An Independent Web that is More Social than ‘Social Media’:
For the Rileys in my world who make the leap, one of the most important things I can do is interact and engage with them in their newly established spaces. This is about human to human engagement, not just typing ‘like’ in every comment box. Annotate, dialogue, amplify, and interact.
Amen.
This emoji does not show in the title bar of Safari, presumably to prevent less-reputable sites pretending to be secure (encrypted using HTTPS) when they are not.
This is a truly awesome resource and collection of history from Stephen Hackett. He went through all macOS (or Mac OS X, or OS X) releases and made a library of screenshots about the system.
These images came from the OS, running on actual hardware; I didn’t use virtual machines at any point. I ran up to 10.2 on an original Power Mac G4, while a Mirror Drive Doors G4 took care of 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5. I used a 2010 Mac mini for Snow Leopard and Lion, then a couple different 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros to round out the rest.
Check it out if you interested in Macs and UI design in general.
Of course, the natural extension of this new notebook was to start sharing some extracts online, specifically on micro.blog. It reminded me of the charm of early blogging. When it wasn’t so serious, when you didn’t need a specific goal or career from it and mistakes were useful and a sign of growth. You didn’t (and don’t) have to present yourself as an expert in something you just started out in.
Thomas Fuchs deleted his Twitter account after the latest API deprecation:
I’ve deleted my account. I will miss the friends I made, but I will not miss the abuse. There’s a line that was crossed recently with Alex Jones and with removing support for various API functions, a move designed to deliberately target power-users and early adopters who prefer 3rd-party clients over the Twitter apps and their force-fed crap.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Social media can be fun. With friendly people, and with no engagement pressure, and no algorithms force-feeding you content designed to make you feel bad.
Well, I’ll try this first instead of messing around with Mastodon.
Stephen Hackett talking about notebooks.
I’m a bit Field Notes junkie too and I use them as a capture tool. I like to read and watch stuff about other people workflows, so it’s always refreshing to see how somebody else uses something that I use as well.
When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.
It’s weird, but I’ve just subscribed for Headspace to have a way to practice the routine of sitting in silence.
I'm still thinking about which apartment should I stay in or stop wasting my time and move away completely. I started making my own cabin in the woods which I use at the weekends. Too bad that I like some of my current neighbors.
I agree with this so much. You should read the whole thing, if you have a website or you’re building websites, especially if you're using that bullshit Google AMP.
Most email systems do not signal to others that you are online, and such signaling is not part of the email protocols themselves.
We usually say a lot of bad things about email but it's a rare case of a technology which is independent, interoperable and if you use it right, can be non-distracting.
I really miss the old days of communication, it was such a simple system: when I was online (on whatever chat service) you could ping me, otherwise, you were able to send me an email. Nowadays we just install multiple messaging apps, each of them is constantly online. We receive multiple notifications and we try to fight the distraction with hacks like Do Not Disturb and AI that tunes our notifications.
Sometimes it works, but we should also train some basic expectations on response time to our peers: send me an email, or if it's urgent, message me, but never expect an instant response.
I've never really stopped using RSS. My blog still has an RSS button in the header, I still read blogs using RSS, and if you've subscribed to any podcast then you're using RSS too. It's still a fundamentally important technology albeit some "social" companies want to see it going away.
Maybe Apple should bring RSS back in Safari like Tiger had.
I assume BBC had this amazing footage laying around after editing Planet Earth 2 (which I’ll rewatch in 4K soon), so instead of putting it away on a hard drive somewhere, they’ve released it as 10-hour long looped videos. These are way better than any noise-making app for focusing when I code or relax. I even tried connecting a second display to my iMac just to see the video part too in fullscreen while I work, but that was too distracting.
My blog got included in the sources of hashtagopenweb which is a cool site from Michael Rockwell collecting all kind of one-man blogs related to Apple and technology. I also found a couple of new blogs which I subscribed with RSS.
Om describing Skype perfectly:
a turd of the highest quality
I'm using Skype for podcasting but I'm in the hurry finding a good alternative for it. Since they dumped a fairly good Mac app with a stupid Electron crap, I just want to avoid it.
And don't get me started on the iOS version…
Flitter is a really nice upcoming Twitter client for iPhone with some cool UI ideas.
