Lately, I started to do a bunch of (what I call) Project-based Zettelkasten™, which are just git repositories containing a bunch of Markdown files related to different projects.
This post reminds me that iA Writer can grab all that stuff and make it available in one app.
Previously:
Steve Jobs said this in 2011:
No ads. We build products that we want for ourselves, too, and we just don’t want ads.
Then, we have a new rumor, that Apple is thinking about showing ads in Maps.
My reaction? No ads. You build products that you and I want for ourselves, too, and we just don’t want ads.
Yet more reading about President Musk (I’m gonna steal this).
Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control.
Lately, I feel early Gilead vibes while reading the news.
I try to operate on the “Nothing Doesn’t Go in Here” principle. Flipping through the notebook that is on my desk right now, I see shopping lists, notes from conference calls, sermon notes, a little chart I made when working on some invoices for Relay, a doodle of the Widgetsmith icon I made for some reason, and a lot more. A receipt for a recent meal with a friend fell out of it onto my lap; I’ll probably tape that into the notebook for safekeeping.
The good thing about Field Notes is that you don’t have to care about it. It doesn’t feel pristine like some other brands. So, I mainly capture similar things, but I group them by date. I have meeting notes, programming session notes, random ideas, outlines, journal entries, etc.
These notebooks are a trail of breadcrumbs dating back almost 15 years. If I flip through an old one, I get a glimpse of what was going on in my life at that time. I can go to the notebook I was using when we launched Relay, or when I quit my job. I like having them on hand; seeing them in my studio each day makes me happy.
I never scanned my old Field Notes but kept them safe in a wooden box. I don’t care if they are destroyed someday since I use my notebooks as a temporary capture tool. If something is interesting, I’ll transfer it to my GTD system or just scan that part of the notebook.
Otherwise, the notebook can be discarded.
Previously:
Programming as we know it is in a process of dying out.
Most haven’t come to terms with it yet.
I’m just saving this, so I can look back at it in 3 years and see if it’s becoming true or not.
Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week.
Asked for comment, the company pointed TechCrunch to a new blog post on “responsible AI.” It notes, in part, “we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”
Shit, I just finished watching the Terminator movies yesterday.
Well, meh…
I like Tapestry. It’s going to be a great app, and people seem to like it. No Mac app for now though.
I’m just not sure why everyone was complaining about Reeder 5 when it was released doing basically the same thing.
Here are a couple of highlights from Why I Make Minimal Use of Social Media:
I have a relative who loves to post about their perfect, loving family, filling their Facebook feed with happy family photos. But, as you might guess, they conveniently leave out the reality of their many conflicts and challenges. It’s a polished image that doesn’t show the truth.
Nobody’s gonna share their struggles and failures as much as their fun times, so I think this behavior is just for display. Remember that when you see something like this, it’s just a snapshot of their day. Nothing more, nothing less.
There are other ways to keep in touch with family members and friends. Emails and texts can be addressed to a group of contacts or individuals. By not using social media yourself, you can discourage others from using it as their preferred way to “keep in touch.”
I never emailed any of my friends, but we usually keep in touch via text messages. Texting is like having a peer-to-peer social network.
Streams are not created on a personal basis, they are shared between people interested in them. Streams are like shared folders for individual threads. This additional layer keeps your communications organized: you don’t anymore have one cluttered inbox, threads are now sorted in streams with authors’ hands. Streams are high-level enough to make inbox organization effortless and not to introduce significant overhead.
Interesting ideas about making email from an inbox to streams.
Instead of striving for a 100 percent success rate, it’s better to aim for 80 percent.
Having a buffer allows you to move forward without feeling like you’ve failed when not everything goes as planned, which is often.
This is something I’m trying to learn currently. Most projects won’t even need 80%.
macOS Sequoia introduces another new feature labelled Help Apple Improve Search, which sends and stores various search queries from Safari, Spotlight, and other sources to improve search results.
This feature, too, is enabled by default and is well hidden at the very bottom of System Settings > Spotlight.
I turned this off.
CoverSutra 4.0 got open-sourced (actually, it was open-sourced on Christmas, but I just got around to blogging about it).
