Harry Winser.com

Sundays are a slow news day, so I thought I’d spend today’s “bloglet”* sharing what apps I use to write. I admit this is pretty self-indulgent but maybe, dear reader, you’ll find some kinship in these words.

First, my “daily driver”; Obsidian. It’s a free app (for personal use) that runs almost anywhere; phone, desktop, and tablet. It’s my stalwart companion as I write technical notes, documentation, and D&D campaigns, as well as where I draft these bloglets. It stores each note as a Markdown file, which is just plain text, and formats text as you write it. The Markdown format is excellent; it walks that line between enabling structured formatting, while not being so flexible that you can end up with a soup of complexity. I grimace whenever I receive a Word document that contains headers that have all been manually sized with indentations tabbed in, instead of using proper semantic formatting. Many colleagues feel similar, and it’s been easy to sell Obsidian and Markdown to them.

My second favourite is Apple Pages. It makes it easy to produce good looking documents with little effort. I’ve used it to write large documents including a business plan. It’s also free, though there is a subscription option for templates. However, there are some mind-boggling limitations, with the most offensive being that you can’t orientate different pages differently. They all have to be portrait or landscape throughout a document. I do have to warn you however; you might find yourself jumping back to Word. I’ve had to ditch Pages when working with particularly complex documents. But whenever I write with Pages, I come away feeling happy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a similar experience with Word. I start with Pages and migrate if I need to.

The final tool is Apple Notes. The sharing feature is excellent. I use it all the time with my partner to write shopping lists, and we have a running note focused on home improvements. Though, I don’t understand how people drive it as a daily note tool as I find the macOS version to be a little buggy. The autocomplete is also incredibly aggressive which is distracting and flow disrupting. It’s also locked down so manually exporting notes is the only way to jump ship. With all that in mind my usage tends towards the iPhone, or if I just need a quick scratch pad.

Honourable mention; Apple Journal. I’ve given that its own blog post already about how annoying I find it, but it’s still an app I use each day.

And that’s it! I’d be interested to know of other apps out there that people recommend, so let me know on Mastodon.

* Bloglet is what I’m calling these posts, as they’re short and usually focused on something current.

Last year I was made aware of a startup called Operation Bluebird, which is focused on attempting to free the Twitter brand from X.com. They claim X has abandoned the trademark of Twitter (plus the terms “tweet” and “retweet”) and so it’s fair game for them trade on Twitter’s name recognition with a new service. This has spun out into a legal dispute, which continues to this day.

Over the last few weeks two things happened in quick succession.

First, Operation Bluebird launched Twitter.now. As stated previously, the legal dispute continues. It’s a standard micro-blogging affair, but with the Twitter branding + a $20 “founders” fee.

Eight days later there was a quick rebrand from Twitter.now to tweet.app, as a judge ruled that they couldn’t use the name “Twitter”. But they could use “Tweet” and the “Bird” logo.

I think there are a few interesting bits here. First is that Operation Bluebird still exists. With Threads, Bluesky, X, and Mastodon all vying for relevancy, there being another micro-blogging service whose USP is brand recognition doesn’t seem like a solid bet. Name recognition certainly can get you far, but not that far. Micro-blogging is crowded, and after 3+ years of X.com, it seems like a very tenuous business proposition.

Second is, again, how stupid it was for Musk to rebrand Twitter. The fact that thousands still search for Twitter, news outlets still write “X (formerly Twitter)”, and anecdotally I still see many websites with the blue Twitter logo shows what a colossal screw-up the rebrand was. I expect it’s now being taught in Business & Product Management courses as a cautionary tale across the world.

In the end, I don’t think it really matters if Operation Bluebird succeeds or fails. I don’t think the micro-blogging space can handle another service, nor do I think the “Twitter” brand is strong enough alone to pull punters away from their favourite haunts.

ChatGPT released their last and most advanced model GPT-6 yesterday.

