Arc Browser

Arc Browser seems to getting closer to release. It’s a beautiful opinionated browser, and my default for last month. It even managed to replace Safari for my 2016-02-26 mac at work apps.

Funnily, on paper, many of the features we’re done first by Vivaldi. In practice, Arc’s beautiful design really sets in apart. It does require you to let go of 20 years of browser conventions.

David Pierce on theverge.com

Arc is more like ChromeOS than Chrome. It tries to expand the browser to become the only app you need because, in a world where all your apps are web apps and all your files are URLs, who really needs more than a browser? For the moment, I do, if only because Arc’s bad window management makes it too hard to quickly move amongst all my stuff. 

Chris Hannah:

There are certainly good parts to the browser, I like the design, split-view, separate spaces, chrome plugins, the concept of a command bar, and a few other things. But for how I want to use the web, and a web browser specifically, I started to get the feeling like it was working against me. And I don’t have the energy to use a web browser that makes me feel like that when there are much better options available for me.

Darin Fisher, Chrome and ChromeOS Lead Joins Arc Browser:

I co-created the world’s most popular browser. Now, I’m joining The Browser Co to fulfill an old dream. […] I imagine a browser that is more than just a browser — that makes it easier for me to create on the web, and easier for me to discover what others have created. I dream of the browser fueling a virtuous cycle between creator and consumer, and ultimately growing the web ecosystem.

Matt Birchler, on youtube.com:

I’m still loving Arc by @browsercompany and this video touches on some of the little things that I just don’t get from the other browsers out there today.

Dates Are Content

I found an old notebook with notes and writings. If it weren’t for a small date scribbled on the top right, it would have been really hard to pinpoint when I wrote it.

In fact, I have many similar notebooks with stuff on them that I can’t bother to deduce when they were written. Just 10 characters — if you use ISO dates — are the difference between curiosity and archeology.

This isn’t limited to the analog world. Text files in a computer are great at keeping metadata on creation and modification dates … until you do a restore, and it all gets flattened to today.

A date is part of the content. It can provide context, a sorting parameter, or an organizing convention.

Just like habit makes any writing without a title feel unfinished, a lack of date should make it incomplete.

The Way I Heard It
by Mike Rowe

The Way I Heard It

Some audiobooks truly benefit from the author’s narration, and this is one of them. On the surface, The Way I Heard It is a selection of episodes of the podcast with the same name. Rowe’s commentary glues the episodes together, and it is done in such a way that it justifies calling this collection a book.

Both in each of stories and in between, I learned, was entertained, and made me think. What else can you ask of a good book?

I think this book will make me revisit my top 10 audiobooks post from a few years back. An easy recommendation.

State Your Processes

Starting a major project soon, in which we need to map all our processes. We have a lot of practices that are not always formalized. And while we’re staying clear of codifying ourselves into a corner, we can’t hide behind the agile banner anymore.

Thinking about how to do an initial inventory, the playbook first step is to ask: what are your current processes?. To which, I can imagine half the team blankly staring back and repeating the question out loud: what do you mean by pro-cé-sees?

Therefore, the new script asks: what are your responsibilities and common tasks? And in a few initial meetings, it has worked extremely well.

It is fascinating how we already have many systems but are not aware of them. The next challenge is going to be translate and document them.

Affinity V2 of Photo, Designer and Publisher Launched

Jess Weatherbed on theverge.com

Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2, and Affinity Publisher 2 have all been visually redesigned and introduce some new features for designers and creative professionals.

Denny Henke on denny.micro.blog

Exciting day for users of the Affinity suite of creative apps, especially #iPad users. Serif have released the new 2.0 suite which includes Publisher for iPad. Publisher was previously only available for Mac/Windows. So, now all 3 desktop apps have been updated and all three are also updated and available on the iPad. I’ve already imported a project from my Mac into Affinity Publisher on the iPad and it’s fantastic.

Matt Gemmell on mastodon.scot

Wow. Affinity Photo, Publisher, and Designer v2 are all out. You can buy a one-time license that covers all three, on all three platforms they support (macOS, Windows, and iPadOS) all for £90 right now. No subscription. That’s ridiculously good value.

Robert McGovern on social.tarasis.net

[…] even better is that other people in your household are allowed to use those apps, and only required to get there own license if used for commercial use.

That’s fab for families where say kids use windows/iPads and adults use a Mac/iPad

Still deciding if I’m only getting Affinity Designer 2 for the intro price of $40.99, or the three apps for $99.99. I really only need a vector drawing app — since Sketch went subscription years ago — but every so often a more powerful photo and publishing app is needed. Specially since it includes the iPad version.

Calendar App Walkabout

Taking a break from the beloved Fantastical as my main calendar app. A couple of circumstances helped me make the change:

1. Access to Vimcal’s Microsoft 365 Beta test.
2. Fantastical’s yearly renewal was up last week.

I knew that as long as Fantastical was an option, it would be my comfortable place to go when I didn’t know how to do something in Vimcal. So cancelling (likely just postponing) the subscription helped the experiment.

