When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.
It’s weird, but I’ve just subscribed for Headspace to have a way to practice the routine of sitting in silence.
I'm still thinking about which apartment should I stay in or stop wasting my time and move away completely. I started making my own cabin in the woods which I use at the weekends. Too bad that I like some of my current neighbors.
I agree with this so much. You should read the whole thing, if you have a website or you’re building websites, especially if you're using that bullshit Google AMP.
Jeff Perry reacted to a post that Anchor wrote a couple of days ago:
I pay $12 a month on Simplecast for both Getting Caught Up and A Slab of Glass. I do it happily because I know that I am supporting developers with my money for hosting, a website, technical support, and download statistics that they share with me on how my shows are doing. I don’t have to hope and pray that Anchor makes their money with ads in order to keep my content alive.
I’ve mentioned briefly before that video podcasts used to be a thing, but nowadays everybody just uses YouTube to maintain an online video presence. Sure, it looks attractive first, but when you use a service for everything end-to-end, you automatically lock yourself into it.
Luckily, we don’t have a YouTube-like monopoly in podcasting. I produce one podcast at the moment (sorry, it’s Hungarian), and the best thing about it is that we have a lot of hosting choices. Our listeners are not bonded to the same company that does the hosting. Everything is based on open standards and there are plenty of ways to start making a new podcast.
My podcast is hosted on a Digital Ocean VPS using the same server that hosts this blog. The site is built using Jekyll (you can find it’s source on GitHub, although it’s not well documented), new episodes are posted using Workflow. Everybody can adapt its source, change the design, set up a server and start making podcasts. It’s not as nice as dedicated podcast hosting services, but I like that it’s independent and very cheap to maintain. People are always afraid of doing stuff on their own, but to be honest I kinda like messing around with it. I learn new stuff.
Anchor is an interesting service and they’re building nice apps, but to be honest, I don’t want them to succeed. Maybe they really care about podcasting, but we’ve seen what happens with a medium that gets controlled by one company and podcasting currently dominated by nobody. Apple has a directory of podcasts, but it’s just a directory, it’s not the same as hosting and running them. iOS (and Android) made possible to choose whatever podcast client you want to use. Usually, the bigger ones integrate some kind of server-side directory or use iTunes, but they’re already making possible for people to find shows and subscribe to them very easily.
If you want to get into making podcasts quickly then you can choose a service like Simplecast or Firebase, pay a monthly fee and have your content hosted there. It’s a simple and straightforward deal.
We shouldn’t walk into the same trap as we’ve already done with YouTube and Medium. Those “free” services always want to “disrupt” a medium with some innovative way of making money, but at the end, we’re back to an ads based user tracking business, with monopolies and lock-ins. A couple of guys can get popular enough on those platforms to earn the big money, but the rest of us always have to follow business rules that a company makes for everybody.
A reminder about what difference can be made in technology just in a couple of years apart.
Most email systems do not signal to others that you are online, and such signaling is not part of the email protocols themselves.
We usually say a lot of bad things about email but it's a rare case of a technology which is independent, interoperable and if you use it right, can be non-distracting.
I really miss the old days of communication, it was such a simple system: when I was online (on whatever chat service) you could ping me, otherwise, you were able to send me an email. Nowadays we just install multiple messaging apps, each of them is constantly online. We receive multiple notifications and we try to fight the distraction with hacks like Do Not Disturb and AI that tunes our notifications.
Sometimes it works, but we should also train some basic expectations on response time to our peers: send me an email, or if it's urgent, message me, but never expect an instant response.
I kinda like the new version of Skype for iPad. Their macOS version is still crap, so I hope they’ll adopt something nicer with Martzipan and the current iPad app.
I've never really stopped using RSS. My blog still has an RSS button in the header, I still read blogs using RSS, and if you've subscribed to any podcast then you're using RSS too. It's still a fundamentally important technology albeit some "social" companies want to see it going away.
Maybe Apple should bring RSS back in Safari like Tiger had.
To be honest, I still question whether using RSS and Twitter is beneficial for me in the long term. I feel the excitement that dopamine causes, when I refresh these timeline based apps—it feels similar to craving sugar, which I’m also trying to get rid off. If there is no new content, I feel a little bit of disappointment.
Also, this constant scrolling of Twitter really hurts my ability to read. I don’t read anymore, I scan things. That’s pretty fucked up and I think it’s because I don’t read longer stuff that needs me to slow down and immerse myself in the story.
