- @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
Thirty Months with a 12-inch PowerBook G4 – Shawn Blanc
I loved my 12-inch PowerBook. It was the first Mac I bought, in 2006 thereabouts (after being converted in the school library for years. I think my cousin was using it, with Linux, to do music as church as recently as 2015. 🧑🏽💻
Why we should be bullish on X, @Culture_Crit (on Twitter/X).
TLDR; the ‘24 election will make X the de facto platform for public discourse, ads will return, etc.
Not entirely wrong. Even if most of his predictions don’t pan out.
(See also, the replies to @gruber re Mastodon & Threads.)
The robustness of Twitter - Marginal REVOLUTION
“So you all should be long Twitter. And those who have left are missed far less than they might have wished.”
Tyler Cowen is not wrong.
Filmic’s Entire Staff Laid Off by Parent Company Bending Spoons | PetaPixel
Deleted the app. Anyone with alternative ones, please recommend.
NYT. Microsoft Hires Sam Altman
In case you missed it, Sam Altman Doesn’t Want to be your AI King… but he might be anyway, The New Atlantis (July 2023)
My university IT department did not freeze computers from upgrading to Sonoma. It’s a Christmas miracle.
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?