2018.02.02.

2018.02.01.

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.

Yeah, I get that. Maybe you should start quoting the best ideas from the Facebook group on your blog in series of weekly posts or something. That would be interesting too.

I like to talk about iPad workflows, too bad it's a Facebook group. I'm not going to sign up just for this. ?

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.

Problems with over-tracking stuff

I’ve turned off the battery percentage on iOS about 4 months ago. This one in Settings/Battery:

It removed a lot of anxiety that I had about battery life. I’m starting to think that there is stuff which is nice to track when we have problems, but not every time. Let's see a couple of those.

Battery

Future iPhones will get longer battery life I’m sure, but as it seems the current longevity of batteries is being more dependent of the physical size of the device and software optimizations, than a great advancement in battery technology. I have an iPad Pro which already has great battery life, stressing about it is unnecessary. Case closed there, but what about my iPhone?

My iPhone 6s had terrible battery life, that's why I've bought an iPhone 8 Plus last November. Plus-sized iPhones usually have way better battery life than their smaller counterparts. I'm easily getting through the day with my iPhone 8 Plus. Seeing how much energy left on my phone is just an information which I don't really need to know at each moment. My phone sends me notifications when it's has 20% battery left, but it's still 1 or 2 hours of usage. I can safely reach my charger until then, I'm sure.

The only thing I'm still waiting for Apple to do regarding batteries is to ship the AirPower matt for wireless charging.

Sleep

I have a bigger level of health anxiety than normal people, so I have to be mindful of what I’m tracking and what’s that information means. Health data can be helpful, but I had problems misreading it before—the same usually happens with symptoms of some sickness.

It actually happened a couple of weeks ago tracking my sleep. I haven’t slept that well and I was seeing a declining trend in the length of my deep sleep hours. As always, it raised the anxiety level in me, and I started thinking about it which continued for a couple of days. Then in my morning meditation, it occurred to me, maybe seeing how many hours I’ve spent in deep sleep—which presented in the sleep tracking app as some kind of competitive metric—causing the anxiety. I uninstalled the app then forgot about it. My sleep routine starts to get better. I’m not sure why, but at least the anxiety has disappeared.

Money

If you have money issues, tracking something for a month or two can give you an incredible insight into your spending habits. You can use this data to optimize and plan your budget accordingly.

On the other hand, if you start stressing about every penny you've spent then you just micromanaging your money which gains you nothing. Some people easily get over the fence and can be extremely frugal, especially when they have data that they can rely on. They are ones who always stressed about a couple of bucks spent on something. Collecting coupons is the next level of advancements in frugality.

I learned in the last couple of years trying out multiple budgeting apps, that money management is like managing your attention: finding something which leaks in a big way, fixing it then moving on. Trying to fix every small hole doesn’t do any good.

As you can see, there is clearly a pattern emerging here which is not a problem with tracking itself, but understanding its data and internalizing it. I tend to be overanalyzing stuff and today's technology makes it more and more easy to collect data. I have to be mindful and find the sweet spot: collect when needed, don't read subjective things into emerging patterns, finally, make a conclusion then take the next step.

The Mac, The Myth, The Legend: How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability

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.

2018.01.31.

There are new apps starting to pop up in the App Store which are truly nerdy, like OpenTerm and iVim. They’re still feel like a mobile demo of their desktop counterparts, but it’s nice to see something like that on iOS finally. I’m not sure where this’ll lead but I would be really grateful if I could replace my remote server setup running in Blink with something that I can use locally for web development someday.

Check out what OpenTerm can do.

Having said that, I still love using Blink, you should checkout the app, it’s open source on GitHub. Also, the new beta version is very stable, and fixes a lot of annoying UI bugs I had with the app.

@manton Interesting to see this No More Posts button in Micro.blog. Is it there to stop mindlessly scrolling the timeline? ?

After years of posting stuff to this site alone, today I’ve turned comments back on. It feels like the old days of blogging again when there was always a great discussion after almost each blogpost.

Nowadays those discussions moved over to social networks, swept away in threads which are siloed into closed websites. I want them to get back here, right below my content. So from now on, every reply or like or retweet of a tweet of mine that contains a URL to my blog should also show up here, like this.

Also, I support webmentions, and let’s not forget about those plain old WordPress replies. I hope these updates will get the discussion back where it should belong, right below after each post.

2018.01.30.

I've migrated my site from Jekyll back to WordPress (it was fairly easy actually). I was missing all the great integrations of WordPress after using Jekyll for a couple of weeks. Now I can easily write again without pushing stuff to git repos.

Inserting timestamps

One thing I miss from TextExpander is the ability to insert timestamps into any text input on my Mac. There are apps with this feature built-in (like OmniFocus and OmniOutliner), but I want a global keyboard shortcut which insert todays date into any app. Luckily we have Automator services in macOS which can easily replicate this functionality.

I've created a simple Automator service called "Insert Date". You can download and install it via Automator. It uses the built in date command with a custom format. The service gets installed into ~/Library/Services and you can open it from this folder and change the date format into whatever you need. Here some examples how to do that.

One last thing: you can assign a custom keyboard shortcut to this service in System Preferences/Keyboard/Shortcuts (may require logout and login to work). Mine is ⌃⌥⌘D.

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.

2018.01.28.

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.

Okay, let's head over to Medium and read about what 10 things I did wrong today. Then check out what doing things wrong means for UX design.

