Some folks on Micro.blog who also actively use Bluesky have noticed something new we’ve been rolling out over the last couple of days: Micro.blog will now look for replies on Bluesky to your blog posts, bringing them into the Micro.blog timeline. This transforms Micro.blog into a base platform to manage even more of your social interactions.
Now you reply to the Bluesky post directly within Micro.blog. Micro.blog copies your reply back to Bluesky seamlessly.
Rather than being a one-way train out to Bluesky, Manton has built a railway back, allowing two-way travel between your blog and your Bluesky account. It’s even more of the social web’s Grand Central Station than ever!
I’d love to see this interoperability come to its Mastodon/Threads support too. It’s less necessary for those platforms since they work with ActivityPub, which Micro.blog does natively. (I don’t have a “true” Mastodon account but can follow and interact with Mastodon users from within Micro.blog using my @jarrod@micro.blog address, as well as follow Threads accounts with it.) But some people would prefer to have a “real” Mastodon and/or Threads account to get full functionality out of those platforms. Having everything flow back to your blog, even from those platforms, would be pretty cool.
Here’s the bottom line, and one of the reasons I love Micro.blog best despite its quirks and bugs:
Micro.blog is effectively a universal timeline for not just Micro.blog but also ActivityPub, Bluesky, and other services. We want to make the web a little better by encouraging people to post to their own blog while still being connected to friends. That means embracing open platforms wherever they are.
Manton Reece is building the open social web he wants to see in the world, and I’m all for it.
I know I just shared a bunch of links in 7 Things, but then I saw this video from Scott Yu-Jan. WOW! He 3D-printed a case for the Mac Studio in the style of the original Macintosh, with a slot in the front to hold an iPad mini for the screen. As Yu-Jan says in the video, it gives his iPad mini a new purpose when not in tablet-mode as an external display for his Mac (much like Federico Viticci’s MacPad) with the added benefit that now it’s always charged when he takes it on the go.
Oh, and the pull out drawer for storage, headphone hook, and cord slots are just chef’s kiss.
It’s the perfect intersection of nostalgic desk trinket and kick-ass functional tool. As an M1 Mac Mini user, that tease about a version for its smaller case certainly also has my attention. 👀
As an aside, I was as transfixed by Yu-Jan’s cinematography as I was by the product — it’s beautiful! He artfully captured the design, printing, and assembly of the casing, and told a compelling story all in a tight eight minutes. Nice.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Blogroll.social is a new site from Dave Winer with a neat way to display a blogroll: sorted by more recently updated. Blogrolls are cool again! [🔗 blogroll.social]
2️⃣ I don’t record a lot of videos of myself, but if I did I’d be very tempted to get this auto-tracking dock that Belkin made to work with the iPhone’ DockKit. Stephen Robles gives a great overview in this video, and it’s pretty charming to see the little robot arm swing the phone around to keep faces in frame. 🤖 [🔗 Stephen Robles // youtube.com]
6️⃣ Credit where it’s due, Humane seems to have taken criticism of their over-serious demeanor to heart. This latest demo video is far more casual and fun. Not as fun as the Rabbit R1, and still without a lot of personality, but a step in the right direction. There’s a lot to digest here, but my impression is that this interface may be better served by glasses and/or watch hardware. It’s very early days, though, and I’m intrigued to see where this technology goes. [🔗 humane // youtube.com]
It’s not very original to select one of the quintessential jazz albums as one that’s influential or important specifically to me. And yet. When I was a wee seventh grader, still learning my way around the trumpet and with dreams of joining the Ionia Middle School Jazz Band, Miles Davis is to whom I turned to get a feel for swing and blues. I don’t think I even knew at the time that he was the jazz trumpet guy. I just searched iTunes for jazz trumpet, Miles Davis popped up, I clicked “Buy”, and started listening on repeat.
I would later transcribe and play “So What” as a class assignment, so it has an exceedingly high play count as I would play along, scrubbing back and forth trying to nail the notes and style. Miles Davis’ music opened the door to learning about getting behind the beat and how one could infuse emotion and personality into every note.
