Ron Guest

Last month I set a goal to follow 100 people on Micro.blog by the end of the year (I was at 79 at the time). I easily surpassed that goal yesterday and it is very nice to see the quality of my timeline remains high. 💯

On social media like Facebook and Twitter virtually everyone I interact(ed) with is someone I knew before (family, friends, colleagues). In the early days of Flickr almost everyone I interacted with was new to me and I still have very fond memories of that period and retain some of those people as friends. Micro.blog is the only other instance where I’ve met a lot of smart, reasonable and kind people online and felt it was a net benefit to me. I recently tried Mastodon and at least my experience hasn’t been good and I doubt I’ll really participate there.

Like some others I have a long list of things (I think?) I’d like to see changed on Micro.blog. But at the same time I really appreciate that they’re taking their time to manage the experience. Flickr ruined the social aspects (as well as undermining it as a serious, or at least semi-serious) site for discussing photos. I wouldn’t want to see that happen again.

A cappuccino tastes especially good on a dreary day.

Hanging out at the local coffee shop to spend some time working on my economic/financial forecast. We’re facing the broadest range of outcomes I can remember so I want to have a solid game plan. Planning >> Reacting.

For those who have deleted or deactivated their Facebook account: did you post a note on Facebook in advance pointing people to an alternative site (like micro.blog)?

Welp, did my first ECG using my ⌚️ ♥️ Apparently I’m still not dead ✔️

It’s a “needy” time of year for social media companies. Three times in 2 hours yesterday Facebook sent me silly email notifications (over nothing important), then LinkedIn joined the party, and now Twitter is bugging me. I’ll eventually block them but curious how far they’ll go.

This kind of info might help us convince some of our friends to leave the platform.

Facebook’s internal documents show its ruthlessness

I’m really curious: what school of marketing teaches that if a customer buys something from you the best next step is to bombard their inbox with multiple emails a day? Does that really drive the most revenue? Instant opt out from me, and also I hate you from now on.

A few months back I dropped the Adobe Photo plan subscription. I’ve never gotten along with Lightroom (still pining for Aperture!) and didn’t feel the cost justified my infrequent and light usage of Photoshop. Their recent approach to Cloud storage and deprecation of the standalone app left a really bad taste in my mouth. Plus, for me, their Cloud approach made for an extremely awkward workflow. I’ve been doing simple work in Apple’s Photos app on iOS and macOS as well as randomly using apps like Darkroom on iOS for more advanced photo processing.

I recently needed to do some Photoshop-type photo editing and recalled getting Affinity Photo for macOS for free about a year ago. I fired it up and It was a great alternative and I quickly accomplished what I needed. After doing some research I decided to buy the iOS version. It is quite powerful and after watching a couple of their tutorial videos I’m getting along quite well with it. I appreciate they put in the work to do some very clever things to take advantage of a touch device. It feels good and is a productive approach - better than on my Mac.

Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I get nothing out of posting this, and don’t know anyone working for the company. N.B. I wish people disclosed this kind of information in posts about products. I often see people post positive comments on product’s and later find they are compensated, have a relationship with, or get special privileges from the company. Not cool.

We’re blessed we live only a block away from this creek. It has never run dry, even during a drought. After heavy storms from here to points north it rises rather dramatically. Even more wonderful is the fact there is a trail running next to this creek that stretches for miles.

Grasses 📷

Neon and Invisible. Not two words I normally see together.

Our real-world usage * My wife uses her iPad Pro exclusively (she is the full time manager of our home life)
* Our 10 year old son uses his iPad 99% of the time (once every couple of months he plays a game on an iMac)
* Our 14 year old daughter games on an iMac most days and everything else is on her iPhone, even school work. She almost never uses her iPad.
* I use my MacBook Pro for hardware and software development, some macOS-only financial reports, and bulk photo processing. Everything else is on my iPad (even some script development).

Our son could easily live without a Mac. Our daughter lives without an iPad. I need both. So amongst us, given our life stages and interests, it’s 50-50. I don’t see anything happening the next couple of years that result in us eliminating Macs.

The main difference the iPad has driven for us is we no longer need two Macs and our Macs will last longer (our 5 year old iMac is still doing surprisingly well playing games). There is also an implication for my backup strategy as more and more data shifts to iPads — even my code is in iCloud (as well as on the Mac and Github). My 12.9” iPad Pro is awesome but it can’t compete with the development productivity having an ultra-wide monitor, true windowing, background tasks etc bring. I don’t see any way this is going to change in the next couple of years. I think if Apple made a strategic shift to enable this kind of thing on iOS it would be a huge mistake for the general iOS user base. I can see them making some moves to support development but not to the point of trying to replace Macs.

I am not sure what impact the advent of iPads has on Apple’s share-of-wallet. The iPads are personal devices so each person needs one (for our family even if the iPad had user profiles this would still be the case). The upfront cost of iPads is marginally cheaper than buying a couple of Macs however Apple is driving a faster refresh cycle on iPads. The rate of improvement of iPads vs Macs makes it hard to resist regular upgrades (at least for the parental units) and in practice I think these costs will exceed a Mac-focused approach.

The longer I go between opening the Facebook app (to check posts from the kids’ schools) the more needy Facebook becomes - sending a steady stream of notifications in email and push. Often nothing more than “oh look, someone you’ve never met posted a photo!”. Yes, they’re evil.

I was quite sad when Apple dropped support for ordering Calendars, Cards etc directly from the macOS Photos app because I had used it for many years. I decided to give Snapfish a try and was really pleased with their site - easy and responsive composition in Safari on my iPad.

The more work I do on the 12.9” iPad the more impressed I am. With the keyboard attached it’s a better “laptop” than my laptop & reading is expansive to say the least. I didn’t initially get the pencil but I think I’ll use the money from selling my old iPad to buy one.

Even a Mars rover gets all look, something shiny and new!

Another glorious day of severe clear 📷 🌞 👟

After 24 hours w/the iPad Pro 12.9” (up from my former 9.7” Pro):
* My iPhone X suddenly looks like a postage stamp * I can type much faster - don’t know if it is the larger size of the keyboard or if it is the increased rigidity (used on lap) * Glad I got this instead of the 11”

I’m curious what app people who host at micro.blog use for drafting posts? When I was hosting on WordPress it was easy to draft posts, preview the result etc.

Note: my question is about iOS as I do all my posting from my iPad/iPhone.

Setting up my new iPad went great! Until I tried to access my files in iCloud Drive - nothing there and nothing will upload. So far nothing Apple Support has tried has fixed it… Moving on up the support chaing.

TIL in the Micro.blog app on iPhone I can expose a return key when composing by going to numeric mode. Always bothered me Twitter had a return and this app didn’t.

Native Texans are stereotyped as conservative and Republican in general but they threw their support to Beto. Transplants were thought to be from liberal states. Hmm. Native Texans voted for native Texan Beto O’Rourke, transplants went for Ted Cruz, exit poll shows

I might have done a thing…

I Christmas shopped at a local mall today. While there I tried a new place for lunch. The tacos al pastor were small (suited me well) and very tasty. In addition to the requisite ESPN on the TVs over the bar they also had Food Network playing. I wondered if that is a strategy?

NASA gets a lot of shade. While its had its own failures it’s the only agency to ever land on Mars. Multiple times. InSight used several new technologies which all worked first time. Impressive! 🚀

Control room video of the touchdown
Summary from Ars Technica