Blog

  • Apple Arcade recommendations?

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  • Using Spotlight and Shortcuts to create daily notes in Simplenote

    While trialing Obsidian I became fond of a core plugin it had called Daily notes. Activating the plugin adds a button in the interface that creates a new note with a name based on today’s date. It makes keeping a daily log extremely easy. Since I primarily use Simplenote I wanted the same thing on […]

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  • Attending Venture Idol 2020 via Zoom

    Last night I virtually attended Ben Franklin Technology Partner’s Venture Idol 2020 via a Zoom Webinar. That’s a sentence that I hope I only write in 2020 and not too far beyond. I’ve written about attending previous Venture Idol’s at Ben Franklin TechVentures, the building in which a previous employer of mine was in for […]

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  • It is nice that you can subscribe to Exposure’s Publications via RSS. I’m now subscribed to their Adventure pub.

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  • It is this time of year that I become more aware of, and have more ire for, Earth’s tilt. But hey, at least we don’t have to deal with Neptune’s crazy 97º tilt. Imagine that!

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  • A new theme for my site

    Update December 10, 2020: I tried. And I’ve now reverted. For the last several years I’ve been using a customized version of the Davis theme by Anders Norén. I started using the theme right out of the box and slowly customized it to my needs as I had time to do so. And for that […]

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  • Unmark chosen for GitHub’s Archive Program

    Unmark, the open source bookmarking app that you can use for free on our hosted service or grab your own copy on GitHub, was selected to be included in GitHub’s Archive Program. GitHub describes this program’s purpose “The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve open source software for future generations.” This happened […]

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  • Delay updating to Big Sur

    macOS Big Sur will be released to the public tomorrow. As I did with iOS 14 this year, I’ll be waiting for at least two releases before I update. Josh Centers for TidBITS: We recommend delaying upgrades for your production Macs. We’ve heard similar stories from many beta testers and TidBITS readers: Big Sur is […]

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  • Jack Baty on being burnt out of film photography

    Jack Baty: The trouble, I’m finding, is that I don’t really like the results I’m getting. I’ve shot maybe 20 rolls of film this year and a couple dozen large format negatives. Not a ton, but I’ve gone through them and there are only a handful that I really like, and most of those I […]

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  • Learning SwiftUI is tough because it is still early days

    Back in early October I quipped that I was opening Xcode to start a new project. I have no qualms in telling you that the project was going to be a Mac app for Unmark. I was going to build the app for a variety of reasons but the main one was to learn SwiftUI. […]

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  • We need to do more about light pollution

    Paul M. Sutter for Universe Today: For years we’ve assumed that streetlights are the main culprit behind light pollution, but a recent study has shown that streetlights contribute no more than 20% of all the pollution, and if we want to solve this vexing astronomical problem, we have to think harder. Tuscon, Arizona did a […]

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  • But she’s a girl on Obsidian

    But she’s a girl…: I wanted something that operated on plain-text files kept in a local folder, and that also had a graph view: that was the feature in org-roam that really made the difference between me just writing notes and seeing how they fitted together and building ideas out of them. Obsidian has both of […]

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  • Worst iOS feature by far; you open an app and you’re no longer where you left off. 13 years in this should be fixed.

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  • Om Malik: Why bother with film?

    Om: One aspect of film that I have personally found appealing is the restrictions it imposes. Film photography is about constraints. It limits the frames at your disposal. It limits the capability of the sensor (aka the film.) And in most cases, it limits the choice of lens and equipment. Such constraints tend to ultimately […]

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  • What I’m looking for in a note taking app: works exactly like Simplenote, except it saves Markdown files to disk. Does this really not exist?

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  • I have an overwhelming number of personal technology tasks that I’d like to tackle that I’m not motivated to do any of them.

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  • Chris Coleman on The Mandalorian Season 2

    Chris Coleman, my longtime Star Wars sensei: I have some quick thoughts on The Mandalorian Season 2 that I need to get out of my brain before Chapter 9 is released in a few hours. Caution: There may be spoilers ahead. I’ve already watched Chapter 9 twice. The number of throwbacks to og Star Wars […]

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  • My iPhone updated itself to 14.1 last night on its own. I have never had automatic updates on. That is very weird.

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  • Annihilation – Scranton, July 2020

    Shot on 35mm Kodak Color 400 with Olympus Stylus Annihilation – Scranton, July 2020 This ivy is going to find its way in.

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  • Andy Baio interviews the owner of the house on Blue Lick Road

    Andy Baio: But a larger question remained: what’s the deal with this place? Whoever owned it, they were too organized to be hoarders. The home appeared to double as the office and warehouse for an internet reseller business, but who sells a house crammed floor-to-ceiling with retail goods? With all of the mud slinging and doom scrolling […]

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  • Sketch on native Mac apps

    Sketch: Native apps bring so many benefits — from personalization and performance to familiarity and flexibility. And while we’re always working hard to make Cloud an amazing space to collaborate, we still believe the Mac is the perfect place to let your ideas and imagination flourish. Lovely little blog post. Couldn’t agree more. I feel […]

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  • I keep having coffee cravings at night.

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  • Brain Pickings turns 14

    Maria Popova: The challenge has never been more colossal than this past year — the most trying I have lived through, by orders of magnitude. Depression has lowered its leaden cloudscape over me again and again since I was fifteen, but no other year has lidded life more ominously, as the staggering collective grief we […]

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  • Obsidian didn’t stick, for me

    Back in May I came across Obsidian, a knowledge base app that stores your information in Markdown files. I used it a bit here and there until, in July, I stumbled onto Ton Zijlstra’s post about Obsidian which motivated me to try it in earnest. I was excited to have a note taking app that […]

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  • What I saw somewhat recently #71: October 22, 2020

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  • Do you use the Web Share API?

