Ephemeral Scrapbook

When tech disappoints, and the platforms crumble, the independent web, human creativity and curation deliver what matters.

07 Dec 2025 — 7 min read

Header photo by Geoffrey Chevtchenko on Unsplash - This is Montreal, Canada during winter

👤 Personal {#creativity}

1️⃣ I might have found the right creative beat by alternating between creating a YouTube video and a new edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. I shouldn’t try to do both during the same week, it’s way too much. 2️⃣ I made another change with this newsletter edition. I decided to support the “not by AI” movement. You’ll see a small badge at the bottom, along with a link to learn more about the movement and why it is essential. The rule is that at least 90% of the content must be human-made. I’m easily crossing that threshold. I discovered this initiative through this website, I like the idea but their version of the logo, not really.

🗺️ Discoveries {#web #fediverse}

1️⃣ Ghost is relaunching Ghost Explore, a place to discover other blogs and websites hosted or running on the Ghost platform. It’s a great way to be discovered and to find new places to explore (pun intended), too. By moving towards the Fediverse, Ghost kind of had no choice but to augment its platform with a discovery mechanism. 2️⃣ Explore 6,000 years of battles, inventions, philosophers and more... on an interactive 3D globe. It’s super cool. That’s the web that I like. 3️⃣ Dealgorithmed and disassociated.com both seem to aim for the same mission: to help people stay out of platforms and enjoy the web as it should be. I’m subscribing to both. 4️⃣ It appears that TinyGlade can be played on the Mac via GeForce NOW! I saw a post on my Micro.blog timeline about that. That’s something that I could try during the upcoming holidays!

👨🏻‍💻 Writing {#yearinreview}

1️⃣ It’s that time of year to take a look back at my year as a blogger. This year, although I kept a journal of my highlights, I must admit that 2025 was relatively quiet. Yes, I could say that 2025 passed like a long, peaceful river. Writing this review should be pretty quick, especially since I plan to change my approach to get a different kind of review than last year’s. Stay tuned.

🌄 Photography {#mood #source/reddit #source/unsplash}

1️⃣ The end of autumn and winter is the time of year when I am the least active in photography. I live in a rather big city in Canada (Montreal, as seen in the header photo), a cold, gray country in winter. I know it’s still a source of beautiful images, but this climate and the discomfort it brings me are enough to take a break. Maybe it’s time to focus my energy on cleaning up my thousands of photos; who knows, I might come across a gem or two to share with you. 2️⃣ Reddit contains not only rage and controversial threads, but you can find a few gems like this one posted by users like u/unlicensedlensed, it’s foggy out there | Munich. Great B&W images.

🍎 Apple & Tech {#tech, #stevejobs}

1️⃣ Thanks to a shared memory by Scott Knaster on his Substack, I didn’t know Steve Jobs had the idea of an all-glass headquarters a long, long time ago. 2️⃣ The tech world is moving fast, and it can be exhausting. Actually, it is exhausting. But is the tech world moving in the right direction? Because we cannot have an iPhone moment every year, it seems that more than ever, the tech world is surfing on hype. If tech companies don’t deliver, we might feel betrayed because we’re constantly tricked into some marketing traps. Trust is eroding. For Riccardo Mori, that’s precisely what happened in the last two decades. His piece is an excellent recap of what actually happened. Well worth the read. 3️⃣ Alan Dye, the guy in charge of design at Apple, left. He will join Meta. Stephen Lemay, a 26-year Apple design veteran, will take over the role from Dye. Alan Dye is a controversial figure in Apple’s design space. Some pundits will say that he isn’t really a designer. Now, it’s time to look ahead and see how Apple will evolve. Liquid Glass is controversial, probably not as much as the iOS 7 redesign was, but it is nonetheless polarizing.🏃🏻‍♂️‍➡️ 4️⃣ But that’s not all, two other execs are retiring, enough to warrant a press release. A few years ago, Apple ran a marketing campaign in which it announced a new product each day for a whole week. This year, it’s different: Apple announces an exec departure once a day for the whole week.🤷🏻‍♂️ You can visit the current Apple Leadership page right here.

“Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.” — John Gruber, quoting Louie Mantia on his recent post following Alan Dye’s departure from Apple. Ouch.

