A long-overdue status update

I realise that lately the silence here must have felt deafening for a fair amount of my loyal readers. My apologies. This time, things behind the scenes have also been more problematic due to an issue I had with the email account tied to this website, which I extensively use to respond to any feedback related to my articles.

The issue turned out to be simple in nature, but since the system was failing silently, it took me a while before realising what was going on, and an additional little while to troubleshoot and resolve matters. The consequences have been a bit disastrous, though. Essentially, if you wrote me an email between mid-October and mid-November 2023, I couldn’t access it before 20 November or so, and it’s now part of a pretty sizeable email backlog I’m trying to go through in my spare time.

In other words, if you’ve written me in the past month and a half (or even longer in some cases), I haven’t been ignoring you — I just couldn’t see your message immediately; I have seen it now, and I will try to get back to you. I want to especially apologise to Vladimir Prelovac, whom I still owe some feedback about the Orion browser (which is still my main browser on Mac along with Vivaldi), and to Maciej W., who wrote me a long and thoughtful email talking about the subject of my previous article on Apple’s DNA and Europe’s DMA.

I normally don’t write status updates and “sorry for not having posted anything in a while” blog posts. Years ago I used to publish more stuff more frequently here, trying to keep up with the frantic pace of technology. It didn’t take long to realise that it wasn’t feasible. Especially when my daily job became more demanding of my time and attention. In recent years, tech has also become a rather weary subject to follow, debate, talk about. Essentially, my stance is that I publish an article when I have something to say. When I don’t have anything useful to say or add to a discussion, I just don’t write and I also don’t like to pepper this place with short-form things like quick links or brief quotes with one-line commentary. I use Mastodon (and X/Twitter, but less and less frequently) for that.

But in this case I made an exception because among the emails that are now queued in this big backlog I’ve seen subjects like, “Are you okay?”, “Everything good?”, “You’re not dead, are you?”, and so on. These are clearly people who only follow my blog and don’t follow me on social media, otherwise they would know I’m okay. So, given this level of concern — thank you, everyone, it really means a lot — I wanted to write an update and reassure you all. I’m fine. Lately I’m just busier than the usual level of busy, and alternately fatigued and annoyed by technology. I’m also a lot behind my RSS feed reading, and when this happens, one frustrating consequence is that by the time I can write something in reaction to a certain piece of news or commentary, the debate (and inevitably the interest) around it has already died down.

Anyway, I hope this status update has been useful and helped clearing things up about what’s been going on behind the scenes. I’m currently writing a new piece, which I hope to publish here shortly. Thank you all again for your concern and for your messages of support. It’s always greatly appreciated.