Future-proofing my online presence
My thoughts and opinions on ActivityPub and the Fediverse are numerous, and I am already working on an article to share them with you. For this one, the plan is to explain my strategy to future-proof my online presence.
If you don’t know what ActivityPub and the Fediverse are, please watch my recent video about this topic. But the most important information to understand is that one can follow and be followed, as well as engage, regardless of what social platform is being used.
Many services have been compatible with the ActivityPub protocol for a long time now, but I don’t think we can deny the fact that if large corporations adopt it, the chances of it becoming mainstream are higher. And based on the recent announcement by Flipboard and the tests being conducted by Threads, I’m pretty sure this is what’s happening right now.
Again, I suggest watching my recent video on the topic to understand the details and implications. For now, let us discuss the reasons behind my choice of Micro.blog and Mastodon.
Micro.blog
I believe that Micro.blog is a link between the old Internet, before social media, where people used to write on websites and blogs, and the new Internet that is all about sharing everything.
At Micro.blog, you can make a website with static pages and and also have a blog. The cool thing about the blog is that it uses the ActivityPub protocol. This means that anyone using any ActivityPub service can read and engage with your posts.
But there’s more, or, should I say, less? If you read Manton Reece’s book about starting a Micro.blog, or follow him online, you’ll see that he is really into writing short posts. It is also evident in the company’s name and the blog feature on Micro.blog.
If one writes simple posts, such as tweets, they will be added to the timeline, like what happens on Twitter and other similar services. On the other hand, if a long-form text is created, that will become a blog post like this article you are reading. However, it will also be added to the timeline with a link to the article. And, once again, that timeline is compatible with ActivityPub.
All these means that someone, say, on Mastodon, can follow and engage with all the posts without ever being a Micro.blog user. You can use my blog to try it out. Just look for @vladcampos@vladcampos.com on your preferred Fediverse platform.
There are already many great interviews with Manton Reece about Micro.blog out there, but I’m thrilled to share that he recently accepted an invitation to have a conversation about all this on my YouTube Channel.
But if Micro.blog is both services in one, why would I need Mastodon? Well, a year ago, I tried using it alone, but I had no success. I left because of a design decision. There are no likes or re-posts on the Micro.blog timeline. To explain why I care about it, let’s talk about Mastodon.
Mastodon
When I first heard about Micro.blog, I was already a Mastodon user, where I was building a new community after leaving Twitter. On doing so, I quickly learned how important likes and re-posts are. Because of them, I got to know so many nice people re-posted by someone I was following. The same thing happened the other way around. People re-posting me on Mastodon helped me get noticed by others.
Nevertheless, I fully understand Micro.blogs decision. The goal is to stimulate conversations, but, to be honest, I felt very isolated there. And at that particular moment, I did not have a significant number of people following me on Mastodon, and I still do not. Until these days, I keep discovering interesting people and communities through re-posts.
How is this future-proofing my online presence?
First of all, ActivityPub is a W3C protocol. Then, there’s the fact that major corporations are beginning to embrace it. But the most important reason is that ActivityPub-compatible social media allows you to move between different services and bring all of your followers with you. Let’s say that in the future, Micro.blog adds likes and re-posts and I decide I want to leave Mastodon. I’ll be able to easily do it, bringing with me all the followers, whom, by the way, I prefer to call community.
This is such a win-win situation. Whenever and wherever it pleases me, I am free to move, and I don’t have to ask anyone from my community to move to a different social media platform. Furthermore, if they also wish to move somewhere else, that’s fine. As long as it is compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, neither technology nor CEOs will prevent us from keeping in touch with each other.
The Plan
My website has already been migrated to Micro.blog, but I will continue to post on Medium, which is, incidentally, also in the process of adopting the ActivityPub protocol.
In December 2024 I started the processo of moving my site to Obsidian Publish. In August 2025 I moved back to Micro.blog
Regarding micro-posting, I’ll be doing it on Mastodon. So, if one wishes to follow only my articles or only my micro-posts, they can do so. Or, they can also follow both. And the best part is that anyone can follow and interact with me using any ActivityPub-compatible service. This is absolutely remarkable!
