2025.07.07.

Starting Pezeta

Finally decided to start building Pezeta today. It’s been in my mind for years – since we started Agyvihar, our Hungarian podcast about personal finance and productivity.

What’s Pezeta?

Simple: a budgeting app that tells you one number – how much you can spend right now.

That’s it.

No charts. No categories. No endless reports. Just open the app and see: $47. Or $134. Or whatever you can actually spend without screwing up your budget.

The features (keeping it minimal)

The One Number – Your daily spending limit. Updated in real-time. Factors in your bills, savings, everything.

Goals – Want to save $2000 by December? Cool. The app adjusts your daily number automatically. No spreadsheets required.

That’s basically it. If budgeting were simpler, maybe more people would actually do it.

Starting with Rails

I’m not jumping straight into building native apps. Starting with a Rails MVP instead.

Few reasons:

  • Rails 8 has some new stuff I want to try
  • Need a reference implementation anyway for the iOS/macOS versions
  • I can actually use it myself while building

This Rails version won’t go public. It’s just for me to validate the idea and work out the kinks.

Building in public (might regret this)

I’m putting it all out there because watching someone figure things out might be more useful than another perfect tutorial.

Partly for feedback – maybe someone will tell me this is a terrible idea before I waste six months on it.

Partly for accountability – harder to quit when people are watching.

Partly because I’m curious what happens when you share the messy process instead of just the polished result.

The plan

Starting with Rails 8 setup, basic models, authentication. The boring foundation stuff that nobody talks about but takes forever.

After that, we’ll see. Building software is weird.

2025.02.08.

Using tags to create threads in WordPress

Continuing 3380:

Maybe I should use tags as a thread title in a way that group posts together. I’m using pretty general tags currently, which is fine, but a tag page is just another filtered wall of text. This way, each post could be part of an ongoing conversation. Here’s an example page for a thread.

It means that I could have more precise tags which can be displayed in the sidebar, or even better, I can link to a thread which kind of acts like an article on its own. It was just written in a chronological order.

As an icing on the cake, a post could belong to multiple threads.

Continuing 3378:

If you visit the front page of my blog, you’ll notice that I organize posts by day, inspired by the daily notes feature from Roam Research.

I typically enjoy this wall of text style more than having separate posts highlighted individually (perhaps that’s why I like threading on Mastodon).

The issue is that WordPress lacks a similar feature, but I would love to have threading on my blog too. My Zettelkasten can stack connected notes, which aligns with this concept.

Maybe I should create something that allows me to link posts together, with backlink support.

Previously:

I sometimes think we might need different ways to share ideas instead of long articles—it’s important to mention that I’m talking about ideas, not stories.

Looking at how I read, I see that I usually skim content instead of reading it all at once. Then, I go back to the interesting parts later. If you think this is like Incremental reading, then you’re correct.

I’m not sure what might happen if I started using formats closer to the raw idea then heavily edited posts.

Exploring Real-Time Voice-to-Text Transcription Options

I’ve been thinking about using voice input more in my workflow after watching Chris from DailyTekk talk about quitting typing. He made some interesting points about how speaking (120-150 words per minute) is naturally faster than typing (40-60 words per minute). What was interesting is his observation about typing disrupting the flow with constant self-editing—I’ve definitely experienced this.

So, I’m experimenting with various voice-based input options for my Mac (and possibly iOS/iPadOS as well).

I recently acquired VoicePen as a tool to take voice notes. It’s not a direct dictation app, though. Instead, it works by recording voice in a separate app and then allowing you to copy the cleaned transcription back to your note-taking app. It maintains a history of transformations (such as fixing grammar and cleaning the text) alongside the original transcription. I can revisit and reapply these transformations or copy different versions of the text. It’s a decent tool, but it’s not designed for real-time voice input.

I looked at Inbox AI too, but it’s more of an automation app and I don’t want to invest time learning it right now. I’m sure it can do this.

Bolt.AI offers something different – it has an inline dictation feature. I’m currently trying out its dictation with chat assistants—being able to talk naturally to AIs instead of typing.

I’m also experimenting with macOS’s built-in dictation. It integrates well with text editing and shows what I’m typing in real-time. Sure, it sometimes types the wrong stuff, but these can be fixed quickly with the built-in writing tools.

I’m noticing there’s a difference between thinking out loud and just dictation—I’ll need more time to figure out what works best for each case. For now, I think each input method—typing, voice, even Apple Pencil—probably has its place. I’ll likely end up using a mix of them depending on what I’m trying to do.

