I think I might try ditching Fantastical in favour of the stock calendar app on iOS. I’m fed up with Fantastical not supporting travel time, and by using Drafts I should still be able to add events using natural language.

I’m having to upgrade to the 2Tb iCloud tier for our family. My wife takes too many photos!

Read-it-Later with...

I’ve used Instapaper relatively consistently since Marco Arment introduced it. Was that a decade ago now?

Occasionally I’ve stopped using it, or toyed with other services like Pocket, or Safari’s Reading List feature. In the end, however, I’ve always gone back to Instapaper.

Despite that usage, I’ve never been interested in any of the service’s ‘power user’ features. They’ve always felt disjointed from my larger workflows. My Instapaper history is an island of data that is unconnected from my other information, which is primarily kept in DEVONthink.

The End of Instapaper

At this point, I’m giving up on Instapaper. The finally nail in the coffin was the realisation of just how hard it was to get my data out of Instapaper. The RSS feed it provides is truncated, and links back to the Instapaper version and not the original article. So all my reading was excised from all my knowledge held in DEVONthink.

Fortunately, DEVONthink makes available a script that works in version 2.x (and not yet beta 3.0) that is able to create PDF versions of an Instapaper archive, using a CSV list of links available from Instapaper.

I was able to run this last night. It took about 3 hours to pull down over 2,000 articles. Now, these all exist within DEVONthink.

This experience has convinced me that I need a better way to manage my reading list such that I keep available my archive for more immediate use.

The Benefits

If this new process works, the benefits will be:

  1. One less app/service to deal with.
  2. Ubiquitous access via system-level extensions.
  3. An integrated corpus of information that can be better leveraged for future purposes.

Finding a Better Read-It-Later Workflow

My new workflow is still a work-in-progress.

I am going back to basics and plan to use Safari’s in-built Reading List feature. This has the benefit of being universally available across all Apple platforms. This will serve as my queue. From there I can push articles deemed worthy of keeping to DEVONthink for long-term archival.

Safari’s Reading List, combined with its Reader view, should be sufficient enough for most purposes. It doesn’t work offline, which was a key feature of Instapaper… but let’s be realistic. When am I ever offline?

When importing to DEVONthink I will most likely save it as a clutter-free web archive or Markdown. I can do this using the share sheet on iOS and the DEVONthink clipper/share extension with macOS.

DEVONthink 3 (currently in beta) offers a simple ‘Reading List’ feature similar to Safari’s, but it seems a bit underwhelming at this stage. The iOS version is older and doesn’t have this feature at all. It is unlikely that I will adopt this element into my workflow at this time.

Breaking Down the Steps

So, in summary, these are the workflow steps:

  1. Identify article at source generally through Safari or Fiery Feeds.
  2. Push the article to the system-level Safari Reading List.
  3. Read the article in Safari, optionally using Reader View.
  4. Capture article into DEVONthink using the share sheet, share extension/browser extension/clipper.
  5. Leverage DEVONthink’s ‘Groups’ feature to save the article to the correct location and the ‘See Also’ feature to find similar information.

Ctrl-Cmd-G has to be about the best feature in the new version 3 of DEVONthink. It’s the equivalent of Cmd-O in OmniFocus.

I updated the details of my technology stack.

I was just able to successfully extract over 2000 articles from Instapaper into DevonThink using an AppleScript. Now I can search and leverage my reading history. I’m going to cease using Instapaper now, and consolidate around DevonThink.

Microsoft says mandatory password changing is “ancient and obsolete”

Via Ars Technica:

Microsoft said it was removing periodic password changes from the security baseline settings it recommends for customers and auditors. After decades of Microsoft recommending passwords be changed regularly, Microsoft employee Aaron Margosis said the requirement is an “ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value.”

I use 1Password to reduce my own security risk by allowing it to automatically generate random passwords as required, but I’m not most people.

It’s good to see one of the industry giants admitting to the risks posed by security theatre and changing its best-practice recommendations for password management.

I have ploughed hours of time into Zelda and I still feel that I’m only just scratching the surface.

Getting Back in the Swing

It’s not particularly easy getting into the swing of work after an extended absence. Today is my first day with my legs back under the desk after enjoying an extended break.

This is a time of reacquainting myself with things. Picking up projects and tasks that have laid idle for some time, waiting for my return. Checking in on others and hoping that progress has been made in my absence.

This first day back has not been productive in the sense that tangible and visible work has not been completed. Nevertheless, it’s given me a chance to refamiliarise myself with the job. I’ve got some fresh perspectives on how I want to do the work, so I’ve been able to think on how those might be incorporated.

