Why did Apple’s weather app do an amazing job of notifying me about rain while we were out in the middle of nowhere, Saskatchewan, but now that I’m in the city it has no clue what the current weather is? ☔️
I dig how Descript uses their own tool to display employee testimonials on their careers page.
Instagram is Dead - Round 4?
Via Manton, Om Malick writes Instagram is Dead:
What’s left is a constantly mutating product that copies features from whatever popular service — Snapchat, TikTok, or whatever. It is all about marketing and pushing substandard products and mediocre services pushed by influencers with less depth than a sheet of paper.
Instagram For Me
Instagram replaced Facebook for me as the place to keep up with what friends or family might be doing. I keep a personal Instagram account mainly to keep up with friends and family. There’s a couple accounts I follow who use it as a traditional photography app - for the rest it’s all status updates in visual form. I go back and forth between using it to post an interesting photo I took (Instagram v1 style), and posting 9 photos and a video of a family camping trip (Instagram v5? style).
I also have a business account because I feel like I should - but I use it in spurts, and really could delete it without any noticeable impact on my business other than the time it would free up from me feeling like I need to check it.
Instagram For My Kids
Seeing how my kids use Instagram, I want to hurl the app into the sun and watch it burn for a thousand years. We’ve given our oldest 2 Instagram accounts in order to keep up with youth group activities, and naturally they’ve connected with friends and family as well. But they spend 3 minutes checking out the photos or stories from those friends, and then the rest of their screen time allotted flipping through the Reels tab.
I love me some TikToks more than the average adult. But seeing my kids mindlessly swipe through Reels feels especially gross somehow. I want them to experience media, culture, and find their own funnies - but it feels like I’m just letting them walk up to the McDonalds counter at breakfast and order a Big Mac with large fries and a coke every day. The long term effects of “swipe away in 2 seconds if it’s boring or not funny” remain to be seen, but it doesn’t feel good right now.
It’s nearly impossible to move off of Instagram though. The only other platform used by their friends is Snapchat, and the discover tab on Snapchat feels even more unhinged than Reels on Instagram.
If I could remove the Reels tab from Instagram, I’d worry a lot less about what my kids might discover on the app.
Instagram Is The New Mall
In an attempt to be all apps to all people, Instagram is steadily becoming the new home shopping network as well:
The company just announced a new creator marketplace which means creators (much like celebrities of yore that hawked wares on QVC and HSN (the Home Shopping Network) can do the same for the brands. “Social media is essentially the new roadside billboard, only it accomplishes the goal of traditional advertising in a much savvier way,” Bankrate.com analyst Sarah Foster told Fortune.
Count me out. As above, if I could remove the shopping tab from Instagram, I’d worry a lot less about what my kids might discover on the app.
If Not Instagram, Then What?
I don’t have the answer for what to do instead because there’s not going to be enough people moving off Instagram to move the needle anytime soon. I’ve tried formally quitting Instagram and Facebook multiple times, but something keeps me from fulling deleting my accounts. Much like the occasional stop at McDonald’s on the way back from camping, I can’t quit the junk food of the internet completely.
For now I’ll be over on TikTok watching the memes my kids will be watching in a month on Reels. 😆
Not much more rock ‘n roll than listening to Welcome to the Jungle while driving through the suburbs in a minivan. 🤘🏽
This tiktok is listing some of the things tiktok (and other apps no doubt) track about users and mentions “keystroke patterns or rhythms” as a way to track people across apps. Is that for real? On iOS and Android?
This is your reminder that Apple’s Clips for iOS is vastly underrated as a video editor, especially if you’re editing for Instagram, TikTok, or other vertical video formats. Combined with Cinematic mode, you can create some really cool looking video.
I don’t know if this was the exact recipe we used, but this is your reminder to make yourself some strawberry and peach sangria, especially if you have a bottle of white wine you haven’t found a use for.
The 2022 M2 MacBook Air
From Gruber’s review:
Basically, there are millions of people whose computing needs would be more than met by the MacBook Air but who feel like they probably need a slightly thicker laptop with a fan on the inside and the word “Pro” stamped on the outside because their current ostensibly pro-level laptop — which may well be a MacBook Pro from Apple with Intel inside — struggles under the load of their daily work. It runs hot, the fans scream, and the battery doesn’t last long enough. Switching to this new thinner fan-less MacBook Air from a thicker MacBook Pro that makes frequent, clearly audible, use of its fan sounds like a downgrade. But for the overwhelming majority of Intel-based MacBook Pro users, it’s not. Switching to the new M2 MacBook Air would be the biggest upgrade in their computing lives.
I feel seen. :)
I have a 16" 2019 Intel MBP that’s fairly loaded up that I do my work on, and use a family M1 Mac Mini for processing audio through filters. It’s fine. But the fans on my MBP spin up pretty quickly for a lot of tasks, especially when I need to edit a Learn with Jason episode in Final Cut Pro.
I’ve been thinking that my future Mac work set up lies in getting a Mac Studio at my home office, and a M2 MacBook Air for keeping up with any work the 3 - 5 weeks of the year when I’m not at home because we’re on holidays, or if I want to go work at a coffee shop for a morning.
My personal MacBook Pro is space gray, maxed out (no pun intended) with a 4 TB SSD and 64 GB RAM. In my daily use, this $1,900 MacBook Air feels identical to my $4,700 MacBook Pro.