2025.01.31.

How to clean a MacBook keyboard

After today’s post on disabling the wake on lid open, I got a comment from smarthieef on how we can switch off this behavior for the keyboard too, so we can only turn on the MacBook using the Touch ID button, making the keyboard cleaning process way easier.

  • Press and hold the left Control and Command buttons with right Shift button for a total of 7 seconds.
  • Without releasing them, press the Power button and hold together for an additional 7 seconds until your laptop shuts down. The login screen may flash for a second so don’t prematurely release the keys until the machine is off.
  • For your next startup, your Mac can only be powered on by using the Power button or closing and opening the lid.

I tested this on a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro, and it works indeed. It is also a one-time thing, so on the next boot, it resets this behavior to the default one, so we can get the best of both worlds.

Update: I tested this on an M3 MacBook Air too, and it didn’t work.

2025.01.24.

I’m just playing around with Muse for Mac, and I just found this picture in their macOS version announcement post.

Creative process.

I love this analogy. Every idea we execute should have some form of artifact at the end: a blog post, a Zettelkasten note, a presentation, an email, etc.

I’ll use this distinction between the different apps that I use for idea development.

Previously:

2025.01.19.

Setting Up Mona for Private Thinking

Since I started to thinker with private Mastodon threading, I’ve been experimenting with using Mona as a private note-taking app.

Hiding the Home tab from Mona makes the app feel more private. I only left the following tabs available because I want to optimize it only for my posts.

I read other people’s posts in Reeder; I use Mona for threading and journaling about ideas privately (and keeping up with my notifications and mentions).

Another thing I did is to replace the ⌘N keyboard shortcut with a custom Keyboard Maestro macro which creates private posts by default. This way, I can work on my threads in a private manner, but still see my notifications if I post something public.

These changes make Mona a note-taking app with built-in discussion features. I don’t know if we have any other app like this.

This is one of the things I love about the Fediverse. In essence, it is just a public place where we post things, but we can make weird mashups on top of it, like a note-taking app.

2025.01.16.

Using Mastodon’s threads for thinking out loud

A few days ago I wrote about getting back to Mastodon, and it’s becoming an unexpected part of my workflow. While I initially set up my instance just to syndicate my blog posts, I found myself using it in ways I didn’t anticipate.

Remember how I loved Gibberish’s chat-like UI for drafting ideas? Well, Mastodon’s thread format accidentally became my new space for thinking out loud. I create private threads where I can ramble about stuff, just like I used to do in Gibberish, but with some nice advantages:

  • Mastodon is completely open, so I can:
    • Run my own instance
    • Control my data
    • Build whatever I want on top of it
  • The clients are surprisingly good
    • Mona
      • Highly customizable
      • The sliding panes UI reminds me of the old Tweetie for iPad
      • Perfect for browsing through connected thoughts
    • Ivory
      • Clean, focused interface, but I prefer Mona’s sliding pane UI

What I find fascinating is how this turned into a lightweight note-taking system. I write posts for myself, bookmark them, and can easily go back to review my thoughts. It’s like a poor man’s Zettelkasten, but the thread format adds this natural, conversational flow to my thinking process.

The best part? Mona’s sliding pane UI feels like it was accidentally designed for this kind of short-form note-taking. The way you can slide between connected thoughts makes it natural to build on ideas. I treat my posts as append-only – while I could edit them, I choose not to. Instead, I add new posts to clarify or expand on my thoughts. This self-imposed constraint helps in capturing the evolution of ideas.

I’m finding myself using Mastodon more and more for drafting ideas, alongside Gibberish. Not what I expected when I set up my instance, but it’s becoming a nice addition to my workflow.

2025.01.14.

CES: We made a tablet that you can fold up like paper.

Me: Ohh cool, when can I buy it?

CES: What do you mean? 🤨

2025.01.13.

I always forgot that I have a global shortcut for microposting using MarsEdit. Although I’m not sure about what defaults it is using for the new post.

Looks like 37signals is building a new editor called House (MD). The code is already available in the Writebook project which I haven’t tried yet.

This new editor is based on Markdown, which I like, since their current Trix editor is WYSIWYG, although it works pretty well in my experience.

2025.01.07.

