Changelog to Checklist

New month, yet another monthly report. I’m really getting dividends out of a detailed checklist created over the past few months.

It’s actually a log/checklist I’ve been updating for the past year. But it has help bring down what used to be two full days of report generation to a couple of hours.

As usual, the blank page scares the shite out of me. What helped this checklist get created is that started as a changelog. Over a few months the repeating parts got codified, and what could be automated was scripted.

Next step is documenting the checklist so it can be handed off.

Sugar Rush

Halloween as a celebration of scariness doesn’t hold any particular attraction to me. But with kids, I now enjoy the community aspect it brings.

Granted, you could recreate the community experience in a much healthier way. But as immigrants, it’s also comfortable to have a 3rd party custom we can all vaguely relate to.

Very sure I’ll change my tune in 10 years when Bettina tries to leave the house with some horrifically short costume — but I hope we still have a few more years of geeking out with Robie on how to put the decorations, and arguing with Bettina on how to give out candies.

Who’s the Boss?

A combination of old age and capitalism bias is making me care about today’s twitter circus news. Never a good sign.

But here’s the thing: Musk is now Twitter’s boss and owner. Does that excuse him for being a tyrannical maniac? Well, no. But it’s his show. He bought for $44 billion something that appears to be worth around $15 billion.

He will cut costs and generate revenue. Setting crazy expectations from one of the few revenue streams Twitter has, seems like a simple way to achieve both.

It’s now make or break time for a lot of teams inside Twitter. I don’t envy them one bit. An almost 20 year old company thrown back into startup mode. The surgery will hurt. The patient might not survive.

There are many reasons why I might leave Twitter. Even more reason for me not wanting to work there. But the current news cycle drama isn’t on them.

Micro or Not

When I started this daily experiment, I was certain that these dailies would end up on my microblog. Au contraire.

Now I’m leaning to consolidate everything back to one blog. The segmentation between this main blog, the microblog and twitter/mastodon is not worth the trouble.

The question then is going to be: is 5typos.net the url for the next 14 years of this blog?

Lucky Me

Sometimes you’re not where you want to be in your life/career/tennis forehand. But a better introspection is to travel back to the past and see how your current situation would look from the past.

Would past Roberto be happy with where present Roberto is now?

You can of course skip talking to yourself in third person — that’s a great first step to not making your past self hate your present self.

DuckDuckGo for Mac Public Beta Out

From spreadprivacy.com:

Since announcing the waitlist beta in April, we’ve been listening to beta testers’ feedback and making even more improvements to meet your needs. We added a bookmarks bar, pinned tabs, and a way to view your locally stored browsing history.

Forgot to post this. Not a bad v1. As mentioned before, it uses the Safari engine, so it’s fast with very little resource use. The UX seems slightly off, not in a bad way, just different.

Good option to keep around.

Back to Square 5

The strangest thing happened today. For the first time since February 2020, the office was full. So full, in fact, that even the meeting rooms weren’t available. When 3 of us in the office had a meeting with a fourth that was remote, we had to take it each on our seat.

Here’s the strange part: it felt perfectly natural. Actually, it felt less uncomfortable than trying to involve the remote person when 3 others are in the same room.

Not sure what it means, but some sort of threshold has been crossed. The office is forever changed. And… noise cancellation headphones should be part of desktop equipment soon.

Kmapp Store

I don’t go into the App Store anymore. Just like most retail stores, it’s not worth the trouble.

If an app is not recommended on Twitter, Mastodon, a blogs or website, I won’t go into the App Store to search for it. I’m more likely to go into my purchase history and see if any of the apps has been updated than to use the App Store search to browse.

Which means I don’t really care about more ads in the App Store. It’s just more noise in a place I quick visit with my headphones on.

USB Si

With the iPhone becoming the only product line still using the Lighting, the writing is on the wall regarding its switch to USB-C.

The current inconvenience of carrying 2 cables is such a first world problem that complaining about it deserves an eye roll. However, the convenience of carrying only 1 cable is a nice aspirational future.