2018.01.26.

I’ve just deleted Viber from my phone. It annoys me with stupid notifications about stickers and I can’t turn it off. I could turn off Viber notifications completely, but that’s not that useful for a messaging app. I wanted to use it as a Facebook Messenger replacement, but it’s worse.

Mindfulness does indeed slows down the current moment:

One antidote might be mindfulness, the researchers suggest. People who try to live “in the moment” may better appreciate the uniqueness of those moments once they have passed, making it less likely that they’ll be swallowed up into a “chunk”. Meditation and engaging with art may perhaps also help, they write, since “these experiences have the potential to re-sensitise us to the satisfaction of simple things and, perhaps, counteract life’s quickening pace”.

2018.01.25.

Rands in Repose on writing:

Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you.

This is exactly what I should do more. I often have random ideas but never get them into Ulysses because they are just thoughts. Maybe I should keep way more drafts and see where they lead me.

(Instead of Agenda Ulysses can be used for journaling as well. Maybe I should keep everything in one app.)

Integrating Agenda into my workflow

I'm still thinking about what's the best way to use Agenda. I'm not going to talk about its features, MacStories has a great overview of that. At first, it looks like another notetaking app, but having the ability to assign dates to notes is making me consider to use Agenda instead of Day One for journaling.

The main pitfall for me with Day One is still its own sync backend. They switched over to it more than a year ago now, but I'm still not comfortable using that for personal journals and photos. I've used iCloud sync with Day One which always worked fine for me. iCloud servers are maintained by Apple whom I trust more from a privacy point of view than a small 3rd-party developer. Agenda uses iCloud for syncing which is a big win for me.

My other problem with Day One is that it feels like an app that made for writing a personal diary instead of a journal (yes, there's a difference). I'm not really into writing diaries, although I have 1100 entries in Day One at the moment. Agenda, on the other hand, feels like a digital version of bullet journaling. There is no separate view for each note, everything is in a scrollable timeline. Notes can be edited inline which makes the whole journaling process quick. I really enjoy this aspect of the app.

Agenda still misses its iOS counterpart and the ability to add attachments to a note—each of these features are coming according to the developers—but I've started using it for the following:

  • I'm developing my first iOS app and I've started documenting the whole process in Agenda. At the end of each day, I go through my git commits and make one or two notes about changes and ideas I have for the app down the road. I'm also collecting a list of things to talk about with the client. This is where Agenda's ability to attach notes to calendar events comes in handy for meeting preparations.
  • My commonplace book was also migrated from Day One to Agenda. When I'm marking a paragraph in a note with the #reference hashtag, it's gets added to my "Commonplace Book" saved search. It's nice to see quotes, links and all kind of small wisdom in one list.
  • I'm having bowel problems again lately, so I've created a project to heal and started tracking my food intake there. Throughout the day I keep Agenda open with it's Today view next to Things. This way I can easily see my daily food log here and append new things to it.

What I'm still struggling with is the missing iOS version of Agenda. I can collect stuff into my Inbox with Things then transfer it into Agenda on my iMac, but having access to my journals, especially from Calendar on meetings will be very useful when the iOS version arrives.

2018.01.22.

Agenda is a very interesting app, but there is no iOS version yet. It would be a great alternative for a commonplace notebook and a work journal instead of Day One which starts to be a bit overwhelming for me. And I still don’t like that they switched to a custom sync backend.

I didn’t know about this:

Added in iOS 10, Emergency Bypass is a way to ensure that you will always be alerted by a certain contact’s phone calls and/or texts, even if the phone is in Do Not Disturb mode and even if the mute switch is engaged. But this feature is a little bit hidden, so here’s how to turn it on.

You can also exclude certain groups of people from ignoring by setting "Allow Calls From" under Do Not Disturb preferences. It does silence messages though…

Don't want your Mac to go to sleep? You can type caffeinate -t 3600 into Terminal to keep it awake for an hour or 7200 for 2 hours etc.

I’m giving Twitter another shot. I’ve scrolled through my timeline and unfollowed a bunch of accounts that doesn’t interests me anymore. I miss discovering small things that doesn’t reach me via RSS, like new iOS app betas, interesting links etc. But I’m also trying to be more aware when I’m using the service. Here are my rules:

  • Posts, links and statuses will be still posted to Decoding then cross posted to Twitter via Micro.blog. I don’t want to change that since I like to own my content and I can also write longer stuff here than 280 characters. Also there are people who follow this blog via RSS.
  • I’ll reply and interact with people on Twitter as I did before — I don’t care that much about where threads and comments are made anyway.
  • I’m keeping Tweetbot on my iPhone and my iPad, but I’ll avoid using the official Twitter app. I don’t care about polls and ads, the timeline usability of that app is a piece of crap anyway.

So, I hope these rules will make Twitter fun again.

2018.01.18.

Design+Code is really awesome resource with an equally excellent iOS app for anyone who interested in iOS development and design.

2018.01.17.

Fears of the IndieWeb:

Some of my favorite memories of writing online were during the early days of Blogger, prior to the Google acquisition. Personal journals were still a fairly new idea, with fairly few people publishing them. We were a community of people and of writers and we had a connection to each other and a desire to share, help, and enjoy unique content online. This feels like that.

Sometimes the IndieWeb movement feels like that couple of guys starting to learn WorsPress again.