marco's µ.blog Profile Photo

marco's µ.blog

[🧪👨🎓] [🚴💨] [👨‍💻]

macOS

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week seventeen, 2024

    In continuation of week 16, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the seventeenth week of 2024:

    Wishing you a beautiful week! ☀️

    2024-04-29: Fix credentials for Time Machine Icons

    1. I’ve started with SteerMouse and so far have no complaints. ↩︎

    2. Sorry, I got this wrong on my initial post. Hopefully corrected now. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week sixteen, 2024

    In continuation of week 15, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the sixteenth week of 2024:

    • 🎮 This week was an exciting one for retro gaming on iOS. After some initial debacle with a ripoff GB emulator, which was pulled after a few days by Apple, another one, Bimmy, was pulled by its developer just a day after it was approved. But then the well-known Delta emulator developed by Riley Testut, which was previously only available via the AltStore was released worldwide in the App Store, except for Europe. Here you can get it exclusively via the AltStore PAL, an alternate iOS Appstore.1 Its developer wrote a little about the availability of Delta and the AltStore PAL in general. Installing the AltStore and downloading Delta went as smoothly as Apple currently allows, and the app is just great. Very nicely designed, customizable through skins and comprehensive. However, I see myself rather less playing GB[AC]* games on my iPhone, as they bring more fun on the Analogue Pocket or one of my other devices with a built-in gamepad. However, the situation is similar to photography, you know, the best camera is the one you have with you …

    • 🕹️ If you’ve now gotten a taste for it and also want to play some of your legally acquired Roms on your Mac but don’t want to install an all-in-one solution like RetroArch or even ES-DE right away, you can also pick up some tips on stand-alone emulators here: Emulators aren’t new; here’s the great ones on the Mac. More emulators are also apparently in the starting blocks, and I also downloaded a C64 emulator, but I haven’t looked at it yet and therefore don’t know if this a valid recommendation.

    • 🧠 This week, MetaAI unveiled its new Llama 3 models, which can be easily downloaded to the Mac using Ollama with commands such as ollama pull llama3:8b or ollama pull llama3:70b. If you prefer not to use the command line to interact with the LLM or any of the GUIs mentioned in Week 8, you might consider exploring ‎Enchanted LLM. This app offers a free and slick interface to interact with Ollama’s LLMs.

    • 💻 I mainly use Rectangle Pro for window management on macOS, which also offers the possibility to throw windows into predefined areas via mouse gestures (Window Throw), but if you are looking for an alternative, you might want to check out the free Loop.

    • 🤖 This is so f*%king incredible: Farewell to HD Atlas. But of course that can still be topped: All New Atlas 🤯.

    • 🦉 As already mentioned on my little Site Project, DropScout for iOS / iPad is out of beta and available for free: DropScout tracks your Amazon products and alerts you when prices drop! Also mentioned there, since version 3.11, Soulver once again includes an iOS version that can be unlocked with a one-time purchase. After years of incompatibility, you can finally exchange files between macOS and iOS again. Did I mention before, that I love Soulver?

    • 💻 Lou blogged about apps that Open at Login on his Mac, and two apps were new to me. As Mission Control Plus - Put the “control” back in Mission Control - is included in my Setapp subscription, I started evaluating it. The app does mainly two things, it adds an X-button to Mission Control’s windows and several keybard shortcuts managing them. The other one was Backup Status - View the status of Time Machine right from your desktop or Notification Center. Bookmarked but not tried myself yet.

    • 💻 On A Better Computer, I stumbled across 10 useful Mac apps you may not have heard of and found Cleft quite interesting. However, it absolutely did not want to work for me and instead of transcribing my spoken text, it bombarded me with error messages and just deleted everything. Well, I might look at it again in version 1.1 or maybe 2.x.

    • 🛠️ Whether I spend a lot of time troubleshooting to get something running that I would like to accomplish depends strongly on the platform I’m doing it on and my expectations of the project/product.2 With Apple products or other commercial services, my tolerance for having to spend a lot of time to make something work as it should is quite low, for example. This was also one of the reasons why I switched from Windows to macOS about 20 years ago. I just didn’t feel like dealing with the fiddling anymore. With Linux projects, it’s different for me. I almost expect it to be difficult, and it’s fine with me because in general it’s open source and I heavily benefit from the hard work from others. So, I spent countless hours trying to set up a WLAN access point on a Raspi that is connected to my network via LAN and brings the connected devices into the network via VPN. (My regular router can’t do this, and I have one or two devices that I’d like to connect to the network via VPN, but I can’t install a client on them.) I ultimately failed and gave up a few weeks ago. Last week, I stumbled across the BerylAX GL-MT3000 and it took me no more than 5 minutes to get it up and running with NordVPN. This really blew me away.

    • ⏺️ The Stream Deck Neo was announced and looks really compelling to me.

    • 📺 Continued watching Palm Royale - still not sure about this TV series.

    • 🎥 Watch Riders of Justice - enjoyed that one.

    • 🕹️ Spent way too much money for discounted games on Steam and played a lot of Dead Cells. Really hard but I like it a lot.3

    Have a nice week! 🙋‍♂️

    1. BTW I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s spontaneous change of direction regarding emulators was related to the AltStore PAL to take some wind out of the sails of the alternative app store, but maybe I’m going too far with that. Perhaps others can unravel this. ↩︎

    2. This paragraph was obviously inspired by a section of Clockwise. ↩︎

    3. BTW as of writing this, Dead Cells is no longer on sale on steam but for Nintendo Switch. So, if you own one, go and check it out. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week fifteen, 2024

    In continuation of week 14, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 15. week of 2024:

    • 🎮 I was briefly excited when I read that the first GBA emulator had landed in the iOS App Store. Unfortunately, it was not a legitimate app, and it was subsequently removed (again too late and why at all approved?) from the store: Apple Removes Game Boy Emulator iGBA From App Store Due to Spam and Copyright Violations - MacRumors.

    • 🛠️ Jarod Blundy released another great shortcut: Simple MB Image Uploader.

    • 🏎️ I’ve learned that in Mario Kart 8, you can choose from 703,560 driver, kart body, tires, and glider combinations, but you can still be more clever than others: Mario meets Pareto 🤯.

    • 📱 At first, I was skeptical, but Simple Scan • Quick Scanner gets updated regularly and has reached a stage where it is definitely much more useful than a simple one-step shortcut or going into the Files app and initiating the scan from within there.

