Bryan Lunduke, on lunduke.substack.com:
elementary OS, a Linux distribution that is currently ranked as one of the top 10 distros (according to DistroWatch.com), appears to be in the process of completely imploding on itself.
Sad to hear. They do have an unique distro, with nice attention to details.
snippetsDaniel Aleksandersen, on ctrl.blog:
I’ve been having a lot of fun with Cardboard, the scrollable tiling window manager (WM) (STWM) for Linux. It’s quite an unusual WM, and it’s really only at the prototype stage. After the initial learning curve, I found that it helped me stay focused on one task, and it greatly reduced how much time I spent rearranging my windows.
This reminded me a bit of 10/GUI:, a 10 Finger Multitouch User Interface concept that boasted a “linear window manager”.
snippetsAnkita Kirti, on techcommunity.microsoft.com:
We’re excited to announce that OneDrive sync for macOS will now run natively on Apple silicon. This means that OneDrive will take full advantage of the performance improvements of Apple silicon.
We know this has been a long-awaited and highly requested feature, and we’re delighted to make it generally available starting with build 22.022.
Version 22.022.0130 from the App Store still appears Intel only, but this is good news.
Derek Sivers, on sive.rs:
My written words are my most precious asset. They are also a history of my life. That’s why I only use plain text files. They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option. Here’s why.
Right now I’m on the good side of this — with Obsidian being my work hub. Same with this blog, it’s basically a bunch of .md on Dropbox.
However, there are times when a managed libraries work — 1Password, Apple Notes and Photos come to mind. Still, I agree with the premise, only text files future-proofs access to your data.
snippetsMegan Spurr on news.xbox.com:
Experience the joy of flying with Microsoft Flight Simulator, available today with Xbox Cloud Gaming on the devices you already own, including Xbox One, phone, tablet, and PC.
Now that it’s available I’m going to chicken out for now of buying an Xbox — but will give Game Pass a try for sure.
snippetsEric Berger arstechnica.com:
Russia has decided to suspend cooperation with European launch officials, and says it will withdraw its personnel from Europe’s main spaceport.
In context with the human suffering happening in Ukraine, this is almost comical. But for science satellites it’s a reminder of the few tickets that exist out of planet earth.
snippetsFrom chromeenterprise.google:
Install Chrome OS Flex on your PCs and Macs so they are secure, boot fast, don’t slow down over time, update automatically in the background, and can be managed from the cloud.
Seriously considered Neverware CloudReady a few years ago for our computer clients in the operations area. It worked really well, but you had to be sure your whole stack was web-based.
Although our applications were, we had some scanner hardware that didn’t seem to work perfectly.
Still think it’s a great option for old PCs.
snippetsFrom workspace.google.com:
Create a Google Workspace account with your current work email address and start using the tools you know and love today. Stay connected with secure video meetings and chat, and collaborate on Docs, Sheets, and Slides using 15 GB of Drive storage for hundreds of file formats including Microsoft Office files.
Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I really miss Google Docs and Sheets. On the other, not sure the file organization mess of having stuff in Office 365 and Google Drive is worth the trouble.
And if you are going to tell me that Excel isn’t that bad — get off my feed.
snippetsKyle Alspach on venturebeat.com:
Akamai Technologies announced today it has reached an agreement to acquire infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform provider Linode for approximately $900 million, in a move to help enable Akamai to become “the world’s most distributed compute platform.”
Always concerning when a big corporation takes over a cool relatable company. Usually it doesn’t get worse, it just stops getting better. But sometimes, planets plus culture aligns and the addition resources makes something really cool.
I just hope my mini shared-host price stays at $5 a month.
snippetsShannon Maughan, on publishersweekly.com:
Proponents of AI audiobook narration tout its much lower production costs (compared to a traditional recording of a human narrator) as a way to improve profitability of audiobooks as well as allowing publishers to publish more audiobooks that have limited audiences. But according to actor and narrator Emily Lawrence, cofounder of PANA and president of its board of directors, “It’s very easy to reduce this issue to dollars and cents, but it’s very complicated and nuanced.”
I recognize the concerns of technology decimating your sector, but this reminds me of The Candlemakers’ Petition. Mind you, my favorite audiobooks are those read by the author, so I buy into the complicated and nuanced argument. But with the narration improvements in apps like Matter, I see the use-case where you switch to AI audio in the middle of reading.