I don’t listen to as much jazz these days, but I do find that it makes for excellent music to have on to get my creative juices flowing. I can’t listen to lyrics when I’m reading, writing, or focusing on something — but a little soft jazz gets things flowing.
So, yes, I’m going with Kind of Blue as one of my go-to jazz albums. An unoriginal, but absolutely essential choice.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
This isn’t a novel thing to say, but I’m a big fan of AirPods. I’ve named them as my most transformational tech product in the past, and I spend multiple hours every day with them in my ears. I’ve tried every generation of AirPods, save for AirPods Pro (2nd gen), and have more audio products scattered throughout my home than I’d like to admit.1 My daily drivers are AirPods (2nd gen). Suffice it to say, I have opinions about AirPods.
With rumors ramping up about next the generation of AirPods non-Pro, I wanted to take a moment to lay out what I’d like to see come in their next version.
In order of importance:
Improved fit
Tap-to-control
Noise cancellation magic
Improved audio quality
Fitness features
The rest
Improved fit
You saw above that I’m still rocking the AirPods (2nd gen) that debuted in 2019, but whose design is unchanged from the original AirPods introduced in 2016 along with the iPhone 7. Why? Because they’re the design that fit in my ears. As far as a first-generation product goes, Apple truly knocked it out of the park with AirPods. They said they studied thousands of ears to come up with the best shape to fit the most ears, and I believe them.
That said, they also made the same claim about the third-generation AirPods, the ones that gained an elongated “head” to nearly match the style of AirPods Pro, and those didn’t fit my ear holes at all. I was so disappointed that they fell out with any sort of activity or chewing motion. The same goes for AirPods Pro. I’ve tried every ear tip size, third-party foam tips, and every imaginable orientation to try to get them to fit. They just don’t and the combination of discomfort and worry that they’d fall out at any moment prevented me from ever getting lost in the music or conversation getting piped through them. In-ear tips are not the answer for me, and there are plenty of us out there that I think there needs to be a non-canal-obstructing option.
And so I’ve stuck with the second-generation version which Apple has mercifully kept available for sale, I assume, because they know that the two fits cover a wider breadth of customers than if they only sold the third-generations. But I can’t imagine Apple wants to keep that original design around forever, and so I’m optimistic that the next design will fit me as well as the 1st/2nd gens do.
Tap-to-control
Here’s another thing I want to see brought forward from the second-generation AirPods to the fourth: the imprecise tapping mechanism to control media playback. For the first two generations of AirPods, a simple double-tap with your finger on the outside of the head of the earbud would play/pause the media, and a triple-tap would skip tracks. And they were configurable to summon Siri.
For the third-generation design, the stem of the earbud shrunk in size but grew in capability. Play/pause/skip was moved to a pinching gesture on the stem, as measured by a new force sensor. AirPods Pro brought volume control to the stem as well, allowing you to drag a finger up and down it to adjust volume. In my experience, the volume control is awesome and something obviously missing from prior models. But the pinching gesture is a swing and a miss.
John Siracusa did a, predictably, good job at articulating why the pinching mechanism is a regression back when it was introduced, and you should listen to his rant about it on the Accidental Tech Podcast. The tl;dl version is that you need to be more precise to grab and pinch, you run the risk of pulling the AirPod out of your ears when you grip the stem (as opposed to pushing them in with the tapping gesture), and it is a difficult gesture to accomplish with gloved or otherwise covered (dirty, soapy, etc.) hand. Oh, and it’s likewise difficult to do when the AirPods are covered by a hat like mine often are here in the northeast.
I’m sure that plenty of people have gotten used to the new gestures, so I don’t necessarily think that the pinch gesture should be removed, but bringing back “tap-to-control” and introducing volume control to the non-Pro model would be big wins in my book.
