The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-30

👤 Personal

#youtuber #youtuberecording

1️⃣ Since July 1st, I’ve been spending more than half the time at a rented country house at about one hour and a half of Montréal, Canada. This place is gorgeous and I have the pleasure to work from there a few days per week and spend all my weekends over there, too. I can’t count how many dozens sunset photos I made because our house is right on the lake shore, facing west. In short, I’m enjoying my time here. Because of this, I don’t really use my M4 Mac mini at home and can’t record any new videos for my YouTube channel. I miss that a lot, but I do prepare a few new ones that I’ll record sometime in September.

🗺️ Discoveries

#Perplexity #Browser #ai #comet #experiment #ipad #ipados26 #company/openai

1️⃣ Got a chance to get an invite for Perplexity's Comet browser and tried it on a few YouTube videos. I can see a trend here. 2️⃣ If you are an iPad user or consider becoming one, consider starting to follow Journeys Through Glass where Chris Hannah tries to revive his iPad usage, thanks to iPadOS 26. 3️⃣ OpenAI launched the study mode for students. On paper, it seems incredible and all. Think about it: you have a teacher at your disposal anytime, anywhere, for as long as you want. Not sure about a math problem? Solve it with ChatGPT! I wonder if we are also introducing a tool that could make students even lazier or even more tempted to cheat. OpenAI is moving so fast these days. Before Study Mode, they introduced Agents, which is another category of AI tools in itself. Dislaimer: I'm a paying subscrber to ChatGPT Plus.

tree.fm – Tune Into Forests From Around The World

France, 2 Rue de lOrne, Colombelles recorded by Nicolas Germain.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#bloggerlife #blogging #web #ai #experiment

1️⃣ Edition #100 of the People & Blog series from Manual Moreale is now available. The web isn't boring. Just pay attention. 2️⃣ I decided to contribute to my company's blog to write an article about the upcoming releases of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 and how they might impact device usage. My general outline is mostly complete, but now I have to decide whether to use ChatGPT in Canvas mode to continue or take the traditional route and write it out myself. I decided to kick the can and tried ChatGPT Canvas. I'm rather pleasantly surprised by the results. I'll tweak the text, but it helps to move faster, much faster. Yet, the quote below is a reminder that writing is a necessary process that should remain owned by humans. 3️⃣ I was recently wondering why I don't write long-form articles anymore. After giving much thought, I came to the conclusion that I'm still writing, but for another type of content. Maintaining this newsletter requires some time, as well as this living document about Apple Liquid Glass failures. Additionally, rebuilding a personal landing page using an unfamiliar app had an impact. All in all, I'm still quite active from a creativity perspective, albeit in a different way, and I should feel okay about it. 4️⃣ Don't miss my July blog posts digest, from Micro.blog, if you don't subscribe to the digest newsletter. Here's a summary: “The August 1, 2025 Numeric Citizen newsletter shares a moment of inspiration from a scenic view and ongoing frustration with iPadOS 26 beta 4. External display support remains unreliable, with UI glitches in Control Center and window handling. Liquid Glass still feels unpolished. No in-depth articles this time—just personal notes and quick observations.” — ChatGPT summarization. 5️⃣ I'm leaving Medium, here is why.

« (…) to me, the most important element of writing isn’t what you put on the page, it’s how the process of putting something on the page alters your thoughts... » — M.G. Siegler

🌄 Photography

#minimalism

1️⃣ I've been renting a country house since July 1st and just realized that I didn't bring my Nikon camera once. It's a great place to make sunset photos, but then what? 2️⃣ Here's a nice visual find on Glass, from Jules: Strange in the City. You'll see a very moody and strange atmosphere surrounding the city buildings. Really nice. 3️⃣ Here's another superb one, found on Mastodon, from Lou Plummer. I like minimalism in photography.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#microsoft #stevejobs #timcook #iphone17

1️⃣ Microsoft is firing a few thousand employees. Yep. They aren't exactly struggling, but they are looking forward and think that people who helped build Microsoft as it is today are no longer needed. It's a big middle finger to human decency if you ask me. Oh, and yes, they think that AI is the future, so they need people who are now embracing it, for good or for bad. 2️⃣ Is this the first sight of the iPhone 17 Pro in the wild? It could be. 3️⃣ Apple made a lot of money during their 2025Q3 quarter, which ended in June. Great highlights from MacRumors. 4️⃣ Apple launched the Apple Care One in the US. If you are curious to know if it is better than keeping your current Apple Care protection plans, head to this online calculator: iCare. Results might surprise you, as they did in a simulation I ran, even though I'm not in the US. I would barely save any money. 5️⃣ Tim Cook's tenure at Apple is now as long as Steve Jobs’ has been, as documented on Pixel Envy. I'm not sure this is a good thing or not. 6️⃣ It took 17 years to sell three billion iPhones.

