Thinking about the new Mastodon collections, it reminded me that we have blogrolls on Micro.blog that don’t get enough attention. Today I improved a few things with adding blog recommendations, including a search across other platforms if you don’t have the URL for someone handy.
A rare selfie for the blog… Enjoying some time with family in Rosemary Beach, Florida. Found this Eadweard Muybridge shirt randomly last month at a Goodwill and had to get it.
Flowers growing through the fence.
Apple opens up app distribution for Brazil:
Beginning with iOS 26.5, developers can distribute apps on alternative app marketplaces, operate alternative app marketplaces, process app payments for digital goods and services outside of Apple In-App Purchase in iOS, and more.
So we’ve got the EU, Japan, Brazil, and partially South Korea. Slow progress, but still progress.
I’m curious what model Codex cloud (that can automatically check GitHub PRs) is using. It often catches bugs that regular GPT-5.5 misses. Perhaps just a different, more comprehensive prompt.
AI researches are in such demand, they shuffle between companies often, and it’s hard to tell which hires are meaningful. Anthropic likes to say that none of their founders have left. Now Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. He was the co-author of the transformer architecture. A big deal.
Josh Baer has died in a plane crash. Tragic. He founded Capital Factory and was a huge part of the Austin startup scene. Thinking of his family and friends, and so many people whose lives he must’ve impacted. Rest in peace.
Mastodon 4.6 is out with featured user collections, similar to Bluesky starter packs. I’m exploring the best way to support this in Micro.blog. The API is similar to quote posts in how it’s built around opting in, so there’s more chatter between servers via ActivityPub.
The new Google Home Speaker looks pretty good, but I don’t think I’m bought in enough to the Google ecosystem for it to be for me. Eventually someone is going to nail the voice assistant speaker. Not sure Alexa+ is it either.
Thanks to Jim Krenz for the kind words in this blog post. I never prompt for app ratings or reviews, but I do love seeing posts like this. I’m always encouraged to keep going. Micro.blog is the best today that it has ever been.