Noise cancellation magic
Now we’re getting to the nice-to-haves. Apple is doing such interesting work in the noise cancellation field with AirPods Pro, that I’m, frankly, a bit jealous. I’d like to be able to tune back outside noises with cancellation, boost conversations with conversation mode, or let the AirPods do all the decision-making and just keep them on Adaptive Audio. I recognize that these features would suffer from the lack of an in-ear tip to provide passive noise cancellation along with the active version. But I also think Apple can make some headway here. And you could always turn it off if you don’t like the effect.
Improved audio quality
I think this is pretty much a gimme that Apple would tout their audio processing prowess, along with an improved physical speaker system for any new set of AirPods. But it’s fourth on my list because I’m not dissatisfied with how even my second-generation models sound. I don’t have particularly discerning hearing, so any slight change that could made in earbuds so small would likely get lost on me.2 But better is better, so let’s always keep moving sound quality forward.
Fitness features
Alright, now I’m just throwing pasta at the wall. There have been whispers of fitness tracking features coming to AirPods, and that sounds cool, I guess? If having a sensor inside my ears helps my Apple Watch to better track my heart rate or other health metrics, sure, let’s go for it! But it probably wouldn’t be a selling point for me, just an extra cool thing.
The rest
Finally, let’s not regress from any other improvements AirPods have enjoyed along their journey. USB-C should be the physical port on the charging case. The buds should have some water resistance to guard against sweat or rain when out on a run. Current battery life is plenty, but could always be improved (provided the case doesn’t have to get bigger — in fact, the smaller the case the better). Their Bluetooth standard should meet the latest specs, or maybe even adapt to use ultra wideband for a more stable and dedicated connection with larger data bandwidth. Improved microphones for phone calls and voice assistants. In short, the usual suspects when bumping up a generation.
AirPods are the gold standard in the wireless headphone industry, and they could stand on their own as a titan in the tech industry if broke out from the rest of Apple’s business. They’re a wearable product, which comes with distinct challenges regarding fit and durability. And they’re deeply personal. Most people I talk to would feel as out of place without their AirPods as they would without their keys or wallet. So a lot rides on each new generation, but I’m hopeful that the next ones will be the best yet.
Although, I really should do a full write-up of my audio journey one of these days.↩︎
I’m honestly not sure why I even have the higher bitrate setting in Apple Music turned on. I should experiment if I can even tell the difference there, or if I can save storage and bandwidth by dropping back to the default setting for sound quality.↩︎
I got a nasty surprise when I purchased an “ebook” version of a climbing manual this week.
I thought it was going to be great. I could load it up, along with other guidebooks and reference books, onto my Kobo, and have them all at my disposal on a small, lightweight, and waterproof device that’s easy-to-read in the sun. I’d toss that in my climbing pack any day! But nope, it turns out I purchased a license to read the book through an app, and not even a good one at that. Sure, I can read it on my iPad and iPhone, but it’s not the DRM-free version that I’d been expecting. I suppose I’ll do some digging for a version I can load onto my Kobo, but it left a sour taste in my mouth — like I’d been duped.
This isn’t the outcome I was expecting from this experience, but more and more I’m wondering if I should have just stuck with the Kindle ecosystem. It simply has access to more books, which is the whole point. Ugh.
Taking a page out of Maique’s book and trying a more bite-sized /now update.
🏋️♀️ A weight has been lifted off my shoulders after discussing my Leap Year plans with my wife. I wanted to have more of it figured out before I came to her and made “the pitch”, but I needn’t have waited. She gave me her full support, because of course she did. 🥲 There’s still much to research and line up before it’s a go. But her having my back was the proverbial starting line and I’m so excited/terrified. 😁
⌛🧗♂️ Counting down to my Red Rocks climbing trip. It’ll be my first time climbing in Las Vegas — actually my first time in Vegas at all, unless you count a flight layover (I don’t). My buddy and I are looking to rack up some vertical mileage on easy-to-moderate multipitch climbs, and Red Rocks has some of the best of them. Can’t wait!