Question is: how much is this convenience worth? Enough to also change my AirPods 3 battery case if/when they make the switch? Not sure.

Might be one of those cases where the last iPhone’s with Lightning will depreciate at a higher rate than usual. Next year is starting to sound like a good year to buy used.

Review the Review

I’m in the middle of a role-change at works, and that has thrown a few of my routines out of whack. The biggest one being the Weekly Review.

In a fun one step forward, two steps backs — I’d started doing a short daily review as part of my shutdown practice. While it’s a bit of a pain, I’ve found it extremely helpful to close the day and disconnect. However, when the daily review started failing, it took the weekly with it.

As I procrastinate on today’s daily review by writing this, I wonder if I should refocus on the weekly or bite the bullet finish the work day.

New Keychron K3 Pro in Kickstarter

kickstarter.com:

The Keychron K3 Pro is the world’s first low profile wireless mechanical keyboard with QMK/VIA enabled for endless possibilities. Everyone can easily customize any key or create macro commands through VIA software on the ultra-slim yet durable K3 Pro.

Starting at $89 and shipping in “December”. It comes with PBT keycaps and more standard placement of stabilizers.

It looks like a more serious NuPhy Air75, which is a good things for me. If they keep the price under $100, I may get one next year.

Tidbits for 2022 Week 43

• Medley: iOS music player that looks like pre-iOS 6 Music app. Sadly doesn’t work with Spotify.

• Buzz: OpenAI’s Whisper for Intel Mac, Windows and Linux. No Apple Silicon yet.

• Whisper Memos: record voice memos in iOS and use OpenAI Whisper library to transcribe.

• Note: music(ish) app for iOS for beats, samples melodies. Part companion to desktop App.

• Velja: macOS browser picker with rules. Will likely replace Choosy for me after 14 years.

• Copy URL: macOS App that shows as a browser, copies the URL passed to it and then quits. Works great with Velja above.

Requiem Reading

My book reading has taken a nosedive over the last few months. Some book choices haven’t helped, but that’s no excuse. So it’s time for another experiment.

Starting today I have to read 5 pages of any book daily. That’s the system: fixed number of pages. Hopefully the number can go up in a few months, but that matters less than the daily reading minimum.

On macOS 13.0 Ventura

Not much to say yet. Stage Manager, the main reason I upgraded, is interesting. Will give it a week, but during the first day, it hasn’t gotten in the way.

The new System Settings is atrocious. I may be one of the few that liked the throwback of System Preferences. Since Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar was the OS of my first iBook G3, it was a nice reminder of 20 years of computing.

All in all, I’m always excited with macOS updates — and extra excited if I get a new Window Management feature.

Day One Web App in Development

dayoneapp.com:

We also have a development team entirely focused on a new Web-based app to allow Day One to work in a web browser in an optimized way while remaining secure and encrypted.

And Coming Soon: Day One on the Web :

We’re hard at work building a web-based version of Day One that will allow secure and encrypted journaling from within your favorite web browser like Safari, Chrome, or Firefox.

I’m happy with native apps. The macOS version did throw Markdown under a bus a few years back — and that made me stopped using it for anything not that is not Journaling.

I still remember Day One Publish — their weblog tool. That was micro.blog before microblog as a thing. Now that they are owned by Automattic, it would be cool to see some publishing integration with Wordpress — as a one-stop blog service.

Consistent Shortcuts

If my über-geekness shows anywhere, it is on how peculiar I am with keyboard shortcuts. Go back a decade on this blog, you’ll find a post about triggering bookmarklets with shortcuts.

Thankfully, present day macOS is a garden for multiple way to go nuts with keyboard shortcuts at the OS level — and darling Obsidian literally allows assigning one to any command. Please hold me.

That said, apps sometimes develop different conventions for similar actions: Things and Fantastical, have completely different commands to go to today. So very uncivilized.

What to do? What to do? Most of the time I try to allow both shortcuts to develop muscle memory. If the apps are different enough — task manager and calendar — it works. Other times, I catch myself using the keyboard commands in the wrong place. This means war. The most logical one must survive — even if you can argue my sanity didn’t.

