Pizza shop stools.

I hate anxiety, especially the work-induced kind. Neither my parents nor grandparents held senior positions across their working careers. It makes me consider how impacted they were by similar challenges. I wonder how I am managing to hold it all together and even why I continue trying to do so.

@MitchW People find explanations or reasons to justify their prevailing opinion. So rather than accept he did something inappropriate, they find weird justifications to satisfy their views. It was an “awkward autistic moment”, or “he got carried away”. It’s actually an Occam’s Razor situation: the most straightforward explanation is the truth; he did a Nazi Salute. But admitting that means admitting you support/enjoy the activities of a Nazi.

I’m not sure I will be able to deal with another 4 years of Trump news. Not my country, not my President, but I can’t help but think Australia will suffer at least some collateral damage. Get ready for the era of US oligarchs, featuring tech bros.

@mitchw Confirmation bias in true effect.

I’ve been re-engaging with my blog, and the micro.blog community, over the past few days. Still the nicest place on the internet.

@Omrrc I agree. Got to let it stew.

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

@cheesemaker I’m an NBL (Australian basketball league) junkie. I commentate the live stream at our NBL1 (State league) level.

@Omrrc Thank you for sharing this article. A great read.

@jim An immediate return on my investment! 😂

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.

@philbowell I forward and bcc in using its secret email address.

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.

@thedent.net Everybody kissing Trump’s ring now.

@thedent.net Everybody kissing Trump’s ring now.

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!

@mroutley You’ve convinced me. I’ve bought it!

@mroutley You’ve convinced me. I’ve bought it!

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?

@mroutley Was the Chuck Klosterman book good?

@fahrni I hope you are feeling better. Never fun to be unwell.

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?

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.

My crappy Dell monitor has died. Long live the crappy Lenovo monitor that shall replace it!

I’ve turned on cross-posting from my micro.blog account to my bluesky one. Not sure I’ll keep it, but may as well give it a try.

Notetaking app update: my experiment with Notebooks.app is over and I’m back to DevonThink, and for work, I’ve bought a month’s subscription to Obsidian Sync and will likely get it for a year.

Commiserations USA.

Inside Out 2, 2024 - ★★★½

A good rendering of anxiety, especially towards the end. Overall, though, this movie didn’t do it for me like the first.

Over 15,000 steps recorded by my Apple Watch before 2pm today. Well over my normal pace. That’s what gardening and packing a house ready to move will do for you.

Lonely Planet, 2024 - ★

I watched this 48 hours ago and have already forgotten it. Did not enjoy; it felt like a throwaway Hallmark movie.

🔗 Scripting News: Monday, October 7, 2024 interviews with star athletes saying the same predictable bullshit after being asked how it felt to do whatever heroic thing they just did. All of TV and news is like that, none of it is news, all of it is predictable bullshit. News is no longer news, it’s just another form of disposable content.

It’s weird to think that globally there are millions of businesses using Teams. This is the best that the giant Microsoft can build? Is all of corporate society playing a game of “The Emperor Has No Clothes”? Teams is shit software and we all deserve better.

I borrowed a book using Libby from my local library. On comparing it with the Kindle sample of another book with the same name, it’s some kind of scammy AI-rewritten scam book. Fascinating. I think I will just buy the legitimate one.

At work I get barraged with email. I want to be able to compose an email without seeing my inbox. It’s an Outlook on PC situation. Let me guess, this is a whacky idea for normies and thus there is no way to achieve it. Am I correct?

As I recover from pneumonia, I cough, then hear my lungs crackle and pop as the airways pop open. It’s weird but kind of enticing. Like having a built-in bowl of rice bubbles.

Finished reading: The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape 📚As a long-term envelope (YNAB/Actual Budget) disciple, I found some of this too non-specific. Although it has some good thoughts on longer-term financial planning.

It’s a couch, wine and music night.

Finished reading: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami 📚 A slow-moving story that kept me engaged, but I’m not sure what I come away with at the end.

I’ve spent this week watching all the Indiana Jones movies in sequence with my 8-year old kid. A nice way to spend evenings. 🍿

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, 2023 - ★★★

Silly fun but way too long.

Benji solved a Rubik’s cube using an app and showed it to me. I scrambled it. “Well, that was a cool few seconds,” he said, as he looked at the messed up toy.

Hemispheric Views E119

Hemispheric Views E119: We kick things off at an odd time for everyone this time. How many Counter Chats™ are allowed in a single episode? Remember Pzizz? How many countries have you listened to the show in? I am Gratitudinal for all the basketballs in the run sheet this week.

At work I’m almost at the point where I couldn’t live without Obsidian. At home I don’t use it because now it’s embedded in my brain as “work software”.

I sold my Toyota Camry SL Hybrid 2021 today. It served me well for 40,000km. A lean manufacturing success story!

It would appear that I did not win the $100 million lottery. This week…

It’s been a big day. Listed my house for sale and agreed to a sale on my Toyota Camry. All change at the station!

I’m trialling the new micro.blog post editor in the browser on iOS. My goodness, @manton, this is so much better! Thank you!​

Lucky Extension

Launch: Lucky - And a Dinosaur: Lucky not only removes the clutter from the Google search results but also removes tracking, lets you block spammy domains, and fixes some of the annoyances with Google search. Another cool Safari extension from And a Dinosaur.

Recorded another episode of @HemisphericViews with @martinfeld and @Burk.

Jarrod Blundy @jarrod created a shortcut that allows the creation of a meme library and subsequent selection from it, then the creation of a markdown reference to it. This is how I imagine Jarrod during its creation.

Why does every day have a morning I have to deal with? 😴

Cat guy.

Signed on for anotherr year of Micro.blog Premium. The best blog host I’ve ever had, by far. @manton

I held a 4-month old baby today and had it chuckle as I zoomed her around. So cute!

I’m about 30 years late but it turns out shoegaze is the name of the music genre I like.

The Dark Knight, 2008 - ★★★★

The best Joker.

Perhaps I’m getting reasonably good at this audio editing caper.

🔗 Hey, it’s Jason! // Arcadia June 2024 So, what is everyone playing for? Fame, bragging rights, LinkedIn endorsements? Sure, all of those, but if they are honest, it’s for the COVETED bespoke yearly Arcadia June Trophy! Obviously. Jason has taken Hemispheric Views Arcadia June trophies to a new level.

Discovered the band The Boxer Rebellion tonight. I like. 🎵

Australia Day, 2017 - ★★★

A gritty film that is more honest about parts of Australia than we’d probably like to admit.

I finally finished the full run of The Walking Dead. 📺

Double Rainbow. 🌈 🌈

My glasses are not in the same locationn as me. How annoying. 👓

I needed a spreadsheet solution but couldn’t be bothered to design and build it myself. No problem, I’ll spend $5 on an Etsy solution. Pay the money; now waiting 72 hours for payment clearance. Awesome. That time-saving idea didn’t quite pan out.

A Family Affair, 2024 - ★½

A couple of funny lines and lots of Zac Efron muscle shots. Why the hell did I watch this?

Those shockwaves you just heard? Yes, that was me deleting my YNAB account. I’m now all-in on Actual Budget hosted on Pikapods.

You know you are back from holidays because once again the weekend is filled with laundry.

I hate getting sick while on holiday. 🤒

Sydney Opera House Concert Hall.

With YNAB leaning into a new branding of Yet Another Price Increase or YAPI™, I’m trialing Actual Budget running on PikaPods. Early in my testing, but this could be good enough. Being in Australia I don’t get any of the fancy YNAB automation anyway.

Oppenheimer, 2023 - ★★★½

A 4-hour flight was the catalyst needed to watch this marathon movie. I didn’t realise I was signing up for a political thriller. It kept me engaged so it must have been okay.

I’m copying Pawel and have set my MarsEdit quick entry to Hyperkey-P. Now I have to internalise the shortcut.

Anyone But You, 2023 - ★

A vehicle for both Sydney’s and other anorexic women. Bryan Brown must have grabbed the bag.

It was a beautiful day for a walk.

I hired a e-scooter for a bit of dumb fun. 🤣

I miss dunking on my kid.

I’m genuinely excited by what Apple has put forward in its WWDC24 keynote. xos18’s, Sequoia and Apple Intelligence all look brilliant. I’ve never been so excited for math worksheets.

It doesn’t matter how organised your task list is, you still need to do the task. I’ve procrastinated on my boots for two years!

Under Paris, 2024 - ★★★★

An environmental warning plus sharks eating people. What’s not to love?

🔗 ROSS GITTINS: The RBA has squeezed us like a lemon, but it’s still not happy Problems such as higher world petrol prices and higher insurance premiums caused by increased extreme weather events. I’d like to see Bullock put up a big sign in the Reserve’s office: “If it’s not coming from demand, interest rates won’t fix it.” Ross Gittins succinctly notes the disconnect in the Australian economy and the frustration of interest rates as a singular mechanism. Mortgage holders, such as myself, have cut back and the data shows it. The problem is elsewhere, and so the solution must be also.

🔗 I really like everyone on my blogroll, but I’m sorry to say that it must die — Keenan And, let me reiterate that I understand this was irrational, driven wholly by anxiety. These were inside thoughts, and inside thoughts are better left alone Keenan has the best lines. I often listen to my inside thoughts even when I shouldn’t.

As They Made Us, 2022 - ★★★★

Touching movie with great comedy from Bergen.

Got to love fire pit season.

Episode 112 of Hemispheric Views was one of the crazier ones.

The orange one being found guilty has made me so happy. He’s going to be so full of rage now - watch out America.

Slash Guy

On Hemispheric Views it has become a bit of a running gag that when I become interested in something new or different, the phrase, “I’m an insert interest here guy!” is unleashed. Most recently this was raised in Hemispheric Views E112 when it became clear that “I’m a footy guy!”. Robb Knight has formalised the collection of slash pages across the IndieWeb. Persuant to that list, I hereby submit an RFC—not to the IETF—but to the RKTF (Robb Knight Task Force) to formally add /preferred-pronoun as another potential slash page. For my purposes, that page would be entitled /guy. Hereforth, as best as I can recall and in no particular order is my current list: I’m a pencil guy! I’m a beach guy! I’m a footy guy! I’m a dSLR guy!

🔗 22.00.0058 Get up early! • Johnny.Decimal I don’t do much in the way of ‘life advice’, but here’s one: get up early! As in, 05:00 early. Today I woke up just after 5am. I read this post yesterday. I’m not pleased with Johnny’s undesired influence. I’m not a morning guy.

Dinner Preparation. 📷

I wish Apple sold a standalone Touch ID sensor.

Over the past few years I have made some amazing Internet friends. I’ve met people with whom I have much in common. The only problem is they are distant. How much I would love to find a friend who is local. Whom I could go to the pub with and talk to in person.

I sometimes wonder how other people live. At dinner time, what do they eat? How do they organise their evenings? Do their homes resemble my own? I would love the opportunity to observe a bunch of other lives, in other homes. Are we all the same? Or do we differ wildly? It’s a curiosity of mine.

The joy of a self-cleaning oven. Pyrolysis for the win.

Job satisfaction.

I’ve ticked many tasks off the OmniFocus “household cleaning” list. ✅

Respect our Overlords. A 3x2 submission for @martinfeld and @Burk

🔗 slash pages Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. I’m particularly partial to /defaults and /save

I’m proud to be the commentator of the Perth Redbacks NBL1 team who is smashing out these numbers!

🔗 My Podcast History • Robb Knight Now I’m mostly listening to a handful Relay shows like Connected, Rec Diffs, and Ungeniused plus Hemispheric Views, ATP, and Really Specific Stories. I’m not going to lie. It’s pretty cool to have my podcast mentioned in the same breath as some of these big names. Thanks Robb!

Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022 - ★★★

That was weird but fun, and slightly confusing.

I’ve woken at 4am and stayed that way. Cool!

Even on the hard days, and facing hard times, it’s healthy to find the fun.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999 - ★½

After watching the TV series Ripley, this didn’t hold up.

The one thing I want to buy after the announcement of new iPads? A replacement battery for my existing iPad Pro (3rd gen).

Our pal @rknightuk has knocked this one out of the park. We talked albums on Hemispheric Views E110. Now Robb has built a replica-iTunes to catalogue responses from listeners. It’s incredible.

I’ve been in Epic Games account v Microsoft Xbox account hell for the past hour.

I’ve completed the first Chapter of the Johnny Decimal Workshop. This is a pre-recorded video training course that has excellent production values. If you want to get organised, I highly recommend it.

In my happy place commentating NBL1 basketball. 🏀

A brick wall.

All of Us Strangers, 2023 - ★★★

Poignant, sad, confusing. In equal measures.

Mornings of Reading are a Blessed Treasure

A good reading session will take me on a journey. Often the start will come as a surprise, and will take me on a voyage to an unknown destination. Along the way, my mind will be engaged, interested, and challenged. Today, I’ve had one of those mornings. Here is some of what I found, and some of the most captivating excerpts from them. I invite you to come with me on my reading adventure. Music I started with an article on musical taste. Daniel Parris dives into how musical tastes change and develop, using statistics: Open-earedness refers to an individual’s desire and ability to listen and consider different sounds and musical styling. Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness, with a greater willingness to explore and appreciate diverse musical genres. During these years of sonic exploration, music gets wrapped up in the emotion and identity formation of youth; as a result, the songs of our childhood prove wildly influential over our lifelong music tastes. My music tastes were definitely set in my earlier years. I still get ridiculously happy when I play Radiohead’s OK Computer and it still feels modern. While reading the article, I found it supported a stance I often talk about when I buy the same noodle dish from the same shop, the theory of opportunity cost. Then Parris educated me on the optimal-stopping problem and the 37% Rule, which were new to me: The explore-exploit trade-off and an adjacent decision-making puzzle known as the optimal-stopping problem have prompted extensive research and the coining of a shortcut known as the 37% rule. This heuristic suggests we spend the first 37% of available search time exploring our options before settling on a preferred solution or selection.  Seriousness Next, I found an article by Ian Leslie1 on what it takes to be a “serious person”. If I could choose to live my life over, I would be a serious person. Sadly, I think my personality traits and my lived experience prevent me from achieving this. On seriousness, this quote sums up my issue well: I wanted to have children partly because I thought it might make me feel more serious. It actually did, although only somewhat. Maybe the biggest difference is that I stopped worrying about being serious. Wokeness Having recently suffered the wrath of extreme wokeness in a work setting, I have been subconsciously trying to understand this issue better. For most of my adult life, I’ve identified as ‘centre-left’. Progressive, but with an understanding that there is a place in society for a functioning economy, but that the economy is there to serve people and create an improved society. I don’t believe we are there merely as agents to feed the economic machine, and so there is a social justice and care for humanity that must be incorporated. Then, all of sudden, I was in a meeting where I became type-cast as the ‘old white guy’ and became the target for woke vitriol. Since then, I’ve been somewhat fascinated by my own stance on all of this. This morning’s reading was interesting, in this regard, as another of Ian Leslie’s articles was entitled, Am I Anti-Woke? On Nick Cave, Leslie writes: Cave is, like most rock stars and artists, a left-leaning liberal, but he has a well-stocked mind which draws from various streams of influence, including and particularly Christianity (although he’s not a practicing Christian). As a result he takes positions that are unusual for his milieu. For instance, he has written that “cancel culture” is having “an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society.” In another blog post he says he’s repelled by “woke culture” because of its “lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims”. On conservatism, this resonates. Am I becoming a conservatist? Or just willing to recognise the value that it can deliver? “The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better.” Ah, hang on. Leslie covers my thinking in the next paragraph: By the standards of most conservatives, Cave is a progressive, but I take him to be saying that he combines a conservative sensibility with a liberal one. This is how the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it: “Yes, there is a part of me, as I think there should be a part of everyone, that is conservative. There are things that we don’t want to change, you know.” And getting to wokeness itself, Leslie writes: Wokeness is a social contagion at least as much as it is a set of ideas - I’m sorry to say it, but ‘mind-virus’ is not the most inapposite epithet I’ve ever heard. It has an amazing ability to make clever people say stupid things and to lower the IQ of institutions. I think that’s partly a function of an emphasis on appearances, on being seen to be saying the right thing, in a world where everyone feels on show, and vulnerable to a moralising ransomware attack. That’s why so many people in positions of power have passively gone along with it, without quite buying into it. Up until recently (this is changing) wokeness has been a safe space for those who can’t or don’t want to risk thinking for themselves in public. The passivity of moderates allowed a minority of activists outsized influence, and woke’s worst aspects - divisiveness, scapegoating, obscurity, just the sheer absurdity it generates - to flourish without check. I think this is what I experienced in my work setting. I appeared different, I didn’t speak according to the norms of the room, and so I became vulnerable to attack. I love this 1924 quote, showing that things have, in a sense, always been about finding a way between two extremes. However it seems that, as with many things, time has created further polarisation. Less shades of grey: In 1924, G.K. Chesterton wrote about how the world was dividing into Conservatives and Progressives: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The world is now dividing into a degraded version of this dichotomy: woke and anti-woke. You’re either for Kamala Harris or Ron DeSantis. You’re either for children being taught there are 183 different genders or you want to ban gay marriage. Nick Cave All these links and discussion of Nick Cave were a surprise. I know virtually nothing about Nick Cave other than he is liked by Tim Hein of The Unmade Podcast. Today, I learned he is an interesting and thoughtful character. My reading session led me to articles about Cave, and his own blog. A couple of quotes from Cave that stood out to me today, include: I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as ‘the truth’ or ‘the way’. This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including ‘woke’ culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me. … Wokeness, for all its virtues, is an ideology immune to the slightest suggestion that in a generation’s time their implacable beliefs will appear as outmoded and fallacious as those of their own former generation. This may well be the engine of progress, but history has a habit of embarrassing our treasured beliefs. … However, my duty as a songwriter is not to try to save the world, but rather to save the soul of the world. This requires me to live my life on the other side of truth, beyond conviction and within uncertainty, where things make less sense, absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns; where dogma is anathema, discourse is essential, doubt is an energy, magical thinking is not a crime and where possibility and potentiality rule. Nick Cave, is, indeed, a serious person. Incidentally, this article led me down a rabbit-hole of Ian Leslie writing, and has me closer to subscribing to a Substack article than I have been before. For now, I’ve grabbed the RSS feed. ↩︎

Late-Stage Capitalism & Housing Supply in Australia

Late-stage capitalism is destroying a basic human right - being able to live in a house - as housing affordability for renting and buying across Australia has been smashed in recent years. A report produced by Anglicare Australia highlights with cold hard facts something that is already clear in the community: Australian housing is unaffordable. I note a few quotes from ABC News’ story covering the release of the paper that highlight the challenge facing our nation. There is not a single property across Australia – or even a room in a shared house – that’s affordable for someone on youth allowance, according to a new report from support organisation Anglicare Australia. Not one property! Not even a crappy place in a crappy suburb. Nothing. And good luck convincing a renter to let you rent their property and establish a share house. That isn’t going to happen. You’re stuffed. In Western Australia, the housing market has lost all dynamism. It has ground to a halt, with just a couple of thousand properties on the market in a city of around 1.8 million people. If people can’t be certain of being able to find a house to buy a house, they’re not going to try to sell the one they’re in. So we end up with a malfunctioning market. Just as the employment market needs dynamism to ensure productivity—people leaving old jobs and entering new ones—so the housing market needs a pipeline of properties on a continual basis. Housing unaffordability has killed the market, and is leaving a wake of homelessness as a result. The solution isn’t unknown. It has been known for a long while. But conservatism and vested interest holds back change, which is hardly a surprising situation. “an overhaul of the tax regime” is needed – including the capital gains tax discount being phased out over a period of 10 years and negative gearing deductions to be phased out for new investors in the private market. It has been evident for many years that the ‘investor class’ are leveraging what is not a loophole, but designed policy, in the form of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount to profit from housing. Buying and owning multiple homes has become an investment game for those who can afford it, pushing up prices and pushing out people who need a home to simply live in. The increasing price pressure means rents go up in lockstep, further punishing those who can’t afford a ride on this particular gravy train. A previous Federal Election saw Bill Shorten as Opposition Leader run an aggressive campaign to end the current negative gearing tax policies. Confronted with a scare campaign from the conservative side of politics, he lost the election. That’s scared away current politicians from making changes that are necessary for the greater good, never mind the wake of economic and social destruction that might be left in its wake.

I swear my Roomba stalks me. Whichever room I move to, sure enough, Roomba soon turns up.

Domain transfers from Hover to Porkbun are in progress.

Reviewing my Backups

I identified that my formerly robust system of data backups, particularly for photos, was no longer great. A combination of frugality and simplification had gone too far. Some time ago I deleted my Backblaze account. Recently I deleted my Flickr account. That left me only with iCloud Photos, which is a sync service and not a true backup. This doesn’t protect my old Lightroom .dng files, nor anything else that isn’t a photo. I tried using my OneDrive account, but attempts to upload large volumes of files through the web interface and disabling the relevant folder through the OneDrive client to avoid multiple download/duplications failed. OneDrive on the web borked at the folders - I don’t know why, and nor did I have the patience to investigate deeply. I asked my brains trust over at the Hemispheric Views Discord, and the answer was Backblaze. So, I’ve returned to that service, tail between my legs. My other option was to dig out my spinning disk caddy, and buy a hard drive, but that sounded like more physical labour than I was motivated to achieve. As Backblaze once again sends terabytes of data from my system to its data centres, I feel some sympathy for the machines. But seriously, NBN, can we please get some faster upload speeds?

Tonight I was lucky enough to commentate a triple-overtime game of NBL1 basketball between Perth Redbacks and Eastern Suns. 🏀

Rocking a new pair of shoes.

I finished Season 1 of 3 Body Problem and don’t want to have to wait for Season 2. Bring it on! 📺

Should I subscribe to Castro podcast player? I like the direction the new ownership seems to be going in.

Fun to be back behind the microphone calling NBL1 West basketball games for Perth Redbacks. 🏀 🎙️

Those who listen to @HemisphericViews will know that I’m a beach guy! Here I am repping the show and a wetsuit!

Spotify is so much better at surfacing interesting, not necessarily mainstream music. Apple Music works really hard to keep me near the Top Charts. 🎵

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, 2014 - ★★½

This feels closer to Star Wars than The Hunger Games. The plot to kill Catniss is possibly over convoluted?

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, 2013 - ★

Just get to the good bit already. Oh, there is no good bit.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., 2023 - ★★★★

More evidence that the 70s were the best. I remember reading this Judy Blume book (and others). Wholesomeness delivered to the sad 20s.

Run Rabbit Run, 2023 - ★★

The audio mix was terrible, but the film at least made me think. But can somebody tell me what the deal was with the face appearing in the memorial?

Buying something with coins feels as good as getting it for free.

Sideways, 2004 - ★★★★

Such a fun movie but it feels like a movie from the mid 90s. A lot has changed in 20 years - more than I realised.

Boti Nagy giving NBL Pocket Podcast a good shoutout!

NBL Pocket Podcast with Boti Nagy

How fortunate am I that I could do a podcast with journalistic legend, Boti Nagy. This man has a huge history reporting the National Basketball League, is a published author, and thanks to my friend Joseph Corr is now a co-podcaster with me! I was reading Boti’s articles when I was 12 years old. What an honour to do a show with him.

Currently reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚

I dated a handwritten document as 21/3/14. Crikey, I’m a decade out of date!

Taking photos of signs @maique style. This one is a relic! Look at those seniors!

The boy and I started playing It Takes Two on Xbox. So much two-player raging. Lots of fun. He pulled out the nail while I was swinging on it! 🎮

The Family Plan, 2023 - ★★

Not great but good family fare.

Finished reading: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 📚 Probably one of the weirder books I’ve read. Entirely compelling, but I’m not sure I comprehend what I read.

Last night amongst my many vivid dreams, I met Linus Torvalds. I thanked him for his work and the contribution to society that Linux has been. Then I went and rode an elevator that went sideways instead of up and down.

Surely now I own all the Notes apps.

I listened to E70 of @hemisphericviews tonight. So cute to hear my own son from an earlier time. “Be more negative!”

We are aware that enshittification is a big deal in the tech industry. With the latest apparently vindictive moves by Apple against Epic, is the great fruit company now on the fast track to its own enshittification? Hubris is at an all-time high.

Good grief, parenting a kid with autism can be hard. 🪫🧩

I’m trying Alfred instead of Launchbar. I keep getting stuck. Today, I couldn’t get an equivalent of Launchbar’s “Instant Send” up and running. Why am I doing this to myself?

I’m not built for humidity. The last few days in Perth have featured this weather condition, and I’m not coping well. I have finishing mopping my floors, and now I’m the one who is mopping wet. 😰

My Day One journal consists of 2,597 entries. Of those, 418 are Instagram imports, leaving 2,179 “proper” entries. The oldest entry is an Instagram import from 5 November 2011. My first genuine entry was on 4 August 2012. I’ve journaled on 1,808 days since then.

Finished the show One Day and feel sad. It’s an impactful series. 📺

I’m watching the 46th season of Survivor. That is crazy! 📺

Refreshed my site’s Bookshelf page and simplified my navigation bar.

One of those days where I wake up at 4:15am. An hour later now and I feel tired but know I’m not going back to sleep. Here we go then. Bring it on, Monday.

The Lost Daughter, 2021 - ★★½

Children really can be that annoying.

The Sad State of Fibre Internet in Australia

A couple of days ago I got fibre to the home installed (finally). Australia’s broadband rollout is a decades-long case study in political fuckery. Previously I was on “Fibre to the Node” which used fibre to the end of the street, then copper from that street node to my home. Now I have fibre all the way to my home, which is great, but the plans offered are still depressing. I used to pay for 100Mbps down/40Mbps up on copper and I would get about 88 down and 37 up. Now, with new fibre, my plan is 100/20. I get 107 down, and 18.6 up. Despite my nice new cabling, I’ve got a marginal improvement, all because our Internet plans have been bastardised. I could pay even _more_money to get 1000 down and 50(!) up, but they only guarantee 600/40. Nah, I’ll keep my money. It’s a sad state of broadband affairs here in Australia.

Proud of my Podcast Productions

Several years ago I became interested in creating podcasts. As an early adopter, I’d listened to them for years. I decided I finally wanted to try the creation side of the equation. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved since that decision. Yesterday, two podcasts of mine were released on the same day. They show two different aspects of my personality and interests. I am incredibly proud of these latest episodes, but also the incredible run of consistent podcast creation I have achieved over the past few years. Hemispheric Views Episode 105 highlights my nerdy, techy side that is still linked with empathy and humanity. NBL Pocket Podcast Episode 268 demonstrates my knowledge and love for Australian NBL basketball, combined with great rapport with my friend, Joe Corr. Hemispheric Views is carefully and meticulously edited. NBL Pocket Podcast is a shoot-from-the-hip live recording. Two entirely different topics, recorded and edited in two different ways. I’m proud of being able to create podcasts in both forms. I’m also proud that I have the ability to edit and produce as well. Podcasting has given me a whole raft of skills that I wouldn’t otherwise have. I am proud of these shows. I am proud of myself for having the confidence and capability to produce these shows. I am proud that both have a large audience of listeners.

Zoolander, 2001 - ★★★★

I watch this film now and struggle to identify the cameos. Not all careers kick on, I suppose.

Bob Marley: One Love, 2024 - ★★★½

I was unaware of the Bob Marley story and this clued me in well. Actors of course were more attractive than the actual people.

Windfall, 2022 - ★★★

A well-acted kooky thriller.

I’m binge watching S4 of For All Mankind. I didn’t have “labour dispute and unionisation on my bingo card of topics. Was this show written around the time of the Hollywood Writers’ Strike? 📺

A GP appointment time is more of a general indicator that they will see you sometime in the hour following that prescribed slot.

It’s great to see Jon Stewart back home on The Daily Show. Old Presidential candidates. What could go wrong?

Autism Parent Night: Making checklists to assist kids with morning, afternoon and evening routines, and pack lists. Made it all look pretty with OmniOutliner. ☑️

If the United States population somehow finds it in themselves to re-elect deadbeat, shyster, and Russian-compromised Trump, we are all fucked. Gift link to a relevant New York Times article.

Wonka, 2023 - ★★★

I wanted to like it more, but it was trying too hard.

After resisting all the Bluesky invitation codes; I’ve signed up with the masses.

Lean Can Be Applied Anywhere

Deploying small, incremental improvements. Prototyping an improved workflow using lean, visual control and 5S principles. Observation will determine what improvements and changes to next make.

I need a side hustle that generates a reasonable amount of cash. Why are my skills so esoteric?!

I spent the money. This is a much more pleasant reading experience. 📚

Should I spend $16 to buy a Kindle version of the book I’m reading so I don’t have to deal with small print? The pink highlight shows the Kindle viewport. 📚

My Replacement Xbox Controller Dead on Arrival

What’s the deal with garbage Xbox controller hardware? I had to return a controller because a button wasn’t responding. My replacement controller arrived. Straight out of the box, it reports LB as being permanently activated, and I can’t even navigate the menu system with it, as the D-sticks and buttons don’t respond correctly. So now I’m sending back the replacement of the replacement, but Amazon won’t issue another replacement. So I will have to buy another somewhere else, and hope that Amazon eventually give me my money back. The main issue though, is this is about the 4th Xbox controller I’ve had that has had problems. Is this common? Are there any alternative controllers I can get instead?

I’ve decided not to renew my Flickr Pro account. I’ve had it for years and years. I don’t use the service enough to justify the cost. Sorry for any link breakage that may occur!

Vesper, 2022 - ★½

Wow, that was really boring.

The Big Lebowski, 1998 - ★★★½

This movie makes me want to go bowling.

The Breakfast Club, 1985 - ★★★★½

I think I’m older than the teacher now. He’s the guy I now relate to.

Currently reading: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 📚

I just used Make Me A Cocktail. I don’t have a large bar at the moment, but it suggested a Black Russian and I’m enjoying it!

I feel in the flow. Normally this feeling is linked to a particular task, job or project. Yet I’m feeling it broadly across life management and my mental state. I like it. 🌈

Finished reading: From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks 📚My takeaway is that I am in a spiral career transition. Plus I now have an excuse as to why my energy levels for work are lower than they used to be.

I simply don’t care about Apple Vision Pro. I have no desire or motivation to watch the 10 minute demo videos. I don’t care about listening to hours of podcast thought pieces. I’m not interested.

I started watching Loudermilk tonight. I like it. Not sure if only because Ron Livingstone basically plays a recovering Peter Gibbon from Office Space, 📺

Finished reading: Thirst by Scott Harrison 📚on Headway app (🪜). Glad I only committed 13 minutes to the book, rather than actually reading it, because it was terrible.

