- @maique Subscriptions
- @podique 2022: my subscriptions
- @gabz Subs game
- Fantastical runs as a widget so I can see the days events. I use Busycal on my Mac, like a barbarian. Don’t @ me.
- Tunnelbear is my VPN. I got a discount on a multi-year plan a while ago and so I’m sticking with it until it expires—and then, who knows. I’ll stay or switch depending on what the market looks like when that happens. But if you’re not using a VPN on public wifi, you should really start.
- Authy manages all my 2-factor identification with the exception of my university which uses Duo. Thus far, I have not found a way to get my university’s 2FA to run inside Authy. But I keep looking.
- Vox will play FLAC files on your iPhone. When reviewing my 2021 practices, I was disappointed that I didn’t listen to as much music as I used to. So I unsubscribed from all but three podcasts, moved Overcast to the app library and recommitted. I can talk audiophile gear all day, but suffice it to say, this is overkill for the casual listener.
- Glass is here because once I decided to delete Instagram, I wanted to commit to this before I decided if I want to keep it or not. I’m unsure if this will last for the year.
- Gluon is a wonderful Microblog client and I love it.
- Metatext runs Mastodon. Mastodon is weird, and I think I should quit it. But I’m sticking it out, for now, until I decide if it is worth it.
- Lichess is a free chess club. I’m not very good, but I still love to play. Chess is honestly the only digital gaming I do.
- Literal is another service that I’m unsure about. I like it’s layout better than Goodreads, but at times I wish it was more like Goodreads. Like Mastodon and Glass, I can’t form a bigger opinion until I give it more time.
- Disney+ – Nope. I don’t have a Netflix.
- Fastmail – I’m a convert. It’s great.
- Hover – best domain name service I’ve used.
- Wall Street Journal – free from my university
- New York Times – also free from my university
- Glass
- Flickr
- Literal
- Mastodon
- Twitter (but only if you’re a professional academic or into national security)
It look most of the weekend, but I finished Wolfram’s ~20,000 word article on ChatGPT. It’s technical, but not prohibitively so.
There’s only one big tech company that seemingly never played this hire-for-the-sake-of-hiring game, and thus hasn’t announced any layoffs at all, let alone a headcount that would fill a basketball arena. Just one. One company that has, at its best, always kept its cool in the face of economic swings both up and down.
“More than any other time, if you are not on Twitter, you just don’t know what is going on.”
🗞️ Professors and academics will stay on Twitter—for now
Mostly confirms my priors the network effects will keep most of academe on Twitter.
I’m uninstalling Emacs and moving my config files into archive. As powerful as it is, maintaining it isn’t worth my time and energy, especially when a good chunk of my workflow is on the iPad. It’s been a good run (~11 years), but it’s time to move on (at least for now).
A modest proposal: If university libraries are going to lean into eBooks over physical books, they should also make it easier for logging into whatever eBook reader app is necessary to read said books.
I have the seen the future and it’s a two-stage, 5/8 horsepower, noise dampened garbage disposal. 🤙🏽🏡
PSA for those keyboard shortcut users on Mac who suddenly are wondering why CMD+I opens mail.app, I found the workaround.
Wow, yeah. This is wild.
Yesterday a student admitted to not knowing the meaning of “ripping” a CD.
To be clear—not “Oh, yeah I heard of it, but never knew what it meant.” Rather, “Uhm, what is ripping and why would anyone ‘rip’ a CD?”
🗞 Your Attention Didn’t Collapse, It Was Stolen
Brutal. See also, Deep Work
Home screen & subscriptions in 2022
I meant to post this on the first, but then forgot. Thankfully, other microbloggers posted their iterations of this genre.
Here’s my iPhone setup.
I only have one home screen. Merlin Mann convinced me on a podcast years ago to keep at least on row empty. I think he was talking about committments, but he said something to the effect that if we’re always operating at 80 or 90 percent, we won’t have anything left when the opportunity of a lifetime arrives. When Apple made it possible to keep the bottom row empty, I did it immediately. I suppose you could call it minimalism, but I learned the lesson elsewhere, from stoicism. (That’s what I get for double majoring in Ancient Greek and Latin. )
In the dock is Drafts, YNAB, Omifocus, and Scanner Pro, These are the critical and crucial for my day-to-day. Nearly everything I write starts in Drafts. I send links there from Twitter or the web and tag them with what I want to do with them (email, Omnifocus, Microblog); I, er, draft, emails, manuscripts, and reading notes before processing them periodically through the week. YNAB is a budget and expense tracker that my wife and I use; while I’m aware of the kerfluffle over the price increase, I’m not bothered by it because there’s nothing else comparable right now. I’ve been an Omnifocus user for a very long time; you couldn’t pay me to leave them. I’m sure I could find a better app than Scanner Pro, but it’s very useful when I work on a white board while teaching or in my office and need a PDF of it before I erase. I occasionally scan other documents, but most of the tme it’s just this uni-purpose and good enough that I want fast access.
My iPad home screen is a hot mess.
