πŸ“‘βœ¨ Blips, now by email

Blips now has a newsletter. On the 1st of each month, you’ll get one email with everything I posted here the month before: the quick thoughts, the links, and the photos from my β€œI Was There” trails. Each blip is included in full, with its links, so you can read the whole month in one go without clicking through.

The first issue goes out November 1 and covers October. One email a month, nothing in between.

To subscribe, use the form in the sidebar or the one under any post.

For the curious: it’s built with an n8n workflow that pulls the month’s posts through the Scribbles API and creates the email in Buttondown. I’ll probably write up the details on meta.numericcitizen.me.

πŸ•– Now β€” Giving the iPad with external display another try

I've been doing this on and off since getting my M4 iPad Pro, and it always has been a mixed experience. The iPad is currently on iPadOS 27.2 beta 2. I'm using Apple Notes and Safari to prepare for my next trip in Thailand at the end of this month. A few observations:

  • Control Center is still not available on the external display! How hard is this to add? Reaching the iPad display for this is diminishing the experience of a "full-blown" computer.
  • Resizing windows creates such weird animation artifacts. Can this ever be improved?
  • Notifications coming at the top of the external display is nice but having them centered requires a long lasting animation from the top left corner to the top center that I find distracting.
  • I cannot make my Magic Mouse use my finger to scroll window content... only the track works. Does it requires a newer Magic Mouse?
  • There are many very small reminders that the iPad is not a Mac albeit all the efforts Apple put into iPadOS in recent years. As an example: clicking outside a windows on the external display doesn't bring the desktop. There is no desktop, only an Home Screen. Bunker. Another example: the absence of Raycast.
  • Leaving the iPad off for a day will force apps to be reloaded including Safari. Any unsaved work in a web page might be lost. It's a reminder that even on the Pro iPad, memory is tightly managed.
  • The lack of clamshell mode as found on MacBook is another bummer.
  • More to discover, for sure...

β†’ Links πŸ”— Going to OLED MacBook Pro

MacRumors reports that a new OLED MacBook Pro is coming soon. Compared to my M2 15-inch MacBook Air, the upcoming rumoured MacBook Pro brings a lot to the table:

  1. About the same weight (3.4 lbs) because I would go from a 15-inch to a 14-inch Mac
  2. A much more Pro XDR-level display (that was already available with the current generation of MacBook Pro) with a 120 Hz refresh rate!
  3. A higher-resolution screen but a smaller one (From 2880 x 1864 pixels to 3024 x 1964 pixels)
  4. Now with a touchscreen with macOS 27.2 support (I expect this change for the Mac to be like when Apple introduced mouse support for the iPad)
    • Support for scrolling webpage content, panning and zooming into photos is all I expect
  5. A longer battery life (from 18 hrs to 24 hrs)
  6. A 50% memory bandwidth increase @ 153 MB/s
  7. Now with a Dynamic Island with full macOS 27.2 support
  8. Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, one HDMI port and an SD Card slot would be a massive upgrade, too

This could be the best MacBook upgrade ever for me. But also the most expensive one. Selling my current MacBook Air and M4 Mac mini would help finance the transaction.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/08/apple-october-27-macbook-pro/

πŸ•– Now β€” With updated visuals

I'm done updating this blog's theme. If you know about my other websites, you'll feel at home here, too. I tried to keep a few visual details that are reminiscent of Scribbles' original design. It was much easier than I thought, and I know why. Not only Scribbles.page is a very flexible blog hosting service, but its documentation is also extensive. Feeding Claude AI with the custom theme building documentation helped seal the deal to build a custom theme.

πŸ•– Now β€” Scribbling

I knew Scribbles.page supported visual tweaks to hosted blogs with custom CSS, but I remembered I could build a new visual theme from scratch. This morning, I explored this capability with Claude AI by sharing all relevant documentation links, and 20 minutes later I had something working in preview mode. 😱

It's not live yet because I want to restyle my blog so that it shares many visual attributes from my other blog here. But I also want to keep some of Scribbles' default theme personality. Stay tuned.