Severance S2E01 was weird! Not that I should be surprised by that.

I’m playing around with Pixelfed. Have set up my account and posted a single photo.

Good Friends and Dead Websites

I’m really not qualified to own and manage a website. 🤷

In attempting to tweak a few things last night I broke everything. The site was down and dead. 💀

I was stuck. I couldn’t fix it. 😬

Enter my pal @Burk. While I slept in my Australian timezone, he worked to fix it in his US one. 🤖

Also enter micro.blog founder and owner @manton. He responded to my help email overnight and also worked on it like the internet greybeard wizard he is. 🧙‍♂️

I woke up and the site is back. 🔙

Thank you, friends, Jason and Manton. I’m fortunate to be connected to you both. 🙏

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Thanks for the tag, Gabz.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

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.

Who will participate next?

I would like to hear from Rach Smith and Scotty Jackson.

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?

Our @hemisphericviews with a Tight 45 on the button for 2024.

Kung Fury, 2015 - ★★★★

Funnier now than when I watched it on release.

Paddington in Peru, 2024 - ★★

Lacked the charm of the earlier two. Perhaps it was the different Director.

Robot Dreams, 2023 - ★★★½

Enjoy love where you find it and accept that things may change.

I had a foot massage today. I think it’s the first one I’ve ever had. It was nice - even the painful bits!

I See You, 2019 - ★★★

I chatted throughout, which might make it seem like I wasn’t into it, but I was into it! Although what has Helen Hunt done to her face?

My New Year’s resolution is not to change my PKM app stack for 12 months. OmniFocus plus Obsidian (work), DevonThink (home).

These are lovely words from Tim Klapdor about my podcast Hemispheric Views.

A Year in Podcasts:

Hemispheric Views:

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.

The Lighthouse, 2019 - ★★

What the fuck did I just watch?

House framed by a rainbow

It’s not everyday that you see a home perfectly framed by a rainbow.

Happy Birthday Booji!

9 years old today. My, how time flies!

Norwegians FTW

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.

Defaults (2024)

It has been more than a year since Episode 097 of my podcast Hemispheric Views, where we held a Duel of the Defaults! competition.

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.