It seems like an uphill batter to fight AI narration as-a-feature. However, they have succeeded in the past.
snippetsLorenzo Gravina, on trms.me:
That said, tools won’t change you. We buy shinier tools thinking they’ll help us change who we are. And this is the tool trap. They don’t. Better tools make your craft better, but they won’t make you better.
Really connected with this post, and 2021-03-22 The New Tool Trap:
Don’t change tools to fix a problem. Change tools because you need to reset your workflow, or you want to optimize some process — but never bet that changing the tool will fix what’s wrong. In most cases, problems have nothing to do with the tool.
Yours truly, about a year ago.
Same itch, but scratched differently. And I enjoyed how Lorenzo draws a line in the sand between the tools and the craft. Worth a read.
snippetsGabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo CEO on spreadprivacy.com:
Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers.
Old news, but on the subject of Browsers, I’m excited about this approach. Haven’t heard anything else about it, but will be sure to try it.
snippetsRiccardo Mori, on morrick.me:
Orion’s approach is utilitarian. It doesn’t want to win users with a fancy UI or quirky æsthetics to appear ‘different’. Its user interface is not that different from Safari. Its design philosophy has to do with how the browser works, not how it looks. And today a browser should be fast (in a Web that’s getting progressively bloated and dragged down by intrusive, resource-consuming scripts), privacy conscious, and adhering to the web’s standards. And that’s what Orion is and does.
The current private beta is very impressive. It’s crazy fast, and the extensions support mean almost no compromise. The only reason I’m still on Brave is that the BI tool/data lake we use at work seems very optimized for Chrome. It’s also useful to experience the tool the same way 90% of my users do.
I also suspect the other reason for not switching is the boring UI — I agree this is a feature for most people and makes sense for the product. But some coolness would probably drive me to reach for it more often.
snippetsFrom knockout.chat:
The problem with this is that 99% of the conversations that take place in Discord are missed. So many solutions to so many problems are just swept away in a never ending cascade of chat messages which remain undocumented elsewhere.
I don’t enjoy discord communities. I understand the appeal to have a similar hive-mind more in things different than work, but I don’t have time for them. I much prefer to participate in forums like Obsidian’s, the asynchronous nature of it works for me.
Maybe I’m just getting internet-old. I experienced compuserve boards, loved Newton mailing lists, spent hours on PalmOS forums, joined IRC chats for Apple Events, and I’m not into whatever’s next.
snippetsCareful with adding benchmarks when defining new habits. At the beginning of any habit, its compliance is the most important measurement. It’s binary: either you do it or not.
Once the new habit starts to become more natural, then optimization has a place.
I just feel into this trap recently, and only by reminding myself of non-zero days, was I able get started again on working the habits.
Docflipper: macOS Cmd + Tab utility that ads a bottom row of bookmarks (Folders, URLs, URLs Schemes). Subscribed and added to my login apps.
Start11: Didn’t know Stardock was still around. People seem to be enjoying this Start menu enhancement on Windows 11.
From github.com:
Support for displaying Mermaid diagrams has appeared on GitHub’s top list of feature requests since 2015. In its absence, many developers simply added screenshots to their Markdown. Today, we’re excited to add native support for Mermaid wherever Markdown is supported (e.g., issues, repositories, discussions, gists).
Great news. Currently that way I deal with mermaid diagrams in GitHub issues is either: a screenshot — which is static and a pair — or an external image to the mermaid live — a potential security issue.
This change will make me push mermaid diagrams a lot more with the team.
snippetsThe possibility of connecting 2022-01-26 Free Plugin to Trigger Shortcuts from Obsidian sent me down a rabbit hole of moving this blog’s content creation from Drafts to Obsidian. Of course, I redid all bookmarklets and Shortcuts which grab links and quotes for them to open in Obsidian now.
All worked great, until… mobile. While Obsidian on the Desktop is a joy to use, on iOS it’s workable. Since I use iCloud as the sync engine — not sure if the same thing happens on their own sync — any time I could start on the app, you can be sure that it will take a few seconds to sync existing files. This is a pain for appends, because it usually means the new content can be lost.
And now I’m at the point in which the grass was greener on my original side of the fence. Will give it another week before I break everything again. Setting up separate configs for Desktop and Mobile in Obsidian seem like a good next step. I’m going to break that next.
I had a plan. Ironically I even wrote a drafts post about the morning page and how it’s becoming too much like a morning task list. And then… life happened.
Slowly at first, then faster than expected, broken datasets on the day everyone has their January reports due threw my day into a debugging frenzy.
