2024.04.11.

2024.04.07.

Read “What We Give Up”

Whatever regulation that required these kinds of policy-change notification emails greatly failed us. A notification is not enough. If a company changes their policies, individual user data should be made completely inaccessible to that company until that user explicitly agrees to the new policy.

Yes, this should be the default. However, companies would heavily exploit a rule like this, like they abused the cookie consent UIs on the web.

2024.04.01.

2024.03.26.

2024.03.18.

2024.03.16.

Read “Building a Stronger Web Without AI”

If we all build our own places, we can live the dream of the web, now. We can create the web that was always meant to be. By connecting our websites together by—spoiler alert—linking to the people who inspire us, we build a stronger web than a search engine can index, one that won’t be littered with content we can’t control.

Amen!

2024.03.05.

2024.02.28.

2024.02.22.

2024.02.20.

2024.01.13.

2024.01.06.

2024.01.05.

2024.01.01.

Bookmarked “Tofu · Amar Sagoo”

Tofu was designed to help you read text on your Mac.

Text is often very wide, making it hard for your eyes to jump from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. That’s why newspapers have narrow columns: it makes them faster to read. Another problem is that vertical scrolling can be disorienting, as lines of text all look pretty much the same and are hard to track as they move.

Fuck yeah, there is an update to Tofu!

2023.12.30.

2023.12.26.

2023.12.24.

Read “Jack Baty | I won’t be joining RSS Club”

Mostly, though, it’s that blogging itself has enough problems with adoption. I’m not sure it’s a great idea to be “hiding” blog posts. Good blogs are hard enough to find these days. Why limit your writing to only those people who’ve already discovered you?

These are exactly my thoughts about this RSS Club thing. I don’t want to make my readers search for hidden content on my site (there is hidden content on my site, but it won’t be accessible by RSS), I want them to find my stuff easily.

It is already annoying that social networks, like Twitter, hide otherwise free content behind a login page; bloggers shouldn’t force readers into subscribing to something (maybe this is why I wouldn’t say I like newsletters too).

If you enjoy hiding your content, that’s fine, but we have a sparse number of good blogs these days. I want good content to be more discoverable, not hidden behind login pages and RSS feeds.

2023.12.23.

2023.12.21.

2023.12.19.

New Hookmark scripts for Reminders

I updated my Reminders/Hookmark integration script recently to make it faster on Sonoma. I also made sure that I have a “New Item” part too, so I can create reminders directly from Hookmark.

The “Get Address” script uses the backing SQLite database to find the ID of the selected reminder by title.

There are some caveats to keep in mind:

  1. We have to replace the remindersDatabasePath property with the proper database path which is different for everyone.
  2. Reminders are matched by title, so if we have multiple reminders with the same title, the script may fail to link the proper one.

Here are the scripts updated for Sonoma:

Get Address

use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite (10.10) or later
use scripting additions

-- Replace this with your Reminders database path.
property remindersDatabasePath : "/Users/yourusername/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.reminders/Container_v1/Stores/Data-some-UUID.sqlite"

tell application "System Events"
    tell its application process "Reminders"
        tell its window "Reminders"
            tell its splitter group 1
                tell its UI element 3
                    tell its UI element 2
                        tell its UI element 1
                            set reminderOutline to first UI element whose selected of UI element 1 is true
                            set theReminderName to value of UI element 2 of UI element 1 of UI element 1 of reminderOutline
                        end tell
                    end tell
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

set theSQLCommand to "/usr/bin/sqlite3 \"" & remindersDatabasePath & "\" \"SELECT ZCKIDENTIFIER from ZREMCDREMINDER WHERE ZTITLE = '" & theReminderName & "'\""
set theReminderIdentifier to do shell script theSQLCommand
set theURL to "x-apple-reminderkit://REMCDReminder/" & theReminderIdentifier
return "[" & theReminderName & "](" & theURL & ")"

New Item (this one can be a bit slow unfortunately)

tell application "Reminders"
    set theName to "$title"
    set theBody to "$user_link"
    set theReminder to make new reminder with properties {name:theName, body:theBody}
    set theReminderURL to the id of theReminder
    set theReminderURL to do shell script "echo \"" & theReminderURL & "\"|sed 's/x-apple-reminder:\\/\\//x-apple-reminderkit:\\/\\/REMCDReminder\\//g'"
    activate
end tell

theReminderURL

I haven’t tested these on earlier systems.

2023.12.17.

2023.12.13.

Read “No Influence | skoo.bz”

Speaking of social media, that’s a very distracting place to post to. You see the feed before anything. It’s far too easy to get sucked into that feed before you remember why you came on there in the first place. At that point, I question what my purpose is being on there at all. You’re there to get attention. Bar none.

2023.12.09.