It is so long ago, it’s hard to remember why. Was there even a why? I was a nerd interested in technology, and blogs were the hot new thing. There was a cool platform called Movable Type and I wanted to try it out. So I started a blog. This was all a very long time ago.
My blog varies between a diary, an opinion platform, a software review centre and a place to dump thoughts, photos, audio and video. A blog in incredibly versatile!
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
I use micro.blog and I can’t picture myself moving away from that platform for the foreseeable future, even though my friend Adam is building a cool new thing called Neato, and my friend Vincent has Scribbles. For my purposes, micro.blog is perfect.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I’ve used Wordpress, Blot and Movable Type.
How do you write your posts?
However I feel like it. Sometimes I use the micro.blog app. Right now I’m drafting this in Paper. I might use iA Writer or Ulysses or MarsEdit. I might use Drafts. That’s the beauty of Markdown. It doesn’t matter what I use and I can bounce between them freely. I love that.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I love all my children the same.
Looking at what my readers like, my Duel of the Defaults post that stemmed from the viral podcast sensation which was Episode 097 of Hemispheric Views is clearly the favourite with 2,464 views over the lifetime of me tracking stats with Tinylytics. That one page accounts for 16.7% of all my website traffic.
Any future plans for the blog?
Nothing really. I haven’t changed anything for quite a while. It’s doing its job and I’m okay with that.
I couldn’t be bothered walking back from the pub where I had dinner.
My 9-year old is asking how consoles work. This is testing my ability to teach computing hardware principles based on my knowledge that was established 30 years ago. Do I still talk CPU, GPU, RAM/ROM? HDD v SSD?
This is the only “guys having a chat” podcast in my feed. I really enjoy the dynamic of these guys and the community they’ve built around them. Recommend: The Battle of the Defaults and the App Defaults craze it created is a great place to start.
Norwegians are the best. Listeners of Hemispheric Views will already know of the esteem in which I hold fürstenberg; who is essentially Norwegian me. We have many similarities across our respective histories; it’s quite fun!
Now, I’ve got another Norwegian to thank: Erland. I discovered Erland through Mastodon, I think. Although he also has a micro.blog site, so it could have been there. Like myself, Erland also seems to have an interest in notetaking apps, and his favourite is Paper. He wrote a wonderful review of it.
I’ve looked at Paper in the past, but the sheer cost of the app prevented me from trying it. I have so many Markdown notetaking apps, I simply couldn’t justify buying another, no matter how nice it may be.
Now, though, thanks to the kindness of Erland from Norway, I am typing this blog post in Paper, as a way of testing. I’m using the Mac app now, but I also have the iOS version. How? Erland provided me with codes for the apps! This came about as we had a little discussion on Mastodon (still my favourite social network) about our notetaking app preferences. Typewriter mode was one such nicety, and I see that Paper offers that very feature. I have enabled it now, and it is very lovely—especially the slightly delayed scroll on each carriage return.
This blog post is the first thing I’ve written in Paper. I’m about to go back and add links and stuff. I’m using my new MacBook Pro which is lovely, but I haven’t yet installed Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink tool to automate link insertion, so we will see how Paper handles this next process.
The takeaway from this blog post? Firstly, Paper is a new app I’m trying. The main point though? Norwegians are great! I must visit sometime.
Others have been updating their lists, one year on.
It seems appropriate that I should do the same.
If there is a change from my list last year, I’ve indicated it with a leading ✨.
Change?
Category
Default
Comment on Change
✨
Mail Client
FMail2 & Apple Mail
Back to FMail2 app & no more MailMate
Mail Server
Fastmail & Apple Mail
✨
Notes
Obsidian for Work; Apple Notes for Home
Different apps for different contexts
To-Do
OmniFocus
iPhone Photo Shooting
Camera.app
Photo Management
Photos.app
Calendar
BusyCal (plus Calendar.app)
Cloud file storage
iCloud (plus OneDrive)
RSS
Reeder with FreshRSS
Contacts
Contacts.app
✨
Browser
Vivaldi (plus Safari)
Vivaldi is great, and Arc has been deprecated by the developer
Chat
Signal
Bookmarks
GoodLinks
✨
Read It Later
GoodLinks
I hardly read later anymore
Word Processing
Pages
Spreadsheets
Numbers (plus Excel)
Presentations
Keynote
Shopping Lists
AnyList
Meal Planning
AnyList
✨
Budgeting & Personal Finance
Actual Budget on PikaPods
YNAB became overpriced
News
Apple News (plus ABC RSS feed)
Music
Apple Music (plus Spotify)
I have access to a Spotify account for variety, now
✨
Podcasts
PocketCasts
I left Overcast after the disastrous rewrite
Six changes out of 23 categories. 26% of the apps have been changed. Yikes.
I’ve re-established the Pi-Hole on the home network. Ads be gone.
My crappy Dell monitor has died. Long live the crappy Lenovo monitor that shall replace it!
I’ve turned on cross-posting from my micro.blog account to my bluesky one. Not sure I’ll keep it, but may as well give it a try.
Notetaking app update: my experiment with Notebooks.app is over and I’m back to DevonThink, and for work, I’ve bought a month’s subscription to Obsidian Sync and will likely get it for a year.
