From Neil Macy’s blog (but not from a post):

I’m falling back in love with reading and writing blogs. Twitter’s downfall isn’t all bad.

I couldn’t agree more. And I recommend his blog post Blogs are dead, long live blogs.

🪴 Last weekend I moved some pages from my personal notes to a Digital Garden hosted in my domain. Digital Gardens don’t follow the same structure of a blog and are in constant mutation. For now you can find there:

• Unit Testing With Doubles and Fixtures
• Contributions and Projects
• Child Benefits in Germany

All the pages have a link to my Buy Me a Coffee page, for those who think the content is useful for them. Coffee helps to keep the Digital Garden growing.

Braille Institute released a font for low vision readers, Atkinson Hyperlegible. The font is great and I asked Matter to add it to their list of supported fonts. Matter accepted my requested and within a couple of hours they deployed the changes. I’ve update my blog to use Atkinson Hyperlegible as well.

I keep going back-and-forth between Reminders and Things. Every time there’s a new macOS version I go back to Reminders to see what changed. But the truth is, Things is an amazing app and I decided to go back to it. The best of all, I can synchronize Things on all the computers I use, no matter if they’re using the same Apple ID or not. Reminders use iCloud, so I’m limited to the Apple ID I’m using. The downside is that I had to pay for Things twice.

Same goes for Safari and Firefox. I’m a big Firefox fan (since it was called Phoenix) and love the Multi-Account Containers feature, but Safari is so much faster and has better support for physical keys and Apple Pay so I keep going back to it.

I read a review about ReadKit and decided to give it a try. I deleted Reeder from my devices to force myself to use it. The application is actually nice and I’m enjoying it a lot. I like the way it integrates with Pinboard as well, which is a service I use for about 15 years. It supports Smart Folders, a great feature when subscribing to tons of feeds.

Decided to create a mini Digital Garden on Micro.blog. It’s not perfect because I have to create all the links between pages manually. But at least all the content is hosted in my blog. I have to check if there’s an API to post Pages on Micro.blog directly, and add an option to my Micro.publish plugin so that people can publish posts and pages from Obsidian. For now, the digital garden has notes about Unit Testing, Open Source, and Child Benefits in Germany.

I released a minor change to Micro.publish plugin, including a link to my Buy My a Coffee page. I added a link to Buy My a Coffee in all my mini Digital Garden pages as well.

We’re cat sitting for friends and I usually go to their house at night, after tinyScientist goes to bed. I’m using my time there to work on my omg.lol native client for macOS and iOS. My client is fully modularized and each feature is a micro app on its own. Once all the setup is done, the app should scale pretty well, and adding new omg.lol features should be a breeze. I plan to write about Modularization once the setup is finished.

I finally started playing Fire Emblem Encore, but already have my eyes on Metroid Prime Remastered. I must resist, in two weeks there’s Octopath Traveler II and in May, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

LEGO Series 24 is complete. We went to a LEGO store and they had hundreds of minifigure bags. Spent a good amount of time there, feeling the bags and found the last two.

And finally, I had to use Twitter to talk to my ISP’s support. Their service is too unstable and every now and then I have to contact them to complain (and ask for my money back). Maybe it’s time to switch providers so that I don’t have to use Twitter anymore.

For a couple of reasons I prefer to take photos in JPEG (but that’s a topic for a blog post). That’s what I do with my Fujifilm camera, but not with my iPhone. iOS enhances JPEG photos taken in low light conditions, destroying the mood. The “fix” is to shoot RAW. A real bummer.

I’ve made some changes to my blog yesterday, putting some Nord colors here and there. For the codeblocks, the following lines were added to Micro.blog’s config.json:

{
    "pygmentsCodefences": true,
    "pygmentsCodefencesGuessSyntax": true,
    "pygmentsStyle": "nord"
}

• Had my parents visiting us during the week and visited several museums with them
• Finished removing all my followers on Twitter
  • It took a while since I had thousands of followers (from a remote time when I had a popular podcast back in Brazil)
• Deleted more accounts:
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Stack Overflow
  • Git Tower
  • mastodon.social
• Added support to a new statuslog.lol feature to my native macOS and iOS client, which allows users to reply to statuses via Mastodon
• Used my page and /now pages as base to create the theme for my weblog.lol

Following the example of some digital friends, I’ll start posting some short weekly notes about what I’m up to, things I’ve learned, and things I found online I think are worth sharing. Think of it as some sort of newsletter.

