The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2024-46

Decay, a Series by JF Martin — Glass

A selection of the best decay scenes as seen through my camera lenses. Many of those images were shot when I was an active urban explorer circa 2018-2020.

The following is a summary of my contribution activities since the previous newsletter edition
👨🏻‍💻 26 posts 🙂
🏞️ 11 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔
This edition covers week 44, 45 and 46.

👤 Personal

1️⃣ Coming back from a one-week vacation, working on the plane with my iPad Pro. I'm loving it each time. This was a small vacation before starting a long stretch of no-time-for-vacation. Nothing until next spring, until then: work, work, home improvement project, writing, sharing, contributing.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I’m continuing my gradual discovery of Bluesky. My usage follows an up-and-down curve, but I’m learning to like Bluesky. I started this journey in mid-2023. Since then, Bluesky has grown in features, maturity and popularity. The platform is now reaching more than 20 million users. I'm hearing that Bluesky usage has been surging recently, especially since the US election. I’m not sure why. I’m happy to see Micro.blog support for Bluesky continues to grow, too. Micro.blog is still my go-to solution on the web, but I’m adding Bluesky to my daily routine, mainly for reading the news. The only thing to remember: social networks can be toxic and time suckers.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ In the “Small scale is the best scale,” blog post, I was reminded of a thought a friend of mine shared with me recently: the world as we know it now makes everything seemingly close. At any second, we can see and hear what is happening everywhere. It can be a good thing, but some people think it could be harmful to some degree. Are we really made to absorb this always-on proximity with the rest of the world? My friend thinks no. And I'm starting to agree with her. As I get older, I should focus on locality instead of globality—food for thought. 2️⃣ I discovered Read Max, a site on Substack. I read a few things here and there, but this one about people preferring AI-generated art over human-created art caught my attention. Let me say this: we tend to overestimate people's ability to decipher what is great art like what is a great photography. I would argue that it's a minority of people who can recognize what makes a great photo. We also tend to overestimate our value in our creations, be with images or words. That one is not really related to the Read Max website.

Read Max | Max Read | Substack

Explaining the weird new future, one newsletter at a time. Subscribe for a twice weekly delivery of internet culture, mega-platform grotesquerie, crypto conspiracies, deep forum lore, fringe politics, and other artifacts of what’s to come. Click to read Read Max, by Max Read, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

SubstackMax Read

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ The recent news of Apple's acquisition of Pixelmator prompted me to write about this. Since then, nothing new has been announced either by Pixelmator or by Apple. It's too early, I guess. I'm sure future events around Pixelmator apps will trigger more writings. Meanwhile, application updates and videos like this one are still being pushed out! 2️⃣ About once a week or more, I get requests for guest posts on my blog on numericcitizen.me. As shown below, the inquirer doesn't specify why my website seems interesting to him and doesn't specify which subject he would write about. How am I supposed to pull the trigger and ask for more information? 🤔🤷🏻‍♂️

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I finally had a chance to experience the Glass Series feature, officially available since November 12th. Since then, I managed to create a few photo series (see Darkness, Minimalism, Shadows). Creating a new series is simple and can be done in two ways: uploading many new images or selecting already published ones. The first method will flood the followers’ timeline. I wish photos would be published with some delays until all images in the series are made public. The second method is straightforward; it is not shared with followers once the series is published. As shown below, social network previews are well-designed (a link leading to a specific series posted on Bluesky). With Glass Series, Glass gave a new name to Flickr or another similar service, an album. When browsing the photo timeline, pictures that are part of a series are identified with photo thumbnails overlaid on the photo. Hovering the mouse over produces a nice animation, expanding the thumbnail to show the number of images in the series. The side effect of this design decision is to improve the discoverability of past published images. The Series adds value to Glass and proves that Glass is maturing. I'll use them to organize my photos better. 2️⃣ Thanks to the new Series feature, I discovered this photographer on Glass; Here is the Impressionism series from Nico Photo. 3️⃣ Finally, I shared many of my best urban exploration photos on Glass to go with the new category of the month: decay.

