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    ∞

    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?

    ∞

    App Defaults

    Shamelessly stolen from Robb  and inspired by Hemispheric Views 097 - Duel of the Defaults! here are all the apps I use in the various categories as written by Andrew:

    • Mail Client: Mail.app
    • Mail Server: iCloud with custom domain and posteo.net
    • Notes: Obsidian and some stuff left in Notes
    • To-Do: Reminders (and Things at work)
    • iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
    • Photo Management: Photos
    • Calendar: Calendar
    • Cloud file storage: iCloud Drive
    • RSS: Reeder
    • Contacts: Contacts
    • Browser: Safari
    • Chat: iMessage, Threema, WhatsApp
    • Bookmarks: Anybox
    • Read It Later: Readwise Reader
    • Word Processing: Pages (MS Word at work)
    • Spreadsheets: Numbers (MS Excel at work)
    • Presentations: Keynote
    • Shopping Lists: Pons
    • Meal Planning: Mela
    • Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB
    • News: Mastodon, tagesschau.de
    • Music: Apple Music
    • Podcasts: Overcast
    • Password Management: 1Password
    ∞

    MS Office Reset

    TIL that you can easily uninstall your entire MS Office package under #macOS with Office Reset (https://office-reset.com/), then download only the app(s) you need from the Mac Appstore and use your existing Office 365 subscription. I always thought you had to purchase a new one somehow via Apple IAP. Cool, now I’m rid of all that garbage MS AutoUpdater.

    ∞

    Here are a few things that caught my attention in week 35: week.esamecar.net/35

    Teaser: iOS and macOS stuff

    #weeknotes

    [Old gas station in Bonn, Germany, no longer operated as such.
    ∞

    How to use kagi search within Launchbar

    There is a kagi help document for Alfred and another one for Search Templates in Launchbar I used as a reference. It’s really easy to set up:

    1. In your Browser
      1. go to kagi.com / Settings / Account
      2. copy your Session Link
    2. Invoke Launchbar
      1. select Menu bar / Index / Show Index
      2. in Launchbar index go to Web / My Search Templates 1 -> add a new one
      3. paste your Session Link into the Template URL field
      4. append &q=%s
    3. done

    1. on my system it’s in German, but you’ll figure it out ↩︎

    ∞

    Indie Dev Sales

    So, the Indie Dev Sales for #macOS and #iOS apps is currently running. Here is what I

    bought

    already have

    consider

    • Personal Best – Workouts - wrote about my initial thoughts here; it’s not exactly what I was looking for but seems like a real bargain right now
    • Reading Time - still tempted to buy this, but it only works with page numbers and Readwise Reader does not provide them

    considered

    What apps are your favourites?

    ∞

    What I was interested in during the fourth week of 2023 (teaser: podcasts, iOS, macOS playdate)

    I still felt sickly, so I refrained from cycling. Hope that I get the curve then next week.

