2024.05.11.

Read “Bookending | everything changes”

Mandy Brown on ending your day:

Here’s a small trick that worked for me over the dozen years I led remote teams: at the end of your working day, shut down every app on your machine. Yes, all of them. Stash your tabs somewhere if you must, but close them all down. The only exception that may be made is for a simple note-taking app—the kind that lacks any kind of notifications. Then, spend ten or perhaps fifteen minutes reflecting on your day, whether in said note-taking app or, even better, on paper. This needn’t be anything formal or structured, just jot a few things down—maybe short phrases, maybe just some key words. The only hard rule is to do your best to keep any sense of judgement out. Then, in the morning, when you open up your machine, there should be nothing yelling at you—no unread badges, no cluster of notifications calling for your attention.

This is the best shutdown routine you can do.

2024.02.22.

The new version of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin lets me reply to comments coming from Mastodon and federate them back as standard replies. I just wanted to install an instance this morning to have a profile that I can use to reply to incoming comments, but this one is way better.

Again, you can follow me on Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance.

2024.01.19.

It is more than funny (and sad) that Electron apps are so bloated now that they can’t even offer a proper universal binary. You have to pick the CPU family on download.

2023.12.12.

Follow-up on Apple and journaling:

I like the Journal app, even if it’s barebones as all 1.0 apps usually are. Since I mostly use default Apple apps, the recommendation feature works well for me.

It is a good base for more advanced features in the future (I guess we see nothing new until the next WWDC).

I’m going to keep Everlog around as an archive though.

2023.12.09.

2023.12.06.

2023.11.29.

Follow-up on Liked “MailMate”:

I just bought MailMate a couple of minutes ago. It turns out I love to use plain-text email for writing and reading. It’s just way easier to edit my emails in MacVim than to fuck around with the Mail.app compose window.

The Things integration is also pretty cool. I can get the complete plain-text email in the to-do note, which is way more excellent than the jumbled text-fest I had previously parsed by the Things mail service forwarded from Mail.

I’m still developing my workflow around the rule-based smart mailboxes, which are pretty powerful.

I’ll write more about this app in the future.

2023.11.23.

I’m just testing if I can ping another post from MarsEdit using Webmentions.

This is the not-so-poor men’s version of backlinks.

Update: looks like it worked!

Screenshot 2023 11 23 at 09 10 52

Liked “MailMate”

MailMate is an IMAP email client for macOS featuring extensive keyboard control, Markdown integrated email composition, advanced search conditions and drill-down search links[…]

Sometimes, I wonder if I should try to use MailMate instead of Mail.app (at least for some specific tasks). It’s an app made for nerds.

I think it’s even have MacVim integration, and still makes emails available in the filesystem instead of closing them away for Spotlight only.

Related

2023.11.20.

Should I publish longer articles as one big post, or break them up into 2-3 pieces?

2023.11.01.

I’m not sure what happened but I rarely listen to any podcast these days.

Sometimes I pick up an episode of something GTD or productivity-related when I’m doing chores around the house, but I stopped listening to the “6 hours-long episode of a couple of guys talking about Apple” style podcasts (except Mac Power Users).

2023.10.31.

The first Apple event I haven’t watched live in 16 years was today’s one because you know… we were sleeping in Europe.

2023.10.30.

I love Apple Shortcuts, but there is no other important Apple software on the Mac which is buggy as this one.

And don’t get me started on the constant sync conflicts.

2023.10.29.

My Micro.blog integration was broken since April. 😳

It’s a good thing that they have account logs. Otherwise, I wouldn’t figure out that my feed was too big.

I fixed the RSS feed, so new posts should be imported into my Micro.blog timeline. I also updated the sidebar to link to my Micro.blog/Mastodon profile.

I know it’s not Mastodon technically, but still easier to explain and understand than this:

You can follow me via Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance).

Maybe I should update the blog sidebar to link to my Micro.blog profile instead of explaining how to follow me on Mastodon.

Micro.blog would handle that too.

2023.10.13.

2023.10.12.

2023.10.03.

2023.09.07.

2023.07.06.

So people are running between Facebook and Twitter and vice-versa. And I’m just sitting here relaxed because I give away my last fuck about any social network.

I just want forums, blogs, and RSS.

2023.06.19.

2023.06.15.

2023.06.08.

Apollo is shutting down on June 30th.

It means that I officially end up using any social network.

I stopped using Twitter when Tweetbot was killed. I’ll do the same with Reddit too – which I liked better because the community was awesome, but I’m not going to visit a site that kills a superior app like Apollo.

All I need nowadays is a blog and an RSS reader and I’m good.