Fixing one last thing after our server problems yesterday. I almost finished it last night but realized I was too tired to risk making a mistake restoring data. Much better in the morning with coffee and triple-checking backups and scripts. One day we'll have a full-time sysadmin!
Roomba vs. dog. It takes a lot for Ollie to move... Certainly more than a robot nudge. If he's sitting in front of a door you want to open, for example, forget it.
Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch about Evernote's experiments with a more limited free plan:
…a pop-up message that informed them that unless they upgraded to a paid plan, they would now be limited to only 1 notebook and 50 notes. That change would dramatically limit the service for longtime Evernote users who have accumulated hundreds or thousands of notes over the years.
Evernote is a perfect example of a company getting too big for what it's trying to do. It could've been a great 20-person company. The billion-dollar valuation ruined it.
Reminded by this post from Vincent that Arq exists. I used it years ago when I was frustrated with something from Backblaze, but I didn't stick with it. Going back to it, backing up to S3 and skipping a backup subscription altogether.
I've been eyeing a specific domain name for several months. It's a premium TLD and I can't really justify the price. But every once in a while like today I come this close to grabbing it, then talk myself out of it. Whew.
Default apps for 2023
There have been a bunch of "what apps am I using?" blog posts recently, inspired by an episode of Hemispheric Views. Robb Knight has a page with links to other people's posts.
Here's my list:
- 📨 Mail Client: Hey
- 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail and Hey
- 📝 Notes: Ulysses
- ✅ To-Do: Basecamp, GitHub, and Ulysses
- 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Apple Camera
- 🌅 Photo Management: Apple Photos and Dropbox
- 📆 Calendar: Fantastical (iOS) and Apple Calendar (macOS)
- 📁 Cloud File Storage: Dropbox
- 📖 RSS: NetNewsWire and Feedbin
- 🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
- 🌐 Browser: Safari
- 💬 Chat: Messages and Slack
- 🔖 Bookmarks: Micro.blog
- 📑 Read It Later: Micro.blog
- 📜 Word Processing: Pages and Google Docs
- 📈 Spreadsheets: Numbers and Google Sheets
- 📊 Presentations: Keynote
- 🛒 Shopping Lists: none
- 🍴 Meal Planning: none
- 💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Numbers
- 📰 News: Safari and YouTube TV
- 🎵 Music: Spotify
- 🎙️ Podcasts: Overcast
- 🔐 Password Management: 1Password
- 🤖 Code Editing: Nova and Xcode
- 📚 Books: Kindle
- 🌎 Blogging: Micro.blog
I added a few at the end that I've seen other folks use even if they weren't in the original list. There is scoring too, but I don't understand how it works. 🙂
Playing around with Raindrop.io today. It's really nicely done. I've added support for importing Raindrop.io bookmarks to Micro.blog bookmarks. There's also an API, so maybe we'll have more integration later.
Transfer domains to Micro.blog
Today we're rolling out some major improvements to domain name support in Micro.blog. We've had domain name registration for a while, but it was fairly limited. Now you can transfer domain names to Micro.blog hosting and let Micro.blog handle all the details. We also have a better management interface for adding custom DNS records.
Here's a screenshot:
To register or transfer a domain name, in Micro.blog on the web click Account → Get a Domain Name.
There's no requirement to use Micro.blog for domain names if you want to keep your domain name at another hosting provider. Some people like to keep domain name registration separate from their blog hosting. But if you'd like everything under your Micro.blog subscription, now it's easier.
Interesting conversation about web hosting and AI in this interview on Decoder with Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix. But this also stuck out to me:
The developers, they just read a very fantastic post by somebody on how to do something in a much nicer or interesting way, and then they want to try it. They want to play with it. They want to build something with it. And suddenly, it’s like, “Oh, no, this is how we do it. You have to do it like that.”
It takes a lot of discipline to ignore tech fads. I'm convinced this is why large teams often spin their wheels, getting very little done for users.
Usually I work on improvements to Micro.blog for a couple days or weeks and roll them out. Very rarely does something sit for months before customers see it. But sometimes very big features need a little more process and restraint... Working on something new off and on that will launch in January.
MarsEdit 5.1 is out with support for posting to Mastodon and improvements for Micro.blog too, like attaching photos in the micropost window and updated character counts. Congrats @danielpunkass!
Not sure what to make of Elon Musk's interview yesterday. It's so easy to say he's unhinged that I'm questioning whether I should dig deeper. Ultimately my core belief about huge social networks hasn't changed in years: too much centralized power opens the door for user-hostile, dev-hostile leaders.
