Cheri Baker:

I believe relationships take time. Conversations. Support. An investment in one another. And in that regard, getting off Facebook acted as a sorting mechanism. I found the answer to: Who will make time to hang out? For me that’s a small group, but a treasured one. And sure, it can feel lonely while you look for your people in the flesh-and-blood world. But it gets easier the more you invest in your relationships.

Text people. Set up a coffee date. Schedule a movie night, or a game day, or happy hour. Join a book club. Get your ass out there. I’ve gotten pretty introverted these last few years, so it takes effort, but in the end, it’s worth it.

I can relate to these ideas.

Apple published a great App Store feature about RSS readers—you’ll need iOS to read it but I stitched together a screenshot. They list apps for beginners and advanced users too.

So basically this is how I should sit.

The Alternative to Thinking All the Time:

Wine tasting is nothing but a particularly specific and well-developed way in which human beings have learned to notice their present-moment experience. We can “taste” any present moment in the same way, as long as we make a point of noticing what it’s like. We can’t do it by accident though. When we’re preoccupied by worry and idle thinking, we don’t even recognize that we’re having an experience.

I like this wine tasting metaphor of meditation and experiencing the world.

Also:

When people ask me why I meditate, I often say something about reducing stress and improving mood, because those are the simplest benefits to relate. It does those things, but it might not be clear how. You can think of meditation as time set aside just for tasting the present moment, just for seeing what’s actually being offered, putting aside other projects like planning or analyzing.

[…]

It’s the 21st century, and mindfulness has entered the pop culture mainstream. Even science, as slow and careful as it is, is continually giving us reasons to investigate it for ourselves, yet the most common reason given for not bothering with it is “I don’t have time.”

Meanwhile, we lose years to aimless, ephemeral thinking. The primary experience of the adult human being continues to be rumination, with real life happening in the background.

I have a Headspace subscription but I’m not meditating habitually at the moment. And yes, my reason for not doing it is because “I don’t have time”.

My main problem with meditation is that I can’t get over the feeling of perfection. When I meditate, I always start thinking about thinking, which is perfectly normal, but it makes me really frustrated sometimes.

Maybe I should write an email to Andy Puddicombe. He usually answers them and have something smart to say about things like that.

Creating iOS 12 Shortcuts with JavaScript and Shortcuts JS:

I created a library that allows you to create Shortcuts using JavaScript. You can find it on npm as @joshfarrant/shortcuts-js, and find the documentation on GitHub.

I have no idea what I would use this for, but it’s a pretty cool achievement.

Instead, we chose to apply an obsolete image compression technique called “dithering”. The number of colours in an image, combined with its file format and resolution, contributes to the size of an image. Thus, instead of using full-colour high-resolution images, we chose to convert all images to black and white, with four levels of grey in-between.

This is awesome. I really like the design and I just started to think, maybe I should build something similar for this blog.

Web Design Museum:

The museum exhibits over 900 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1995 and 2005.

I’ve spent like an hour just clicking around. So many great examples of interesting ideas, annoying stuff, dead technologies (yes, Flash), and just memories. The web seemed so innocent back then.

Go ahead, read the whole article, but first I have to highlight this trend which is especially interesting:

Whereas 66% of this demographic agreed with the statement “social media is important to me” in 2016, only 57% make this claim in 2018. As young people increasingly reject social media, older generations increasingly embrace it: among the 45-plus age bracket, the proportion who value social media has increased from 23% to 28% in the past year, according to Ampere’s data.

I’ve seen this happening in my immediate environment as well in the last couple of years. Older people are getting on Facebook more and more, while younger ones are getting off. What’s more interesting is that older ones are started to behave a bit different: they’re seemingly more gossipy, as they’re following their friends’ everyday life more closely. Also, it’s sad to see how quickly some of them got hooked on stupid crap like fake news, politics, hoaxes and joined these type of groups.

I assume there is whole new world opened for some of them, but it seems like they have no idea about the negative privacy and mental implications of using social media (yet).

Meanwhile, I know people from the other side as well, those who refuse to use it. But their primary reason for skipping it is not valuing privacy, but time wasted mindless scrolling on Facebook.

I really like what Serif does lately. I made the switch from Sketch to Designer after they released it for iPad and it quickly became one of my favorite tools (next to Blink). Now there is a completely new Mac app as well for desktop publishing.

It’s very comforting to know that there are great alternatives to the behemoths that Adobe ships.

An Independent Web that is More Social than ‘Social Media’:

For the Rileys in my world who make the leap, one of the most important things I can do is interact and engage with them in their newly established spaces. This is about human to human engagement, not just typing ‘like’ in every comment box. Annotate, dialogue, amplify, and interact.

Amen.

This emoji does not show in the title bar of Safari, presumably to prevent less-reputable sites pretending to be secure (encrypted using HTTPS) when they are not.

Details.

This is a truly awesome resource and collection of history from Stephen Hackett. He went through all macOS (or Mac OS X, or OS X) releases and made a library of screenshots about the system.

From his introduction post:

These images came from the OS, running on actual hardware; I didn’t use virtual machines at any point. I ran up to 10.2 on an original Power Mac G4, while a Mirror Drive Doors G4 took care of 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5. I used a 2010 Mac mini for Snow Leopard and Lion, then a couple different 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros to round out the rest.

Check it out if you interested in Macs and UI design in general.

A Commonplace (book/blog):

Of course, the natural extension of this new notebook was to start sharing some extracts online, specifically on micro.blog. It reminded me of the charm of early blogging. When it wasn’t so serious, when you didn’t need a specific goal or career from it and mistakes were useful and a sign of growth. You didn’t (and don’t) have to present yourself as an expert in something you just started out in.

Thomas Fuchs deleted his Twitter account after the latest API deprecation:

I’ve deleted my account. I will miss the friends I made, but I will not miss the abuse. There’s a line that was crossed recently with Alex Jones and with removing support for various API functions, a move designed to deliberately target power-users and early adopters who prefer 3rd-party clients over the Twitter apps and their force-fed crap.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Social media can be fun. With friendly people, and with no engagement pressure, and no algorithms force-feeding you content designed to make you feel bad.

Well, I’ll try this first instead of messing around with Mastodon.