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Finished reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear 📚

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Leaving the Apple Watch Behind

For about two months, I haven’t been using my Apple Watch anymore, at least only sporadically. Previously, I wore one of my Apple Watches daily for almost ten years (9 years, 9 months, and 2 days). My longest streak for closing the activity rings was two years (735 days), and overall, I closed all the rings over 2,750 times in the 3,563 days that I owned an Apple Watch. I could hardly imagine life without an Apple Watch on my wrist. I once bought a new watch because the battery of my old one had lost its performance, and I didn’t want to be without a watch for two or three days during the repair. In the end, I even started wearing it at night for sleep tracking.

My general dissatisfaction, especially with the tech industry and particularly with the ever-declining software quality and Apple’s behavior, led me to the decision to break free from these constraints. It really challenged me mentally. But if I’m honest with myself, closing the rings, the incoming notifications (which I had already significantly minimized), sleep tracking, and all the other functions I used the watch for often stressed me more than they might have helped. Is it really better for my health to put pressure on myself every day to close some rings instead of relaxing and taking it easy in the here and now? I’m really not sure.

The underlying fear of a dead battery, meaning the watch’s battery life, also weighed on me. The first setback came with a COVID infection that occurred over a year ago. At that time, I broke my streak and afterwards simply stopped paying attention to closing my rings. That was a relief. As mentioned earlier, I then decided some time ago to just put the Apple Watch aside and not to wear it anymore.

I initially bought a very simple Casio watch for 30 EUR (Casio A168WEM) and have since supplemented it with a “slightly” better model (GW-5000U), which charges itself using solar energy and automatically sets itself correctly via a radio signal. This watch I can simply wear. If I want to know the time, I look at it; otherwise, I don’t. I certainly won’t become a watch collector (😇), but I enjoy considering whether I want to wear one watch or another, or none at all, on special occasions. I am confident that I will continue to pay attention to my heart health and other things, even if I haven’t closed three rings at the end of the day (🤞).

What do I miss the most? Apple Pay on my wrist. I used it a lot, even though sometimes it’s easier to do it via phone, as you don’t have to contort yourself at the sometimes awkwardly placed terminals. I also genuinely miss setting the timer with voice commands, as it was my most-used function on the watch. But that’s okay too.

In the meantime, I thought about buying a fitness ring to continue collecting vital data. However, maybe I’ll just avoid being informed about atrial fibrillation or other things that hopefully won’t happen to me, and save myself a subscription, avoid uploading my data to American servers, and spare myself the frustration of another piece of technology that looks great in marketing materials and works wonderfully but often disappoints in reality.

Let’s see…

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Finished reading: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman 📚

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Birds and Frogs

Today, the farmers mowed several meadows nearby. About ten storks took the opportunity to look for food, maybe mice. Various birds of prey joined them. Unfortunately, I’m not a wildlife photographer at all, but I still tried to capture them on film.

Two storks walk on freshly cut grass near a tractor and trailer.A stork is walking on a grassy field with trees in the background.A stork with outstretched wings stands in a grassy field in front of a dense row of trees.A bird is flying against a clear blue sky.A bird of prey is soaring through the sky with its wings spread wide.A bird with outstretched wings soars across a clear blue sky.

On my way back, I came across these little guys – apparently the storks haven’t noticed them yet ;-)

A frog is partially submerged in water surrounded by aquatic plants and greenery.A frog is partially submerged in a pond surrounded by lily pads and water plants.
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TIL that you can install the free KOReader on your PocketBook Era and export your highlights via WLAN to e.g. NextCloud Notes and Readwise Reader. What a game changer! 🤩

