Quality of Life

I recently found out that if you use Cloudflare, you can do a domain redirect with them, rather than needing to create a blank website with a 301 rule in Apache or something similar.

So here it is (as much for anyone that needs as for me when I surely will forget about it):

The documentation is here with more examples.

Here’s the rule I used to redirect the old “.ro” domain to this one:

I’m trying not to use the phone before going to sleep, so I decided to get an alarm clock to know what time it is during the night. I looked for one cheap enough on Amazon and tonight’s the night!!

I haven’t owned an alarm clock for the last 20 years or more, since college, probably (when we didn’t have smart enough phones, initially).

So, here I am, using this kind of clock:

After the Candle Light concert I’ve been to, I came back home and searched for the music the artists played.

Well, that’s how I found out that there’s a string quartet that has played these convers/tributes for a long time called Vitamin String Quartet.

You can find them on Spotify and soon they’ll launch an LP based on Taylor Swift’s songs.

You might enjoy them.

I don’t know if you know, but we have a dog. His name is Sami and he’s a Westie. And he’s really cute. So cute that we always think he could’ve been a Disney character, with those big eyes and big nose.

Well, now we know how he would look like :)

Miruna made a video tutorial about how to turn YOUR dog into a Disney character, as well, in case you want to try.

Oh, and the AI prompts we used are available to copy/paste here.

I had lunch with a good friend today. In an almost full restaurant. It almost felt… “normal”.

It’s a really sunny day, which is amazing, especially since April had been really rainy. As it is usual in Portugal, apparently (“Avril, chuva mil”, they say here).

Our dog was uncharacteristically happy to see us when we picked him am from “dog school”.

Some things I work on are moving along and are looking good.

A good friend of mine just announced some great news.

It’s been a good day. And I felt the need to write this because there were so few of them lately.

8 years ago I was writing something similar, about a completely different situation, though.

The sunset in Nazaré, Portugal, yesterday.

I love my iPad. I have an iPad Pro 10.5, the last one before the new design of the iPad Pro. I didn’t buy the new one since I didn’t feel like I need it, but I have to say the new M1 iPad Pro sounds really, really good.

But the problem I have with my iPad as a pro machine is the same as previously: even if the new iPad Pro has the same M1 processor in the MacBook Air I’m using now to write this article, the app I use to write (MarsEdit) isn’t available for iPad.

And this is a small issue. Apps like Photoshop or similar on iPad don’t have the full set of features the one on the desktop has. My fiancée owns an iPad Pro 12.9″ (the first that came with the new design) and she still needs to use her MacBOok Pro. Will this change with the new M1 iPad?

Is the future of iPad a problem of software and not of hardware anymore?

The difference in hardware between the 2020 iPad Pro and the 2021 iPad Pro isn’t a small jump, it’s a large leap over the chasm between the Mac and the iPad. That said, I can’t help but wonder what about the software?

These latest iPad Pros aren’t looking to be an improvement in the user experience for the next version of iPadOS 14, but instead it is looking at iPadOS 15 and beyond.

It is almost a given that Apple has another trick or two up its sleeve for the iPad this year. They showed their hand for the hardware in the new iPad Pros but they have yet to flourish what iPadOS 15 will bring.

From here: The iPad needs the software to catch up with its hardware – Tablet Habit.

I was an early user on Twitter, on Facebook and a host of other early social networks. I still remember how fun it was in 2008-2009 on Twitter, how many fun conversation I had there.

But Twitter was never meant to stay like that. Once they started to get bigger, problems came along.

Almost every platform that attempts to be a safe place for a certain type of person falls flat on their face with this problem of scale. You can promise to be moderation free, or simply not have the time to do it, but the fact is it’s impossible to run a platform that doesn’t have to do moderation.

Start with the spam you’ll inevitably get once there are enough users. Then the things you legally have to take down — abuse, copyright material etc. Once you reach a critical mass of users, then comes the algorithmic feed decisions due to lack of engagement and inability for users to keep up. This too is an inevitability as users can’t decide if their posts will be seen or not and start to post less if action isn’t taken.

All platforms that need engagement or show adverts will devolve into the same state eventually. Nothing will ever ‘fix’ social media. Scale kills almost everything, there is a huge benifit to not being where everyone is. Stay small.

Quote from Greg Morris and you should read the rest of the article, to get the context.

This is one of the reasons I still have a personal blog, 17 years after starting one. Because it’s my own small space.