Drafts alternatives

I still use Drafts and am not planning to switch, but in recent years, I’ve seen a couple of nice quick-capture app alternatives pop up. Since I just stumbled upon the new version of Funnel, I thought I would share some quick thought-capture apps.

  • Funnel
    • It captures text, transcribes voice, and even uses Shazam, which is pretty nice. Unfortunately, it is available only on iPhones.
  • Bebop
    • It is optimized for text file capturing, but it can be a pretty nice tool if you have a file-based system with The Archive. Again, iPhone only.
  • Capture
    • This seems to be the most interesting alternative to Drafts since it works on most Apple platforms (no Watch, though) and can capture stuff into a timeline-like format.

Retiring Script Debugger

I ran into this post the other day about Script Debugger getting retired.

January 2025 marks Script Debugger’s 30th anniversary. It’s been a very long run for a two-person effort. Script Debugger began as a Classic MacOS product, survived Apple’s near-death experience, transitioned to macOS X and migrated across 4 CPU processor types. We are so grateful for the support we’ve received over these years. This support allowed us to keep working on Script Debugger much longer than we ever imagined.

Shane and I are retiring and the effort and costs associated with continuing Script Debugger’s development are too great for us to bear any longer.

I bought this app about 2-3 years ago because I was getting serious about learning AppleScript, and in a short amount of time, it became an important part of my workflow. As I mentioned, I learned AppleScript with the help of Script Debugger’s awesome live inspection feature.

Since then, I have used this app to build many scripts that I use in my everyday workflow.

I don’t know the current state of AppleScript inside Apple, but I know that the difference between Script Debugger and Script Editor is night and day. Script Debugger should be part of the system, which is why I feel sad that another great Mac app, especially one with such a long history, is getting retired.

In June 2025, Script Debugger will no longer be offered for sale and all support and maintenance will cease.

At this time, Script Debugger will become a free download. Links to all versions of Script Debugger back to 5.0 will be posted, along with registration numbers that can be used to activate the software. These free versions of Script Debugger will be provided as-is and without any maintenance or support.

Currently, the developers plan to leave it as is. The problem with this approach is that any future macOS update could break Script Debugger. It’s not like 1Password 7, which, after years, I still keep around because I’m not going to migrate to their stupid Electron app. Script Debugger is a complex beast, so any new Windows Vista-style “security” dialog could kill it in an upcoming version. And boy, Apple has been really into “Cancel or Allow” lately.

Will Script Debugger become an open-source project? No. Unfortunately, there are portions of the Script Debugger source code we do not have the right to release.

I’m not sure how the app could be saved. I created a topic on MPU to let people know about it. Open-sourcing will not work since there are licensing issues, so the last resort is for someone to buy it. Or maybe some people in the Macscripter.net community could take care of it as Late Night Software “contractors.”

I don’t know yet, but it’ll be pretty sad the day when Script Debugger stops working.

Just an aside: it makes me wonder why we have Emacs and Vim still around alive and well…

2025.01.06.

I just love the Gibberish UI for drafting ideas

I subscribed to Gibberish again. It’s a pretty simple app with a weird idea: you can write blog posts by typing out your thoughts in a text messaging-style UI. Each message represents a paragraph.

Why that’s great? The messaging UI somehow triggers me to spit ideas into a chat thread, which I can revise later. Well, the “revise later” part is not the strongest suit of Gibberish, but creating the first draft is the best I found for me.

I just love this chat UI for capturing ideas. It’s not coincidental that people text themselves a lot. Also, it just makes sense how the app calls drafts “thoughts” and published stuff “posts.” I love small touches like this.

Though these are not posts, and I’m not writing a blog here, since I have to publish a post to get the “Copy Post Text” menu working, I figured, why the hell not? I’m not going to share the URL of my Gibberish “blog” since it is just a side effect of using the app “wrong,” but because I love this way of drafting things, I’m going to keep it around. I don’t care if people find it.

Since I’m using the app just kinda right (I don’t care about the blogging part), I wish it was just a private thing that syncs over iCloud (or whatever) with better support for exporting my “thoughts” into other apps like Drafts. As mentioned, I only publish my posts there to get the “Copy Text” option working.

So, essentially, I just want an app that I can use to ramble about stuff and then export to revise the content somewhere else. Gibberish would be an awesome app for collecting thoughts without having a blog behind it.

2025.01.05.

Nice, I can have a custom Bluesky handle using my own domain. Updated the links on my blog to @zsolt.decoding.io.

