Apple Pencil on iPhone!!! I’m in!
★Things that interest me so far from the Apple event:
Aperture on iPhone Pro - Change the light allowed in the camera in low-light. Up to 1.8F. Amazing.
Apple Reference Image - See if an image was originally captured on iPhone.
Live activities on dynamic island now supports three activities. Actually a number of times I need this while traveling.
Live rewind on Apple Watch - Potential to rewind conversations for things I missed. I'm a little hard on hearing so this might help.
iPhone Duo!
★This is triggering, in the most hilarious way.
★This looks interesting. Running local small ai models for specific purposes.
★Gruber just posted his iPhone Air review. I saw this non-sarcastically, I’ve been waiting for this all year.
★The Devils, by Joe Abercrombie, took me a while to get into—mainly because they’re so many characters to understand and follow. But, as I’m nearing the end, I can’t wait for the second book.
★Just finished season finale of Silo Season 3. Amazing. Absolutely loved it.
★The parts for my new project arrive today. Stay tuned.
★Looking into ring sizers for my Pebble 01. I think that will solve my problem. It keeps rotating around throughout the day. Bummer that it doesn’t fit on my index finger, and it’s too big for my ringer finger. Hope a sizer solves it.
★I once heard that you shouldn’t systematize someting until you’ve had to do it three times. I was tempted to do just that today, but realized it’d only been twice that I’d had to deal with it. I’ll wait till tomorrow and see if it’s still needed.
★I’m thinking of having a single blog. All the things I write in one place (except the religious stuff, that’s elsewhere), and having multiple RSS feeds. Subscribe to all, or to short form, or long form.
★Wow. Just got my Pebble Index 01. I’ve been excited about this device since it was announced, and a bit concerned as well as to whether it’d work.
Well, I love it.
I even bought the 3d printed sizing kit to make sure it’d work—I opted for the size that fits on my ring finger, despite them suggesting that I go with the index.
After a quick setup (and a slightly buggy vibe coded iOS app—Pebble if you’re interested I’m happy to help improve the UI of the app), my first two tests performed perfectly.
And here’s the thing—the Pebble, in one instant, with one try, did something that Apple Watch and iPhone and Homepod have all failed utterly at over the years. I added a reminder, and had an instant, 100% hit rate of success.
That’s a great product.
I asked it to remind me to pickup milk tonight, and a second later I checked and saw it in my Apple Reminders app.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to get my Apple Watch to performance this dance. It often has a 50% success rate, and that’s infuriating. Sometimes Siri takes a nap (and yes, I have the new Siri on iOS 27, if anything it’s worse than old siri for simple tasks like this), sometimes it misreads me and plays a song, and sometimes it just errors out.
The Pebble is so simple, and perfect.
I’m excited to see if it becomes my replacement for—well many things. So much of the reason I hold onto an Apple Watch (apart from seeing calendar events) is to be able to quickly capture 5 second ideas for later. With the Index 01 I can press a button, speak into it, and then have my phone process that once I get back to it.
Now, this glowing report is obviously a bit new, since I just tried it. But if it works as well as I’m hoping, I’ll be an absolute believer.
★When you ask AI for 5x more ideas, but you accidentally meant 5 more ideas. Happy accidents.
★1%. That’s about how often LinkedIn’s stupid notifications are actually useful—where someone real wants to connect. I’m a sucker and keep coming back, despite the spam. It’s the last social network I haven’t fully shaken off.
★Interesting thought experiment. This morning I was thinking about Freeform and my frustrations with it. Realized I could probably use AI to build my own sketching app that has exacdtly what I need, and nothing more. Well… I have something in the works. Testflight coming soon.
★I was talking with a friend today about RSS. One thing I realize I’ve shifted on in the last few years is how I process posts. I like to read view them, save them, read them, and my final ouput from all that is finding a way to write about it or share with a friend. Much of what I read (most of what I read) never gets processed that way, but the occasional posts or thoughts often originate from original inputs.
★I’ve been debating what to do with my writing. I want to get back into long form, but I have so many short form post ideas. Do I put it all on joshuawold.com, or post it in multiple areas? Not sure.
★Having two weeks off work has been amazing. The world kept turning, and I had time to relax and read a bunch of books, and take an amazing vacation. Thankful to be back.
★Just cracked open my Xteink X4 Pro. After months with the X4 I’m really excited to try this out. The only downside is the power—the weird little pin connector. It’s hard to keep it in place as it wants to just pull away. The backlight and touch screen are amazing.
★Walmart finally supports Apple Pay, per Daring Fireball, and having come back from Italy where I spent the last two weeks exclusively using my Apple Watch for Apple Pay—I’m glad to hear this. It’s so much simpler to just know my watch can pay for things everywhere I go.
★I’ve been running an ad campaign for a non-profit I believe in. Really hoping the results go well, it’s always hard to know with these things until the final moments—you can have signals, but the on the ground event is the real deal.
★I’ve been working on stat lines today for Claude Code. These are the little status updates that you can see at the bottom of Ghostty in the terminal, which gives you information about how your Claude Code usage is going. I’ve modified an existing one to match what works for me.
Fable 5 | code | ⎇ main | ( 42,-7) ctx ▓▓░░░ | 5h ▓▓▓░░ | 7d ▓▓░░░ | F5 ░░░░░
★The Odyssey was fantastic. I need to watch it again to digest it.
★It’s smoke season in Idaho. The only season I won’t run outside in. Bummed it arrived so soon. Hoping it doesn’t stay around.
★I sleep with a cubed pillow, a matress for my head.
★I want the Codex Micro. But it’s out of impulse buy territory.
★Not original, but I really wish em dashes weren’t an AI thing—I love using them.
★LinkedIn seriously has nothing good anymore. The notifications I get are all ads.
★What if I don’t have 750 words in me? Years ago I gave myself a challenge, to write 1,000 words a day, six days a week. I did that, more or less, for a few years. It was a wonderful experience, and gave me the necessary muscles to be able to put out words and challenge myself.
But some days I didn’t have it in me, so I would just journal; trashing words together like an ape on a keyboard.
Something I’ve often wondered, in the time since, is what I should do if I don’t have the minimum amount of words in me on a given day. Some days I combat that by getting it out. But lately, many days that’s meant not writing at all. I don’t love that. But I also don’t want to put out rubbish to people who pay attention with their time.
Enter this blog. I have lots of shorter thoughts I want to share on a daily basis; but many aren't processed enough to fit into a blog post, or worthy enough of an email blast. That's what this is for. It's my own replacement to Twitter of old. It will be an endless stream of consciousness, hopefully just a little better quality than my journal entries of old.
★Chatbots can be so helpful to explain the context of thigns that are outside our domain of expertise. Also, risks involved.
★There’s a future with building quality apps. Yes, everyone can do it themselves now. But maintaining? That’s hard.
★AI keeps giving me ideas, then when I go with them, it congratulates me on being so clever.
★Ghost CMS is fine. But I don’t love it. The whole UI inside isn’t simple, it feels outdated somehow, and too cumbersome. I’m tempted to switch to Bear blog, but also tempted to just move away from CMSes altogether.
★Been using Ghostty for all my Claude Code work. Today I wanted to try GPT Sol. It was easy to just turn it on inside Ghostty and test it on a project. It works great. Truly making the LLM a commodity.
★Tried Cloudflare Drop. It allows for quick uploading of html/css/js.
I use Netlify and love it. Nothing comes close to its speed and simplicity. Cloudflare might be a good competitor, eventually. Took 15 minutes to create the drop and claim it.
Kept running into issues.
★