To all those who told me to just suck it up and buy iA Writer on the Mac, I think you are right. I’ve used the demo for a couple of hours and it has made me forget about MultiMarkdown Composer.
Australian Politics Is the Best
A fish kill of this scale from algal bloom is a serious issue.
I give full credit to Jeremy Buckingham for bringing it to our attention in this way.
2009 v 2019: Italy v Staycation. #10yearchallenge #2009vs2019
My Fastmail Account is not receiving calendar invitations sent to my custom domain from Google or iCloud. Office 365 invitations work. So far, I’ve been unimpressed with their support, which has gone downhill since my last experience. Am I going to have to change providers? 😫
I convinced my wife to use DEVONthink. 😳
Pi-Hole Really Is Fantastic
I’ve had Pi-Hole running on our home network for several months. It has been so reliable over this time that I have reached a point where I almost forget that it’s there.
Taking a belt and suspenders approach, I also use 1Blocker on Mac and iOS.
Phil Nunnally’s “Hotbrain” ➜
Sometimes, in meetings, I have to scribble down a non-work-related thought or question to hunt down later just to get it out of my head so I can pay attention to what’s going on in person.
Phil nails the exact problem I have right now, as I trial using The Brain, consider how it fits into my existing usage of DEVONthink Pro, and consider whether I persist with my Wiki.
If the Australian dollar wasn’t so weak against the US dollar right now, I’d probably just purchase The Brain to relieve myself from the cogitation.
Ask Micro.blog: Does anybody know of text editors that support the Dokuwiki syntax? I’ve found Textastic and nothing else - not even BBEdit or Atom.
Pursuant to my theme of fun I am having a great time mucking about with my wiki!
@twelvety Regarding your Plex server on Raspberry Pi, does yours connect to a NAS for the media? I’ve got a 3B+, but all my media is on an old QNAP NAS. I can’t figure out how to connect the Pi to the media drive over the network, so I have to keep Plex running on my MacBook.
2019 - Looking Ahead
I enjoy listening to the podcast, Cortex. CGP Grey approaches topics in a thoughtful way and Myke Hurley is a wonderful conversationalist. One of their tropes I enjoy is listening to them talk about their yearly ‘themes’. The two eschew New Year’s resolutions in favour of establishing a thematic target for their year ahead.
Over the last few years I have played along, although historically I have tended to arrive at a handful of areas of focus, as opposed to a single theme.
For 2019 I wanted to simplify and be guided by a a single theme myself — no excuses.
After some thought, I have determined that 2019 will be my “Year of Fun”.
In practical terms, this means that I want to find fun and enjoyment in everyday life. It doesn’t mean I’m going to engage party central each day of the week, but it does mean that I want to take a positive mindset into the day and find ways to maximise my enjoyment.
I will concentrate on doing things I enjoy. I will carve out time for hobbies and recreation. I will sneak turns with my son’s new Nintendo Switch. I will enjoy conversations with both my boys. Even the boring things, I will try to embrace with a positive approach. It might be difficult to make ironing fun, but at least I can try not get depressed about having to do it.
There’s no doubt that this year will be defined by what happens in my wife’s life. This will create familial stress. It will make the kids anxious. What’s the best defence against stress? Laughter. Find the fun! I can take a positive mindset into this adventure and realise that it’s a unique and interesting journey, that few people have the opportunity to experience. So I shall live it to the fullest.
Bonus Round
A further challenge I want to set myself, which is related to my year of fun, is to learn. I want to challenge my brain in new ways this year. I want to keep my grey matter in good order by pushing it to work through learning. I’m still thinking through some ideas as to what I want to set as my learning goals. I have a few ideas — nothing incredibly earth-shattering — that I think will be interesting to pursue.
How does learning relate to fun? It does because I think learning is fun. I like the feeling of having my mind enter a flow state, where it is engaged and concentrating on absorbing and synthesising new information.
It has been interesting to experiment with a constructing a personal wiki but I am sure that as a single user I am better served putting this information into DEVONthink. It is less fiddly and better able to bubble-up related information - but I can’t share the information. 🤔
After earlier discussion here on micro.blog I can report that I have paid for and switched to Castro for podcasts. I like its queue, but I don’t think its EQ is quite as good and I miss iPad support and multi-device sync. It looks great and operates well though.
Listening to @jack talk on the Micro Monday podcast about avoiding snow to date, while I sit by the resort pool. 😝
I got a couple of levels into Mario & Rabbids on the switch, before my son decided he needed to play.
Jack Baty's Wiki
Jack Baty is a great member of the Indieweb community. He continually tinkers with online tools and services. His latest experiment is in publishing a wiki - specifically a TiddlyWiki instance he has set up at Rudimentary Lathe.
Jack’s enthusiasm has inspired me to throw up my own wiki to play around with — even though I have a local installation of DEVONthink that does a perfectly fine job of capturing and managing my knowledge and notes.
I didn’t have a super quick and easy way to install TiddlyWiki on my web host, but I did have the option to one-click create a DokuWiki. So I’ve done that and published it at my domain.
Federated Wiki Is a Strange Beast ➜
After seeing a micro.blog post by Frank McPherson about the Federated Wiki, I took a look at it.
Created by Ward Cunningham, who happens to be the inventor of the original wiki, the Federated Wiki system appears designed with a more fluid, attractive front-end, supported by the concept that each author should host their own content, rather than relying on a central ‘owner’ of the content - who could go away and take your content with them.
I get the ideal, but I find the implementation confusing. Despite its allure, I don’t think this system is for me.
Summer sunshine. Out with @hannahbeazley4swan. Thanks for the hat, @yasmin_ivie
A quick test to ensure that in-line micro.blog names are working, thanks to @smokey.
I’m on a bit of a spirit quest to find my ideal Markdown editor on Mac. I’ve tried BBEdit, Typora, Multimarkdown Composer and Atom with plugins. What do others use?