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marco's µ.blog

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    What I have done in the first week of 2023 (teaser: mastodon, omg.lol, playdate, ankermake)

    I was motivated by muhh’s blog entry to write down what was on my mind in the first week of January. I’m not sure yet if this will become something more regular, but I wanted to start putting something online more often anyway - more on that below.

    I’ve had the last two weeks off. The weather was bad, I had a cold 🤧 and therefore a lot of cycling wasn’t an option either (at least that’s what I told myself). So, I used the time to hang out at the computer a little more than usally. There was a lot of exciting things to discover there. Somehow Elon started this with the downfall of twitter, which he initiated. I had only been there reading for years anyway, and then after the takeover I decided to download my data, delete the clients on my end devices and no longer use the account.

    As an alternative, I was of course interested in Mastodon and clicked an account on the standard instance mastodon.social. Thanks to tools like movetodon and fedifinder my timeline has also filled up pretty quickly, and I actually “met” pretty quickly some real people with whom you could exchange ideas in a friendly manner. All in all a very positive experience.

    One great thing about the fediverse is the extreme dynamics of the tools and clients that are currently being built around it. It feels like back in the early days of Twitter where, for example, a single programmer, Loren Brichter, with Tweetie could turn the whole twitter landscape upside down. (BTW he only has an inactive account on Mastodon 😢)

    I tried countless clients over a few days. Among others (unsorted)

    The official app is okay, but IMHO not great; toot! I liked the range of functions very much, but you also have to cope with the strange design somehow. Because I follow some accounts that post a lot, and since the timeline on Mastodon is not orchestrated by any algorithms, posts from other people are in danger of being lost. Thats why a good list function is very important to me personally. There, Mammoth also makes a very good impression, but in the end I was lucky and was able to test Ivory via Testflight. The app by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine has an button design that is a bit too playful for my taste, but otherwise it is extremely stable and really great at everything it does. The recently added list features are awesome, as they allow certain accounts to be hidden from the home view. So, atm I stick to Ivory and am looking forward to even better builds.

    Then, sometime last week, I came across a post from @otaviocc@social.lol on omg.lol. And then, coincidentally, I signed up for the service with thousands of other people (who must have read a post on Hacker News and not otaviocc’s post 😎). On omg.lol you ultimately get a “funny” address on the web that contains a wide variety of small services. A single page website (to use as a business card), a statuslog, an omg.lol-email address (forwarder), different DNS services, pastebin, PURL service, a weblog (beta), etc. And while I was at it anyways, I also have my Mastodon account moved from mastodon.social to social.lol. Luckily that went really smoothly. It was a lot of fun getting involved, configuring everything and thinking about what it’s even good for 🤦‍♂️.

    In the meantime, I continued to work with the AnkerMake M5, which also arrived after a very long wait at the beginning of December. All in all I’m very happy with the 3D printer, but still don’t really know what got into me back in early 2022 when I backed it on Kickstarter. But that is definitely going too far at this point and maybe I’ll go into more detail elsewhere.

    Well, micro.blog is kind of a universe in itself too. In addition to choosing a theme, there is of course the client question. I got some for iOS (the official app, Gluon for Micro.blog and MacOS (MarsEdit 5, which I use via Setapp) looked at various editors (iA Writer, Drafts and Runestone. In addition, there are useful tools as Mimi Uploader (iOS) to upload images and Epilogue for Micro.blog to track books, but I’m just starting out here, there are just too many apps and I have to see which ones “click” for me.

    There are of course all sorts of little helpers for publishing interesting links and posts on Mastodon or blog entries. Among others Linky and Re: Toot by Simon B. Støvring (who, by the way, is also responsible for Runestone) I would like to mention at this point.

    As if all that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of last week, after a 1.5 year wait, I received my long-awaited playdate game console. (In the meantime I had actually already forgotten that I had even ordered it and I was all the happier that it suddenly arrived.) It’s a lot of fun to deal with the little yellow box and I wanted to jot down some impressions I got. I rented a domain with Wordpress installed last year already and tried a few things with micro.blog but didn’t really publish anything on either platform. This year I wanted to change that and thus started with a post about the playdate.

    All in all, it was an exciting time in terms of IT. Now all of a sudden I somehow have three blogs and will soon have to concentrate on one of them and see when everyday work starts again tomorrow, whether I still have the time and, above all, the desire to continue writing down my thoughts, or these escapades were again one of my “manic” excursions into something new and I would lose interest again the day after tomorrow - which would be a pity.

    So, maybe cu next week 🙋‍♂️

    PS: initally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the music and podcasts I’ve listened to, too but this post is already way too long.

    1. Update 22.01.2023: It seems like he is not actively developing it right now. ↩︎

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    Anybox - Manage bookmarks like a pro (iOS / macOS)

    One app that I’ve been using a lot for a while now is Anybox. Both the Mac app and the iOS app are very functional and the developer is friendly. It has completely replaced pinboard.in as my bookmark manager, although there is also a very nice iOS / macOS third party companion app called Pins, which is currently no longer being developed as rapidly as it was in the beginning, but is still great.

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