I see more people in direct message chats and Discords these days, and people seem to get energy from them in a way you just don’t from Twitter anymore.

I Don’t Think People Really Want Another Twitter

I find myself agreeing with this and spent a chunk of the weekend finding ways to replace the value I once saw in Twitter. I appreciate the folks immediately jumping to Mastodon, but for me I think I’ve simply outgrown this sort of social networking on the web.

Stay tuned for a post on how my consumption has changed.

No matter how the quality of Google’s results seems to have declined, I find its results are often more relevant, closer to the source, and more complete than those from DuckDuckGo.

https://pxlnv.com/linklog/google-enormous-sums/

Quick thoughts:

• Google’s results have declined, and is just about unusable without an ad blocker.
• I have always found DuckDuckGo pretty lackluster. If you’re looking for an alternative, I’d suggest giving Brave Search or Kagi a try.

Hopefully one of the latter will be available for switching my own Safari default on iOS someday.

What if you ran your own news feed? You could fill it with things you actually care about, not just clickbait. real journalism, not whatever your racist high-school classmate shares. Learn something new, remember to stay active, keep tabs on what matters.feeeed is an app for that!

feeeed » build your own news feed

feeeed is the latest app I’ve been playing around with on my iPhone. It’s a fun, personal aggregator that delivers me things I’m interested in but don’t want to spend time scrolling the respective app to do so.

Currently, I’m creating a feed of:

• My step goal
• Hacker News
• Weather
• Personal photo flashbacks
• subreddits (TodayILearned & ExplainLikeImFive)
• Top shared links via my Twitter feed

Smooth scrolling of a no nonsense feed. Like I said, it’s fun. Major kudos to the active dev @nateparrott.

PSST: In the future, this sidebar will also show integrations!

Introducing: Your new task view

Honestly, the new task view works great for me and all the new additions are pretty solid. But I’m most interested in the quote above and what they have planned.

Also, and I’ll beat this drum until I’m blue in the face, but the iPad is special specifically because it appeals to such a diverse set of people and needs.

The iPad is for Everyone

I just wanted to amplify this thought from Matt. I don’t get why others continue to want an iPad to be one specific thing, or tailor to the needs of traditional Mac professionals.

I look around my family and see iPads being used in various ways:

• It’s my mom’s only device. She browses the web, does her banking, plays solitaire, iMessages with her family, scans documents. And I don’t have to worry about viruses or updating her machine.
• My three year old daughter can play games, watch shows, color pictures and do amazing things with the Osmo app. She may navigate an iPad better than I can.
• I use it to watch TV, serve as a working dashboard during business hours, extend my MacBook’s screen while traveling, read books, and simply do any bit of computing for my work that I do at my desk.

The iPad thrives in its versatility. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

With Discussions, search results on Brave Search are augmented with actual conversations related to the query, pulled from popular forum sites like Reddit. This allows users to easily see what the community is saying about a topic, rather than just reading content curated by websites.

Introducing Discussions: Real Human Answers in Search Results | Brave Browser

Cool new feature for Brave Search, which I’ve started to use a lot more recently.

Even better is this tidbit about an upcoming feature:

But Discussions is just the first step in Brave’s mission to make search more neutral and open, and to counteract bias or outright filtering of results. Discussions will soon be followed by Brave Goggles, which will allow users to create their own result filters, and rulesets to constrain a searchable space or alter result ordering.

Rather than a single, secretive way of ranking and “curating” results (as there is with Google), Brave Search Goggles will allow for an almost infinite number of ranking and filtering options. All driven by the community of users. And together, Discussions and Goggles will offer a powerful set of tools to counteract bias and Big Tech’s unseen influence on our information.

Sign me up for a personalized search experience. Hopefully they can get better at local search, too, as that’s where Google (with Google My Business) truly excels.

The average quality of the average Netflix original just isn’t very good compared to their competition — not enough to justify the highest subscription prices in the industry.

Daring Fireball: Netflix Shares Drop 25% After Company Reports Losing Subscribers for First Time in a Decade

A thousand times, this. We’re a streaming household and we often do turn on/off various services as we work through different shows. I started to realize recently that we watch Netflix the least and I somehow continue to receive notifications from them about price increases.

It’s just not worth it anymore as an auto subscribe (like Disney+ is) when there are so many alternatives.

You can now select and copy text fragments that span multiple blocks.This is a step towards bridging the gap between Gutenberg as a block editor and Gutenberg as a text editor. While blocks enable powerful page-shaping capabilities, they also compete with text for selection and clipboard space. Gutenberg 13.0 is a step towards an editor where blocks and text coexist frictionlessly.

What’s new in Gutenberg 13.0? (14 April) – Make WordPress Core

Hooray! Kudos to all involved on this one.

DuckDuckGo for Mac does not fork Chromium (or anything else). Instead, we use the rendering engine that comes with macOS, which is created by Apple and the same rendering engine Safari uses. By building off the macOS rendering engine, our browser should also be most compatible with the Mac system (the same as Safari). Technically, we don’t have to “fork” any code to do this – we just call an API provided by macOS.We are building everything else from scratch. So beyond rendering, all the code is ours – written by DuckDuckGo engineers with privacy, security, and simplicity front of mind.

Introducing DuckDuckGo for Mac: A Private, Fast, and Secure Browsing App

I signed up for the beta list to try this as soon as I learned about it. Perhaps it can unseat Brave as my browser of choice. If nothing else, it’ll be great to have a non-Chromium based alternative.

You might remember us from 2012 we launched Pebble on Kickstarter and raised over $10m from 68,000 people around the world. This was our first breakthrough (a classic 5 year overnight success!) Over the next few years, we sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales.

Success and Failure at Pebble. We launched Pebble on Kickstarter 10… | by Eric Migicovsky | Apr, 2022 | Medium

I remember Pebble’s launch being a fantastic time online. I feel like it launched both the wearables category and Kickstarter itself.

In 2015, I attended a Pebble party at SXSW in Austin as they were gearing up to launch new models. I happened to be there for work, but didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to see this excitement in person.

Later that day I took an Uber to the local Best Buy in Austin and purchased one of the original Pebbles. I wasn’t a watch wearer at the time, but it converted me. I preordered the first Apple Watch not long after in April and have been a happy user ever since.

I wish Pebble had found more of its own niche and lasted longer, but I do thank it for showing me the potential of this product category.