marco's µ.blog

In continuation of week 01, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the second week of 2024:

• 🏋️ After my Covid infection in early December, followed by exhaustion, I started with a training program. It includes (indoor) cycling, strength training, and yoga sessions. It’s exhausting, but it also feels good to finally be able to challenge my body a little again.

• 📚 Additionally, I wanted to read more, watch movies more regularly, meditate daily if possible, and do other nice little things more frequently. Therefore, I have started to enter these things as events in my calendar so that I don’t lose sight of them.¹ The first week has already gone quite well.

• 🤖 Jarod Blundy released an excellent Shortcut on HeyDingus. It automatically generates an image description using OpenAI’s GPT4. And if this was not enough, he released Micro.blog Multimedia Uploader - upload any file to Micro.blog and format it for your blog post. 🤩

• 🔗 Carlo pointed to Phanpy’s excellent Mastodon thread viewer.

• 💻 I really enjoy all the Apps from Apptorium. Lots of great stuff available, mainly for macOS. They came up with a new app: Cursor Teleporter - Teleport your cursor across your displays. In my lectures, I often struggle with moving and finding the cursor on the projector behind me; this app helps a lot to avoid that.

• 📝 Obsidian collected projects for its Gems of the Year 2023, and now the voting on their Discord has begun. Lots of interesting plugins. I already use some of them, but most were new to me. I voted for Carlos' Actions for Obsidian, among others, and installed Image Converter: Convert and compress images from one format to another by drag’n’dropping or pasting files into the note. I’ve been looking for a plugin like this for a long time and created something similar myself with the help of Shortcuts and Retrobatch. But, this plugin is much more convenient and powerful. I also really like the linter plugin - an Obsidian plugin that formats and styles your notes with a focus on configurability and extensibility.

• 🔖 Furthermore, I have bookmarked the following plugins to possibly come back to them at the right time: canvas candy, dataloom, day planner, easy bake, folder notes, full calendar, git, kanban, khoj, meta bind, modal form, latex suite, obsidian to ical, quickadd, smart connections, and time ruler.

• 🎮 It was mentioned on the last episode of Hemispheric Views, ‎Idle Iktah - Idle Iktah is an incremental iOS game set in a fictionalized Pacific Northwest where you start from nothing and create your own path to success. It looks very strange. I downloaded it but have not started playing yet.

• 🕹️ I believe this one-dimensional Pac Man game that you can play in your browser was mentioned on DF²: Paku Paku.

• 🎥 Max Handelman, the developer of GameButler, released ‎Minerva for Trakt - the movie and TV show app that you’ve been looking for. Yet another Trakt client. It has a similar, quite cool, aesthetic as GameButler (I would call it very functional) and no subscription model (just a small one-time payment). I still stick to TV Forecast though, the only thing missing for me is the ability to sort my own watchlist by various criteria. (Which seems to be possible with Minerva.)

• 🛠️ Eternalstorms is another developer whose software I really like. I was a long-time user of Screenfloat before I replaced it with the corresponding function of CleanShot X (also on Setapp). But I am still excited about Version 2, which will be released next week.

• 📝 Barebones released version 15 of BBEdit. I instantly upgraded before even reading the release notes. Its main new feature is ChatGPT worksheet support. Matt made a video about it, if you’re interested.

• 🎨 Hiro posted these Teenage Engineering iPhone Wallpapers in his weeknotes. I am not into sequencer stuff at all (unfortunately, I am completely talentless when it comes to music) but they look awesome, nevertheless.

• 📺 Started watching Slow Horses S3, For All Mankind S4 and watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi. What a great documentary!