What went wrong with Evernote? How did we get here?
I expect negative comments on every video or article I publish about Evernote now. Sadly, talking about it makes me feel anxious.
I don’t think Evernote is doomed, but there is a profound shift in perception going on. It used to be that going to the Evernote Conference was the most important moment I looked forward to every year. It was great to see my friends, clients, developers, and the Evernote team.
Furthermore, sharing news from the conference or anything else Evernote released throughout the year had such positive vibes. Now, it’s hard to ignore all the negativity out there.
But the mood didn’t shift at once; it rarely does.
It all started many years ago
In July 2015, Phil Libin stepped down as CEO, and Chris O’Neill initiated a series of changes that made many of us, myself included, uneasy with the future of the company, or, in other words, our notes.
Evernote had a family of companion apps, and the new CEO gradually discontinued most of them, making many of us unhappy. But moving Evernote’s database to Google Cloud and the layoffs kicked off the first negative wave I’ve ever seen. At least, I do not recall anything similar during the Libin years.
I have to believe that from a financial standpoint, moving to Google servers was the best course of action. Even Apple used Google’s service in the early stages of iCloud. And I think they still do. However, the public’s perception was distorted by the way the media covered all the other CEO decisions.
For instance, I recall reading articles that referred to Evernote’s headquarters as a “ghost town.” I was furious about that; it made no sense. Back when Libin was CEO, or, in other words, before the layoffs, I visited the company and can attest that the building was not fully occupied. As far as memory serves, floors one and two were completely empty. Not even desks! The idea was to have enough room to grow in the future.
Nevertheless, I can relate to the anger and frustration people felt. The way the story was told made it hard to tell the difference between noise and reality, which leads me to the topic of communication. I’ve always found Evernote to be terrible at conveying decisions to its users. And the problem is still present. For instance, I believe that transferring operations to Europe was an excellent decision, but again, the public perception was different.
When you are hosting people’s memories, you don’t have the luxury of being as secretive as Apple or carless as a cable TV announcing the new version of its app. Every decision has to be over communicated.
Building your brand out of a domain name
TL;DR: Social media is a great space to become known, create authority, and grow your audience, but you need a home base that is yours. Buy a domain, create a basic website if you don’t want to spend too much time on it, and always, always promote it on all the social media services you are using.*
How having my own domain gave me so much freedom
Like many of us, I have grown tired of social media, and in recent years my posts have shifted to basically promoting the content I create and getting in touch with other creators and potential partners.
About 20 years ago, after using Geocities and other similar services, I decided it was time to establish a web presence by creating a self-hosted WordPress website with my name as the address. When that became too technical for me, I switched to WordPress.com. But I didn’t stop there. I decided to give Squarespace a shot long before it became the recognizable name it is today, primarily because I wanted a more professional-looking website.
Many years after that, I moved to Google Sites because I was already paying for it on my Workspace subscription. It ended up not working out for me because of some limitations, and last year I went back to WordPress to give it another try.
Between all the switches described above, I also tried Micro.blog and Postash.io for a while. More on this shortly. Finally, last week I moved to Obsidian Publish.
Despite all these transitions, people could always find me visiting my website. Having my own domain and using something called permalinks made this possible.
What is a permalink?
If you search for ‘what is a permalink?’ on Google, many of the results will be explanations based on the SEO benefits. That’s a good reason on its own, but I also think they are a great tool for moving your website to another hosting service. Let me tell you what I mean by this.
This was precisely what I did when going from one service to another. Many times I used the moving opportunity to remove some posts and rearrange others. But because the permalinks were kept the same, rearranging pages in different places didn’t break anything.
Here’s an example:
For a long time, I have had a page listing some of the books I have already read. The address has been vladcampos.com/library since I created it. But when I recently moved to Obsidian Publish, I decided to rearrange parts of my website structure. I now have a ‘toolbox’ directory containing the ‘library’ and other pages, like one for my filmmaking gear. So instead of the address above, I ended up with:
vladcampos.com/toolbox/library
Because the page is now located inside the toolbox subfolder, I set vladcampos.com/library as a permalink. Now, if you type vladcampos.com/library, the website will present you with the correct page. In other words, old visitors and Google Search will still find the page.