Lunch skipped — which worked out fine because I wanted to do a 24hr fast this week — by end of day the biggest fires were out. But there’s still smoke in the ticket system.
This is the paragraph that should have closed my ramblings about the morning page not being as productive as I hoped:
I must remember that the point of the exercise is the exercise. Enjoy the doing, not the before or after.
It might make little sense on this post, but that’s the insight: the morning page cannot be judged by its influence on the rest of the day, that’s too big of a burden to put on a harmless practice.
Jon Porter on theverge.com:
[…] the new service includes a larger high performance antenna and advertises speeds of between 150 and 500Mbps (20 to 40ms latency), up from the 50 to 250Mbps (20 to 40ms latency) promised by its regular service. Premium also claims roughly double the upload speeds at 20 to 40Mbps, compared to 10 to 20Mbps for the standard tier.
It’s $2,500 for the antenna, and $500 a month, so clearly for the enterprise. Expensive, but if you’re in a place without good wired internet, not a crazy ammount.
snippetsI usually tell myself that I blog to leave a window into my thoughts for my kids. A snapshot of my mindset in a moment in time.
As I struggle to contain my 6yo access to YouTube and TikTok, I wonder if I’m not barking at the wrong tree. Is a written journal — outside all platforms and with a domain that’s only cool to me — even going to register in their radar? Is this blog the 50 years remove equivalent of a weekly editorial from a ham operator?
The truth is that I write because I want to be recognized. I have thoughts, ideas, hacks that I believe are valuable. So then, I want to be an influencer? Seems to me that written content influencer are few and far between. Never mind having millions of followers, the coolest writers I follow fall flat when I try to share them, even with my wife.
So what’s the point? The truth is: kicking off the script in Obsidian that results in these words being published on my website is one of the most sure-fire ways to bring a smile to my face.
It’s solved then, I blog for me.
Nirav Patel on frame.work:
We’re using this $18M to fund development of upcoming product categories and the long roadmap of new modules and geographic expansion for the Framework Laptop. Much like our products are built around longevity, we’re building this company for the long haul.
People seem to love their Framework Laptops, and in a world where MacBooks aren’t an option, it would be on my top list using Pop!_OS. Happy to hear they have runway for new product categories.
snippetsI’ve fallen into the bad habit of optimizing before having an MVP. This leads to a higher rate of abandoned initiatives than usual.
Iterations are a way to help with this, but sometimes you just want to create, deliver and be done with it. Cut once.
Maybe documenting how it should work, and then delivering the unfinished initiative is the shortcut.
Inspired by others, I’ve taken some action on my social networking for this year.
In addition to hiding Twitter apps, I also block it (alongside Instagram and Youtube) in the early morning and at the end of the weekdays with Freedom — and during the morning on weekends. This has really helped in cutting the impulse to go there when I’m running away of another task.
I’m missing a photo sharing part in all of this, although Glass looks great, my needs are more toward family photo sharing. So for now posting into my microblog and mastodon will do.
Looking ahead, the group mastodon instance is the only iffy part of the plan. If it doesn’t catch on, I’ll likely go back to Micro.blog. But I’ll cross that river later.
Actually using Hometown fork, hosted at Spacebear, because of its local only posting feature.↩︎
Federico Viticci, on macstories.net:
With Obsidian Shortcut Launcher (or ‘OSL’), you’ll be able to trigger any shortcut you want from Obsidian, passing along values such as the text of the document you’re working on, its name, text selection, and more. Obsidian Shortcut Launcher is free to use and works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
Whoa. This sounds very powerful and useful. Thinking I could go crazy with the options — however, it’s nothing I couldn’t already do with Drafts. Don’t get me wrong, the plug-in is really exciting. It’s more of a note-to-self before heading down a rabbit hole with it.
Too late. Already thinking of ways to migrate existing Shortcuts to this.
snippetsFred Wilson, avc.com:
It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on.
Food for thought. I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet, but I completely agree that we need to move on from COVID news as entertainment.
snippets
5typos.net
networkQuality command-line tool.The effect this had was to split the broad “read” meaning of peruse into two narrower meanings: one that referred to carefully examining or reading something, and the other that referred to casually looking at or reading something. These two meanings aren’t contradictory; rather, they are just two sides of the same coin.
Well, learned something new. I always thought it was used in a skimming context.
snippetsMy brother in law is fighting an uphill battle. A political contest in an unfair electoral system. With backstabbing former alliances and very limited funds. All in a community where he has been working for at least 10 years.
