Geekery
I’m making a bold move in my social networking workflow, inspired by these two posts by @moonmehta: this one and this other one.
I have unfollowed everybody in Micro.blog (after backing up the follow list, just in case I need to go back (You can do this by Exporting Follows in your Fediverse details in the Accounts section). and then subscribed everybody back via RSS (I use NetNewsWire for this).
The https://micro.blog/posts/user format (no .json nor .xml extension, just the plain user name) lets you subscribe to both posts AND replies of a certain user. Every post they publish and every reply they send, regardless of the recipient (I even found out that this format https://micro.blog/posts/'mastodon user' lets me subscribe to any Mastodon account via RSS).
The idea is twofold. On one hand, I limit even more the addictive nature of every social network, even a one like Micro.blog, limited-by-design. My Micro.blog timeline will not show my follow’s posts anymore, so I won’t need to be checking the web or the app like I used to do with Twitter and I still do with Micro.blog. That should help me own even more the time I give to my digital stuff.
On the other hand, scrolling down the timeline wouldn’t guarantee that I’d read every post from my follows, and I’d miss many of them. Having them in NetNewsWire will assure that I can read every post and reply and I won’t miss my favorite people’s insights.
I have started subscribing to 75 RSS feeds. This might change. I might see that I want to receive updates from a smaller number of people. Or I might like the system and follow even more people this way. I have 3.750 unread posts right now, so the Mark All As Read feature is going to be very handy in the beginning, and probably down the road too.
Engaging with the posts and replies might be a bit cumbersome. When I see a post I want to reply to, NetNewsWire opens the original blog. If the blog has the “Comment on Micro.blog” feature, it’s easy to reply to. If not, it’s a bit more difficult. Replies are opened directly in Micro.blog, so that’s not an issue. I’ll see how it goes.
So here’s a new try in my blogging/social networking journey. I want to write more and scroll less; I want to engage in meaningful conversations and read everything from the people I like. Above all, I want to own the experience and the time.
And one added benefit: this RSS feed https://micro.blog/feeds/eumrz.json now gives me my posts and the replies I receive from other people. That’s very cool. Thanks to Jatan for the idea.
xkcd: Machine
🚀 xkcd: Machine
Please, do yourself a favor and go check this awesome proposition from XKCD. I need to work a little and I have to leave it for now, because otherwise I can fall in this rabbit hole for ages. If you got a few hours to spare, don’t miss it. Or else, bookmark it.
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It’s easy to generate a UUID in Terminal: simply type
uuidgen
and that command tool will return a fresh UUID as its response, neatly formatted using the standard layout. There are also equivalent calls available to software through the UUID structure in the macOS Foundation API. You can use those to verify that UUIDs generated close together in time are actually very different indeed.
I don’t know what I need this for, nor whether I will ever remember I bookmarked it, but it looks cool and I have the feeling some day it might pay off to keep it. #geekery
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Summary
- For key repeat:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
- For diacritics:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true- TinkerTool for either.
I’m grateful to Mark for reminding me of this setting.
And I’m grateful to Howard for bringing it back so I can take note of it. #geekery
A shortcut to rule them all
I posted a short video showcasing my All In One Shortcut menu that I place in my dock and use constantly.
It’s almost become my main interface with the iPhone. It starts with a Favorite shortcut menu when I put my most used actions (call wife, take a quick note, etc). That menu has a More… button that runs a more comprehensive menu that takes me to other choices.
I have menus for Home or Work related shortcuts, to choose from different countdown timers, to run Omnifocus actions, etc. Each of them, with the More… button, can take me to the main menu. Or I can cancel the loop. When I find the desired shortcut I just run it.
If I ever get en iPhone 15, this workflow will be placed in the hard action button. Meanwhile, it lives in the dock and gives me plenty of joy several times a day.
So I installed RayCast to try a DEVONthink plug-in that looked promising, and I uninstalled it after two minutes. It was quite meh. The plug-in, I mean, and how it searched and managed groups and files within DT. And overall, RayCast is not a match for the File/Folder handling of LaunchBar. Instant Sending, moving, copying, renaming, batch processing… are handled much more conveniently in LaunchBar. I did not bother to look into any other features of RayCast: I guess I’m still a die hard LaunchBar user. #geekery
DuckDuckGo, Walkmans and Elon Musk
Three random thoughts this Monday evening.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my searches for the last couple of weeks. Both on the Mac and on iOS/iPadOS, I set it as my default search engine, and it’s been working really well, giving me very accurate results and helping me find relevant things when I was looking for something specific, and interesting stuff when my searches were more general.
Two weeks ago I also logged off my Google account, so I’d like to think that Google is not harvesting as much data from me as it did before, for years. The thing is that I’m still logged in YouTube, so I guess I’m giving Google more information that I’d what to think.