I really like the redesign of Apple Books (iBooks) in iOS 12 and I want to get back reading more books. And not non-fictional stuff about how to get better at GTD or pretend you work 4 hours a week, but stories about fictional worlds. I really like sci-fi, and there is awesomeness hidden in those books.
Here’s what I’m going to do:
I assume BBC had this amazing footage laying around after editing Planet Earth 2 (which I’ll rewatch in 4K soon), so instead of putting it away on a hard drive somewhere, they’ve released it as 10-hour long looped videos. These are way better than any noise-making app for focusing when I code or relax. I even tried connecting a second display to my iMac just to see the video part too in fullscreen while I work, but that was too distracting.
My blog got included in the sources of hashtagopenweb which is a cool site from Michael Rockwell collecting all kind of one-man blogs related to Apple and technology. I also found a couple of new blogs which I subscribed with RSS.
Colin Walker brought up yesterday the idea of using your website as a private repository.
This also occurred to me a couple of months ago when I searched a better alternative for Day One. This blog which runs on WordPress looked great for a private journal, but I didn't find anything that would migrate my entries from Day One, so I created a script for myself. I've open sourced it on GitHub so anybody with a little bit a terminal knowledge should be able to use it.
Before you ask: I still use Day One with encryption turned on. When I reasearched the topic of private posts using WordPress I found a couple of security concerns which I've also shared on Colin's blog. But after last week's Day One security fiasco, maybe it's something that I should reconsider.
According to GDPR, from May 25th I can't talk to myself alone without agreeing my privacy policy first.
Sarah Jeong writing on The Verge:
I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t […] Facebook is an emotional labor machine, and if you want to leave it, you’re going to have to start doing a lot of work
When I read a post like this, I get angry and sad at the same time: it’s so easy now to reach people, but we still use our tools wrong. It looks like we have the same old problem that we had with every new technology getting popular. We just have to learn to use them. What makes Facebook different is that it’s also a tool for others to hijack our attention and they try to do everything they can to keep us addicted to it.
I’m not comfortable with that. This’s one of the many reasons why I left Facebook. If you think about it for a second, Facebook is no more than just a bunch of tools made for people to
Nothing is new on this list, but we haven’t dealt with something like this before at this scale. Facebook tries to make the first three as easy to use and addictive as possible—although the internet has a lot of tools already for communicating and publishing— combining them into one is what makes collecting data and influence people this efficient.
I don’t like the idea of collecting data about my behavior and habits to carefully model a profile of me to sell crap or use it as a tool to get me addicted to something.
Existing tools can replace a lot of Facebook functionality (and they already do). You can easily leave Facebook, you just have to leave your laziness behind too. Replace your posts with a blog. There are email and text/IM services to communicate with people (although I still use Facebook Messenger without a Facebook account, I proactively ask people to switch over to iMessage if they can). You can use IM groups to organize a party or let people know about things.
But following people on a feed means you don’t really pay that much attention. We used to follow topics or news, following people around was called stalking. Now we know everything about each other thanks to addictive stalking. Meanwhile, something seriously fucked up: we have hundreds of “friends”, but according to statistics, we feel alone more than ever. That’s because we got lazy to invest a bit more energy to have more meaningful relationships with our friends. We follow them, but we don’t interact that much anymore. You must have been in a situation where you met somebody again after a while, but you didn’t enjoy it, because you had already know whats up with him/her. You were sitting there staring each other.
That’s happened because of batching. Facebook lets you see your friends prefiltered ideas and life moments in a nicely formatted feed. It makes keeping up with information convenient, but there is a problem: while batching works great when you want to be efficient, deepening relationships and friendships isn’t about convenience and efficiency. It’s about experience and time invested in each other. Facebook removes the intimacy of the moment when you “connect” with somebody. It makes it convenient but also isolating. It’s not surprising that people feel themselves alone on Facebook, it’s because they’re isolated.
Do you want to know what’s up with your friends? Message them, call them, meet them, then ask about their life, have a conversation. Invest time in your friendships. I know it takes way more energy and you can’t keep up with that many people, but who cares when it’s way more satisfying than following a bunch of curated profiles.
I like to read about the technical details of service outages since we can learn a lot from others' mistakes. But I still think Day One was better when they had iCloud sync. As far as I know, accidentally journal sharing wouldn't have happened with CloudKit.