⛑ It’s apparently professional development season for Jarrod. My first aid and CPR certifications expire soon, so I’ve signed up for a Wilderness First Aid course next months with some new friends I made climbing last week. And in early April, I’m attending the New York State Outdoor Guide’s Association conference. I’ve never been to one, but the sessions look interesting, and I hoping to meet more folks in the industry and learn as much as I can from them. Finally, I pulled the trigger and signed up for an American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA) Single Pitch Instructor (SPI) course in early May. AMGA is the professional instructor certification body in the USA for mountain guides. Since my long-term goal is to become an internationally-certified guide in all the mountain disciplines, the SPI course is the first step along that journey. (I actually took this same course back in 2016, but never got around to signing up for the exam. I won’t make the same mistake this
time ’round.)
❄ The weather here in the Northeast has been throwing me for a loop. We got a warm spell for a few weeks that demolished our snow and got me psyched for rock climbing season. But now winter is making a return with new snowfall. I got out skiing a few more times, and I might be able to get in a little more ice climbing if I wasn’t headed to Nevada next week. Who knows what season it’ll be here when I get back! 🤷♂️
📺 I tend to only have a couple of TV shows going at any given time. My wife and I have been getting into Foundation as our serious show, and we’re doing a rewatch of New Girl for our lighthearted one. Both are excellent. We’re almost through the first season of Foundation and I’m so glad we’ll be able jump right into the second.
🍿 Have you seen the Elemental movie? What a strange film. Inventive, as always from Pixar, but it sort of missed the mark for me. Not a huge fan of the relationship between Ember and her father. But her love story with Wade in the second half almost pulled it back into the good zone. Still thinking about it, which is something, I suppose. The Taylor Swift: Eras Tour movie has been staring at me from the ‘Up Next’ queue. I’ll probably break down and watch that again soon.
🧘♂️My 30-day yoga journey has turned into more of a 30-to-60-day yoga journey. I haven’t been very consistent about doing it every morning before work, but I’m still seeing some benefits and enjoy it when I drag my ass out of bed to the mat.
📌 I continue to save more blog posts and internet articles than I could ever read.
🫶 The best part of this week, except for item number one at the top, has been the response to kicking off the One a Month Club. Obviously, I believe its a good model, but having other people get excited about it too has been heartwarming. I’ve had people emailing me every day about the project, and it’s already sparked some great conversations. The club itself has nearly 30 members and continues to evolve. You’ll notice short descriptions for each site start to pop up there (if you’re a member and can send me your preferred one-sentence description, please do!). I hope you’ll browse through the awesome sites there and find at least one to support. On a more personal note, I’m blown away to now have six(!) supporters of, as Maique puts it, my dingus.club
“shenanigans”. I’m touched.
🤖 Finally, I’m exploring how I can make my /now page a bit more dynamic so that there’s new stuff here even when I don’t get around to writing a full update.
“Being a PenPal with someone in Kyrgyzstan” is not something that I would have had on my Bingo card a couple of years ago. Which is my way of saying that I’ve got a new exchange with Valerie up on our PenPal conversation page.
This time we chatted about studying abroad, Valerie’s experience as a teacher in Kyrgyzstan, and some cultural differences between the States and there. Val made an astute observation about how language impacts how a whole group of people can experience the world around them, while I prattled on some more about climbing and recreation in the mountains. I hope Val get the opportunity to look into some adult clubs!
We also talked a bit about what brought each of us to Micro.blog, which is where we met.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Apple is moving steadily toward their sustainability goals, this time updating packaging on some charging accessories to no longer use plastic bits and to implore customers to recycle the boxes. (iOS’s ‘Translate this page’ feature came in handy!) [🔗 macotakara.jp] (Via Michael Steeber)
4️⃣ Some design trends to look for in 2024. Pretty slick site, too. (I’ll peg highlighting text, karaoke-style as a trend too.) [🔗 designtrends.click] (Via Matt Birchler)
5️⃣ I don’t think I need this app, but I commend Iconfactory for their creative solution to the “what’s going on with my iOS device” problem. They made device memory/network stats into a movie that can be watched picture-in-picture while you do things in other apps. [🔗 Craig Hockenberry // blog.iconfactory.com]
7️⃣A friend reminded me of this list of things that Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the US Army. A staple of comedy in my formative years. [🔗 skippyslist.com]
I discovered CHVRCHES through Merlin Mann and John Siracusa. I don’t know why I was surprised that this was the kind of music they liked too (ageism, I guess), but I’m so glad I took them up on the recommendation. They’re so up my alley with their clear lyrics, powerful beats, challenging topics, and high energy.
