Here is the Numeric Citizen Introspection Newsletter #7 for February of 2021. Deep in the winter season, I’m still curating the internet, nothing less, to build a newsletter full of interesting tidbits for you.

Now, let’s start with this month’s post highlights.

Post highlights from my microblog

• The efficiency of Apple’s Rosetta 2 on M1-powered Macs could partly explain why there are quite a few un-optimized apps.
• Intel has been silent and took its time before responding to Apple’s M1 announcement last fall. Now Intel has spoken. I’m far for certain they are helping themselves here.
• Are we digital nomads? People come and go, move from one place to another, all the time. That’s certainly true in the physical world, but what about the numeric world? See, people like a service better than another, so they move their stuff over there. An example of this is moving from Mailchimp to Substack. Read the article and the conversation that followed to learn more about this phenomenon.

Post highlights from my Medium page

• The Friday Notes series continues. In issue #10, I wrote about the feeling of the pressure to keep writing.
• To any current or potential GuruShots game players, I talk about how time and money-consuming this game can be for those looking for some fame. Must read.

Post highlights from my Numeric Citizen Blog

• One of my most popular blog posts, written in 2018, needed a major refresh. This GuruShots game tricks and tips guide has been revamped, and take another look at the popular photography game: GuruShots. I had so much to write about; I had to create part I and Part II.
• Another important blog post, « The Journey is the Reward,» is about focusing on the journey, not the results of writing for an audience. Even we very few readers, the acts of thinking and writing are the most important.

Apple tidbits worth my attention

Another slow month for Apple-related news. There were no new products, no new and notable software releases, but I managed to track a few interesting things.

First, on February 24th, Steve Jobs would have been 66. Even if I love what Apple has become over the years since he died, I miss him dearly. What a great picture of him.

1️⃣ Part of the Apple experience lies in the product launches, not only owning and using a physical device. I’ve been following Apple’s keynotes since Apple started to make them open to the public with event streaming. Wayne Goodrich was the producer of Apple’s keynote for 20 years, during the Steve Jobs era. It is always fascinating to get a « behind the scene » look at Apple's critical moments.

2️⃣ Do you remember Mac OS X 10.6 — Snow Leopard? I do. Many people remember this release of Mac OS (not macOS) as being one of the most stable ones in the history of Mac OS (and macOS) releases. I don’t know personally; I can’t remember how good it was. Things were certainly simpler at that time, with a lot fewer services to maintain. Riccardo Mori is looking back at this release in great detail. Worth a look and read.

3️⃣ Chromebooks are eating into the Windows world, not the Mac world. For now. Is Apple scared to be next? Probably not. Microsoft? Probably.

4️⃣ Apple helped a company to perfect its manufacturing process of COVID-19 test kits.

5️⃣ If you have an M1-based Mac, you may experience Bluetooth connectivity issues. I do. Apple supposedly fixed those with macOS 11.2. The situation improved but as Marco Arment puts it, there as still many lingering connectivity issues. Be sure to read responses to his tweet. He is not alone.

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Some of my photos that came to light

As we keep moving through winter, our photos tend to reflect this. Here are two pictures I took in my neighbourhood while taking a quick and refreshing walk.

Must see photography stuff

It seems every user of Adobe’s Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic will, at one time or another, ask himself or herself if they should drop the service to go elsewhere. One example of this self-questioning is Jack Baty’s recent blog post. 🖥

The following article contains a graph comparing the decline of traditional cameras and the rise of smartphone cameras. It is simply astonishing how important the iPhone came to be in digital photography. Maybe I should say, in popular digital photography—no wonder why companies like Nikon are struggling big time. 📷

Some photographers talk a lot about their gear. Others don’t. I always thought that to make great photography; the gear has little to do with it. This article is interesting in that respect. Do you agree? 📸

If you’re working from home like me, you may find that your webcam is not precisely producing the best video image than what you get from an iPhone. In this extensible article, learn why webcams suck.