Once a Nerd…

I can draw a fairly straight line from my personality as a young fella to who I am today. I mean, look at this nerd. He’s got a Commodore computer running Workbench 2.04. Dot matrix printer. Stephen Lawhead books on the shelf. A thermometer that read the outside temperature. Basketball trophies. This would be a great submission for one of Hemispheric Views Desk Reviews. But it doesn’t end there. As listeners of my podcast will know, I maintain a depreciation spreadsheet tracking my major asset purchases. Turns out, this isn’t a new concept for me. Here is the prototype, from 2001: People may also know me as a prodigious booster of YNAB as a means to manage your personal finances. Before YNAB, there was Quicken. Before Quicken, there was my ledger book. And before my ledger book, there were my transaction registers! To give a sense of the timeline, the registers, as the first documents, are dated from 1994. That would put me at 16/17 years old. My memory has me doing these a little younger, but this is the first documented evidence. I also found a neat record of my automative service history from 2000. This car needed a lot of work! I’m not sure I’ve changed much in the 30 years since.

Douchebags Galore!

Steven Hackett is being ripped off by douchebaggery from 37signals, as they try to get their HEY! Calendar app approved by the App Store Review Team. 37signals Resubmits Its Calendar App, Includes Dates in Apple History to Get Past App Review – 512 Pixels: It’s a real bummer to feel like I’ve been ripped off by a much bigger company, seeing them pitch something I’ve worked hard on as a free feature in their app. I find it fitting that douchebag DHH is promoting his actions on X, a site owned by another douchebag.

So many big life decisions to be made. Being an adult can be hard.

I just did an internet quiz like it’s 1999. What Anime Hair Color Best Suits Your Personality? Hosted By theOtaku.com: Anime via Thomas Rigby

In between watching basketball and packing Lego into boxes, I recorded E102 of @HemisphericViews with @Burk and @martinfeld.

Our friend @rknightuk has built a word cloud based on the 320 default blog posts arising from @HemisphericViews Episode 097. His talents are amazing to me.

Year in books for 2023

Here are the books I finished reading in 2023. This is a terribly short list.

I’m at the beach! It’s a bit cold today.

Out of my Comfort Zone

This year has been one of significant change. A big positive change I’ve experienced, but haven’t talked—or blogged—about is my new relationship. Lisa, my partner, is an impressive woman who has made her way in life with strength and conviction. Her life has had challenges and events that have shaped her, and those events could easily have destroyed her if not for her own strength of character. Through it all, Lisa has navigated a path that has ensured she is a bright, happy and joyful person. She is raising two kids and both of them are absolute delights. They are a credit to her as a mother. In episode 101 of Hemispheric Views I talk about how I’ve become a beach guy. For whatever reason, I didn’t explain how or why I’ve become a beach guy. I’m into going to the beach now because Lisa introduced me to it. It was her that taught me the 20 minute splash. It’s her smarts that brought forth the “get in, swim, get out, wash feet” process. I should have given Lisa credit in that episode, but I didn’t. When I’m with Lisa, there’s another bonus that may occur, and that’s a coffee after the swim. Even my coffee order has been changed by Lisa. My flat white is now made with almond milk. My guts thank me, and I in turn thank Lisa for pulling me out of my coffee ordering comfort zone, even though it caused stomach discomfort. My comfort zone. That’s where I feel safe and tend to return all too often. I am naturally risk and conflict averse. Lisa has a way of extracting me from that zone, and challenging me to grow and change. When I leave my comfort zone I’m a better person. Lisa makes me a better person through her encouragement and support. Yet it’s my comfort zone that has prevented me from coming out and saying these things. From speaking openly about now being in a new and special relationship. It was my fear of judgment from others, of having to explain and answer questions, that has prevented me from being upfront about the fact that I am in a positive and wonderful relationship, and that it makes me feel happy and valued. Lisa’s presence in my life makes me a better person. She makes my life better. This past year has been a doozy in so many ways, but upon reflection, I am not sure where I’d be if I hadn’t benefited from the steadfast care, attention, and honest love that Lisa has bestowed upon me. There’s been enough of me prevaricating about how to express my relationship situation. It is thus. I am in a relationship. I am in love. I love Lisa. I’m excited to head into 2024 with this clarity of thought. I’m excited to share the news with whomever might read my blog. I’m a beach guy, and I am that because Lisa made it so. I’m a better person, because Lisa inspires me to be my best self. I love Lisa.

Remember that time I live-streamed going to Officeworks to buy an SD card as part of the @HemisphericViews live event? 😂

Amazon - and Prime Video Ads - in Australia

Jason Snell writes about the consideration given to Amazon Prime: Shocked—shocked!—to find that Amazon is putting ads in Prime Video – Six Colors: when my wife and I were auditing our streaming subscriptions the other week, Prime was one of the ones that will basically never get cut, because free two-day delivery saves us money in the long run. When Amazon Prime was a USA only thing, I lusted for it. Finally, Prime came to Australia and I jumped onboard at their low introductory price. Amazon sucked for the first year, with low availability and high prices. Over the past 18 months it has improved. Even with their improvement, though, when it came time to review my annual subscription, it didn’t make the cut. I’m intentionally buying less and not having ready access to free shipping was almost a blessing. If I really want something, there are plenty of other Australian retailers that will take my money. I’ve gone from being sad that Amazon is not in Australia, to extremely happy it hasn’t achieved total market dominance. As for Prime Video? If I hadn’t already cancelled my subscription, adding adds to my paid video service would incentivise me to ditch them even more. The quest from all these services to squeeze more blood from the stone is simply going to steer me back towards Usenet.

Currently reading: From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks 📚Time to start thinking about Act II (or is it III?) 🤷‍♂️

I did an end of year review today. Interesting to look back on all that has happened over the course of 12 months. (tldr, a lot!)

In my on-going Pokemon-style quest to catch all the note-taking apps, I’ve bought Notebooks by Alfons Schmid.

For Christmas this year I got everybody in my family their own AI-generated Funko Pop likeness. 😃

It was @Ddanielson that made me do it! A throwback to my younger years.

Perth can be alright. Merry Christmas.

I’ve jumped aboard the Ai-generated Funko Box bandwagon!

Hello, this is Andrew talking into MurmurType, the recording app that records and then transcribes whatever I have to say. I could use this to write a blog post, I could use this to write an essay. The only problem is, I don’t think as well speaking extemporaneously as I do when I write.

Subscriptions 2023

th:nth-child(3) { width: 50%; } A few people are blogging about their current subscription software. Here I am, jumping on the train. I have a subscriptions grouping in YNAB so I’m referencing that to assist here. In writing this, I’m discovering that there are a few subscriptions without a YNAB category. I will have to fix that! Even with YNAB, some of the cost estimates are fuzzy because of currency exchange fluctuations. What might be most noticeable is the paucity of streaming services. I’ve gotten rid of them all recently, as my budget has changed, and their value quotient declined. I now only have Apple TV+ and Fetch (for ESPN) during the Australian NBL basketball season. Service Monthly Cost AUD Logic Apple One $24.97 I use enough Apple Services that the full deal is worth it. I share this cost, so only pay 50%. YouTube $2.00 I rarely watch YouTube, but my kids love it, and I don’t want constant ads being driven into their brain. NY Times $2.00 I subscribed on a sweet deal to play the Crosswords. Now I’m only playing Wordle and Connections, so this will go when the cheap option expires. Xbox Game Pass $18.95 This one comes as goes based on the interest of my kids and I. I tend to subscribe for a month, then turn off automatic renewal. When we want it, I turn it back on again. Micro.blog $15.00 The price fluctuates because of the currency conversion. Micro.blog is my digital home. It hosts my blog, it hosted my first podcast, and I love it. omg.lol $2.50 My second home on Internet, which hosts my profile landing page, but is also my Mastodon instance. Adam is also a friend. shoutouts.lol $2.00 Another indie service hosted by a friend, Vincent. It helps me profile things I like on canion.blog. tinylytics.app $2.00 Also by Vincent, this service is a nice simple way to get a sense of which pages on my website are interesting to people. Domains $10.00 You can’t be on the internet and not have a few domains. Key ones for me include canion.blog, canion.me and andrewcanion.com Day One $3.00 I have been journalling in Day One for about a decade, and I enjoy having a private, safe place to put my thoughts. I’ve even used their book printing service. It’s excellent. AnyList $1.34 AnyList helps me with my shopping, but also with my recipe management. I use it all the time. Textexpander $2.17 I went away from TE for a while, but a friend works there, and I still enjoy the affordances it provides. They really took a lot of heat moving to subscription before most other providers did the same. 1Password $5.00 I would be willing to move away from this, but I’m part of a family group and I don’t love the idea of having to deal with transferring other people. Fastmail $10.00 I have been this close to leaving Fastmail in favour of iCloud, but I don’t think I have the motivation. My subscription still has about 4 months left, so we will see how I feel then. YNAB $8.00 It’s pricing is stupid, a bunch of their features don’t work in the Australian banking sector, and I’ve outgrown all their training. Yet it’s still the only show in town for keeping me on the financial straight and narrow, so it’s not going anywhere. Flickr $15.00 I went through the cancellation flow last year, which netted me a big annual discount and kept me onboard. It’s basically a photo backup and not much else. Microsoft 365 $9.73 I got a cheap subscription to the Family plan through my previous employer. I honestly don’t know if I even need it now, but am worried that I will cancel, discover I do need it, and then not have access to the discounted rate anymore. Setapp $15.00 I’ve gone back and forth on Setapp, but have always kept it around. I have been onboard since launch and am grandfathered into a slightly cheaper plan. Fetch $6.00 An Australian TV service that gives me access to enough ESPN to watch Australian NBL basketball. So there we have it, my subscriptions as they stand in late 2023.

Boosted! 🩼🦠

My long national nightmare of not being able to swipe to change Apple Watch faces is over. The setting can be changed in Settings > Clock > Swipe to Switch Watch Face. Now can we revert the button functionality, Apple?

I can hardly believe our little Hemispheric Views podcast has inspired 267 blog posts!

I’ve designed a TypeForm survey. So much nicer to use than SurveyMonkey.

Candy Cane Lane, 2023 - ★★★★

A good old fashioned comedy that actually made me laugh out loud.

My 2023 Mac Apps of the Year

Once again, I’m here to blog about my favourite Mac Apps for the year. See previously: 2022 2017 The Standard Criteria For my purposes, to be considered an App of the Year, the software needs to be something I used extensively, value and enjoy. I also must feel I would miss them if they suddenly went away. Of course, it also needs to be a Mac App. OmniFocus It’s almost to the point where this app needs to be put into the Hall of Fame, and removed from future consideration. OmniFocus continues to provide structure to my life both at a professional and personal level. Most of this year has been spent using the beta of OmniFocus 4 in tandem with OmniFocus 3. The new version has come a long way and is closing in on release. While there are elements that continue to frustrate me (please, can we have natural language entry?) there is still no other task manager that can filter, slice and dice tasks like OmniFocus. And of course, defer dates. No task manager can be serious if it doesn’t have the ability to set a start date for a task into the future. Obsidian Notes apps are my playground. I bounce between them continuously. Heck, I’m writing this post in iA Writer! This year, however, has seen me give Obsidian another try - after I stuck with Logseq for some time before it. There are parts of it that I still don’t like, but it’s now rock solid, and the price cannot be beat. I am even putting aside the fact that it is running in Electron! 😱 I wanted to continue to use Agenda, but it’s simply too fiddly. Plain text entry is so straightforward, it is hard to beat. Mona 2023 was the downfall of Twitter. In its place stormed Mastodon and I have enjoyed using Mona. While most of the cool kids seemed to gravitate to Ivory, for me Mona ticks all the boxes I need from a Mastodon client. Reeder Last year, NetNewsWire took over from Reeder as my RSS app of choice. This year, I’ve flipped back to Reeder across macOS and i(Pad)OS. It’s smooth and gorgeous, and rock solid. What’s even better is that this year has seen somewhat of a renaissance in blogging, and with the help of the App Defaults craze, launched by our own Hemispheric Views 097, I’ve found a bunch of new voices to add to my feed reader. Safari Last year I used Arc. For whatever reason, this year I’ve retreated to the comfort, energy efficiency, and cross-platform syncing offered by Safari. It also makes me feel good that I’m not supporting the Chromium hegemony. Apps That Fell Off My List From Last Year NetNewsWire: As mentioned above, it’s taken a back seat to Reeder. Arc: I’ve moved back to the default choice of Safari. MarsEdit: I continue to use it, but I could live without it if it went away. Still a great app. Launchbar: This year I trialled RayCast, but I’m back on Launchbar. As much as I like it, given there are other alternatives, it didn’t make the cut this year. Agenda: As discussed, Obsidian has trumped Agenda for 2023.

Who can resist a Blu-Tak snowman guy?

I can’t.

🔗 Connected #478: Not So Bankrupt Anymore - Relay FM Amazing to see our podcast, Hemispheric Views, and its Duel of the Defaults! mentioned on Connected!

In today’s “I’m an idiot” news, I almost feel victim to a phishing scam. I wasn’t on my A-game and almost got found out. Frightening!

I did it! Wordle 892 1/6* 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I reintroduced my old Raspberry Pi 3B+ to the home network today, and with it, Pi-Hole! I may elect not to renew my NextDNS subscription as a result.

I’ve been building class timetables. Hyper Plan has been a life-saver. I love this app. Timetables have multiple variables (time, day, teacher, skill level) and Hyper Plan has wrangled it all for me in a way that is so much easier and better than Excel Pivot Tables. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Mop Will Always Be Your Friend

A career is an interesting thing. I’ve never been a “career at all costs” kind of person. Probably why I’ve never made millions of dollars or been a CEO. At uni, I worked at a pizza shop and a liquor shop. The mop was my friend. Things always needed to be cleaned. I spent the first part of my “proper” career working to get ahead, to succeed in using my brain and to find new challenges to overcome. The middle part of my career was spent leveraging my specialist skills to deliver consulting services and support others. There was value in status with this role; being seen to be successful and knowledgable. Now, in the current (but hopefully not last) part of my career, I’ve got no interest in any of that. I don’t really care what others think of me, or what status is assigned to my job. I’m enjoying the effort of being a good manager. As a manager I have an ethos of never asking somebody to do something that I wouldn’t do myself (if I have the requisite skill and capability). Mopping. I know this. 30 years later, the mop is still as friendly as ever. I feel no embarrassment about being a manager that mops.

Time for Some Fiscal Policy in Australia

Talking with a friend today. The topic of interest rates came up, as they do in any recent conversation within the Australian context. My friend asked a poignant and sensible question, “why doesn’t the Government adjust the rate of the Goods & Services Tax (GST)?” It is a broad-based consumption tax. If consumption is getting out of hand and creating an inflationary spike, then why not add a disincentive to consumers by raising the price of consumption? With interest rates variations it’s the mortgage belt who carry all the pain. They represent about 25% of households. Yet rising interest rates enrich those with existing savings, enabling greater consumption. Wouldn’t it be better to share the load equitably across any and all of those who spend? The downside to this strategy is that the GST is regressive. It hits everybody with the same cost. For those with lesser incomes, the proportion of income the tax takes is greater. It’s not an equitable solution, because now low income earners are bearing a greater proportion of the pain. From a political point of view, it’s easier to blame the independent Reserve Bank for pain and suffering. Why place the crosshairs on your own government by changing fiscal policy? “Monetary policy delivered by the independent Reserve Bank, that’s who to blame!”, is the relieving Government cry! Whether it’s the GST, or a more equitable adjustment to the broader taxation platform, the Australian Government needs to do something. Since its election, the Albanese Labor Government seems content to sit on the sidelines, apart from some modest targeted tinkering. It withdrew funding for some capital works projects, that at least in WA have now been funded by the State Government, so that attempt at withdrawing money and inflationary pressure from the system didn’t work. Some modest efforts to encourage growth in housing supply have been delivered. Small target strategy, however, seems to remain the prevailing preference in Canberra. I would like to see the Government take some real, tangible action. Let’s look at negative gearing. Let’s look at tax breaks that make no sense. Let’s recalibrate towards equality and away from the neo-liberalist agenda. I elect a government to do things: not to watch the RBA use its only blunt instrument. Get to work, Labor.

🔗 So Many Default Apps • Robb Knight The latest feature was added today when I was inspired by something said on episode 098 but as of this moment I cannot remember what it was that was said. Regardless, I wanted to visualise the links between all the blog posts to get a sense of how the “trend” spread between people so I created the Network Graph page. Robb has done an incredible job compiling all these Default Lists. My sincere thanks to him for doing it.

🔗 Bridges | Devon Dundee But what sets Bridges apart from the rest of the pack is its focus on making it really easy to get links back out once you’ve saved them. It isn’t a vault for locking links away forever; it’s a funnel for storing links and then putting them to good use. I’m looking forward to putting Bridges through its paces. This is a great analogy from Devon to describe its value.

My 2022 Mac Apps of the Year

This article was originally written for the December 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. In December of 2017, I put together a list of my Mac Apps of the Year. For this issue of Hemispheric News, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this article to see what, if anything, has changed. Given our collective consternation about Electron, the average capabilities of Swift-based apps, and the sad state in general that Mac development seems to be in against the influx of web apps, has the Mac App of the Year category shown improvement? In 2017 I defined the apps on the list as those I used extensively, value and enjoy. I also noted them as those I would most miss if they suddenly went away. Given that criteria, my nominations for Mac Apps of 2022 are: NetNewsWire NetNewsWire has taken the job of feed reading away from Reeder. NNW doesn’t do a lot, but it does what is needed. The app works fast, never crashes, and plays nicely on macOS. Arc Still in beta, this browser is efficient in our modern web world. I don’t use a number of its more esoteric features such as Boosts (site based code injection) or Easels (weird pinterest-like pages), but its ability to manage multiple independent spaces/containers that let me stay logged in to multiple Microsoft accounts - while keeping me spatially aware of which is which, is better than any other implementation I’ve found. The only downside I feel is that it isn’t as battery-efficient as Safari, and I feel a bit guilty about that. It’s built on Chrome though, so at least every single website out there renders correctly. OmniFocus I continue to rely on OmniFocus to steer my work and my life. Having said that, after being on the v4 beta train on macOS for some time, I don’t love it. OmniFocus have taken a gamble and built the new app in Swift, and it seems they are really an excellent edge-case for the language. They are asking a lot of it. I stick with OmniFocus at this point because I know it inside-out, I have workflows built around it, and it keeps me on track. I don’t love it nearly as much as I used to. This is unfortunate. MarsEdit A rekindling of my enjoyment for blogging has coincided with the enjoyment of using MarsEdit and the new version 5 has made it even better. There are still some weird things about the way it uses Markdown (I wish it had more affordances and keyboard shortcuts), and it intermingles HTML with Markdown too much in my view, but it is solid. Lots of other apps can push to my micro.blog host, but only MarsEdit offers a seamless editing experience. I also love its browser extension, but I wish it was available for Arc. MarsEdit remains an honest-to-goodness Mac app. Launchbar Without Launchbar I’m inefficient, and I don’t even remember to use half of its available features. I’ve tried to replace it with Alfred, and Raycast, but I always come back to Launchbar. It works how my mind thinks - or at least it has trained my mind to think like Launchbar. I wish development was faster and that third-party support was greater. But it works and I can’t be rid of it. Agenda Thanks to the additional shortcuts from friend of Hemispheric Views, Scotty Jackson, Agenda has become an important cog in my macOS arsenal. I use it to take day notes and meeting notes. I don’t love its in-built text editor, so sometimes notes might start elsewhere (Drafts, iA Writer, Tot…) but then I can dump them into Agenda. It’s helpful to be able to find notes either by project/client or by meeting/date. Agenda has seen a lot of development over the past year and it continues to scratch an itch. Apps that are no longer on my list from 2017: 1Password I use this app, but I do feel that if push came to shove, iCloud Keychain is probably good enough that I could move into that. 1Password has a few niceties that keep me using it, plus inertia. Also my mother-in-law is part of my Family account and I dare not disrupt that workflow. It is interesting to note that 1Password 8 uses an Electron front-end and a Rust backend. Not very macOS-like at all. Logseq I have fun using this app, but I could just as easily move its content into any number of other apps and go on just fine. Logseq is another Electron-powered application and its current sync system makes me nervous. Bear I haven’t used Bear for years. Also for years, they were promising a new text engine. Agenda has taken over the role Bear once played. Ulysses I sometimes use Ulysses for work-related writing, but that’s about it. Any Markdown writing is done somewhere else, such as Drafts or iA Writer. DEVONthink Pro It’s like infrastructure in my system. I keep things in there. But I don’t enjoy using it. It has the capability to do almost everything that I use a whole bunch of other apps for. But it can be confusing, even after I’ve been using it for more than a decade. StockMarketEye I continue using the old version 4, despite version 5 being out for a few years. I like v4 more, plus its not a subscription. I don’t need much, and SME4 does enough. Update: As of a couple of weeks ago, StockMarketEye has closed down. Reeder NetNewsWire took the crown. PDF Expert Wow, I haven’t used this for ages. BusyCal I’ve been on a Fantastical subscription for a couple of years, but don’t worry BusyCal because I’m coming back. The Fantastical price increases were too much, and I get BusyCal through Setapp, so come March I will be back as a full-time user. Apps that came close in 2022: Craft Bike Discord Day One

This iPhone 15 Pronis my first one with an OLED screen and I love it.

I keep getting older. Not even an iPhone 15 camera can change that.

Finished Loki Season 2 and loved it. I wish it had a longer season but then it might have overstayed its welcome? 📺

Look what arrived in Perth, Western Australia @rknightuk @prami@social.lol

🔗 Publish Quote - HeyDingus This shortcut provides a quick and easy way to publish a quote from a Safari webpage (or in-app Safari web view), with or without a comment, to Micro.blog. Just select the text you want to quote, hit the share button in the toolbar, and run this shortcut. You’re given the option to add a comment and review the text before publishing. I really like this Shortcut that Jarrod Blundy has created.

The RBA slugs the economy with another 0.25% interest rate rise. What a terrible decision. Monetary policy is a blunt instrument that smashes those who can least afford it, and benefits those who already have it.

Duel of the Defaults from @HemisphericViews is building community momentum. Thanks to @rknightuk for creating a collections site.

Duel of the Defaults: My List

On Episode 097 of my podcast Hemispheric Views we held a Duel of the Defaults! competition. Jason and Martin fought head-to-head to see who used the most default apps on macOS. As I was the compere and judge of the competition, it wasn’t for me to speak of my choices during the show. For the sake of the record, and to follow some of our loyal listeners who have blogged their defaults, here is my list: Mail Client: Apple Mail & Fastmail Web App (plus MailMate) Mail Server: Fastmail & Apple Mail Notes: Obsidian (plus Agenda & Apple Notes) 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: Safari (plus Arc) Chat: Signal Bookmarks: GoodLinks Read It Later: Readwise Reader (will be moving back to Omnivore) Word Processing: Pages Spreadsheets: Numbers (plus Excel) Presentations: Keynote Shopping Lists: AnyList Meal Planning: AnyList Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB News: Apple News (plus ABC RSS feed) Music: Apple Music Podcasts: Overcast Password Management: 1Password I encourage you to join in the fun, both by blogging your defaults and listening to our show. 2023-11-05 Update with Score On Mastodon, Jarrod Blundy asked about my score. I’ve calculated it to be 38!

I’m having fun editing @HemisphericViews this week for E097. It’s a different and fun episode coming up!

Four months ago I took an opportunity for a career change. A move from consulting to managing two Centres of not-for-profit WA Police & Community Youth Centres. It’s been an opportunity to learn, grow and improve. What I love most is working for my staff. The people at Rockingham and Fremantle Centres are first-class. As their manager it’s my job to make their work days better. When employees are happy, customers win. Culture is king.

Tim Cook chasing more of that sweet services revenue. A 16% increase! Even though I don’t use Arcade & Fitness they still have me over a barrel.

I can hardly believe I’ve installed Obsidian again. It didn’t gel with me last time; let’s give it another go.

Totally Killer, 2023 - ★★★

A fun movie that doesn’t take itself seriously and works as a result.

Champions, 2023 - ★★★½

A fun, heartwarming movie that is a good reminder that sport should be fun.

Fair Play, 2023 - ★

Molasses moves faster than the plot of this movie. Bad in so, so many ways.

Jarrod Blundy on Really Specific Stories

My friend Martin is a great interviewer on his podcast, Really Specific Stories. And thanks to Jarrod for mentioning Hemispheric Views! My Appearance on ‘Really Specific Stories’ - HeyDingus: That, along with this being my very first time on the speaking side of a podcast rather than the listening side, made me quite nervous, but it paradoxically felt both exhilarating and completely comfortable to just chat with an internet friend. All those hours listening to RSS and another of Martin’s shows, the also great Hemispheric Views made it easy to jump into our conversation. I enjoyed hearing from Jarrod just as much as I did other Internet luminaries such as John Siracusa, John Gruber and Jason Burk. Like and subscribe today!

Object Linking & Embedding

This article was originally written for the November 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. Martin has set me a challenge as to what to write about this month. He told me I have to write something about old office technology; maybe an office app feature that I used to use, or something similar. Because I’m so old, I have many topics to potentially write about; but also because I’m old I have forgotten so many of them. Ideas that I considered and discarded: fax machines, binding machines, shredders, Lotus Notes, Windows NT Workstation… All great things that I had to deal with that Martin did not. Today, however, I wish to write about Object Linking and Embedding. In our current era we take embedding items as a given, notably in web pages, where elements are easily embedded, be they Flickr images, Twitter tweets, or podcast episodes. Adding multiple content forms in a single page is not innovative in 2022. There was a time, however, where embedding items from one place into another was indeed innovative. It was Microsoft leading the innovation as they pushed the concept of OLE - Object Linking and Embedding. How amazing would it be to embed a live spreadsheet chart into your Word document. Make a change in the spreadsheet, and suddenly the chart data in your report is updated! Incredible! Excel not cool enough for you? No problem, create a view in Access and include that in your Word file. This was a time when the combined power of the MS Office Suite with its stylised puzzle art design on the box, actually made sense. You weren’t using a single application one at a time; you were working within a connected ecosystem. At least… that was the dream. Now it’s time to hit you with a dose of the reality from those times I tried to use OLE in a meaningful way within a work context. There were a number of drawbacks that I can recall — and I’m sure there were others that I do not. Let’s work through the shortlist of those I do: PC Speed. The 166 MHz Pentium I was probably using, that would also have had limited RAM, didn’t love running multiple applications at one time. Having to run an instance of one program inside another one; well that made everything that much worse. Hard Drives. Have you forgotten how slow spinning hard drives are? Try to think how slow a 5400RPM drive, running in an old PC with limited throughput, might handle swap files, which once OLE was enabled, was an automatic outcome. File Servers & Sharing. This was an era of local files and a bit of network sharing via Novell Netware, or maybe the first instance of Microsoft’s network stack. I recall for a long time we had to use a terrible Document Management System called Hummingbird, which added version control and check-in/check-out features. Now imagine how well a system like that worked when one file was calling the contents of another file embedded within it. More often than not, if it was somebody else opening the file, they wouldn’t have access to the embedded data. Printing. We used to print a lot. It was surprisingly difficult to get the window into the data displayed on screen in such a way that it would also print that way. And heaven help you if somebody clicked inside the OLE to activate it. There went your careful print-aligned view. To be fair to Microsoft, they weren’t the only company going down this path. Apple tried something similar with the OpenDoc standard. It too, didn’t deliver. In hindsight, all these years on, it is evident that this technology didn’t work. The ideas, however, of embedded content and live data, made sense. With web applications backed by database systems we’ve now arrived at a similar destination, albeit via a different route. However, I’m still not sure we have hit upon a complete standard, that OLE tried to deliver. Maybe one day. For now, though, I do not miss OLE.

Not sure if this is a compliment or a brickbat, but I think I prefer micro.blog as a Sonoma Safari app ahead of the native Mac app. Sorry @manton and @vincent

End of month YNAB life. 😅

Cannonball, 1976 - ★★

I really wanted to watch Cannonball Run! but I got this instead. The 1970s were a simpler time.

Reading Ross Gittins on Economics

I enjoy reading Ross Gittins' articles on economics. He is doing a great job of highlighting the many failures of the neoliberal dogma in Australia. ROSS GITTINS: What's kept us from full employment is a bad idea that won't die: Wages have risen in response to the higher cost of living, but have failed to rise by anything like the rise in prices. Why? Because, seemingly unnoticed by the econocrats, workers’ bargaining power against employers has declined hugely since the 1970s. This is so key. When I was in university, the Phillips Curve was being boosted as the saviour solution. I’ve changed, and economic thinking needs to change as well. Unions have been neutered. Individualised long-term contracts have nobbled any opportunity for people to achieve meaningful wage growth; unless you’re a CEO in which case your performance bonuses alone will see your income skyrocket year-on-year. Our major economic problems are that trickle-down economics didn’t trickle—rather it locked in wage growth benefits to the elite—and that the value of capital has been overvalued at the expense of labour. Which benefits the elite, who are the continued proponents of neoliberalism. Wow, who would have thought?

NextDNS or Pi-Hole?

I’ve been using NextDNS for a few years to block ads. Previous to it I used Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi. With the terrible AUD-USD exchange rate, I’m contemplating a return to Pi-Hole, but this time via Docker running on a Mac mini. Does anybody have any experience with this setup? I don’t want to have to do a lot of fiddling around and regular maintenance.

Climate Change Stripes for Perth, Western Australia

Depressing; alarming. This is an emergency.

Today’s Advice: Don’t Get Old

I know, the advice is meaningless because age is undefeated. The world turns, time moves ever forward, and we get old. If you can manage to avoid the process, though, I recommend you do. My latest ageing problem is a pulled back muscle that has entirely incapacitated me for one day, and three days later continues to prevent me from walking properly, putting on pants, or picking up things I have dropped. The worst part about said back complaint is how I did it… by walking. Nothing crazy; nothing energetic. I was at work walking between locations. If that doesn’t say “ageing man”, then I don’t know what does. When I was young this sort of thing didn’t happen to me. But I’m succumbing to ageing. Stupid progress of time. Not happy.

Case Study: The Weekly Cost of an iPhone

Hemispheric Views - Blog - Case Study: The Weekly Cost of an iPhone: During the episode recording I referenced the spreadsheet as I was describing my decision to buy an iPhone 15 Pro. I rattled off some statistics, but Martin (appropriately) suggested I write a blog post that provides the necessary detail. Fun fact: the description of number series are not great content for an audio show. A blog post written by yours truly in support of a conversation had on Hemispheric Views Episode 094.

