My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024-21

👨🏻‍💻 18 posts 🙂
🏞️ 8 photos shared 🙂
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I'm a slow creator. 2️⃣ I hate Alzheimer’s disease. 3️⃣ It seems that the pace of my online contribution (especially writing) is slowing down. Is it because summer is around the corner and I don't like to stay inside when it’s so nice outside? Should I care or just let it be?

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ What is more challenging for me: discovering a new photographer or writer? I would say the latter because I consume more photos than words, and the time it takes to appreciate an image is far shorter than reading someone's blog posts or articles. 2️⃣ It appears that Ubiquiti might be on the verge of releasing a network attached storage unit (a NAS) according to this article. I'm curious about this; as a Ubiquiti network user, I love their home networking wireless router and switches. I also love my Synology NAS, too. It will be interesting to watch!

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I'm still unsatisfied with my reading habits. Not enough time, not enough reading, sadly. 😑

“The web has become a kind of business over the last few decades and AI will be the final step in making the internet impersonal.” — Flips on Scribbles

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ This week was a balancing act between migrating previously published blog posts and writing original content on my metablog. I started migrating my content from Craft to Micro.blog for this site to get RSS feeds, among other things. It's a long but fun process. 2️⃣ What should I do with my old writings that are shared online? For example, I created a small website last year about building a small virtual lab on an Apple Mac Pro. I wanted to document my building process and test different things using VMware Fusion for Mac. For many reasons, I abandoned the project. It's an eleven-page website containing more than 8000 words. What should I do with it? Delete all the content? Since I still have the source content in Ulysses, I should probably go ahead and delete it. Nobody is visiting the microsite anyway. 3️⃣ On Saturday, I decided to delete the content. Poof! 4️⃣ My monthly Micro.blog posts digest is out and can be found here.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I forgot about this iPhone camera review published by DXOmark after the release of the iPhone 15 Pro Max last fall. It’s a must read if you are considering upgrading to the newest iPhone.

Ben Kenney on Glass Photography Community

Ben Kenney. Musician, motorcyclist, camera owner.

🎙️ Podcasting

1️⃣ It's not about podcasting but the recently introduced audio narration on Micro.blog. Here is a great example. This post should have included the play button, but there is an issue with the Cards theme. I submitted a support case to the developer. Meanwhile, you can read and listen to a test post here.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Gruber thinks that Spotify is being hypocrites. I agree. 2️⃣ This fascinating article about Microsoft's Surface trying to beat Apple’s laptops is perplexing. Still, the following quote below is very telling about Intel's current state in the CPU market, and maybe in microchips in general: they are losing the general-purpose CPU mindshare. They never were in the GPU game, either. What’s next for Intel, then? 3️⃣ Apple WWDC24 is approaching, and 2024 ADA finalists were announced. Djay and Rooms are my favourites on the list. I played with Djay quite a bit during my DJing course last fall. The Rooms game looks great, similar to Craft (the game) but fancier. 4️⃣ If you are an Apple fan and a LEGO fan, this guy built a unique and custom Apple Store with LEGOs. That's cool. I wonder if Apple would be willing to negotiate with LEGO and make a deal to sell such a LEGO kit. 5️⃣ Speaking of WWDC, I want someone to create a new version of these hand-drawn notes for this year's edition. 6️⃣ I decided to stop using Timery and Toggl. This week’s edition will be the last, featuring a summary of my time-tracking, as seen at the bottom of this newsletter. It was a great experience to track how I spend my spare time on creative activities, but it is a burden to do and costs me too much money.

“I’ll go out on a limb and say that today marks the beginning of the end for x86. Either the x86 architecture has reached an inevitable endpoint, or Intel and AMD cannot compete talent-wise. (Or both.) But as of today, the performance-per-watt gulf between ARM and Intel/x86 is no longer just an Apple silicon thing — it’s now a PC thing, too. If there was any chance for Intel or AMD to catch up it had to happen between the M1’s breakthrough introduction in 2020 and now. But they couldn’t do it.” John Gruber
“Apple should outsource infrastructure (like AI) so they can focus on user-facing experiences.” — Unknown author

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ I'm dropping Timery and Toggl Track from my digital landscape. This combo was used to track how I spend my creative time, and I reported on this in each weekly creative summary. This edition will be the last one sporting the Timery time tracking report at the end. 2️⃣ I’m considering buying TimeStory for iPad for a unique personal project. I’m a big fan of this app on the Mac, but I need the mobile version. In case you didn't know, TimeStory is an app for building timelines. 3️⃣ Craft 2.8.3 will introduce an update to support ChatGPT 4o. It’s about time! 4️⃣ I finally got the ChatGPT Mac app installed, and I like it, especially the Spotlight-like prompt window. I don't know how I'm going to continue using MacGPT.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ This video showcases the Hasselblad Master 2023 finalists. Strangely, all the photos share a common aesthetic, and I don’t know if this is a common trait among Hasselblad camera owners. It’s fascinating, nonetheless. 2️⃣ My YouTube usage increased recently because I'm listening to more and more electronic music using the service. YouTube seems better at surfacing electronic music, which I like compared to Apple Music. 3️⃣ A great photo walk video in New York, late at night. I love those videos.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Manuel Moreale is discussing what is the best consumption-to-creation ratio. After some calculations, he thinks his ratio is around 97/3. I don't know what's mine, but if I had to do the same exercise, I would add all the writing I didn’t finish as a shared article. I have many pieces I never published, and I don't know if I ever will. I know also that I don't read enough. I also know I don't always finish reading articles or watching videos. It's a chaotic world divided between consuming all sorts of things in whole or in part and writing pieces that most find the finish line, but many are dropped along the way. 2️⃣ Because of my increasing generative AI services and apps, my use of services like Google Search and Unsplash has dramatically decreased. My case might be anecdotal, but I can confirm that one of my friend's Google usage also drastically decreased. I wonder if Google is starting to notice.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I updated my main blog's card theme to get full support for the recently introduced audio voice-over for a blog post. Now, I need to test that feature of playing my voice to read my blog post aloud. 2️⃣ I plan to tweak this newsletter starting next week's edition. The exhibits section will go, but content will be spread across sections instead. Let me know if you prefer the old way or the new way.

I wish you a great week!

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index

Exhibits 👀