In continuation of week 52, 2023, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the first week of 2024:

  • 🤔 I read some blog posts about One Month Without and I always find it interesting to see what people are willing to give up for a month. I did this spontaneously in the first half of 2023, giving up alcohol, caffeine (not entirely true, I did drink green tea a few times, but completely abstained from coffee, cola, etc.), sweets, and snacks. Giving up coffee was definitely the hardest. I have not yet decided if and for how long I will repeat it this year, but I have declared January to be alcohol-free.

  • 📱 Clicks for iPhone - a REAL KEYBOARD for your iPhone: tempting, and I still hate typing on my iPhone (sometimes I get the impression that Apple wants to annoy me on purpose, always choosing keys nearby and never those that lead to sensible words; the new LLM for autocorrect is also not yet available in German). But I wouldn’t want to keep taking my phone out of the case (which I use most of the time), putting it into this keyboard and back into the case again.

  • 🖥️ Sindre did it again and released a little utility for the Mac: Second Clock - Show a second clock for a different time zone in your menu bar.

  • 🎨 A DALL·E playground for the Mac: I had not tried DALL-E before because I always assumed that you needed an OpenAI-plus subscription for it. For this app, you only need an API key.

  • 🕹️ Didier posted about vAmiga - a user-friendly Amiga 500, 1000, 2000 emulator for macOS. I have not tried it myself yet, but it looks great.

  • 📷 Gruber had a problem with unknown files in his Photo Library, and Caleb Hailey helped him.

  • 📚 Otávio posted a link to Standard Ebooks - a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost. Oh well, if only I read more books …

  • 💾 Speaking of Otávio. He is the author of Micro.publish, an Obsidian plugin that lets you publish directly to micro.blog. Love it. I ran across a bug trying to publish my last weeknote and he was so kind to fix right it away 🤩. (Otávio even wrote a blog post about it.)

  • 🇩🇪 Marcus posted a link to All German words (German wordlist) - who knows what it might be useful for in the future; bookmarked.

  • 🎮 Remakes I knew about, but I only just learned that there are also Demakes: Demake of Portal for the Nintendo 64

  • 🕹️ Downloaded Crunchyroll Presents: Hime’s Quest for my Analogue Pocket - Go back to 1999 and help Crunchyroll-Hime protect New Crunchy City from Y2K! By the way, my Analogue Pocket Dock has arrived, which I should have ordered directly. 🥰

  • 🎮 I don’t even want to know how much time this boy has spent playing Tetris on the NES to achieve this: 13-Year-Old Becomes First to Beat NES Tetris. I also wonder why a 13-year-old spends his free time in front of an NES and not playing Fortnite or Minecraft 🤣. And how crazy are these different playing techniques?

  • 🐭 I thought this would never happen: Welcome to the public domain, Mickey Mouse - Steamboat Willie finally slips out of copyright.1 As a result, you can now watch Steamboat Willie via Playorama on your Playdate, if you want to.

  • 🤔 While reviewing my subscriptions, I had already considered canceling kagi. This made it easier for me, although I am aware that probably every search engine at least tolerates unethical practices indirectly or even practices them directly to some extent. My hope is that if service providers realize that such non-technical aspects are also relevant to customers, they will hopefully take them more into account in future decisions.

  • 📺 Finished Season 2 of The Bear and Loki - loved both.

  • 🤯 Watched Oppenheimer (2023) - and I wanted to be more optimistic in 2024!

  1. with many restrictions, of course ↩︎