GPT-6 Astra is our most intelligent model yet, with state-of-the-art performance in computer use, browsing, software engineering, science, and professional work. It excels at carrying out multistep workflows across code, browsers, and professional software. In several evaluations, Astra achieves stronger results while using substantially fewer output tokens—delivering a lower estimated API cost per task than earlier models despite its higher per-token pricing

- OpenAI

While it remains to be seen how powerful it actually is (as a number AI vendors went offline for a few hours yesterday), they’re touting it as their most advanced model yet. I guess we’ll see how powerful it is in the coming days, but they’re saying its better than Anthropics Fable or Opus 5.

As a reminder it was only month since AI companies were begging for outside regulation regarding the pace of AI development. It’s like an addict knowing what they’re doing is bad, while crying that no one is stopping them…

A new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter series dropped yesterday and it is… Well, see for yourself.

First, and I want to be very clear about this; fuck J.K. Rowling. She could have absconded with a perverse sum of cash to some mountain and lived a life of luxury. Instead, she decided to make a marginalised group lives hell. Her actions make partaking in anything Harry Potter morally gross. J.K. - your legacy will be forever tainted.

Anyway, back to the trailer. Having watched it, the same question keeps coming to mind: who is this for?
Is it for children? I don’t think so, as they will be multiple, hour long episodes. I don’t expect kids to sit through multiple hours of TV that’s probably going to be longer than it takes to read the books (well, maybe the three).

Ok, so adults? Maybe, but again it feels weird that 30-something’s will be watching a bunch of 11 year olds go to school. None of this show looks “new”. There’s no exciting new takes on the location or story (apart from some casting decisions). If you’ve read the books and see the movies, who is this for?

This show will be an “interesting” experiment; “Interesting” in the sense that if this works maybe we’ll see remakes of Star Wars™️ or Iron Man™️ sooner rather than later.

Right now, I can’t think of any other franchise that’s been remade like this with modern CGI, smoother writing, and much more “content” (8 hours plus probably). I also suspect the this casts merchandising deal isn’t anywhere near as good as the old ones.

All this to say; the obvious reason for this to exist is money. And I have no doubt it will generate it by the bucket load. It’s a shame that the time, money, and effort on show here isn’t being put into new ideas and projects. Ones without some Turf making more millions.

I’ve been a big fan of 1Password for a good few years now. My workflow is embedded in it, it works well (enough) cross platform, and I trust it’s security. 1Password should just be one of those bits of software that just works ™️ and ultimately I don’t have to think about. And yet here we are today, with folks proclaiming they’re looking to ditch 1Password because it now supports Ethic Cleansing.

Lets take a step back; this all started because of a Linux Distro called Omachy. I was aware of this distro for two reasons:

1. It seems to have terrible security policies even though it prides itself on being secure
2. David Heinemeier Hansson is a racist (I won’t link to the blog here - go search for it)

So anyway, 1Password + others in the last few days have all donated a shed-tonne ($13 million+) of cash to the Omachy foundation - the foundation that runs and supports Omachy. This is deeply weird for the same two reasons above; why spend so much money on unproven / shoddy tech, and on a racist? My line has been; if you invest in a bad person, you’re also a bad person. Pretty simple maths.

Before i go further, you might want some more background; I’d check out The Verge’s reporting.

So what am I going to do?

I’ve been with 1Password for years. I’m pretty darn embedded! But…

If you invest in a bad person, you’re also a bad person. Pretty simple maths.

Is a phase I keep coming back to. If i continue to support 1Password, am I a bad person? Well, yes and no. The Good Place is one of my favourite shows to explain this problem; doing something good in this world is incredibly complex, and has all sorts of ramifications that aren’t easy to anticipate. Just buying a tomato might mean you’re supporting pesticide use.

However, a password manager isn’t food. It’s not a requirement to survive.

So here’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to wait.

I’m currently hoping that 1Password changes their mind, withdraws their funding, and maybe even issue an apology. If they don’t… well expect a post about what password managers I’ve been trailing.