Jim Dalrymple gets it. Leading up to the #Apple event and even afterwards, I noticed a lot of eye-rolling online about how this was just Newsstand all over again and how this would be a failure just as Apple’s past forays into the digital magazine space were.

But News+ is a totally different model compared to the previous “each-publication-is-an-app” approach. News+ is one app. No matter which magazine or newspaper you’re currently reading, you are using only one app with a consistent and unified reading experience.

And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to manage a ton of different subscriptions to various publications…which adds the congitive overhead of trying to pick and choose which ones to subscribe to or not to maintain a sensible cash flow. With Apple News+, you have one subscription. That’s it. One charge per month and you have access to everything.

I’ve been surprised how much I’m using Apple News+…on my iPhone. Of course it’s a delightful reading experience on the iPad with its big beautiful display, but it works astonishingly well on iPhone. Apple even kicked off its News+ presentation showing the app running on an iPhone. That’s impressive.

I’m definitely paying for News+ past the trial period, and I’m excited to see how the service grows and evolves down the road.

This is an excellent overview of the current state of Apple’s iPad lineup, now that there’s a refreshed iPad mini along with a resurrected iPad Air (!) with a larger 10.5” screen which makes it feel more akin to the previous-generation 10.5” iPad Pro.

Both of the new models feature laminated True Tone displays, which is awesome, and they also support the Apple Pencil (1st-gen). Having Pencil support now in the iPad mini is actually a great update for people who are fans of the tiny form factor for note-taking on the go. I also applaud Apple for not skimping on the base storage. 64GB is a great starting size for the iPad.

I feel like it’s weird the now-very-out-of-date entry-level iPad is still a thing. I would have expected it to get a price drop or something. At this point, I couldn’t in all good conscience recommend anyone buy it, unless it’s for bulk purposes such as in the education sector. Otherwise, either the new iPad Air or iPad mini would be a fantastic tablet to get if you don’t need the extra power, size, and utility of the iPad Pro.

Like most Americans I suspect, my general knowledge of Western European history—particularly the British Isles—is far more robust than what little I learned about the East. I knew about Constantinople and the fractured relationship the Byzantine Empire had with the West…first after the initial schism of the Roman Empire, and then at times following the fall of Rome and subsequent rise of the various “barbarian” nation-states in the West. But other than those broad strokes, nothing. This essay by Dionysios Stathakopoulos is a fantastic overview, and it whets my appetite to dive into further study of Byzantine history and culture.

My latest fun geek project in my ongoing quest to use self-hosted, libre #openweb apps as much as possible is installing Gitea on a DigitalOcean server. I’ve used either Bitbucket or GitHub for hosting all my code repositories (including this #website), but I’m planning to transfer them over to my own Gitea-powered server going forward. The great thing is, Netlify (which I use to publish static sites) supports custom Git servers. Simply install the SSH key they provide, add a webhook to your repository settings on Gitea, and it just works! I’m a happy camper.