One of the thing that YouTube fed me today is that, apparently, Walkmans might be back. I’m a sucker for useless and/or sentimental gadgets, so I’ll probably end up buying more than one. I do have a cassette collection stored away somewhere…
Another thing that I corroborated today is that I don’t stand this guy. I mean the African one. Everything he says comes off to me as bullshit. I could not watch more than five minutes, and I made myself stay longer than I wanted because I think that we need to expose ourselves to uncomfortable views. Still, nothing but bullshit. Why on Earth are we so prone to give so much voice to guys that have proven to be liars.
UPDATE: These to comments by @pratik and @clorgie are much more accurate in their depiction of the guy:
I watched the entire Don Lemon’s interview of Elon Musk. Such an inarticulate and incomprehensible, the supposedly smart, man! Is this what we are considering a genius these days? Either he’s afraid to (he claimss he is not) admit or doesn’t understand the basic concept of implications.
@pratik I watched some this morning. Musk is a dull man masquerading as a much smarter one caught in his own web of lies. Sad.
I missed it because of DST, because in Europe we enter into DST a couple of weeks later than the US, so we’re still in winter time. But im not going to miss the next one, for sure.
Another interesting, thoughtful, and fun Micro.blog Analog Tools meetup this morning! 🖋️📓🗂️ We talked about hybrid analog/digital tools and processes, how friction can help slow thoughts down, and much more.
I think that the blogroll implementation for micro.blog’s Recommendations is lacking one thing. Since the recommended blogs accept an optional description, I would expect the description to show in the blogroll. I wanted to use that to explain why I think that each blog in the list is worth a visit.
So I learned that I need to have an ActivityPub user if I want to follow Fediverse accounts from micro.blog. Duh.
2024-03-17 UPDATE: I changed my home page to a more conventional one. The one I designed was quite gimmicky. If I ever learn a bit more about web design, I may come back to visually depicting my garden metaphor. For now, the patches in my garden, meaning the different sections of my website, will be featured in the conventional navigation bar.
I want my site to resemble a garden, so a few days ago I made a home page with buttons that represent the patches you can find as you walk around one.
Tonight, fiddling a little more with the site, I asked MacGPT to give me some simple code to change the color and the shape of these buttons. I managed to choose my own colors and even give an animation to each of them.
The patches that have content are different shades of green and are animated when you hover over them. The ones that are waiting for future content are yellow-orange-ish and static. I think they do convey that they are not alive yet.
And I added a link in the navigation bar that brings you to that home page. It’s called Panorama, because it gives you an overview of the garden.
Do you like it? Maybe the animation is a bit too much, maybe the colors are not right, maybe the whole concept is ridiculous. I’d love your feedback.
Will I delete my micro.blog apps?
I have not detached myself from the habit of seeking feedback every time I post something in my blog. I want to go minimal, so I logged off from every social media account, deleted every app and turned off every cross-posting link. I told myself that I want to focus on my blog and look for other personal blogs and interact with their authors via email. Yet I still find myself looking for attention in micro.blog, the only app that I keep in my devices. Should I cut that tie too? I really like the small community around micro.blog and the people I once in a while chat with, so I don’t think I want to switch that off, but I have to look for some other way to prevent myself from seeking that social media dopamine reward. #thoughts
#geekery
P&B: Brad Barrish – Manu
🚀 P&B: Brad Barrish – Manu:
This is the 28th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Brad Barrish and his blog, bradbarrish.com
Wow. Is this interview interesting and full of great recommendations. Do not miss it.
App store scam?
It’s the second time in a few days that, as soon as I enter the App Store app on my iPhone, it offers me to install Tik Tok. Not just the add, but a sheet asking me if I want to install it. I may have accidentally clicked on something, but I really don’t think so. Has anybody noticed the same thing? Can it be some ad abuse or scam? #geekery
Wednesday
I am quite impressed by the automatic transcription of podcasts on the Apple Podcasts app. That this is the highlight of the day does not speak very well of my achievements today. Anyway, that’s that. #thoughts
#geekery
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In all seriousness, if in 2024 you’re using one single email address for everything that’s a you problem, not an email problem. Also, Ian, let me ask you a question: what’s the alternative here? Do we all move to Slack/Discord/Teams? Do we all move everything to DMs? Do you think that’s a better solution?
There’s a reason why emails are still here. They’re still here because they work. Is email perfect? No. Is there a better alternative? Also no.
I wholeheartedly agree with Manu. Separating work and personal email is easy enough. And filters are necessary to manage subscriptions and other types of messages, but with a minimum setup, email can be tamed. #thoughts
#geekery
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Happy Sunday, everyone! We have a short and (hopefully) sweet one this week:
A new report by [@hiro](https://micro.blog/hiro) and it is, as always, full of goodies. You don’t wanna miss it and you do want to spread the word. #geekery