    • 💻 I am a long-time Bartender 5 user and don’t see a reason to switch. However, for those who don’t already have a Setapp subscription or don’t want to pay that much money for a “simple” utility app, ‎iBar-Menubar icon control tool might be worth a look. However, you have to more or less blindly trust the developers, as their website will probably remain incomprehensible to many people.

    • 🛑 If it also bothers you that every App Store link in Safari directly opens the store instead of just calling up the overview page, maybe this will help: StopTheMacAppStore - Mac app that stops Safari from automatically opening the App Store app.

    • 🖥️ I used to have a version of iStat Menus (Setapp) running on every Mac, but nowadays I do without. However, there is also a number of alternatives, for example, the freshly updated Usage, which, for instance, also allows access to the status of the Mac from a mobile device, or the free Stats - macOS system monitor in your menu bar.

    • 📁 In week 9, I mentioned Manila, a free app that lets you change the color of a folder’s icon. There seems to be a similar paid upfront app called Foldery, that might be easier to set up and is regularly updated; bookmarked for the case that Manila stops working someday. If just a color is not enough, ‎Folderizer might be worth a try, too. So far, I was occasionally using the Setapp version of Image2icon but might give the former a shot.

    • 🎮 I fell in love with ‎Gamery - Game Tracker and switched to the app from GameTrack. Actually, I was looking for an app that runs both on iOS and macOS, but I am not very satisfied with the macOS version of GameTrack. The developer of Gamery has mentioned that he plans to enable the iPadOS version on macOS and is working on a native macOS version, too. That all sounds very good.

    • 🗓️ Sindre Sorhus makes so many great apps, and many of his programs are free. To support him, I bought the Mac App Store version of Dato even though it was available via Setapp, too. Anyways, if you’re looking for a free alternative, Itsycal for Mac or Calendrx might be worth a try.

    • 📸 I briefly looked into the new app from Aptonic, the developers of Dropzone (Setapp), called ScreenSnapAI - AI Powered Screenshot Manager. But that’s not for me. I will definitely stick with CleanShot X (Setapp) for the time being. By the way, did you know that pressing space to switch to window capture from capture area mode also works with CleanShot X and not only with the built-in macOS tool?

    • 🌐 The one and only master of the indie web, Robb, released EchoFeed. You have most probably already heard of his service to pipe an RSS feed to open web endpoints, like Mastodon or Micro.blog, etc. Love it.

    • 📲 Did you know that you can change the iOS wheel picker to a number pad by just clicking on it? I did not!

    • 🌍 Marcus reminded me that it is a very good idea to support OpenStreetMap. I am now an associated member.

    • 📺 Watched the Pilot of Palm Royale with my wife. Not yet sure what it will turn into.

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week fourteen, 2024

    The week before Easter was once again very quiet in terms of new software and tech-related stuff. This was probably also because there was a lot to do at work before we went on our Easter vacation. For a few years now, we have been traveling more or less regularly during the Easter holidays together with my wife’s family. She has three siblings, all of whom have partners and children, and our dog joins us as well. This year we went to Belgium, the weather was quite rainy and gray, but that’s okay. We were 15 people and, of course, it was very bustling but also very nice. There was a lot of hiking, eating, reading, playing, and laughing. Especially for the younger ones, who let it show more, the fact that there was almost no functioning internet in the area and in the vacation apartment was quite noticeable. Wi-Fi and mobile networks were unusable. It took several minutes just to retrieve a single email. Social media, game streaming, YouTube, etc. were completely unthinkable. Digital detox par excellence. Actually, it did quite good and that was the reason there was also no post here on the blog last week. 🐣

    Therefore, in brief and in continuation of week 12, here are very few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 13th and 14th week of 2024:

    Have a pleasant week ahead!

    1. I thought I’d start with a Stephen King novel since his books always captivated me in the past; however, I was not so convinced by Holly; the book is quite repetitive and long-winded. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week twelve, 2024

    In continuation of week 11, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 12th week of 2024:

    • 😴 Actually, this week was a very quiet week in terms of tech-related stuff. It was probably because I was very busy at work and in the evenings, I preferred to relax with a game of Balatro1 instead of surfing the net a lot.

    • 🛠️ This week, many things just broke. It started with dishes, not just once, followed by a PS5 controller that wouldn’t turn on anymore and got dangerously hot while charging and started to smell. Then, the power supply of the old MacBook simply quit working, a 256 GB USB stick made my Mac crash reproducibly as soon as I tried to access it, the crank handle of my Playdate just broke without any external force2, our eCargo bike suddenly refused to go any further (Error E010), the coffee machine at work gave up the ghost, and my knee is broken. Well, it’s been messed up for 30 years, it just hurts more this week than usual. I think that’s a good sign for next week. It can only get better.

    • 🔄 The developer of Anybox has released a new app: Event countdown & up - Pinning app. I was a long-time user of Countdowns before I switched to Up Ahead because the latter was much more fun to use. However, there has been no update for over ten months, and I’m somewhat reluctant to pay a subscription price for that. I’ll take a look at Pinning, although there is no macOS version yet and it also has a subscription model behind it. Otherwise, I should dig out Countdowns again. It works wonderfully, it just doesn’t look nice at all.

    • 🎉 Robb announced that his Podcast Ruminate joined MacStories. Congrats!

    • 🤔 I was curious and also signed up for Scribbles. I definitely don’t need another way to blog, but I kind of like the projects by Vincent.

    • 🧩 Table of contents — for Safari on the App Store: A funny little plugin that does exactly what it promises.

    • ❤️ I was absolutely impressed that I sent a feature request to the developer of Default Folder X and he replied on the same day that he had implemented the feature and it will be included in the next release.

    • 🐶 Besides, I was pleased that you can now use Siri in German without saying “Hey.” This solves our biggest mistake in dog training. We chose “Hey” as a stop signal (“no”) for our dog, and therefore we could only ask the Homepods to do things via voice very limitedly, otherwise, we would completely confuse our dog every time 😅.

    • 🎮 I’ve finished Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (GB) on my Analogue Pocket and started playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong (GBA). The next real Mario game will be Super Mario 64. I’ve been thinking a bit about how and on which system I want to play it. I’ve decided to buy the Nintendo 64 bluetooth controller and try it on the Switch via Nintendo Switch Online Plus.

    • 🎥 We watched The Shawshank Redemption (1994) (again) with our sons. What a damn good movie.

    • 🎸 I was at an IDLES concert 🤘.