2025.01.04.

I’m back on Mastodon and Bluesky

After years of focusing on my blog and staying off social platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, I’ve decided to set up profiles there. Why now? Here’s what’s changed.

I’ve mostly set up Mastodon and Bluesky profiles to publish my posts to social media platforms. This could also be a way to have conversations around my content. I might occasionally post short status updates, but the main way I’ll share ideas will continue to be through my blog.

I also want to try out new iOS apps like Ivory, Croissant, and Reeder which are integrating with these services.

If you’d like to follow along, here are my profiles:

Feel free to follow me, say hi or share something interesting.

The blog will remain my main hub for new posts, which are also shared to Mastodon and Bluesky via Micro.blog and replies to these posts should appear as comments here on the blog too.

Why do I have so many posts today?

Well, I was reading Simon Willison’s post about his blogging process, and I realized that I often write about weird ideas, thoughts, and things I discover online, but I usually keep them in a private journal.

Some of these things are available publicly on my Zettelkasten as notes or annotations, but not here. I think I’m going to change this habit.

While I don’t always have interesting content to blog about, I shouldn’t keep these thoughts to myself either. Most of these ideas are just ramblings, but if you visit any blog or social media platform, you’ll realize that it’s mostly people rambling about random stuff.

On the other hand, you can find interesting sparks for ideas, peculiar thought chains, workflow tips, and bits and pieces that I actually enjoy more than coherent and lengthy blog posts.

So, I’m going to publish more of these fragmented ideas that I’ve kept private until now.

2024.09.03.

Trying out Strflow for project-related status updates

I used Strflow today with OmniFocus, which is pretty good for an interstitial journal. I can quickly bring it up and leave a status update about projects. It is handy when making a phone call and logging what we discussed.

I made two shortcuts, which work on the selected action’s project:

  1. Journal About Selected OmniFocus Project: ask for a quick status update, then it automatically tags the note with the project name converted to a hashtag.
  2. Open Selected OmniFocus Project Timeline: opens the timeline based on the project name.

I created a journaling shortcut for OmniFocus a couple of months ago, but it is built on top of DEVONthink. It doesn’t automatically get the project, and storing these entries in DEVONthink will make my status updates get mixed with project-related assets, which I don’t like.

By the way, I can also add pictures to Strflow entries, which is kind of hard to do in DEVONthink.

I used to do interstitial journaling in TaskPaper, and I’m not sure yet if Strflow is better or worse than TaskPaper, but at least it is available on iOS, too.

These days, I’m using TaskPaper for “brainstorming,” not journaling. TaskPaper is a pretty cool outliner, so I can quickly create session notes related to the selected OmniFocus action. But these are just fleeting notes… I’m using TaskPaper as a temporary thinking tool.

I can also share Strflow notes with other apps, like Day One, or add them to Drafts, where I can process and export them to other places, transforming Drafts into a tool that migrates text-based information between apps.

Also, I like how the Strflow timeline was made to look like a chat app. In a way, it feels like the old Twitter feed, where we posted random thoughts to get them out of our heads. It is a private version of that.

2024.09.01.

Maybe I should try Setapp. My Hookmark subscription is expiring soon, and it would be cheaper to use Setapp than just trying to subscribe to Hookmark directly.

From a UX point of view, Hookmark has this weird and confusing licensing behavior. I have to pick a specific license file, which I always mix up, and I don’t know… It’s just confusing…

I assume on Setapp, it works as long as I pay for the subscription.

I would also have access to Ulysses, since it is also available on Setapp.

I’m unsure how Setapp works on iOS, though. I should look into that.

2024.07.03.

David Allen’s GTD System Up Close

A few years ago, I found a hidden video series about how David Allen does GTD. I instantly downloaded it and merged it into one video.

While browsing today on YouTube, I stumbled upon two existing videos from this series that are still available. The rest are removed or marked as private, I don’t know… Edit: actually I checked the video and these in fact are the same ones. But I wanted to share them because they are pretty interesting.

Luckily, I saved the full video, although I can’t share it here. If you are interested, maybe you can ping me via email. Otherwise, I embedded the two existing videos here as an introduction.

2024.03.18.

Making my file archive portable in a different way

I looked into how Tailscale works behind the scenes, but I’m still not sure I need a 3rd-party tool to create a virtual network for my devices. There are a couple of cool uses of a network like this, like syncing DEVONthink and OmniFocus over WebDAV using my Mac mini. Still, I also have an Apple Watch, which doesn’t seem to work with Tailscale, so I can’t sync OmniFocus with my Mac mini there like I originally planned.