All is fine… until a third app implements the shortcut that was voted out of the island.

Obsidian 1.0 Released

ericax on news.ycombinator.com:

Obsidian 1.0 introduces two big changes: a UI overhaul and an new tabbed interface. We’ve put a lot of care into making the app more approachable and more accessible. We’ve also prioritized using more native OS features for menus, windows, and many details.

From obsidian.md:

Calling Obsidian “1.0” is a scary thing. It comes with a lot of expectations and means both everything and nothing. It doesn’t mean Obsidian is feature complete, it doesn’t mean it’s bug-free. But it does still mark an important milestone. It means we’re proud enough to drop the word “beta”.We have grand plans to continue making Obsidian the best and most refined thought-processing app for decades to come. Obsidian 1.0 is just the start.

Obsidian completely 2020-12-27 My 2020 Sofware and Hardware of the Year during the first year of the pandemic. Similar to Keynote and Superhuman, it made all my synapsis trigger at once while I shouted “Eureka!” the first time I used it.

I may be exaggerating the first time use, but this is no exaggeration: Obsidian is the tool that generates more value in my software stack. I’m very excited to see where it will go next.

Plan, Do, Repeat

I tend to go on planning binges, where I over analyze situations and over plan. In many cases I don’t even execute. Which makes these rabbit holes the most pathetic daydreams possible.

The concept of iterating as part of planning has helped me a lot. Over the years I keep trying to manifest it with some catchy habit goal:

• Learn by Doing
• Let the Error Happen
• Motion & Action

But the point is the same: in thinking about solutions to a problem, the point diminishing returns arrives early one. You can afford a few wrong decisions in the same timeframe and end up with a much better (informed) solution.

Workflow Interrupted

I’ve mentioned non-zero days before. But the gist of it is: on those days when everything got in the way — including yourself — just do one thing. The difference between an irrelevant and a relevant one thing is for you to ponder, we all have the yardstick in the back of our minds.

It’s a magical psychological trick. But it works. Even if you waste a day in an 1x task, which is shameful. That’s still a lot more than a 0x day.

I want to revisit 1x, 10x, 100x and 1000x tasks soon. But what better way to set the stage for it than almost having a 0x day?

A Day for Review

Almost missed today’s update. Actually, not sure if I’m going to make even as I write this. Which makes this a great day to check compliance.

Overall it hasn’t been hard. Filtering these posts from RSS and social feeds has worked. It helps me feel ok about writing reflective posts without clear messaging.

Posting the directly with tomorrow’s 12am time has also worked great. It helps me fail forward. Makes me have to opt-out of the post. Might as well finish it.

Finally, days when I get something down in the morning a much much easier. Either creativity goes down throughout the day, or the voice in my head judging each sentence gets louder.

Was going to negotiate with myself to allow snippet post count as the daily post. No dice. Dailies shall continue.

Earlish Adopter

I fancy considering myself an early adopter — but with time I’ve become more conservative with core technologies. Sometimes this is reflected on an aversion to beta versions: iOS/macOS, Obsidian, even services like Tana.

Other times, I hold myself back with a technology to give it time. At the moment, I’m really excited to incorporate Whisper from OpenAI voice recognition into my workflow. But instead of diving-in, I’ve setup search alerts to keep an eye out on a less geeky macOS release and/or some sort of online service to take some of the setup pain away.

I’m all about testing the rollercoaster on opening day… I just prefer the afternoon slots.

Moto Perpetuo

Learn about this concept from the kids violin practice this week. It has two meanings: notes of equal lengths played continuously, and/or a melody that is played an infinite number of times within a song.

Very likely butchering the concepts, but the ideas has stuck with me. There’s something about both definitions that connects with mindless productivity. And the eternal routines we live in — many of us at least.

It also sounds very cool, moto perpetuo.

Altered (Life) Plans

I get anxious on our flights to Venezuela, even when we technically have everything in order. Growing up there taught me rules and reality are not necessarily the same.