    Have a wonderfull week ahead!

    1. Somehow I really like the game, although I’m not really into card games otherwise. I’m still failing at the first deck of cards, at the latest at ante 8/8, but what the heck 🤷‍♂️. ↩︎

    2. Thanks to my 3D printer, I was able to print a temporary replacement. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week eleven, 2024

    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. ↩︎

    ∞

    IndieAppSales Spring 2024

    Indie App Sales! is running from 12. to 13. March 2024

    Here are some Apps I’ve looked into so far:

    Update 2024-03-12T13:00: add Everlog and SharePal; update note for Bridges
    Update 2024-03-12T21:35: add Text Workflow

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week ten, 2024

    Continuing from week 09, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 10th week of 2024:

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week nine, 2024

    In continuation of week 8, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 9. week of 2024:

    • 🎥 Inspired by Jason’s awesome OfficeSpace.gif, we (re)watched Office Space (1999) as a family. We had a lot of fun.

    • 😆 Cool: RSS IS DEAD LOL.

    • 📚 Bookmarked Calibre Sync. It seems like a great way to access your Calibre library on the go. I’m thinking about moving my library to my NAS and sharing it via WebDAV.

    • 💻 A few years ago, I had this little Finder Service installed that let me change folder colors via the context menu. Somehow, it was not migrated to my new MacBook, and I had a hard time finding it on the web again: Manila.

    • 🛠️ This might come in handy at times: Mist - A Mac utility that automatically downloads macOS Firmwares / Installers.

    • 🔄 OnlySwitch for macOS was updated.

    • 🎮 If I had a PSP Go and shipping did not cost three times the price of the adapter, I would have bought this right away: Micro SD Memory Card Adapter for the PSP Go.

    • 📱 There was a lot of buzz about the changes in the upcoming iOS version to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). One positive outcome might be this: MacPaw Announces Upcoming Beta Version of Setapp Mobile. Now, I’m just waiting for retro gaming emulators to be released for iOS on an alternate store.

    • 🕹️ Right now, Emulation on iPhone is a mess. It’s easier to stream PS5 games to your phone or even Apple TV.

    • 🤖 But iOS is not the only complicated platform for emulation (frontends). As mentioned last week, ES-DE was released for Android. The programmer did not get permission to distribute it on the Google Play Store and therefore went to Amazon. They delisted it too, and he had to move to Patreon. Anyway, it’s a bit finicky to set up but runs very well on my Retroid Pocket 2S.

    • 🎮 On my Anbernic RG35XX, I stumbled upon VVVVVV. How could I have ignored this for so long?

    • 🐸 Came across Bubble Frog by Timbo Johnson. It’s a lovely little game for the Game Boy, and the developer seems very passionate about his project. You can download it for free on itch.io, and to support him, I backed it on Kickstarter.

    • 🕹️ BTW, there is a new GBA emulator out there. So, if you collect ROMs and emulators as well, you can get this one: Hades: A Nintendo Game Boy Advance Emulator v1.0.0 released

    • 🏰 Finished Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. This took me a while and was really, really hard at the end. Next, I finished Super Mario Land. This was the opposite; it only took a few hours. Right now, I am playing Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2.1

    • 📚 Even though I’m not 100% convinced that my purchase of a PocketBook Era was the right decision, I still like the idea of an e-ink reader/tablet. These look really great: BOOX Note Air3 C and Note Air3 Series. I’ve never heard of them before, and I wonder if they are more performant than normal e-readers.

    • 🚴‍♂️ My wife and I went for our first bike ride (55 km) of the year outdoors. The weather was fantastic, and there was a hint of spring in the air. It was beautiful.

    1. I’ve decided to (re)play all the main Mario games in chronological order but don’t necessarily stick to the original platform. If there was a remake available for GB[AC]*, I bought the cartridge and play that version on my Analogue Pocket. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week eight, 2024

    Continuing from week 07, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the eighth week of 2024:

    • 📱 Simple Scan • Quick Scanner was teased by Agile Tortoise. Curious to see if this will be a better solution than just opening the Files.app and initiating a scan from there. (Actually, I’ve never checked if those generated PDFs have automatic OCR.)

    • ☑️ Twodos - Simple Todos: Interesting concept but definitely too basic for my needs.

    • 🌧️ Looks Like Rain: Another weather app. It focuses on graphical bars showing the rain tendencies for the next couple of days. I like that because that’s the main reason for me to open a weather app.

    • 🖥️ And another updated utility: Dock Exposé - MacOS window previews on the dock.

    • 🐬 Flipperzero - Portable Multi-tool Device for Geeks. I totally missed the hype about this device and am not that tech-savvy, but somehow I wish I was able to do something with it.

    • 🤔 I still don’t quite understand why I am still looking for alternatives to Anybox. The only thing that bothers me about the app is that the sync speed is a bit too sluggish for my taste. Everything else is great. Regardless, after I took a closer look at Link Cluster last week, this week there was an update for Linkeeper. The new version also looks quite promising but unfortunately does not support the import of bookmark collections as an .html file. And therefore, there is no easy way for me to migrate my bookmarks. I’ll keep both Apps in mind, though.1

    • 🛠️ Stumbled upon Zint - a complete cross-platform open source barcode generating solution. For individual QR codes, I still use V2 of QR Factory, which is now available in Version 3. Zint is only available as a CLI on the Mac but I’ll keep it in mind in case I want to generate a lot of codes automatically someday.

    • 💻 Mainly for work, I revisited various ChatGPT / LLM frontends and local LLMs. I had somehow completely lost track of the tools and their capabilities. In the process, I stumbled upon MindMac - Connect seamlessly, chat effortlessly with ChatGPT on macOS. It’s a (not very pretty) GUI for more or less all the AI services in the world. Together with OpenRouter, you can quickly and easily try out the major commercial APIs (OpenAI, Google Gemini, etc.), but also, for example, integrate a range of local LLMs (Mistral, Llama, Llava) with the help of ollama. Even uploading images is possible, and the integration of the Google Search API for queries that do not allow online searches. (If you only want to use Ollama with a GUI, there is also, for example, Ollamac - A macOS app for interacting with the Ollama models). In addition, MindMac also combines LM Studio and GPT4All under its interface. The developer is also extremely helpful. I like the app. Apart from that, at the end of the day (more or less in the truest sense of the word), I had to realize once again that ALL of these LLMs are still not capable of doing what I hope for them. Serious work on scientific texts is simply not possible with them. The models make too many mistakes and fail at seemingly simple tasks. I’ll take another look at this in six months. But it does scare me a bit that these tools are probably already being (supposedly) used productively in many related areas.2

    • 💡 I’ve learned quite a bit from JDHeyburn’s How I use Obsidian to journal.