I’m going to give Stage Manager another honest try on iPadOS 17, with “More Space” set as the display resolution.

Currently reading: Transforming the Difficult Child by Howard Glasser 📚

Really Specific Stories: John Gruber

My friend and Hemispheric Views co-host Martin Feld was able to interview John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame for his podcast project, Really Specific Stories. It’s incredible the line-up of guests Martin has been able to assemble for this podcast series. Let’s fireball the feed!

Dr Drang's Shell Script for Blank Calendars

A shell script for blank calendars - All this: I wanted a script to help me print out blank monthly calendars. Oh Dr. Drang, where have you and this script been my whole life? The steps I have gone to to get blank calendars in the past. Now I can simply run your script. Thank you!

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 2004 - ★★

Some nice moments but this film felt like it ran for 4 hours.

Love this end frame quote from Young Sheldon. If this doesn’t describe Trump I’m not sure what does.

My Dad joke for today: Q: What do you call an extra vegetable? A: A-spare-agus. 🥁 I’m here all week, folks!

I preordered an IPhone! This will be the first time I’ve had a Pro designation. My history as best I can remember it is: 3G, 5, 5S, 8, XR, SE, SE2, 13 mini. Soon to be 15 Pro.

Today at work I casually sketched out a swimlane diagram as I listened to a colleague describe a process. Can’t decide if I was a good management consultant for so many years, or I’m just a nerd now.

The Apple event was most underwhelming, even with low expectations. Evidence perhaps the iPhone in current form has reached its zenith. While I’m tired of having a too small for me 13 mini, it’s hard to justify the expense (and the environmental impact) of an upgrade.

Heading into another Apple event, and I’m not that jazzed about this one. It’s hard to be too excited when the most impactful development is likely to be USB-C. However, I am still looking forward to moving beyond my too small for my big hands iPhone 13 mini. Great in my pocket; not great in my hand.

I’ve cancelled my Backblaze account. Photos continue to be backed up across iCloud and Flickr. Everything else? 🤷‍♂️

I’m enjoying Kagi a lot. Am I seriously going to pay for a search engine? I’m not a normal internet user.

The Challenge of Podcast Discovery

This article was originally written for the October 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. A couple of weeks ago I inserted a thread into the Mac Power Users Forum. Part honest question, part hopeful Trojan Horse that might lead people to discover Hemispheric Views. The topic of the thread was around how people discover new, independent podcasts. This is a problem that I don’t believe has been solved. In fact, I’m not sure the problem has even been considered in any meaningful way. The economics of podcast exploration don’t stack up. Closed ecosystems want to put their money behind their own properties. Independent podcast apps are so often not that independent, because they are “friends” with existing networks. Overcast is the great example here. Developer Marco Arment has his own successful podcast, and they are tight with Relay.fm. It is a clique and despite their power in the market, they don’t seem to be using it to lift others up. So how do people discover podcasts? While machine learning might be helpful (other people who subscribe to your shows also subscribe to ‘x’), this could prove to be an amplifier of already successful shows, as well as being a potential negative privacy vector. I want to find new shows, new voices, but that have high production values. Basically, I want to find other versions of Hemispheric Views. At the same time, I want people to discover Hemispheric Views for themselves. The challenge is the old rule of Dunbar - 90% of everything is crap. How do you get people to wade through the crap to find the good stuff. It’s not exactly an enticing task. How do you convince people that the show you want to promote is not part of the 90%? How do you know it’s not part of the 90%? It’s a dilemma and I don’t know how to solve it, and I don’t see much appetite from others to do so. Do our readers know of any great independent podcasts that deserve more listeners? And can our readers share the good news of Hemispheric Views? I want more people to enjoy our show.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, 2023 - ★★★★

Just love the animation style. So impressive.

I love international basketball. I like that every couple of years I see the Head Coaches of each nation, and I remember them only from the previous tournament. Somw coaches I love, others I hate. All based on tournament impressions. 🏀

“Frugality, quite simply, is about choosing the things you love enough to spend extravagantly on—and then cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love.” — Ramit Sethi

I’ve deactivated my LinkedIn profile and deleted all my social media apps (except Mona and Micro.blog). I’m done with big social media.

RIP Warnock and the Hollowing of the Tech Industry

The passing of John Warnock brings to mind how few current tech “leaders” have technical prowess. Zuckerberg might be closest but he stole stuff to get ahead, Gates is retired, Musk is a snake oil salesman, Cook is a business guy. I wish the tech industry would get back to making useful things instead trying to get rich.

I know this is not a new insight, but the older I get the quicker life goes. Enjoy each moment because none of it lasts long.

I am so not ready to start my day.

This is a test post using Scribe, a web-based text editor for micro.blog, developed by @amit. He is continually making new and interesting projects. The pop-over bubbles when text is selected is a nice touch.

Three Years of Hemispheric Views Feedback

Three Years of Hemispheric Views Feedback: 040 I am furious Andrew doesn’t use “Grand Canion” as a username everywhere because that is so fucking good Let’s face it, I probably should use that username everywhere. This is just one of the many things I’ve rediscovered about myself and Hemispheric Views after reading this epic blog recap by @rknightuk. I am incredibly appreciative of the work Robb invested through his committed listening project of reviewing the entire back catalogue of our podcast. I think Hemispheric Views is a special podcast and I’m glad others think that too.

The Value of Rest

This article was originally written for the September 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. Beck Tench is a person whom I follow online. Beck has produced a range of content pertinent to her areas of interest as an academic. One of the topics Beck has written about includes the power of rest and what makes a restorative environment. I’ve always found this interesting. I’m not an academic but I do have a brain that grabs onto new and interesting thoughts, philosophies and approaches. Rest by definition is restorative. If the body and soul are not being restored in a period of rest - then what is the point? But in this modern world, what is rest? I think mental rest is almost more important than physical rest for many of us. That is not to diminish physical rest - especially hours of sleep - but many of us as modern knowledge workers are not destroying our bides daily in the way the majority of the workforce once did. We are, however, pressing our minds so much more, whether that be through higher-level thinking or information absorption. How many RSS feeds, podcasts, news articles, and social networks do you imbibe daily? The point is, we need to give our brains a break. We need a chance to restore. Recently I enjoyed a week away in Exmouth - a remote town of Western Australia. Exmouth has bad internet. You may have surmised this when I called into Episode 064: Nested Jackets. On this holiday I was able to step away from the daily hosepipe of information. I allowed my mind a rest from the the thoughts of others and gave it a chance to focus on the here and now, and my own thoughts. In addition, I gave my body more activity and motion than it usually gets - but an amount that is more healthy than what I typically achieve. This may seem opposed to my thoughts about rest. But what it meant was that I went to bed hours earlier than usual and got more sleep each night. This additional rest was restorative. Another element of Beck Tench’s thesis (as best I can tell) is that water is restorative. I experienced this to be true on my holiday. Between pool swims, ocean splashing and reef snorkelling seeing coral fish and turtles, being in and around water was restorative. What am I trying to say through this essay? Apart from corroborating what I’ve noticed Tench write about, it is an exhortation to myself to not lose touch of the value of stepping away; and to you, to encourage you to take a rest yourself.

The best podcast you’ve never listened to is 3 years old! Happy birthday @HemisphericViews

The Bear is great television. 📺

No Meta apps (Instagram, Threads) load when IPv6 is enabled. Vanguard website doesn’t load when IPv6 is disabled. Argh.

Even when I’m not on Hemispheric Views, I’m on it. Episode 089

Week One Done & Finished With a Flourish

Today I completed my first week at my new job. It’s been a whirlwind, but every day has been better than the previous one. It’s been so many years since I started a new job that I wasn’t match fit in the process. I’d forgotten how to ‘start over’, so that in itself has been an experience. Learning what is expected of me, and figuring out how to implement that without getting lost in the minutiae becomes the next challenge. I need to keep my head elevated and focus on the strategic objectives, without getting too deep into the weeds of daily tasks. An interesting juggling act to think about over the coming weeks. Today, however, as part of NAIDOC Week, a bunch of the team got together to work on an indigenous-style artwork. We were provided with the starting template and then as a team we “completed the dots”. It was a great way to get to know everybody and bond while doing an activity that was quite meditative. The team is a wonderful group. I haven’t done a team activity for such a long time, and this was a perfect way to end a first week at a new job. I am also proud of the painting. I think it looks fantastic!

Browser-based Apps Just Aren't as Nice

I can’t believe that 40 years of computer software design has led us to a world where we are all reliant on a range of entirely bespoke browser-based apps. The tech world has really ended up in a basket-case of UI design. I don’t mind server-based stuff, but I love a native front-end. It’s such a shame that market economics has resulted in us running complex apps in an app that was never designed for that purpose. It’s such a massive kludge, retrofitting entire platforms into a web browser. Native code kits are sitting right there, and simply not being used. It saddens me.

Half-way through the first day of a new job. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to go through the rigamarole of induction. 💼

Wordle 739 2/6 🟨🟩🟩⬜🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 It’s going to be a good day!

That feeling when you’re enjoying the job of being a basketball commentator. 🏀

When the struggle is real, a walk can be the remedy. 🚶🏼‍♂️

I’m liking Tinylytics - a new project from @vincent. Giving me what I want to know, and nothing more, about site stats for my micro.blog site.

Binance ordered out of Nigeria

This could be a headline from The Onion. You know things are bad when Nigeria decides your business is too scammy to be allowed to operate in its country. Binance ordered out of Nigeria: Nigeria…has ordered Binance to “immediately stop soliciting Nigerian investors in any form whatsoever”. I bet there are many Nigerian Princes happy to once again have a clear run at the market.

Thinking about Slack’s fall from grace. Acquired by Salesforce. 🤮 Squeezed on the business side by Teams with typical Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish. Squeezed by Discord from the casual side. Slack will probably keep limping on as a sad brand, Yahoo!-style, for years.

Friendships make my heart sing.

Reddit is Enshittified

Social Media Deathwatch II - Mark writes: When a site tells you they don’t want you using it, except by their captured clients, you should stop using it. All they want is to control you and put ads in your eyeballs, until you explode. … Reddit came out of Digg being fed into a woodchipper just because Kevin Rose wanted a little bit of money… Don’t use closed networks owned by someone else. The enshittification of Reddit is now complete. Christian Selig, developer of the best Reddit client, Apollo, is shutting it down after he failed to comply with Reddit’s mafia-style multi-million dollar shakedown effort. Instead of paying the protection money, he is closing Apollo down. Remember all those cool tips about adding reddit to the end of your search term to find real results? That’s probably not going to be reliable much longer, because I think this is the first—and last—step to Reddit becoming an unmoderated cess pool of spam, devoid of helpful humans contributing good content. This is a cycle that any venture capital-backed firm seems unable to fight against. The interest of community and users is sacrificed at the altar of money; those high priests seemingly unable to see that it is the community being sacrificed that generates the potential to make money in the first place. I’ve enjoyed Reddit. Maybe we need to reboot Usenet?

Keane on the RBA's Approach to Inflation

I’m happy to see pressure mounting on the RBA. Not so much even for the decision to lift rates, but on it’s myopic approach to analysis. The economy has changed; it has become more integrated, and duopolies and oligopolies rule the Australian markets. A fundamental lack of competition is allowing the growth of profits, and the RBA currently seems unwilling to accept this as a line of thinking. Bernard Keane, writing for Crikey, knocks it out of the park on the Reserve Bank of Australia’s approach to inflation. It’s hard to choose a few highlights from Keane’s article; the entire piece is worthy of reading. The RBA wants to wish the entire profit-inflation debate away, seemingly enraged at the suggestion that gouging by firms with high levels of market power is a greater spur to inflation than the traditional villain: greedy workers demanding pay rises driving a wage-price spiral. … the OECD weighed into the debate, devoting a section of its latest global economic forecasts to the issue. Its data specifically on Australia shows unit profits massively outweighing unit labour costs as a source of inflation. … this bout of profit-driven inflation comes at the end of a near-decade of wage suppression, and a historic shift — especially since 2017 — from wages to profit share of income nationally. Merely preserving, let alone strengthening, profit margins in a period of high inflation perpetuates that shift from workers to business. … Neoliberals have a blind spot when it comes to market concentration: the core idea that unfettered markets work more efficiently than highly regulated markets means a relative antipathy to effective competition laws designed to protect the very mechanism by which markets work efficiently.

Monetising Latent Skills

Most people have a set of skills that aren’t monetised. These skills are often linked with hobbies or interests. Why don’t people make money from them? Perhaps there is no discernible market for the particular skill. Maybe the joy is removed when a transactional element is added. For whatever the reason, humans are adept at many things, and we often only get paid for a small aspect of the overall talent inherent within us. A large part of the economy is built around free labour in the form of volunteering (probably much to the disgust of neoliberals - unless they are receiving the fruits of the labour). Many volunteer in some capacity; whether it’s coaching their kid’s sports team, or sitting on the board of a not-for-profit organisation, or singing in their church choir. I’ve done volunteer work such as this, except singing in the choir. Nobody wants that. What latent skills do I have that could be put to use for some small financial gain? And what are the associated downsides or limiting factors? Skill Limiting Factor Podcast editing & production Niche Personal finance training Liability risk; licensed industry Apple product know-how Apple Store and search engines Basketball I’m not a coach Personal productivity & efficiency YouTube domination It’s a shame I’m not a handyperson. Physical labour continues to be one area that is clearly linked to a necessity—and a willingness—to pay. However, if you see a skill of mine listed that you think could help you, let me know. I may be willing and able to help.

Oh no, now I’m going down a Safari versus Arc versus Vivaldi browser showdown rabbit hole. 🕳️🐇

Oh, is that all we have to do? More gold from the guy earning in excess of $900,000 per year from his one job. “People can cut back spending, and in some cases find additional hours of work that will put them back into a positive cash flow position.” – RBA Governor Philip Lowe

Creating rice outline islands with my boys.

Neoliberalism Gives Again

The “party” that is neoliberalism has been giving our society gift after gift. We’ve had corruption and self-interest at the highest levels, as PwC executives had their snouts in the trough on both sides of the consulting equation, giving legislative design advice to government then flipping that information and advising their corporate customers on ways around said legislation. We’ve had executive wages grow exponentially over recent years, irrespective of their performance, or that of the company they lead. (Hi, Alan Joyce of Qantas!) We see executives engaging more consultants and labour-hire at the expense of full-time wage earners. We’ve had companies making extraordinary profits, helped by government supports such as JobKeeper (Harvey Norman excelled at this one.) Yet workers have not benefited from the neoliberalism party. They’ve just had to buy the drinks then clean up the mess the next morning. Workers have seen their share of the economic pie decrease over time. From ABC News in March 2019: In the two years preceding 2019, Australian workers received the lowest share of total economic output since the 1950s - less than 47% of GDP. This is a decline of 11% since the 1970s. Corporate profits have increased 10% in that same time. Wage stagnation—which is one of the design outcomes of the neoliberalist agenda—is another problem. The economy might have a high level of headline employment, but due to low levels of worker organisation (unionisation has been demonised for years) combined with individualised contracts and wages that are set for multiple years in advance, workers can’t leverage the high rates of employment to broker a better deal for themselves. The cards are stacked against them. Today, we received another gift courtesy of the neoliberalism inherent in our economy. The Reserve Bank of Australia has determined that what our economy needs is yet another interest rate rise. Never mind that this generation of Australians are facing the highest home prices of all time, and that as a share of household income, mortgages are eating more than has historically been the case. Canceling Netflix and not getting Uber Eats once a week is not going to make a dent in the additional mortgage repayments required of a household. Where is the extra money to be found? Surely we are nearing the point where the RBA is expecting people to find blood from a proverbial stone. I predict a major economic calamity for Australia, and it’s not going to be pretty. My only hope is that it destroys whatever credibility neoliberalisms might have. At least then, something will have been gained from the misery.

So we are at the point where the feature update for macOS is… screensavers. Better for energy efficiency, and thus climate change, to simply have the screen turn off.

Sick day. Watching episodes of Seinfeld.

I’ve discovered the music artist Jelly Roll. Really digging his sound. 🎵

It’s storming outside. I’m sick and don’t have a voice. Today’s Public Holiday is wasted on me. My boy wanted me to feel better so brought me breakfast in bed. 🥰

Life admin takes up an inordinate amount of time, effort and resources. Problem with having a task manager is nothing ever gets lost in the mix. Full personal accountability can be a real bear.

The Whale, 2022 - ★★★★

Incredible acting supported by great lighting and the 4:3 aspect ratio.

The Redeem Team, 2022 - ★★★½

Turns out I like Carmelo Anthony, even though he carved up Australia when playing for USA.

Arcadia June, the annual @HemisphericViews gaming event, is getting underway. Check out our launch video!

How the heck was this opening sequence from Apple 10 years ago? Feels like last week. via @jarrod

Where Have I Been?

I think this list is complete, and compiled in no particular order. Thanks @manton for the inspiration. 🇮🇹 Italy 🇻🇦 Vatican City 🇫🇷 France 🇨🇭 Switzerland 🇮🇩 Indonesia 🇭🇰 Hong Kong 🇨🇳 China 🇻🇳 Vietnam 🇸🇬 Singapore 🇯🇵 Japan 🇭🇷 Croatia 🇺🇸 United States of America New York Washington D.C. Virginia West Virginia Tennessee California Texas Florida 🇦🇺 Australia Tasmania (born) Perth (reside) Darwin Sydney Melbourne Brisbane Canberra

Post-soccer hangs with The Booj.

Looking forward to commentating #NBL1 West action between Perth Redbacks and East Perth Eagles, streaming on Kayo Freebies tonight. 🏀 🎙️

My Favourite App — Not Spoiled in the Title

This article was originally written for the August 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. I’ve written about my favourite apps before, namely OmniFocus and DEVONthink. I starting to learn and enjoy anther app — Logseq — but I don’t feel I’m in a position to yet write about it with too much authority. I use a whole toolkit of apps on a regular basis to get my work done and enjoy my computing time. All these apps (and others) are great to use but I don’t feel compelled to write about them here now. Upon consideration, I am going to write about another app that I use every day. It’s an app that you can install on macOS, iOS and iPadOS and experience a consistent and enjoyable experience. It’s an app that will cost you nothing - it’s free, as in beer. It can work alone or sync with services and share content to other apps. A Universal app, that is free, that is a perfect citizen on the OS. Universal, free, perfect… Are you getting it? That’s right, it’s NetNewsWire. One the most Mac-assed Mac apps you can find, that is also an iOS and iPadOS-assed app as well. NetNewsWire has had more lives than your local cat. I remember using it eons ago when it looked like a more exciting version of Mail.app. Then it had its dark days when it was owned by Black Pixel and left to wither. Then once again under the stewardship of its original author, Brent Simmons, it was brought back, this time into the open-source community. NetNewsWire is a wonderful app. It doesn’t do everything. If you want everything, get Reeder 5. If you’re content with everything you need, get NNW. But what is it? C’mon, this is a Hemispheric Views newsletter. You know its an RSS reader. Reading web pages via RSS is a feature that I have used almost every day for probably about 20 years. I used Bloglines. I used Google Reader. I used FeedWrangler. I used Feedly. Now I use Inoreader. Others use Feedbin. With NNW, you can continue to use RSS syncing services, or you can rely on its internal sync engine that leverages iCloud. I will probably do that once my Inoreader subscription expires. NNW has a few themes you can switch between, it can share to Read It Later services, and it can subscribe to Twitter and Reddit feeds in addition to regular RSS ones. Does it do much else? Not really. Is it absolutely rock-solid in what it does do? Yessiree. I’ve never once had NNW crash. It hardly uses any system resources. It’s blazing fast. It has one job and it does it. I love NNW and I think you will too. It costs nothing to give it a try. Why not do so?

What happened to Roam Research? For a while it was the talk of the internet. Has Obsidian entirely cut its lunch?

So it seems I will once again be addicted to a Zelda game. 🕹️

I watched Seinfeld S1E1. It holds up relatively well, apart from some of the stand-up bits that don’t factor in modern phone technology and riff on normative gender stereotypes. The episode itself was still a lot of fun. 📺

Currently reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear 📚

Finished reading: The Tools by Phil Stutz 📚 As with any “self-help” book, application is the key. Interesting how in alignment with stoicism many of the concepts are. There is nothing new in the world.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 2023 - ★★★½

I like that I don’t need to be an MCU nerd to enjoy this film. I didn’t like the music in this as much as the first two, but playing from a brown Zune makes up for it. The corridor scene is epic.

Hemispheric Views 084

Discord voice messages are like a podcast in a podcast! Voyager crushed Eurovision, and you know it! Operation Employ Andrew is full steam ahead, and @martinfeld is leading the campaign. Wait, you can play games on a Mac!? Have you tried text-only toolbars? You should! Finally, why are all these tins full of buttons!? Listen to Hemispheric Views 084 now! @HemisphericViews @Burk

andrewcanion.com/cv

Everything is Going to Be Alright

I was a young teenager in the early 1990s. My brother, 11 years my senior, had children early in his life. He would often come back to the family home and bring his young son and daughter with him. As the older Uncle Andy, I had responsibility for entertaining the boy. What a pain he was! Entirely obsessed with playing F/A 18 Interceptor on my Amiga 500, but so young that he could rarely get the bird off the carrier without crashing. Over and over he would try - driving me crazy in the process. “Alex!”, I would bellow, “go away and leave me alone!” Today, at 4:15am Perth time, little Alex hit the big time with Voyager, the band for whom plays he bass guitar and provides supporting vocals. After a near-miss in 2022 in the Australian Eurovision qualifiers with their song, Dreamer, this year they made it through to the Eurovision big show in Liverpool, UK. Their song for this year_Promise_, is even better. The band absolutely slayed their semi-final. The song was great, the performance was impeccable, the lighting and staging first-class. When my little nephew Alex let out his gutteral, “riiiigghhttt”, I knew this performance was on the money. My annoying little nephew transformed into a rock superstar, and I’m here for it. My 2023 has been a challenge. I’ve suffered the end of a marriage. I’m soon to lose my current job. Yet for this 3 minutes of Eurovision all those personal challenges was washed away, as I jumped around a Perth lounge room at 4:15am with my two sons, all three of us belting out the lyrics, “everything is gonna be alright!”. For Alex—for Voyager—who now push onto the Eurovision 2023 Grand Final, no matter what happens in that performance, everything is going to be alright. They’ve made it. For me, dealing with one of the hardest times of my life, it was reassurance that everything is going to be alright for me also. The annoying little nephew has taught his old uncle a good life lesson. I bet he still can’t land an F/A-18, though.

Voyager just slayed at Eurovision! 🎶

andrewcanion.com/cv

Today it was confirmed that my current employment will end as of 30 June 2023. If anybody is looking for a person with broad knowledge and skills, get in touch! andrewcanion.com/cv

Currently reading: Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware 📚

In Hemispheric Views E083 I ask whether to mustache, or not to mustache. @Burk thinks Migration Assistant is fantastic. Do you have a series of items you carry around every day? We learn @martinfeld is actually in Europe and loves clubs with pokie machines. Plus depreciation is great!

Hey @amit I have noticed my stats page seems a little broken - under-reporting my post volume. Just wondering if there might be a bug with the plugin?

Currently reading: The Tools by Phil Stutz 📚

This week in NBL1 West basketball I am commentating Perth Redbacks v Willetton Tigers (women and men). These games will be broadcast on Kayo Sports Freebies. Watch the stream and enjoy my commentary!

Once Again, I'm Asking You to Suggest a Note-taking App

This article was originally written for the July 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. It’s happening again. I’m feeling a degree of dissatisfaction with my note-taking app of choice. I thought Craft was going to be the one. It was as close to a macOS native application as I was going to find (albeit with Catalyst sensibilities) and features the ability to take topic notes, daily notes and collaborate with other people. Craft has been working well and my use-case was aligned with the vision the developers seemed to have for their own app. Until… venture capital. The company developing Craft wasn’t willing or able to build a business the old-fashioned way—by making a product and selling it for money. Well, they did do that (I paid!) but obviously the revenue wasn’t enough to pay the bills or deliver the desired return on investment. So venture capital provided at least $8m, and now Craft needs to find a way to not only cover costs, but deliver a return on a much larger amount of invested capital. They’ve chosen to do this by… you guessed it… pivoting to the business market. Their newly revamped website no longer promotes the idea of attractive note creation for a motivated individual. Now, they are all about creating impactful documents, showing how Craft makes business documents more attractive than Word or Docs. Good luck to them, I say, if they think businesses care that much about how documents work - so much that they’re going add on a Craft subscription on top of their existing Microsoft 365 account. I can’t see companies going for that. Appearance doesn’t matter that much. For me, now, I’m left using an app that is adjusting its focus towards a market that is not me. I can either roll with it - which I will at least until my current subscription (that just renewed for 12 months) runs out, or until there is another option that is immediately compelling. I’ve tried Obsidian before (have you heard the good word?) but it’s not for me. Just the other day I took advantage of a discount price to renew my Agenda subscription for another 12 months. I’m also now exploring Logseq, which is intriguing, despite being entirely non-native to macOS. Who knows, maybe I simply fall back to DEVONthink—the old workhorse. What I do know is that it’s disappointing that businesses don’t seem willing or able to build a product that is targeted at the home or individual user. Everything is about making it big and trying to attract that sweet corporate cash. Which leads to product design decisions that offer no benefit to home users. Oh Craft, why have you put me in this position?

I’ve had doubts about this season of Ted Lasso but the Amsterdam episode is a welcome return to form. 📺

“There’s always been this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of [a] sudden get very dull and boring and serious when they come to work, and it’s simply not true. So if we can again inject that liberal-arts spirit into this very serious realm of business, I think it would be a worthwhile contribution.” – book.stevejobsarchive.com I love this quote from Steve Jobs. With my own ageing my work persona has become less serious. I have no desire to be dull and boring.

This special guest episode of Hemispheric Views features the wonderful Scot Hacker, author of The BeOS Bible. We talk about the past, present and future in this great extended episode covering BeOS, photography and writing books.

Djeran is definitely my favourite season in Perth. Perfect amount of warmth, I’m not getting sunburnt, and relatively little wind. I love it.

I just became moustachioed!

I’ve liberated the archive of tweets from my @andrewcanion account, and set them free. Unfortunately the larger @canion archive remains on my local storage only. Thanks @manton for building this feature into micro.blog.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, 2023 - ★★½

Hits all the Mario tropes, and I got a few chuckles along the way. Mainly one for the kids, though.

Tomorrow I am flying to Karratha to commentate the NBL1 basketball game between Geraldton Buccaneers and Perth Redbacks. It will be streamed live at 7pm (+8GMT) if you want to watch. 🏀

Air, 2023 - ★★½

A basketball movie about business - my kind of film! Would have benefited from some tighter editing, but it’s always a pleasure to watch Damon act.

I’ve been watching this video of hit songs via kottke. My two takeaways: the 1980s was the era of epic bangers, and strong sexual innuendo in music video clips arrived around 2005.

Finished reading: The Dry by Jane Harper 📚 I ruined this excellent whodunnit mystery by taking far too long to read it. Shame on me.

Thank You for Smoking, 2005 - ★★★★

I was excited to rewatch this movie, until I saw the opening credits where both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were listed as Executive Producers. Urgh.

Using an iPad in Centre Stage with a Studio Display is kind of compelling. I’ve just been bouncing between apps, servers, local servers, etc. With Spotlight to jump between it doesn’t feel terrible.

On the Hemispheric Views Discord I diagrammed my cable connections after my recent setup change. I thought it would be fun to post it here, as well.

New Mac Setups

Today I restructured my computing setup. For about 2 years I’ve been running a MacBook Air M1 as a satellite device, keeping my 2019 Intel iMac as my centralised ‘home base’. The iMac had a nice screen, 40GB RAM and apart from at boot, never felt slow. To the iMac were connected a bunch of devices, including a Stream Deck, JBL speakers, an EVO-4 audio interface, and a Time Machine drive. Today, I got sick of the whole setup. The slow load time and the flakiness it was showing with regard to iCloud Drive sync pushed me over the edge. I’ve promoted my MacBook Air to ‘home base’ status. I’ve retired the JBL speakers, Stream Deck and Time Machine drive. For the time being, I have access to a Studio Display, which I’m using as a great monitor. If I lose access to this, I can see myself buying another (perhaps even with nanotexture glass). The MacBook Air feels faster with a bigger screen! The iMac isn’t entirely retired, although I’ve moved it into a retirement home, setting up a new computer desk in my front ‘library’. Now I can choose my computing location - study or library. It might be nice. In all the changes, I considered promoting my mac mini to ‘home base’ but the fact that I bought it with only 8 GB RAM, and the noise that its attached 4-bay Thunderbay drive array made meant that idea was short-lived. That machine is back in the closet running as the headless media server once again.

My Intel iMac annoyed me one too many times. The closet/server M1 mac mini has been promoted to the production environment. Biggest loss? Going from 40GB RAM to 8GB. ☹️

Why do all modern washing machines have such obnoxious beepers?

The Love Punch, 2013 - ★

This was bad. What were the contract terms that got Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan on board?

Living, 2022 - ★★★★

A great reflection on what is truly important in life. Supported by great cinematography and the audio treatment of the dialogue is lovely.

Software Before Hardware

This article was originally written for the June 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. Another WWDC has come and gone, and Apple have released the M2 and a new MacBook Air to go with it. Apple’s hardware continues to be refined and it’s hard to argue that they are not knocking all their new machines out of the park. The thin and colourful iMac, the Studio with ports on the front, MacBook Pros and now the Air. Add on beautiful iOS devices and every piece of Apple hardware looks (and works) brilliantly. Apple software, on the other hand, is not going well. I don’t know whether to blame the new design guy that took over from Jony Ive, the business managers who are trying to create consistency across platforms in the name of efficiency, or that SwiftUI seems to be entirely incapable of acting as the supporting infrastructure for feature rich applications (or even utilities). The latest kerfuffle arrives in the form of the proposed “Setting” application in macOS Ventura. It’s ugly, it’s not optimised for the platform it’s operating on, and it feels like a regression from the “Preferences” panel that came before. Given that the Preferences panel was universally seen as “not great”, it is a sad indictment on Apple’s current ability to build good user-facing software that the rewrite is turning out to be worse. There are other examples, such as the vertical orientation of notification panels in macOS, the notifications system on all platforms, and even larger software efforts such as GarageBand never embracing podcast editing, Podcasts app continuing to be average, etc. The strange thing is, Apple is insanely great at developing low-level core frameworks. That they transitioned the entire macOS fleet to APFS without anybody realising is amazing. They built Metal - which goes chronically underused by game developers - but still they did it. Rosetta emulation is a masterpiece to aid the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon. I suppose no company can ever be perfect. Apple is doing great on the engineering side: highly technical work and manufacturing process management. They are not doing great on the softer design side. I think they need to take a new approach to software design, and that probably starts by changing their vision of what good software looks like. To me, it doesn’t mean everything looks like an iOS element. To me, it means embracing complexity where that complexity is beneficial to the user. There is no point making something look simple, if in using that simple design things get harder.