“macOS and iPadOS are definitely merging. macOS is looking more and more like iPadOabout whether it is better than your current Apple Care protection plans, check outS, and iPadOS is looking more and more like macOS.” — @tekphloyd@social.lol

🚧 Special projects

#workflow #youtuberecording #apps

1️⃣ I decided to revamp a portion of my supporting documents for my YouTube video production. First, I'll revisit all my Craft documents to add tags. Second, I'll reorganize my usage of Play, a YouTube video collector for Mac, iPad and iPhone. It's a fantastic app that plays a small but valuable role in supporting my creative process. One of the things I want to do is synchronize my list of YouTube channel subscriptions with the ones stored in Play. While doing this, I'm reconsidering all my current subscriptions.

📱 Apps & Services

#utility #ipad #ipados26

1️⃣ The debate “native apps” vs “web apps" still rages. Can web apps be more secure than native apps? Provided that people don't enable permissions to access location and contacts, I disagree. 2️⃣ Are you looking to back up your iCloud Photos? Parashute Backup seems to do it straightforwardly and elegantly. It's on my list of apps to try. 3️⃣ Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. Poor Apple. Now that Apple has made the iPad a real computer, people are complaining that the iPad is no longer... an iPad. 🤦🏻‍♂️ 🤷🏻‍♂️ 4️⃣ Do you know Iconfactory? They are the makers behind many apps, like Tapestry, among many others. They decided to put some of their apps for sale because they lack the resources to update them. One thing I was curious about is that they have an app called Wallaroom, a wallpaper app. According to one of its founders, the company has been creating wallpapers since 1999! I didn't know that. I love that one, that one, and that one. And they keep doing them in the age of cheap and soulless wallpapers. They have the guts to keep them coming. Bravo. Oh, and they do a lot of icons, too, which is why the company is named that way, I guess.

📺 YouTube

#ipados26 #foldablephones #uidesign #android

1️⃣ Can Apple do better next year with the iPhone Fold? 2️⃣ Marques hails iPadOS 26 as the long‑awaited shift that finally lets the iPad feel like a true laptop — spotlighting freely resizable and movable windows, a Mac‑style menu bar, full cursor support, an expanded dock with folders, and a built‑in Preview app, turning the multitasking workflow into a real productivity environment. 3️⃣ The video compares Google’s Material 3 Expressive and Apple’s Liquid Glass design systems, arguing that Material 3 offers a more user-friendly, expressive, and accessible UI, while Apple’s approach prioritizes aesthetics over usability.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#experiment #ai #perplexity #writing #craft

1️⃣ Starting with this newsletter edition, I'm experimenting with the upcoming support for tags in Craft. Each section now sports tags describing the themes covered. It should help a bit the reader who is glancing at the content and it helps me organize my content. 2️⃣ I ran an experiment with Perplexity AI, which was triggered by this blog post from Andrew Canion on Micro.blog. It was fun. The next step is to ask Perplexity AI to imagine and write the next article for me. I tried. But to respect my dear readers, I decided not to publish it. 3️⃣ Here's a reminder that this experiment of live cataloging Liquid Glass failures and oops is still going on. 4️⃣ This article from Om Malik gives me clear reasons why I hate Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.

🔮 Looking forward

#aisummary #ai #company/google #company/meta

1️⃣ People are less likely, much less likely in fact, to click a link when searching on the web with an AI summary at the top. Google is offering this, and Microsoft is too. This means fewer visits to the website and less ad revenue. By adding an AI mode in Google, I wonder what Google is thinking: do they prefer to lose ad revenue over losing visitors to their search services altogether? I do refer a lot to these AI summaries, and yep, I don’t usually go further than this. 2️⃣ It seems that, according to this post, the next major release of Ghost, the website hosting platform, is launching this upcoming week or the week after! I can't wait to see what’s in store! FYI, numericcitizen.me where this newsletter is published is hosted on Ghost.org.

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇪🇺 💪🏻