The M2 MacBook Air with the same 16GB RAM and 1TB storage upgrades runs $2,399+tax in Canadian dollars. Next up, configuring the Mac Studio. 😍
Craig Got COVID
Speaking of Craig Mod, the latest issue of his newsletter #69 (nice!) chronicles him catching COVID (not nice!). This summary should tell you everything you need to know to want to go read the full thing:
Broken penises, dizziness, isolation, emergency rooms in strange lands. I’ll be thinking about cost — first and second order costs (of which the pandemic itself is one) — the next time I’m set to fly internationally. It’s expensive, so expensive, in so many complex ways. For twenty-eight months I avoided Covid. Then I went abroad and got it almost instantly. That’s not to say the trip wasn’t “worth” it, but it was worth far less than I might have estimated ten years ago. In the end, it was largely — and to a degree, sadly — what I expected out there: Kind of a mess.
What If One Day the Podcasts Went Silent?
Justin Duke, creator of the great Buttondown email newsletter app, has an “About This Site” for his personal blog that’s a great read and motivator for creating a personal site.
This section jumped out at me as someone who helps create podcasts for a living:
One day, though, I made the mistake of accidentally messing up my syncing on my podcatcher of choice by pulling out my iPad that hadn’t been touched in a few months for a plane ride. For a few bizarre moments, I caught myself listening to episodes that was three months out of date. What started out as a minor annoyance (oh no, I need to spend the next three hours doing crosswords to the sound of silence!) turned into fascination and finally into horror as I realized just how irrelevant the content was — entire swaths of how I spent my day had the shelf-life of a mere fortnight or less.
Obviously I think it’s very healthy to not spend the majority of your day tuned into podcasts, despite the fact that podcasts are what puts food on my family’s table. I also noticed a similar thing happen when I unplugged from the daily or even weekly tech and news podcasts I was subscribed to - not much changed in what I felt I knew, and I had more time to spend on other things - namely editing client podcasts. :)
Finished reading: No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod 📚
A Culture of Defensive Leadership
My friend Tim Neufeld, from my @U2 fan site and podcast days, posted his thoughts about an article published in the MB Herald detailing the mess that the Canadian Conference of of Mennonite Brethren Churches and their US equivalent, USMB, made of a recent book they published, and then quickly pulled and removed 3 pages, and have now republished - all without talking to the author, editor, or anyone involved in the publishing of the book.
Setting that mess aside, my point in mentioning all of that is part of what Tim wrote hit way too close to home here in my own church that I was compelled to document it below:
…but one value I have always prioritized is to honor voices of diversity, not just in theory but in practice. Many leaders are fearful these days. That fear shapes a leadership culture of defensiveness rather than openness. Voices of disagreement are threatening when denominations and churches face peril on multiple levels (declining attendance, closure of facilities, damage control after scandals, reduction of budgets and staff, challenges to old patriarchal assumptions, etc.).
Three critical qualities are needed in both local and national leadership as we hurl through the chaos and upheaval of these changing times. (1) Absolutely essential is the capacity for self-reflection and the ability to see oneself as others would see them. We are dead in the water without the wind of self-awareness. (2) Similarly, the need for empathy and the desire to empathically hear and feel those that are voiceless, marginalized, and victimized on the edges, without leaders projecting their own pain onto those that have been hurt by leaders’ actions (red flag warning: “It hurts me to do this, but…”). (3) Finally, rather than belittling and controlling, leaders should focus on empowering members into new thoughts and experiences without feeling threatened and without seeing leadership’s primary role as theological gatekeeper.
When leadership acts out of fear, and without empathy, the community they are trying to lead are pushed to anger or apathy - neither of which bring peace or love back to the community.
The Whitney Plantation Museum
Matt Haughey wrote a Twitter thread today referencing his experience back in 2018 of visiting the Whitney Museum in New Orleans:
I’d read Just Mercy, I’ve read the People’s History of the United States, I’ve read a bunch of Ta-Nehisi Coates, so I naively thought I had some idea of how bad slavery was. After visiting and hearing the stories from my guide and seeing the displays, I really had no clue. Think of the worst thing you can possibly imagine that one human being might do to another and know that what really took place was a hundred times worse."
I don’t know if or when I’ll ever be in New Orleans, but I hope I can someday take my family to visit this museum. Much like visiting the museums and memorials to the holocaust in Germany, which I was lucky enough to do with my family back in 2000, it’s important to know where and what we’ve come from - and in North America, the generational destruction that is slavery is a huge part of the foundation of what we’re all standing on today.
The darkness and brutality of slavery was evident from start to finish on the tour. In the “Gold Coast” around New Orleans, slaves lived for only 7-10 years after arriving on plantations in the region, no matter what their starting ages were. Slave owners insured their property (including their slaves) and would get up to 75% of their investment back when slaves died, so plantation owners had every incentive to work everyone to death, making many times over what they paid thanks to their free labor and when their slaves did die, owners were rewarded by recouping most of their original investment. The entire economic system was designed to support it.
I know here in Canada we have our own reckoning with the past that we continue to make a mess of even today, in light of all that we know.
I don’t have the answers for how to heal from the past atrocities. But I do know that actively working to deny they happened is among the worst ways to process and help healing:
I feel like the rise in conspiracy theories is due to so much more concrete information and data out there and people saying they can’t possibly believe what they see with their own eyes, instead it just HAS to be something else that doesn’t undermine their own beliefs.
My trusty @Netlify mug that has served me well for years of almost daily use has got a crack in it. 😢 It’s just enough that I can feel it pull apart when I pick it up.