1️⃣ In a recent post by MacStories, they argue that since LLM models are mature enough that most people won’t actually see the difference in performance, the attention is now turning to the user experience. For example, consider how you configure an MCP connection in ChatGPT versus in Anthropic’s Claude. The latter is much easier to do. The look and feel of the Claude Mac client feels better than ChatGPT’s. I decided to give Claude a try for one month to experiment with Craft MCP connections to portions of my content. 2️⃣ The CEO and founder of Ghost, John O’Nolan, recently shared that he is working on a new RSS feed reader called Alcove. Another RSS feed reader, you might wonder? Yep. Another one. What strikes me about this announcement is that he used x.com to share his article. As Ghost adopted Fediverse this year, you might wonder why bother with x.com! Actions speak louder than words for me.

🚧 Special projects {#craft/mcp}

1️⃣ I made a few changes to my projects page on my landing page. I’m slowly gearing up to plunge into the consumption of Shortcuts and Craft APIs. The only missing things: spare time and patience, because I’ll need a lot of both, especially with Shortcuts editing, which is far from an enjoyable experience. 2️⃣ I found a use case for MCP and Craft, and I’ll document it in a separate document so that I can submit my use case to the winter challenge the Craft team put together. In summary, I’ll use Claude to prompt my Craft daily notes via an MCP connection to build a year-in-review summary. For 2025, the review will be incomplete because I restarted using Craft daily notes in October. But for next year, if all goes according to my plan, I should have a more complete journal.

📺 YouTube {#iphone #ipad #macintosh}

1️⃣ What if a robot could help benchmark iPhone performance? That’s exactly what was done in this video. 2️⃣ Even with this year’s additions to iPadOS, the iPad is still a rather limited device compared to the Mac. This video explains the three main reasons. Just a reminder: iPadOS’s roots are much closer to iOS than to the Mac. 3️⃣ Do you often reboot your Mac? Do you like the booting sound coming from the speakers each time the Mac reboots? I do. Here’s a short video explaining the audio science and a little bit of history about the Mac startup sounds.

Fascinating benchmarking video but unsurprising results.

Is the iPad really fixable or is it a lost cause?

A sophisticated discussion about the Mac startup sound over the years. Fascinating.

1️⃣ I want this (YouTube video about Apple’s Digital ID) to come to Canada ASAP! But, it will take a long time before we can leave our wallet at home if Matt Birchler’s experience is any indication. 2️⃣ Certainly looking forward to Alcove, a new RSS reader by the CEO and founder of Ghost. 3️⃣ I’m looking forward to seeing the winners of the winter_challenge organized by the Craft team. I shared my submission, which I think fits really well with Craft’s mission: being a good app for writers and thinkers like me. You can see that in action in my latest YouTube video.

1️⃣ What’s going on in Musk’s head? Maybe we should look at X’s current state to get an approximation. The article from The Atlantic (paywall might apply) argues that X’s new “About This Account” feature—meant to improve transparency by revealing account origin, location, and username-change history—has instead exposed the massive scale of misinformation, foreign influence, and deception on the platform. The feature instantly revealed that many seemingly “patriotic” American accounts are actually operated from abroad, while also mislabelling some legitimate users, further confusing matters. The result is a chaotic environment where authenticity is impossible to verify, fake personas amplify political narratives, and X’s architecture incentivizes performance over truth, turning the platform into a dysfunctional information ecosystem detached from reality. Best thing to do? Log off and delete. You’ll see there is life after Twitter. 2️⃣ Once you log off for good from Twitter / X, you’ll discover that there is a world awaiting you, away from platforms, away from manipulation and rage. Just ask Greg:

“When there was one big platform, leaving meant missing out. Now there’s Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and whatever else springs up next week. No single space feels needed anymore. The FOMO vanished. Once that happened, having your own blog stopped looking like the odd choice.” — Greg Morris

👉🏻 Main 🌟 Meta 🌟 Blips 🌟 Blog 👀

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇪🇺 💪🏻

📌

This newsletter edition is also available as a Craft shared document here. An index of past editions can be found here. This week’s edition is based on template version 1.8.4 and was put together with ❤️ mostly on an M2 15-inch MacBook Air, Craft Docs and many supporting subscriptions! If you like this newsletter, please consider supporting me via PayPal or becoming a supporter by visiting my Ko-fi page!

https://notbyai.fyi