Cold day in Austin, might see some snow tonight. Working on server fixes and performance. We also submitted Strata 1.2 for iOS to Apple for review, so hopefully that’ll hit the App Store soon, with Android to follow later this week.

Trump’s second term — which apparently started a day early — is going to be a series of mismanaged, real crises and completely dumb, fake issues. Gonna try to ignore both. 🇺🇸

ByteDance was been trying so hard to sell TikTok and they just ran out of time. Thankfully, Trump is going to extend the deadline, giving TikTok more time to find a buyer! Whew. I’m sure TikTok will be sold real soon now. 🤪

I’ve optimized a few things with our Twitter / X import. If you never imported your tweets, now is a great time! Micro.one and Micro.blog copy all your tweets and photos (minus RTs and videos) to a space you can control. Full API access to the data, easy to embed on your blog.

Molly White:

"The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control."

Get your own domain name. If you don’t know where, Micro.one hosting is $1/month. https://www.mollywhite.net/micro/entry/202501190959

TikTok’s “not available” message is blatantly manipulative… So a fitting end to the app, for now.

Morning haiku https://www.manton.org/2025/01/18/morning-haiku.html

Another shot of downtown and the sky with fewer clouds, from across the river.

Custom printing code for Mac apps is a lost art. Nice work by @danielpunkass in the latest Black Ink. https://micro.blog/danielpunkass https://redsweater.com/blog/4169/black-ink-2-4-for-mac-quick-look-printing-and-pretty-text

I’ve never had a problem with Mac app notarization until today. Usually it takes just a minute. This new build is stuck “processing” for 20 minutes now. Not as bad as human review taking days, but on principle I don’t like that Apple is the bottleneck.

Lady Bird Lake and downtown Austin from the pedestrian bridge.

My cookies and sessions are all out of whack now serving both micro.one and micro.blog from essentially the same web application. Separate load balancers, but I think I need to split things out even further to fix a couple issues.

New updates to the mnml theme for Micro.blog. Looks really nice @jimmitchell! Remember you can preview new themes now without having to switch your blog. https://jimmitchell.org/2025/01/17/mnml-theme-update-photos-page/ https://micro.blog/jimmitchell

Great lineup of social web talks at FOSDEM next month. Wish I could be there. Good luck everyone! https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/social-web/

I’ve been ignoring most podcasts over the last month. This morning, listened to the latest Dithering on my walk. It’s got everything you need to know about the TikTok ban and new interest in Xiaohongshu (RedNote). https://dithering.fm/

I haven’t installed the latest iOS 18.3 beta yet, but just from screenshots I like this italicized change for notification summaries. https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/16/ios-18-3-temporarily-disables-apple-intelligence-notification-summaries-for-select-apps-more/

We posted a new Core Intuition today, catching up on all the WordPress drama from the last month or so. https://coreint.org/2025/01/episode-625-what-fresh-hell/

Very small example of a Siri paper cut and why I avoid using it. This morning I got a text while driving asking “what time” something was. I responded with “ten thirty”, and Siri sent “1030” instead of “10:30”. Not a big deal, but there are countless scenarios like this.

TikTok threatening to shut down completely on Sunday — which is more than is required by the law — is such a transparent attempt to influence the supreme court and others. Good riddance. It’s not great if everyone just joins Reels, but we need a shake-up.

If you only build a new skyscraper every year or so, downtown Austin doesn’t seem like it’s changing much. Looking at the skyline, it’s familiar — hey there’s the capitol, and the Frost tower, and… — but when I think about the full scope of changes over decades, it’s almost unrecognizable.