Twitterrific: End of an Era:

Twitterrific has been discontinued. (…) Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store (…)

Congratulations, Elon Musk… 😤

I’m happy with the two blogs I have, otavio.cc and photos.otavio.cc, but I might merge them into one and have an RSS feed for all the content and one just for the photos. WIM 👨‍💻

Update: I’ve killed the latter on 2023-01-30.

I’m a big Obsidian fan - even created Micro.publish to send posts from Obsidian directly to Micro.blog - but Obsidian Publish is a little bit pricey. I’m thinking if it makes sense to use Micro.blog Pages to build a Digital Garden… 🤷‍♂️

Tony Stubblebine in Medium embraces Mastodon:

Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse.

Evan Williams' Medium is embracing Mastodon. Kinda funny.

I usually browse Micro.blog using their official iOS application, but recently I decided to try Gluon, and am impressed. The app is incredible, it has features that take the Micro.blog experience to a whole new level 🧑‍💻

Finished reading: Contact by Carl Sagan 📚

I have a bookshelf called Comfort Food, and Contact is one of the books in it. From time to time I read it again.

Finished reading: A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet) by Madeleine L’Engle 📚

Finished reading: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson 📚

Finished reading: Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki 📚

Decided to give audiobooks a try using the local public library service (using the Libby app).

I had my Micro.blog set to cross-post to Twitter, and my Twitter account to auto-delete posts after two weeks. Just removed the integration since I don’t even have Twitter on my devices. I’m thinking if I should do the same with Mastodon 👨‍💻

My Obsidian plugin Micro.publish - to post notes to Micro.blog - was accepted and can be installed directly from the Community Plugins. New features coming soon 👨‍💻

Currently reading: O Negócio do Jair: A história proibida do clã Bolsonaro by Juliana Dal Piva 📚

I was looking forward to reading this book before the Brazilian elections, but it wasn’t available at Amazon.com, only at Amazon.com.br. I have three days to finish it 🤓

Obsidian is the source of truth for most of my writings¹ and I though it would be interesting to post to Micro.blog directly from it. In the past I explored several applications such as Ulysses, iA Writer, and many others which allow publishing to Micro.blog, but they don’t work for me, they don’t reflect the way I think and take notes. Obsidian does.

So I searched on Micro.blog and found this post from @philbowell:

I wonder if there is a way to post to Micro.blog from Obsidian. 🤔

And nope, there isn’t. So I took the challenge.

Obsidian isn’t a native application and I can’t remember when it was the last time I wrote something which isn’t compiled to run on an specific architecture 👨‍💻, so I had to learn TypeScript and npm, and spent a good amount of time making Visual Studio Code look pretty (stealing ideas from my friend Atila).

Luckily for me, the TypeScript syntax isn’t that different from Swift, so in a matter of hours I had something working. Since the Obsidian Plugin architecture is OOP, I decided to go with OOP using MVVM, without third-party dependencies to avoid taking unnecessary complexity into Obsidian.

The result of all this is Micro.publish, my Obsidian plugin to publish to Micro.blog. The plugin isn’t available to install from Obsidian’s Community Plugins yet since they review all the plugins there, but it’s possible to install it directly from GitHub by following some manual steps.

Micro.publish has the features I need. It allows

• setting default tags
• setting the default post visibility
• setting a default blog (for those with more than one M.b blog)

And before publishing, it’s possible to override these default settings for the post being published.

More features are planned, and will be coming soon.

Submitted my Micro.blog Publish plugin for Obsidian to review.

First version of my Micro.blog plugin for Obsidian is ready 👨‍💻 Some feature are missing - as expected for a first release -, but I plan to add them in the future. E.g.,

• Blog selection
• Set categories/tags

Currently it allows users to

• Set the default post visibility for new posts
• Set the post title
• Open post, preview, and edit URLs after publishing the post

The plugin can be found on GitHub. The next step is to submit it to Obsidian’s Community Plugins.

Important: The name isn’t final since this is not an official Micro.blog product. I have to find a better name for it.

Some screenshots:

Preferences

Command

Review

Confirmation

Wrote an Obsidian plugin to publish notes on Micro.blog. It’s my first time writing in Typescript, so I might have to clean up the code a little bit before I publish it on GitHub.

I’ve added a link back from Goodreads to Micro.blog. They are called Book Links and can be created here 📚

For Micro.blog:

ISBN: https://micro.blog/books/search?q=#ISBN#
ISBN 13: https://micro.blog/books/search?q=#ISBN13#
Title: https://micro.blog/books/search?q=#TITLE#

For now my Pinboard client sends links to Micro.blog using the following URL:

https://micro.blog/bookmark?url=PAGE_URL

but I’m thinking of using my MicroblogAPI framework to save bookmarks directly there, without having to open the browser.