    • 🍿 Watched Raymond & Ray (2022) - ★★★★☆ and enjoyed it.
    • 🎙️ Listend to a bunch of different Podcasts:
    • 🎙️ This was my first episode of Launched. It was a rather intimate podcast. And both the developers of the Darknoise app and Sofa seem to be very nice people. After what they said about software subscriptions, I’m afraid that sooner or later all apps will have to switch to the subscription model. I personally don’t like that, but if there’s no other way for indie developers, you probably have to think about what you’re willing to spend per year and then keep an eye on your subscriptions, e.g. with Bobby, and limit them accordingly.
    • 🛋️ Speaking of Sofa. I really like the app, but I think I’ll try to stay away from software and services where it’s not possible to get your data out again with open standards, an API or at least an RSS feed.
    • 🫰 Speaking of subscriptions, after all this back and forth, I cancelled my Strava subscription. I’ll see if I can enjoy cycling without all their pro features.
    • 🚴‍♂️ Speaking of (I know, I know …) cycling, once again I have felt annoyed, no, threatened by SUV drivers. I really don’t know where all this is going. Fittingly, the post about the size of cars.
    • 🐘 I had a look at Tusker, a new iOS Mastodon client. It’s still fun to see all these many ideas for Mastodon clients. There hasn’t been so much dynamism in the scene for a long time. Even though IceCube gets a lot of praise, I keep coming back to Ivory, which was finally released in the App Store this week. You can only have missed it, though, if you’ve been living under a rock. Even though I find the development speed of IceCube absolutely remarkable and the app is certainly one of the most impressive in terms of features, I am still bothered by the many small bugs and especially the bad scrolling performance. (I think SwiftUI might be the one to blame here.) Ivory, on the other hand, is really fast and performant. The great thing is that you can change at any time.
    • 🕹️ I’ve played the two new playdate games that were released for me this week: Flipper Lifter and Echoic Memory. I am really bad at audio and don’t know if I enjoy Echoic Memory and I haven’t found any access to Flipper Lifter yet. In general, with some playdate games, I sometimes feel like I don’t really understand the mechanics of the game, and just do anything that will somehow get me to the goal. I sometimes wish the games would introduce you a little more and not leave you completely out in the cold.
    • 🕹️ In the end, everything was overshadowed by the fact that my playdate probably has a faulty battery. I have, surprisingly unexpectedly, received an answer from Cabel, but unfortunately not yet from support. They seem to be quite overwhelmed by support requests right now.
    • 📱 On iOS, I looked at Countdown to Anything! but I think I’ll stick with Countdowns.
    • 📱 This screenshot of Jason’s homescreen inspired me to tinker a little bit with Widgy. I also bought Opener, don’t know why 😇
    • 💻 On the Mac, I’ve been looking at the new Arc browser, which is kind of hyped right now. I really don’t know why though. I have a bit of a suspicion that it might just be the invite system. To me, the browser seems extremely sluggish. My password management and Apple Pay don’t work, which is probably not the browser’s fault. It’s too early to judge, but so far I always go back to Safari after a short time.
    • 💻 It came to my mind, that you can use Markdown links of hooked items together with One Thing, an App that I really enjoy. It gives you one click menu bar item to the one file you are just working on.
    • 💻 I had a look at HiDock, for Mac and Lasso - Window Manager for macOS.
    • 💻 Thanks to Matthew I became aware of Menubar X (Setapp). This works pretty well together with DeepL / DeepL Write and elk.zone.
    • ✅ I’ve moved all my todo item for work from OmniFocus to Apple’s Reminders app. I want to see if I can separate them enough thanks to smart lists and tags. The only thing I miss so far is the ability to filter by focus modes, like it is possible with Calendars, etc. Only Apple knows why this is not possible yet, I guess.
    • ❤️ Thanks to Faisal Misle, I now also know that you can publish to the omg.lol weblog via github. I have no idea about all these things, but thanks to the many great tutorials, even I managed to do it. Speaking of omg.lol and how clueless I am about all this internet stuff, I managed to change my status.log via the API, again thanks to the awesome docs. I control this with a Shortcuts shortcut and can trigger it from my Stream Deck and Keyboard Maestro. You can do so many funny things with this 🥰

    🙋‍♂️

    PS: I’ve also posted my thoughts on the first, second and third weeks.

    ∞

    If I got 1 € for every bug, I would be ...

    2023-02-17

    Security Contacts (iOS 16.3.1)

    I am quite sure, that I did not add my security contact on 01.01.1970.

    Security Contact was added on 01.01.1970

    Screen Time and Messages (macOS 13.2.1)

    Screen Time for children is completely broken. And the feature to receive requests via Messages.app renders the app useless on macOS.

    Broken Messages App trying to show Screen Time requests Messages quit unexpactedly

    2023-02-08

    Mail (macOS 13.2)

    My smart folder with the rule to only show unread emails shows a couple of read emails.

    Apple Mail displays read e-mails it shouldn't.

    2023-02-04

    macOS Ventura 13.2

    After a reboot my System decided to present an empty list of apps granted Accessibility access. Normally there are about 20 applications listed. I then immediately received countless warnings from various apps (Hookmark, CleanShot X, Typinator, etc.) that they would no longer work. Only after another restart the list was back, all apps were ticked, so they should have access - but they did not. I had to switch all the switches off and on again manually.

    Default Folder X complains about revoked access rights.

    macOS Ventura 13.2

    After each restart Ventura tells me again that background objects have been added - EVERY TIME.

    macOS warning about background tasks

    2023-02-02

    Find My / Wo ist? (iOS 16.3)

    These mentioned AirPods, that are “moving with me” are my own! 🤦‍♂️

    iOS alert stating that some AirPods are moving with me

    Messages (macOS 13.2)

    It would be too easy if I could just approve the request. (Instead it loads forever).

    Forerver loading indicater "Bildschirmzeit"

    2023-01-31

    Shortcuts (iOS 16.3)

    This is for sure not how a context click in shortcuts should behave.

    Shortcuts app iOS four times invoking the context menu of a media selector to get variables shown.

    2023-01-30

    iPad Lockscreen (iPadOS 16.3)

    This time it was my iPad that I had to reboot, because scrolling up to unlock it did not work.

    Reminders (macOS 13.1)

    Why is the text in the field shortened, there is so much free space.