Did you know that you can use your iPhone as a webcam replacement? Learn how you can do this in the following article.

I love great object design. Cameras are often great design examples. Leica is well known for creating a well-crafted piece of art that happens to take great pictures. I recently stumble on an article that gave me the idea of getting a Leica camera. After looking at the price, I changed my mind.

Want to see our planet in all its glory on your computer? These videos are mind-blowing. Too bad our planet is so sick.

Speaking of space, must-see photography of Perseverance descent on the surface of Mars taken by HiRISE. Mind-blowing that something like this can be seen so far away.

Do you remember the photography-oriented social network named “Ello”? I’ve been trying the service recently to republish some of my work. Have a look.

Climate change issues

Privacy stuff we should care about

Apple’s iOS 14.5 is around the corner. One of this release's main features is about allowing users to decide if they want to be tracked or not. Facebook doesn’t like Apple’s move. Google will adapt. Facebook too.👮🏻‍♀️

Speaking of Apple, it recently updated its “Platform Security Guide”. This guide is an overview of security measures Apple puts in place in all its products and services. I did have a look at it for a few minutes, and boy, this stuff is complicated. Security is complicated. 📄

Quotes to remember

iOS 14.5 developer beta is out and it confirms that Apple is as frustrated as all of us about unlocking the iPhone with a mask on. — Jooanna Stern

The truly creative person is not satisfied with the solutions to problems unless they are elegant. He or she demands work that is simultaneously both true and beautiful. — Ken Kocienda

The biggest disruptions start with the simplest solution to the most important part of the problem instead of the complete solution to the whole problem. — Aaron Levie

What’s next? I’m glad you asked!

I recently learned about the existence of what is called “Digital Gardens” (read this article to learn where they come from and what it is all about: “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden”).

“Digital gardens are online places to keep pieces of information in a semi-structured fashion. They fit between well-structured timeline-based blogs and unstructured numeric artifacts. Like natural gardens, their digital counterparts are unique from one person to the other and keep growing over time with new knowledge tidbits linked together to form some kind of web.”

My blog is a digital garden, not a blog:

“The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting "showpiece" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.”

I like the idea so much that I wrote about it recently on Medium, in Friday Note #11. I’ve been thinking of doing something like a digital garden using the excellent note-taking app called “Craft”. As an example of its capabilities to create beautiful websites, look at this one that I have made about Apple’s rumours. Stay tuned.

Speaking of Craft, I’m still in the process of doing my research so that I can write a review of it. In the meantime, if you want to learn what is Craft all about, see this YouTube video; it is one of the best out there to show Craft in action. Craft is the most significant new application to come to my numeric life in the last few years. It is that good.

Finally, I wanted to share some exciting news for me: I started a website about my experience as a blogger: Numeric Citizen I/O. If you are curious to have a look behind the scene of a serious blogger, it’s the right place to go!

Leftovers

First, let’s start this section with a number: 500 000. 😔

Silence. 😶

Back to normal programming. 📺

I’m a big iPad fan since 2010. It is great for so many of my numeric needs. In iOS 13, Apple made it simpler for developers to use the Apple Pencil in their apps. Writing on the iPad is something I rarely do, though. I recently came across reMarkable, a very intriguing tablet made for handwriting. Their presentation is very Apple’ly.

Newsletters and Hey… what do they have in common? https://world.hey.com. You can read my thoughts on this intriguing service currently being tested by HEY founders.

If you are like me and have to prepare many presentations, please, do your audience a favour and look at these simple tips.

Do you know about the “Timex Sinclair” computer? I nearly bought one in 1981, before starting programming on an Apple ][+. Compare this device with the latest RaspberryPi 400 now. What a world of differences and similarities.

Oh, and finally, something REALLY mindblowing:

This concludes the Numeric Citizen Introspection Newsletter #7 for February of 2021. I would love to get your feedback and read your comments. Thanks for being a subscriber. Thanks for reading! Thanks for sharing. 🙏🏻