marco's µ.blog

Continuing from week 03, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the fourth week of 2024:

• 🌐 I didn’t quite understand the commotion about the DMA this week. Gruber proved himself to be a true patriot once again, and I still don’t understand where exactly the doomsday mood is coming from. Whether Apple has chosen an appropriate strategy, I don’t know either, see also Apple ruins its big week.

• 🎮 My Anbernic RG35XX H arrived. Now I can sell my RG353PS and send the RGB30 (more or less electronic waste right from the start) to recycling. So far, one is more or less reliant on the stock firmware, which isn’t very nice. But there are a number of very young Custom Firmware Projects and also a cleaned-up stock version. To not lose track of all the associated SD cards, I printed a series of these Micro-SD Label Sticks.

• 🕹️ I was surprised to learn how easy it is to get The Full AMIGA Experience on Analogue Pocket. Until now, I was also unaware that you can convert save states created with an emulator to and from the Pocket / MISTER: Save File Converter.

• 🛠️ I am actually very satisfied with Anybox. Only sometimes I wish that the sync speed would be much faster. I recently archived 20,000 (!) old bookmarks and kept “only” the last 2k, which only helped to a limited extent in getting the bookmarks stored on the iPhone displayed faster on the Mac. Over the last few years, I’ve tried more or less all the alternatives, except for Link Cluster. Its developer Daniel Witt is not an unknown¹, the app was an up-front one-time purchase, and so far I have been hesitant to pay the money without knowing that the app does better than Anybox. That changed this week. A big update to Version 2.0 has been released and you can now (very limited) test it first, which I will definitely do over the next week: Link Cluster - Collect and manage links.

• 📰 I checked out NetNewsWire for macOS again. I will stick with Reeder for the time being.

• 💻 I changed my window manager again. The app Moom, which has been used on my macOS for decades, has now been replaced by Rectangle Pro. Ryan Hanson is another indie developer who releases just great utilities, and that’s why I bought the Pro version right away. Alternatively, you can also use the free Rectangle first. In fact, I can hardly imagine my life without Superkey (alternatively Hyperkey) anymore.

• 📱 No week without a new app from Sindre: Doodle Draw.

• 🏠 I hung a very inexpensive Amazon Kindle Fire tablet on the refrigerator a year or two ago and display in a Full Kiosk Browser Magic Mirror2, which runs on a Raspberry Pi. I programmed a series of small Python scripts that show me the energy consumption and our weekly changing family tasks, in addition to standard functions like family calendar, weather, date, time, etc. Unfortunately, I have forgotten most of what I taught myself with Python last year, and for some reason, Magic Mirror can no longer be updated without everything breaking afterwards. I’m afraid that if the shaky construct falls apart completely soon, I’ll have to hang an old iPad on the wall and perhaps use a solution like the recently updated Wallflower for HomeKit or just understand more about IT, Linux, Python, NPM, and Node ;-)

• 🏆 The Obsidian 2023 Gems of the year winners have been announced. It’s a pity that Actions for Obsidian didn’t win. While looking at the entries, I stumbled upon Data Visualization in Obsidian with Obsidian Charts. There’s simply nothing you can’t do with Obsidian, albeit much more complicatedly than with other programs better suited for the task. I love that! 🤣

• 🔋 If I ever think I need a big battery pack on the go, I might buy this one: Shargeek 170: Unbeatable Power.

• ⏰ The idea of a location-based alarm clock for train rides or similar is great. But I believe I wouldn’t have the confidence to rely on this solution: WakeMeHere - A Location Alarm with Brain.

• 📚 I have been diligently reading Holly - for my standards. However, I am disappointed with the PocketBook Era. I had hoped that e-book readers would have evolved somehow over the past ten years. But at least the Era is insanely sluggish, and marking text is an outrage. Well, at least most of the time the text is displayed…

• 🎬 Watched The Teachers’ Lounge (2023); I know exactly why I work at the university and not at a school.

• 🙋‍♂️ Have a great week!