Yes, you can set up permalinks on Obsidian Publish.
Why did I move to Obsidian Publish?
Back in 2014, a company called Postash.io released a service to create blog posts from Evernote notes. All one had to do was add the “publish” tag, and the note would be converted into a blog entry. And, yes, removing the tag would unpublish the note.
Until this day, I still believe that this is a genius solution because all of my articles start with an idea that I write down and work on using an app like Evernote or Obsidian.
Postash.io is still available, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time and doesn’t have many important features a website need. That’s why I used it for less than a year back then and quickly moved on. However, as a concept, Postash.io still makes a lot of sense for my workflow, and that’s why I recently moved my site to Obsidian Publish.
Publishing became so much easier, but there are many other reasons that I’ll explore in future articles and videos. Furthermore, having the original posts on my computer as notes is like having a backup of a backup, and this is pretty comforting.
What were the lessons we learned today?
Social media platforms come and go. Use them to your advantage, but make sure you have a home base — a website with your own domain name. And if you wish to experiment with other hosting services, permalinks can help you keep all the old links working.
Without experiencing the unknown variables, it’s impossible to organize efficiently
The best way to organize things, whether they’re physical or digital, is to accept the mess for a while. That’s why my strategy for organizing things is to always start with a messy environment, a blank canvas to play with. However there’s a catch: I have to pay close attention to what I’m constantly searching for and using.
It is only after rearranging things again and again and learning my necessities that I am finally ready to begin building the system that will meet my needs. But, there is no doubt in my mind that that will not be the final version. The world around us constantly changes, and we must adapt to keep up.
The tricky part is figuring out the exact moment when the messy stage has to give way to some order. I like to use a concept I borrowed from economics: Transactions Costs. In other words, if the mess is making me less and less productive, it’s time to pause and organize by choosing the best workflow I’ve come up with so far.
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to watch the video below. It’s about an Evernote notebook being built from empty to fully functional. It started out messy, and I added tags, links, etc. as I learned what I was constantly looking for and using.
And like I said before, it’s a strategy that works in both the digital and physical worlds. Last week, I finally organized my workbench inspired by the way I moved objects around when I was working on the Apple IIe restoration project. I’m pretty happy with the final result, but I already had new ideas for it.
The messy approach is also a way to foster creativity. There are many good books about this subject. There’s one literally titled Messy, but The Click Moment and Algorithms to Live By also discuss it.
Moving things around forces us to look at a problem from a different perspective, which helps us come up with unexpected solutions. But it is important to keep in mind that the project on which we are currently working is not our sole concern. In my case, the messy workspace was also a project in progress.
Take a look at the shelf and the soldering station; they are all made from scrap wood. By the way, I love that cool industrial vibe. You can even tell from the black circles on one of the shelf legs that the piece of wood was once below the table glass. It was a test; I was trying to figure out how many crossbars I needed to keep everything stable and I ended up replacing the studs with the thicker ones that are there now. As for the rest of the replaced pieces wood, they were used on other projects.
But there are more repurposed materials. The desk itself is made up of the top glass of an old kitchen table, supported by some cheap Ikea trestles. As for that Chromebook, it will not get Chrome OS updates anymore, but it is still good enough for Google searches and the Evernote web client.
So, the next time you are working on a complex project, don’t be too hard on yourself. Every so often, a little mess is what you need to unlock a solution that was always there, but you couldn’t see.
By the way, switching to another project also works, but that’s a story for another time.
Generations
After helping me fix the issue with the ROM chips a few weeks ago, my son got to play Gremlins on the Apple IIe.
Is your computer truly yours?
It is remarkable how contemporary technology is built around the loss of control over our devices. In contrast, the Apple IIe, which is considerably older, is so open to experimentation and modifications.