The prospect of traveling for weeks from Venezuela to the US, and having the rules changed before you arrive, triggers emotions I don’t want to deal with. Mostly because, who the frak cares about my emotions when others are carrying their children through 7 countries. Myself included.

The Venezuelan migrant situation is complex. As we see and interact with hundreds passing through Costa Rica, my objectivity is clouded. I don’t want to have a smart public policy discussion, I want the problem to not exist. To not be a reminder of a country destroyed. Of a delusional society which dares to half-joke: Venezuela is now fixed.

But regardless how much of a trigger to my precious migrant sensibilities the Venezuelan family asking for money in the corner is… They — and many many more — continue to exist.

Springtime for iPhone mini

If the iPhone mini becomes a similar product line extension as the iPhone SE, I’d think it would fall into a cadence of alternating among each other. Funny thing, both were updated last year, so one of would need to jump ahead this year.

Really hope the mini with iPhone 14 internals is the one that leaps ahead and launches in a few months. Otherwise I see myself sticking with my 12 mini until the regular iPhone 15 next year.

They Bellow!

I used to change complicated words when reading bedtime stories to my kids. Not anymore. My almost-seven year old and five year old now get the unchanged edition.

This still leads to some tiring results, but on most cases I see their confused faces, followed by a acceptance quick nod.

I like the feeling of stretching their vocabulary, but their English had to get to a level before this made sense.

Notebooks and Laptops

Apple’s change in naming from Notebook to Laptop across products, documentation and software is bittersweet. It makes sense, most people call them Laptops, and Notebooks usually require an explanation.

So the most noteworthy aspect of this change is… how not noteworthy it is. But this is the bitter part. Ten years ago, this change would have prompted a never ending stream of expectation from everyone. Well, at least from me.

They’re changing the name to Laptops because Notebooks are going to be a new category.

I fell for this before with the renaming of iBooks ebooks reading app to Books. Which ended up being, just a name change. And it seems this time no one has falling for it. Not even myself.

What does this say to the state of Apple product line? Is it just this complete? Or have we lost the capacity to dream up unreasonable-but-exciting product categories? Probably a little of both.

GitHub Projects on GitHub Mobile Public Beta

From github.blog:

Stay connected and up to date on your work with GitHub Projects on GitHub Mobile, now in public beta. This marks the first milestone to bring GitHub Projects to your hands, so that you can track issues and projects from anywhere at any time. We would love for you to try it out on iOS TestFlight or Google Play (Beta) and give us your early feedback.

Github Issues and Projects keeps getting more features — which is great for us at work since all of our development is based on it. Sadly my most needed feature Ability to add a project to a project, it forever in the future column.

Micro.blog Day

Two toys in play today with Micro.blog:

• Mastodon integration: existed before, but finally enabled it. Will be going down this route instead of moving to another instance after 2022-10-07 mastodon.technology Instance Will Shutdown in a few weeks.
• Publish to Micro.blog from Obsidian: with Micro.publish plugin. Not sure how this fits in my workflow — but it’s fun to have.

An obvious question comes to mind: why are these daily post here on 5typos.net and not my micro.blog ? I know the answer, but not the reason for it.

Still, the point of this experiment is not a coherent online presence, but to create the habit of writing and posting everyday. This is day 6.

Looking Forward to Apple October Announcements

Looking forward to either: Apple Fall Event invite, or press release just launching stuff. It did seem like a press release combo announcement fall this year:

• MacBook Pro’s with M2
• iPad Pros’ with M2
• macOS Ventura release

A redesigned base iPad would justify an event. However, if the low-end iPad is getting the iPad Air/Pro design language, then that sounds more likely to happen next year to minimize iPad Air cannibalization.

Tidbits for 2022 Week 41

• Actions for Obsidian: Obsidian actions for Shortcuts on macOS and iOS.

• Ask Command: Mac app which runs terminal commands questions thru Open AI’s GPT-3 before suggesting a command.

• Tot Mini: Tot app now has an Apple watch version.

