I ain’t got no time for this new bloated Dropbox garbage. I don’t use Dropbox for that much already - might be time to let it go. The one thing I will need to figure out though is how to publish to @blot with Github.

I feel emotionally drained after watching Bob Hawke’s memorial service. What a magnificent Prime Minister he was for our nation. I’m honoured to at least say that I met him a number of times.

I’ve borrowed a book from the public library, this copy of which has not been borrowed by anybody before me. It feels wonderfully decadent to have access to a brand new book for free. 📚

Hanging out with the kid.

I’m trialling DevonThink 3 beta, and the side bar workflow is weird. I know what they were trying to do in terms of making it more like Mail, but the new structure has made me much less efficient.

Getting SSL encryption on micro.blog was a heck of lot easier than with my previous hosting provider. I’m feeling pretty good about this transition.

It seems like my reconfigured web services are working. Homepage at andrewcanion.com and blog with micro.blog. Micro.blog for the win!

I’ve just signed up for a paid micro.blog account and this is my first post to it. I think this could be the way out of my Wordpress quagmire.

DNS reconfiguration tasks are the purgatory of the Internet.

@brentsimmons NetNewsWire is great, thanks for bringing it back to life. I understand why Feedly is next on the sync list, but can I request Inoreader support after that?

I’m proud of myself - I just debugged somebody else’s Javascript code, and I’m not even a programmer. Now it works as intended.

@jamesshelley I am checking in with you as I have enjoyed your writing in the past. Your website now seems in some bit of disrepair. I hope you are still out there and doing well.

@joejenett I think I fixed it with the help of this resource - so this post is a test!

Uber’s Path of Destruction - American Affairs Journal

Uber’s Path of Destruction - American Affairs Journal:

Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic reality.

An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply much higher than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate.

Enjoy the Uber ride while it lasts because at this rate the service won't be around in the future. Ultimately, the tune will stop playing on this game of musical chairs.

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.