I’m gonna call a #MykeWasRight to say that “Apple Enthusiast” is my preferred term for my interest and coverage of the company and its products. I am enthusiastic about what they make, and it does color what I think and share. But my enthusiasm also makes me wish for them to do better and more.
[The internet] has enough hot takes, perfect websites, and thoughts on the latest [news] stories. Write about you, write about the person behind the screen who wants to be seen and heard. Write about what makes you tick and what makes you happy. That’s the blog I want to read and that’s the type of blogs we need if we want to make a better internet. We don’t need another news blog, we need something folks can relate to and you can show your not so techy savvy friends that makes them think, “Wow, the internet can be something more than just [scrolling social media.]”
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To feel that being a “writer” is one of the markers of my identity, I need to be writing often. The word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and “identidem, which means repeatedly. Identity is literally “repeated being" — I am a writer because I write repeatedly.
You must read this. Another bit:
The more I wrote with prompts, the less I needed them. Prompts gave me the push I needed to build a habit, a ritual. Now, life and its gifts and grievances are generally all the prompting I need.
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Be kind, be honest and engage on your own terms. Walk away from anything that doesn’t serve you and don’t be afraid to craft a browsing experience that best suits you. A healthier web is one that’s slower, friendly and serves you. Eschew things that make demands of you, insist or impose upon your time and attention.
Cory’s post is full of good rules of thumb when it comes to being a happy and healthy internet citizen.
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2023 marked the end of the transition to Apple silicon. It may have taken longer than Apple anticipated, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Macs are running faster, cooler and longer than they ever could with Intel inside.
All it cost was the Mac Pro’s dignity, which it just regained in 2019. The last Intel model was everything a Mac Pro should be — expandable, upgradeable and more powerful than anything else in the line. The new one is a Mac Studio with slots and optional wheels.
A banger of a line from @ismh@eworld.social. 😂
Thanks to @arne@spezi.social for the good list of articles I perused this morning!
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Calendars, on the other hand, cover the entire spectrum of time. Past, present and future. They are the closest thing we have to a time machine. Calendars allow us to travel forward in time and see the future. More importantly, they allow us to change the future.
I was already thinking of how I can better use my calendar to log things like a journal, but this post unlocked more imagination. I’d love to be able to look back at how I actually spent my time!
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But hey, if it’s all pretty much the same stuff — and it is — why stop at distilling it into a single book? Why not condense the repeated lessons of an entire genre into one article? That’s what I’ve attempted here, after reading dozens of history’s biggest bestsellers so you don’t have to. Here is the essence of the advice I’ve seen delivered again and again.
Good reminders, concisely summarized.
🔗 You’d Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don’t You?
“What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day [during the pandemic], as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the potential joys of a physically closer network. Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could join me on a stroll at a moment’s notice? […] How good would it be to have more spontaneous hangs instead of ones that had to be planned, scheduled, and most likely rescheduled weeks in advance?”
🔗 The science of why you have great ideas in the shower — nationalgeographic.co.uk // Stacey Colino
During the day, doing something easy and familiar, often involving some kind of movement, is likely to facilitate the flow of spontaneous thoughts. When you’re in the shower, for example, “you don’t have a lot to do, you can’t see much, and there’s white noise,” notes Kounios. “Your brain thinks in a more chaotic fashion. Your executive processes diminish and associative processes amp up. Ideas bounce around, and different thoughts can collide and connect.”
🔗 Does gear matter? — arun.is // Arun Venkatesan
The problem is with the question itself. It’s one of those questions that can’t be answered with much aside from “it depends”. It depends who is using the gear. It depends what they are using it for.
To the novice me, believing that gear mattered and accumulating it helped me come to my own conclusion. Along the way I tried a wide variety of cameras — old, new, cheap, expensive, film, digital, fixed lens, interchangeable lens, etc. This variety of gear helped me build up of a wide library of skills.
It’s my wonderful wife’s birthday and we celebrated doing all Jo’s favorite things! 🥳 Including a hunt for 30 balloons hidden throughout the house. Phin might have had the best time of all of us! 🐶🎈 📷
Had the best time summiting Algonquin and Wright Peaks with Jeanne and Jessie yesterday. Our stoke was as high as the wind speeds, which is to say “quite high”. And we met a furry friend! 📷
🆕📝 Crashing Clockwise #541: ‘Peripherereral Free’
In which I turn one of my favorite podcasts into blogging fodder each week.
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One of their engineers testing in IE6 had noticed the YouTube banner pretty shortly after it went live and immediately took it to their manager as evidence as to why they should do the same. Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals.
This story is just the best. Should we? Could we? We did. Now everyone is!
Warm weather had the usual spot looking sketchy but we still found some ice for @adkiceclimbermeetup last night. Thursday nights, 6ish to 9ish at Pitchoff Quarry (or Pitchoff Right in this case). Keep 🤞 for ice regrowth in March! 📷
🔗 A decade of working remotely | Lynn Fisher
I’ve seen execs point to a super productive off-site as proof that in-person is better. But in reality it showed what the team could do when they’re able to focus on one thing, uninterrupted, and with the usual decision blockers removed.
An excellent point and good reminder that interpretation matters.
Micro.blog just got 5x more valuable and was already leading the way. Love this service.
Today that’s changing. We are getting rid of the per-blog pricing. Instead, there will be three simple plans, and Micro.blog Premium will now include multiple blogs.
- $5: one blog with all the basic features
- $10: Micro.blog Premium, all the advanced features and up to 5 blogs included
- $15: Micro.blog Family, same as Premium but up to 5 users can post to any of your blogs
In which Apple isn’t quite the price hog it’s thought to be.
That leaves the Mac Studio. The [best Ultra model comes] with the RAM and storage spec I want, but it is $5,000. With a display, it will be over a thousand dollars above my inflation-adjusted target. But hang on, because the CPU upgrade is $1,000 on its own; with the base Ultra SoC, I am just above the inflation-adjusted budget. That is close enough for my books, and a surprising result: you can now get the second-best SoC available on any Mac with a display for basically the same as the highest-end 2017 iMac.
Don't skip the 'Take a Chance' link this week. Well, don't skip any of them, but especially not the TAC. 🤭
A note for folks looking to get the most out of a generous return period/policy.
Uh oh, time is already so easy to lose in Vision Pro. Watch out TikTokers. If Reels debuts, I’m doomed.
Apple’s Vision Pro headset now has a native TikTok app, the shortform video service has announced.
The interface will look relatively familiar [...], with a vertically oriented player for videos as well as buttons to like, comment, favorite, and share. But the company has taken advantage of the increased screen real estate [...] to spread out other interface elements, showing comments and creator profiles on a pane [...] so they don’t obscure the main video player.
Busywork isn’t always bad. I turn to it when I can’t deal but still need to get shit done.
A web designer told me busywork serves as “productive procrastination” when she’s avoiding more complex tasks. A woman in sales and marketing said she values the solitude of rote tasks, and retreats into spreadsheets “when everybody’s annoying and I’m peopled out and my bullshit meter is filled.” A senior research program manager at a nonprofit explained that she values how data cleaning [...] creates an intimacy with the information she’s processing.