I've been following the progress of the upcoming version of System76's Pop!_OS ever since I heard about their idea to write their own desktop environment in Rust. It's going to be a pretty huge update by the looks of it, and it goes by Cosmic.

From what I've read on the blog, and also watched via the episode of Tech Over Tea with YouTuber (Host) Brodie Robertson and System76 founder Carl Richell, I'm 100% going to try it out when it's' available. And I really think there's a chance that if I like it, I could eventually persuade myself into buying a System76 computer in the future.

I just checked out The Iconfactory's Kickstarter for their Project Tapestry project, which in their words will be a "a universal, chronological timeline for iOS for any data that’s publicly available on the Internet".

It's a nice idea. And reminds me of BlackBerry Hub on my old BlackBerry, which used to combine things like Twitter and Facebook, along with your emails, BBM notifications, etc.

As for myself, I don't plan on backing the project. The only "feeds" that I currently use are Mastodon (via Ivory), RSS feeds for various blogs, and Twitter/X for football updates. And none of those really need to be combined together.

That's not to say it's not for you, so if you're interested, check out the Kickstarter.

Seeing as I've just recently switched to Firefox, I think it only makes sense that I try out Pocket at the same time. It's already built into Firefox, and when I've used Pocket in the past I've been impressed by it's suggestions. However, I haven't tried it in a long time, so it will be interesting to see how it compares to something like Readwise.

When I've pictured my "ideal" phone in the past, I've regularly had long battery life as one of the key features. But I've thought about battery life as something that hasn't improved. Because most people have probably been charging their phone every night for quite some time.

However, you could probably argue that battery life has always been increasing. The problem is, so have our demands.

Sure, more powerful chips require more energy to run. So an iPhone 15 will naturally require more resources than an iPhone 5. At the same time, we also weren't expecting an iPhone 15 to record 4K HDR video without affecting the battery life.

It's probably not a big revelation to many. But it's a perspective that might be worth considering when judging the evolution of technology.

I finally watched the Rabbit R1 announcement video earlier, and while I think it's a really raw product and has a lot to prove, I was definitely wowed by it. Maybe it's the hardware design (which was done in partnership with Teenage Engineering), or the idea that this will actually be able to do things for you, rather than just be another conversational AI. Either way, shortly after watching the video, I decided to pre-order an R1.

The relatively low entry price for the R1 at $199/£160 definitely helped. But I also wanted to put my money where my mouth was. Since products like the Rabbit R1 and others like the Human Ai Pin are examples of the direction that I want technology to move towards.

In my ideal world, technology would be used to help us understand, explore, and experience the world around us. Rather than keep us locked away in digital worlds, cut off from people around us. No matter how "connected" it can make us feel when we've got a screen constantly in front of our face.

I'm hopeful that we're moving in the right direction.

I can't believe it took this long, but as of tonight I've finally started watching The Walking Dead. I don't know what I was doing in 2010 when it first started, but somehow I let it completely pass me by.

I'm just about to start the fourth episode, and I'm already hooked. 🧟‍♂️

There's a total of 177 episodes, which seems a lot, but at this rate I'll be getting through them pretty quickly.

DHH:

The App Store dispute can be boiled down to one big question: Is the iPhone a computer or not? If it’s a computer, we ought to have the right to compute. Like consumers have won the right to repair. If it’s a computer, it ought to be yours, and you ought to have the right to install whatever software you should so choose.

I mean, is he wrong?

The Verge:

Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees at Activision Blizzard and Xbox this week.

Just as World of Warcraft (and Blizzard) starting looking like it was on the up.

I'm hoping this won't affect their existing games, such as WoW. But since Mike Ybarra (Blizzard President) is leaving, and the survival game that was in development has been cancelled, it's not looking great.

I have a weird relationship with my iPad. I can go months without using it all, and then suddenly something switches in me, and I want to use it for everything.

While I'm not trying to blame anyone, I think a lot of this comes from me falling for the "what is a real computer" or the "everyone can work from an iPad" hype that used to be quite common on the internet.

Now I'm not saying either those are objectively true or false, or that I want to try and change anyone else's opinions on the iPad. But whenever I pick up my iPad Pro, without any case or keyboard attached, it feels magical to me. It feels like I'm using a computer from a science fiction show^[1].

It's because of that feeling, coupled with the conversations around it having the ability to be your only computer, I start wanting to do more things with it. I attach the Magic Keyboard because then it looks like a laptop, and that's a real computer, so it must mean it becomes better. I also then occasionally connect a mouse, or even play around with the Apple Pencil, because this clearly makes it a more capable computer.

Yet every time, it leads me to getting irritated with the quirks/drawbacks of the iPad and then avoiding it for another month (or few). Instead of just letting the iPad be the magical device that it can be for me.

I need to learn how to just enjoy things for what they are, and not try to dream up weird and wonderful scenarios that add needless complexities and friction in my life.

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1. Don't take this as me thinking the iPad is a perfect computer. But that's not important right now. ↩︎

The Artifact team announcing the news via their Medium blog:

We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. We launched a year ago and since then we’ve been working tirelessly to build a great product. We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved. The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.

On one hand I'm dissapointed that an app that I enjoy to use will soon be no more. On the other hand, it's not really surprising. I found it to be a great way to surface content that I was interested in (although the quality did drop in recent times), however the reading experience in the app wasn't the greatest. Even so, it still made my "Software I’ve Enjoyed in 2023" list last year.

I assume this is the case for other people as well, but at least for myself, I would have used the service a lot more if it had some form of web interface.

Also, isn't it a bit weird that this news was posted on a Medium blog? I can understand wanting it in a more permanent place outside of the actual Artifact app, since that will soon stop working. But Medium? Not their own artifact.news domain, or even just a blogging platform with a better reading experience than something like Medium. Maybe that sort of decision shows why the app was like it was.