• Quick Launch: Yet another iOS lock screen launch app — but free and from a great developer.

• ‎Soro: Shortcuts for Sonos.

The Long Fix

I’ve been trying to reconnect a Wyze Cam V2 to my network for about a year. One day it stopped connecting and — it never worked again. I’ve tried everything from factory reset to setting up a temporary 2.4Ghz network. No dice.

The stages of fixing mindset has gone through anger, to acceptance, to a sort of curiosity now. Every few weeks when I’m (likely) procrastinating, I pick the damn thing off the shelf, and attempt to solve the puzzle with some additional twist.

Will it ever be fixed? with each passing day the likelihood seems smaller, but I just can’t give up on the $25 thing.

Two Days Until Monday

Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend… and I’m thinking about some tool changes for Monday:

• Revisit Bunch: specifically for setting up Shutdown, Projects Review and GitHub Sorting, context scenarios.
• Setup Personal Profile in Arc: this has been a rough edge vs. Brave. It was updated yesterday and I missed it.

Workflow based contexts take effort to create and maintain — and when explaining them, it’s hard to not have a giant OCD sign above your hear. However, the act of setting them up is clarifying.

Not Going Away

The Twitter sale news circus is making me pause more, not because I care about Twitter — really don’t anymore — but because of the announcement 2022-10-07 mastodon.technology Instance Will Shutdown instance is going away.

Mind you, this is exactly why Federated networks are great. The implication is just a few minutes of exporting, and a lot more minutes of finding another instance. But, the little voice at the back of my head which tells me:

While the tech is great, it won’t catch on because it can’t scale.

I played with Mastodon hosting earlier in the year, with the idea of replacing a Slack group — but that failed miserably. So then, if the tech doesn’t scale, and the 2022-04-15 Mastonaut Mastodon Mac Client is Now Open-Source Free… is it a case of Much Ado About Nothing?

Amazon WorkSpaces Introduces Ubuntu Desktops

Sébastien Stormacq, on aws.amazon.com:

Starting today, you can also provision Ubuntu desktops for your developers, engineers, or data scientists.

For this launch, we chose to use version 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish). Canonical has optimized the base image for cloud development use cases. We have preinstalled AWS CLI and SDK.

Initially no support from their macOS client, but this is good news.

WM within AWS are common recipe nowadays¹ when some data needs to be manipulated with something web tools can’t deal with. It’s “close” to the data, and destroy the VM afterwards. Reducing the trail of data and leak points.

mastodon.technology Instance Will Shutdown

Ash Furrow, on ashfurrow.com:

Dear mastodon.technology community,

I have sad news that I have decided to shut down the mastodon.technology instance. In accordance with the Mastodon Server Covenant, the server will be shut down no earlier than December 1, 2022.

He cites personal reasons and complexity in managing the instance. I really hope him the best, and will miss the instance.

Hello Daily World

Welcome to an experiment. This is a combination of multiple ideas:

• Write every day.
• Find time for writing.
• Something is better than nothing.
• Build systems not goals.

So, here’s the experiment: I’ll be writing a post throughout each weekday. At 12am the next day, whatever is here will be published. It would appear as a post, but won’t go out on the RSS feed.

Some days it might be coherent, on most it won’t. But since it’s only staying on my blog and not going out to RSS/social media, it stays between us — 🏼 hi gang! All 3 of you.

Hyperkey.app is Now Free

hyperkey.app:

Convert the caps lock key or any modifier keys to the hyper key, all four modifiers combined: ⌃⌥⌘⇧

Ryan Hanson on reddit:

[…] I’ve decided to make my single-purpose hyper key remapping app, Hyperkey, free! For everyone that purchased it in the past, thank you for your support! You can obtain a coupon code for my “pro” version, called Superkey, from within Hyperkey if you purchased it

On Superkey:

Superkey has all of Hyperkey, and its main feature is called Seek, where you can type in a search bar and it will use OCR to scan the screen for matches. You can select a match and use the keyboard to click (or right click, double click, middle click, etc). Personally, I remap caps lock to Seek and make it so it clicks when I release caps lock. This makes using Seek feel quick like executing a keyboard shortcut.