It’s a just cause. And very likely a lost cause. But he’s there. Vocation, craziness or weird career choice. All three would be my guess.
I’m not into sports, yet Ted Lasso’s it’s the hope that kills you vs do you believe in miracles? plot line connected with my electoral history. A very long losing streak with a pendulum of both these extremes.
I believe in hope. I believe in putting in the work. I believe in Chola. This won’t likely be the year — but he’s building something important that will make a big difference someday. He’s also learning a ton.
And where his tireless intensity drives me crazy sometimes, it’s also a big part of his future triumph.
From apple.com:
Apple today announced Self Service Repair, which will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts and tools. Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips […]
Regardless of this being a reaction to the right to repair legislation, or out of the goodness of their hearts, this is great news.
snippetsProductivity is suffering. I need to gain altitude, perspective. Differentiate the tasks from the projects, the important from the urgent, the long term from the… screaming headline.
Lower quotas and intermediate packets are the short term plan. Long term? Be a manager that can both teach and make.
Jatan Mehta, on blog.jatan.space:
Here’s a brief history of some major missions lost because of very avoidable human errors, and which aren’t programmatic failures like the Space Shuttle.
Some of these I’ve heard but I had the details wrong. Others, I had no idea. Good read.
snippetsLukasz Erecinski, on pine64.org:
- Announcing the PineNote, one of the most powerful devices of its kind on the market
- Quartz64 based; specs include — fast refresh e-ink panel with multiple frontlight settings, RK3566, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage
- Wacom panel compatible with many EMR pens: we will offer our own
- Available this year for $399; early adopters batch includes EMR pen + magnetic cover (later sold separately)
Similar as the android e-ink devices, this platform is far from user ready. Yet I’m still extremely happy that this category exists and continues to grow.
And of course, I dream of the day someone ports NewtonOSis to it.
snippetsJatan Mehta, on personal.jatan.space:
If we think of what you put out on the internet in terms of physical places, this is what they are like.
Social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube → Hotel rooms
Free Blog or Website → Rented house
Website/Blog + Domain → Home
This framework resonated with me.
snippetsJason Snell, on sixcolors.com:
The Boox Nova Air is an impressive piece of hardware that’s let down by its software. Despite Onyx’s attempts to add software to make the experience better, it’s still pretty far short of a good reading experience. The freedom to do anything I could think of on an E Ink screen only revealed to me why other devices with E Ink displays are completely locked down, with specific functionality tuned to specific hardware.
Just ordered my iPad mini 6, but for sometime I was strongly considering this device. Sadly one of its main features — Android app support — doesn’t sound too great. However, for some specific uses the Boox Nova Air seems like a good option.
snippetsGame-changing MacBook Pro with M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers extraordinary performance and battery life, and features the world’s best notebook display.
Of course Apple’s newsroom is going to be full of adjetives, but this time they all appear true.
Some notes:
While I could make a case for one of these machines, I’m going to hold on for the next MacBook Air. As I said before, this M1 wonder has been the best notebook I’ve had, and slowdowns are something I rarely experience in my Obsidian, Excel, Microsoft Edge, Outlook Web1 workflows. What I really need want is an external 5K monitor. And sadly Apple is not taking my money yet on it.
However, if you’re in the market for a Pro machine, and have $3k to spare, you can’t go wrong with this lineup.
More on this Microsoft centric shadow on my colophon soon.↩︎
Rui Carmo, on taoofmac.com:
I’m a bit weirded out by this, but, overall, the multitasking UX on Windows is actually better than on the Mac for me right now.
In all the review videos, this is what makes me both curious and envious. Mac window management is stuck on the Snow Leopard era. With smaller screens and less powerful multitasking than we have now.
Just like with other Windows windowing features, I hope 3rd party apps implement them soon.
snippetsYou can now use footnote syntax in any Markdown field!Footnotes are displayed as superscript links. Click them to jump to their referenced information, displayed in a new section at the bottom of the document
My blogging workflow is mostly based on Drafts and Shortcuts - but for a while I used Github Issues with labels and Integromat. It worked really well, but the lack of footnotes was the main blocker.
Already used it in a couple of work issues.
snippetstape it: iOS App for songwriting & audio recording. Looks simple and powerful. Looking for way to use it.
BrowserParrot: local browsing history search engine for Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and Safari. Currently on macOS only.