based on a frequently used visual theme. To make changes, I need to know about HTML (I’m kind of okay with this) and CSS (I’m not okay with this!). CSS is the weirdest thing I have ever encountered in my digital life. What a messy “language”². No amount of reading or YouTube videos will make it understandable for me.

Another solution would be to import an already-made Hugo theme in Hugo. The other issue with Micro.blog is that it isn’t easy to import open-source Hugo-based themes. They need to be “ported”. Again, it’s not something I want to mess with. I recently started to think that maybe it was time to have my own microblog hosted somewhere to get complete control of the visual appearance. Installing Hugo on my M1-based Mac mini is simple. Having a publishing pipeline from my machine to the web looks pretty easy, too. It’s only the beginning. Even with great articles like this one, I find it difficult to wrap my head around it.

After much reading, I changed my mind and settled on the “Hyde” theme of Micro.blog. I would lose too much if I were to be alone, and new challenges would certainly arise. I hope for Micro.blog to keep evolving, especially in the area of better customization. I asked its founder to open up its roadmap. I’m anxiously waiting to see what’s next.

Writing about my numeric experience isn’t new for me. When I was an indie iOS developer (2009-2013)¹, almost at the same time I started learning Objective-C, I opened a Blogger site called “buildingiphoneapps.com”². The idea behind this was to share my experience of learning a new language and a new programming platform. I wanted to share my discoveries, my challenges, etc. It was fun while it lasted. This website started my experience of being a blogger. So, today, welcome to Numeric Citizen I/O - a metablog from Numeric Citizen.

Meta definition according to Wikipedia:

Any subject can be said to have a metatheory, a theoretical consideration of its properties, such as its foundations, methods, form and utility, on a higher level of abstraction. In linguistics, grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, language operating on a higher level to describe properties of the plain language (and not itself).

Meta?

This blog is all about meta-blogging³. What? You might think? In other words, this blog is about the tools, services and workflow I depend on daily to build and maintain my online presence. I think that many people find it interesting to know how things are done behind the scenes. This is the purpose of this blog. From time to time, I’ll post updates when a new tool, application, or service comes into play. I’ll also document workflow changes or retired services. From now on, updates will be published here. While waiting for the next post and to get a sense of my current blogger workflow, consider the following diagram. It doesn’t reflect the presence of this blog yet. Wait for an update very soon.

Why?

But why use a separate website to write about blogging? I’m glad you asked. Here is why. Each of my websites has a specific audience and content type. Think of my websites as different specialized TV channels. Each of them fills a specific role or targets a specific audience. I think it is better for a blog to stay focused on its core subjects. Each website can have its own personality and visual theme to support it. That’s why.

Make sure to visit the About page for more details about this blog. You can leave a comment, too; I would be more than happy to engage in the conversation! To do so, just hit the post’s publishing date to see an individual post and add your comment at the bottom. Thanks.

As a content creator, I’m always looking for new ways, tools and services to improve my workflow to be as efficient as possible. If something no longer fits my needs, I’m not afraid to make changes. The last update to my blogger workflow dates back to last November. Since then, I made quite a few important changes.

What’s in?

First, I added my Synology DS720+ as a central tool to manage my digital assets, mostly pictures used in my publications. I acquired this NAS last year to consolidate my numerical assets, and I cannot overstate how good this product is. The first use was to back up important files and archives later I added the digital assets use by taking advantage of Synology Moments, a photo library service that comes with the product. Read more about my use of Synology NAS here.

Next, an important addition is Craft. I’m still in the early stages of working with Craft, and I plan to write about my observations in the near future. Meanwhile, let’s say Craft is a similar yet quite different beast than Notion. It has a cleaner and really polished design and helps me gather digitals tidbits, write and organize my thoughts. You can have a look at a few micro-interaction examples with Craft on my Vimeo page. I don’t plan to kick out Notion from my workflow yet. Notion is much more powerful than Craft. I think there is a place for both of them in my toolset.

Speaking of Vimeo, I’m back for another year as a paying subscriber. I much prefer Vimeo to YouTube (you know my stance on data privacy protection and Google, right?). I used Vimeo to publish a video about why I’ll never be a YouTuber. I’m also creating a collection of short clips of great micro-interactions with apps. Craft is one of the collections. My Vimeo profile page is here.

To create short animation clips in my publications, I use GIF files. Those are created from video clips and then converted to animated GIFs using the powerful ImgPlay application available on iOS, iPadOs and macOS Big Sur (thanks to the M1-powered Macs!). For me, it’s the best animated GIF creation application out there. Think of ImgPlay as a Final Cut Pro but for animated GIF creation.

Finally, the diagram doesn’t show my use of Apple’s Shortcuts to automate many repetitive tasks. One shortcut is used to add a device frame to any screenshots. Screenshots are prettier this way. Another shortcut saves interesting links into Apple’s Reminders app for future link posts. Finally, another one is used to create an archive of my microblog front page from time to time using Newsy.

What’s out?

Google Analytics is out, thanks to Plausible, a great alternative. I wrote about my switch recently and decided to walk the talk regarding my stance on data privacy protection. While not as powerful as Google Analytics, it does the job quite well for my basic needs. Since closing my Google Analytics, Databox was no longer needed.

A mature workflow

After many updates in the last 18 months, I think my blogger workflow is in an equilibrium and mature state. We never know when a new application or service pops up and can make a difference for me as a content creator looking for efficiency. That being said, I don’t expect much change for the foreseeable future.

It’s been a while since I updated my blogger workflow. The last time was back in September of 2020. It’s time for some tweaks.

The number of services I pay for has increased. Now, I’m paying for IFTTT and Buffer. IFTTT has improved its offerings this year and started to offer a paid tier. I recently added an automation where new posts from my Micro.blog RSS feed will get saved to a Google Sheet document. It makes it much easier to find previous post references when working on my Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter.

I’m paying for Buffer because of the added features I get in return. I get more channels and better post-management. All of my blog posts are now queued to Buffer. From there, I can choose when my blog post will be reposted. Sometimes, I may elect not to repost some of my work. Another use of Buffer is when an Apple event comes up. I will schedule tweets in advance. On the event day, I can focus on the event itself. It’s working fine for me this way.

The other addition is in fact a return of an old buddy: Reeder 5, the venerable RSS feed reader. I’m still depending on News Explorer (read my review here). I’m using Reeder 5 because of the Read Later feature, where I put all my internet articles that I want to eventually read. It works great, supports tags and runs on all Apple platforms.

Probably on the way out is MarsEdit. It’s not that the app is bad; quite the contrary. What I’m looking for is to consolidate my writing apps. Ulysses is rumoured to introduce support for Micro.blog beginning of next year. If that’s the case, I’ll drop MarsEdit.

In the next few weeks, I’m looking forward to Apple finally approving my submission of this blog for publication on Apple News. They recently updated their review process and asked all content creators to resubmit their articles and answer questionnaires. We’ll see.

Finally, I updated the general look of the diagram to make it easier on the eyes. I hope you’ll like it! Are you a blogger too or a content creator? What is your workflow?