A lot of similar items like Drats and Omnifocus. I have two text editors worth noting, Editorial and iA Writer. Both are good when I need something different than Drafts. iA is great for prose and has more or less replaced Editorial. YMMV. I need to consolidate the various files from both and make space for a dedicated code editor like Textastic so that I can work on R scripts when I’m away from my laptop but still want to get some writing done.
Here, it’s all in the dock and the widgets are helpful. But note that I have two calendar widgets. It’s just an experiment to see which format makes the most sense for my uses. I expect my iPad setup to look a lot different at the end of the year.
What else am I subscribed to?
Resolved, 2022
TL;DR: My changes, and updates for (mostly) personal social media use
I’m very much looking forward to making Microblog my digital center of gravity in the new year. I came back to it in the spring after trying, then quitting it, back in 2018. I relied on it, a lot this year. I expect to be more active in 2022. But, I’ll still be around in other places.
I don’t “do” resolutions, but this year almost made me
I haven’t done a new year’s resolution in over a decade. I forget where I learned it, or heard it first, but I concluded that if you want to resolve to do something, then resolve today. Waiting until the new year is—or, at least, can be—a form of procrastination. It wasn’t Seth Godin, but he once wrote something similar, namely that the most important blog post is the one you write, today.
Moreover, resolutions usually fail, or at least they did for me, because they often aren’t clearly defined SMART Goals. “Lose weight,” or “read more” don’t work because they lack a measurable objective as in “lost x-number of pounds by summer by working out at least three days per week and cutting out fast food runs.” None of this is particularly surprising or revolutionary to anyone who’s read books on contemporary goal setting.
But a new year is a time to reflect, to take an inventory of one’s time and attention. It is a natural break, and it is natural that we all are reflecting on our lives in a semi-collective way. As much as I am loath to read yet another year-in-review post, I am also eager to see what changes and lessons others have learned over the last year.
This year seems to me to be especially reflective as the end of the pandemic seems to be within eyesight. All reasonable estimations that I’ve read think that after this current omicron wave subsides, we should be more or less done with it. (To be fair, they said that before the Delta variant. Hope spring eternal.) If those estimates hold, the pandemic as a social phenomenon will have lasted 2 years (give or take when the first wave hit one’s region of the world). I’ve noticed a palpable sense among almost everyone that January will be a sort-of collective psychological ending to this whole thing.
Sure, we’ll still have to take reasonable pre-caution, and governments may still yet impose various restrictions which may or may be be sound policy; and yes, thousands of people are still going to die from the virus. But even with those caveats, many folks—liberal, conservative, pro-vaccine or anti, religious or secular—seem ready to use the New Year as a mental demarcation point. I welcome that.
Reflections on the year
I got sidetracked from a lot of professional and personal projects. Although I managed to get my first peer-reviewed publication during the pandemic, my book manuscript lingered, and my leisure reading and music listening more or less collapsed to name a few. I ceased being more deliberate about my media consumption and, as a result, I was spending more time aimlessly when I already knew that these apps are designed to do precisely that.
But although I was aware of the friction, I think it provided a way to feel connected even though I was becoming less connected. And besides, I was connecting with old friends who I had lost touch with during my doctorate and early years of marriage. So, I ignored the friction to an extent.
But the friction, man. It took some time to identify what has been bothering me about social media. Much of the social media landscape has changed, often (not always) for the worse. Twitter is an example. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think it’s anything the company is doing. Rather, the social landscape has shifted. When I signed up for Twitter in late-2008, it was because a good friend messaged me that there was a taco truck in LA using Twitter to broadcast its location throughout the day. I demurred the thought of microblogging until then. All the way from Philadelphia, they were the first account I followed.
Now, Twitter is mostly a public forum for elites to yell at other elites. (Indeed, the collective yelling distorts reality and doesn’t represent real life.) You’re expected to be “on brand.” That’s fine, but it wasn’t why I originally signed up. I considered quitting it, but I accept that there’s some utility to be had, provided that it is a different value proposition than 13 years ago.
Intentionality
So what am I doing if I’m not making resolutions? Well, I decided to be more deliberate about my digital habits. I synced my Twitter with Microblog, I’m experimenting with Mastodon, and dramatically cutting down on consumption. I’ll still be on Twitter, but mainly to interact with colleagues and friends I’ve made there.
I am, joyfully, deleting Instagram. Long story short, my wife convinced me because I like taking photos but I wasn’t sharing them outside of niche sites like Flickr. (Niche in the sense that outside of dedicated photography circles, few know about it, even now.) But where IG was a great place for photography, the center of gravity of sharing photos is elsewhere. I spent the better part of the other day getting my archive to import to Microblog (thanks, @manton).
Eg., I recently unsubscribed from well over a dozen podcasts, maybe two dozen. Now I have three, tried and true. Between work and the kids (really, just the kids), my disposal free-time isn’t what it used to be. I love that—but I had another friction point in my life (namely feeling guilty about missing this episode or that interview, ignoring the episode for weeks while I do other things, and eventually bulk delete the backlog).
And don’t get me started on email. It took all of December and most of November. But my daily inbox of email is in the single digits. That’s a huge start.