Category: General

The topics covered here didn't fall into one of my usual categories.

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I’m always happy for a friend when they start a job at Apple — but I’m also sad when it means they have to stop their community activities: no more podcasting and blogging, developer meetup organizing, presenting at conferences, writing side-project apps, contributing to open-source things.Brent Simmons

Those sort of restrictions is one of the reasons why I don't want to have a "job", i.e. be an employee.

The Micro.blog experience and a few thoughts on the open web (Beardy Guy Musings)

I write this and mull it over from the perspective of a creator and as a longer-term user of the “old web”. I have, at least, a basic grasp of the ideal (and importance of) the open web, ownership and access. I write it as someone frustrated with the nastiness of the business practices of the corporate entities that own the big social media as well as the lack of moderation on those sites making them potentially dangerous places. But even amongst the relatively tech fluent (and likely, financially affluent) community of tech/apple oriented users that I follow on Twitter, there is little impulse to move to alternatives such as Micro.blog or Mastodon. I’ve seen evidence of an almost complete lack of interest.

As one of those "old web" guys who has been blogging for almost two decades, I understand this anguish over the open web. I've seen the rise and fall of alternative like app.net and despite what others may think, micro.blog's success isn't ensured. The lack of diversity, both cultural and economic, is perhaps why the "relatively tech fluent (and likely, financially affluent) community of tech/apple oriented users" ignore micro.blog. It's one of the reasons why, despite having backed the Kickstarter project, I chose to let my hosted micro.blog lapse and use micro.blog more like Twitter. Both are free but Twitter is less of an echo chamber.

I visit micro.blog only a few times a month now. The discovery feed is boring.

I've documented my issues with micro.blog in several blog posts. I don't expect anything to change in the near term.

Others have voiced similar complaints.

I prefer the approach advocated by the IndieWeb and have also written about the issue of discovery for independent blogs who don't use social media.

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Ditching your laptop for an iPad Pro by Bill Bennett

The gap between what you can do on an iPad compared with what you can do on a laptop has almost closed. Every new version of iOS makes the gap smaller. That will accelerate now Apple has split iPadOS from iOS.

But we’re still not all the way there yet. Some tasks are still better done on the laptop.

I don't have a MacBook but my wife does. I have a 27" iMac with 9TB of storage and lots of peripheral ports. I also have an iPad Pro.

I wish Ben, who writes for a living and so has a limited understanding of "work", would stop evangelising about the iPad. Let us each use what we like.