A couple of years ago, iOS Twitter clients were UI playgrounds, but then Twitter started messing with developers and nobody wants to create new apps anymore. It is awesome to see there are still new clients are being made.
You can preorder it on the App Store.
There is a hidden directory inside of macOS that contains the app icons for built-in services like iCloud Drive. You probably wouldn’t know they are there because you’ll have to enter a specific file path in order to access them. Here’s how to put the iCloud Drive Icon on your dock for easy access to Apple’s cloud storage.
This setup will cause you to be less responsive on chats and email, but that’s sort of the point. Your phone shouldn’t dictate to you what you focus your attention on, and the behavior it cultivates in keeping you “always ready” is unhealthy and spills over into parts of our lives that aren’t serving us well.
Although I don't agree with everything, this the sanest article that gives you tips about phone addiction, without going into extremes. I'm already doing a lot of these tips, I just need to revise my notification settings.
Cal Newport writes about owning your content on the social web:
Buy a domain. Setup a web hosting account […]. Install WordPress or hand-code a website for this account. Let people follow you directly by checking your site, or subscribing to an RSS feed or email newsletter.
It was like that couple of years ago, then social media made really really easy for everyone to tell their story. The problem is that your story is now tied to some company that controls basically everything outside a textarea which you use to tell your story. That's way more limiting than having your own website or blog which you control as a whole. Sure, it takes a bit more work to set up a website and you may have to hire a professional to help you, but it's way more satisfying at the end than creating a Twitter account or a Facebook page.
One more thought for Twitter users: if you want to tell something which needs a thread of multiple tweets then write a blog post instead. That's how we used to do it.
Wired has a nice collection of repeated apologies from Mark Zuckerberg over the last decade.
Last month, Facebook once again garnered widespread attention with a privacy related backlash when it became widely known that, between 2008 and 2015, it had allowed hundreds, maybe thousands, of apps to scrape voluminous data from Facebook users—not just from the users who had downloaded the apps, but detailed information from all their friends as well.
I’m getting tired of all Facebook’s crap so I have to get rid of it completely. I’m sure there is a shadow profile of me on Facebook servers even I deleted my account about a year ago.
I have Messenger on my phone with no access to photos, my location nor my contacts. My next goal is to get rid of that junk and move my communication of Android people over to Telegram. Luckily a lot of my friends and family use iOS devices.
Maybe I’m a bit masochist but I’ve always found SQL a really useful skill to have for filtering and aggregating a lot of data. I found this site which can help me master this a bit more with PostgreSQL, although the logic can be reused in any SQL based database backend.
And that’s how I discovered that meditation is an incredible design and problem solving tool. Instead of wasting hours browsing the internet looking for a solution or an idea, I sit in my room, close my eyes and simply think about the problem. It’s an incredibly useful exercise and more often than not, I come up with solutions faster that I’d do by browsing randomly the internet.
It sounds like the "walking meditation" practice that Cal Newport mentions in Deep Work. When you want solve a problem, get away from your computer and go for walk focusing on the problem. You'll get a solution almost every time.
Sometimes it can be boring to read about other people productivity systems, but this one really interesting. If you can’t find a GTD app that satisfies your needs, maybe you should try a plain old spreadsheet.
David Sparks writing about scheduling his workdays:
I treat the blocks of time more like versatile soup ingredients than a rigid jigsaw puzzle, so I am happy to move them around as I'm planning the next day.
I like this analogy of the calendar working like a puzzle where I can put and arrange pieces of my time as blocks. The problem is making a daily plan then scheduling my whole day simply doesn't work for me. This system feels too restrictive, and believe me, I tried it. It was creating unwanted stress and admin work because I got into the flow, ignored notifications then rescheduled stuff constantly.
I like the idea though. Also, currently I have a longstanding problem reviewing my right task lists at the right moment. Using my calendar, I'll try to schedule blocks of work categories, like @Home or @Admin which are representing context lists in my GTD system. I hope it will start to form at least a list review habit for me, so I can start to trust more in my system.
The secret for this—as with many things—is trying to not overdo it.
Simple tool from the MindNode guys to automate App Store screenshot creation.
Things 3.4 just has released with an awesome update to its URL scheme. I've already wrote about how can it be used, also there are more examples on MacStories and The Sweet Setup.
Twitter is killing its own Mac client. It was a big piece of crap anyway, but this attitude pisses me off.
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.