    • 🎮 As mentioned last week, I really enjoy EmulationStation on my Anbernic RG35XX H (for which a new release was just published) and Raspberry Pi. Actually, there was no reason, but this week I’ve installed ES-DE Frontend (EmulationStation Desktop Edition) on my MacBook. Next, I will try to get the Android version running on my Retroid Pocket 2S. According to Retro Game Corps, it might not be that hard. IMHO it’s just the best Retroarch / Emulation frontend and it’s fun tinkering around with it.

    • 🎮 I wanted to check something on playstation.com this week and had to enter my password three or four times, provide a 2FA code, and solve a CAPTCHA. WTF!? That’s why I took the opportunity to switch my account to a Passkey. I am curious to see what hurdles Sony will now put in my way when using it.

    • 📊 This graphical 2023 Report Card breakdown I found interesting in terms of the biggest Apple fanboys in the “community” 😜.

    • 🍿 Watched L’immensità (2022) with my wife. Neither of us liked the movie.

    1. Raindrop.io is still not an option for me, as I am uncomfortable with the developer’s proximity to Russia and especially the potential access to its servers by governments. ↩︎

    2. With NotesOllama - Use Ollama to talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes - you can also consult your Apple Notes via a local LLM; however, I don’t really use Apple Notes anymore. Just for ChatGPT I still really enjoy MacGPT and there are quit some Obsidian plugins I all don’t like. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week seven, 2024

    Continuing from week 06, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the seventh week of 2024:

    • 👌 So, I think I’ve read and seen enough about the Apple Vision Pro for now. I hope I’ll stay firm and wait at least for Gen 2 and not want to buy it as soon as the AVP is available in Germany. However, I still find this video noteworthy: What Reviewers Aren’t Telling You About Apple Vision Pro.

    • 😤 Gruber’s polemics and European Union bashing are getting on my nerves. I’m going to remove him from my RSS reader and podcast player for a while. Maybe then my Watch won’t complain about an elevated pulse even though I’m not currently training. 1

    • 🎶 Last week I mentioned algoriddim djay, which now also supports Apple Music, and this week I came across Mixxx in my Mastodon timeline for the first time. (Sorry, I can’t find where I saw it right now.) It doesn’t seem to support any streaming services, but it is open source and therefore free to try.

    • 🎨 Well, as said I can’t make music and I can’t draw either, but I found this app interesting: astropad slate - Control your Mac using your iPad and Apple Pencil.

    • 🔗 In week 5 I briefly looked into Link Cluster but due to its lacking ability to copy links in Markdown format it was no real alternative to Anybox for me. I sent Link Cluster’s developer a feature request and this week version 2.1 was released. Among many other new features, you can now copy MD links but unfortunately there is still no share sheet extension for adding links on iOS. So, still on my watch list but no real alternative to Anybox.

    • 🖼️ Clop - Image, video, PDF and clipboard optimiser Copy large, paste small, send fast: There’s plenty of software for shrinking, for single images, for batch processes or even as a plugin for Obsidian. Clop monitors the clipboard or directories and optimises images and videos. It’s also available on Setapp. I will definitely take a look at it.

    • 📸 I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t offer a way in Photos.app to compare several photos from a series and specifically select the best one. I even briefly subscribed to Lightroom because it offers a brilliant X|Y comparison function. But since I didn’t really need most of the other functions, the subscription costs were of course not justifiable. I bought Photos Workbench, but I didn’t really get along with the app - I have no idea why 🤷‍♂️. For iOS, there is now Photoscope - Storage Cleaner, which I will take a closer look at, but of course it won’t be able to replace a macOS app.

    • 📝 Reor - AI note-taking app that runs models locally: Looks interesting, especially in combination with lots of MD files you already store e.g. in Obsidian, but I don’t get the difference between all those LLM available. I have to dig a little bit deeper into this, I guess. I just tried it with TheBloke/DiscoLM_German_7b_v1-GGUF and a sample collection of 5,300 text files and the results were very, very disappointing. Can’t recommend it yet.

    • 🤖 Speaking of AI. Google’s Gemini is now supposed to understand books in a fraction of a second and Open AI’s Sora can now create videos. I can’t keep up. Today, I asked Perplexity to extract the first 25 hits from a Tier List from a website and the LLM absolutely refused to maintain the correct order. But why start small when you can make chairs float …

    • 🗂️ After reading Robb’s Three Months of The Johnny Decimal System I decided to preorder Johnny’s Workshop. I’ve been using the basic concept 2 of the Johnny.Decimal System for many years (I would claim ten, but I don’t know how long it’s been around actually), but especially in a work context I eventually hit my limits with the system and am curious if I can apply it even better if I engage with it more intensively.

    • 🎮 I spent way too much time with Batocara.linux this week. I installed it on a Raspberry Pi and a derivative of it on the Anbernic RG35XX H. Wow, I’m very impressed with what’s possible with it. It looks so stunning 🥰.

    • 📺 Continued watching For All Mankind S04.

    • 😊 My mood was better than last week but not perfect. I hope yours is and have a nice week ahead!

    Update 2024-02-20

    • Added reason why I don’t yet use Link Cluster as my bookmark manager of choice.
    • Added disappointment about Reor.

    1. Speaking of training, since the beginning of the year I’ve been doing workouts six to seven days a week (sometimes only for 15 min), of which I ride 5 - 6 times on the trainer (30 - 60 min). It’s actually way too strenuous for me, but my FTP at the end of the week attested me a significant jump 🎉 . Now I just need to muster the strength to lose 10 kg. But phew, one thing at a time. ↩︎

    2. Meanwhile, my file storage in Obsidian has also partially merged with the PARA system and is threatening to collapse into chaos. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week six, 2024

    Continuing from week 05, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the sixth week of 2024:

    • 🤦‍♂️ Last week, I failed to configure my Mac as a WIFI Access Point with NordVPN. This week, I tried to do it with a Raspberry Pi 4. Since I no longer have a monitor with an HDMI input, I connected the Raspi using a micro-HDMI to HDMI adapter, HDMI cable, HDMI Capture Card with a USB-A connection, and a USB-A to USB-C hub to my iPad 🤯 What a mess but it worked with HDMI Monitor - Orion perfectly fine. I then tried to set up an AP with the help of RaspAP and install NordVPN on the Raspi. No matter what I tried, my devices just don’t want to connect to the Raspberry Pi’s WLAN, although my iPhone briefly did in hotspot mode and everything seems to work in principle. Well, failed again 🤷‍♂️ 😢.

