My name is Thord D. Hedengren, and this is my site, The Bored Horse. I’m a writer, publisher, and web developer. I’ve written a bunch of books, and I’ve been published all over the web.
2023.11.22.
Bookmarked “abhinavsarkar.net”
I am Abhinav Sarkar. I’m a software engineer currently living in Bangalore, India. When not making software, I read books, play drums, take photos and ride my bike.
While you’re here, you can read my blog posts, my notes, my microblog, learn about me and this website, or look at my projects, the books I’ve read, the photos I’ve taken, and the recent activities I’ve done.
Read “I love email”
You see, I love email. It’s gotten a bad rep, and numerous services and startups have both tried to replace it, and make it work differently. To me, email was never a bad thing, not since we moved over from POP3 to IMAP. Sure, there’s better and more secure technology out there, but the fact that my email account will work, and synchronise, with any device using standard protocols is great. Amazing, really. I don’t need a specific app for a specific service, not as long as I stick with the open standards (i.e., no Proton or Skiff). You can’t say that about Slack, possibly the worst solution to “the email problem” to date. There, you are stuck with the Slack app, which is basically the same as running the service in the web browser. And it whines at you in real-time, breaking your workflow.
2023.11.21.
Bookmarked “Use plaintext email”
There are two main types of emails on the internet: plaintext and HTML. Many people, particularly in technical communities, strongly prefer or even require the use of plain text email from participants. However, your mail client may not have it set up by default. We’ll help you get it configured, and introduce you to the norms and conventions of plain text email.
rknightuk/custom-finder-sidebar-icons: An Xcode project to add custom sidebar icons to folders on MacOS
It is way more complicated than needs to be to add custom sidebar icons to folders in Finder, but I still want to save this project.
2023.11.19.
2023.11.17.
The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard
I agree with this. We would be better off with a more “natural” update cycle on the Mac. It’s a slower-moving platform these days anyway:
Regardless of the motivation, the annual updates are more of a burden than a blessing to many Apple customers, including myself. I wish that Apple would drop the artificial schedule and let the major updates come more naturally. This isn’t just the attitude of a developer and so-called “power user”. Many “normal” users”, the proverbial moms, feel the same way. Actually, my literal mom told me she doesn’t like the ceaseless annual major updates either. She’s learned from hard experience that they’re not necessarily safe to install. Major updates can be very disruptive, creating new problems and wrecking old workflows. The press is always excited by major updates, because they give the press a lot to write about, but the public is not as sanguine. We occasionally need a break of 23 months, or more, from computing disruption. That would be another Snow Leopard.
Related to this: The Mac, The Myth, The Legend: How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability
2023.11.01.
2023.10.30.
2023.10.29.
Great choice of fonts. I would only add iA Writer Duo for writing, Source Code Pro for coding, and Verdana for reading.
2023.10.27.
Bookmarked “Hand gestures in macOS Sonoma – Mike Crittenden“.
The Handcrafted Artisanal Web – nadreck.me
I’m still a big believer in having expertise in something and sharing that with your peers.
The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.
But having enough money is what people forget to realize. You can get a nice online side business up and running relatively quickly if you have an interesting “product”. Making that a full-time job is yet another step, but you can still stay a niche without losing your soul.
My iPad Is My Computer Again – Jason Journals
The iPad is a big iPhone, which is actually a good thing:
Apple has taken iPhone simplicity, added Mac productivity, and balanced them together to create iPad modernity.
Never really thought about it this way before.
2023.10.19.
Avoiding Distractions in Modern Computing
Notes from Avoiding Distractions in Modern Computing:
Most of the upcoming generation will never experience “slow computing”.
Slow computing can be done in a “distraction” heavy environment like email. It all depends on how we set up our tools and what we let our computers do. I can still control a lot of aspects of macOS and iOS and I don’t feel them distractions, but simple tools.
It baffles me that people buy pricey phones and have no idea what these devices are capable of. All they do with them is browse TikTok and Instagram.
It is like a blank canvas with no outputs, just waiting for a command about what I would like to do next. At this point I might navigate to a blog directory and open a document with my text editor of choice: emacs. When done writing this post I will add it to git, my text versioning system. After this I do whatever I please with the text file. I might push it to my central blog repository where a static HTML file generates on a public area or I may pipe it to some other program. This is the Unix philosophy.
The terminal-based environment can feel like an island of peace. Not because apps are distracting but because it is a limited interface that is very easy to control.
Some people, like me, feel at home with a customized Unix prompt.
2023.09.07.
Read “File over app — Steph Ango“.
2023.08.09.
How I get shit done (or at least get started) while having executive dysfunction
I like these ideas, but especially gathering all information.
Let’s say I need to reply to an email. I start by reading the email I’m supposed to reply to. If there’s any more information I need to be able to answer that email, I go and get that information. I then dump all the information I have into an email draft for easy reference, and write my email from there.
I learned this behavior by keeping a Zettelkasten for writing. It is always easier to start with existing content rather than starting from scratch.
These days I even use journaling as a tool for getting started. If I have no idea what’s the next action on something, I begin to write about it in my notebook. Sooner than later, I figure out something by rambling about the problem in my journal.
2023.07.28.
Social Internet > Social Media
Tools I still like to use:
E-mail, text/MMS, RSS, a blog/personal website, podcasts, forums. What did I miss?