    If you use the Web Share API, Jeremy Keith is looking for more feedback. I’m not expecting anything to happen anytime soon, but it would be really good to gather as much data as possible around existing usage of the Web Share API. If you’re using it, or you know anyone who’s using it, please, […]

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  • I’m a huge red onion fan.

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  • Gorgeous pinhole photograph by Michael McNeil in Ireland

    Michael McNeil: It’s the first time I’ve used this film, so it was all a bit of an experiment.  As usual, I did no research before I went out. I appreciate how he detailed the struggle and sort of out-of-control feel that pinhole photography can be. Regardless, stunning result.

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  • Video: How Unmark works

    Today I recorded a quick few minute walkthrough of how Unmark works. I use Unmark every single day (and have for years) to store links to read, watch, listen, etc. It is a simple app but has some great features and so I thought I was overdue on a quick video to show how it […]

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  • At a stop light in Scranton, Pennsylvania around 5pm on October 13, 2020. Nothing glamorous today for Micro.blog’s A Day in the Life – just driving to get grocery pick-up.

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  • No matter what Apple announces today, I hope the iPhone 12 proves to be a solid, reliable computing device for Eliza. Her iPhone Xs has given her a lot of issues over the last few months.

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  • Clicking the “Create a new Xcode project” button.

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  • Unmark 2020.3 has just been released. It has been running on the hosted version for a little while but today it rolled out to all of you that run it locally. Enjoy!

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  • I am “my compost pile makes me exceedingly happy” years old.

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  • If you own an Epson scanner you may be able to get Silverfast SE (a much more robust and quicker scanning software) for free. Get your serial number and go here.

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  • Podcast: Photographing an abandoned Lace Company in Scranton – September 2020

    Photographing an abandoned Lace Company in Scranton – September 2020 Recorded in September 2020. Holy cow a new episode! Finally. Sorry for the wait for those that are subscribed to the podcast. I’ve recorded dozens of episodes that may well never see the light of day – I sort of explain why in this episode. […]

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  • Give Micro.blog 2.0 features a try for free

    Manton Reece: For the Micro.blog 2.0 launch week, we’ve enabled the new bookmark archiving and highlights feature for everyone to try out. Personal blogging has gotten a big boost over the last several years. In part due to people’s abhorrence of the policies of the social networks du jour, but also as a direct result […]

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  • Watching @adactio‘s screencast demo of a Huffduffer feature was a rollercoaster of emotions. He removed me, added me, removed me! I hope he added me! Good reminder to use Huffduffer again.

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  • We need to disincentivize dangerous photo ops

    Dangerous photo ops are all the rage on social media. Countless stories over the last decade or so have hit the news about someone trying to get a selfie on a rock ledge, on the balcony of cruise ship at sea, or hanging one-handed from an under construction skyscraper hundreds of feet in the air […]

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  • Most people live with technology being terrible

    Jay Sitter, on people expecting technology to suck and just leaving the issues in place rather than fixing them: I’m in no way making light of these people knowing less than me about technology. They’re smart people who just didn’t spend their teenage years installing RAM and hard drives in their basement. I bring it up because […]

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  • Me: Lay down for a late-afternoon nap out in the backyard. Apple Watch, a few minutes into the nap: Time to stand!

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  • How to move referenced originals in Photos for Mac

    Warning!! I’ve only just hacked this solution together and I don’t fully understand the ramifications of my actions yet. If there are any, I will update this post. First, a bit of context on how I use Photos for Mac (Photos). I do not allow Photos to store my original files within its “package”. I […]

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  • Stephen Hackett on #iOS14Homescreen

    Stephen Hackett: Customization and expression has always been part of personal technology, from this, to MySpace, to putting an Apple sticker on your car, to even picking what brand of home computer you bought in the 1980s. People have always used technology to project something about themselves into the world — just like people do […]

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  • What I saw somewhat recently #70: September 24, 2020

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  • Duck.com keeps growing. You should use it.

    In 2014 I linked to a post that showed DuckDuckGo‘s daily search volume at roughly 5 million searches per day. In 2015 they had grown to 12 million per day. I hadn’t checked in to their stats in a long time until I saw this tweet from them. They are now averaging 67 million searches […]

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  • NetNewswire 5.1 for Mac

    Excellent update to my preferred desktop feed reader, NetNewswire. I especially like “Reader View”. Here is how it is described. Some sites only publish extracts of their full articles. Reader View can fetch the full article text and show it to you in NetNewsWire, so you don’t have to go to another app. There is […]

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  • Goodreads isn’t very good

    Sarah Manavis: After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to add what they’ve read to their “shelf” or to discover new titles, users know they’ll be forced to give up, confronted with the fact that any basic, expected functionality will evade them. […]

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  • What I saw somewhat recently #69: September 17, 2020

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  • Architectural decay – July & September 2020

    Architectural decay – July & September 2020 Photos of dilapidated buildings, like these two, can be stared at for hours figuring out their histories. What vehicle had that oil leak? Why the plywood? Does that light work? Isn’t anyone missing that dumpster? Both photos were shot on the Olympus Stylus 35mm point-and-shoot on Kodak Color […]

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  • Repost: Scott Jehl on modern web dev

    👉 Scott Jehl on Twitter: modern web dev is an extreme overreaction to not liking some php

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Writing helps me think more clearly and to form or transform my opinions. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.


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