One or two years ago, I wanted to try ChromeOS Flex and decided to install it on my old MacBook Air 2012. I enjoyed the process of installing it and had fun with the OS. Now I needed macOS back on the computer to be able to use it on the Apple IIe restoration project, but when it came time to reinstall macOS, things didn’t go well at all.
macOS Recovery
If you start macOS holding command + r, you’ll be prompted to reinstall the OS. I was counting on this when I decided to try ChromeOS Flex. Anyway, I tried all possible variations of the command + r command, but at some point, near the end of the process, a glitch would always stop the installation.
Another issue was that the countdown to the end of the process would display a huge negative number, which would also result in an error message. I searched online and found out that the negative number was related to a network problem, but my network and internet connection were working perfectly well.
I also tried to reinstall macOS by holding the option key. This is how you tell the Mac to search for external drives when it starts up. However, I was unsuccessful there as well. I was probably doing something wrong because the system would never recognize the installation disk on connected drives. It is also possible that the bootable part of the disc was damaged during the installation of Chrome OS Flex. I don’t know. Regardless of the reason, I am puzzled as to why I was encountering such difficulty. After all, it is my computer.
Downloading macOS
We are provided with downloads of older versions of the operating system, but I challenge you to try installing it on a computer with a dead or new hard drive. One must go through numerous workarounds to make it work. By the way, during my saga I also learned that Apple does not provide any official instructions for how to install an older OS over a newer one. Even worse, it tells us that we cannot do it.
Carbon Copy Cloner
After jumping from one website to another and failing miserably, I remembered that my wife didn’t get rid of her old Mac mini from 2012. My new plan was to clone the Mini hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Of course, I had problems there as well. First, I had to find an older version of the program that worked with macOS Mojave. Next, the mini drive is 500 GB, and the Air’s is 64 GB.
To make a square fit into the circle, I created a new admin user (me) on my wife’s computer, and on Carbon Copy Cloner, I unselected her user and all the non-essential files before cloning. Of course, figuring out what are the essential files is easier said than done. After lot of trial and error, I was successful, but I would not be able to use this same strategy on a slightly newer Mac. My 2012 machine has a removable SSD, and I happen to have the correct USB enclosure. In other words, I could remove it from my computer and connect it to my wife’s Mini via USB.
My computer finally started, but the OS was extremely slow. It would take several minutes to boot, and the mouse was jumping all around the screen every time I moved it. Thinking that some issue could have occurred during the cloning process, I repeated it several times, but I had no success.
It was time to take a break, like I usually do when I get stuck.
The next day, I remembered that macOS has an Activity Monitor. I ran it, but to my surprise, the total CPU load was over 90%, even though no software or process was taking more than 5% of the CPU time. Back to Google!
Resetting PRAM and SMC
In the end, there wasn’t anything wrong with the cloning process. The issue was with the different computers. Using Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy is like transplanting a brain from one person to another. The new brain in my MacBook Air was from a Mac Mini. To put it simply, I had to help it adjust to its new body.
I don’t have enough technical knowledge to explain this, but there’s a way to reset basic macOS configurations called PRAM and SMC. I reset them, and the OS started working like a charm.
Finally!
Anyway, all this was just another step in my Apple IIe restoration project. I could finally install the ADTPro software on the MacBook Air to copy old software to the IIe. Of course, I hit a new brick wall. But this is a story for another day.
A thoughtful gift for my father.
Before smartphones, my father would always have a pen and notepad like this one in his shirt’s front pocket. Not only that, but he would use them to explain anything I asked him about, drawing and writing every single detail while talking to me.
He always said, “You should write it down if you don’t want to forget it." I guess it worked. It seems there’s no other explanation; I got into note-taking because of him.
Have you had the chance to listen to my conversation with Jon on the Triple T Productivity podcast? I am currently on the trip I mentioned, and today I came across this small notepad that I immediately bought for his birthday tomorrow. It’s not exactly like the ones he used to have, but I believe it will bring him good memories.