There’s a lot of power there, but I’m still wrapping my mind around it.

I wrote about Hyperkey before, and it changed how I used my Mac. I started using Karabiner last year because of a weird bug with my Bluetooth keyboard. But the simplicity of Hyperkey is unmatched. Highly recommended, specially now that it’s free.

Amazon Kindle Scribe

press.aboutamazon.com:

Kindle Scribe features the world’s first 10.2-inch, 300 pixels per inch (ppi), Paperwhite display, and an included pen that never needs charging. The premium, front-lit, and glare-free display feels like reading and writing on paper, with crisp text and ample space for larger fonts, images, charts, and documents. Designed for reading and notetaking in millions of books, adding notes to documents, journaling, and more, Kindle Scribe is available for preorder today from just $339 and will ship later this year.

Will like to take some fake credit by calling this before the event and the leaks.

Other than the screen, hardware-wise it doesn’t seem too impressive. It’s thicker than the RM2, and a bit heavier. The design is similar to the Kindle Oasis, which is functional, but not particularly pretty.

Two things it has going for it are: screen and Kindle books.

The screen is hi-dpi and backlit. Both things that leave the RM2 behind. However, im curious on the latency. The promotion videos seem to show some lag, but that could be my imagination.

The Kindle ecosystem is a very nice plus. At least it makes it easier to justify the device for many.

Looking forward to the reviews.

Changes to reMarkable Connect

From remarkable.com:

Our new approach is simple: Everything that happens on the paper tablet, comes with the paper tablet. Integrating with Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive, converting handwritten notes into text, sending your notes by email, and presenting your ideas on the big screen — it’s all included when you buy a reMarkable.
[…]
Connect, as the name suggests, gives you full access to cloud functionality beyond the paper tablet.

Most previously paid Connect features are now free, and new paid plan is $2.99/mo. (down from $7.99/mo.). The Connect plan boasts:

[…] notes will always be stored safely in the reMarkable cloud and instantly accessible from other smart devices using reMarkable’s desktop and mobile apps. Subscribers will also receive exclusive offers in the reMarkable webshop and additional peace of mind with a reMarkable 2 Protection Plan.

I had voted with my wallet and cancelled with Connect account after just a couple of months. With this change I resubscribed on Sunday. Excited to see where this goes. I do hope this is part of the coherent plan and not a desperate attempt to grow their services cashflow.

Whisper Speech Recognition from OpenAI

From openai.com:

We’ve trained and are open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.
[…]
Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.

Looks amazing. The fact that it has multilingual data makes it specially interesting — at least for those of us that speak with an accent.

Applications for automatic speech recognition (ASR) go way beyond than dictation. But I think the UX of Voice/Keyboard/Pen input still lacks. There’s no “mouse pointer” equivalent — yet?.

Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

frame.work:

The Chromebook Edition is available for pre-order in the US and Canada today starting at $999 USD, with first shipments starting in early December.
[…]
The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition is built with the Titan C security chip and receives automatic updates for up to eight years, all to keep your Chromebook fast and secure.

Fun. The pricing is crazy when you compare it with the M1 MacBook Air — but if you’re into Chrome OS, seems like the best/coolest option after Google giving up on the Pixelbook.

I’ve always had a soft-spot for Chrome OS. Sadly, it has never reached its full potential imho.

Spotify Launches Audiobooks in the US

Nir Zicherman on medium.com:

Today (September 20, 2022), we at Spotify are launching audiobooks. For the first time ever, any Spotify user in the United States can discover their next great read in our catalog of 300,000+ books, buy it, and listen to it across any Spotify-enabled device.

Not crazy about yet-another-not-music-content in Spotify — my music app. But at least they’re not throwing it in our face like Podcasts. Price wise, the appears competitive vs Audible, but I still found books cheaper (and DRM free) in Downpour.

Still, Audiobook competition against Amazon/Audible is good news for everyone.