Darkness, a Series by JF Martin — Glass

In this series, I want to show different degrees of darkness expressions.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Apple continues to release the next iteration of its operating systems with more Apple Intelligence features. 2️⃣ iCloud Backups for devices running iOS 8 no longer work, and Apple asks users to upgrade. 3️⃣ Lightning to Headphone Jack adaptors are no longer available from Apple; they were introduced with the iPhone 7. 4️⃣ I switched to the M4 Mac mini, and it went well. I shared a few details here. 5️⃣ Apple makes it even harder for thieves or the police to get access to a stolen iPhone with this little trick. Thanks, Apple. 6️⃣ AppleInsider reports that Apple no longer offers free repair of the infamous butterfly keyboard on MacBook Pro. What a bad streak for Apple.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I always have one project or two in my mind. For a few weeks, I've been following the development of RealMac Software Elements, a static website editor for the Mac. It's in beta, and the program is expanding its beta tester base. I have received an invite to look at myself. The only issue is a subscription to enter the beta program is mandatory. That's a first for me, and I wondered if this is a frequent practice. Nonetheless, I'm really tempted to give it a try. My first project would be to build a prototype website for a hypothetical freelancing job in IT services. The second project would be to rebuild my current company's website, which needs a complete redesign. Ultimately, I would love to use Elements to replace some of my publishing needs currently addressed by Craft's shared documents, like my About page. I'll give myself more time to think about this as I have a few other things on my plate for the rest of the year.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ News Explorer, a lesser-known RSS reader, entered beta for version 2.0. A few years ago, I happily used News Explorer for a few years as my primary RSS reading solution after spending quite some time with Reeder. The upcoming version 2.0 brings a few notable additions, such as feed filtering with keywords, which I appreciate in Inoreader, the RSS reading solution I'm using now. Am I going to switch back from Inoreader? Nope. Yet, I like to keep track of apps that I used to like. You never know when I might return. 2️⃣ You can use Apple Intelligence to ask ChatGPT to create images, but they come out in a square format. You cannot use a directive like “using a 16:9 aspect ratio”, which is possible in the ChatGPT client. Also, requests aren't saved in ChatGPT conversation history, even with a paid account, which is too bad. 3️⃣ I like using small Mac utilities, and up until now, I was happy using Tot, a small menubar text editor. A recent update to Raycast introduced Raycast Notes, and I'm in love with it. I moved all my notes to Raycast Notes and dropped Tot.

RSS Readers War: From Reeder to News Explorer

I’m a long time user of Reeder, a well known and well designed RSS reader for the Apple ecosystem (see my review of Reeder 4 here). But, recently during a discussion on Telegram (which by the way y…

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

Tripsy – Trip Planner for iPhone (iOS), iPad & Mac

The Ultimate Travel Companion – Tripsy is a travel planner that helps you plan your entire trip in one place. You can share your itinerary with family and friends, get flight alerts, store documents, and make wish lists of places to visit.

In theory, Tripsy is a great app idea that appears well designed and executed. The problem is that I don’t plan my trips in enough details to warrant buying or subscribing to an app like this. I’m sharing this here just in case you might find this useful.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Realmac Software continues publishing new videos about their upcoming static website editor Elements. 2️⃣ Pixelmator also continues publishing videos about recent updates, too. I like that. 3️⃣ If you want to see Apple Intelligence in action, this time, image playground and genmojis creation are showcased in that video. 4️⃣ Marques Brownlee talks about Apple Intelligence, too. 5️⃣ In Shot with iPhone, Tyler Stalman exposes the current state of iPhone photography and videography with many intricate details. There is a lot to unpack in the video here. Many valuable insights about iPhone photo formats, image processing, and more exist. After watching this, I realized that iPhone photography is becoming quite complicated. 6️⃣ An interesting one from the Notion team. Being 20 years younger, I would probably seek to work for them. 7️⃣ Montreal, the city where I've been living since 2006. At 32:09 in this video, we can see the building close to my downtown office, on the right. Montreal is such a diverse environment with so many great places as well as more troubling or ugly ones, like any big cities in North America. I often compare Montreal to New York.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I’ve been experimenting with Apple Intelligence Image Playground in recent weeks, and I must say that I'm not very impressed. No matter which photo I select, the results are awful. 2️⃣ I tried something with ChatGPT: “Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like.” The results aren't compelling, as seen below. 3️⃣ I put my M1 Mac mini for sale. Many of these are currently being sold, following the redesigned M4 Mac mini. It won't be an easy sale.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ I'd like to put some time aside to create a series of YouTube videos dedicated at Craft 3.0 that is coming very soon. I'm not sure if I'll be able to achieve my objectives here because my next few weekends are rather busy.

I wish you a great week! ✌️👋🏻