I have the Brother HL-3170CDW laser printer. It prints. I like it. Nilay is right 🖨️

A Relationship Well-lived

“So it goes” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five I met Hannah Beazley in 1999. We married on 19 March 2005. Innumerable highlights (and lowlights), some of which include: Establishment of a business, which together we ran for 5 years, then sold. Multiple overseas trips. Vietnam, Hong Kong, Italy, USA, Croatia, Singapore, Bali. Each of these trips with their own massive collection of memories and experiences. Hannah’s chronic medical challenges, which resulted in near death, as then virtually unknown hypereosinsophilia ravaged her body. Two children, when for the longest time we figured that number would be zero because of the aforementioned medical issues. Home ownership. Political campaigns, culminating in her becoming the Member for Victoria Park. 18 years of marriage. Now, that chapter comes to a close. Life is long. People grow and change. Wants and needs change and morph. I will never have another marriage, or even relationship, like the one I’ve had with Hannah. My heart sings with happiness about the time we’ve had together. I look forward to continuing to work with Hannah on our shared lifelong project of parenting our two beautiful boys. The time for romantic love, however, has come to an end. In its place is admiration, respect and appreciation for a friend who has been there through the highs and lows, and will continue to be there for our children as they experience the highs and lows of their own lives. Stoicism has been a helpful support over the past few months. Concerning myself with the controllables, and letting everything else be, has been a great help. I thank my friends and family for their support. Emotions are hard and having shoulders has been a blessing. Despite the massive change this change of relationship status entails, I feel sanguine. A life is long. I have been rewarded with a successful relationship that lasted 24 years. This is a thing deserving of marvellous celebration. An end is not a failure. Our relationship brought two new incredible people into a world that needs more incredible people in it. Now that relationship closes, and I feel appreciation and kindness towards the one I shared it with. I am so grateful there is no domestic violence, hatred, drug abuse, or other negative elements. The relationship ran its course and ended well. That is a good thing. Now, Hannah and I both enter new phases of our lives, and we work to ensure our children understand that this can be a good thing for us and them. For me, it’s an opportunity to once more spread my wings. To try new things, meet new people and explore the world on my own terms. There will be hard, lonely and depressing times. I know this to be true. But there is a chance for a recreation, a rebirth. I look forward to what comes next as I strive to live my best life.

Did some window shopping at the Apple Store yesterday.

Listening to In Rainbows by Radiohead while drinking expensive whisky. What a life. 🎵🌈🥃

canion dot blog slash save @HemisphericViews

I’ve had a music evening. I love these nights. Ranged across Jónsi, R.E.M., Sloan, Dolly Parton, and Toby Martin, to name a few. 🎶

I am enjoying reading The Daily Stoic each morning as a devotional. Today, this resonated.

My nephew Alex Canion doing media on ABC News. His band Voyager are going to be playing Eurovision in a couple of months!

Perth today feels as though it’s the end of summer and perhaps an early end to Bunuru season. It wasn’t warm enough to swim today. It’s 7:25pm and it’s dark outside. Perth moves closer towards Djeran.

Photoblogging Challenge Day 5: tile

Bohemian Rhapsody, 2018 - ★★★★

Watched on Friday March 3, 2023.

Currently reading: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday 📚

Parenting a son with autism is hard. The thunderstorms of rage pass, but lightning is fired from the maelstrom in the moment.

My reward for mowing the lawn.

Bed Update 🛏️: I appreciate all the thoughts and suggestions. I went with the expensive, local-manufactured option. Supporting Western Australian small business! Also hopefully getting a better product as a result.

The Edit of Hemispheric Views 078

Here is a screenshot of the edit for Hemispheric Views episode 078. Six audio tracks in play. Lots of edits and adjustments. Ferrite by WoojiJuice makes this possible, combined with a couple of years of editing experience and know-how I have built up. I’m proud that I have the skills to do this. Not something that generally goes on my curriculum vitae, but maybe it should?

In Andrew’s exciting world today, he does online shopping for bed frames. Does he buy the cheap one? Does he take the risk of entering the second-hand market? Or does he say, “stuff it”, and buy the expensive locally-manufactured option? Opinions welcomed. 🛏️

The @hemisphericviews Discord server is my happy place. I love the wonderful community that has formed there.

The choreography of this entire NFL Half-time show was incredible.

I’m enjoying the app Structured as a corollary of OmniFocus and a calendar. It is allowing me to fine-tune my day.

This is why I make podcasts. Quote is from Kurt Vonnegut, via Do the Work by @rishabh

My Mom sent me this quote. Much appreciated right now.

Paddington 2, 2017 - ★★★★

Absolute heart warmer of a movie. I love it.

Finished reading: Relationship Reset by Lissy Abrahams 📚

Finished reading: Belong by Radha Agrawal 📚

Finished reading: Disentangle by Nancy L. Johnston 📚. This book has taught me things I didn’t realise were a thing.

Finished reading: The Anxiety Handbook by Calistoga Press 📚

Currently reading: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday 📚. I am hoping I will be able to read this each day this year. I need to escape the mental health dangers and associated anxiety of ruminating upon things I can’t control.

Stutz, 2022 - ★★★★

Me bring me, I wanted more technical details of application.

The Menu, 2022 - ★★★★

A gastronomical delight, with acting to die for.

Depression is a right bastard. ☹️

Hustle, 2022 - ★★★½

I’m old so I liked cameos by old guys. But this is a movie for the next gen, with a solid development montage.

I’m contemplating a career change - or at least a new job. Is there anybody out there that might be interested in having a conversation?

Today I learned that Siri can identify buffalo grass with its machine learning.

Uncle Buck, 1989 - ★★

It’s pretty bad, but it still an iconic 80s movie.

It was wonderful to have a conversation with @heyscottyj today. Another cool friendship in the making.

I’m trialling Raycast (again 🙄) as a possible replacement for Launchbar.

Harry Froling has nothing on Nick Tan!

My App Toolkit 2023

At the beginning of 2023, an update to my 2020 post about my App Toolkit. It is still overflowing with tools, although I think it’s in better shape than at my last review. Purpose iOS Primary iOS Secondary macOS Primary macOS Secondary Best Cross Platform Blogging Gluon Micro.blog MarsEdit Micro.blog Drafts Report Writing Word Ulysses Word Word Meeting Notes Agenda iThoughts Agenda iThoughts Agenda Daily Notes Agenda Logseq Agenda Logseq Agenda Tasks OmniFocus Reminders OmniFocus Reminders OmniFocus Brainstorming iThoughts MindNode iThoughts Bike iThoughts

Does anybody know what has become of @smokey - no activity for a couple of years on any of his sites.

My favourite tree.

I’m going through a tough time. Day One has been a blessing to capture thoughts, feelings and emotions. The subscription is worth every cent.

Finished reading: A Guide for Grown-ups by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 📚

Microsoft Authenticator will no longer work on Apple Watch. I use this feature every single day. 😖

Strange World, 2022 - ★★½

A story of climate change wrapped up in some impressive animation and characters that I didn’t warm to.

Die Hard, 1988 - ★★★★½

Now I have a 64-bit computer. Ho Ho Ho.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, 1992 - ★★½

1992 really seems a different era, back when you could board a plane because you assumed your parents were on it. Slapstick cruelty is still fun, though.

Books of 2022

I’ve not done so great on book reading this year. The list looks a little thin!

Oiling the Deck

There are some household jobs that I procrastinate over. Oiling the deck is a new one I can add to the list. Our deck was installed a couple of years ago as part of a backyard renovation. I knew at the time this would be a necessary maintenance job that I would despise. I dutifully entered it into OmniFocus as a task for the future. That OmniFocus task has been deferred for about 9 months. I did the prepartory work of buying the expensive Cutek Extreme CD50 oil and the fancy Deck Boss applicator. The task of actually oiling the deck, though? That sat for a long time. Most of the time because of my own laziness. Sometimes because of the weather. I contemplated outsourcing the job but knew deep down within myself I wouldn’t trust anybody else to care enough to do it right. Finally, the time came and I went for it. The first step was to clean the deck a couple of days before the oiling. That went well. I used Cutek Quickclean. A few days after the clean, it was time to oil. The weather was hot - over 32ºC. I had to do the work in two shifts: one in the morning and one in the evening. The morning shift came to an end when I almost vomited from exertion in the heat. I’m too white, too old, and too unfit for manual labour in the burning sun. This is how I looked after the first shift — just a touch pink: I completed the second shift, and the job, with a minimal amount of oil left in the can. Maybe there’s enough to do a second coat on areas that look to need a little more. There is definitely not enough remaining to do a complete second coat. I think I’m okay with that. Now I have to schedule the next maintenance coat into OmniFocus…

You Always Own Your Blog

My Blog, My Home - Geoff Graham: That’s why I love my website. It’s apolitical. It can’t be bought by a billionaire (maybe). It doesn’t care when I last logged in. It doesn’t push me to gain an audience and could care less if I have a one or not. And the feed is spot-free of algorithms and sponsored content. But it’s always ready for me to say something if I need to. It’s all signal and no noise, and gives me the peace of mind to write without abandon. I pulled up my old (now lost) blog, twosittingducks.com, on the internet archive the other day. There were posts there from 2004. While I don’t think of myself as a blogger, I’ve run a blog site for a long time now. Like Geoff, I love that my blog is always here for me.

Swearing in of Hannah Beazley MLA as Parliamentary Secretary

Earlier I posted how happy I was that my wife, Hannah Beazley MLA had been made Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Emergency Services; Innovation and the Digital Economy; Medical Research; Volunteering, within the WA State Government. On 14 December, 2022, Hannah was officially sworn in by the Governor. It was fantastic to share the experience with her, and also with her Dad, former Governor of WA, Hon. Kim Beazley AC. It coincided with his 74th birthday, so it was a great birthday gift from his daughter!

Stephen Hackett on "Really Specific Stories"

My friend and Hemispheric Views co-host Martin Feld continues to bring incredible guests to his interview show, Really Specific Stories. This week he welcomes Stephen Hackett, founder of Relay.fm. Martin Feld: This time on Really Specific Stories, I’m joined by @ismh, who delves into the history of Relay FM and explains his shift to podcasting and running a business—all the while balancing the needs of advertisers, co-hosts, members and of course, family. … Really Specific Stories: Stephen Hackett – 512 Pixels: I recently sat down with Martin Feld to talk about the history of Connected and Relay FM, as well as my story as an indie content person on the web.

Another average day in Perth.

On Episode 073 of @hemisphericviews I talk about shoutouts.lol by @vincent

Hemispheric Views 073

Hemispheric Views 073: I Can Delete You from this Note!: In the second to last episode for 2022: I have a big shoutout for Monster Cables. @martinfeld solves my audio (or is it video?) problem. @Burk does some inefficient shopping for Kangaroos. Rate, review, subscribe!

My 11 year old kid woke me up to watch the World Cup (3am). It’s half time and I might go back to bed. ⚽️

Congratulations to my Wife, Hannah Beazley MLA

New McGowan Cabinet Ministers elected: Wanneroo MLA Sabine Winton and South West MLC Jackie Jarvis will be sworn in as Cabinet Ministers tomorrow, along with new Parliamentary Secretaries Jodie Hanns, Dr Jagadish (Jags) Krishnan, Meredith Hammat, Pierre Yang and Hannah Beazley. The Premier will announce the allocation of portfolios tomorrow, with Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries to be officially sworn in by the Governor of Western Australia at a ceremony at Government House. I’m extremely proud of the work my wife Hannah has done for the community as the Member for Victoria Park, and I know she will continue to do that while also fulfilling the role of Parliamentary Secretary with skill and diligence, irrespective of the Portfolio provided to her by the Premier.

Quality Tech Support from Indie Mac Developers

How good is the Mac indie developer community? Caddyshack Good GIFfrom Caddyshack GIFs I have been a long-time user of the SearchLink service developed by Brett Terpstra. I use it so regularly that I have it tied to a button on my Stream Deck, as well as keyboard shortcut, ⌃ + ⌘ + L. Last night I attempted to use SearchLink while typing in the all new MarsEdit 5. Instead of it working as it always has, I received a confounding error: The action “Run Shell Script” encountered an error: “-e:1778:in `scan': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError) from -e:1778:in `ddg' from -e:987:in `parse' from -e:2147:in `<main>'” This was beyond me. I knew that MarsEdit 5 had a new foundational text editing platform, so I assumed whatever had changed was probably a bug related to that. I also tried SearchLink in BBEdit (another great Mac app made by legendary Mac developers, Bare Bones Software) and the problem appeared there too - which shot somewhat of a hole in my MarsEdit theory. Nevertheless, I emailed Daniel Jalkut, developer of MarsEdit, with a support request. He quickly responded saying that he doesn’t use SearchLink, but would look into it. I also sent a support request to Brett. Very quickly Brett asked a further diagonostic question, then while I was asleep (welcome to Australia-USA relations), he emailed me through an updated version of the SearchLink script. Brett had determined that DuckDuckGo, the engine powering SearchLink, was suddenly providing results in a zipped format. The new version 2.2.27 fixes the issue. So within hours of noticing a problem with SearchLink, I again have a working version that supports the all-new MarsEdit 5 — and every other Mac-assed Mac app1 that works with services2. The Mac indie developer community is amazing. I thank them, and encourage you to support them by buying and using their products. Let’s keep this thing alive. Kudos to you, 1Password, for registering the domain macassedmac.app in defense of Electron-based 1Password 8. I don’t know what to think. ↩︎ I’m looking at you, Electron. ↩︎

I got a new pair of glasses a couple of days ago. They’re playing havoc with the muscles of my left eye. It’s early so I guess I wait a few more days to see if I become accustomed. This is the worst part of getting new glasses.

I taught Benji how sports brackets work. Now he is building his own World Cup version. 😍🥰🤩⚽️

Elvis, 2022 - ★★★½

A wonderful telling of the bastardry of Colonel Parker.

I’ve disabled cross-posting from micro.blog to mastodon. Going to try letting each be its own thing.

Ferrite 3

Ferrite 3: Ferrite 3 offers an enhanced, modernised UI all across the app. I couldn’t edit Hemispheric Views without Ferrite. Believe me, I tried. If Ferrite wasn’t available, I’m not sure our podcast would be either. Version 3 is an insta-upgrade for me. While it has a list of new features, the faster playback speeds are the real seller.

On one of Jack Baty’s blogs, I saw a reference to neofetch. It doesn’t do a lot, but it looks pretty. I’ve run it on my three machines: iMac MacBook Air Mac mini

Casey Liss on Really Specific Stories

My friend and Hemispheric Views co-host Martin Feld continues to build his other excellent podcast, Really Specific Stories. The latest episode features a guest famous to many of us in Mac-nerd circles: Casey Liss, one of the hosts of the hugely successful Accidental Tech Podcast. Casey references his experience as a guest on the show on his own blog. Appearance: Really Specific Stories — Liss is More: On this episode, Martin and I walked through my path into podcasting, starting all the way — and I’m not kidding — from when I was a toddler. It was a fun discussion, and I’m honored that Martin asked me to be a part of the project. Of course, I can’t help but mention my own appearance on Really Specific Stories, but I encourage you to binge the whole run.

This is a post mentioning @vincent to help him test @gluon

Excuse me @rosemaryorchard - are you still developing When.Works? Does it work?

I’ve cancelled my Fantastical subscription that expires in March 2023. My need for the bookings service may be declining. That, plus their price increase, means I will go back to BusyCal through Setapp. If it turns out I really need bookings, then I will reassess at the time.

Poor USA. The goalie has been poorly treated by his defenders. ⚽️

The Fantastical price increase is a bummer, because it’s a double whammy for me as an Australian user. Our weakened exchange rate multiplies the scale of the increase.

Spirited, 2022 - ★★★½

I don’t like musicals but I liked this movie.

Oh no, I’m going down a TaskPaper rabbit hole.

Thanks, Medibank data breach. I really appreciate you holding onto my details as an ex-customer, allowing it to be shared on the dark web following its theft. Great stuff.

Is This Thing On?

A mini-revival of an old favourite.

Human-sized Services

My friend Adam at omg.lol is building another special surprise for his customers. I have taken the pre-alpha version for a spin: A Weblog · Human-sized Services: There are now three blogging services that I admire, all of which are run by humans - not corporations. Humans making websites was what made 1.0, back in the Netscape Navigator days, great. Blink tags, under construction logos, and multi-colour Times New Roman font. It was joyous because it was the web at human level. The Internet is healing.

My mental health energy meter is reading at about 3% today. Can we shut it down today and reconvene tomorrow? 🪫

Web App Barbarians

This article was originally written for the April 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. I love to use native software but it feels like I’m the last of the troops that has been put on the final line of defence, guarding against the marauding ‘web apps’. It appears that most users are more than happy to load a copy of Google Chrome and run a bunch of web apps in fullscreen mode. This is what I see in my day job, as companies use Xero, Hubspot and any other number of web apps to run their companies. On a personal level things aren’t much better with Google Apps, YNAB, etc. sharing the platform with a growing number of Electron apps such as Discord, 1Password and Slack (and, of course, Obsidian). So I end up feeling like one of a declining number of people who prefer an app that utilises the native architecture of the client platform. Either people don’t care or they actively prefer web apps. I actually think it’s the former (users not caring) combined with development houses caring more about cost management and not actually putting the user first. If they were willing to invest development resources in native applications I am sure people would enjoy them. But they don’t care enough to force developers' hands. So we end up with the best app to meet profit targets — not the best app. As much as Apple invests in outlandishly fast and impressive hardware, what’s the point if all it means is that the platform can successfully run more Chrome tabs? Is that really what we have arrived at? Apple is not helping by not investing in their own first platform applications, either. They are creating meh apps across macOS as they attempt to consolidate development efforts through shared Swift/Catalyst implementations. Nothing seems better or more powerful than it was a decade ago. I hope that now Apple has its hardware house in order, that it can focus on its software. I’d love to hold off the web app barbarians at the gate just a few years longer.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 30: I am having to watch online cybersecurity safety training videos. They suck, and the questions at the end are poorly worded.

Embedding Toots in a Blog Post

Sometimes I ask dumb questions: Sometimes, kind people humour me: Thank you, @jameskoole@indieweb.social

I can’t sleep so I’m reading my book, Principles. I’m at the section where there are glowing references to amazing “shapers”, such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. Yeah, those latter two are so amazing. 🙄 This book is perhaps not ageing well.

We Need a New Approach to Social Platforms

The Elon-gate’d Man | Jared White: Jared White mounts a solid argument as to where we have gone wrong with big tech celebrity, and talks about how me might be able to do better in the future. with this maturity has to come broader awareness that Big Tech can’t simply act like 21st century echoes of the robber barons. Either the tech sector must demonstrate its ability to police itself and show good corporate governance and a willingness to let bottom-up creativity and entrepreneurship flourish in the marketplace of ideas, or we must call for increased regulatory scrutiny on all fronts. … And for the love of all that is holy, we must rid ourselves of this absurd myth that a single person just shows up one day with a skip in their step and a spark of genius in their brain to change everything overnight. Never again should we fall for an Elizabeth Holmes. Never again should we fall for an Adam Neumann. Never again should we fall for a Sam Bankman-Fried. Never again should we fall for a Mark Zuckerberg. Doing the same thing again, with a different company, a different founder offering a story of salvation, a different VC backer… any of that will only take us to the same place we’ve been, and has been proven to fail. Let’s build something different. Let’s build interop.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 29: Is it wrong that I’m waiting for our fish to die? I don’t want to kill them, but if they were to not make it much longer, I’d probably be okay with that. 😬

A reminder that now is a great time to sign up to @hemisphericviews at One Prime Plus Dot Com to take advantage of our version of Black Friday/Cyber Monday!

When considering investing time and effort into a service, check to see whether it is VC funded. If it is, keep in mind that they are more interested in their financial return than you receiving a return on the investment you make in that service.

I may need a note taking/writing app intervention.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 28: I loathe the current trend towards the mullet haircut. Wasn’t good in the 80’s, isn’t good now.

I’d forgotten how enjoyable World Cup Soccer (Football) can be. Morocco beat Belgium, 2-0. Amazing. ⚽️

We set the Christmas tree up today and in doing so crossed some sort of kid threshold. This year, our boys actually helped setup and decorate the tree. They enjoyed unpacking decorations and reminiscing about their associated memories. It was really sweet.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 27: I had to work hard to find the motivation to put up the Christmas tree. Didn’t I just take it down a couple of weeks ago?

Microblogvember 2022, Day 26: I have made a commitment to not use Twitter while it is owned by Elon Musk.

I’ve figured out why Australia doesn’t have Thanksgiving. It’s celebrated on a Thursday, which would mean our entire country would then of course chuck a sickie on Friday. The productivity decline would be far too deleterious.

Currently reading: Principles by Ray Dalio 📚

Seems host nation Qatar will be out of the World Cup. If this were basketball, I’d say “ball don’t lie”. Some degree of justice delivered for the payola World Cup. ⚽️

Microblogvember 2022, Day 25: Completing a microblogvember post everyday this month has almost become ritual at this point.

I'm Out on Twitter 🫡

“The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.” — Lieutenant General David Lindsay Morrison AO Upon reflection, I have determined that my values are inconsistent with those of Twitter’s post-acquisition by Elon Musk. Rather than continue to use the service - even within my safe #NBL23 bubble - I believe the correct and appropriate action is to cease use of the platform. I am available on Mastodon @canion@social.lol and micro.blog @canion 🫡

Microblogvember 2022, Day 24: As I get older the challenge to retain my hair becomes greater.

Lunch date at Parliament House, with Hannah and, uh, Benji’s lion.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 23: With the doom of Twitter, I have enjoyed being able to focus on a daily update of my micro.blog site — this content I own.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 22: When I was a kid I would constantly have a graze somewhere on my body. Fortunately, I survived.

Should I Mix Up My Approach to RSS?

I’ve always been an RSS completionist. Since the days of Bloglines, which was before Google Reader. I have a few hundred feeds and I work through them — usually on a daily basis — to ensure they are read and down to ‘inbox zero’. I achieve this with Inoreader and a combination of NetNewsWire and Reeder. I’m wondering though, should I be using FraidyCat? I tried it years ago and it didn’t stick. Maybe I should try again?

Microblogvember 2022, Day 21: It is late November and our swimming pool is still as cold as ice. I don’t like it.

Tipped 100% for this round of #NBL23. Thanks Shaun Bruce of Sydney Kings for knocking down the end game triple to steal that one.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 20: As a parent, I find I have to repeat myself quite often.

Recent events have almost — but not quite — destroyed musk sticks for me.

Welcome New Micro Bloggers

It’s good to see new accounts and activity on micro.blog. I hope a reasonable proportion stick around. The best thing to remember about micro.blog is that it is a personal blog host as much as it is a social network. Blogs are a permanent place for your writing, and in my opinion, this makes them more weighty, and less transient, than tweets. It provides an opportunity to build a corpus of thoughts in the form of text, pictures, video and audio over time. Slowly but surely you end up with years of posts that you can look back upon - and link to. Micro.blog is not Twitter, it’s not Mastodon, and that is its strength.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 19: I used to read a novel quite regularly. Nowadays, I still read a lot, but it’s mostly short-form articles and news. I should re-focus attention on books.

Musk Has Destroyed His Own Mythos

Ed Zitron has published “The Fraudulent King”, a marvellous explainer on the latest happenings at Twitter, but at the same time, outlined what a petulant, unimpressive person Elon Musk is — and how the world now knows it. There were so many great lines in this article, it was hard to know which to highlight as an extract: …we are in the process of watching said timeline wholesale reject Elon Musk and his ideology. Musk has paid $44 billion to purchase a website that has all told him to go fuck himself. … Under the largest spotlight in the world, Musk has proven himself to be a petty charlatan who lacks any meaningful skills necessary to run a company. While we may have been able to fool ourselves that Musk could have successfully run three or four companies at once, the truth is more likely that SpaceX and Tesla have survived his tenure as CEO rather than thrived under his leadership. … When given absolute power and the world’s undivided attention, Elon Musk has managed to economically destroy his company, publicly (and repeatedly) humiliate himself, ostracize most of Silicon Valley’s engineering talent, and dispel any belief that he is a Tier 1 Genius Operator. Honestly, read the entire article.

With all the Twitter stuff, can we please get one more season of Silicon Valley?

Why have I woken at 5am? It’s Saturday! 😩

It is amazing how quickly @neatnik can roll out a new feature. His opt-in address directory at omg.lol was an idea I threw out during @HemisphericViews E071. Listen to the podcast and check out the directory!

If anybody finds Instagram isn’t loading on wifi, try disabling IPv6. That worked for me with my Eero 6. This will please my wife.

This sounds frightfully Trumpian: In a tweet Thursday evening, Musk said: “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.” Source: Hundreds of Twitter employees resign after Elon Musk’s ‘hardcore’ ultimatum - The Verge

Microblogvember 2022, Day 18: I’ve knocked off 18 consecutive microblogvember posts. I will not tire before I reach 30.

Twitter Circling the Bowl as Employees Leave

Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink; in hindsight it should have been a toilet, because Twitter is now circling the bowl. Elon Musk eases return-to-office order - The Washington Post One Twitter staff member said the numbers of employees seeking to leave had alarmed Twitter’s managers, who had formed “war rooms” to determine which employees should be asked to stay on. Resignations and departures were already taking a toll on Twitter’s service, employees said. “Breakages are already happening slowly and accumulating,” one said. “If you want to export your tweets, do it now.” Hate speech and other abuse was also likely to spike, employees said. Most of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, consisting of up to 40 people, was expected to resign. Is it surprising that engineers are opting to leave and take a 3-month severance package, as opposed to staying where they have to work extensive hours for a mercurial owner, without the joy of working with colleagues? Musk really doesn’t seem to understand that employment is a two-way street. These people are not indentured servants. If the deal isn’t good, they can/should/will walk. Last one out, please switch off the lights. What’s the bet that in a couple of months, Twitter is employing remote-work engineers working out of India?

Adam Newbold of omg.lol returns to Hemispheric Views E071 to discuss recent developments. I roll up my sleeves to offer some top-tier business advice while Jason and Martin back away slowly into a hedge.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 17: What exactly is a barrel of laughs, anyway? Were laughs once packaged in a barrel for easy transportation? I don’t get it.

Watching the Artemis I launch - T-7 minutes. 🚀

Twitter News: Don't Criticise the Owner (But the Owner can Criticise You)

Musk fires Twitter engineers after critical posts on Twitter and Slack: Musk had already tweeted Monday that he had fired at least one engineer who publicly criticized him on Twitter. The latest terminations come in the wake of Musk’s decision to let go of about half of all Twitter employees in a bid to cut costs. Some Twitter employees confirmed the layoffs on their verified accounts. “Looks like i just got fired for s—posting too ✌️” one wrote in response to another person who said they had been let go. It’s never smart to criticise your employer in public, although some of this criticism was published on an internal Slack. A mature manager would probably look at the recent unrest and seek to counsel their employees. Not Elon, who has shown not maturity to date and continues to exhibit none. He fired the complainers, and gloated about it publicly afterwards: “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” he (Musk) wrote on Twitter. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” Good to see he can criticise those individuals publicly without recourse, hey?

Microblogvember 2022, Day 16: Every sports team needs a franchise player to be truly successful. At the moment, for the Perth Wildcats, that guy is Bryce Cotton.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 15: Barenaked Ladies have a song entitled Aluminium on their album Everything to Everyone. It address the pronunciation elephant in the room. Track on Songwhip

Summer is gradually returning.

I’ve been comparing two Read-it-Later services, Omnivore and Matter. Omnivore had the head start with earlier integration with Logseq but now Matter also has that feature. Matter is more attractive. Omnivore is open source. If there is one thing that the recent Twitter/Mastodon comparison has reminded me of, is that open source is probably the safer long-term bet.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 14: It will be fascinating to see how Twitter evolves and if all the people and organisations who decided to leave, stay away.

Own Your Content (A Reprise)

Precisely two years ago today, I wrote this, in the context of Instagram.Blog of Drew - Own Your Content: A personal website and domain name remains the most reliable way to avoid your content serving as feed stock for a commercial enterprise. Today, it holds up in the context of Twitter. The more things change…

Microblogvember 2022, Day 13: My first experience with the game Deathloop left me unimpressed but after playing some more I may have to adjust my initial impression.

Shooting Hoops

Recently we have installed a cool basketball hoop in our front yard, ostensibly for our kids to play as they grow into their teenage and teenage years. An unexpected benefit has been for me – Dad. I used to play basketball. You may be aware that I now host NBL Pocket Podcast, have media accreditation for NBL, and commentate games for NBL1. When I was younger, I was an athletic guy who could slam dunk and knock down 3s. Age, however, shoots 1.000 and I no longer have the leap I once did. In fact, my knees are basically destroyed. Installing this hoop, however, has proven to me that a jump shot (or maybe a standing shot now) is like riding a bike. You don’t forget how to do it. You also don’t forget the love. There is something about shooting a basketball that is immensely soothing for me. Nothing else eliminates the worries and stresses of day-to-day life than hearing the shwoosh of a basketball ripping through a net. I wish I had installed this basketball system a decade ago. Nevertheless, I remind myself that while the best time was 10 years ago, the next best time is now. I have my now. I am shooting hoops. In my mind, I am young once more.

Micro.blog has changed my life trajectory. It has given me connections with a range of people across the Internet. Without micro.blog, I would not have @HemisphericViews and the group of friends that are part of that community. M.b has changed my life. @manton @jean

One thing the whole Twitter saga has done is re-energised my use of my own blog, as well as getting into Mastodon. Happy with the changes and improvements I’m making to my own web sites.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 12: I have a suspicion that things at Twitter are going to get worse before they get better. If they get better.

Sorry, Crypto Bros

Molly White, reporting on her brilliant site tracking all the happenings in the crypto/NFT world. FTX files for bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried resigns: Aaaand there it goes. FTX announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. I wonder how all the Diamond Hands crypto HODL bros are feeling. There’s only one thing worse than a Ponzi scheme, and that is being the one holding the “asset” when the music stops and there is no next fool in line.