    • 💿 I upgraded my PS5’s disk space. It now has an additional 2 TB internal SSD. It took me less than 2 minutes; what an alternative universe it would be if it were the same on a Mac.

    • 💡 Adam had a cool idea again: Neatnik Notes · URL as a sentence.

    • 📱 I enjoyed reading Hiro’s first impressions of his  Vision Pro and was wondering about the future.

    • 🕹️ So far, I use Pupdate to update my Analogue Pocket. Looked briefly into pocket-sync: A GUI tool for doing stuff with the Analogue Pocket, but I think I will stick to Pupdate.

    • 😢 I lost all my Save Files for my Analogue Pocket, mainly Super Marios Bros. games. I cried a little bit and now have to start all over with Super Mario Advance 4.

    • 🎮 It’s somehow cool that there is still a lot of great stuff released for the Game Boy, like From Below Pocket by Matt Hughson (NES Dev) or Repugnant Bounty by Repugnant Bounty.

    • 🎵 I really enjoy using Longplay on the iPhone. There is now also Longplay for Mac (Early Access), but I’m not sure if it’s worth $25+ to me at the moment.

    • 📈 I stumbled upon another Obsidian plugin: obsidian-tracker - A plugin tracks occurrences and numbers in your notes. You can really dive deep into it if you want.

    • 🎶 Unfortunately, I lack any major DJ skills, but still had a lot of fun at parties in the past with algoriddim djay; that was back when people weren’t streaming 100% of their music and still owned stuff. Unfortunately it was not possible with Apple Music. Years after its launch, that finally changed: algoriddim djay - Now with Apple Music Integration.

    • ⚡ This Portable Wireless Charger for Apple Watch looks interesting. My S7 only has 80% of its initial capacity and this might be handy.

    • 🚴 I first watched the making of, Riding the hardest Ski Race track on a bicycle (with Spikes), and then the actual video Fabio Wibmer - THE STREIF. Infinitely insane and great to see the immense preparations needed to capture such an extraordinary performance on film.

    • 🎥 Watched The Big Sick together with my wife and The Marvels with the whole family. Enjoyed the first one, and the latter wasn’t that bad either. It was quite amusing.

    • 😔 My mood has been extremely bad this week. I’m sure everything will be better next week. I hope you have a great week too!

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week five, 2024

    Continuing from week 04, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the fifth week of 2024:

    • 🎮 This week I had to repeatedly curb my nearly uncontrollable urge to buy gadgets I don’t need - so far quite successfully. I did not order the Ayaneo Next LITE nor pledged the Ayaneo Flip - World 1st Dual-Screen Windows Handheld on Indiegogo. I definitely do not need more gaming handhelds at the moment, even though I don’t own one that supports Windows games yet. My backlog is already long enough, I don’t need another platform with even more games that I will never play. 1

    • 🕹️ One of the games therein is Celeste for the Switch or Playstation. It seems to be an absolute classic and I only know the version for the pico-8, where it all started. It’s really hard and so far I can’t even get past the third (or fourth?) screen. Regardless, there is now a version as a homage to the N64 area: Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain by Maddy Makes Games, Heidy Motta, Noel, saint11. Unfortunately not yet for the Mac, but in the comments you could already read that it is technically quite possible and probably will come.

    • 🖥️ Speaking of gaming on the Mac: This week Death Stranding Director’s Cut was released. I hadn’t dealt with the game so far, I don’t know either the original version for the PS4 or the Director’s Cut for the PS5. Unlike Resident Evil 4, which recently appeared for Apple’s devices, this was an opportunity to get an AAA game for macOS at a reasonable price that I hadn’t played before. And wow, I am absolutely impressed by the graphics on my MacBook Pro M2 so far. Holy shit, I mean, wow. So far I was not considering a Mac being able to do such a thing. Whether the actual game will appeal to me, I still have to find out, but as a tech demo it has definitely already picked me up. To be able to play it better, I bought a Pro 2 Controller from 8BitDo. At first I despaired of their product portfolio, 2 and then I realized that I could have used an old PS4 controller. Well, what can you do. I guess, now I am not only somehow collecting retro handhelds, but also game controllers …

    • ⏱️ The release of Death Stranding was well timed, as I finished the story of Diablo IV after about 56 hours of playtime this week. I can note for myself that I always take about twice as long for a game as indicated on HowLongToBeat 🤷‍♂️. My Rogue is now level 49 and I will definitely tackle the end game again, at least until I reach level 50 with her. I enjoyed the game, but Diablo IV did not 100% convince me. At first it overwhelmed me with its complexity and its own language for all the facets of the game. The whole system seems unnecessarily complicated to me and later the gameplay became quiet repetitive. And all this in-game loot box up sell shit really got on my nerves. I mean, you buy a full price game and then you’re constantly being thrown pointless IAPs for up to 150 € in your face. Seriously?! Anyway, in the next few weeks I think I will focus again on Super Marios Bros. 3 (GBA) on my Analogue Pocket and look maybe at smaller indie titles on the console at most. Then I see if I enjoy Death Stranding. Maybe I’ll understand the trailer for part 2 better afterwards?

    • 🎮 BTW what definitely interests me more than a Windows handheld is the now possibly upcoming Switch 2 this year and I found the rumors that The PS Vita’s Successor Is Reportedly On The Way & Compatible With PS4/PS5 Titles interesting, too.

    • 📱 I also did not give in to my impulse to pre-order a rabbit r1 - your pocket companion. I find the r1 very exciting as a concept study. I like the design, which comes from the same pen as the playdate. However, the r1 would not be delivered to Europe until the second half of the year anyways, and if the rumors are true, hopefully a usable AI will also be included in iOS 18 in the fall. Ultimately, of course, something like this belongs in the smartphone, and I therefore see the r1 at best as a cute gimmick, without a real future. But that’s not a reason not to have fun with a toy, is it?

    • 💻 If I understood correctly, the r1 uses perplexity.ai, about which I have read a lot of good things lately. Therefore, I wanted to take a closer look at this service, but their Cloudflare configuration initially did not want to let me play along with Safari 🤷‍♂️. I don’t know what exactly Cloudflare didn’t like, the check also came with the Arc browser, but disappeared after some time. I’m not really convinced yet, but I definitely need to use the service more to form a final opinion.

