Great new video course on Things from Shawn Blanc over the Sweet Setup.

The outboard memory is like an external hard drive, a place to curate any useful information, quotes, facts or figures you might come across. You might be familiar with the term "commonplace book" which is, usually, a handwritten book where all these references and snippets would be placed.

I'm very into the idea of using my blog as a commonplace book. Maybe some of that stuff should be public though.

Roughly is a small Apple Watch complication that displays the time in human words—almost like FuzzyTime on the Mac. It works best with analog watch faces by hiding the numbers on the watch face.

On a similar note, many believe that blogging is making a return. Folks now seem to recognize the value of having your own little plot of land on the web and, although it’s still pretty complex to make your own website and control all that content, it’s worth it in the long run. No one can run ads against your thing. No one can mess with the styles. No one can censor or sunset your writing.

Not only that but when you finish making your website you will have gained superpowers: you now have an independent voice, a URL, and a home on the open web.

I'm optimistic about the state of blogs in 2018. I discovered a handful of new blogs thanks to Micro.blog and I don't want to leave them unread.

Crontab.guru is a great webapp to create (and learn) crontab schedules a bit easier.

Colin Walker writing about issues subscribing to RSS:

While RSS readers are making a bit of a comeback in certain quarters there's no doubt that, as Sameer puts it, "subscribing to feeds definitely has fallen out of parlance."

RSS is more than a decade old now, but explaining it to mere mortals still hasn’t really been solved. Podcasts apps are also using RSS technology in the background, but they usually have a directory of podcasts which gives you an easy way of subscribing in the app. This solves a lot of problems for average users.

Out in the open web, you have a feed URL and you need to know where to paste it. It's a big UX problem, but I'm not sure it is even solvable. We can build walled gardens or create a directory of blogs with a built-in RSS reader, but in theory, they still lock you into a service.

As a blog author, I still have to figure out the technical aspects of the IndieWeb and as a blog reader, you also have an obligation to find out how to follow blog over RSS. In this process, you can find a balance to lock yourself into a walled garden or choose something else which you can control, but give up some convince along the way.

Brent Simmons on why Micro.blog is different than App.net:

But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together. Those were great years — but then a few tragedies happened: Google Reader came out, and then, almost worse, it went away. Worse still was the rise of Twitter and Facebook, when we decided it would be okay to give up ownership and let just a couple companies own our communication.

Yes, it's pretty much sums up the last decade of the web. I want to get back the ownership of my content, that's why I'm posting from my blog nowadays and syndicate elsewhere. On the top of that, Micro.blog is a pretty great network with a lot of interesting people. As Jack Baty wrote:

I need to say it again… I love Micro.blog. It feels like something new and it’s pretty great. Sign up. Post stuff. Interact. Own your shit.

Robert Peake wrote about "daily to-do lists" on Next Action Associates:

To put a finer point on it: you are not a “good boy” or “good girl” for completing all the items on your short list any more than you are an unproductive person for not ticking off every item by the end of the day. It may well be that you focused on exactly the right things each moment of the day without striking through a single item on the sub-list. Simply having those short list options to hand can help you to validate that those choices you make which are not on the list are, indeed, correct – because you have consciously weighed them against that shortlist before acting.

This is a great mindset to have about the Today list functionality in Things. I like that Robert calls it a daily sublist which sounds way better than the "I have to do these today no matter what happens" list as people like to think about it usually.

I'm also in the habit of curating a weekend chores list from my main Home list into Things' Today view. I do this because my biggest problem with GTD at the moment is sometimes I forget to review my appropriate context lists on a daily basis or at the right moment.

Initial experiences with Snow Leopard weren’t as blissful as more recent commentary remembers. The troubled rollout of MobileMe, iCloud’s precursor, was still an open wound. Soon after release, a major bug was discovered in Snow Leopard that would cause the home directories of guest accounts to be wiped completely. The issue was prevalent enough that Apple publicly responded and later issued an update, 10.6.2, to address the problem.

Sure, Snow Leopard had it's problems too as almost all macOS up to this point. So I'm still not subscribed to this Apple software quality is in decline bullshit. Most of it just nostalgia, for example: I remember a lot of kernel panics on my old white MacBook back when it was running Tiger but I had not seen them since Lion.

Great episode of Hurry Slowly about why time management is a myth and why you should care about where you put your attention instead of focusing on time.

Casper Beyer on Electron:

I tend to call Electron applications web pages whenever I talk about them, which in turn tends to piss off a lot of web developers but really that’s all they are. There is nothing desktop like about Electron applications, they always feel out of place, even the simplest elements like the native menu bar is not available, it’s usually a custom alien looking thing if it’s even there. > Electron applications just don’t integrate with the operating system the way a native application is expected to do, is this not the reason that why we vowed to kill Flash and the Air Runtime in the first place?

This sums up exactly why Electron is the biggest piece of junk since Flash. Next time somebody ask me why I think about Electron this way as a "fellow" web developer, I'm going to direct his/her attention to this Medium post.

Unobstruct is one of the best content blockers for iOS. You can hide all kind of floating sharing bars and newsletters subscription pop ups which gives you a nice relaxing way to read a website. It's basically a pop up blocker fo the "modern" web.

You can also turn on Unobstruct in Safaris action sheet and hide floating crap manually. Great to remove annoying signup modals temporarily if you not registered on a particular social site with an f in its logo but stumbled into a link which goes there.