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Moving (my Data) to Europe

In recent weeks, like many others, I’ve been contemplating where my digital data and the services I use are actually located. Predominantly, they reside on servers located in the United States, owned by American tech companies. Given the current political climate, I’ve made an effort to migrate much of my digital life to services within the European Union. To begin this digital relocation, I’ve gone through my current services. My encrypted online backup is hosted on Microsoft’s OneDrive. I use iCloud for emails, calendars, contacts, photo storage, passwords, music, and video streaming. I also rely on iCloud for file storage. Apple services are exceptionally well-integrated into the operating systems I use. The Family Sharing features they offer are awesome, and the stability is now commendably robust. Allegedly, most of these services are end-to-end encrypted. All seems fine, except for recent developments involving Trump, Tim Cook’s support of him and the general attitude of Apple towards the European government. But I don’t want to get too political at this point 😎. Anyhow, I made a table in my BuJo1 and started looking around and testing stuff. Here are the results, including not only servers and services but also related stuff:

A few things were quite simple, at least after I made a decision. Based on very helpful feedback on Mastodon, I found out that NextCloud can be quite well used as a managed service at Hetzner for a reasonable amount of money. I then set up an instance there and moved all my calendars, address book2, tasks3, and a few files and pictures. I still need to spend some time researching encryption on NextCloud and understanding its implications, but overall, it was very easy to set everything up and configure it for the whole family, including calendar sharing, and so on. What I’ve seen so far, I like very much. Even the macOS and especially iOS apps are quite good and you can use passkeys and add two-factor for web authentication. Files that are too sensitive to be stored in the cloud without E2EE, I have saved in a koofr.eu vault. Unfortunately, that’s not quite as simple; you have to use rclone, which is a CLI program, but it’s generally doable. For now, I’ve moved a few backups of my most important data there, which have so far been backed up on OneDrive with Arq4. I exported all the individual photos from my Apple Photo.app library and copied them to an encrypted koofr vault. This went extremely well with the PhotoSync app, which not only supports WebDAV but also encrypted rclone targets.5 How and where I will store my photo roll un the future, I do not know yet; it’s still the biggest challenge. But, I was very pleased to see that a few weeks ago Micro.blog, which is still my blogging platform of choice, offered its users the option to move their blog’s data to European servers, which I did right away. My Obsidian data has felt like it’s been on European servers for years now, and I was thrilled to see that the instance of my only remaining actively used social network, Mastodon, was moved to European servers as well. Regarding maps and route planning, I am now trying to rely solely on OpenStreetMap-based services and apps like OsmAnd, or perhaps Guru Maps. Furthermore, due to the sale of Komoot, which, while still a European company, no longer earns my trust for other reasons, I’ve started switching to bikerouter.de. I already knew that it’s fantastic, but it has a considerably steeper learning curve. I moved my passwords back from Apple’s password app to 1Password. I’m not entirely happy with it6 but after all, it seems to be mainly a Canadian-based company. For email, I’ve been using Posteo, a German provider, and I am very satisfied with it. Regarding search, I haven’t found a European provider yet that I want to use, but I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and hope that their privacy statement holds up. Searching remains an open issue. Additionally, I’ve canceled my YouTube Premium subscription and am trying not to buy anything from Amazon anymore. Maybe I’ll just have to delete my account there to keep this up. We’ll see. To sum it up, I find it very unfortunate that it had to come to this and hope that despite the lack of integration, the various apps and services will still work as reliably as they have. Time will tell for sure.

  1. This might become another post someday. ↩︎

  2. Unfortunately, it appears that contact groups are not supported under macOS when synced via CardDAV; you can only use one address book. It seems to work under iOS, though. I guess only Apple knows why. ↩︎

  3. There seems to be no way to export my reminders and tasks properly; I had to transfer them all by hand, except for those that are already managed in my bullet journal, which fortunately were not many. ↩︎

  4. I am still searching for a service where I can use Arq again; however, that hasn’t worked out yet. I would really like to have an incremental backup of all my data in the cloud. ↩︎

  5.  Filen might be something to look into as well. ↩︎

  6. With all the back-and-forth of moving data, it is not about having fun, but about having a better feeling afterward, I guess. ↩︎

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Making your own bread is awesome

Baking bread is really a great thing. Yesterday we had “Wurzelbrot” (similar to baguette) made with sourdough for breakfast. Then in the afternoon, homemade pizza in the Ooni oven with our own yeast dough, and in the evening, lard bread (with vegan lard and soy yogurt), also made with sourdough 🤩.

