Ben Brooks writing about the topic of “smartphone addiction”:

Too much is getting blamed on smartphones — that people are addicted to the phone. Which isn’t actually true. People are addicted to Social Networks/Media — yes. But the phones, no.

I couldn’t agree more. People do all kinds of bullshit, like grayscaling their screens, turning off all notifications and using dumbphones from 1977. These are cheap and stupid lifehacky ways to not being honest with yourself and getting away from the real question: what are you really addicted to?

As I wrote before:

Well, I don’t want to pop the productivity bubble of blocking stuff, but what helps is deleting your account from Facebook. The same applies to phone addiction: you have to remove those time-wasting apps from your devices and then be mindful of how you’re using your phone. Turning on an accessibility setting then complaining about colored app icons that make us addictive to stuff is just stupid. Addiction is a way bigger problem than that. You have to acknowledge that your phone is just a tool and it’s your responsibility what you’re using it for.

Mesmerizing Translucent Waves from 19th Century Paintings

What separates Aivazovsky’s seascape paintings from others is his ability to replicate both the intensity and motion as well as the translucency and texture. His energetic waves and calm ripples are equally effective.

That glow! I have no idea how you can create an effect like that on a simple painting.

This is just sad.

Really cool looking wallpapers for all Apple devices. It also has versions for displays with P3 color.

David from Raptitude:

If you time-traveled to the 1960s, or even the 1980s, and tried to describe smartphones to the people you met, they wouldn’t believe you.

It would simply seem too good to be true—an affordable, pocket-sized device that provides:

• instant telegrams or phone calls, from anywhere to anywhere, usually free
• maps of virtually every city or rural area, even showing current traffic conditions
• searchable encyclopedias
• up-to-the-minute news about anything in the world
• step-by-step instructions for doing virtually anything
• quick translations between dozens of languages
• endless articles, courses, movies and TV shows
• a camera that takes stills and video, and can transmit them to anyone instantly
• the means for anyone to create their own regular column or newsletter, or audio or video broadcasts
• the ability to adopt new functions at any time, usually for free

These are just a few basic smartphone functions, but to your new friends, they would all sound like life-changing superpowers. Their imaginations would run wild at how much easier such powers could make their lives.

They might assume that due to these devices alone, people of the 21st century will be achieving their most important goals at multiplied speed. It would be hard for them to believe that even one of those superpowers—the ability to find decent instructions for virtually any task, for example—wouldn’t make a person vastly more capable and fulfilled. Imagine what would they pay for those powers.

This is a very inspiring thought to guide my smartphone usage, but I don’t agree with the rest of the article. I’m reading stuff like this for years now, and we’re are always returning to the same solution: limit your smartphone usage which will solve your control problems. Also, it’s always the phone’s fault. You are the one who sets up stupid notifications and installs time-wasting apps, not the phone.

You can set up rules of what you’re going to install, but don’t blame the phone. It’s your fault if you can’t stop using social media or playing stupid games. Just remove them, don’t try to invent systems and blame it on the tool.

Also, I never understood people who just toss away their devices, then call themselves zen. You clearly have a problem of control. Throwing away a tool that can help you with so much is just ignoring a problem. It is true that a smartphone can feel like a superpower, but you know:

With great power comes great responsibility.

MacMenuBar.com:

Small apps to help you become more productive and maximize your workflow with MacOS.

A great collection of menubar apps, although I haven’t found anything here that I need or don’t have already.

This is the weirdest, nerdiest, most awesome, and most detailed setup post from Stephen Wolfram I’ve read in a while.

I can’t quote one thing that represents this article, but I like the idea of having a camera which hangs over my desk, so I can present papers and iOS devices used in real-time on a screen share.

Viticci collected his yearly app picks again. I found some really cool old and new gems there.

Cheri Baker:

I believe relationships take time. Conversations. Support. An investment in one another. And in that regard, getting off Facebook acted as a sorting mechanism. I found the answer to: Who will make time to hang out? For me that’s a small group, but a treasured one. And sure, it can feel lonely while you look for your people in the flesh-and-blood world. But it gets easier the more you invest in your relationships.