So uh, is Twitter Blue no longer available for purchase? Just when I thought things couldn’t get crazier over there.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 11: I am happy about having shoutouts to display on my blog’s homepage.

More news from the front. Grey “official” check marks are back. Yes, Elon killed them yesterday. Now he has revived them. This isn’t hard to follow at all, is it? I don’t know why you can’t keep up.

Twitter Loses Executives

So the Twitter executives responsible for selling ads and ensuring trust and safety have both left the company. You would think they’d be kind of important to the business? In a normal company, two executives leaving would be bad, but maybe it would be an opportunity to promote others. Unfortunately, Twitter probably sacked those others a few days ago. Musk is now talking about bankruptcy. I imagine this might be a way for him to wash his hands of the affair, and socialise the losses across his venture capital buddies. Remember that is a key edict of corporations: capitalise the gains and socialise the losses. It seems like Elon might be contemplating pulling an Adam Neumann.

The Twitter News Cycle Moves Fast

Not even a day, and there’s a new item of craziness I can add to my earlier list. Elon Musk's First Email to Twitter Staff Ends Work from Home - Bloomberg: The new rules, which kick in immediately, will expect employees to be in the office for at least 40 hours per week… At least 40 hours per week? The standard working week in Australia is 38 hours. So if Twitter were an Australian firm (or perhaps for the remaining Australian Twitter staff), Musk is asking them to work in the office for more than the typical working week. And since it is “at least”, one presumes additional work would be required at home beyond those 40 hours? Maybe he should have announced this before the firings. That might have minimised severance costs while still reducing head count. Once again, we are provided evidence that wealth and intelligence are not inextricably linked.

With a massive thanks to @vincent I’ve got his new shoutouts.lol platform running on the homepage of my blog. I’m still tweaking the look but I’m loving the opportunity to promote things I like™.

Fun and Games at Twitter

Update 10 November: Now Elon is requiring employees to work at least 40 hours per week in the office. Twitter is a clown show. But I have an irrational fear of clowns, and not Twitter, so maybe it’s better described as a dumpster fire. Anyway, let’s see if I can get this straight. In a few short days, Elon has: Fired half the company, including ones who knew what they were doing. Introduced the blue tick for anybody - at a price ($20, nah, $8 - USD anyway). Seen impersonation happen (surprise!) and created random rules about not being allowed to do that. Implemented a new grey, “official” checkmark for people who sort of used to be the blue tick people (but not quite). Removed the grey official checkmark: I just killed it — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022 There’s move fast and break things, and then there’s fly by the seat of your pants doing random shit because you can’t think even 1 step ahead. Further evidence that there is false equivalence between wealth and intelligence.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 10: My father-in-law was once Australia’s Minister for Defence. My father was an Anglican minister. Separation of Church and State!

The Great Correction?

Are we now experiencing “the great correction” in the tech world? Meta has announced layoffs of 11,000, we just had now privately-owned Twitter reduce headcount by 7,500. Stripe let go of 14% of its people, and Sketch had to let a bunch of it’s employees go recently as well. These are just the ones I recall off the top of my head - I’m sure there are others. Higher interest rates reduce the availability of cheap venture capital; leading to increasing pressure to run a business to deliver profit and return to shareholders; and a number of these firms are behemoths that may have reached the end of their natural growth potential. Social media in particular is a business that relies on ad revenue above all else. If interest rates continue to increase, people will buy less, and thus advertisers will have less free cash flow to put towards advertising. Ultimately this will result in more pressure on revenue for the social media companies. Good luck everybody; I think the tech seas are about to get rough for some time.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 9: After virtually no sleep last night, I am certain to sleep well this evening.

You Get a Checkmark, and You Get a Checkmark!

Update, 10 November: Now the official checkmark has been unrolled out. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Twitter’s solution for ruining verification is another check mark - The Verge: Twitter is rolling out another type of check mark to help distinguish accounts that users actually need to know are real. Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray “Official” check mark Twitter is on the pathway to full farce. it reminds me of this clip from The Late Show:

This past night I slept for about 90 minutes. Today is going to be so much fun…

Microblogvember 2022, Day 8: I truly hope that Australia reaches consensus regarding the need for — and value of — an indigenous voice to Parliament.

This submarine cable map is really cool!

I’ve set up shoutouts.lol by @vincent. For now it is running as the opening entry at canion.me or specifically at canion.me/shout-out… I’ve tried it on andrewcanion.com but the styling doesn’t look so nice and I don’t know how to fix that.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 7: With the amount of time spent in Microsoft Teams, surely I have gained enough insight for a single work day.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 6: I went on a roller coaster today. I’m too old for it. But I heard the echo of screams while riding.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 5: Today I am exempt from making lunch.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 4: After two weeks of solo parenting, I look with admiration upon all those who do it alone full-time.

Microblogvember 2022, Day 3: I’m so old. I’ve had a license to drive a car for 28 years. I still remember driving myself to school for the first time; I felt like a bad-ass.

I got myself a new avatar! Thank you nanayudhistira2.

I see that @dave has created Feedland. I’m having trouble grokking it - or maybe I’m over-thinking. It grabs RSS feeds and presents a river - but I don’t understand why I’d use it ahead of a feed reader. I’m missing something, right?

Microblogvember 2022, Day 2: My coffee shop sandwich was de-contented. It was definitely not a feast. Guess that’s one way to defy rising cost of materials.

Business Basics and Twitter Acquisitions

Can Elon Musk Make the Math Work on Owning Twitter? It’s Dicey. - The New York Times: Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations. That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. In my paid employment I often take time to explain to companies who do not benefit from the largesse of venture capital that the number one priority must be to keep revenue ahead of expenses, and avoid saddling their firm with debt. Musk has ignored these basic tenets of business because the culture of tech bros is that the rules don’t apply to them. In a falling market, however, other people’s money becomes less accessible. At some point, the music stops, and the debtors knock on the door.

I have added rel="me" links on my various websites so they each vouch for one another that they’re all related to me.

I am grateful not to be working in an office, where I have to pretend to care about the Melbourne Cup. That stupid horse race has ruined so many of my Tuesdays - I even remember having to watch it in Primary School! (obviously the teachers were betting on it)

Microblogvember 2022, Day 1. I need to figure out how to rediscover my motivation for work. Been feeling meh these past few days.

Trick or Treat! Happy Halloween.

Having a night where I can’t fall asleep. Then I start thinking about not getting enough sleep, and start calculating how little sleep I am going to get before having to wake up, which causes sleep anxiety… you know the drill.

I’m having a lot of fun with Mastodon tonight. I’ve joined the server hosted by @neatnik. My username is @andrew@social.lol

Okay @maique I’m at the point where I feel I need a cute avatar like all the cool kids. What was the name of the guy who did yours, how much did it cost, and what source material did you have to supply to provide inspiration?

What kind of bizarre inception moment is it when you follow your own micro.blog account via Mastodon? I have done it. 😵‍💫

The Book Thief, 2013 - ★★½

Watched on Saturday October 29, 2022.

It’s macOS and iPadOS release day and I’ve updated nothing. That is a first for me!

At @HemisphericViews we finished our One Prime Plus member re-watch of Severance Season 1. It’s been a fun opportunity for @martinfeld, @Burk and I to get to know a group of our listeners better. We are blessed with a wonderful audience. Start listening today!

Planning on Paper?

Finished reading: The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran 📚 After reading this I’ve pulled out a hard copy Best Self journal my wife bought me a while ago and have been giving it a go. I am enjoying the paper lifestyle in support of my typical Fantastical/OmniFocus/Agenda/Logseq combination. I am going to give it a full genuine effort for at least the 13-week cycle the journal allows. I don’t know if it will stick after that but having a change-up in approach to help keep some mindful plasticity is probably no bad thing.

Lactose free coffee is a bit gross. Not sure it’s worth it.

It’s terrible when you order a takeaway coffee and it’s still almost too hot to drink 25 minutes later.

Perth RAC Arena at 7:33pm. Perth Wildcats lost to Melbourne United, 81-84. I was invited to attend and sit court side by a Patreon supporter of my podcast NBL Pocket Podcast. What an opportunity! #adayinthelife

I have two podcasts, both of which I think are pretty great. As always with podcasts, however, achieving discovery by a wider audience is the greatest challenge. I’m all ears for good ways to grow the listenership.

If you’re looking for 5 minutes of fun, have a listen to the Cappuccino Corner chapter in Episode 68 of Hemispheric Views. I promise you will be entertained. 🎙 ☕️

I took one last BeReal photo, and deleted the app.

With my employer making it harder to login from multiple devices, I’ve had to go searching for a web-based cross-platform text sync program. It’s back to the future with… Simplenote!

Secret Headquarters, 2022 - ★½

I watched it with kids. Even they got bored.

Guest Appearance: Throwback Hoops Episode 46

I was welcomed as a guest on the podcast/YouTube show “Throwback Hoops” Episode 46 to talk Australian basketball. We covered women’s world, cup, NBL Round 1, and gave our predictions for the league’s awards. 🏀 🎙 Podcast link

Fall, 2022 - ★★★½

A nice amount of nervous tension in this one.

I remember as a kid sitting in the backseat of our car. I can place exactly which road I was on. I was calculating how old I would be when the year became 2000 (13 years old). Now I’m well into 2022. I’m both impressed with my memory and saddened by my age.

Fun with DALL-E: “A painting of a middle-aged white man creating a podcast about basketball.”

Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986 - ★★★★★

Watching this with my kids for the first time. It's such an awesome movie. But Rooney is not the old man I remember him being! John Hughes was a genius.

I Hate Entropy

This article was originally written for the March 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Things break down and that causes me stress. I know that everything in the world is gradually corroding, eroding and disintegrating but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The root cause of my problem is that I don’t like fixing things. I have zero interest in hardware, maintenance and DIY projects. I’m more capable of worrying about making things worse, and the ramifications of not fixing something than I am about actually getting a thing repaired. I think I put too much mystique into infrastructure. When a repair person comes around who knows what they are doing, inevitably there is futzing around, bashing things, and basically forcing it to work. I have a mindset that things should elegantly function - that they shouldn’t have to be pushed into working as designed. My latest adventure has been a hydrochloric acid dispenser for my swimming pool. It uses a peristaltic pump system to draw the acid from a bottle and doses it into the pool. The control unit monitors the pH of the pool water and runs the peristaltic pump on a regular basis to inject small volumes of acid into the pool. According to my research, peristaltic pumps are simple and reliable. According to my real world experience, they aren’t. A few weeks ago it stopped dosing. I played around with the rubber hosing, asked the retailer for help, and eventually managed to reseat it in a way that must have made it happy, because the dosing worked once more. Fast forward to now, and a few additional weeks of entropy, and the pH levels were again elevated. This time the control box is telling me to replace the tube. Fine, I do this thinking that a worn tube must be the root cause. Of course, this small piece of tubing was $42. I manage to remove the old one and install the new one. I seat it back into its peristaltic pump in a way that looks right. I prime the tube. I let it run for a few hours. Has the pH level come back down? No, of course not. Because hardware doesn’t love me. Will it resolve over the next day or two? I don’t know. I don’t even know if the pump is pumping - there is no way to see if there is any fluid flowing. Of course, this is made a little more dangerous by the fact that the fluid is hydrochloric acid. Another day passes and the problem is still there, so now I have to call out the guy who knows what he’s doing. Turns out the pump spinner had suffered entropy of its own—eroding such that it didn’t create a strong enough pulse in the piping to effect peristalsis. I hate that entropy exists in the world, such that equipment can’t be relied upon for a longer period of time. I hate that I’m not a more capable handyman. Addendum Today, one of my outdoor taps broke. I managed to find a replacement part - after visiting 4 hardware stores, and get it changed out. So while I fixed it, it’s still more household entropy.

Jurassic World Dominion, 2022 - ★

This was so boring, derivative, and I didn’t appreciate the Indiana Jones rip-off moments.

Semi-Pro, 2008 - ★★★

It’s fun, but it’s not the best basketball movie.

The Jurassic Park Lego exhibition put on by Brickman is epic.

8 days of basketball, 15 games, 8 podcasts, 2 silly videos, many conversations with basketball people, countless Twitter updates. The NBL Blitz in Darwin has finished, and I had a blast engaging with it as an accredited member of the media. I live a fortunate life. 🏀

Making this parody video was hilarious.

I would consider this grammar a bug in iOS 16. Anybody else agree?

While at the NBL Blitz, Nick and I made a parody video of this South East Melbourne Phoenix inside look video. We had fun with it. 📹

Just a metre away from a crocodile. No big deal. 😬🐊

Today at the NBL Blitz I’m cross-promoting @hemisphericviews 🏀 🎙️

Suburban Darwin needs to lift its coffee game.

That Thing You Do!, 1996 - ★★

I’m watching this movie 30 years from when it was made, which is the same amount of time between when it was made and the time it was portraying.

NBL Blitz Day 1

I am in Darwin this week as the National Basketball League is holding its pre-season Blitz tournament. All 10 teams competing to win the Loggins-Bruton Cup. I am attending all the games as accredited media, representing the NBL Pocket Podcast. These are my brief notes from Day 1. A venue where the first NBL volunteer I meet is a friendly Darwin lawyer by day, basketball fan by night. Plenty of NBL staff scurrying around 90 minutes before tip-off, getting score benches ready. One of the cup namesakes, Cal Bruton, strolls into the stadium. Later in the night, I would speak to said man. This man who dazzled me I was 9 years old and he played for the Perth Wildcats. Unlike the pre-season of two years ago in Tasmania, where beanies and hoodies were the go, here in Darwin is shorts all the way. Players warm up on court, Craig Randall II draining many threes from NBA range, but shooting with less accuracy from NBL 3-point range. Having played G-League and with a dream of making the NBA, this shouldn’t be a surprise. That’s the range he’s been practising for years. The crowd filled in and were genuinely excited to be here. They were getting into the cheers, and were 100% behind Kai Sotto. This support for Sotto remained evident after the game, when a scrum formed around him to take photos and be in his presence. The broadcast had scoreboard issues. I became a defacto score updater for viewers via Twitter. At half-time I shared a printout of the half-time box score that I obtained from the score bench.

Our clothes dryer died today. Repair guy isn’t available to the end of the month. Of course, now it’s raining.

Hotham Valley Steam Train. 🚂

Professional Realism - I'm Not Who I Was

Tonight I have been noodling around on LinkedIn. It’s the curse of working in our current world, that I must maintain a LinkedIn account. The whole site feels incredibly superficial — a ‘social network’ devoid of true humanity, but full of humblebrag posts and small talk comments in something which amounts to little more than a business-suited circle jerk. Yet there I must be. Truth be told, for the last few years I’ve mostly used it as an avenue for promoting Hemispheric Views because if there is a podcast that deserves more listeners, it is that.1 So as I was on LinkedIn tonight, removing connections to ancient Groups that I’d not interacted with for years, updating my profile with current URLs, etc. I took a look at my profile picture used on the site. The photo was nice. It was taken by a professional photographer at a time when I was more intensely involved in “corporate” work. I was wearing a nice tailored suit. I was 20 kilograms lighter than I am now - and 10 years younger. It was the kind of photo that you keep on a site like LinkedIn in some odd attempt to demonstrate a youthful verve that never fades. Looking at that photo tonight I realised that it was no longer me. That it was a photo of a different Andrew. It was an Andrew who was still trying to climb a ladder, impress those above him, and show capability. I’m not that Andrew anymore. I’m at a point in my life where I’m interested in doing work that interests me. I don’t want to climb a ladder. I don’t feel a need to try to exude competence. I am competent. More importantly though, now I’m confident. I know who I am. I’m relaxed and more aware of the need to build human connection ahead of corporate achievement. To that end, I knew that the Andrew in that LinkedIn photo was not the truth. It was the truth, but not anymore. So I changed my photo. Now I’ve got a mug shot that shows me with a slight smile, my hair longer, stubble on my face, and a few more wrinkles and signs of ageing. This is who I am now. It’s the photo I’m already using on my personal sites, because it’s how I identify with myself. As for LinkedIn, if you want to do business with me that is fantastic and I’m excited to explore opportunities. If you don’t, that’s fine. I’m walking my own path now. Please, tell your friends. Let’s boost those listener numbers! ↩︎

This is the first day of my life in which Queen Elizabeth is not with us. As an Australian I’m a firm believer that our country should become a Republic in its own right; but that is not to dismiss the magnificent servant of the Monarchy that Elizabeth II was. Rest in Peace.

Is this the last night that Australia has Elizabeth II as its Monarch? She’s had an amazing run.

Things got a bit crazy for E066 of Hemispheric Views. We struggled to keep to the script, and it was mainly my fault. @HemisphericViews @Burk @martinfeld

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005 - ★★½

Watched on Wednesday September 7, 2022.

Once again I’ve decommissioned the Logitech MX Master 3 mouse and Logi Options+ in favour of the Razer mouse supported by razer-macos drivers and button management by Steermouse.

Like You – A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids

If you have kids, you and they might enjoy the wonderful Like You – A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids. I’ve been a Patreon supporter for almost as long as Noah Glenn has been producing it. My kids fall asleep listening to Noah almost every night. Like You is a mindfulness podcast for kids. We use breathing, affirmations, music, and imagination to explore feelings, relieve anxiety, encourage self-esteem, and grow empathy, all while having fun! Noah is basically another member of our family at this point.

3D Impression of Tokyo's Subway System

This 3D Version of Tokyo's Subway System Looks Like a Labyrinth of Roller Coasters: …by creating a 3D model of Tokyo’s tangled subway system, one which has brightly colored tubes swooping up and down, running over and around each other like the tracks of one of the craziest roller coasters ever. I’ve appreciated the scheduling efficiency of the Tokyo subway system in the past, but this 3D impression of how all the lines interact is something else.

Ali, 2001 - ★★

The movie needed a more forceful editor.

The latest episode of Hemispheric Views One Prime Plus is something else. Ostensibly we discuss our experience with the new browser, Arc, but we meander into a bunch of other unrelated - but funny - side topics as well. Sign up at OnePrimePlus.com. It’s in the long game!

I’ve never been able to achieve blue-tick status on the bird site, but @neatnik at omg.lol has blessed me with his blue tick. Also, you should definitely buy an account. It’s an awesome service offered at a crazy-low price.

macOS Content Caching Fails to Propogate Security Updates

Last Week on My Mac: Security updates are down again – The Eclectic Light Company: Howard Oakley is doing an amazing job at diagnosing and bringing to light (pardon the pun) issues involving macOS Content Caching Server: Over the last three months, of the nine security updates to XProtect pushed by Apple, only one has been delivered and installed correctly through my Monterey Content Caching server, that on 4 August. The other eight security updates to XProtect and its new companion XProtect ‘Remediator’ all downloaded correctly from my local server, but then failed to install. After reviewing Howard’s articles on the topic, and using his impressive apps to identify whether I had an issue, I discovered that all three of my Macs behind a Mac mini server running content caching had failed to receive critical security updates. I’ve now disabled the caching server. If it can’t be trusted to deliver security updates it doesn’t matter how much internet bandwidth I can save, nor how much faster I can update machines. Security is more important than that. Apple needs to do better. Maybe they need to rewrite the Content Caching Server in Swift? 🥁

Email is not a messaging platform. Load the email app a couple of times a day, write and respond, and shut it down.

I’ve been monkeying around with websites. Of course I managed to break something. Does anybody know how to configure DNS such that it will redirect a URL to an omg.lol profile page? @maique

Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 - ★★★★

Watched on Friday August 26, 2022.

My young fella performed at school assembly today. They rocked out to a song about adjectives!

Thanks to Howard Oakley’s article Has Apple fixed recent Software Update problems? – The Eclectic Light Company I can confirm that no, Apple’s Content Caching service is not fixed. All Macs on my local network had out-of-date versions of XProtect. Content caching now disabled.

Great episode of Really Specific Stories podcast with @manton hosted by @martinfeld

Choosing a Twitter Client

This article was originally written for the February 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Update as of August 2022: I have basically settled on Twitterrific on iOS/iPadOS and Twitter on macOS. I don’t love Twitter, but I use the heck out of it for one reason only: following the Australian National Basketball League (@NBL) and the community of passionate fans around it. For a normal person with this use case, they would use the company-issued Twitter app and be done with it. But you know that I’m not normal (and not Martin Feld) so default apps are not generally in my wheelhouse. So it is with Twitter. The best thing about a third-party app is the lack of in-line ads, and the chronological timeline. They bring other benefits (and some deficiencies) but these are the two reasons why I don’t accept usage of the Twitter app. For the past year I’ve been using Tweetbot, but as is my wont, I elected not to auto-renew my subscription. They got a year of income from me, but the implied agreement with a subscription app is that I can (and should?) walk away at the end of the term to consider my options and assess the broader market. A couple of months ago I purchased Spring. I like that this app is a one-time purchase, and it unlocks the app on all platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS). I’ve been using it in tandem with Tweetbot to see how it works. It’s… fine? I don’t like the way it shows the thread of a retweet within the context of the main timeline. I end up seeing the same tweets over and over, and it bloats the timeline. This is probably because I’m a timeline completionist. I can imagine that if one was dipping in and out, the additional context might be welcomed. I also struggle with the UX flow of the app. I think I understand its logic, but I find myself having to think about it. I don’t want to think that hard about Twitter. My next option is Twitterrific. I used this many, many years ago. I’ve once again downloaded it for iOS but have yet to buy the subscription. I don’t like that the subscription doesn’t unlock the macOS version. That seems less than ideal. I have a memory of developers Iconfactory saying this was going to change, but I can’t confirm that, and as at the time of this article, it isn’t the case. So I will judge based on what is in front of me. I like the airy, spacious feel of Twitterrific. Its big thing is the unified timeline where it puts replies and mentions inline with everything else. This seems less revolutionary these days. I honestly don’t know what to do. Are there other options out there that I’m neglecting? Which app do you use? Which one should I use? Help! And if you want to see lots of random comments about NBL basketball, follow @andrewcanion.

Adventures in SoftRAID

I’ve had an adventure with my OWC Thunderbay 4-disk drive array this week. I’ve emerged the other side, ultimately unscathed, but the journey certainly could have been easier. Let’s take a look. It all started when I reached the capacity of my RAID-5 formatted array of 4 x 2TB drives. The 6TB of storage this provided me was almost full. This array sits in a cupboard connected to a headless M1 mac mini, so all operations need to be managed through screen sharing with Screens or SSH. Incidentally, for many months now this RAID-array, with SoftRAID as the management software has been causing hardware panics and reboots on the M1 mac mini it’s connected to. My winding adventure has also been able to resolve this problem - although word is Ventura will eliminate some macOS bugs that were the root cause. Preparing the Way Back to the story… the SoftRAID software has a neat feature within it that allows the user to resize a RAID volume if the disks have additional capacity than is used by the volume. RAID 5 allows any one disk to be removed at a time and continue to operate. This feature I would use to my advantage to grow the size of my array. I bought four new 4TB disks. One at a time, I removed an existing 2TB disk - setting the array to a degraded mode. I dropped in a replacement 4TB drive, and the Thunderbay took a day or so to rebuild the array using 2TB of the new 4TB. I did this same thing four times. It took days, but I ended up with my existing array of 4 x 2TB but now it was on 4 x 4TB disks. No Resize for You ⛔️ Now I could use that nifty feature to upsize my volume to 12TB. I happily clicked the button and tried to enter my new volume size. Nothing. Nada. Zip. It wouldn’t let me go beyond the current 6TB. Oh no. Off to the SoftRaid website and support forums I go. I eventually find a support note - and random threads in the forum - that there is a known bug in SoftRAID 6.3 that prevents resizing and growing RAID arrays. The solution? Use SoftRAID 6.0.3. Cool! I’ll do that. But SoftRAID 6.0.3 is only compatible with Big Sur. Not Monterey. Hmm. All my Mac’s are upgraded and I don’t fancy trying to downgrade any of them. This is a dead end. There is no resolution. Except one. Erase the RAID array and start again, formatting the drives and going from scratch. ARGH! On the bright side, by formatting the drives I could select a 64kb stripe size instead of the recommended and preferred 16kb stripe size the RAID array was using now and that was causing the kernel panics on any macOS version less than Ventura for M1 Macs. Belt and Suspenders So I needed to find a way to backup 6TB of data. I bought a USB 3.1 hard drive caddy. My friend Nick allowed me save some dollars by lending me two 6TB drives which I could use as backup media. So now how to actually undertake the backup in a way that was resilient to failures, kernel panics and restarts? Running rsync from the command line was one option - but I’m not a command line guru and was worried I’d get my flags wrong and not properly copy metadata. Aha, I have a license for SuperDuper! That’ll do it! Except my license had expired so I couldn’t use it. Before I bought a new license, I checked in on Carbon Copy Cloner, which I know other people praise. Not only does it feature a more up-to-date (and informative) user interface, it offers a fully-featured 30-day trial. Brilliant! I setup CCC to create a clone of my RAID. Off it went. It took about 24 hours. This was extended because what I did forget to do was erase the Time Machine backups that were on the array. I shouldn’t have kept them, but oh well, I left it alone. Nick recommended I actually make two backups, because he couldn’t verify the quality of the disks he’d lent to me. Despite no errors being reported from the first backup, I did as suggested - setting CCC to do a repeat backup (but this time I deleted the Time Machine backups first). Another almost 24 hours passed. Erase and Restore 😱 Now, onto erasure of the RAID array itself. This was the ‘gulp’ moment of the process. No going back from here. I re-initialised the drives and reset the volume, and thankfully, was able to choose a volume size of 12TB. And, as mentioned, I went with the 64kb stripe size to avoid kernel panics (even though I will probably regret that once Ventura is released with support for 16kb stripes). RAID array ready, it was time to restore from my backup. Queue another long process. The next day, I check the completed restore, which… had errors. Nick, this is where I thank you for suggesting the ‘double backup’ strategy. While the backup drive had no errors writing content, it had troubles reading it. This is also where I was very thankful to have chosen Carbon Copy Cloner which offers a clear and helpful log file showing the failed files. There was only about a dozen that didn’t work, so I was able to restore all of these successfully from the second backup. With this done, the RAID array was back! And almost everything picked up from where I left off. As I had transferred some invisible BackBlaze configuration files, I had to re-associate the new drive with my account, which was an easy toggle. I had to reset the Time Machine settings in the MacBook Airs that back up to it, so they would find the new drive. Finally, I had to reinitiate Content Caching on the mac mini by turning it off and on again. After a week, I’m up and running once more. Will I do all this again when Ventura is released and I want to leverage 16kb stripe sizing? I don’t know if it’s worth it, to be honest.

A photo from Yardie Creek during our recent break in Exmouth, Western Australia.

Lightyear, 2022 - ★★★½

Incredible animation and a non-stop action adventure, with just enough Pixar feels added.

It is wonderful to be attending the Basketball WA Awards with my wife Hannah Beazley MLA.

I am loving Arc Browser, and I’m not even using the fancy “new” stuff it contains. Just it as a browser is a great experience.

The Rescue, 2021 - ★★★★

An incredible story well told.

I’m not an academic but that is not stopping me from futzing around with Zotero.

Enjoying a holiday read. A View to Die For by @cheri

Finished reading: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande 📚 I didn’t want a story justifying the use of checklists; I wanted a book providing a guide to the development of best practice checklists.

Still Loving Logseq

My love affair with Logseq continues unabated. I enjoy using the software - even through the weird and buggy bits. There is an immediacy to it that I like, which Craft has been unable to match. Craft was always too fussy, and I found myself becoming distracted by fonts and styles. The best comparison I can make is that Craft is the modern Microsoft Word, while Logseq would be BBEdit.

In E063 of @hemisphericviews we talk to @ericmwalk to find out how he is so good at Arcadia. Plus we pontificate profusely pertaining to Podcasting 2.0.

I made a caraway seed cake. When I was a schoolboy, my Mom would sometimes make one of these during the day. When I got home we would eat it alongside a cup of tea using our fancy tea cups. This cake today has provided me with both deliciousness and nostalgia.

Scotty Jackson has been working hard and putting up with my bug reports regarding his Shortcut to create a daily note in Agenda with links to calendar events and OmniFocus tasks. The Shortcut is now flawless - and amazing!

Today I had a conversation with a magpie. 🐧

Why’s everybody talking about Obsidian? Loqseq is where it’s at! I’m digging it.

Minions: The Rise of Gru, 2022 - ★★

A few light-hearted moments scattered amongst a sea of meh.

Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 - ★★★★

Massive fan service and I’m here for it.

Logging into Agenda.app with Shortcuts

I’ve been getting back into Agenda as a work diary and daily tracker. The app is brought to a new level of usefulness thanks to the ingenuity of Shortcuts developer Scotty Jackson. Scotty Jackson: This is all about my Rapid Log Shortcut, for use with the Agenda app … and my Agenda Daily Log Shortcut. The basic conceit of this Shortcut is that it appends provided input to note in Agenda. Scotty works wonders with Shortcuts. This is a new version of his Rapid Logger that ties in with his also new Daily Log shortcut. Check them out, they’re excellent examples of the power of Shortcuts as a programming application.

I’ve discovered another Read-it-Later service, Omnivore. Hard to find out much more about it though - has anybody else heard of it?

Big, 1988 - ★★★

Watched on Sunday July 10, 2022.

Console Games are Fun; Mobile Ones Aren't

Matt Birchler writing on his blog makes a succinct point. Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that don’t exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Fun is not the point. Matt nails it. This is why I enjoy playing games on Xbox and Switch, and get nothing from mobile gaming.

I hate knee bursitis or whatever worse thing is going on with my ageing joints. One small jump today led to immediate chronic pain after suffering underlying soreness for months prior.

Me in 1 Chart

After listening to myself interviewed by Martin Feld on Really Specific Stories I started thinking about the strange mixture of interests I have. For fun, I thought I’d grab the main categories and represent them in graphical form. Basketball is predominantly represented by NBL and NBL1 - not NBA. Podcasting incorporates listening, and producing NBL Pocket Podcast and Hemispheric Views. Productivity and IT & Tech almost bleed into one another to an extent. Productivity is about finding optimal ways of working, creating time and space through efficiency and clever use of technology where appropriate. This can be applied at a personal level or a corporate level. Application of effective productive measures is how I can often add value with companies I support as part of my day job. The IT & Tech portion has shrunk over the years, as this area has become commoditised and it becomes harder to tinker. Nowadays my focus is mainly on using Apple platforms to build nice workflows to support my own productivity improvements. I will let IT & Tech also capture the small amount of computer gaming I do. Finally, politics encapsulates mainly Australian Federal politics and Western Australian State politics. I used to work in State politics; my wife is a State Parliamentarian, so I guess this checks out. I wonder if there are any other people out there with a similar cross-section of interests?