    Shortened filter bubble in Apple's Reminders App

    2023-01-26

    Apple Mail / Account Aliases stopped working (iCloud)

    Okay, this is a bummer. I have just discovered that none of my Apple iCloud email aliases are working. Now the question: why and since when? I’d rather not know how many emails I’ve missed because of this. 🤯 At least, I think, I’ve resolved the issue: Under icloud.com / Mail / Settings / Accounts I’ve disabled the Alias addresses, filled in Fullname and Label, renabled the Account alias and now it’s working again.

    2023-01-25

    Apple Mail (macOS 13.1)

    Of course, it would be nice if Apple Mail would also show me my emails.

    Screenshot of Apple Mail not showing the selected mail.

    Home Screen (iOS 16.2)

    Ah, not only does the lock screen not want to show widgets all the time, the (Files.app) widget on the home screen can also be empty.

    Screenshot iOS home screen with blank Files.app widget

    App Store (iOS 16.2)

    Why not give us even more sorting options for subscriptions? Would be very easy to implement as they do nothing.

    Screenshot iOS App Store - sorting option in subscriptions list not working

    2023-01-19

    Lockscreen (iOS 16.2)

    There might be missing something, isn’t it? 🤔

    iOS lockscreen with blank widgets

    Calendar deletion bug (iOS 16.2)

    Deletion of an entry from the search entry does not clear the deleted item from the list.

    Calender deletion bug deleting entry

    2023-01-18

    App Store (iOS 16.2)

    Going back from the detail screen of a subscription and swiping up or down does not scroll the subscriptions in the list but the modal view.

    Animated Gif showing a scroll bug in App Store subscriptions

    Springboard (iOS 16.2)

    Not able to go back to the springboard. Swiping upwards is refused.

    Animated Gif showing swipe up to go back to homescreen not working

    2023-01-17

    Xcode CLI tools

    So, I wanted to install an App via brew. It told me that I don’t have Xcode CLI tools installed and asked me to do so. I already had but, yeah, anyhow, I did it via the given shell command … A few minutes later macOS tells me that there a two updates available.

    Screenshot Updates available - CLI Tools Xcode

    WTF? Why two versions? And why an update anyways, I just downloaded them directly from Apple?

    Shortcuts

    The Apple Shortcuts App constantly gets out of sync between my MacBook and my iPhone. Thanks!

    Reminders

    Why does adding reminders via Siri work without any problems under iOS and exactly the same request via Siri under macOS leads to absolutely pointless queries and error messages (at least when set to GER)? WTF?

    ∞

    What I have done in the second week of 2023 (teaser: playdate, macOS apps, podcasts, movie)

    After all, this is the second time this year that I’ve managed to write down a bit what has been keeping me busy during the week. 🥳

    • 😔 So, this was my first week at work and thus, unfortunately, again far too little time for things I really enjoy. (I’ll have to think about my work situation in great detail at some point).
    • 🕹 Playdate: After the two pre-installed games on my playdate, the first two new games included in Episode 1 arrived for me on Monday: Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure and Boogie Loops. Unfortunately, I’m completely musically untalented, so I haven’t looked at Boogie Loops yet, but I despair of Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. As a now completely inexperienced player, I fail grandiosely at this game. For me it is extremely difficult. I just got to level 20 and I was told that there must be 50 levels. Another game on the list of games I will never play through. Bloom meanders along. I find it a bit of a pity that in the dialogues there are really only the same statements available, each worded a little differently. I don’t feel that you can really influence the story. I’m not 100% sure if I would buy the game again. I had a quick look at EYELAND. However, it doesn’t support savegames and so far I haven’t felt like trying to tackle it in one go.
    • 🎧 Podcasts: Despite the ones I regularly listen to (ATP, The Talk Show, Automators, Connected, Techmeme Ride Home) and due to my recent interest in micro.blog and omg.lol, I stumbled upon Hemispheric Views by Andrew Canion, Jason Burk, and Martin Feld as well as Core Intuition by Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut.
    • 📔 I’ve written a follow up post to my short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like: Even more macOS apps I enjoy using 😎
    • 🍿 I’ve watched Avatar: The Way of Water in the cinema with my family. Bombastic, sure, but - as expected - completely irrelevant and above all predictable plot. Still, I didn’t regret going to the cinema again.
    • 📺 Together with my wife I finished watching the third season of For All Mankind. I think I liked it better than the second and I’m looking forward to the fourth.
    • 🤓 Because of omg.lol , I tried to understand IRC. It’s been a long time since I was on it. It felt like back in the Amiga days. I’ve installed irssi via Homebrew, was able to connect, but failed with its operation. I’ll have to look at it again some other time. Even though I am not a fan of, I understand very well why Discord etc. have become famous 🤦‍♂️
    • 🍩 I’ve 3Dprinted some small things, primarily for household or work purposes, such as an iPad Stand, to use it as a second monitor at work and a tea bag drainer. And of course things for my AnkerMake M5 itself, like Spare Parts Box and Accessory Bins. (I was already afraid that this is another hobby that is only concerned with itself. In other words, you do things with it that you only do because you now have this thing that does things … You understand me.)
    • 🤯 For me, I still haven’t been able to conclusively determine on which platform I want to follow whom and where I want to post something and how. The interoperability of the fedivers (micro.blog <-> mastodon together with RSS etc.) is ingenious, but it also leads to a lot of friction and redundancy at least for me. I definitely need to get better at this. In all the experimenting I’ve been doing over the last few days, I’ve often had the problem of finding the exact URL of an RSS feed. To achive this via Reeder or similar was too cumbersome for me and the times when the browser I use simply displayed the feeds prominently are also long gone. I have therefore created an iOS/macOS shortcuts. I’m not good at it, but it does the job I hope.
    • 👨‍💻 Oh, I almost forgot. The battery on my private Intel MacBook Pro was dead. I had it replaced. It cost me € 229 - not exactly cheap. But the whole thing, including sending it in (to the Czech Republic, repair and return) took less than three days 👏. However, I got a new top case with a new keyboard etc., which probably wasn’t a bad idea for that model. Since it had already been in use for several years, I decided to completely rebuild it. I would have preferred to save myself the experience. So many little macOS (iCloud) bugs in the process really annoyed me and the new system settings are hell.