Originally launched as an iTunes controller in 2007, CoverSutra is making its comeback as a standalone music player for your Mac! Version 4.0, code-named Cappella, brings you seamless music access directly from your menu bar. With its elegant interface, you can instantly search by album, artist, or song—all while staying focused on your work without needing to switch apps.
I used to love CoverSutra back in the day. In fact, I even created a Hungarian localization for the app (here’s an archive.org link to my old hungarian blog which looks like some old MySpace crap).
However, the app mysteriously disappeared around 2013. If I remember correctly the developer, Sophia Teutschler, was hired by Apple at that time.
A few months ago, Sophia brought CoverSutra back, but I’m not particularly pleased with the new version. It has become a separate music player, which is quite different from the original app.
These days, I primarily use Sleeve, which is quite similar to the early version of CoverSutra. It retains the feature of displaying the current song’s album artwork on the desktop, just like the CoverSutra did. I also use Sleeve to scrobble my music to Last.fm like it’s 2007 again.
Interesting story from James Thomson about the development of the early version of the Mac OS X Dock.
So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.
By the way, my birthday is January 5th too.
On the other hand, I got a little bit angry when reading this part (especially how Space Karen talks crap about remote work lately).
Steve left, and then visited my manager’s manager’s manager and said the fateful words (as reported to me by people who were in the room where it happened).
“It has come to my attention that the engineer working on the Dock is in FUCKING IRELAND”.
I was told that I had to move to Cupertino. Immediately. Or else.
I did not wish to move to the States. I liked being in Europe. Ultimately, after much consideration, many late night conversations with my wife, and even buying a guide to moving, I said no.
They said ok then. We’ll just tell Steve you did move.
As a software developer who has been working remotely for more than 15 years, I have never understood why it’s so important to be in the office…
Interesting use-cases for the Reminders app.
Even so, there are some neat features of Apple’s Reminders that can make your life a lot easier.
I haven’t found anything new about Reminders in this article, but it can be useful to others.
On the other hand, the use case of birthdays just doesn’t make sense.
A couple of years ago I quit Facebook. One of its last remaining utilities was helping me remember friend’s birthdays and I meant to transition everyone to a Reminders list, but only got a handful done. Even so, it’s been nice to have a short list of birthdays to check out every time I worry I forgot someone’s birthday.
For birthdays, use the Contacts app in conjunction with the Birthdays calendar in the Calendar app.
You can also create a smart list in Contacts for upcoming birthdays in the next N days.
Update: by the way, I forgot that I also wrote a lengthy article on how to use Apple Reminders for GTD.
GTD is a collection of relatively simple tactics for coping with, prioritizing, and organizing the things you want to do. Many of the methods relate to organizing your own projects, using a handful of context-based to-do lists (e.g. a list of things to do at the office, at home, while waiting in line, etc). These lists consist of simple tasks. Those tasks are, in turn, derived from another list, of “projects” – things that require more than one task, which can be anything from planning dinner to writing a novel to helping your kid apply to university.
I have never seen next actions mentioned like this: tasks that are derived from another list, a list called projects. The thing I like about OmniFocus (and TaskPaper) is that projects are outline headings, and next actions are simple rows. It naturally blends the two together.
Most of the internet is still on the web, which means it can be bookmarked, which means that it takes me one second to add it to the group of things I’m staying on top of, and one second to remove from that group. I get up in the morning, middle-click the “unfucked rota” item in my bookmarks pane, make a cup of coffee, and then sit down and race through those tabs, close-close-close.
It takes less than a second to scan a tab to see if it’s changed (and if I close a tab too quickly, the ctrl-shift-T “unclose” shortcut is there in muscle-memory, another habit). The whole process takes between one and 15 minutes (depending on whether there’s anything useful and new in one of those tabs).
I like the idea of using tabs as a list for next actions; however, my main concern with this approach is that it doesn’t clarify why I need to open a specific tab. It feels like a variation of the “Waiting for” list, which can serve a similar purpose. I can access this list daily, quickly scan it, open links from the task notes, and even update it with new information.
It’s interesting that Cory discusses how he utilizes the “Waiting for” list in another article.
I’m relatively new to the indie blogging, so I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to follow. What works best for me is when I come across a blog that references another one I almost always click through, check out the “About” page, and skim the article archives to see if their content interests me. If it does, I’ll add their blog to my RSS feed.