Om describing Skype perfectly:
a turd of the highest quality
I'm using Skype for podcasting but I'm in the hurry finding a good alternative for it. Since they dumped a fairly good Mac app with a stupid Electron crap, I just want to avoid it.
And don't get me started on the iOS version…
Testing Icro:
It's okay for 1.0, but I'm keeping the official one installed since I don't keep up with my timeline but (silent) notifications are nice to have.
Electron is like, you have a knife and you want to slice stuff with it, but also eat soup.
"We updated our privacy policy" is the new "this website uses cookies".
Flitter is a really nice upcoming Twitter client for iPhone with some cool UI ideas.
A couple of years ago, iOS Twitter clients were UI playgrounds, but then Twitter started messing with developers and nobody wants to create new apps anymore. It is awesome to see there are still new clients are being made.
You can preorder it on the App Store.
There is a hidden directory inside of macOS that contains the app icons for built-in services like iCloud Drive. You probably wouldn’t know they are there because you’ll have to enter a specific file path in order to access them. Here’s how to put the iCloud Drive Icon on your dock for easy access to Apple’s cloud storage.
Washed my Apple Watch band. Now it hangs on the drier as it should.
This setup will cause you to be less responsive on chats and email, but that’s sort of the point. Your phone shouldn’t dictate to you what you focus your attention on, and the behavior it cultivates in keeping you “always ready” is unhealthy and spills over into parts of our lives that aren’t serving us well.
Although I don't agree with everything, this the sanest article that gives you tips about phone addiction, without going into extremes. I'm already doing a lot of these tips, I just need to revise my notification settings.
Things already got a great URL scheme which can be used for automation. On the Mac, we can take automation to the next level with things.sh which is a Terminal interface for reading (and writing) Things’ database. Really awesome for somebody like me, who spends his day in vim and tmux.
Cal Newport writes about owning your content on the social web:
Buy a domain. Setup a web hosting account […]. Install WordPress or hand-code a website for this account. Let people follow you directly by checking your site, or subscribing to an RSS feed or email newsletter.
It was like that couple of years ago, then social media made really really easy for everyone to tell their story. The problem is that your story is now tied to some company that controls basically everything outside a textarea which you use to tell your story. That's way more limiting than having your own website or blog which you control as a whole. Sure, it takes a bit more work to set up a website and you may have to hire a professional to help you, but it's way more satisfying at the end than creating a Twitter account or a Facebook page.
One more thought for Twitter users: if you want to tell something which needs a thread of multiple tweets then write a blog post instead. That's how we used to do it.
I separated my shorter statuses and longer posts into two new categories, which means you can subscribe to them individually now. Here's each new category and RSS feed:
If you're into social timelines, then you can also follow me on Twitter or Micro.blog. They are mirroring the blog's content.
I’m officially getting older. I had to increase my coding font (Source Code Pro) from 12pt to 13pt.
I love these home screen bugs in iOS 11. I had Mail.app trying to escape, now I have a ghost Tweetbot icon.
I had syncing problems with Safari since the first version of iOS 11.3 beta. Apparently, I'm not the only one. It’s started getting so bad, that I had to abandon Reading List in Safari because it's randomly deleted saved articles. Sometimes there were random bookmarks showing up in the sidebar. Sites that looked like were added there by Frequently Visited Sites.
I got suspicious about this: maybe Frequently Visited Sites does something weird with syncing. I went ahead and turned it off on every device I own, also on each device that my girlfriend uses since she has a really big collection of bookmarks in Safari. After using Safari for weeks without Frequently Visited Sites turned on, I can safely say it fixed syncing problems. I haven't seen lost bookmarks and deleted articles in Reading List since then.
If you have bugs like this, turn off Frequently Visited Sites in settings on every device that syncs with your iCloud account.
On iOS:
On macOS:
Wired has a nice collection of repeated apologies from Mark Zuckerberg over the last decade.
Last month, Facebook once again garnered widespread attention with a privacy related backlash when it became widely known that, between 2008 and 2015, it had allowed hundreds, maybe thousands, of apps to scrape voluminous data from Facebook users—not just from the users who had downloaded the apps, but detailed information from all their friends as well.
I’m getting tired of all Facebook’s crap so I have to get rid of it completely. I’m sure there is a shadow profile of me on Facebook servers even I deleted my account about a year ago.
I have Messenger on my phone with no access to photos, my location nor my contacts. My next goal is to get rid of that junk and move my communication of Android people over to Telegram. Luckily a lot of my friends and family use iOS devices.