These fundamental tools are still around because they are the best tools where you are in control of what you are interested in and what you can discover.
2023.06.15.
We’ve Lost Our Damn Outrage Because ‘The Community’ Knows Where Their Money Comes From And Are Scared to Lose That Income — But My Fucking Money Comes from Readers, And I’m Pissed
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Brooks.
Related
2023.05.21.
Get A Notebook And Write Stuff Down
Greg Morris writing about notebooks:
You don’t need to start a second brain, or do some weird PKM stuff, you just need to have a place full of things that will help you out. Record things you find interesting, things you need to remember, things that might help you work later on, literally anything you might need later on. You don’t need to start a commonplace book or anything, you just require a notebook around, all the time.
I start to wonder if there is a more straightforward way to manage ideas other than keeping a full PKM or Zettelkasten.
2023.04.13.
Episode 169 – Zsolt Benke from Decoding.io – iPad Pros
I got a chance to talk about how I use my iPads on the latest episode of iPad Pros.
I hope you like it!
2023.04.08.
Twitter Has Stopped Working in NetNewsWire
Looks like Space Karen caught up with NetNewsWire too:
Twitter suspended NetNewsWire today because, according to Twitter, “This App has violated Twitter Rules and policies. As a result, it can no longer be accessed.”
I still have a couple of feeds in Reeder, which are working for now, but I don’t expect them to be around that long.
Honestly, I don’t care about Twitter (or social media in general) anymore. I can do everything I want with this blog regarding publishing my stuff on the web.
I still POSSE my blog posts to Twitter using Micro.blog because some people still follow me there. I may turn that off one day because very few people are coming to this blog from Twitter.
2023.04.06.
Fantastical adds broader Shortcuts support
Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.
Nice! I have a shortcut which syncs up calendar events with agenda items in Things. Now, I can automatically do the following in one shortcut:
- Get all my meetings for today from Fantastical.
- Create or find existing agenda items about them in Things.
- Link the Things agenda item and Fantastical event using Hookmark.
- Start a new session from Things when the meeting is due.
- I’ll write about how I manage deep sessions with Things one day.
2023.04.04.
2023.03.23.
My Notebook System – ratfactor
This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook.
I read the whole article and took a lot of notes which inspired me to think about how I can consolidate my capture (logging) habit a bit more into one place, but still keep multiple capture tools.
After finishing this essay, it feels like Dave accidentally invented GTD for himself in a different form based on a stream of captured ideas that are moved up in the chain to have projects and next actions.
The part at the end where he writes about weekly, monthly, and yearly recaps feels very GTD-esque.
I actually tracked my time in a notebook like this before. I had a timestamp of when I started and when I ended a session of work. I have a long history of working in sessions, as I used to do a lot of freelance work, which requires time tracking (a session means that I focus on one task for a more extended period of time). My only question is how Dave transcribes his notebook entries into his digital system? I did it by hand, and it was awful.
Anyway, this is an excellent write-up of a fantastic system that I’m going to use as inspiration.
2023.03.21.
Bookmarked “Easy CSV Editor Mobile“.
2023.03.19.
Notational Velocity and Twitter as Birdhouse for Mac
This is an old post about how we can select text in any app and send it to places:
Here’s an nice solution to something I’ve been wanting. I love Birdhouse for iPhone, which stores tweets until they’re ready for publication. There’s no Mac alternative, so I’ve been putting potential tweets into Notational Velocity, and then copy-and-pasting them into Twitter when ready.
Today, MacStories points out that Twitter for Mac adds a contextual menu item that lets you tweet nearly any text you’ve selected in Mac OS X. You see where this is going: I can call up Notational Velocity with a keystroke, right-click on a tweet and send it off via the contextual menu. Awesome!
Translating this into the blogging world: we can publish micro posts directly from The Archive – which is the modern version of Notational Velocity – (or any other Cocoa app) using MarsEdit’s new Micropost feature.
2023.03.18.
Really? Are we accepting this bullshit that a freaking chat app written is JavaScript is bigger than a full music production application?
2023.03.14.
How to Plan Anything by Email Alone — and why it’s Faster – Just Use Email
Interesting article about how we can use emails to collaborate on projects:
For something temporal, and for groups of eight people or less, I believe email is superior for planning. Pretty Trello boards may look like you’ve got your act together, but you still have to type it out, get others to agree, and not forget important details. Trello can’t help you think. Even though software like Trello is quite easy, that doesn’t mean its universally understood the way email is. The documentation for Trello still must be read and understood.
I’m one of those people who like to communicate over email because it’s quick, and you can organize your end in any way you want.
The problem with a planning approach like this is that some people can’t use email appropriately. They create new messages when they should reply; they forget to answer questions etc. It happens on other platforms too. Usually, they are terrible with planning in general. So people blame email for being old and unusable.
Nowadays, a lot of people are in love with Slack.
Let me tell you a secret: it is even worse for work-related communication and project management in any possible way because it is closed, everyone has to use the same horrible client, and people expect instant communication from it (and don’t get me started on people who want everyone to use the status field as team Twitter).
People who couldn’t manage their emails started to blame it, which made companies switch to Slack, where these people are still the bottlenecks in the process, but now everyone has to use the same crappy client.