Text people. Set up a coffee date. Schedule a movie night, or a game day, or happy hour. Join a book club. Get your ass out there. I’ve gotten pretty introverted these last few years, so it takes effort, but in the end, it’s worth it.

I can relate to these ideas.

Apple published a great App Store feature about RSS readers—you’ll need iOS to read it but I stitched together a screenshot. They list apps for beginners and advanced users too.

So basically this is how I should sit.

The Alternative to Thinking All the Time:

Wine tasting is nothing but a particularly specific and well-developed way in which human beings have learned to notice their present-moment experience. We can “taste” any present moment in the same way, as long as we make a point of noticing what it’s like. We can’t do it by accident though. When we’re preoccupied by worry and idle thinking, we don’t even recognize that we’re having an experience.

I like this wine tasting metaphor of meditation and experiencing the world.

Also:

When people ask me why I meditate, I often say something about reducing stress and improving mood, because those are the simplest benefits to relate. It does those things, but it might not be clear how. You can think of meditation as time set aside just for tasting the present moment, just for seeing what’s actually being offered, putting aside other projects like planning or analyzing.

[…]

It’s the 21st century, and mindfulness has entered the pop culture mainstream. Even science, as slow and careful as it is, is continually giving us reasons to investigate it for ourselves, yet the most common reason given for not bothering with it is “I don’t have time.”

Meanwhile, we lose years to aimless, ephemeral thinking. The primary experience of the adult human being continues to be rumination, with real life happening in the background.

I have a Headspace subscription but I’m not meditating habitually at the moment. And yes, my reason for not doing it is because “I don’t have time”.

My main problem with meditation is that I can’t get over the feeling of perfection. When I meditate, I always start thinking about thinking, which is perfectly normal, but it makes me really frustrated sometimes.

Maybe I should write an email to Andy Puddicombe. He usually answers them and have something smart to say about things like that.

Creating iOS 12 Shortcuts with JavaScript and Shortcuts JS:

I created a library that allows you to create Shortcuts using JavaScript. You can find it on npm as @joshfarrant/shortcuts-js, and find the documentation on GitHub.

I have no idea what I would use this for, but it’s a pretty cool achievement.

Instead, we chose to apply an obsolete image compression technique called “dithering”. The number of colours in an image, combined with its file format and resolution, contributes to the size of an image. Thus, instead of using full-colour high-resolution images, we chose to convert all images to black and white, with four levels of grey in-between.

This is awesome. I really like the design and I just started to think, maybe I should build something similar for this blog.

Web Design Museum:

The museum exhibits over 900 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1995 and 2005.

I’ve spent like an hour just clicking around. So many great examples of interesting ideas, annoying stuff, dead technologies (yes, Flash), and just memories. The web seemed so innocent back then.

Go ahead, read the whole article, but first I have to highlight this trend which is especially interesting:

Whereas 66% of this demographic agreed with the statement “social media is important to me” in 2016, only 57% make this claim in 2018. As young people increasingly reject social media, older generations increasingly embrace it: among the 45-plus age bracket, the proportion who value social media has increased from 23% to 28% in the past year, according to Ampere’s data.

I’ve seen this happening in my immediate environment as well in the last couple of years. Older people are getting on Facebook more and more, while younger ones are getting off. What’s more interesting is that older ones are started to behave a bit different: they’re seemingly more gossipy, as they’re following their friends’ everyday life more closely. Also, it’s sad to see how quickly some of them got hooked on stupid crap like fake news, politics, hoaxes and joined these type of groups.

I assume there is whole new world opened for some of them, but it seems like they have no idea about the negative privacy and mental implications of using social media (yet).

Meanwhile, I know people from the other side as well, those who refuse to use it. But their primary reason for skipping it is not valuing privacy, but time wasted mindless scrolling on Facebook.

I really like what Serif does lately. I made the switch from Sketch to Designer after they released it for iPad and it quickly became one of my favorite tools (next to Blink). Now there is a completely new Mac app as well for desktop publishing.

It’s very comforting to know that there are great alternatives to the behemoths that Adobe ships.