    🙋‍♂️

    ∞

    Even more macOS apps I enjoy using.

    Sure, shortly after I’ve published the short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like it came to my mind, that I forgot the most important ones. But hey, I never claimed it was an exhaustive list 😇 So, I’ll just continue and list randomly some more apps, I enjoy using:

    • Mela: “Mela is a simple, elegant and modern recipe manager that syncs with iCloud." I recently switched from Paprika, which is also a very good recipe manager. But I do prefer the app from Silvio Rizzi (Mastodon/rizzi@gloria.social) because of its more modern design and the build in recipe RSS feature 👨‍🍳. RSS is something Silvio knows a lot about, as he is also responsible for my RSS reader of choice:
    • Reeder: “Keep control of your news reading with Reeder, RSS reader and read later client in one app, now with support for iCloud syncing." Of course there is a bunch of other RSS readers 📰. If I had to switch, I would probably go with NetNewsWire.
    • Dropover: “Dropover is a macOS utility that makes Drag and Drop easier. Stash, gather or move draggable content without having to open side-by-side windows." Before I’ve stumbled upon Dropover I’ve used Yoink for years (Setapp). I do like both apps. With the former, you don’t always have to wander 🖱️ all the way to the edge of the screen to drop files. I kind of liked that. Yoink also has a counterpart for iOS.
    • Soulver: “Soulver is a notepad calculator app for Mac. It’s a notepad that gives instant answers to calculations in your text." Soulver is also such a macOS classic. Since version 3, the Mac app is unfortunately no longer compatible with the iOS version and I have a little impression that the developer has lost a little desire 🥱. But nevertheless, it’s a great tool. [Update 19.01.2023: I have learned, that the iOS version has been discontinued but instead the Mac version is now on Setapp.
    • Money Money: “Alle Bankkonten im Blick mit MoneyMoney." Okay, Money Money is specific to the German market. But if you have a bank account there and don’t want to deal with the web interface of your bank 🏦, Money Money is a great choice. The app only costs money once and I don’t remember ever being asked to pay for an update. (That scares me a little bit, I have to admit).
    • Day One: “Day One is a journaling app for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One’s elegant interface makes journaling your life a simple pleasure." My first entry 📔 dates back to 2012, and I have ~10 k entries saved in there. I think that says it all 😄 I do pipe a lot of stuff to Day One with the help of ifttt.
    • Bartender 4: “Bartender is an award-winning app for macOS that superpowers your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what’s displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them." I run a lot of menu bar apps. Therefore this app (Setapp) is indispensable for me on my 13” MacBook 💻. Speaking of menu bar apps:
    • Coca: “Coca is a tiny app that puts an icon in your menu bar. Right-click the icon to prevent your system from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers." Very handy in certain circumstances, e.g. you want that backup / download to finish over night etc. There are lots of similar apps, like Amphetamine or Caffeine ☕.
    • AirBuddy: “Take Control of Your Wireless Devices on macOS." If you own Air Pods 🎧 and want to switch from iPhone to Mac, have a look at this utility (Setapp). And speaking of music:
    • NepTunes: “A desktop accessory that allows you to see and control your music (Apple Music, Spotify) with customizable shortcuts, advanced Last.fm support and beautiful themes." Any nice app that results in me having to open Apple’s music 🎵 app less often is a win.
    ∞

    A short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like

    Here is a short list of apps I use a lot under macOS privately (so not only work related) or I have recently discovered and think I’ll stick with them.