After a few days of testing Fantastical’s free version, Outlook, Apple Calendar and other’s the current setup is as follows:

• Mac:
  • Vimcal in browser (their electron app still doesn’t have support for M365)
  • Apple Calendar
  • Raycast Calendar for Menubar up-next view of events.
• iPhone/iPad:
  • Apple Calendar
  • Eventually Vimcal iOS app, but still doesn’t support M365 either.

You might say this is crazy… and you’re right. What can I say? Some people enjoy hours of pain going uphill on bikes, I like to break my perfectly tuned workflows to play with new apps.

Will it hold? Not sure. Vimcal is really good, but not sure if $15 a month good. When the iOS version gets M365 support, I’m will be able to more clearly test it.

At the same time, Superhuman calendar continues to improve (albeit slowly), and on Google it already supports team availability. That’s currently my main blocker for not using its calendar to create events.

Still, I don’t expect Superhuman to come up with iOS Widgets or Apple Watch complications. Knowing that Apple Calendar is can do those tasks is great news.

Going to give Vimcal a few more days before sharing some impressions.

Fix OneDrive for Mac Not Opening Files From Spotlight

support.microsoft.com:

Resetting Microsoft OneDrive can sometimes resolve sync issues and resets all OneDrive settings. OneDrive will perform a full sync after the reset.

Not sure if it was Ventura’s update, but my files and folders in OneDrive wouldn’t open from Spotlight. This was very frustrating.

Luckily, following the steps in the above Microsoft Support page, fixes the issue.

Write If Else End If

Yesterday was the conclusion of the month long daily writing experiment. I dare to say that maybe a habit has started to form. It was a good experiment.

I think the most successful part was understanding the goal: creating a system to write every day.

If I had to pick the three biggest learnings:

1. Make it very easy to succeed. During this month, my metric was to write something at least longer than a tweet (280 characters). Anything above that, was good enough.
2. Deadlines make you deliver. I didn’t question “if” I wanted to write, I had to. This made it easier to just grab the less bad idea and go exploring in writing.
3. Chew on ideas. Write down your sparks during the day, but let them marinate a little before sitting down to write. This helped a few lines ready to come up when the writing started.

That’s it. I’m going to continue posting everyday, but it won’t be part of this Daily Post tag anymore.

A Roundup of Mastodon Mentions

Interesting week for Mastodon given Twitter’s latest circus show. Here’s some interesting points I came across throughout the last few days:

Exploring Mastodon:

Indeed I’d expect that most people won’t use Mastodon. The essence of this federated social future isn’t the software the instances run on, but the protocol they use to communicate (ActivityPub). Hosting services will run different kinds of software, designed more with the needs of a hosting service in mind.

Taking a look at Mastodon:

Twitter can’t really be replaced with anything else, because everyone’s Twitter experience is unique to them and their community. […] With email, it doesn’t matter which provider you go with. Thanks to universal SMTP standards that every server uses, you can exchange messages with everyone else. This is the same with Mastodon. You’re not siloed into a single instance, and you can follow people from any other instance.

Mastodon is the new Google Reader:

Mastodon is to ActivityPub what Google Reader is to RSS. Google Reader wasn’t the only RSS reader, but at its height it was the biggest. Mastodon isn’t the only ActivityPub application, but it is the biggest.

I agree with the narrative in which the ActivityPub protocol is “a” next big something™ being brewed here. Mastodon is just the biggest (small) application at the moment.

Mastodon is not ready for me:

I have managed my own email server since the ’90s, but I do not feel that the system administration effort required to maintain a private Mastodon instance would be justified at this point: there is not even a Debian package! Mastodon either needs to become much simpler to maintain or become much more socially important, and so far it is neither.

The Elon Gambit:

So the exodus will continue until morale improves, but mostly as far as the exiles are concerned. Many will come back, or post on multiple networks, or just do what normal people do and use different forums for different things.

Colin Devroe:

I have to admit, I’m surprised that just a few tens of thousands of new users can make Mastodon underperform.

Elon and Twitter:

A few of my friends — maybe 10, which actually isn’t a small number for this situation — have declared the future is Mastodon and that I should come and join. I looked at Mastodon years ago, and I took a fresh look this week, and no, it’s not a place I’m interested in moving. It is, and always will be, the “linux on the desktop, this time for sure” of social networks.

Still, if you grade Mastodon on a curve with Twitter, it clearly is far from ready to be a replacement. But that’s the rub, it isn’t a replacement. The Linux on the desktop burn is on point, but not for the reasons most people say.

True, Linux and ChromeOS together have an inmaterial share of the desktop market. But Linux as the underpinning of Android, is the most popular OS in mobile. Maybe that’s ActivityPub reason-to-be, the next something.