I switched to Google Tasks
I’ve recently switched to Google Tasks, and there are a few clues as to why in this post. But detailed information is coming soon. I’m currently working on a script for a video explaining the hacks I used to build my system and why it might be a better choice, depending on what Apps and devices you use.
And talking about tasks, there are many videos on my channel about Evernote Tasks and the tutorial below explaining how to set up and use the Obsidian Tasks plugin.
A captivating and enchanting language
Dogs can’t speak like humans, but they know how to make themselves quite obvious. It is only a matter of paying attention. And we should always listen because they have so many lessons to teach us about a mindful life.
For the past three years, I have been learning a lot about kindness, persistence, compassion, loyalty, friendship, and love. ♥️ 🐾
This is extremely embarrassing, I lost the Tile, not my keys.
The app shows me the circle on the map, pointing me to the approximate position of where it is. I know I’m close to it because I can see the option to make it chime when I approach the area.
For the past couple of days, I have been walking around that spot, staring at my phone and the ground below, as if I were chasing a Pokémon that isn’t there. Despite walking the entire perimeter many times, I never received a signal higher than ‘Moderate’ and could never hear it chiming.
It is a gas station I usually go to; the app tells me I’m in the Bluetooth range, and I even asked inside if they found it. The lost and found box has many keys but no Tiles. Which makes me wonder how people drove from the gas station after losing their keys. Anyway, I have my own problems.
Maybe it is inside a drain. I don’t know. But it’s embarrassing that I lost the device that was supposed to help me find my keys, which I still have.
Evernote and other technologies I used when I was in Morocco
When we entered the boarding area, my wife realized that she had forgotten her phone. In other words, gone were all the messages the travel agency had sent her. Thankfully, Evernote saved our trip to Morocco. At that point, we were unable to go back home and return in time, so I opened my Travel notebook on Evernote to assess the situation. But before I go any further, let me provide you with some context.
Usually, I am the one who organizes our trips, but this time it was different. My wife was doing it. On my side, as I have already shown in past videos, I was saving on Evernote all that she was sending me. Also, I am not a WhatsApp user.
Back to the airport
I had our boarding passes and all instructions in offline notes, but here’s my question. Why would a travel agency send all the information to its clients using WhatsApp instead of email? Also, why would the clients trust WhatsApp with all that information? And I’m not even talking about privacy. I’m talking about access.
😮 Oops, I didn’t take my watch off
Remember my video about why I chose a Garmin instead of an Apple Watch? I was sending and painting for a while when I realized I had forgotten to take off the watch. If you look closely enough, you will notice that there are paint drops on my arm. Some of them ended up on the watch, but that’s alright. All you had to do was wash it, and everything worked out fine.
Why not an Apple Watch or Wear OS?
Before the Apple Watch, there was the Pebble (image below). I loved that smartwatch, but the end was inevitable, the company eventually went bankrupt, and was sold to Fitbit. The final nail in the coffin was the watch being discontinued, and the servers turned off.
Without the servers, many features would stop working, and the experience wouldn’t be the same. To save us, a group of enthusiasts created Rebble to bring life back to the Pebble. I appreciate what they did, but it’s not the same. Our watches would inevitably get old and parts would break.
Long story short, I could never find a smartwatch alternative that would check all the boxes: waterproof, buttons instead of touch screen, e-ink display, long-lasting battery, health sensors, and good quality build. I ended-up moving to a G-Shock, that I absolutely love. However, it was not a complete experience. I was constantly missing the health sensors.
It was only recently that I came across an alternative from Garmin. Yes, I completely missed the original Instinct release. But that’s ok. I recently got the Instinct 2, and I’m thrilled. Not only it checks all the boxes, it looks like the G-Sock I was wearing.
Apple IIe not working
The Apple II was the first computer I ever used. This is a IIe I recently got on eBay, but unfortunately, it is not working. When I plugged it in, I saw smoke coming from what, I think, is a capacitor on the C15 position on the board. Next step, figure out what that part actually is and order a replacement.
I have no experience with electronics, multimeters etc. This is definitely going to be a long-term adventure.