Deleted my Pinboard account and archived all my Pinboard related projects on GitHub.
🪴 👨💻 Another entry to my digital garden, Fixtures, used in Unit Tests. As always, all the examples are in Swift.
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.
🪴 👨💻 The next topic I’m working for my Digital Garden is Fixtures, as part of the series on Unit Testing.
🪴 👨💻 I’ve added another entry to my digital garden, this time with themes for the Mastodon app Mona. There’s a single theme there for now, Nórdico, based on the Nord Theme, but I have ideas for other themes already.
🪴 👨💻 I’ve added a new entry to my digital garden called Fakes. It’s part of a series of notes on unit testing with doubles and fixtures that I’m putting together. The examples are in Swift, but the concepts are the same for all languages.
Digital Garden
🪴 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:
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.
Feedbin has a Podcast app called Airshow, which syncs with Feedbin. Although I use Feedbin for RSS and newsletter, for podcast I’m still on Overcast. Feedbin’s app is limited and the UX needs some love. Overcast’s far superior.
Week 2023-06
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.
This is me, according to AI. My wife says it does look like me 🎨 🤖

GitHub added to people’s profiles open fields for social accounts. I linked my Mastodon account there and now it shows my GitHub profile as a verified URL on Mastodon 👨💻
I’m impressed by Matter’s support. I sent a feedback/suggestion earlier today and they implemented and deployed it within a couple of hours 👨💻
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"
}
Week 2023-04
- 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:
- 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
Deleted my Tumblr and Pinterest accounts.
A few months ago I stopped following everyone on Twitter. This week I removed all my followers and locked my account. I don’t want to delete the account, since Twitter recycle the usernames, so this should be enough for now.
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 📚