Of course, I’ve also had that lovely job of reading through hundreds of emails that have built up. Fortunately, with the help of Sanebox, my inbox had been automatically sorted into groups ranging from ‘totally useless’, through ‘probably not useful’ ending in ‘aged, but still probably worth reading’. This made me email triage job quick and easy. At the same time, I was able to unsubscribe from some mail that was clearly junk.

So, today is the day where my engine has been started, and left to idle gently while it warms up. Over the next couple of days, I would expect I might be able to get out of the driveway. We shall see.

I dislike my current home screen.

Beautiful weather for my first time at Perth’s new stadium. This place is magnificent.

Discovering the thrill of books.

How Differential Gears Work

Watching things like this remind how little I know.

Drafts for Link Posts

canion.me

I’ve been noodling around trying to figure out the most effective way to write and publish onto this Blot-powered page, especially from iOS, but also recognising that I do also use macOS.

The answer is always Drafts, isn’t it? That app that I keep trying to incorporate into my workflow, and then keep forgetting about.

Thanks to @vasta and galexa I should be able to develop a better/faster/more efficient process.

In fact, this post has been written in Drafts, utilising its share sheet extension as suggested.

Link Posts and Blot

I’ve been noodling around trying to figure out the most effective way to write and publish onto this Blot-powered page, especially from iOS, but also recognising that I do also use macOS.

This is theoretically easy, since Blot just needs a file to exist in a Dropbox folder. Where I’ve found some problems, though, is in the production of link blog posts. Recent experimentation on my other blog using MarsEdit and its lovely Safari extension for the creation of link posts has made me more frustrated with my current workflow for link posts here on Blot.

While a work in progress, this is the process I have developed to ‘simplify’ publishing a link post:

  1. Write the file in Notebooks app. Invoke a TextExpander .link shortcut to prepare the file metadata and paste the contents of a clipboard (that would contain the URL of the page to be shared) into a prepared Markdownified URL.
  2. Rename the automatically generated filename to one suitable name for Dropbox. Consider use of TextExpander .ds shortcut.
  3. Copy and paste/drag and drop quoted content from original webpage.
  4. Add additional commentary.
  5. Invoke the share sheet and select a Siri Shortcut.
  6. Choose the Blot Post shortcut.
  7. Select where within my Dropbox Blot structure to save the file.

Not as seamless as a Safari extension, but probably easier than what I’ve been doing to date. If anybody can suggest improvements, I’m all ears.

The Steep Drop in Britain’s Coal Usage

The Steep Drop in Britain’s Coal Usage:

In Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, no coal has been used to produce power for the last 11 days.

Coal is on the decline. This is market forces at work, not simply ideology.

Seven West Media Buys Remaining Stake in Community Newspaper Group in Wa ➜

Print and television giant Seven West Media has taken control of Community Newspaper Group in a deal that gives the company increased control over the West Australian media landscape, but has brought fears more jobs could be lost.

The deal brings several of Perth’s major suburban newspapers under the same company that owns The West Australian and Sunday Times newspapers, and top-rating TV news destination Seven News.

Well, this is depressing. As if our local media scene was not already enough of a monoculture.

I’ve spent the last few days in Albany, in the southwest of Western Australia. I haven’t been here for years. I had a memory of loving it, and I can confirm I do love it.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction:

Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”

This article provides an interesting insight into the value that reading can offer the mind; how it can engage in a way that the shallows of the internet’s social platforms cannot (and will not, because they’re optimised for engagement, not consideration).

Misanthropic Me

How can so many watch and enjoy inane, superficial television shows? Why does the population focus more on sporting events than geopolitical disasters? Why is consumerism celebrated and the rise of social media ‘influencers’ followed with such passion?

I feel as though our civilisation is being incessantly dumbed down. Our attention is the commodity that every company, every ‘influencer’, every entertainment option wants to attract, and competition is fierce. Rather than recognise the value of our attention, we seem willing to give it away for little to nothing in return. I would like for us elevate ourselves and dedicate our focus and attention on things of genuine importance. Yet we prefer being closeted by the warm embrace of ignorance, simplification and superficiality.

It’s tempting to resign myself as a misfit within our society. To disconnect from others. To adopt a misanthropic view of the world. To think about ways in which I might step out of the society in which I find myself.

This, however, would be the choice of weakness on my behalf. Instead, I need to dig in and find ways to stay interested in the world. I need to find others who are similarly frustrated by the banality of everyday life and engage intelligently with them. I need to find outlets of interest that will help me cope with the frustration of being part of a society, swathes of which I don’t identify with nor understand.