🔗 Automattic Acquires Beeper, Will Merge With Texts // daringfireball.net

I don’t get a ton of [X] DMs, and I get fewer now than ever before, but Texts offers a better interface to them than [X] itself does. I also have my Instagram, WhatsApp, and Signal accounts connected to Texts. If I used any of those platforms heavily, I’d rely on their dedicated apps. But I don’t, so a universal messaging inbox is better. I’m more interested in having one central place to check than anything else for those platforms.

It’s why I signed up for Beeper too. I’d rather just one spot for my infrequent chats.

🔗 What Are the Odds? // Jason Kottke // kottke.org

There are so many mind-blowing things about eclipses but the one I can’t stop thinking about is the nearly impossible coincidence that the sun and the moon are the same relative size in the sky. If the moon were a little bit smaller or farther away, we wouldn’t have total eclipses where you can look directly at the sun, see the corona, the sky goes dark, you see a sunset effect all around the horizon, etc. That is some spooky magical shit.

I love coincidences like this. On a grand enough scale, sometimes things just work out.

🔗 It was 23 years from Macintosh to iPhone. It’s been 17 years since the iPhone. // Matt Birchler // birchtree.me

It’s not unreasonable to think that we could be on the verge of a breakthrough computing change that changes the world. Is the Vision Pro that product? I don’t know, and I haven’t exactly been shy about how the current version of the hardware and software hasn’t clicked for me like I’d hoped, but Apple has a pretty remarkable track record here and I’m taking a leap that maybe this will make more sense to me in the next year or two.

And @matt@isfeeling.social with a similar take.

🔗 The Vision Pro isn’t a flop, it’s an ongoing experiment // sixcolors.com

This is what happens with early, evolving platforms in categories that basically didn’t exist before. We’re so used to Apple being a well-oiled machine that it’s hard to look at the Vision Pro and not judge it by all the same rules as the other products Apple produces.

But we can’t. The Vision Pro is about learning, trying things, figuring out new stuff, and hoping it’ll evolve into something new and different and relevant (and hopefully much more affordable!) in the future.

Jason with the long view of Vision Pro.

🔗 Eclipses Should Be Celebrations of Science, Not Pseudoscience // John Gruber // daringfireball.net

We were informed by astronomers, years in advance, exactly when and exactly where the eclipse would occur — down to the second, down to the meter — and everyone in the path of totality could literally see how exactly right those predictive calculations were. We should be celebrating and emphasizing this to laypeople, because these same scientists are the same people who’ve been telling us for decades that we’re destroying our climate with carbon emissions.

I just released my ‘🤣 Markdown Memes’ shortcut version 1.0:

This shortcut helps you to reuse memes saved as Markdown without having to re-upload the image to your Micro.blog account (or wherever you store your image files) or re-write the alt text over and over again. It presents a list of memes saved to a text file for you to choose from, or allows you to upload a new one and save it to that same text file.

Some niceties:

• Auto-setup to create and update the necessary text file
• Auto-sorting to put your most used memes at the top of the list

Get it from the HeyDingus Shortcuts Library.

📷 #mbApr Day 12

Would you believe this was taken inside at Caesar’s Palace? It’s like magic!

I just updated my ‘MB Photoblogger’ shortcut to version 1.2:

• Adjusted the composition of the final text to display better in Mastodon clients (image on the bottom, thanks @burk)
• Split up the RSS results to make it easier to determine the day’s prompt, and double-check that it’s for the correct day
• Simplified how to customize the title of each photoblog post, which is done upon first setup but can be changed at any point

Get it from the HeyDingus Shortcuts Library.

📷 #mbApr Day 11

My heart lives at the intersection of rock and sky.

🆕📝 Edelrid’s Design Team Is at the Top of Their Game

When you trust your life to your climbing gear, it's nice to know that someone's put a lot of thought into how it works.

I’ve been using Things for — goodness — 7 years now and every time I save a task with the share extension I think, “Surely @things@mastodon.online will add ‘When?’ menu so I can set a due date on this task soon.” And yet, here we are! Line me up for that football kick again, Lucy!

And one more change that I need some feedback on… I figured out how to do the gradient blockquote style I’ve been trying to implement. But I’m afraid it might be “too much”. What do y’all think?

Been playing with CSS today and tidying up some corners of the website.

Very thankful to @garritfra@fosstodon.org who posted about how to implement a DuckDuckGo search bar on your website. I’ve never been happy with Blot’s search tool and wanted to use DDG for a while, but never figured out how. This was drop-in perfect.

Let’s try this again! I just updated my ‘📣 Publish Quote’ shortcut to version 2.1:

• Fixed a couple of bugs related to variables incorrectly converting between text and URLs (thanks @pratik and @ericmwalk!)
• Cleaned up the final actions by reusing the text-to-publish variable so it’s more clear what’s getting updated and shared
• Vastly simplified formatting the source’s hyperlink during setup
• Fixed a bug regarding checking for the user’s preference for including the author’s name and checking if it’s being run on a Mac to make sure the author-name variable is passed along correctly

Took Phin for a walk today and surprised him with his first swim of the year! Water dog = happy dog. 😁 📷

🆕📝 Shortcuts Tips: Size Doesn’t Matter

How small can a task be and still be worthwhile to automate?

📷 #mbApr Day 10

My favorite kind of train: The musical people kind!

I’ve been making some improvements over at oneamonth.club. You’ll see new short descriptions of the member projects there. Thanks to everyone who has sent me one so far. Oh, and we’ve had over 2,000 views on the site, powered by @tinylytics!

🆕📝 I Didn’t Hate Apple’s Immersive MLS Highlights Reel

It wasn't perfect and left me wanting more, but it also wasn't as bad as you might have heard.

🔗 FineWallpapers — basicappleguy.com // BasicAppleGuy

🤣 BasicAppleGuy made a “scratched & stained” collection of FineWoven wallpapers last year.

🔗 Daring Fireball: From the Department of Spending Tim Cook’s Money: Online Photo Storage Is Surely Expensive to Offer, but Apple Should Offer More — daringfireball.net // John Gruber

It’s very easy for me and you to just declare that Apple ought to just foot the bill to offer more storage for over a billion users worldwide, but we’re not the ones making new TV commercials telling iPhone 15 users they needn’t worry about photo storage. If Apple really wants iPhone users not to worry about photo storage, they should offer more with iCloud, cost-to-Apple be damned.

🔗 A retrospective on a year without streaming music — coryd.dev // Cory Dransfeldt

It was hard enough to make a living as an artist before streaming and it’s nearly impossible to now. Recorded music has become a loss-leader for tours and touring is grueling[2].

Artists were better off when we were toting around iPods, Zunes, Dell Digital Jukeboxes and buying mp3s one at a time. I think we were too.

With all of humanity’s music at my fingertips, I find myself listening to less of it than ever. That can’t be good, right?

🔗 You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist — bjhess.com

You don’t need to labor over your posts. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or spelling. You don’t need to leave a post in draft for seven months, pouring over research. (Though you can if you want!) You don’t really need to have an idea.

Just write. Then share.

I feel seen.

Also this:

You don’t have to be an essayist. (Though you can be one if you want!) Don’t let those essayists discourage you from blogging.

Just write. Just blog.

📷 #mbApr Day 09

A throwback to my crispy tiger-striped sunburn, a result of an unfortunate application of sunblock. 🐯 🥵