Happy anniversary ChatGPT
One year ago today, ChatGPT was released. It's not that often that products truly change things. Whether you think artificial general intelligence is just a few years off or that it will remain a pipe dream forever, there's no question that some form of AI is going to be part of so many products going forward.
AI is a tool. Even imperfect, it is incredibly useful. Looking back, I can't believe I was so skeptical of its impact. I ignored ChatGPT for months.
This week I was creating a web page to show a grid of Micro.blog feature names, experimenting with different ways to highlight all of the things Micro.blog can do. I turned to ChatGPT to help me get started, like asking it this question:
Can you generate 10 colors that look kind of like #f80 and go good together?
Or this one:
Let's say you have 87 HTML spans with id attributes 1 to 87. Write JS that randomizes the numbers 1 through 87, then loops over each one and sets it's background color from an item in a list called colors.
And then:
Add a random delay before setting each color, from 1 to 2 seconds?
And so on. It probably saved me an hour. I'm still working on it, but you can see the result so far in this video.
This kind of functionality is why Microsoft's "Copilot" branding is so good. AI is the little assistant that helps you with random tasks. Coding, brainstorming, writing. In the above examples, it didn't replace my job. I still needed to take the output and tweak it, move things around, add my own code, think about the design.
Earlier this year when we added Twitter import to Micro.blog, I used AI to help make an illustration for the web page. I combined the output with my own sketches, compositing things together, adding color. AI was my junior artist assistant, helping me create something that I couldn't dedicate enough time for on my own.
And in Micro.blog, we now use OpenAI to automatically transcribe podcasts for all Micro.blog Premium subscribers. I'm interested in finding more use cases like this: not using AI to replace our creativity — Micro.blog will always be about personal blogs, written by humans — but to automate tedious work.
I have no idea where AI will be in another year. I won't obsess about it too much, and I won't follow where it leads blindly, but I'm fascinated to watch it evolve, waiting for the opportunities that bring clear benefits to our work.
Putting on my sys admin hat this week, evaluating what we can improve. Our primary MySQL server has been running for over three years without a restart. Not bad! (Hopefully I didn't just jinx it.)
Seems there aren't many notes apps that are end-to-end encrypted. Obsidian is one, and there's also Day One for journals. Wondering how important this is to folks. Personally, I like that Day One is encrypted but I would use it even if it wasn't. And most of my notes are just on Dropbox.
iA Writer 7
Nice approach in iA Writer 7 for pasting ChatGPT output into your writing and tracking your edits to make it your own. There is also a Markdown extension for attribution in a range of text. However, I found this part of their blog post a little puzzling:
While the format is open, avoid cloning our work. Draw inspiration from what we made. Change it. Improve it. Design it yourself. Work on it until it is substantially better. If you can’t beat our design, then let it be and do something else.
There is a long history with text editors of drawing inspiration from features in competing products. What iA Writer has built here is not easy technically. If someone eventually copies it, I would chalk it up as praise and move on to the next thing. (Admittedly that's easy for me to say as an outsider, though.)
Also, a reminder that iA Writer supports native publishing to Micro.blog! It's a great writing app with elegant support of Markdown. Despite my nitpick above, I do like their thoughtful take on AI integration, and I think version 7 is going to be well received.
December already! I still have 9 books left on my reading goal for the year. I'm halfway through a couple things already so I might hit it if I read more over the holidays. 📚
Glass announced they are raising their prices for next year, but it looks like even with the change I would save money if I switched to the yearly plan. Interesting to see how different companies handle yearly discounts. 50% off is an unusually good deal.
Castro is back online and Tiny is considering finding a new home for the app, via Rob Fahrni. For Micro.blog we host podcasts, and we have our Wavelength app, but we've thought about doing more. Kind of neat to imagine Castro in our suite of apps if we had a non-$0 acquisition budget.
Working more this weekend on the feature I teased about a few days ago. Work has accelerated and now I'm confident in the design and technical bits. The hardest part is pulling myself back every day to work on smaller fixes and improvements.
Just published Core Intuition 578 about the MarsEdit 5.1 release, AI and copyright, software licensing, and more. Lots of good stuff in this episode I think.
My quick 5-minute demo from FediForum is now on YouTube. I show off Micro.blog and fediverse integration. It's a whirlwind tour of several different things including how we think about cross-posting.
Sunset at Lake Ray Roberts.
Quiet night camping at Ray Roberts Lake State Park.