This is exactly what I do as well. I have never used any directory to find interesting blogs—okay, maybe once—but the point is that linking to other people is a natural way to discover exciting things.
I love it when I have ten tabs open related to a topic and browse the web as we used to.
Using the web for discovery feels like how time was presented at the end of Interstellar. The past, the future, and the now exist all at once, and you can go anywhere on the timeline.
Their poor information management skills force them to rely on constant notifications from whatever apps they install and to which they nearly-instantly read or reply, never batch-processing anything in their life.
And they are perfectly fine with it. Oh, they might complain the way some people complain about the weather: “It’s colder than I thought it would be today”, but still not returning home to get a sweater.
And the systems which these types are involved in (jobs, school, groups, clubs) are kowtowing to them more each year. In fact, often those very same systems are run by the same types. It is, to them, unthinkable that anyone would “go rogue” and not have a smartphone lighting up their face 200+ times a day. They see well-managed, calm, distraction-free people (or those trying to be) as cabin-dwelling off-grid and out-of-touch people who are “missing out” on how “easy” life is if you just let everyone and everything ping you with every update.
My all time favorite is the text message about the “email I just sent you”. I know my darling, I keep my shit together.
In 2008, GitHub’s developers could have opted to use git format-patch instead of teaching the world to juggle branches. Or they might have chosen to generate pull requests using the git request-pull command that’s existed in Git since 2005 and is still used by the Linux kernel maintainers today2.
I’m getting into stacked branches these day, but I should look into git request-pull too.
Okay, this was pretty funny.
A lot of folks use Obsidian for managing a system like this; I’m here to provide an impassioned and perhaps overzealous argument for my tool of choice, The Archive (macOS). Because what’s life without fighting for what you love?
I was in the habit of trying to find the perfect Zettelkasten app lately, but I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no app like that, so I’ll just keep using what I have, which is The Archive, iA Writer, and my Zettelkasten website.
I am also trying to simplify my “Zettelkasten” setup (Zettelkasten refinements) to be more like a journal rather than a knowledge base, which would require a lot of discipline to maintain. Instead, I want to capture ideas in a stream and see what will emerge.
Yes, you can change the default app associated to a file on iOS/iPadOS:
Since the new iPads were introduced several weeks ago there has been a lot of talk amongst Apple pundits about what one can and can’t do on an iPad. One of the complaints I encountered was about not being able to set a default app to open certain file types in iPadOS.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the same tip for the same complaint. There was no reply, so… 🙃
I rarely feel an urge to write about things I fully comprehend. More often than not, such regurgitation feels like a chore. I might do it to spread awareness on an issue, but rarely for its own sake.
Instead, I find it more exciting to write about things I don’t yet fully understand, where new information has become available or where I want to clarify my thinking. In other words, to “write so that I know what I think,” or to “write what I need to know.”
Mandy Brown on ending your day:
Here’s a small trick that worked for me over the dozen years I led remote teams: at the end of your working day, shut down every app on your machine. Yes, all of them. Stash your tabs somewhere if you must, but close them all down. The only exception that may be made is for a simple note-taking app—the kind that lacks any kind of notifications. Then, spend ten or perhaps fifteen minutes reflecting on your day, whether in said note-taking app or, even better, on paper. This needn’t be anything formal or structured, just jot a few things down—maybe short phrases, maybe just some key words. The only hard rule is to do your best to keep any sense of judgement out. Then, in the morning, when you open up your machine, there should be nothing yelling at you—no unread badges, no cluster of notifications calling for your attention.
This is the best shutdown routine you can do.
But using it after spending the day on Things really makes it look like a baby app, like an Electron-packaged web app made by people who haven’t smiled in decades.
😃
Whatever regulation that required these kinds of policy-change notification emails greatly failed us. A notification is not enough. If a company changes their policies, individual user data should be made completely inaccessible to that company until that user explicitly agrees to the new policy.
Yes, this should be the default. However, companies would heavily exploit a rule like this, like they abused the cookie consent UIs on the web.
If your passion or livelihood depends on a set of tools or capabilities, don’t rent those tools from someone who can deny you access or claim your output at any time. Own your tools. Be a digital homesteader.
Oh shit, I smell bad stuff.