I only gave up on Facebook last week but I’ve missed it not a bit and have recovered time that is being put to better use. www.theverge.com

Man about town.

“If they hadn’t provided me with a ☕️ stat, I was prepared to blow the joint up.”

Just updated my /now page.

Selfie fun in the city.

Makers vs. Managers discussed at Farnam Street Blog. I’m predominantly a maker, and those long time blocks needed to reach deep focus are critical and generally under-appreciated by others.

I’ve bought Braintoss for iOS as an adjunct to OmniFocus. I just discovered the ISBN search it offers: take a photo of an ISBN and it provides you an email with the name and synopsis of the book. Pretty cool!

I just deactivated my Facebook account. Just so sick of the combination of junk and negativity. I don’t need that.

I’ve been a FastMail customer for almost a year. Now I’m finally transferring contacts sync to them and shutting down iCloud contacts sync.

I had a sandwich for breakfast, a steak for lunch, and now I’m eating cereal for dinner. The whole world has gone topsy-turvy.

Date night so we went to see Thor Ragnarok. I had no expectations going in and knew nothing of it having not seen any Marvel movies for a while. But I’m giving it 👍🏻👍🏻 up.

Early into this book recommended by @manton but so far I’m enjoying the thought exercise.

I think it might be time for Apple to implement something akin to Microsoft’s old ‘trustworthy computing’. This High Sierra security flaw is an abrogation of their responsibility towards secure computing.

I just got a Google Home Mini as a reward for shopping at Woolworths. The Google Assistant really kicks Siri’s butt. This is where ecosystem lock-in is so frustrating. My music is with Apple Music, my calendars are with Fastmail, so I miss some of the benefits.

Australia.

I’ve discovered a number of new (to me) independent voices through micro.blog. It’s good to find and follow new blogs.

Happy Booj from above.

All Jeff, all the time.

Podcast Addiction

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I’ve been listening to podcasts for more than 10 years, way before they were mainstream. I used to load podcasts onto my work-supplied IBM ThinkPad1 and drive to work with it open on the passenger seat, playing podcasts. This was before I owned an iPod, let alone an iPhone. I think I may have been listening to Adam Curry at the time - there weren’t that many podcasts out there, and his was one of the first.

Since that time, I’ve never given up my podcasts habit. In fact, it’s gotten worse. Overcast, my current podcast player of choice says that I’ve saved 197 hours with Smart Speed (a setting that eliminates small pauses within normal speech). That’s 8.2 days saved via a very small tweak. So how many days worth of my life have I dedicated to podcast listening? I am glad I can’t find out!

My podcast listening trends have changed over the years. I had a multi-year phase with Leo Laporte’s network, listening to MacBreak Weekly, The Daily Giz Wiz and This Week in Tech. Now I don’t listen to any of them. The ‘indi’ podcasts I replaced the Laporte shows with have now themselves grown to be pretty big businesses in their own right.

Listening to podcasts is really a continuation of something I have done since I was little. Since I was about 5 years old I have fallen asleep listening to spoken word. Initially it was books on tape. Then I spent years listening to Graham Mayberry’s show on Perth local radio. Then I graduated to falling asleep to BBC World Service. Listening to speech has been a huge part of my life, and now podcasts provide an awesome delivery method far better than radio or cassette tape!

My subscriptions today

My podcast subscriptions today are a straight representation of my interests. I have a lot of technology subscriptions, a few basketball ones, politics and world news and some light entertainment. Looking at the overall list, I’m not sure how I manage to listen to them all. But I carve out time. Mainly it’s when I’m driving or doing some menial task around the house.

On micro.blog I saw recently that others had shared their podcast lists, including:

In the spirit of participation, these are my current podcast subscriptions, broken down into genre:

Technology

News & Politics

Arts & Entertainment

Sports

  1. Yes, an IBM Thinkpad - even before Lenovo bought the brand and IBM got out of the hardware game. It was a long time ago. ↩

I succumbed to one Black Friday offering, but only because I’ve had this on my wish list for about a year: the Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker (with Australian plug).