I’ve built my own Hello page riffing on Alastair Johnson’s idea.

Finished reading: The Profit Paradox by Jan Eeckhout 📚 It took me a long time to finish because I put it down halfway through and left it for a while. Great insights, but did tend to get a little bogged down in the last third. Very US-centric, of course.

I’m seriously addicted to Halo Infinite on Xbox. I love the open world approach to the game.

Look at that - a new episode has dropped! Hemispheric Views 061: Bullet Point Out Of Context!

This is a quick post using Quill which I vaguely remember seeing before, but which I was reminded about by @gabz at What is my process or workflow?. Quill is an online form for entering new blog posts.

I bought a discounted year of Agenda.app. I owned it a couple of years ago, but moved onto Craft. I still think Craft is better, but I can’t resist a note-taking app!

Stopped to make sure old mate wasn’t about to crash into my car in the parking lot as he was having a rough time steering into a bay. He missed my car, then we had a nice old chat about the weather and footy walking in to the shops together.

For all the things my country gets wrong - and we get a lot wrong - today I’m even more appreciative of being an Australian. Our governance systems remain robust and to date have corrected against efforts made by extremist political advances.

I can’t believe Roe v Wade has been overturned. What is going on in the USA? I don’t understand extremist conservative thinking.

Finished Obi Wan Kenobi. It does a really great job bringing insight to the characters we know and love, while maintaining the feeling of something at stake.

Palmer, 2021 - ★★★★★

A tender and touching story of parenting and caring.

Great Writing About a Not Great President

Maureen Dowd: Donald Trump, American Monster Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity. Maureen Dowd truly is a great writer. I would love to be able to craft words in such a way. — Link to this article found via Rob Fahrni

COVID Day 4

Day 4 of COVID has seen me sleep for 14 hours and wake with a sore throat, aches and a pounding head. During the night I had the experience that I sometimes feel with bad flus. It is as if the electrical wiring in my body has been incorrectly rerouted and partly disconnected. So I will get a pinging, almost zapping feel in my hip for instance, when I twist my shoulder. Or in my foot when I move my torso. It’s quite disconcerting and I would be fascinated to know the scientific explanation for it. I guess it’s probably inflammatory symptoms?

If I were to describe how COVID feels, I would say: “Imagine if your body - inside and out - were made up of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Then take away about 35% of those pieces and imagine how unstructurally sound you would feel. That’s COVID.”

I Care a Lot, 2020 - ★★½

Started off great. I would have preferred a different ending.

COVID has finally found me. Now let’s see what sort of defence this triple-vax has delivered me.

I’ve been having all sorts of problems with my DNS and NextDNS. After many rabbitholes, I found it stemmed back to my originating DNS provider, which I had inadvertently set to my ISP. Switched it to Quad9 and all seems to be working well again.

Meeting Australia’s New Prime Minister

Yesterday we attended an event in South Perth with Australia’s new Prime Minister, The Hon Anthony Albanese MP. It was an opportunity for him to introduce the newly elected Labor Members of Parliament from WA, and thank the volunteers that worked as part of the campaign. My wife is a State Member of Parliament, representing Labor in the Seat of Victoria Park. In 2019 she ran for the Federal Seat of Swan. Hannah’s father and Prime Minister Albanese were colleagues in earlier Australian Parliaments (when Kim was Opposition Leader). As a result, Hannah has known Anthony Albanese over a long period of time. This level of familiarity was captured, somewhat hilariously, in these three photos. My wife looks besotted! Should I be jealous? The best thing about this event was how it was managed. It was held in a public open park. The area wasn’t restricted to only those specifically invited. I saw a couple cycle past, and stop to watch when they realised the Prime Minister was there. Apart from obvious police and security personnel scattered around, the event was open and welcoming. No metal detectors. No areas cordoned off. The Prime Minister was amidst everybody else. He met and said hello to our two kids. I love that I live in a country where this can happen. We don’t have any great fear of random shooters arriving. Our elected leader can mingle among the everyday people. This is what is great about Australian culture, society and laws. Preventing people from having guns means we can have a more integrated society. It builds democracy. It builds people’s rights; it doesn’t impinge upon them. It is great to say that I’ve met Australia’s 31st Prime Minister. It’s even greater to say that I live in a country where I can.

Battleship, 2012 - ★★½

Based on the game Battleship? Seriously? The first third of the movie was good, the rest not so much.

I’ve decided to make my various referral codes and affiliate links more accessible, and have added it to the navigation bar of my micro.blog homepage.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 31: endurance (@uncertainquark)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 30: fish (@thedimpause)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 29: stripes (@CTD)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 28: fair (@odd)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 27: written (@sylvia)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 26: schedule (@canion)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 25: mountain (@Miraz)

A replica of the classic iTunes MiniPlayer to control Apple Music on modern macOS.Source: Music MiniPlayer for macOS This looks fun!

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 24: intricate (@uncertainquark)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 23: plain (@CTD)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 22: textile (@stevelloyd)

A great day for Australian politics.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 21: symmetry (@amit)

1917, 2019 - ★★★★

A powerful movie showing the futility of war and the ability of people to push on.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 20: beverage (@bobwertz)

In Hemispheric Views 58, I wrestle with the true nature of my business, Martin bids farewell to iPods (but keeps buying them) and Jason reviews a highly-anticipated yellow device—that’s right, it’s the Playdate!

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 19: indulgence (@sylvia)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 18: random (@JohnPhilpin)

A dark and stormy night. Lightning everywhere.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 17: hold (@dwalbert)

I love full moon nights where I can look outside and still see everything clearly. It’s an underrated benefit of having a life on Earth.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 16: time (@rknightuk)

Rebuilding Drafts

I’ve been a long-time user of Drafts, but my subscription is due to expire next month and I have been thinking that I’d let it go. I’ve been using Tot more these days, and Drafts had become an intimidating mess that I didn’t enjoy using. However, after listening to a Mac Power Users podcast featuring the Drafts app and an interview with its developer, and then reading a blog post by Jason Burk about his Drafts setup (plus a personal conversation with him), I realised that it wasn’t necessarily Drafts that was the problem - it was what I had done to it. That’s the thing, Drafts is almost endlessly customisable to enable it to fit different users and use cases. I had created so many Actions, Action Groups, and sections that the app had become confusing and overwhelming. I had duplicated actions across different groups, I was having to think too much whenever I wanted to use the app. As I said to Jason, actual use beats good intentions. My Drafts configuration had become so bloated with convoluted actions that I thought I might use someday that it put me off from using the simple actions I will actually use today. I’ve taken my myriad Action Groups and boiled them down to a single set. Now the only Actions that confront me are the ones I am likely to use and I don’t need to think about switching between different Action Groups. I’ve also kept a couple of additional Action Groups but set them only as Action Bars - essentially an additional layer of text editing commands that sit at the bottom of my editing window. These are for formatting text, as opposed to taking action on them. In terms of Workspaces, I’m keeping that as I previously had configured, but have clarified my thinking about them. I have workspaces dedicated to: Untagged Blogging Podcast Work Templates These are populated through smart searches based on a tag I apply to each note. The Templates Workspace is specifically for OmniFocus project templates that I send to OmniFocus using the scripts that Rosemary Orchard created. I continue to use this system because it allows for date math (for example, a task will be deferred 6 months from the date the project is created). I’m now feeling much more positive about Drafts after this cleanup. The Drafts editor is great, it supports all the Mac niceties (Services, smart markdown link insertion/pastes, etc.) and now I don’t feel overwhelmed when I load the app. Of course, Drafts also offers that great unique selling proposition of a blank field that is ready for text entry immediately. This is especially great on iOS.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 15: clouds (@klandwehr)

After talking with @Burk I’ve been re-inspired with Drafts. I’ve streamlined my Actions to make the app more approachable. Actual use beats good intentions.

This Redbacks v Cougars game was a fun one to call. The game featured a bit of everything. I am loving doing NBL1 commentary this season!

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 14: fence (@val)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 13: community (@crossingthethreshold)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 12: tranquility (@vincent)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 11: maroon (@rom)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 10: pot (@warner)

We aim to keep Hemispheric Views podcast to around 45 minutes in length. We’re nailing it! Check out all the stats of the show 🎙

Homebrew

This article was originally written for the December 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Are you a Terminal wizard? A command line guru? A shell superstar? No, neither am I. From time to time I attempt to teach myself. It never sticks. As a result I know just enough about the macOS (and Linux, I suppose) terminal (bash/zsh) as the faded memory of a series of beginner courses permit. I’ve resigned myself to this, and have found a happy medium of mostly using the GUI - but using the terminal for a few specific and useful things. Introducing Homebrew If you do nothing else with the terminal, it’s worth taking a look at homebrew(https://brew.sh/). Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. Put another way, it provides an easy way to install a whole bunch of Mac applications with a simple command. To my mind, this is actually easier than finding the product website, downloading a .dmg file, dragging the application to /Applications, unmounting the .dmg and then putting it in the trash. All of these steps can be replaced with the command brew install "appname" where app name could be zoom or microsoft-edge or marta. Brew then does all the hard work of grabbing the file and installing it in the appropriate location. If you aren’t sure what the app is called, use brew search searchterm. It’s that easy. Updating Apps Brew can update apps as well. It’s a two-step process, with two commands: brew update to get the latest version information. brew upgrade to perform an upgrade of all installed apps. Best Brews Using the command brew list I have checked out what I’ve got installed via brew at the moment. Remember, Jason made me erase my iMac, so I’m back to a short list at the moment, but highlights include: Firefox FMail Maestral Mailtrackerblocker Marta Netnewswire Zoom As you can see, that’s a mix of commercial and indie software. Casks or Formulae? Carrying on the theme, Brew has the concept of casks and formulae. All the apps above are casks - which eliminates the .dmg dance I described earlier. Formulae are the instructions that tell a Homebrew what is needed to be downloaded to get a working app on your machine. As a user, you don’t really need to worry too much about it. Is it Safe? Yes, it’s as safe as installing any other app on the internet. That is to say, the major apps will be fine. Microsoft Edge has had 32,214 installs via Homebrew in the last 30 days. I believe there is a submission process for apps to be included in the homebrew directory, although don’t quote me on that. All the non-cask apps are open-source, so there is a degree of protection there in that you (or others) can read the code and identifying bugs or nasties if they so wish. I’ve never had a problem, and I believe that Homebrew is just nerdy enough not to be an attractive vector for bad actors.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 9: bloom (@thedimpause)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 Day 8: union (@odd)

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 7: park @dejus

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 6: silhouette @otaviocc

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 5: Earth @dfj

Knowledge Management: A Fool’s Errand?

CJ Eller – @cjeller on micro.blog – had a take on Personal Knowledge Management that resonated with me, in his articleGarbage Heap: I’ve bounced off of personal knowledge management tools like crazy. Wikis? Digital gardens? Zettelkasten systems? Nothing sticks. I’m a nerd, and I love the idea of capturing all the things I read, the information I learn, and being able to harvest it later for some great good. I have tried all the software tools. Some stick more than others. Some of the time I end up knowing I have information, but not knowing which software silo I stuck it in. Am I getting value from these attempts at capturing everything I know? Probably not, at least most of the time. To illustrate the point of being driven crazy by ‘knowledge’, Eller quotes a short story Funes, His Memory by Jorge Luis Borges: Without the ability to generalize and abstract away his memories, Funes is left with a garbage heap that keeps piling up. “Funes, His Memory” is a story not of a gifted individual but a cursed one, trapped in an endless web of memories with no way out. A nightmare. Is there a point to capturing every piece of information that passes us by? Probably not, but there is something enticing about the idea of being able to somehow extract ‘knowledge and wisdom’ from disparate sources of ‘information’. I think that CJ has it right; it’s a fool’s errand.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 4: thorny @ronguest

Finished the first three episodes of Shining Girls on AppleTV+. That service is really delivering quality content; firing on all cylinders. Netflix could learn a thing or two. 📺

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 3: experimental (my prompt!)

Knotwords is a fun game. It has that classic Zach Gage vibe to it.

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 2: photo @agilelisa

Micro.blog photo challenge 📷 day 1: switch @ridwan

Hello @Burk - your username is capital. That’s odd.

Our One Prime Plus members have received their bonus episode! @hemisphericviews @martinfeld @burk

Is Discord the New Online Meeting Place?

With the probable demise of Twitter, it will join other social networks that have already met their demise (MySpace, Facebook, Instagram) with me, I am not that worried. Micro.blog will remain my generalised blogging location, allowing me to post whatever I like (and optionally cross-post to Twitter if I feel I must). What I’ve also found more recently is that Discord has become an unexpected surprise hit for focused communities. I only participate in four, and I wouldn’t want it to grow much beyond this, but they have each delivered an excellent place for virtual gathering, without anybody portraying negative behaviours, trying to sell NFTs, or undertake any other annoying actions that one sees elsewhere online. My Discord communities are: Hemispheric Views (the podcast I host with Martin Feld and Jason Burk) has built a great community of listeners - if you listen to our show, please join our Discord. NBL Pocket Podcast is the other podcast I host together with Joe Corr, where we break down the Australian National Basketball League. A whole bunch of hardcore hoopers are joining this relatively young server that I set up on a whim. Even better, is now the management of the server has been shared across a couple of users - community supporting community. Neatnik - the developer of omg.lol has a Discord instance for users of his service. Lumon Industries is a Discord server for fans of the AppleTV+ show, Severance. A whole bunch of amazing fan conversations, theories, and art and craft exists in here. These Discord servers have a bonhomie that I don’t see on other social networks. They are private and fun. They embody the good spirits of the internet. I love them.

It’s great to see so many new (and returning) people posting to micro.blog following the Musk Twitter news. I hope they stay and build this great community.

Commentating NBL1 Perth Redbacks Games

This season I have taken the job as a commentator for the NBL1 West’s Perth Redbacks. The NBL1 is the league directly beneath the national NBL competition and is broken into State-based divisions. I had to miss the first couple of games due to COVID protocols, so last night was my first behind the microphone. The games are streamed via the league’s website. The direct links to the videos of the games I called last night are: NBL1 - Perth Redbacks v Mandurah Magic Women NBL1 - Perth Redbacks v Mandurah Magic Men I had an absolute blast calling these games. While the home team didn’t get the win in either game, it was a lot of fun to call the action from the sideline. I am already looking forward to the next game.

Thanks @jean and @manton and @burk - I love being a part of micro.blog!

Despite owning the PowerPack, I’ve switched away from Alfred and back to Launchbar.

I had to buy a subscription for Microsoft 365 today. That was an unexpected event. I appreciate the Home Use Program discount though.

A day of IT disaster. Firstly corporate IT decided to lock down all access from machines other than their own, then by the end of the day my iMac reached a point where a ‘nuke and pave’ installation was the only choice.

The Profit Paradox at play with the iPhone mini 14

The Looming Demise of the iPhone mini - MacSparky: The part that gets me is that they really shouldn’t be forced to make a decision. Isn’t Apple selling enough iPhones that they could afford to sell small, medium, and large versions of the pro and non-pro phones? You’d think they could make that work, but, for whatever reason, they are choosing not to. David Sparks take the customer-centric Apple question, but the answer is business-centric. I’m an owner of an iPhone 13 mini who is also currently reading The Paradox of Profit by Jan Eeckhout. As well as being a fascinating book in general, it also provides an excellent framework to answer the question about why there won’t be an iPhone 14 mini, posed by MacSparky, despite the fact they could. Apple is a company that has market power. A company with market power will produce less, in the interest of profit. If Apple were to produce more iPhones (and the mini, specifically) it would result in lower profit margins. iPhone minis have been sold at a lower price than other iPhones. What incentive does Apple have to continue selling something that doesn’t boost their margin? Companies continue to be incentivised to deliver profit; not the best market outcomes. They also wear the cost burden of another manufacturing line to maintain, for little benefit to the business. As much as we Apple fans like to deify Apple Inc., they remain a corporation with shareholders who look to quarterly earnings reports and admire the gross margin the company delivers, which flows through to the bottom line, and thus dividends. Producing an iPhone 14 mini might please a few million customers, but the economic incentives at play are perverse. Therefore, they will not make an iPhone 14 mini, and be rewarded for this action with greater profit margins. Apple has sufficient market power such that would-be buyers of iPhone minis will not depart the iPhone brand in favour of Android, or another option (which there really isn’t, which introduces a whole other problem of there being a platform duopoly). What the customer will do is buy a higher priced iPhone that delivers better margins to Apple. Therefore, Apple will be rewarded for producing less, at higher prices. I highly recommend The Paradox of Profit to others who have an interest in macroeconomic theory.

I finished the game Disco Elysium tonight. More akin to reading a book than playing a game, it tackled interesting concepts from politics to economics and the meaning of life.

If, like me, you’ve been searching for the ultimate OmniFocus “Complete and Await Reply” automation script, we may have finally hit gold with Autocar.

High School Musical, 2006 - ★★

Lip sync is bad, fade to black transitions and an incredibly well-resourced High School. What’s not to love?

Finished reading: My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout 📚. A short story that initiated self-reflection of how my own childhood experience resulted in the life I have today.

Well that’s just great. COVID-19 has entered our household. 🦠

Severance Unboxing

It was a lot of fun to host another Hemispheric Views live event this morning. This time, Jason was unboxing an official AppleTV+ Severance gift box he had acquired. The event featured Severance talk, Severance sound clips and music from the show - even some Defiant Jazz. There were many amazing goodies in the box. You can see some photos of the items at the Hemispheric Views photo album. My thanks to our One Prime Plus members who joined in the event and helped make it a success!

What Am I Nostalgic For?

This article was originally written for the November 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Since it’s Nostalgic November, I figured I should write something that fits the theme for the November issue of Hemispheric News. What is nostalgia, however? According to Apple’s dictionary, nostalgia is defined as: a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. According to Wikipedia, it is: a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Nostalgia is associated with a yearning for the past, its personalities, possibilities, and events, especially the “good ol' days” or a “warm childhood”. Ah, yes, the good old days. As the elder statesman of the Hemispheric Views triumvirate, my good ol' days are certainly better than the others, especially that whippersnapper Feld. He may speak like an old man, but don’t be fooled. He never saw the 1970s. What am I nostalgic for, then? In many ways, my life now is the best it has ever been. I am as wealthy as I’ve ever been, I’ve got sufficient social status and I’m engaging in hobbies I genuinely enjoy. Perhaps playing basketball - when I was athletic and could jump, dunk and score with confidence? No. I miss that, for sure, but I’m not nostalgic for it. I’m proud of myself but there is no strong yearning to go back. How about school and education? No way am I nostalgic for that. School was hard. Not the lessons, study or exams. They were easy. No major issues there. But dealing with the ups and downs of school friendships, politics and teenage angst? Hard pass. There must be something I hold nostalgia for! If I sit and think about it now, I feel nostalgia for the time when I was young in my career. I had few responsibilities other than keeping myself alive and paying the rent. I had independence. I could come home, sit in my La-Z-Boy recliner chair, watch the “Attitude Era” of WWE Raw and let the hours flow by. The Internet was in its infancy. I had a computer that was connected but my mobile phone was purely a “feature phone”. There was no expectation to document my days, or justify how I spent my hours. Leisure was a primary element of what I did. Yet there was no guilt, because I worked full hours in a proper job. But come evening time, that was mine to do with as I wished. And with that time, I didn’t do much and that was kind of perfect. Going back to that time now is of course impossible. It would also mean giving up all the things that give me meaning and value now: my wife, my children. I can’t go back. Sometimes, though, I want another night where I sit on the couch and watch wrestling - without having to make sure anybody besides myself brushes their teeth before bed.

Can we Have Some Modern Software as Well?

Riccardo Mori really nailed it with his latest post, Raw power alone is not enough where he talks about how Apple has left its software to wither, while it has been busy beefing up its hardware offering. The article is full of juicy content, but I’ve pulled out the parts that resonated with me: Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently. … So, again, we have absurdly powerful machines like the Mac Studio and soon we’ll have the even more mind-boggling Apple silicon Mac Pro, and what kind of software will they run? A handful of professional apps which hopefully will take advantage of these machines’ capabilities to make the same things professional Macs did twenty years ago, ten years ago, but better and faster. … This is the personal beef I have with tech innovation today, which I feel still revolving around the concept of ‘reinventing the wheel and making it spin faster’. I’ve had a number of generations of Apple hardware pass through my hands, but I essentially work in the same way, with a few small workflow changes around the edges. I don’t do video, but I would love some revolutionary ways to leverage all the power of the M-series chips. Software today still comes with much more friction than it should have, given the context of general technological advancement that has happened for the past 40 years or so. … Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently. None of Apple’s software (or much software across the industry) has become easier. Actually, much of it has become harder as a result of either feature-bloat leading to design complexity, or fashionable UI changes making things less discernible, HIG be damned. I would love for their to be some great workflow/project-management software that was integral with macOS. I don’t want to have to jump out to some third-party web service, or use a mishmash of Hook, OmniFocus, Finder and Devonthink to manage project files. Finder is too small-minded with the combination of apps and services and files. But Apple doesn’t seem to care about innovating in any of the hard spaces, or creating new interaction models for existing hardware. I don’t make video, but I’m a professional user of a Mac. I’d like some thought given to my workflows too.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 2022 - ★★

Jim Carrey is fun for the adults and the characters are fun for the kids. I was disappointed with the soundtrack after really enjoying that of the first movie.

Autism & Adults

Hannah Gadsby on her autism diagnosis: ‘I’ve always been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack’ | The Guardian I leave crowded spaces. I switch off discordant music. I wear headphones at restaurants. I openly express my hatred of the saxophone and electric guitar solos. I don’t allow important emotional conversations to take place in cafes with polished concrete floors. My son has an autism diagnosis. I do not. Yet the more I learn about ASD and witness the lived experience of my boy, the more convinced I am that I have undiagnosed autism. There is too much about my childhood - and my adulthood - that ticks too many boxes for me not to be open to the idea that I’m “on the spectrum”. This is completely fine; I only wish I had been able to give it a name earlier in life.

I’ve bought Disco Elysium - The Final Cut because it was on sale on the Steam Store. Friends tell me it’s good. 🕹

The Adam Project, 2022 - ★½

Wow, this was boring. An hour in felt like 2 hours. Not even the Ryan Reynolds charm could save this script.

I’ve got a new domain: canion.au

I’ve re-upped my subscription to TextExpander. While my self-built Keyboard Maestro system was okay, it was rickety enough to create annoyances. @burk will approve.

Kings Park calm.

I can’t figure out why Flickr has two different types of Pro badge. One is black with a square surrounding the word Pro, and the other is blue with a pink underline.

I’ve been exploring Flickr again. I’m still a Pro, so I should try to get my money’s worth.

Finished reading: Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz 📚 An enjoyable read that is let down by its extreme US-centricity.

Today @burk, @martinfeld and I hosted a @hemisphericviews Members Trivia Event. Hosted on Zoom with a quiz platform provided by Crowdpurr, it was a great way to spend an hour with people who dedicate time to listen and support our podcast.

Turning Red, 2022 - ★★

Watched on Friday March 18, 2022.

As fun as getting back onto a basketball court is, at what point do I accept it’s no longer something I should do? Especially after possibly breaking a toe earlier in the day. Now my knee joins the injury party, not to mention the generalised leg soreness. 🏀

If one smashes one’s toe into a door frame, one might worry they’ve broken said toe.

It was fantastic to finally meet my NBL Pocket Podcast co-host in real life. Joe does exist! And so does Nick Tan!

Hi micro.blog gang! I wasn’t able to join the Town Hall live, but I’m watching the replay.

Uncharted, 2022 - ★★

An absolutely ridiculous movie that made me laugh because of just how preposterous it was.

CODA, 2021 - ★★★★★

It for me right in the feels. Amazing singing and acting. The treatment given to the school duet was incredible.

In Episode 51 of @hemisphericviews we talk Severance. Thanks @neatnik for making a Lumon Industries business card generator.

Australian Consumer Law

This article was originally written for the October 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus The Australian Consumer Law (ACL) is an unsung hero for the everyday Australian citizen. In 2011 it was introduced and replaced a bunch of outdated legislation, notably the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth). That piece of 1974 legislation was a foundation block of my university degree and I think s.52 is still seared into my brain. At the time of its introduction I was working in the business lobby, and I remember the doom and gloom scenarios that companies were painting. “It will destroy us!", “where’s the fairness?” were refrains heard all too often. Really makes the heart bleed. 🤷‍♂️ The legislation was introduced during the 43rd Parliament of Australia, led by The Hon Julia Gillard AC. Yet another achievement of a government that wasn’t thought highly of, but had a history of legislative achievement unlike many others, and certainly any since. The ACL rebalances the scales in commerce to provide better support to consumers who buy in good faith, but who turn out to have bought items not of merchantable quality. There are a host of provisions, but this is the crux: if a product fails to meet its stated purpose within 12 months of purchase as new, then the buyer is entitled to remedial action, including a full refund. This also can’t be waived by not returning in original packaging, or any other kind of ‘gotcha’. This is how operation of the ACL can be explained: When the consumer chooses a refund: The supplier must repay any money paid by the consumer for the returned goods, and return any other form of payment made by the consumer — for example, a trade-in. If this is not possible, they must refund the consumer the value of the other form of payment. A supplier must not: offer a credit note, exchange card or replacement goods instead of a refund refuse a refund, or reduce the amount, because the goods were not returned in the original packaging or wrapping. A consumer will usually need to show a receipt or other ‘proof of purchase’. ACL rendered Apple’s traditional AppleCare product obsolete in Australia. For a period of time there was virtually no point buying AppleCare because it offered no benefit beyond that which the ACL enshrined in law. Now we have AppleCare+ and the benefits of cheap screen repairs, but failing equipment is still no reason to consider buying that particular insurance policy. I’ve experienced some problems with some wifi routers I bought about 4 months ago from Amazon. Upon a reminder from a Hemispheric Views Patron I found the option to make a call to Amazon. Upon determining that I was in Australia, I was offered 3 options. The first two seemed like weird cruddy deals that people in other countries have to put up with (sending the faulty unit back and waiting for a replacement of that part, or accepting a part refund of $130). The third option was my ACL protection - the ability to send the whole thing back to Amazon for a full refund. That’s what I wanted, and that’s the option I took. The other choices paled in comparison. You see evidence of the ACL quietly in action (and markedly different to other jurisdictions) in everything you buy in Australia. Vendors are required to insert a printed sheet explaining a consumer’s rights. There is no need to complete those shoddy ‘guarantee’ forms to gain warranty protection from the ACL. This is an area of governance that the Australian government got right, and I’m so glad that it is in operation. And despite all the clutching of pearls, no businesses seem to have gone bankrupt as a result of the ACL.

Thank you to Robert for pointing out issues with my RSS feeds, and for reading my stuff!

I’m still waiting for all my Facebook friends to reach out and check that I’m okay, since my account has been deleted for about a year. I’m sure they’ll get in touch soon.

It’s not much, but it’s something. 🇺🇦

OneDrive Files-on-Demand for macOS

Nick Heer at Pixel Envy: For example, placeholder files are not automatically created for the entire OneDrive directory, only for files and folders I have opened. This means Spotlight cannot index those files and folders, which means I cannot fully search OneDrive on my Mac. It does not matter to me whether this is Microsoft’s fault or Apple’s. It matters that I am surprised — daily — by new roadblocks in my existing workflow caused by software updates and under-hood changes no user should have to think about. The whole OneDrive change has been annoying, but this lack of “indexability” is the largest annoyance, because I rely on that for Alfred/Launchbar/Spotlight integrations.

Can we eject Putin from our world? Who is in favour of this madness? Why is annexation of land such a strongly-held desire. I’m sorry for Ukraine. I wish the people of the country all the best for what is about to transpire. 🇺🇦

I don’t know what Putin sees as his end-game, but his actions against Ukraine are beyond the pale and must be globally condemned. 🇺🇦

Zootopia, 2016 - ★★★

Watched on Friday February 18, 2022.

Volume 2 of my Day One journal has arrived. // @patrickrhone

My 6-year old man broke his leg last night! The bone broke right through, but thank goodness for a great hospital system than got his leg set and in a cast right away. 😢

I’ve adopted the Paper theme, by @amit for my blog. Which also meant upgrading the version of Hugo. I don’t think it broke anything.

Random appreciation tweet for Wayne Simmons. He made playing basketball fun, and was a friend to me when I did work experience at 882 6PR and he was a sales rep. Anybody who played 🏀 in Perth probably knows Wayne and I don’t think anybody dislikes the guy. I hope he is well.

Encanto, 2021 - ★★★

My favourite character was... a house? I was surprised by the ease with which the fractured relationship with Grandma was resolved.

Another day of being sick. Urgh. Tested negative for COVID too, so it’s just a garden-variety flu making my life miserable.

A Second Try With Zavala

Last Time… When I tried this the first time I used each line of the outline as a paragraph. Maurice Parker, the developer of Zavala, answered my call for help. He advised: when you craft your blog post in Zavala, the Topics are headings and the Notes are the paragraph text. Make sure that when you export from Zavala you select the Markdown Doc format. It looks like you exported an outline without Notes using the Markdown List option. So it seems I made not one, but two, mistakes. Now I Try Again So this time, I’ve only got two outline nodes representing the headings, and text in the notes fields for my paragraph. Into the breach once more, I go.

Using Zavala to post to Micro.blog

One of the fun things about micro.blog is its inherent openness. It will accept the creation of new blog posts from a host of applications. I already have apps including Drafts, Ulysses, iA Writer and MarsEdit configured to send posts to my micro.blog site, so why not add another? In this instance, I’m using Zavala, an outliner app that works across macOS, iOS and iPadOS. There is a bit of configuration to do to make it work, including the installation of a support app from the Mac App Store called Humboldt, which provides a linkage between Shortcuts and the micro.blog API, as best I can tell. Testing This is the grand test, whereby I have written this document, and I aim to publish it to my blog.

Thanks @podiboq for suggesting a great improvement to @hemisphericviews.

It’s that time again. Hemispheric Views 049 covers third-party keyboards, the new iPad mini, the weird world of video gaming, and coffee sizes. 🎙

The new Fantastical Openings service may be enough to save me from needing a third-party bookings service. Unfortunately I recently bought a 12-month subscription to one.