But, but, but, I keep seeing positive posts regarding Mastodon:

It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon:

I’ve been using Twitter since November 2006—wow, that’s 16 years! I’ve accumulated 42,804 followers there. It’s been really good to me, and I’ve invested a lot of work generating content there to feed the machine. It’s also attracting very much the kind of people I want to hang out with. Mastodon is, unsurprisingly, entirely populated by nerds. But the variety of nerds is highly pleasing to me. I’ve been checking in on the #introduction hashtag and I’m seeing artists, academics, writers, historians. It’s not just programmers. The variety of interest areas on Twitter is the thing I’ll miss most about it, so seeing that start to become true on Mastodon too is a huge relief.

All said, there’s still a significan uptick in Mastodon activity, and it feels like a new baseline has been reached. One that isn’t a Twitter replacement, but does feel like a geeky water-cooler with some rough edge… just like Twitter 15 years ago.

A Quick Review of the Logi MX Mechanical Mini for Mac

Thord Hedengren, on switchtoipad.com:

It’s a bit too plasticky for my taste, the travel doesn’t feel nice to me, and I’m just not making friends with it.

For $150, you should love a keyboard.

Do Make Me Repeat Myself

Among all the voices in the back of my mind when I’m writing the post: you already said that before always has a front seat.

Here’s Tony Fadell on Steve Job’s iPhone introduction from his book Build:

Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

Of course, if I replied to the voice in my head with the above quote, the laughter would likely be heard outside my head. Still, there’s an important thread here.

Iteration can happen in many ways. And if consciously — or unconsciously — I’m revisiting the same idea in a different post, it should be something to double-down on. Not shy away from.

Liftoff
by Eric Berger

Liftoff

Robie grabbed this book from the shelves of B&N and asked me what it was about. I told him I’d start reading it that night and tell him what I learned. So I loved this booked even before reading the first page.

It’s a great book about the SpaceX early days. Enjoyed that it’s not a how they made it, but rather: in now many ways they almost didn’t. My admiration and appreciation of SpaceX and the new space age we’re now only increased after many of the stories.

iPhone 14 Pro Models COVID Update from Apple

apple.com:

COVID-19 restrictions have temporarily impacted the primary iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max assembly facility located in Zhengzhou, China. The facility is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity.

Whoa, don’t recall a similar consumer-facing note from Apple. Hold on to your hats for iPhone Pro resell value as we head into the holidays.

Sadly/luckily(?), doesn’t affect me. Holding on to my iPhone 12 mini. Only thing I’m considering is replacing the battery — since I still have AppleCare+ for it.

Blog am I?

This experiment has made me think a bit about this blog. I imagine 5typos.net was born like most blogs: with dreams of grandeur and me copying other bloggers.

My first three posts 14 years ago have styles which basically set the tone for all the rest: a link/quote post, a personal note, a longer commentary on a tech feature.

The last 28 daily posts have slowly become easier to write. Not to start writing. But once the kids are in bed, I know any of the half-baked ideas in my head must do.

That’s a change for me. Only Seth Godin writes this way — and he’s really smart. And while I’ve copied his style in the past, it feels uncomfortable to do everyday. Dave Winer’s blog is likely the one I’d stand behind if I had to justify a new style.

But why justify the style? It must be time to face the music and realize my geeky commentary on news is not going to earn me a micro-celebrity status. Nor was that something I wanted.

I blog to write and post. Writing makes me feel good, sharing it on the internet is even better. Would I mess this now if I find an audience?

As I start to go down this rabbit hole, changing the domain name is the first sign I’m procrastinating with planning instead of writing. For now the plan is to finish the monthly experiment with tomorrow’s post — and then decide what the system really is: daily writing or daily postings.

The World Keeps Happening

On routine filled, boring days, it’s good to ponder how many people would appreciate a few days like this. No bombs or dramas. No fights or anxiety. Just a simple meh day you can roll your eyes at, and try to avoid repeating by reading some self-help articles.

Of course, you can have a totally not-boring life, and not imply any of the negatives above. That’s an even better quadrant — I think. But a note to self to appreciate the goodness of this spot in the comfort/excitement matrix is not wasted space.

A Morning Page Practice

The morning page is becoming a habit at the start of the day, but unlike the evening journal, it lacks structure. On most days, is ends being a forward-looking journal. On others, it’s a reflection to whatever problem or projects I went to bed with. Sometimes it’s personal contemplation, while others a productive plan for the day.

Not sure if my struggle to force it into a productive tool is the right way forward. If its the intent is to give my awaking mind an audience to make some sense, of the morning fight between my monkey and lizard brain.

Regardless, the recipe is simple: blank page and pen (analog or digital), and a free flow of thoughts. It won’t make sense individually, but in aggregate, you’ll see something come out of it.

Good Tired and Bad Tired

Some days you finish exhausted, but with a sense of accomplishment that let’s with a nice mellow felling. Other days, you barely survive.

On those bad days, I still consider myself lucky that I’m able to say eff it and close the laptop. It’s giving up, knowing that tomorrow you get another round.

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.