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Automated Daily Notes in Obsidian - Daily News Integration

For over a year, a draft has been lying in my project folder, in which I wanted to describe all the shortcuts I use to automatically add some information to my Daily Notes in Obsidian at the end of the day. However, the project was far too big, as my setup is quite complex, and so I haven’t really made any real progress in writing so far. That’s why I thought I should break it down into several smaller pieces (posts), as is always advisable with large tasks, and just start. So today I’m starting completely at random with a shortcut that was only recently added. I will deliberately not go into too much detail, but rather outline a rough framework. If anyone is interested in more detailed information, I will of course try help. Just contact me via e-mail or Mastodon.

But enough of the preamble.

A series of Apple Shortcut automations runs at the end of each day and push information to my Daily Note in Obsidian. Therefore, a helper shortcut controls approximately 15 different shortcuts that collect data.

My Daily Notes consist of several sections:

  • Properties (setup via Templater Scripts)
  • Personal Notes (via Drafts)
  • Daily News (via iMessages → Drafts)
  • Weather (via Shortcuts)
  • Bookmarks (via [Mastodon →] Anybox)
  • YouTube videos watched (via Play)
  • Books read (via Book Track)
  • Finished Tasks (via Reminders)
  • Logged Activities, Streaks, etc. (via Chronicles)
  • Personal RSS feeds, esp. Media Consumption (via Rss copist and e.g. trakt.tv feed)
  • List of created Obsidian Notes (Dataview query)
  • Imported Readwise Reader Highlights (via Readwise Official Plugin and Dataview query)
  • Links to Daily Notes from one, three, six, twelve, and 24 month ago (Templater and inline Dataview query)

Here is a sample screenshot of one of my daily notes (sorry, it’s in German):

So, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the Daily News integration: Tagesschau delivers three important news items twice daily via iMessage. I have those messages muted but an Apple Automation Shortcut picks them up on my iPhone, saves them into Drafts and applies a tag. At day’s end, another shortcut collects the tagged news from Drafts, archives them there, strips a few things, adds a Dataview prefix to the summarised headline section and inserts them to the Daily News section in my Daily Notes Template. (BTW using that property and Dataview, I can display the most important news per day nicely in my weekly notes. But this is a completely different story I 😎.)

And, in case you have wondered: The magic link between all the different apps, Apple Shortcuts and Obsidian, that makes all these automations possible in the first place, is Actions for Obsidian. This is such a great tool 🤩.

Okay, so, that’s it for today. Hopefully, it won’t take me another year to continue this series. 🙋‍♂️

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ShareMyPlugin: All My Enabled Obsidian Plugins

Lou wrote about his Obsidian plugins and mentioned the Share My Plugin List plugin. I’ve previously shared my 10 favorite plugins, but this tool makes it so easy to list all my enabled plugins that I couldn’t resist giving it a try:

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I love how easy it is to vote in Germany

You automatically receive your election documents without having to request them. On election day, you simply walk a few hundred meters to your nearest polling station—ideally in perfect weather—where friendly volunteers are ready to hand you your ballot.

There are usually no long lines, no waiting times.

The entire process takes just a couple of minutes, plus the short walk there and back.

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Finished reading: Die Bullet-Journal-Methode by Ryder Carroll 📚

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Oh by the way, Dry January ✅

I’m super happy that it was really easy for me.

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These figures are a little out of date, but have only got worse since then. I don’t understand how anyone can really believe that foreigners or LGBTQIA+ people are the core problem in our society.

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Media Diet

I wish everyone a good start to the new week. Over the weekend I deliberately didn’t read any news, didn’t consume any RSS articles or social media feeds. My phone felt pleasantly useless. It wasn’t easy for me, of course, but it was a good move. I have just marked 594 unread articles in my feed reader as read and should urgently think about whether I should fundamentally change the way I consume information.

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OMG why did nobody tell me that Dataview Publisher (https://github.com/udus122/dataview-publisher) for #Obsidian exists? What a freakin' game changer 🤩.