I’ve liked all of their albums, but Screen Violence is something special. It’s a banger from start to finish.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
When I build shortcuts, I like to think through all the usual ways that someone might want to use it. And then I try to think through the unusual ways someone might use it. To account for different preferences, many of my shortcuts now ask setup questions upon installation that propagate variables in my Setup Stuff™ area at the top.
But what should happen when a shortcut doesn’t get set up quite right on that first go? Or what if it’s designed to run actions on some bit of data passed into the shortcut, but nothing is passed to it?
My latest update to the ‘Publish to Micro.blog’ shortcut addresses some of these anomalies, and I want to share the techniques I use to mitigate them.
Import Questions Gone Wrong
Look, I get it. You don’t know exactly what a shortcut is going to ask you to set up when you tap that ‘Get Shortcut’ button. You might not have the necessary information at hand to answer all the questions in the moment. And while you can go back into the shortcut’s info screen → Setup and choose “Customize Shortcut…” to go through the import questions again, or just edit the actions in the editor view itself, I don’t know that everyone feels confident in doing those things.
This means that, despite your best effort, a user might not get their info into the variables needed to successfully execute the shortcut. Here’s how I worked around that eventuality this time.
This ‘Text’ action is supposed to contain a number. What now? ⌘
In this case, the user was supposed to add their blog ID number during setup so that the shortcut can post to the right blog if they have multiple ones. Luckily, Micro.blog can still accept a POST web request even without an ID and it will just get posted to whatever blog was last used. But it requires sending the request to a differently-formatted URL.
So, instead of hard-coding the URL into the ‘Get Contents of URL’ action, I put an ‘If’ conditional block right before it and use it to evaluate if the ‘blog-id’ variable from the Setup Stuff has any value. If it does, that means the blog ID was entered, and we can send it to the URL that includes the ID. If it doesn’t have any value, it uses the default URL without extra appended parameters.
‘If’ blocks come in handy to evaluate the contents of variables. ⌘
This approach provides an additional benefit that if the user has just one blog, they don’t need to worry about finding its ID. The shortcut will just handle sending it to the default one anyway.
Addressing a Lack of Input
Now back to the matter of the shortcut’s input. This one was designed to be the final publishing step in other shortcuts, and to accept text from them as input when run as a subroutine. That’s kind of an advanced technique though, and someone might download this shortcut expecting that they can run it from the Shortcuts app, type into its text box, and have that text get published to Micro.blog.
If someone runs it standalone, we basically have three options:
Fallback gracefully with a way to get some text to publish
Until today, this shortcut resorted to option 1. It just didn’t work, and there was no notice sent to the user. Not great. But now it accommodates for just such an occasion.
This shortcut can still be useful, even if nothing is passed to it. ⌘
Another ‘If’ conditional block checks to see if the special ‘Shortcut Input’ variable has any value. If it does, great, we’ll use the input. But if not, an ‘Ask for Input’ action solves the problem. I added some explainer text to the action’s prompt. And I saved the user from the need to paste in their clipboard, the most likely way they’ll add text, by setting the default answer to the clipboard’s contents. They’ll have the opportunity to edit or delete the text, or can stop the shortcut by tapping “Cancel” and trying again.
Now, you might wonder why I didn’t address the lack of input way at the top of the shortcut by using the built-in fallback-to-clipboard option:
It’s because I didn’t want to bypass the opportunity to tell the user what’s going on and allow them to edit the text. Sometimes, I need to use the clipboard in other ways first, and getting its contents right away can complicate things. The ‘If’ conditional makes it super clear what happens if there’s no input, and it allows me to address the problem in other ways than with just the clipboard. I could have strung together any number of actions in that ‘Other’ block if necessary.