Initially, I was looking for something that could give me access to my Mac mini outside of my network to get to my file archive stored on my external drives connected to my Mac mini. But giving it a second thought, there is a good reason we have the distinction between Cold Storage and Active Storage.

For me, Active Storage is iCloud Drive, which is synced to all my devices. Cold Storage is not something that I should have access to all the time (not to mention ransomware and other dangers). So, from a security point of view, it’s a good thing that I have a local Mac server and a remote Linux server used for different things. Each of them requires a different level of security, and Tailscale merges them all into one network, which I’m not sure I’m comfortable with.

I’m thinking about shelving this whole idea of reaching my Mac mini server outside of my network and making a distinction between private networks and public networks. A public network means it should be available anywhere, but it should be end-to-end encrypted. This is what DEVONthink and OmniFocus do: each uses my WebDAV server running on my public server as a syncing backend, but these apps store data encrypted.

On the other hand, my private network should be guarded, and data stored there should have a good 3–2–1 backup plan instead.

So, instead of using the network as a transport layer to access my file archive, I’m thinking about using an external drive to bring a copy of my archive with me when I’m away.

2024.03.17.

Playing around with Tailscale

I’m playing around with Tailscale, but I’m not sure about the privacy aspect of being on a VPN all the time. I want to sync DEVONthink and OmniFocus using a WebDAV server on my Mac mini, but running Tailscale 24/7 raises some questions.

  1. Is it really end-to-end encrypted?
  2. Does all traffic go through the VPN?
  3. What about network issues when using a VPN? I’ve seen some connection drops in the OmniFocus sync logs when I used my Mac mini as a sync server.

I love the idea of having my private network of devices available everywhere. But I don’t trust random companies with my data, so I want to do my research before I start to use Tailscale with all my devices.

2024.03.16.

Open-sourcing thinking

I write a lot every day, but I don’t publish a lot of it since I have this fear of being judged. But I have a lot of ideas and thoughts that can be boring for some people but maybe interesting for others.

I ramble about tools and workflows in Day One and my Zettelkasten. Those are private posts that are not necessarily useful to anyone, but I want to publish them anyway because I can see a history of my thoughts, which can give someone else an idea.

That’s what #DigitalGarden is about, but it is still different. Sometimes, I want to write a journal entry and be done with it. I don’t need a full-fledged Zettelkasten all the time.

Actually, I’m afraid of publishing these ideas, but as we have had success with open-source software in the last couple of decades, maybe open-source thinking can be a helpful thing to master, too.

What do I mean by that? Blogposts without much crafting and maybe even with a lot of grammar errors, but the idea is that I can write about something, then continue thinking about that idea in a new post, and so on. Maybe I’ll run into a conclusion and come up with something cool or ignore the whole thing at the end, but the critical point here is that I should flex my writing more, and my blog is still the best place for that.

Inspired by More people should write

2024.02.24.

On Apple pundits attitude towards the iPad

2024.02.22.

The new version of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin lets me reply to comments coming from Mastodon and federate them back as standard replies. I just wanted to install an instance this morning to have a profile that I can use to reply to incoming comments, but this one is way better.

Again, you can follow me on Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance.

2024.02.18.

Building my own web

I’m very disappointed after reading comments on this article: How Twitter’s descent into chaos is paving the way for a new web

I don’t want to see this divided mentality (especially politics) under articles that are talking about cool indie projects. The mainstream web has gotten into a state where people just inject politics into everything. If I want to have a place that I like, I have to build my part of the web.

A Zettelkasten and a blog can help with that. I can make my blog cozy, write about what I like, and then browse that from time to time to rediscover things.

2024.01.27.

Getting familiar with Emacs

  • I can safely say that Emacs (with Org mode) is my new PKM app. It is really good (and I’m telling you as someone who loves Vim).

    • I started to mess around with Org mode about a week ago.

    • Org mode is just an awesome way of organizing information and actually do something with it.

  • I added Hookmark integration for Org mode based on these scripts.

  • I’m still going to use Vim for web development, but Emacs is my thinking space now (my home-grown Roam if you will).

    • Of course I’m using Evil mode in Emacs.

    • I don’t have time to learn a new way of editing text currently.