It’s nice to put a voice to Phil Nunnally @twelvety who is one of the Internet nice guys. He was a guest on the Thinking About Tools for Thinking show with @andysylvester

Browser Wars This article was originally written for the September 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus No, this is not an article about the failings of Safari 15. I am sure Apple will get that sorted out, because having no idea about which is the active tab is a problem that will impact millions of users. This article is about finding and selecting a preferred browser for general daily use. Let me preface this by saying that Safari has a huge advantage mainly because of iOS. Even with the changes to the default browser setting, the convenience of Safari on iOS remains streets ahead and it is a nice, fast browser. I’m yet to find a browser option on iOS that gets close to Safari for satisfaction. Therefore, I’m focusing on daily use on the Mac. Again, the ecosystem benefits push Safari to the fore. Syncing with iOS is reliable. Authentication is critical. I love the connections it has with the ecosystem biometrics (Touch ID, Apple Watch confirmations, Apple Pay), and the best feature is auto-filling of SMS 2FA tokens. Let me state that from an ecosystem perspective Safari is the best and only choice. On a laptop, its energy efficiency is another win. I hate running other browsers because I can almost feel them eating my battery life. As a browser for using the Internet, though, I feel that Safari is falling behind. I seem to run into the issue of “this website is using significant resources” more often. This morning, I had the problem with my bank website. Online banking - a solved problem for the last decade, now struggles to run in a modern browser? I realise that problems like this should be put at the feet of the website developers. Yet it’s tiresome swimming upstream. With most of the world using Chromium-based browsers this is the “standard” that developers are coding for. Another issue I find with Safari is identity management with respect to Microsoft 365 hell. I have three work-mandated M365 identities. Even I forget which site needs which log-in. I can tell you, that none of the browsers handle this well. Firefox has containers which should do the trick. And they did, until they didn’t. At some point it got stuck in an authentication loop and the only thing I could do was delete all my container settings and start again. The alternative is incognito-mode/private browsing, or using a different browser entirely for each login identity. This is why I still like apps ahead of in-browser access. Back to browser options, currently installed and in some level of active use, I have Safari, Firefox, Edge and Vivaldi. I don’t have Chrome (eww, Google) and I don’t have Brave (eww, crypto). The Firefox gecko rendering system feels slow, is energy-inefficient, and not being Chromium has the same incompatibility challenges. It did have Containers, but as mentioned, even that broke. Firefox is the biggest loser. Vivaldi is Chromium-based, seems fast but is super-weird. Sometimes I like it, but most of the time I feel I am using a browser from 2004. Edge. A Microsoft product. Even being a Microsoft product it doesn’t have a solution for multiple Microsoft accounts. Yet it is Chromium based. And its UI is almost intelligible. It definitely makes more sense than Chrome. It feels snappy. I like it! Edge wins my award as my secondary browser. What I want to see is a turbo-boosted Safari. I like Safari. I worry that the development team is focusing in the wrong areas, though. I hope they get it sorted out because not until the past year have I even contemplated secondary browsers - it’s been Safari all day, every day.

I can confirm that getting a Day One journal printed is totally worth it. This first test only gets me until 2015. I am definitely ordering Volume 2.

It’s so much fun recording NBL Pocket Podcast. 🏀🎙

Hemispheric Views Interviews His Excellency The Honourable Kim Beazley AC

Episode 48 of Hemispheric Views features an interview with the Governor of Western Australia, Kim Beazley. Previously a Federal Minister, Leader of the Opposition, Australian Ambassador to the USA, among other distinguished roles, Kim has now really hit the big time as a guest on the best tech and culture podcast on the Internet, @HemisphericViews! 🎙

My son came home from his first day of Year 1 yesterday complaining that it was ‘too babyish’. This reminds me of myself. I came home after day one of Year 1 angry because they hadn’t taught me how to read and write, and instead made us do silly things such as colouring in.

12 hours after I unsubscribe from my discount-rate NYTimes games subscription they announce they’ve bought Wordle. To resubscribe at the normal rate will double my cost. 🤦🏼‍♂️

I’m proud to share that @HemisphericViews podcast is no longer on Spotify because we can’t condone the willing spread of misinformation.

I’m enjoying playing Chess.com with @mjdescy - a tough opponent! ♟

Boosted! 💉

Hemispheric Views Episode 047 appeared like clockwork. One might say, too much like clockwork… as if we were all living in The Matrix?

If you have kids, a great podcast for them is Like You. I’ve been a Patreon supporter since they launched, and Noah Glenn does a wonderful job as host.

I did the “thumbs up” ride today. 🚴🏻

Benjamin Canion in Conversation with Jason Burk

This wide ranging discussion between my son, Benjamin and Jason Burk ranges across a diversity of topics. The conversation touches on the Loch Ness Monster, Scooby Doo, questions as to the intelligence of Hemispheric Views co-host Martin Feld, and ends with a great joke.

Is there anything better than an ice-cream truck on a hot summer day?

The Hemispheric Views logo on the Core Intution website. I love it. Proud to be the sponsor of Episode 498.

Spent 4 hours in the pool this evening. Loved it, and kids had a blast. 🏊🏻‍♂️

I was in one of the old buildings of University of WA today, and came across this beauty of a machine. Dymo Lyfe, @martinfeld

Crypto Consumes Ridiculous Amounts of Energy

Crypto Uses Lots of Energy: As of this writing, a single transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain eats up the same amount of energy as the average US household in a 77.8-day, or roughly two and a half month, period. Ethereum, though nowhere near as large, still eats up the same amount of energy that a US household does in eight days.  I knew crypto was bad for the environment and used a lot of energy, but look at the scale of consumption. It’s insane. Especially when you add the fact that so much of this is mined in locations where coal is the energy source of the electricity. Centralised currency is fine - unless you’re a grifter or a criminal.

I had to move furniture today. The temperature was hovering somewhere between 42°C and 47°C. It was not ideal.

Things are Fun!

Sometimes as a Dad you’ve got to forget everything else, and just enjoy some quality time with your kid. They’re only young once. Firstly we went to get a cup of coffee, then travelled a long time looking for a car wash. Car washes are fun! Then onto Fremantle where we saw some container ships being unloaded. Big ships are fun! Then, we went to a the harbour entrance to watch some recreational boats enter and exit the harbour (and talk to a seagull). Boats are fun!

Apparently the #10YearChallenge is a thing. Here’s mine. 10 years ago I was already an Apple nerd - but a skinnier one with less grey hair.

Season 4 of Cobra Kai done. It’s so bad, it’s good. 📺

Rodman: For Better or Worse, 2019 - ★★★★

Is the story and life of Dennis Rodman a tragedy or a comedy? Watching this film gives me the impression that Dennis himself doesn’t know. I tend towards the former.

The Matrix Resurrections, 2021 - ★★★½

Everything is a loop and we are all sheeple. Rebooted in a way that reminded me of Star Wars VII, but probably better? So why do I feel empty at the end, and feel the fan service were the best bits?

The Matrix Revolutions, 2003 - ★★½

Why didn’t they call this “The Matrix Battlebots”? I might have watched it sooner. A limp ending to the trilogy that should have stopped at the first movie.

Hemispheric Views on Discord

Hemispheric Views - Blog - Expanding the Hemispheric Views Discord in 2022!: In 2022, we’re pleased to introduce another new channel: #One-Prime-Plus! This space is intended exclusively for our Patreon subscribers as a member benefit, in addition to bonus podcast episodes and our monthly newsletter at oneprimeplus.com. At Hemispheric Views HQ, we are continually working to build our community experience. Our Discord is open to all listeners, but Patreon subscribers can get behind the velvet rope.

The Matrix Reloaded, 2003 - ★★★

Don’t ask questions, just go along for the ride. The albino dreadlock dudes were criminally under-utilised.

Matter offers Kindle support now. Seems my Instapaper subscription may not be renewed…

It’s an honour to have a media pass for the Australian NBL on behalf of NBL Pocket Podcast. Tonight I joined the press conference to ask some questions of Hawks Head Coach Brian Goorjian 🏀

New home screen. 📱

Wordle 207 5/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 This wasn’t going well, until I solved it. I have a complaint about this word, however…

I’ve been doing strength workouts again, after giving them away mid-way through last year. I actually really enjoy lifting weights. Way better than cardio! 🏋🏻‍♀️

I was continuously getting “signal is weak” messages from Find My with regard to AirTags. I reset the Network Settings in iPhone and now it is working perfectly - tracks, points and finds AirTags.

The Matrix, 1999 - ★★★★★

It’s kinda perfect. Except for maybe the Oracle who is just a bit annoying.

I’ve bought a discounted annual subscription to Bike Citizens. This stuff usually has limited appeal in an isolated city such as Perth. It would be way better in dense Europe, but I figured I’d give it a try anyway. 🚲

Wordle 204 3/6 ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩 🟨🟩⬛🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I really nailed this one!

Played King of Tokyo. So much fun! Our 6 year old loves to SMASH.

Wordle 203 3/6 ⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛ ⬛🟩🟩🟨🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I got lucky.

Finished reading: The Highly Sensitive Person by E. Aron 📚 An insight into a personality type that might generally be labelled as shy. I see many links between HSP and Autism. The book’s best work is done early; the final third lost me. The interminable fixation on a review of one’s childhood was overdone.

On another day that saw us over 40°C, this iced tea was a refreshing beverage.

I’m a Blogger? I’m a Blogger.

I don’t consider myself to be a ‘blogger’. Yet if I think about it, I’ve had some kind of blog actively running for large portions of my life. Just off the top of my head, I’ve had Blogger, Movable Type, Wordpress, Blot and Micro.blog. On the private side of the equation I’ve also got years worth of entries stored away in Day One. Unfortunately some of those posts are lost to the annals of time - which I am sad about. But based on the evidence of use, I am a ‘blogger’.

Can we have a Blog-only Search Engine?

Search Engines and SEO Spam - Initial Charge: What I think I want is a search engine that only gave me results from small, independent weblogs. More often than not I just want to find information from a normal person that’s writing about something because they care deeply about it. And that’s very difficult to find in search engines today. I want the same thing that Mike Rockwell at Initial Charge wants: a search engine focused on nerds who blog about stuff they love. Topics could be far and wide: sport, IT, doll collecting… I don’t care about the topic, but I want to be able to find stuff only from people who are passionate about the topic - not trying to sell something.

Subscription Services

It’s that time of year when many are making lists and undertaking audits of their subscription services. I had an old list in Dynalist that was almost complete. I’ve updated it and moved it into Craft, where I will attempt to maintain it over time.

Facebook’s Role in Capitol Attacks

Om Malik: Instead of using technology and starting to flag downright criminal behavior, the company hums, and haws. They don’t need an oversight committee — they need a moral compass. Am I being silly to suggest that Facebook and Purdue Pharma have much in common?

Deleting Social Media

Colin Devroe is quitting social media: I also spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling tweets, clicking links, reading threads, and darting between subjects like a kitten chasing a laser. I love this analogy. I think the cumulative effect on my brain since 2006 has been that my ability to focus has been effected. Not that I can’t focus. I can sit down and get into flow on a programming project more often than not. But when I’m still, when I’m idle, when I feel like I could be bored at any moment I grab my phone and scroll through Twitter which sends my mind into overdrive on a million topics, timelines, thoughts, and emotions. I don’t think this is good for the human brain. I know it isn’t good for my brain. My only social media now is Twitter, and that is curated to deliver NBL basketball and little else. I deleted Facebook and Instagram ages ago, and do not miss it. Focus is a superpower. Best not to give it away easily.

It’s been cool to see a whole bunch of development happening on and around the micro.blog platform over the past few weeks. May the momentum continue!

Cribbage night @tinyroofnail

I created a castle lady with wombo.art.

I’m on a The Wallflowers music kick tonight. Listened to the new album. Now back on the classic Bringing Down the Horse - released in 1996. I remember buying the CD and this album is embedded deep in my memories. 🎶

Go home ants, you’re drunk.

Self-Reflection

Today has been one of thought and self-reflection. There are many parts of my self that I’m not entirely happy with. Are we ever happy with ourselves? Probably not. Nevertheless, making an effort to do better must be a form of self-improvement in its own right. My effort ties in neatly with a new year, but this hasn’t anything to do with New Year’s Resolutions. This is more about me trying to become a better version of myself, irrespective of the time of year. The helpful thing about early January is that I’m not working, which frees up time for self-reflection. Today I have done some brainstorming. I pulled out my (almost unused) Theme System journal and transitioned my thinking into a theme for the upcoming season — because a year is too long. I hope that applying focus to my theme will lead to self-improvement. I’m trying to confront my weaknesses head on and deal with them. What weaknesses? Let’s just say that being the son of a father who had mental health challenges, and being the father of a son with autism, mental health is an issue I deal with on the daily.1 I can’t change who I was yesterday, but I can strive to be a better version of myself tomorrow. Hopefully this time of introspection and thought will lead to personal growth. The good thing is that it certainly can’t make the situation worse. When I was a young boy who didn’t want to fall asleep, I would listen to talkback radio: specifically 6PR 882 AM. The evening shift featured Perth radio legend Graham Maybury. I even called in to the show a couple of times, as a kid, such was my devotion. Most nights, at midnight when the show came to an end and I had stayed awake listening, Maybury would play the song, One Day at a Time. This song helped soothe my mind. Now, 30 years on, I think it still holds value. Mental health still has many stigmas associated with it, so if this makes you think less of me, read it as such: being the son of a father who had diabetes, and being the father of a son with diabetes, diabetes is an issue I deal with on the daily. Problem solved. ↩︎

I’m well out of practice in dealing with people in a group social setting. An opportunity for improvement.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009 - ★★★½

It's only been on my watch list for a decade, and finally I've seen a typically enjoyable Wes Anderson movie with its delightful art direction and distinctive stable of actors. A lovely movie.

The most epic Jenga game I’ve played. Considering Benji, who just turned 6, was one of the three players — and he didn’t lose — makes it that much more impressive.

Return & Recycle Apple Gear

I tried to return a bunch of old iPads and MacBooks to Apple today. I got $50 for one old iPad. Potentially could have gotten more but the others I’d forgotten to charge and couldn’t be bothered about it, so I returned them for $0. They wouldn’t take the Macs in-store but coming home, I’ve discovered I can get $110 each for two 2013 MacBook Pros. Two older machines are recyclable only. To my mind, it’s all free money!

Climbing through the Roof

I’ve been climbing and crawling around my roof space today running ethernet and installing security cameras. It was hot in the roof - after a few minutes I would emerge drenched in sweat. I would estimate it was around 60º up there. A few hours after finishing I’ve realised that I’m not as young as I once was. I got an inkling of that in the roof when climbing through rafters and making sure I only stepped on the beams - and not the gyprock ceiling - my hips and legs weren’t loving it. Now the general soreness is setting in. I wonder how I’m going to pull up tomorrow. Probably not well. The photo is one I took from the deepest recesses of my roof. We had to get cable from that corner to the other end of the house. Then do that same thing another 3 times. We got the job done. I owe a huge thanks to my mate Daz - without him I couldn’t have done it. What a legend.

I keep playing around with themes on micro.blog, but I ultimately always seem to return to Marfa. The only problem with it is the way that comments/replies are rendered. Will that element of the template ever be improved? @help

Configuring my Stream Deck

This post was originally written in August 2021 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast. Sitting in my OmniFocus task list, and my SkedPal task list, both for two long, has been one item: I have been intending to give myself two hours to do some new stuff with my Stream Deck that has been sitting in front of me for about a year. After an initial foray upon purchase, it has mostly sat unloved and unused. Plugged in and active, but I would forget it is there, and never use any of its little buttons. No more! Clearly if I wasn’t using it, I hadn’t configured it appropriately for my workflow. Hence, the project assignment to review it. Despite that project I let it sit idle. Defer, defer, defer. Now, today, I made progress. New buttons have been configured. The test will be seeing if I stick with it. I crafted some buttons for OmniFocus to apply various stages of kanban process to my tasks, as per this example from Omni Automation. Perhaps this will both establish a use for the Stream Deck and rebuild my love of OmniFocus which I’ve found to be on the wane in recent times (another story for another day). On other screens, I have some nice buttons setup to construct my desktop in ways for different podcasting setups. Unfortunately, I forget to use these, and I even forget what exactly they do and how I have them configured. If I were to start today, they would trigger a Bunch script - but I don’t think they do that at the moment! The best way I have found to leverage the Stream Deck is in partnership with Keyboard Maestro. Having a script in KM is the best and easiest way to build automations which can be triggered via a button press. Don’t use the native/developer created integration though. The KM-link plugin that is available through the Stream Deck app store (for free) is a much more versatile option. So, enough reading, let’s look at some pictures of my current bizarro eternal work-in-progress Stream Deck. This is my default page. It needs work. The IFTTT button isn’t connected anymore. I never use Pomodoros but I have a button for them. Sigh. The happy calendar is good, though. It is a calendar reminder system that changes colour and has a countdown timer as the meeting draws near. I got this from TJ Luoma over at the Mac Power Users forum. My “media” folder has some music controls and playlist icons. I need one for my Favourites mix. Half the Zoom stuff doesn’t work properly. I gave up bothering to connect my dSLR as a webcam. My podcasts setup page. Maybe I did use Bunch! My OmniFocus kanban management page that I’ve set up over the last couple of days. Right as I’m considering switching from OmniFocus to Things. Nice one, Andrew. Looking at these pages, it’s quite clear I need to dedicate more time to my Stream Deck. It remains an under-utilised asset. Do any readers own a Stream Deck? Do you have any great ideas about how to use it? Let me know in the Discord chat room, because any inspiration is helpful.

A bookmarklet to post a link to micro.blog: Micro.blog Posting Bookmarklet – Colin Devroe. This link has been posted with said bookmark. @cdevroe

I’m decommissioning our Apple MacBook Pro (Late 2013). Its had a good life, albeit the last two have been hard as my kid doesn’t show the same care and respect for it as I do. I thank it for its service.

The irony of it being super hot and wanting to jump in the pool, but knowing the UV is extreme and I will burn in 10 minutes. Considering… How does this compare with your situation @gaby?

Another day of heat in Perth. Currently 38.5ºC. To truly experience it I’m sitting outside, under a patio with a fan. This is the fourth consecutive day over 100ºF. I feel sorry for our plants; by yesterday evening a number of them had burnt and dried out leaves. 🥵

Could somebody explain to me why the local council doesn’t offer an extra bin run after Christmas? We have an alternating weekly cycle for recycling and general rubbish. I think they should both be collected following Christmas. As it is I’m going to be backlogged for a month.

I tried to use the micro.blog markdown importer. I got a success message, but after about 10 minutes there is still no evidence of any of the posts on my micro.blog posts page. Is there something I missed? @help

Hottest Christmas Ever

These last two days in Perth have broken records for heat. Both Christmas Day and Boxing Day were several degrees over 40ºC. I am immensely thankful that this year, for the first time in my home ownership history, we have a swimming pool. With weather like this, it’s a complete game changer. A benefit of the heat is that upon emerging from the pool, it takes only minutes to be completely dry from the hot air. At which point you are warmed up enough to want to get back in. I’ve previously explained on Hemispheric Views Episode 032: It’ll Blow the Roof Off Your House! that our house has evaporative - not refrigerated - air conditioning. On dry heat days like we’ve had, it’s worked well. It keeps the house pleasantly cool. So, despite these two days setting December heat records for Perth, I’ve felt more cool than I have in previous years. Tomorrow, the forecast is for a mild 39ºC.

Added another 2 years of subscription for canion.omg.lol. Best value profile provider on the internet.

I’m contemplating migrating my Blot site to micro.blog - and having a single site to rule them all. Should I do it?

8-Bit Christmas, 2021 - ★½

What a waste of an opportunity.

Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021 - ★★★½

Watched on Friday December 24, 2021.

Merry Christmas! 🎄

Finished reading: Ball Boy by Paul Shirley 📚I’m afraid I didn’t love it.

Dealing with a kid that has autism can be trying. 😞

For Benji’s birthday we went to the cinema to see Spider-Man: No Way Home. The boy has been obsessed with Spidey for about the past four years so he was beyond excited. 🎥🍿🕸🎂

Benji was really feeling the Christmas spirit in this one. 😂

It was great to get out of the house today. I read some of my book, and had a FaceTime call with @burk.

My bike has been professionally serviced. Once again, I have no excuse not to ride.

While @maique is looking forward to a wet and windy Christmas, I’m looking at this:

A year ago today I received my MacBook Air M1. It doesn’t feel I’ve owned it for a year; it still seems brand new in my mind.

2021 Retrospective

For the end of 2020 I wrote a retrospective looking at the main events and happenings of the year, broken down by month. I figured it would fun to do the same thing again for 2021. I didn’t take copious notes over the course of the year, so I’m piecing this list together from calendar notes. Year Notes Throughout the year I worked on two podcasts, NBL Pocket Podcast and Hemispheric Views. There is no doubt that podcasting has become an integral part of my life. Managing a child with autism means the year is peppered with visits to medical professionals, school meetings, and a whole bunch of other supportive activities. This becomes part of the tapestry of my life, but it is a burden, no doubt. Work events hardly rated a mention, because after many years of doing the same thing it was hard to build enthusiasm for the job this year. It’s importance to me has slid down the totem pole. Western Australia was fortunate in that it was isolated from COVID-19. Our State has had zero community transmission and life within our State-sized bubble has been quite normal. January I was still going strong (pardon the pun) with my strength and fitness training. Attended EPW Reawakening 19 wrestling show. February Sold my Kia Sorrento. Final touches of our backyard renovation were being completed. Closing in on the WA State Election, in which my wife was a candidate. Stopped going to the gym due to injury. March Hannah won her Seat in the State Election, becoming a Member of WA Parliament, representing the electorate of Victoria Park as part of the McGowan Labor Government. Celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. Sold our Ford Territory. April Visited my friend at his house in Bridgetown. Test drove a Nissan Leaf. I did not like it. May Finalised the execution of my Dad’s will. Had an eye test and discovered that for the first time in my life, bifocals were required. Visited Parliament House as the husband of a Member. June Celebrated my 44th birthday in a minimal way. In fact, I went to the doctor and filled a skip bin. Attended the NBL Grand Final, featuring my Perth Wildcats losing to Melbourne United. Our swimming pool was commissioned, smack bang in the middle of winter. July Watched the Olympics - mainly the basketball tournament. Had a consultation for surgery on my eyelids, becauase of a genetic condition. Had my first vaccination shot. I got Pfizer. August Saw the Boomers win an Olympic medal for the first time. Traveled to Bunbury for an overnight stay as part of a work event. Had my second Pfizer shot, to be maxxinated. Attended Perth Redbacks finals games in NBL1. September Had surgery to repair my eyelids. Started building a friendship with Nick. Dropped Hannah at the AFL Grand Final at Optus Stadium. I didn’t get a ticket. Enjoyed a family vacation in Albany. October Upgraded our home solar system from 3kW to 5kW. Hosted the Hemispheric Views live watch event of Crocodile Dundee. Roamed the streets for Trick or Treat Halloween. I was Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. November Had to drain and restart the pool setup because our contracted maintenance company put the wrong chemicals into the water. This was the event that caused the most anger and anxiety to me throughout this year. Attended EPW Reawakening XX wrestling event. Successfully obtained NBL media accreditation for NBL Pocket Podcast for the 2021/22 season. Did a crossover podcast with The Sport Blokes. December Attended West Tech Fest. Too much crypto. Started some light gym work, trying to avoid the injury problems from last time - even though my shoulders still hurt. Looking Forward to 2022 Reflecting on these notes for 2021, my life had few highlights. Most of the time was taken with household management and caring for our young kids. There’s not much to look back on that was fun or exciting, and that’s probably why I have struggled a bit with my mental health this year. With no tentpole events through the year, it became a grind of sameness. Next year I need to be better at identifying and taking action around doing some things that are for me. If I’m particularly brave, I should review my career path as well, because that has stagnated. I’m probably due for a new challenge, or else my mind may risk atrophy.

The King is Dead; Long Live the King

Update: 14 December 2021: John, a kind reader of this blog emailed me to correct the record regarding the age of these apps. I imply below that Quicksilver predated Launchbar when in fact Launchbar is the oldest of the crop. In my usage, Quicksilver was the first King - it was my gateway drug to this application category. But Quicksilver was not the first. A few days ago I noticed that Launchbar was consuming excessive CPU cycles on my iMac. I quit the app and relaunched. Same thing. I rebooted my Mac. Same thing. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I went to the website of Alfred, downloaded the app and purchased the Powerpack immediately. After perhaps a decade(?) of daily use I was over Launchbar. For the last few years it had seen very little development. The developer was showing it no love - no blog posts, no forums or user community, and its attempt to copy the Alfred ‘workflows’ feature had fallen flatter than a pancake. Now, I couldn’t even rely on it being an efficient system application. So I threw my years of muscle memory in the bin, and I’m working with Alfred from this point forward. It’s different - and I’ve had to tweak a few settings to align with my view as to how an app launcher should work - but it’s working. The main adjustment I had to make was to allow for arrow keys to traverse the file structure. My main frustration is that it doesn’t seem to automatically include files and folders in the default search when the trigger keys are depressed. Instead I have to type a space to enter into file search mode. I see in the preferences that you can include these in the default search, but the app includes text that seems to be warning me off doing that. It also doesn’t have the instant-send feature of Launchbar. While that was neat, I didn’t use it so often that I desperate miss it. It was a nicety, but I can live without it. What I can report about Alfred is that it works without fuss. It is currently using 0.2% of CPU time. It lets me search and act on files. It is fast. Launchbar has been the reigning King since it took crown from Quicksilver. It has now passed the throne to Alfred. Long may it reign.

Family Entertainment

This post was originally written in July 2021 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast. I am a father of two boys. One is 9 (almost 10!) and the other is 5 ½. I work in a fairly flexible capacity whereas my wife has a highly demanding job that has significant variability. Our time as a family is precious, but sometimes difficult to co-ordinate. So when we do have good quality time together, we want to make it count. It’s a challenge to find things to do with as a family that meets all the necessary criteria: Entertaining to the children individually. Entertaining to the children mutually. Entertaining for us as parents. Engaging for all of us (ideally). You might think this would be easy. You might have lovely ideas of joyous, considerate play. No. And no. This is (to coin an Australianism) bloody hard. While the easy answer is electronic, iPads, Nintendo Switch, Netflix, this isn’t necessarily the most appropriate answer. I do have a need to find entertainment that incorporate activity and engagement with all the family members. An extra challenge to throw into the mix is that my eldest has autism. This can make him cantankerous and difficult to get to engage in things that he hasn’t done before or that he doesn’t have confidence in his own ability to do (well, immediately). Recently we have gone to a couple of old classics, and some newer classics. We have played some rounds of Uno. The great thing about this is that our 5 year old can play - and sometimes win - with no skill required. He knows colours and numbers and can understand the concept of matching. Sure, Draw Two and Reverse are beyond him, but that’s okay with a bit of parental support. We’ve also played Skip-Bo. To be fair, Hannah and I have enjoyed this more than the kids. Other board games have included Settlers of Catan (Junior) and Cards Against Humanity (Family Edition), and Clue-Do (Harry Potter Edition). Co-host Jason Burk has also suggested Society of Curiosities. This I am yet to try, but I am keen to give it a go. Can you recommend any entertainment options that might suit my family and get them away from their screens for a while longer? I’d appreciate your suggestions. Fire them back to me via the Discord so that others can benefit too! In no time at all, Martin will be having these sort of challenges with Mac. He’s a baby now, but that won’t last long!

It’s cool to see your own feature request that you’ve been beta testing forked into the main build. Thanks BusyCal team! When dragging tasks from OmniFocus to create events, BusyCal now applies the duration (if any) to the event too. — BusyCal 2021.4.3

Crypto - I Don't Buy the Hype

Either I’m an old man who is shaking his fist at the clouds, or I’m a rational person that isn’t easily bedazzled and deluded by the madness of crowds. I prefer to think I’m the latter. Crypto has captivated the masses, and delivered opportunity to the financial grifters who portray themselves as disciples of a new financial world order. I may be missing out on ‘easy wins’, trading cryptocurrencies - buying low, selling high. What I know for certain, however, is that I’m missing the opportunity to be the last one holding the hot potato when the music stops and the entire Ponzi scheme comes crashing down. Wherever there is fervour, I see risk. Where a financial instrument is deigned by “experts” to be capable of changing the world, I see a snake oil salesman wanting to offload empty promises at my expense. To my mind, a crypto asset has no inherent value beyond the hope that somebody thinks it will be worth more, and so will be willing to pay more, so they can on-sell to the next chump who thinks it will also go up. That’s not a good recipe for sound investing. That’s gambling. Crypto itself has no underlying value. It’s not a commodity with underlying value. It has no intrinsic productive value. A few days ago I attended the West Tech Fest conference in Perth, and a huge chunk of the day was dedicated to speakers excitedly talking up crypto, memecoins, and other such “financial instruments”. One person was explaining that the younger (current?) generation are more financially aware with a higher tolerance for financial volatility, and therefore willing to ‘take the risks’. I’m calling bollocks on all of this. Of course, these statements were also made by an industry insider - a representative of a business that offers a platform for trading crypto. Now why would they be encouraging profligate “investment” in ridiculous products with no underlying value? As always, this is where I turn to my man, Lester Freamon. Further Reading If you’re not convinced that crypto is simply an energy-sapping, hype offering that isn’t going to deliver any of the amazing things it’s zealots say it will, I encourage you to undertake some further reading, and apply some rational economic thought. We’ve seen bubbles before. They always work the same way. Sure, some people get rich. Some do okay. But many are hurt, and left holding an, ahem, “asset” that isn’t worth jack. Just because this is a digital item riding the Web3 hype train doesn’t mean it’s going to end any differently. I suggest you read the brilliant work of Stephen Diehl. He has published a number of excellent, considered articles on this topic. Read his work, follow the links and maintain an open mind. There are a number of great quotes in his articles; below I’ve extracted just a few of my favourites. Everything Stephen writes is so good though, I encourage you to follow the links and read the full articles. On memecoins: Memecoins are pure greater fool investments, they’re basically a hot potato that people trade hoping to offload it on someone dumber than them who will pay more for it. And the implicit assumption behind the terminal value of these assets is that there’s an infinite chain of fools who will keep doing this forever. Nassim Taleb deconstructed this concept from a quantitative finance perspective in his whitepaper but nevertheless these assets persist because people behave economically irrationally and like lighting money on fire and dumping it into memes regardless of financial sanity. Meme coins like dogecoin exist simply for people to gamble on a fantasy about talking dogs, and bitcoin is a meme token for gambling on a fantasy about living in a cyberpunk dystopia. At the end of the day, memecoins are not that economically distinguishable from Ponzi schemes.1 On the value of crypto as a valuable commodity: After twelve years of these technologies existing (roughly the same age as the iPhone) there is basically only one type of successful crypto business: exchanges which exist to trade more crypto. 1 Unlike a gallon of petrol which can be burned for energy, or a kilo of wheat which can be made into bread, or a[n] ounce of gold which can made into jewelery, there is no intrinsic use of a bitcoin. There is nothing inside of a bitcoin that can be used for anything other than to offload it on someone else who will buy it for more than what you paid for it. It is nothing more than a pure greater fool-seeking asset.2 On crypto as a Ponzi scheme: Crypto assets are the synthesis of a speculative mania and a financial scam built around an opaque technology, phoney populism, with a tolerance for intellectual incoherence at its core. And it is a novel type of a scam, one that we don’t have a precise term of art for. They share the obscured and circular payouts of Ponzi schemes, the cult-like recruiting of multilevel marketing schemes, the ephemeral nature of high-yield investment fraud, and payout mechanics of pyramid schemes but strictly speaking they aren’t exactly like any of the classical scams. 2 The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger ↩︎ The Intellectual Incoherence of Cryptoassets ↩︎

So, yeah. I can’t sleep. What are others doing at 1:30am?