    • 🌐 Speaking of Arc Browser, I suspect that Arc Search also uses perplexity.ai, especially since it can be configured as the default search engine in Arc. I am still not 100% convinced by the browser, either. It all seems a bit strange and opaque to me (why do I need an account to surf the web?!) 3 and I find the browser itself quite sluggish and already a bit bloated. I also don’t know what to make of this Act II. Anyway, there were very enthusiastic reports about Arc Search, but the app hasn’t really picked me up yet by now. I will force myself to use it more often in the next few days in order to be able to form a better opinion.

    • 🚀 I stumbled upon this post in my RSS Reader - The Iconfactory Looks To Launch PROJECT TAPESTRY via Kickstarter - and more or less backed the Early Bird Special immediately: With Project Tapestry, we’ll create a universal, chronological timeline for iOS for any data that’s publicly available on the Internet. Who doesn’t like the guys from The Iconfactory and after the whole Twitter debacle a year ago, I’m happy to support the developers. I’m curious to see if an app will ultimately come out that I find useful, and if not, at least I was able to follow the development and had access to some nice wallpapers for a year 🤷‍♂️. Not coincidentally, Silvio Rizzi announced his new app a few days later: A new app, completely rebuilt and rethought from the ground up. This probably won’t replace the current Reeder (not going away) for a lot of users. He also didn’t miss the opportunity to show Project Tapestry directly in his screenshot 😈.

    • 🧹 This little app from Gui Rambo helps you clean your Mac’s keyboard and trackpad: CleanupBuddy.

    • 📎 As announced last week, I took a look at Link Cluster - Collect and manage links. In principle, I like the app, but it yet lacks the ability to copy links as Markdown links, and that alone is a reason for me to stick with Anybox for now. Therefore, I have not yet bought the full version and cannot assess how Link Cluster handles large bookmark collections. But I will definitely continue to follow the development of the app.

    • 🎥 I stumbled upon this at the beginning of the week on Waxy.org and am surprised that it is still online: ASCII Theater - stream free-text-based movies-in your-terminal.

    • I was very happy and honoured that Michael included my little site in his blogroll. I also enjoy reading his posts a lot, so its mutual. I also need to revise my own blogroll, I just have to find the time to do it.

    • 📵 At the beginning of the year, I had resolved to give up certain things for a few months, each for a month. In January, I started with giving up alcohol and today I realized that it is already February. My problem now is that all the things I had thought of not doing for February, I have already done in the last three days 🤦‍♂️. Now what?! I think I just have to spend February without consuming alcohol as well and prepare better for March 🤣 On my list of ideas is also “A month without a smartphone” or “A month without an Apple Watch”. That seems too crazy to me right now, and maybe I’ll combine it into a “A month less gadgets” and give up my iPhone or my watch for “only” a week each, like Arne did with his phone.

    • 😂 When I read this, I had to laugh a lot:4 Deutsche Bahn sucht Admin für Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, which means “Deutsche Bahn is looking for an Admin for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups” and immediately thought of my photo which I took in one of our, oh so modern, ICE trains last November.

    • 📚 I stumbled upon this at Hey Dingus: Learn Morse Code. I would also like to learn something like this. But first, I should probably start refreshing the tying of various knots.

    • 🍪 I printed a very large Oreo cookie. It weighs (not just a feeling) a good half kilogram, consists of six parts, has hardly any space inside but is absolutely awesome. In addition, I printed a HomePod Mini stand for ours in the kitchen. This way it might survive a disaster better. I also like this Apple Watch Stand and while I was at it, I also printed SNES Cartridge Holder (PAL) and the N64 Single Cartridge Display Stand for my Super Mario cartridges.

    • 🖨️ The next project for my AnkerMake M5 is to take a closer look at Gridfinity. It seems to me to be a nice system. Now I just need to figure out which base plates I can best use.

    • 💻 This week I wanted to use a VPN connection with a device that is only WLAN capable. Since there is no way to set up a VPN service directly on the device, I thought it should be easy to make my Mac’s VPN connection available to other devices via WLAN Sharing. Well, far from it. Basically, it seems to be possible somehow, but unfortunately not with the help of NordVPN, my until now used VPN provider 😢.

    • 👌 In the Apple universe, of course, the launch of the Apple Vision Pro was the event of the week. The usual suspects have already written or published videos extensively about it. As a European, I will thankfully not be confronted with the question of whether it might be worth the money for me in the next couple months. Basically, I am of course extremely fascinated and would give a lot to be able to try it out. Especially the entertainment aspect appeals to me, because my better half only tolerates a tiny 32" TV in the living room, 5 and not only having a home cinema, but a whole iMAX cinema in my own four walls, of course appears extremely tempting. However, I am also not sure what would happen if I used a VisionPro at home in her presence, I at least only dared to use the PS VR 1 when she was out … 🤷‍♂️

    • 📝 Last but not least, Obsidian now also offers servers outside the USA. I therefore moved my private Obsidian vault to a European server and immediately imagine that the synchronization is faster. Apart from that, I find it better anyway to know my data in a European data center.

    • 📺 Continued watching For All Mankind S4 with my wife. I enjoy this TV show but it definitely does not make you happy or confident.

    1. Buying computer games is also a kind of addiction for me. ↩︎

    2. I find it very confusing and difficult to find out which controller fits with which device how. Especially since some are listed as not compatible with the Mac, but can pretend to be a Switch controller, which macOS usually recognizes without problems. ↩︎

    3. Is that still the case? 🤔 ↩︎

    4. Actually, it’s much too sad, but by now I have come to terms with the fact that I live in a country where a lot, a lot is broken and only a few people believe we are at the forefront of anything or really good at it. ↩︎

    5. But I was allowed to buy a projector and a portable screen for shared movie nights. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week four, 2024

    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!

    1. For example, I am a big fan of PDF Squeezer 4 and regularly use Remote Wake Up. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week three, 2024

    In continuation of week 02, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the third week of 2024:

    • 🖨️ Almost 2 years after Anker introduced its V6 Color Engine for the M5 3D printer, it cancelled it. You can either get a $600 discount for an as yet unannounced product, or they will refund the paid money. I’ve opted for a $330 refund. Although it’s a pity, I think it was the right decision for Anker to pull the plug on this product. My M5 already has problems with just one filament; getting the printer to work reliably with 6 print heads was probably indeed an unsolvable task.