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That sounds easy and fun. I will definitely try it out: There oughta be a Game Boy Slideshow

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Why do we have to read all the crap about Trump again. All the headlines, all the newspapers… filled with a big load of bullshit. As if our own countries would not be of any interest. Can‘t we just ignore this fucking clown? I try to escape but there’s no way! I need a content blocker that removes everythi... hutaffe.blog

+1

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TIL if you enable “Offload unused apps” in iOS settings, an app will eventually be deleted, even if you use its functions via a shortcut every day. This will of course break the latter. 🤷‍♂️

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Tech I Don’t Need (But Want)

There are a few tech items I’ve been eyeing for a long time1, which I’d love to have, but the rational part of my brain forbids me from buying—at least for now, thankfully.

First on the list is a drone. Long before insurance requirements and discussions about drone safety became prevalent, I owned a DJI drone2. It was incredibly large and loud but fascinating and took beautiful pictures for its time. Previously, I flew 3D aerobatics with RC helicopters, but I couldn’t afford or justify the constant repairs anymore—almost every flight resulted in something breaking. Anyways, drones are quite different now, practically indestructible if you know what you’re doing. Currently, you can get a DJI Neo for about €160 on sale. I wonder how much has changed in the last ten years. But I don’t really need it. While it’s small enough to be carried easily, I’m not an Instagram influencer needing a vlog drone. I’m more interested in aerial photography, which would require larger models, registration, a license, and insurance. Plus, you can’t just carry them around casually. Therefore, I really should resist my curiosity.

Next are AR glasses. The XReal One seems quite awesome. I’d like to try one and see if such devices could replace a TV. However, the cable setup is still quite extensive, requiring a battery pack, adapters, and a game console or other input device, leaving you tethered to the living room sofa. Also, while you might not look quite as strange wearing them as you would sitting in the living room with ski goggles, sunglasses aren’t much better either, I guess. And is the whole experience really better than just holding a handheld or iPad? For the best experience, I sit in front of my PlayStation connected to a 4K OLED monitor in my “home office” anyways. The chair there isn’t that uncomfortable either. Ultimately, I haven’t used a VR headset since the PlayStation VR for the PS4, eight years ago. How much better are they nowadays? Again, I’m very curious but think it’s not worth buying or owning one—and unfortunately, I don’t know anyone who owns one.

I don’t know why, but I would really love to own a Flipper. I’m fascinated by the idea and versatility of this device, and it looks so awesome. But even after watching tutorials on YouTube, I still don’t know what I’d actually achieve with one. I think I’m just not a hacker and therefore not the target group. 😅

Lastly, there are always new gaming consoles and handhelds in various form factors. I’d love to have an original Game Boy Advance SP with an IPS panel or an Anbernic RG35XXSP, or their recently announced RG34XX, and so many others. But I already own a bunch and must stop buying even more—I should start playing some games instead! Speaking of handhelds, I’d really love to own a MiSTER. Although I have devices that can connect to a TV, including a Raspberry Pi running Batocera and an Analogue Pocket, there’s still a MiSTER missing from my collection to tinker with.3 I must not order one!

By the way, this Fujifilm X100VI is so awesome. And what about the X-T5? 😇

Update 2024-12-08

And how could I forget the Oura Ring 4—another category of devices I find very tempting?

  1. and I just don’t mean newer models of devices I already own, e.g. iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple Watch, PS5 (Pro), Action Cam, 3D Printer, etc. ↩︎

  2. a DJI Phantom 3 in 2015 ↩︎

  3. or alternatively a MiSTER Pi ↩︎

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Apps that make me smile

There are those apps that really do nothing productive but just make you smile while using your computer. One I really love is BananaBin a “playful reminder that it’s time to take out the trash”. Today Simon B. Støvring released another one of this kind: Festivitas, which “brings the holiday spirit to your Mac with festive lights for the dock and menu bar 🎄”. You can’t invest your money any better I think.

Update 2024-12-07: laptopllama mentioned “Typibara (a capybara pal that types with you) and Ball (a crucial app for the times where it’s important for you to bounce a ball out of your Dock)”. I instabought Typibara and Ball is also awesome.

Update 2025-03-19: Sindre Sorhus just released Googly Eyes - watchful eyes in your menu bar 👀