    • Bunch: Bunch describes itself as “a macOS utility that uses plain text scripts called “Bunches” to automate context switching. It sits in your menu […]. Bunches can open apps, specific files, web pages, and more. For the Power Users, It also allows advanced scripting, system commands, and integration via a URL handler”. It’s free to download, developed by Brett Terpstra. I switched from Workspaces by Apptorium, which has a much more sophisticated visual concept. I also like the app very much and is also available via Setapp.

    • Typinator: “Enter words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs by typing just a few characters. Save time for the really important things in life." If I use a Mac without Typinator installed, I can hardly operate it. Therefore, it is one of the first programmes I add. (The second one is 1Password, but if I would start from scratch I would try to use the new build in password manager of macOS / iOS.) Many use Textexpander, but I feel more comfortable without a subscription model.

    • Raycast: “Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more." Before I discovered Raycast, I’ve used Launchbar for over 15 years. It was one of these apps I would have taken with me to an lonely island. Other apps like Alfred did not stick with me. I still like Launchbar a lot but enjoy the I am currently enjoying the immense expandability and dynamic development of Raycast. Right now Raycast made even my beloved window manager Moom obsolete.

    • Craft: “Create documents, make impact." I really enjoyed using Craft for some time. But actually I think, I should not use another note silo and try to achieve what I want with Apple Notes. Nevertheless, the app is very comprehensive, cross platform and easy to begin with. If you have a Setapp subscription, you should definitely check it out. (At this point, of course, Obsidian and Notion must also be mentioned, but neither of which I use in a private context so far.)

    • Anybox: “Manage bookmarks like a pro. A perfect replacement for your browser’s bookmark manager." I have never been able to make friends with Safari’s bookmark management and used to use various services, including del.icio.us. Then I migrated to pinboard.in, and in the meantime I only used it sporadically. Pins, a very good iOS / macOS pinboard client by Anh Do, motivated me again to use pinboard more extensively. But recently my use declined rapidly again - I don’t know exactly why. I didn’t like well-known alternatives like raindrop.io and then Anybox came along. It’s available for macOS and iOS and more or less saves everthing but I use it solely as a bookmark manager. I’m actually very happy with it, although I’m curious to see whether the developer of pins can motivate me to switch again with his new app Interlink. (I hardly know why I save my bookmarks in the first place. Most of the time I look them up again using a search engine anyway.)

    • CleanShot X: “Capture your Mac’s screen like a pro." Before I stumbled across CleanShot X, I used the native screenshot function of macOS, which is also quite extensive. In addition I used OwlOCR. A utility that allows you to capture areas of the screen and then copy the text contained therein directly to the clipboard. (Textsniper is also often recommended, but I liked the pricing and the support of OwlOCR much better. BTW Textsniper is on Setapp.) I use this function daily and frequently. I would not want to do without it any more. In the meantime, on the latest version of macOS it is possible to extract text with board tools, at least in photos and I think also in other apps, but I have become so used to cmd+shift+2 (my assigned shortcut) that I no longer want to do without it. What does all this have to do with CleanShot? This function is also implemented and so much more. Also available via Setapp.

    • Rocket: “Mind-blowing emoji on your Mac." I really enjoy using this emoji picker. Tried using the one from Recast but went back to Rocket.

    • Quitall: “Before you Force Quit, QuitAll. A fresh start without a restart." If it wasn’t included in my Setapp subscription I probably would not have bought it. I know it’s a bad habit under macOS to quit apps but sometimes I have so many of them open, that I prefer a fresh start. That’s were Quintal comes into play.

    • Hookmark: “Search Less. Focus more." If you haven’t heart of Hookmark yet, go and check it out. It’s really awesome and I wish something like this was build directly into macOS. You can more or less interlink everything. Also available via Setapp.

    • And of course there are some productivity apps I mainly use for work Dash, DevonThink, Default Folder X, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel and ChronoSync. Maybe I’ll write a little more about them later.

    • Oh, I would have forgotten about CCC: “CCC does everything you wish Time Machine did (and more!)" Buy it, use it! (Or SuperDuper! I don’t care 😎)

    Update: even more apps …

    ∞

    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. ↩︎

    ∞

    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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