    • 📚 I had resolved to read more books this year. I have finished one so far, although I probably started it over ten months ago and have only now finally completed it. Instead of reading one of the countless hardcover books owned by my wife, I wanted to start with Holly as an eBook. But on the iPhone, despite Focus Modes etc., I get distracted far too easily, so I bought a PocketBook Era (with a 20% discount). With it, I will definitely manage to outwit myself 🤦‍♂️.

    • ⏰ Robb linked to this inspiring Clock: A Novel Way To Tell Time.

    • 💻 As teased last week, ScreenFloat 2.0 was released. A ton of new features and even a free upgrade.

    • 🖥️ In addition to all those great windows managers like Moom, Rectangle, Lasso, you name it, there is another (free) little utility: SwiftShift - Sweet window management for macOS.

    • 📆 ReminderCal - Reminders to Cal looks interesting: View Apple Reminders natively in Apple Calendar.

    • 🎮 And this might be a (better?) alternative to Playstation Remote: MirrorPlay - Remote Streaming.

    • 🧠 Marcus mentioned llamafile - bringing LLMs to the people, and to your own computer. A nice way to produce alt text for images locally.

    • 🔍 This was mentioned on HeyDingus: Topviews Analysis: there you can see the most popular pages on Wikipedia per specified timeframe.

    • 📺 Continued watching For All Mankind together with my wife and Slow Horses.

    • 🐌 This week was a rather slow one regarding new software I was looking into but in RL it was much more intense.

      • ❄️ Besides cancelled and new hardware and a couple of new apps, we had a few real winter days this week with temperatures down to -10 °C. Since this is quite unusual here, everyone was totally overwhelmed. There were storm warnings up to warnings of life-threatening conditions, people were advised to avoid driving, schools were closed, and public transportation was severely limited for two days. But the landscape was really beautiful, and the rounds with the dog were slippery but dreamy.

      • ✊ Moreover, in the last few weeks, there has finally been an outcry in Germany against the increasing number of Nazis in society and political parties. There were nationwide demonstrations with millions of people on the streets. Even in our small town, between 13,000 and 15,000 were demonstrating on the weekend. The march had already returned to the starting point, and yet not everyone had even started walking. It was absolutely impressive to see so many people absolutely peacefully demonstrating in freezing cold for human rights in the city center. Our two sons were also there, which made me somehow proud.

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week two, 2024

    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!

    1. I had previously tried to write these things down as normal lists or tasks in Obsidian and other apps. But I didn’t like that. Even specialized apps like RoutineFlow were not the right tool for me. The calendar does the trick for now. ↩︎

    2. Yes, I was right :-) ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week one, 2024

    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 ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week fourty-eight, 2023

    In continuation to week 47, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week 48, 2023:

    • 🦠 My wife was plagued at the beginning of the week with severe headaches and especially nausea. The Corona test was negative. However, on Friday it turned out that she did have Corona, for the first time (proven) since the beginning of the pandemic. She is now slowly getting better, but it has really knocked her down. Let’s hope the children remain spared, who have already had it several times, though. Now I am the last one in the house on whom the virus has not yet shown up on a rapid test. Let’s see how much longer.

    • 🤷‍♂️ Somehow I can’t decide right now whether I should publish my weeknotes in full length on weblog.lol or micro.blog. So far, I have done it on weblog.lol and only created the shorter posts on micro.blog1. But there are so many nice tools like Micro Publish, MarsEdit, and iA Writer to publish directly on mb. I’ll just put the post on both platforms for now and think about how I will handle this in the future by next week.

    • ✏️ Speaking of iA Writer, a really great editor that I use far too infrequently, was just released in Version 7. It has a very interesting approach regarding “citing”2 in Markdown files3. There is also a call to implement the syntax extension in Obsidian.

    • 🎙 And speaking of omg.lol. The last episode of Hemispheric Views was not as absurdly funny as the App Defaults episode, but Adam was a guest. I always find it very interesting to hear what he has to say and am looking forward to his 25 days of omg.lol.

    • 🖥️ This week at Indie App Santa, MacWhisper, probably the best-known Whisper client, was available for free. With Hello Transcribe, there seems to be an alternative that I have not yet tried myself.

    • 🖥️ Also using LLM, but not for transcription, rather for translation, is Easydict: Easydict is a concise and easy-to-use translation dictionary macOS App that allows you to easily and elegantly look up words or translate text. It supports a bunch of different services.

    • 👨‍💻 I started evaluating MediaMate: Fresh visuals for Volume, Brightness, and Now Playing. It has a nice Notch UI for now playing. Have not tested how it plays together with Notchmeister, though.

    • 🕹 Started playing Stray. It is a welcome, quite peaceful change after the 100+ hours fighting as Aloy.

    • 🕹 This week, I actually finished my first Mario game: Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (GBC). I played the cartridge on my Analogue Pocket and thanks to Save States, I have finally managed to see the end credit scene. With every other Mario, I gave up along the way at some point, even though I probably started them all.

    • 🕹 There are not only seemingly 23,342 different retro handhelds, but at least 42 new ones are added every week. I had not heard of the Evercade EXP until now. You cannot play copies of your own ROMs or original cartridges here, but classics are reissued as cartridges for this system. Interesting concept, and there’s even Duke Nukem!

    • 👰 I found it interesting to read how much fuss was made about this one bride photo. But probably because we no longer know or can assess what is real at all. I always wonder how my children are supposed to learn which statements in the form of a photo, a video, or an audio recording they can still trust. But that might also be the reason why many people only dive into their own filter bubble and generally dismiss everything as fake news that is too complicated for them or contradicts their own ideas and blindly believe what they want to believe. This is probably actually the biggest challenge we as a society are facing right now, alongside the climate crisis of course.

    • 👱 Speaking of audio recordings, I couldn’t resist having my iPhone create my own voice. I dutifully read aloud 150 sentences in English. At the beginning, I thought it would never end, but it went quickly towards the end. My iPhone then calculated a lot overnight and the next day I was allowed to try it out. The voice definitely sounds like me. But for my taste, it is significantly too slow. I don’t know if this is generally the case or because I tried to speak as clearly as possible in a foreign language. How do people find it whose mother tongue is English? (I generally find it strange to hear my own voice, which of course makes the whole thing even more absurd.)