‘If’ Saves the Day
So if you haven’t done much with the ‘If’ action, here’s your encouragement to play with it some more. It vastly expands what your shortcuts can handle. In this case, it’s helped make mine way more user-friendly and accommodating outside of the intended use case.
A ‘Show Alert’ action works well in this case, and you just disable the option to continue. Or follow it up with a ‘Stop This Shortcut’ action just to be sure.↩︎
I wrote the other night, after several hours of keyboard-mashing, mouse-clicking, and DNS-wrangling:
Too tired to write a proper introduction post, but I’m happy to say that oneamonth.club is now a thing that exists! It’s something I’ve wanted to put together since being inspired by @manuelmoreale.com. Please send me more sites to feature! And you can support my site for $1/month at dingus.club. 🫶
Well, I’m not much more mentally awake right now, but I am excited to tell you about the One a Month Club. It’s an idea, inspired by Manu Moreale, that kindness from internet strangers can be enough to support a small web project. And that tiered membership overly complicates things. And that it’s hard enough to convince someone to pay anything to support your work, so why would you want to gate any of those fans from seeing what you’ve worked so hard on for them?
We all want writers, code wranglers, and other web artists to be able to get the monetary support they deserve while reaching the widest audience they can.
It manifests like this. To join the One a Month Club, the asking price to support your work and gain access to all of it should be as little as $1 per month. It’s low enough that if someone has any budget at all to spend on extras, they can afford $1 per month. They can set it and forget it, as it shouldn’t make a meaningful impact on their budget. And, as they say, we’ll make it up in volume. Oh, and folks can choose to pay more if they want to. But that’s optional.
Really, you should go read Manu’s blog post about landing on $1+/month as the ideal singular tier for membership. It’s how I got here.
Anyway, ever since reading that post and following suit with my own $1/month supportership at dingus.club, I thought there should be a page that rounds up all the sites and projects that adhere to this framework. A page like nownownow.com or uses.tech. I kind of thought Manu would make one. Instead, it lived in my head and my to-do list rather than on the web for months.
With the introduction of Micro.blog’s single-page sites in January, I knew I could make it a reality. The perfect domain name was available and reasonably priced. I snapped it up as the last piece of the puzzle. (Since the initial idea wasn’t really mine and I see myself as more of a caretaker of it, I’d feel a little weird about hosting the project on my heydingus.net domain and site.)
With a few minutes spent setting up that single-page site in Micro.blog, a few more minutes searching around the web for more sites that meet the $1-for-everything criteria, and many more minutes tweaking the design while waiting for DNS to propagate, oneamonth.club was born.
The web travels fast
As far as I can tell, Manu doesn’t use social media, so I couldn’t adequately notify him with a mention in that initial announcement on my microblog. I intended to send him an email as a heads-up about putting the site together and to open the door for any suggestions, but I wanted to make sure I was happy and settled on its presentation first. Much to my surprise, the next day (yesterday) I already received a request to be added to the site. The inductee said they found it through Manu’s blog.
He’d already found the site and linked to it. Wow! 😅 Turns out, he had been considering putting a similar page together himself after all. I suppose we can both cross that item off our lists now.
Join the club
The club is open to anyone who wants to join.1 As Manu put it in our brief email exchange about the project:
Honestly, I just want more people to jump on board because I’d love to support a bunch of different blogs. We need more of this to keep the web open and sustainable.
So open your tip jar (Ko-Fi and Buy Me a Coffee are pretty popular and easy to use), and send me links to it and your project. And take a look through the sites already listed there. Maybe you’ll find an awesome new site to help prop up. I have! Let’s keep working on that open and sustainable web together. 🙌
I suppose I should be clear that I’m not going to link out to hateful garbage, so don’t even try if that’s what you’re asking support for. In short, no assholes.↩︎
