In continuation of week 10, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 11. week of 2024:

  • 👀 Adam is once again working on something new: Neato.

  • 🏦 IndieAppSales 2024 was going on last week and I bought some new apps.

  • 📱 Just like for iA Presenter, there is now also an iOS version of ‎Deckset. I had hoped that it might do without a subscription, but far from it.

  • 🖥️ Nitro for macOS might be something to keep an eye on.

  • 📆 Currently, I also have no use for this, but I can imagine that might change: ‎Rules Shortcuts based on Event.

  • 💎 Here I found a few Homebrew gems: Hidden FREE Mac Apps!. Especially interesting I found mailsy, speedtest-cli, ata, wifi-password, mas, and yt-dlp.

  • 🎵 There are media control apps for macOS now like sand by the sea, but this one is free and looks quite nice: Tuneful - Control your music with ease.

  • 🎮 Summerhouse (Steam) looks cozy, and thanks to Daniel I stumbled upon Balatro. In addition there were (are?) significant discounts on VVVVVV and Celeste on Steam . I especially suck at the latter on the pico-8 but I adore its aesthetic and am excited to play it on my MacBook.

  • 🕹️ For the Playdate, I stumbled upon Quandino and bought Mars After Midnight.

  • 📺 I did not know now that Retro Gaming on the Amazon Fire TV Stick is a thing.

  • 🎥 Wikiflix: an interface to browse, search, and view movies published as public domain at Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, or YouTube.

  • 🚀 Nice idea and cool implementation, for which, however, I have no necessity: ‎iPulse - Monitor Your Device.

  • 😓 Habib wrote about Overwhelming Tech Fatigue. I too have been feeling an increasing kind of dissatisfaction with technical devices in general lately. I am becoming more intolerant regarding shortcomings, especially of the system’s software. I yearn for things to simply function and find myself increasingly reluctant to invest significant time in troubleshooting things that have been implemented with minimal effort and, as a result, are prone to errors. (Although I still like trying out new software and starting new projects 🤷‍♂️.) I suspect that this actually has to do with age. In the past, I passionately tinkered with (Windows) PCs but eventually had no more desire to spend more time making things work than using them.1 I then switched to Apple because its OS and software was (seemingly) much more thoughtful, functional, stable, and beautiful. This love is massively being lost in recent months, and since there seem to be no real alternatives, turning away from the enthusiasm for technology itself would be the next logical step - even though I don’t actively pursue that of course.

  • ✨ There seem to be only two opinions about Asteroid City, and I belong to the fraction that had a lot of fun watching it.

  • 🎉 Celebrated my birthday, had a lot of good food and nice people around me.

  • 🪙 Last but not least, go and check out the One a Month Club and become a member of all those great blogs listed there 😎

Have a nice week! 🙋‍♂️

  1. Although that also seems to be a pattern in my life: as soon as something works (reasonably) or I master it (reasonably), I (unfortunately) often lose the interest in it. ↩︎