    • 🔑 I really need to reconsider my password strategy. 1Password and Apple’s Keychain just don’t cooperate well anymore on my systems, especially when Passkeys are involved. Autofill with 1Password is frequently broken, and you can’t have both enabled. Perhaps I should designate my 1Password vault as the master (or as a backup?) and save duplicates in Keychain to use for autofill. I’m really unsure. I feels strange to have all my passwords in two separate “clouds”.

    • 📺 Even though the subscription price is personally a little too high for me, because I’m actually trying to reduce subscription costs, I signed up for the Play 2.0 trial. I really like the new channel features and together with Vinegar, it helps me get over paying 24 € a month for a Youtube Prime Family subscription, which is actually way too expensive for my taste.

    • 📺 I’m really looking forward to Slow Horses Season 3, but before that, I want to finish The Bear with my wife. Then there’s Loki S2 and the new season of For All Mankind S4 waiting. Advent will definitely not be boring.

    1. Micro.blog is a service for which I have a kind of love-hate relationship (although this is greatly exaggerated). I want to love the service, and Manton seems to be a really nice person; the community and idea are also great. However, I always feel like mb is so fragile that you only have to look at it sideways for it to fall apart. Something is always not working and it seems very oddly cobbled together. It’s supposed to be a simple service but often it ends up being totally complicated and confusing. I never know if I’m just too stupid to tick the right boxes, or if I’ve stumbled upon another bug again. ↩︎

    2. They call it “text from AI tools”, but it’s more ore less citation in the end. ↩︎

    3. I really do like their other Markdown based app iA Presenter. There are a couple of similar apps already, like Deckset and Hyperdeck, but iA’s implementation is awesome as usual. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week fourty-seven, 2023

    Adam told me to stay on the path, so I’m trying to motivate myself to get back into the habit of writing down what has interested me throughout the week. So, here comes week 47.

    • 🎮 I finished playing Horizon Forbidden West. It was my first computer game in years, and probably the first AAA title in decades that I actually watched the end credits for. Usually, I start playing and then eventually stop. (Why should it be any different with video games than with other areas of my life?) I invested over 100 hours into Forbidden West, and whether or not that was a waste of time is for each person to decide, but I had a lot of fun. Over the past two weeks, I used the Playstation Portal. This accessory for the PS5 is essentially just a (pretty good, but unfortunately not OLED) screen with a built-in, very good controller - nothing more and nothing less. It allows me to play on the couch in the living room while my wife watches one of her shows. (My wife doesn’t like me playing games on the TV in the living room when she’s present.) The Portal suffers from the same weaknesses as Playstation’s Remote Play itself: even with very good Wi-Fi coverage and the PS5 connected to the router with a cable (and properly configured), there are regular artifacts, slow downs, and sometimes even stuttering. I really hope that Sony gives its Remote Play implementation a little bit more attention and love now that they sell a dedicated device for this feature. But ultimately, I’m quite satisfied, and the hardware is really well-made. (The lack of Bluetooth support doesn’t bother me at all; I wouldn’t want to constantly pair BT headphones anyway, and I actually have some very good headphones with a headphone jack that are happy to have found a new use.)

    • 👾 Recently, my Powkiddy RGB30 also arrived. The handheld device was highly praised by a bunch of youtubers and the 1:1 screen is really great for GB, GBA, and GBC games. I also really like JELOS. HOWEVER, the hardware quality and customer service of this device and this company are extremely poor. The device arrived defective, with a stuck shoulder button. I had to contact Powkiddy multiple times to get a response. They casually suggested that I could try opening it up. Opening up a device that is only a few days old, still under warranty, with a spatula and screwdriver is not exactly what I had in mind. I actually managed to open the case and free the button without causing major damage to the device. Shortly after, another shoulder button got stuck, and then the first one again. And if that wasn’t enough, the card slot eject mechanism also broke. All within one week. I really don’t feel like having to dismantle the device every two days just to play a game for a few minutes. Powkiddy mentioned that I could send the device back to China at my own expense and then get a refund - yeah, right. Never ever again! 😡

    • 👾 Speaking of retro gaming, while setting up the RGB30, I stumbled upon the pico-8 Fantasy Console and was immediately impressed. I wasn’t aware of the extent of this community. There are so many nice games, and almost all of them are free. You can play them on macOS, a variety of other operating systems, and even on retro handhelds. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s also the TIC-80. Oh boy!

    • 🖥️ During the Black Week, or whatever this discount rally is called, I made my way through the impressive list of over 400 apps for macOS and iOS in the Indie App Sales 2023. Fortunately, I already own the ones that interest me most and “only” bought three additional small apps this year:

    • Nevertheless, it’s an impressive list that also includes many Mastodon developer accounts that I didn’t know about before. Definitely worth looking into.

    • 🖥️ I also noticed the Apps campaign: 10 applications for you and your Mac. It really only lists great apps. And even though I use Moom, I’ve bought a single Mac license of Lasso and both play quite nicely together.

    • ⌨️ Launchbar, the launcher I’ve been using on macOS for almost 10 years, recently had noticeable delays when launching. It was impressive how my muscle memory was trained to expect to be able to perform actions immediately after pressing cmd+space. It was so bad, I took a look at Alfred and Raycast again, but thanks to the nightly build Version 6.18.5 nightly (6247), everything is back to how I’m used to it 😅

    • 😍 Oh, and definitely not to be left unmentioned is this insanely awesome App Defaults movement that Robb unintentionally kicked off and wonderfully shows off.

    • 👖 Furthermore, I enjoyed “the walkthrough explaining the inner workings of the ship that made the kessel run in less than 12 parsecs”, saved ASCIIFlow in my bookmarks, and pants whose pockets may not be worn out by the phone after a few months.

    ∞

    Indie App Sales 2023

    It feels like every day for weeks now is a special day and everything is and will be discounted. Oh, wouldn’t life be nice if things were just generally cheaper and my inbox was spared the flood of advertising? Anyway …

    There’s another Indie App Sale this year and there are now over 400 (!) programs listed for macOS and iOS. Fortunately, I already own the ones that interest me most and bought three additional apps this year:

    Nevertheless, it’s an impressive list that also includes many Mastodon developer accounts that I didn’t know about before. Definitely worth looking into.

    I also noticed the Apps campaign: 10 applications for you and your Mac. It really only lists great apps. And even though I use Moom, I’ve been dancing around Lasso for a long time, maybe I’ll buy it this time?

← Newer Posts Older Posts →