The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-48

👤 Personal {#newsletter}

1️⃣ I'm sorry if this edition is late. I was on vacation for a week and didn't gather enough content to put together a new edition until recently. 2️⃣ I have also been busy recently testing a new version of Craft, which required more of my time than usual. This version is a significant shift, which prompted me to allocate more of my free time than usual. Things should return to normal once this version is out.

“When the things that matter most become monthly fees rather than assets, our relationship to society changes.” — Jenna Park in “America is one big subscription service”

🗺️ Discoveries {#apple #applerumor}

1️⃣ This could be the best and most surprising video of the year! Discovered on Mastodon, available on YouTube! This guy has a lot of talent, that’s for sure. It's a fake Apple Event happening in March of next year, announcing already heavily rumoured products. I'll let you watch yourself. I wonder if Apple has become too predictable, which allows people to create these videos. 2️⃣ I discovered a new blog: disassociated—a great article about a possible (and desirable) comeback of personal blogs. I certainly hope so.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing {#aiwriting}

1️⃣ iA Writer has introduced a new feature called Authorship that visually distinguishes AI-generated text from human-written content, allowing users to identify and improve upon AI contributions in their documents easily. The implementation is simple yet effective, if demo clips are any indication. It's the first instance of such an idea I've seen. I wish Ulysses would do something like that. 2️⃣ As reported by CBC, Alberta is considering using AI to write a new law. Yep, you read it right. What can go wrong you might say? This is the first known occurence of such stupid idea.

🌄 Photography {#iphone #unsplash #creativity}

1️⃣ In “Becoming an iPhone Photographer”, Lee Peterson reflects on his diminishing use of his mirrorless camera while using the iPhone more. This gradual change enabled him to be more careful and appreciative of his iPhone as a camera, thereby providing greater flexibility. 2️⃣ A reflective exploration of whether AI can create meaningful art, arguing that true artistic value still depends on human intention and interpretation, by Robert Adams. 3️⃣ Finnish photographer Juha Tanhua creates striking “space-like” images by photographing gasoline and oil puddles in parking lots. Although the photos resemble astrophotography—galaxies, nebulae, comets—they are captured by pointing the camera downward at iridescent spills on asphalt, often after rain. Tanhua has pursued this project since 2005, treating these puddles as a hidden microcosm and later enhancing contrast to emphasize their cosmic appearance. 4️⃣ The Unsplash Awards, 2025 edition, is full of gems. The architecture category is always my favourite but most categories contain great and sometimes touching images. That's why photography as art exists: for touching people.

🍎 Apple & Tech {#macintosh #applesilicon}

1️⃣ Recently, Apple Silicon crossed the fifth anniversary mark. Here's a good comparison between an M1 and an M5 from MacRumors. What a ride, and I get the feeling that Apple is far from done with this processor. Apple Silicon is probably the most profound enabler of any transformation the Mac has undergone since its inception. More from MacSparky. 2️⃣ Apple has big plans for the Mac in 2026, but it appears that the Mac Pro might not be part of them. 3️⃣ Apple invited some developers to share their story about adopting Liquid Glass for their apps. My experience, as documented here, is that the outcomes of Liquid Glass adoption vary quite a lot—great examples include Craft and Ulysses. 4️⃣ Backblaze’s Q3 2025 Drive Stats report reveals an overall annualized failure rate of 1.55% across 328,348 drives. That's a lot of drives. Interesting to see drive stats by brand and sizes. This could influence my buying decision if I were to replace drives in my Synology NAS. 5️⃣ I love ChatGPT Atlas even more since they released an update that adds vertical tabs, just like the ARC Browser. But Microsoft might be wrong with its approach to AI with Edge. I don't really like Microsoft Edge, and I don't really like Copilot in general because I've been forced to use it at work, and it's not impressive. They use ChatGPT services in the back-end, but somehow Microsoft manage to create an inferior experience compared to ChatGPT. 6️⃣ Apple's macOS Tahoe icons are a departure from Mac history. As for iOS, the trend goes downhill. Most of the new icons represent a decline in design quality. John Gruber feels rather critical about that, too. The Safari icon, before and after. It's not an improvement. 7️⃣ Is the lack of Windows support on Apple Silicon Macs hurting Apple after 5 years? Well, I don't think so. I guess I changed my mind. What is hurting the Mac is the Electron development framework and web technologies, because fewer and fewer developers are using Mac-native APIs and prefer multi-platform toolkits.

"The first five years of Apple silicon are now the five best years in the Mac’s history." — Jason Snell in “How five years of Apple silicon transformed the Mac”

“iPadOS has got more feature improvements in 26.1 and 26.2 than the entire previous three years of Stage Manager” — Steve Troughton-Smith on Mastodon

🚧 Special projects {#craft #mcp}

1️⃣ I've been spending quite some time reorganizing a vast portion of my content in Craft to better take advantage of Craft’s upcoming APIs and MCP support. I created a large collection of all the video production documents, which allowed me to prompt my collection for metrics like average video duration (collection can’t summarize columns or properties yet). And sure enough, the Craft Assistant returned with a valid answer! 2️⃣ Speaking of MCP, did you know that the Day One journaling app on the Mac supports MCP? Here's the documentation.

📱 Apps & Services {#apps}

1️⃣ Apple announces finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards. Besides Acorn, an image processing app, I don't know any of these apps. To me, this year's selection is meagre. 2️⃣ According to an Apple-commissioned study, the EU’s Digital Markets Act didn't bring down app prices. Who knew! 3️⃣ Folder Quick Look is a macOS app that you must install right now. Preview folder and archive contents (ZIP, RAR, and more) instantly in macOS Quick Look. Just select a folder and press the Space bar. Version 1.5 added support for image thumbnails if the folder contains image files. See the following screenshot: a folder called “background images" is previewed.

📺 YouTube {#stevejobs #bloggerlife #design}

1️⃣ Great and unpublished until recently interview with Steve Jobs, in the early days of Pixar. This guy had so many great insights. 2️⃣ Tiago Forte needs a break—a short video from him explaining what's going on for him in the next few months. 3️⃣ Apple calls it the 'Spinning Wait Cursor.' We, the users, call it the Spinning Beach Ball of Death—an interesting story behind this iconic UI element of the Mac.

🌟 Miscellaneous {#tech #ai}

1️⃣ CloudFlare’s major outage is one of many from internet hyperscalers recently. They didn't wait long to explain what happened and offered their apologies. I read most of the text, and as John Gruber said, it's the best way to address this public relations nightmare. More than ever, those failures show how dependent we are on internet technologies. 2️⃣ I see a trend where more and more people are using on-device LLM for their generative AI use cases. These LLMs require a significant amount of memory and processing power. My next MacBook and iPad Pro upgrade will undoubtedly take this into account. MacStories tested the latest M5 iPad with a local LLM and found that Apple’s claims about the upgraded neural engine are valid. The M5 iPad Pro (or M5 MacBook Pro) is a powerhouse for running local LLMs. More details and charts here. 3️⃣ This newsletter could have been called “The Ephemeral Digital Garden". 4️⃣ For this edition, I made a tweak: tags are now part of each section's header between {}. Please tell me if you prefer it that way. I do.

🔮 Looking forward {#weather #ai}

1️⃣ I always wondered how artificial intelligence techniques could help weather forecasting. People tend to see weather forecasting based on large mathematical models being run on powerful computers. Things might be changing, thanks to Google's WeatherNext 2, a Google DeepMind model. Forecasts take a fraction of the time to produce. For once, AI can be synonymous with power efficiency. We'll take it.

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