Subscribers (or Hemisphereans) to @hemisphericviews podcast now know about the PhD that @martinfeld is working on. One Prime Plus

Finished reading: The Process Is the Product by Paul Shirley 📚I had read most of the source material and I love basketball so this was up my alley. A quick read which would be a nice primer for people who have never dug into the world of productive work habits.

Chess Kids

I taught Benji chess today, and he began to understand it immediately We played a couple of games, which led to David becoming interested, so I taught him too. The boys had a good game between each other, with me coaching both of them. Tonight, Benji is sleeping with the chess set.

I have bought the Alfred Powerpack. I am sick of the glacial development pace of Launchbar, and the fact it seemed to be consuming excessive CPU cycles. I wonder if my muscle memory can be retrained?

I’m a subscriber of Drafts.app although my usage barely scratches the surface. I could probably be using it almost as a Textexpander replacement. I still find it’s UI virtually inscrutable though.

EPW Reawakening XX

Last night our family and and some friends attended Explosive Pro Wrestling’s Reawakening XX show. This is EPW’s showcase annual event. Their Wrestlemania, if you are searching for a comparator. At a sold-out theatre the company put on an amazing show. I’ve always enjoyed wrestling and nothing beats being in a venue where everybody who is there “gets it”. No need to put up with the naysayers who talk about wrestling being fake, or silly, or whatever other negative comment they want to throw at it for some reason. Make no mistake though, EPW is high-quality. These performers know what they are doing, are well-trained, and take it seriously. The Main Event for this show was a no-DQ situation, so it was more intense than one would normally see, and did push the boundaries. Full credit to the wrestlers because there is no way I would put myself through that kind of pain. Julian Ward defeated Mikey Nicholls for the EPW Championship belt and the kids were very excited to meet him at the conclusion of the event. This is the other great thing about EPW - it’s approachability. Kids getting photos with heroes is totally possible. The venue is a great size so you have an awesome view wherever you sit. It’s brilliant.

A follow-up article to Hemispheric Views One Prime Plus 016, with additional information from my brother.

I nuked and reinstalled my iMac successfully. Although the problem that motivated the reset remains. Clearly a bug in the software (Marked.app).

I’m about to erase my iMac and reinstall Monterey. @Burk made me do it.

I’ve watched the first two episodes of Dopesick and I’m into it. Looking forward to the chance to watch more.

I am so bored.

Gallipoli, 1981 - ★★★★

Classic Australian movie that makes me sad for the events that occurred.

Flat white alone at the ice skating rink. Parenting is getting easier.

Last chance to enter the omg.lol giveaway supported by @HemisphericViews @neatnik @Burk @martinfeld www.craft.do/s/iArBaUJ…

Super proud of the latest episode of @HemisphericViews. Rob from Fastmail was kind enough to join us to discuss ins and outs of the business of email. I also spend some time talking about the YNAB disaster. 🎙

Angel-A, 2005 - ★★★

An interesting approach to a redemption story. It kept me engaged but I didn’t enjoy the conclusion.

Anxiety has kicked my arse over the past 24 hours.

I love a business that has a tidy balance sheet.

A happy Sunday evening.

Home Sweet Home Alone, 2021 - ★

It is just… so… bad.

Lest we forget.

Okay, real talk Windows people. How do I create a second Explorer window? How do I stop Explorer save dialogues being so tiny and defaulting to some weird location? And how the hell do you do anything without Quick Look? How do you Windows people live?

Corridor of Doom. Inspired to take a photo as a result of the @hemisphericviews newsletter article written by @burk

Isolated the source of the fridge noise. A wearing fan. I’ve unleashed a vacuum cleaner and compressed air. Still noisy. I bet they charge a fortune for a new $5 fan.

We have an expensive fridge that is only a few years old. It has become really noisy and is driving me crazy. I’ve already had a tech come and check it, and changed a fan. That sort of worked for a while. Now I want to throw the stupid thing on the street.

Too cold to swim. Not too cold to dip the feet.

Nostalgic November

This post originally appeared on the Hemispheric Views blog for the month of Nostalgic November. You can also read the accompanying posts by Martin Feld and Jason Burk. I was in Year 5 at a new school. I didn’t know anybody. My previous school didn’t have a formal uniform and I’d worn velcro shoes everyday. Now at this new school I had to wear leather lace-ups, and I didn’t know how to tie laces. Fair to say, I was nervous and apprehensive. Until I discovered Stratego. Our Year 5 classroom had a bunch of games, but Stratego was epic. I made a good friend playing Stratego. I found my place. I loved the game. Before classes started in the morning, we’d play Stratego. During rainy lunchtimes when outside play was impossible, we’d play Stratego. The winner kept the board, the loser had to shuffle back to the end of the queue of players wanting a turn. Stratego helped me assimilate into the school and become safe and secure. In the early 2000’s I found a rudimentary online version of Stratego but it didn’t have the same experience as using a real board and pieces. Fast-forward to now. A few months ago we were on holiday in Albany, Western Australia and we were exploring a toy store in town. On their shelves were boxes of Stratego. I looked at the games. I looked at my 10 year old son. I looked back at the games and grabbed a box. Was I buying this game for me, him, or both of us? I like to think the latter, but it was probably the former. Now, here we are. Nostalgia has delivered an experience in the present.

The Sad State of Mousing on macOS

This post was originally written in June 2021 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast. On 28 May, I posted to my micro.blog: My kingdom for a good mouse that works with macOS. Logitech MX Master 3 - garbage drivers cause lag all over the place. Razer Viper Ultimate - doesn’t work with macOS. Apple Magic Mouse - ergonomic hell. Why is this so hard? Despite Apple sales being higher than ever third party vendors aren’t willing to come to the party to develop decent macOS drivers for their products. So a person can spend a lot of money on new hardware but still struggle to aim a pointer with precision. Less than a year ago I bought a Logitech MX Master 3. It is promoted as the most ergonomic, fully-featured non-gaming mouse on the market. From a hardware standpoint it is beautiful. Contoured edges, metallic construction and magnetic resistance make it move beautifully. Until you have to use the Logitech Options software on a Mac. I have tried the Bluetooth connection, I have tried the RF dongle. It doesn’t matter. Either option results in random pointer stutters, entire pauses for seconds and other random tomfoolery. It undermines everything that is good about the mouse. It all got too much for me recently so after speaking to my money spending enabler, Jason Burk, I purchased a Razer Viper Ultimate gaming mouse with docking station. Being a gaming mouse it has multi-coloured LEDs and high frequency tracking, so surely it will be good. The hardware is good. The software? Not so much as dire, but rather non-existent. Razer do not make a version of the software for macOS. So all the goodness is wasted unless you’re on a PC. That being said, I booted into Windows via Boot Camp and the Windows software is a terrible mess as well. It was hundreds of megabytes in size with a UX that made no sense. I had packed the mouse back into its box and was ready to return it, when a final search and another discussion with Jason led me down a macOS software rabbit-hole. It turns out there is an open-source community that develops drivers and software for the Razer on mac. This led me to discover the FruityRazer project and Razer macOS - software drivers to control not just the mouse performance but most importantly, the LEDs! There are also two shareware software options, USB Overdrive and SteerMouse. To be honest, I haven’t figured out the best combination of all these software options yet. What I do know, however, is that now the Razer mouse is rock solid. I have a feeling that if I trade out Logi Options for USB Overdrive or SteerMouse that the MX Master 3 will probably be stable as well. What does this say about the ability or willingness or large corporations to develop decent macOS software? It says they are terrible. What does it say about Apple not being able to develop a good hardware mouse that doesn’t deliver immediate RSI? It says that they are terrible. In all instances, the end-user - us, lose out. How’s that for customer sat, Tim?

Sorry kid, I don’t have Instagram. I’ve got micro.blog though!

File this one under “irony” from the YNAB change log. November 5th, 2021 - You Need A Budget: We released a fix to ensure all users are seeing the correct price in their account settings.

Given the number of sites you maintain @jack your omg.lol could be your most useful property on the web. 😂

A new episode of NBL Pocket Podcast has been recorded and released. I’ve been into Australian basketball since 1987. This passion is entirely different to my other more nerdy pursuits. 🏀

Nostalgic November

This month Hemispheric Views podcast is celebrating Nostalgic November. We are inviting listeners to share something from their history that makes them happy, be it a memory, a thing, an experience… whatever they like! As hosts, we each contributed our own piece of nostalgia. This is how mine starts out: I was in Year 5 at a new school. I didn’t know anybody. My previous school didn’t have a formal uniform and I’d worn velcro shoes everyday. Now at this new school I had to wear leather lace-ups, and I didn’t know how to tie laces. Fair to say, I was nervous and apprehensive. Until I discovered… You can read the rest of my memory, or check out Martin’s and Jason’s too. At the end of the month we will be sharing all the pieces of memory our listeners have shared with us. If you would like to play along, have a listen to Episode 041 where we introduce the idea, then share with us. Simply send us a quick text, photo or video in one of the following ways: @HemisphericPod on Twitter with #NostalgicNovember; @HemisphericViews on Micro.blog; in our general Discord chat; or by email to hello@hemisphericviews.com.

What’s that noise? Oh, it’s a new episode of @HemisphericViews podcast hitting the Internet. OMG! @neatnik @maique

Solid workflow, Andrew. Solid. Can somebody please send help?

Keyboard Maestro making it even easier to meet my needs as a Textexpander replacement. Now with menubar icons for specific groups!

YNAB Jumping the Shark

On YNAB, and the pricing outrage that I and other users are feeling: I can afford the increase. It’s ridiculous that it’s more expensive than Microsoft 365 or Adobe, but okay. But really it’s the poor communication, the tin ear they are showing (a budgeting app that promotes forward planning pushing a 100% price increase on people with a month’s notice), that they’ve dumped the news about this (via pop up which I didn’t see because I use NextDNS - that’s right, no official email), and then gone into hiding that bothers me. I smell an Average Recurring Revenue/Average Revenue per User metric being gamed for an external equity play of some kind. What they’ve ultimately done, though, is burned their hard won customer loyalty and goodwill. They’ve given a free kick to their competitors. It will be interesting to watch the space and see if anybody steps up to fill the void.

Undertaking an edit of @HemisphericViews is no mean feat. But like any hobby, it’s a labour of love in which the time invested is not about generating a return, but instead about trying to make something as good as it can be.

Crocodile Dundee, 1986 - ★½

If you ever think society hasn't progressed in 35 years, watch this movie. You will realise that many social norms have improved.

Trick or Treat! Our family comprises a witch, The Grim Reaper, Joker, and American Psycho, Patrick Bateman. 🎃

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 30: home 📷

Static IP locked and loaded. When I realised my ISP had switched to Carrier Grade NAT, I was left with no choice. Also @dsh1705 and @neatnik made me do it.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 30: red 📷

This memoji login avatar is the fun and whimsy I love to see from Apple.

If you’re an Australian YNAB user, beware their new loans feature. It’s a blunt instrument and can’t cope with a typical Australian mortgage situation, such as fortnightly payments, offset accounts, interest-only loans, and daily interest calculations.

I’ve got an itch to setup my iMac from scratch. It’s been migrated a few times, and it’s deeply customised. Trying to do the cost:benefit calculus.

A question for @amit, @jack @twelvety @AndySylvester or any other micro blogger trialing Drummer: can you simply explain the difference between a node that starts with a page icon, and one that has a disclosure triangle? Should the page icon type be reserved for headlines?

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 29: cycle 📷

The logo for Meta (nee Facebook) looks like a pair of kidneys. Are they coming for my kidneys now in some sort of mafia hit job? I wouldn’t put it past them. Do not trust this company.

Micro.blog isn’t in danger of losing my business but I am enjoying Drummer. It feels like I’m writing, not blogging, with no pressure about creating “a blog post”. I also love that its in the form of an outline which is the purest form of thinking and writing in one.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 28: underneath 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 27: chaos 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 26: bliss 📷

A $30 price increase for Disney+. 🤨

‘Whose day isn’t gonna be better after watching a pink and yellow rosy maple moth fly in super-slow motion?’

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 25: gravity 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 24: connection 📷

The @HemisphericViews live event was a blast! Thanks to everyone for joining in on the fun - and the awkward 1980s social norms.

I’m excited for our @hemisphericviews Crocodile Dundee live watch event that’s a bonus for our Patreon members. Kicks off in 3 hours. If you want to join in head over to oneprimeplus.com to pledge support and we will send you the link to the live watch! @burk @martinfeld

I love this kid. He never stops talking, though.

What is with Safari 15 and overly-aggressive caching? I can’t trust that I’m seeing the canonical website at the moment. As if the tabs weren’t enough of a problem!

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 23: meaning 📷

Thanks to @amit reminding me of his micro.threads app, I’ve followed some additional people on micro.blog - some of which I thought I already was following. Got you now!

Free Guy, 2021 - ★★½

A fun romp with plenty of fan service for gamers and YouTubers. Would have benefited from a shorter runtime through tighter editing.

Hello world from Drummer.

I’m getting @maique in my Porkbun emails.

I see the usual suspects getting the Drummer vibe… 😺 @jack @twelvety @amit @pratik

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 22: rest 📷

Sometime in the last 6 hours Drummer lost a bunch of my edits and customisations. A friendly reminder that this is still beta software that is actively under development!

Oh no, what on earth am I doing to myself? Do I have to maintain three blogs now? Micro.Blog, Blot and Drummer

I have followed the instructions but I can’t get the Drummer glossary to work. Included terms are not being converted. I must be missing something obvious. Can I ping @jack and @amit again?

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 21: space 📷

Once again I find the solution when Corporate IT Helpdesk couldn’t.

It’s been a minute since I last posted to my blog from Ulysses. It’s awesome to be able to pick and choose from a variety of tools to create and share content. Interoperability is great. The open web is great.

My playground Drummer instance is at oldschool.scripting.com/andrewcan…

This micro blog may hitherto be referred to as canion.blog. But the old address will probably work as well.

I just registered a domain at Porkbun. They have pigs.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 20: sports 📷

At @HemisphericViews we’ve launched our latest brand extension, Hemispheric Views Tourist Centre/Center. As part of our huge launch, we’d like to share with you the beauty of Perth.

The micro.blog theme Tufte by @pimoore is incredible. Absolutely gorgeous and befitting of the Tufte design ethos.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 19: mirror 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 18: finished 📷

I bought @maique a coffee.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 17: compass 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 16: rotation 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 15: ethereal 📷

Thanks @maique for introducing me to the fine folk at omg.lol. Now I’ve bought my own account!

A Great Day!

Today has been a great day. It started with an outdoor walk on a beautiful Perth day. I could walk all day with Stephen Fry talking to me. This was the most enjoyable “Time to Walk” episode I’ve listened to. Then I made some new connections with people, which might have some awesome ramifications for @HemisphericViews episodes in the future. My new Eero Pro 6 wifi units arrived, so I suffer the ignominy of the D-Link wifi no more. And I look forward to a dinner event this evening!

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 14: wheels 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 13: animals 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 12: legend 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 11: hygge 📷

This is my drummer effort.

I had a quick play with Dave Winer’s new blogging tool, Drummer. I should like it because I love outlines and blogging by way of an outline makes sense. But I don’t love the implementation. Winer’s UX for outlining is not for me. Also, is there no support for Markdown?

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 10: bridges 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 9: safe 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 8: twilight 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 7: spice 📷

Hocus Pocus, 1993 - ★★★

Watched on Wednesday October 6, 2021.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 6: street 📷

I like Heavyweight podcast but I’m not going to install Spotify to listen to it. Au revoir.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 5: toy 📷

Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew - The New York Times

Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew - The New York Times: But Facebook’s research tells a clear story, and it’s not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious. It’s hard to feel sorry for Facebook. Actually, I don’t feel sorry for them at all.

One of my ASUS ZenWifi units has crapped out after only 4 months. A flashing blue light that won’t go away even with a reset. I’ve eaten the cost and ordered Eeros.

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 4: sharp 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 3: majority 📷

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 2: dark 📷

And this article is why, sadly, I’ve been using Edge on my Mac in recent times. Daring Fireball: The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’

Micro.blog October photo challenge Day 1: touch 📷

The Bluff Knoll climb was easier some 15 years ago.

This was the most perfect (double) rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life. 🌈

Enjoyed tasting some whisky at Limeburners.

Dog Rock, Albany.

The Gap, Albany.

iOS 15 and the Find My energy drain hit my new iPhone 13 mini last night. From 80% to 10% battery charge overnight. I hope Apple sort this out because battery drain is the worst kind of bug.

This kid gets it. @hemisphericviews

Keep Practising 20: Two Mic Audio Experiment

In which David and I experiment with a two mic, two headphone studio production. With a guest appearance from Benji.

The internet can be small. I got random help from a stranger via the MailMate mailing list. Turns out said stranger is @PaulGit on micro.blog. Thanks Paul!

Dude, Where's My Car?, 2000 - ★★★★★

I used to know every line of this movie. Shibby!

I Hate Facebook, and You Should Too

Facebook is a terrible company and I’ve felt much better about myself since deleting their products: notably Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. When ditching use of the apps, there is a withdrawal period of 5-8 days, then after that, it’s fine. Life goes on. Time is returned to your life. You miss nothing of import. I’m still waiting for my “Facebook friends” to check in and see how I’m doing and note they miss my absence… At what point do we acknowledge that a company is a net negative, and facilitate its end? Corey Doctorow has written a great article about the latest horrible news arising from Facebook. It’s hard to pull a single quote, but this stood out: Pluralistic: 22 Sep 2021: Everybody hates Facebook, especially FB users. The point of high switching costs, after all, is to increase the pain of leaving so that FB can dole out more abuse to its users without fearing that they’ll quit the whole enterprise. FB’s mission is to increase the size of the shit-sandwich they can force you to eat before you walk away. But they’re not mere sadists: shit-sandwiches have a business model: the more hostages they take, the more they can extract from advertisers – their true customers. Thanks to @fahrni for bringing the Doctorow post to my attention.

Book Tracking Services

It seems there are an explosion of book tracking platforms all of a sudden, after years of it being a Goodreads monoculture. This is good, because competition. This is bad, because now I’m having to update my reading stats on a bunch of sites as I try to figure out which is the ‘good’ one. By my account, there is: Goodreads - nice because it automatically syncs with Kindle, but bad because the website is an early 2000’s horror show. Literal - the newest kid on the block with a clean look and nice shelf management. The StoryGraph - has an interesting recommendation engine. Micro.blog - has a rudimentary bookshelf system but can conveniently create micro blog posts from them.

Currently reading: Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows. This has been on my list for ages; time to get into it. 📚

I’ve decided I’m going to upgrade my iPhone XR to an iPhone 13 mini. I like the idea of a small, pocketable phone. I am nervous about typing on it because I have larger than average thumbs.

YNAB LaunchBar Actions

I’m a huge YNAB fan and a LaunchBar user. I often get jealous of Alfred users because the system of “workflows” in Alfred seems to have caught on better than LaunchBar’s “Actions”. Righting that wrong has appeared @ptujec on Github. He has a number of LaunchBar Actions, notably two built for YNAB. I found a bug in the script, raised an issue on Github and it’s already been fixed. Thanks!

CPLAY2air Wireless CarPlay Adaptor Review

Some weeks ago I bought a wireless CarPlay adaptor for my new 2021 Toyota Camry. The Camry support CarPlay but only when connected with a lightning cable. My experience with it to date has been mostly positive, with some caveats. The largest issue I have is its “Chinese knock-off” software interface. I don’t quite know how they are making this whole thing work, and not having had CarPlay before I don’t know what earlier generations of the software were like. However, the version that is installed on the CarPlay device has a “bootleg” feel. For example, native CarPlay has iconography for buttons. The CPlay device has icons within button borders and some of these seem slightly misaligned. I also notice on my podcast app that not all the interface elements seem quite the same, such as the speed of playback. The other weird thing I notice is when playing back voice messages and other interactions with Siri. The volume is much lower than any other audio making it hard to hear. However, I’m reticent to blame this solely on the CPlay device. I think it may have something to do with the configuration of the audio in my car system? I don’t know, and I’m still trying to figure it out. All that being said, the thing works. I keep waiting for it not to work and partly expecting it to fail, or drop the connection, but it works everytime. It supports multiple devices as well, with both my phone and my wife’s connected to it. It auto-switches based on last use and whichever device is available. For short trips, I think this thing is great. If I’m travelling a longer distance, I’m still going to use the lightning cable. Would I buy it again? Yes, I would. I also bought a custom-fit Chi charging pad. It’s not that great, but is necessary if you want to use the CPlay for a length of time and not kill your phone battery. I have found my phone slips off it too easily unless I put the phone in a case. As these things are designed differently to fit each kind of car, your mileage may vary.

Ready for his first Eucharist.

Micro.camp joins the sticker party!

It’s that time - a new episode of @HemisphericViews has dropped. I practise my singing skills, @Burk enjoys a crunchy roll and @martinfeld kinda praises Microsoft… E037: Teamsception! listen.hemisphericviews.com/037

Trying out the Ink theme on micro.blog. Always good to change the look from time to time.

The future’s so bright, I’ve gotta wear shades.

Finished reading: Honeybee by Craig Silvey. An incredible coming-of-age story of a boy with all the odds stacked against him. Wonderful to read a book set in my home town, too. 📚

OneDrive now has a “personal vault”. A shot across the bows of 1Password. Do Microsoft do more Sherlocking than Apple these days?

I’ve bought my ticket to “A Voyage Through Time” couch concert by Voyager featuring my guy Alex Canion on bass. $20 - bargain! 🤘🏻 voyager.veeps.com

Nacho Libre, 2006 - ★★★

It’s silly but it’s fun. Perfect Friday night movie with the kids.

This is very cool - @HemisphericViews getting a shout-out from DEVONtechnologies

Great to have @HemisphericViews listener @dsh1705 join @Microblog.

Bo Burnham: Inside, 2021 - ★★★½

This provides a stark reminder of how incredibly uncreative I (and probably most people) am. Through imagination, technology and the support of the Bezos delivery system, Burnham creates something quite amazing within a single room.

Promising Young Woman, 2020 - ★★★★

Watched on Wednesday September 1, 2021.

For the first time in 2 years I have a cold complete with aches, pains and a sore throat. Can we go back to isolation and social distancing so I don’t have to deal with these?

I highly recommend Like You podcast for anybody that has youngish children. My kids listen every night as part of their bedtime routine.

Things are getting serious now. @hemisphericviews

DevonJimbo

Episode 36 of Hemispheric Views saw us establish a brand extension - a YouTube channel. I want to call it Hemispheric Toobs, but I think I’ve been voted down. In any case, here are two videos in support of Episode 36. DevonJimbo FinderJimbo

Can confirm that my Intel iMac can launch 205 applications and keep on trucking.

Enjoyed watching a game of NBL1 tonight. My team didn’t win but a good outing nonetheless.

I’m at a pub listening to The Unmade Podcast, playing chess online against my brother, and solving a New York Times crossword. I’m a total rager.

Is this the greatest store/office in Perth?

Speeding up Google Calendar .ics Subscription Refreshes

My project of the moment preventing me from going to bed: configuring a Google Calendar script to work, such that it will force GCal to refresh its .ics subscriptions from Fastmail every 15 minutes, rather than the default 12-24 hours. All so then SkedPal can read GCal and have accurate and timely data from which to build my daily task schedule. Why can’t SkedPal simply support standard CalDAV?

Only Hemispheric Views offers One Prime Plus

I see that Macstories is introducing new levels of membership: TL;DR: Today, we’re announcing the all-new Club MacStories featuring two additional tiers: Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. That’s all well and good, but always remember that only Hemispheric Views offers One Prime Plus membership. Get yours today!

Glamorous work travel in regional Western Australia.

I’m two episodes into Mr. Corman on AppleTV+ and already it’s one of the most impactful, enjoyable shows I’ve seen.

It’s been an expensive weekend. I bought a new TV - LG OLED C1 - then discovered my current Yamaha 375 receiver was too old to drive it, so had to upgrade to a new Denon AVR-X550BT receiver. Fortunately, I’d been saving money for a long time in a YNAB category!

Camera Comparison

Today I pulled my old cameras out from storage. This was prompted by my trial of Glass, and the reminder that my Flickr account still exists. I haven’t had much time to do anything with them, except charge the battery and try to reset them back to a state where they were taking jpegs and letting the camera intelligence do the work. In a sign of how long they’ve been sitting around for, every camera needed its clock reset. I also seem to have lost some SD cards - does anybody know where I put them? I took two photos with each camera from roughly the same position. It wasn’t too scientific, so don’t necessarily read too much into the results, but it’s kind of interesting. My cameras are (with links to relevant pages at DPReview: Panasonic DMC-LX3 Panasonic DMC-GX7 Nikon D7000 iPhone XR Shot 1: Sound Panels LX3 GX7 D7000 XR Shot 2: Tchotchkes LX3 GX7 D7000 XR Findings Each progressive generation gets better at capturing light, leading to brighter images. The iPhone and its computational photography has to be the greatest revolution in photography since the digital camera was born. Keep in mind that I’m using an iPhone several generations old, and that some of the greatest advancements since this model have been low light capture. It was nice to pull out the old cameras though, and I think the D7000 and GX7 in particular still offer some value in terms of a change-up from typical iPhone shots. At this point, the LX3 probably needs to be consigned to use only for outdoor shots with reasonable light.

I am proud to announce that NBL Pocket Podcast finally has its own home on the web. 🎙 🌏 🏀

I’ve pulled out my old cameras to have a play. Going to pare things right back: shoot jpg not RAW, use P mode instead of A/S, and see how things turn out. Back to basics. 📷

My wife will be jumping off a building in November! The WA Minister for Mines & Petroleum; Energy; Corrective Services was kind enough to draw attention to this fact in Parliament today: It’s all for a good cause though. Hannah is participating in the Central Park Plunge 2021 in support of Guide Dogs WA. If you’d like to support the effort, this is Hannah’s fundraising page.

Gloomy and rainy.

Exploring Glass encouraged me to revisit Flickr. The latter is technically better (despite the bugs and UC mishmash) but people are active on Glass. If I could have only one, it would still be Flickr. Why can’t that site be more successful? 📷

Isn’t this the most Microsoft-y thing? Jargon, complexity, and obfuscation. Classic.

I finished watching Physical on AppleTV+. The first half of the series had me engaged and interested, the second half left me feeling undernourished and somewhat confused.

Tot, redux: iOS Edition

By way of follow-up to yesterday’s review of Tot, I can confirm I’ve bought the iOS version.

2005 doesn’t seem all that long ago. (A shared post from Glass.)

With thanks to @keithpound I’m in at Glass. My username is canion over there, too.

I have succumbed.

Tot

Update: The day after writing this, I bought the iOS version of Tot. My friend and Hemispheric Views podcast co-host Martin Feld is Mr. Default. He likes Reminders. He like Mail.app. He likes Calendar. Not for him the world of OmniFocus, MailMate or Fantastical. No sirree. Keep it simple, keep it made by Apple. Except… he uses Tot. I’m sure he uses Notes as well, but Tot. Not Drafts. I installed Tot on my Mac when it was released, because as with anything made by The Iconfactory, it’s worth a look. I didn’t get it. It offers a 7 note maximum. It has limited Markdown support. Mostly, though, while the macOS app is free as in beer, the iOS version of the same app is AU$30.99. For a tiny notes app? So my exploration of Tot ended, and I went back to Drafts, and DEVONthink, and iA Writer, and Craft, and the list goes on. Recently, I raised again my frustration with my note and file management “system”. Martin reminded me of Tot. So I’ve been giving it another try. This time, my verdict feels quite different. The limitations seem useful. The restrictions seem like helpful guiderails rather than annoyances. This all comes at a time when I’ve cancelled my automatic renewal of Drafts - an app I appreciate for its power, but hate because of its interface. I’ve been using Tot on macOS only over the past few days. At this stage I can’t comment on how it works on iOS because I haven’t spend the money. I think I will, though. I’ve written this short article in Tot (yellow page). It’s delightful. And, icing on the cake, this is a Mac-Assed Mac app which has full support for all the niceties of macOS, including Services. I love using Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink service. Tot loves using it too. After a week of reading about 1Password ditching native code in favour of Electron, the joy of using a native app is sweeter than usual. So Tot. Write in it. Put ephemera in it. Switch between plain text with markdown and rich text. Share it somewhere else. You’ve got 7 notes. Use them wisely.

This Twitter thread (which should be a blog, but anyway) from Rich Siegel regarding Electron on macOS should be required reading for anybody who takes even a vague interest in this stuff.

The situation in Afghanistan is deeply saddening. I think of all the women and children, in particular, who are now going to face extremely difficult lives, with no genuine prospect of relief. 😔

My sketchnote selfie done after watching the great Sketchnoting session at Micro Camp. @ChrisJWilson @cm

Beer in hand.

That time my son David got rocked in his pram by Luc Longley. A bunch of Perth people having a chat in Los Angeles.

Lover’s Lament. ❤️💔

Micro Camp is coming! ⛺️

Weekend plans.

In the process of cancelling my renewal for 1Password I noticed they were charging me more than their standard advertised rate. I was paying $5.49 per month, as opposed to their standard $4.99.

The March of Electron: 1Password Edition

I despise Electron apps. What is the point of having a superior operating system (macOS) if every app that resides on it is nobbled by not supporting basic elements of the underpinning system? I see the short-term reason that developers must use: standardised code, cheaper for development, most users don’t know/care. I also caution about the long-term losses: the damage to brand reputation, the disappointment of ‘power users’ and the risks that can occur from alienating this group. It’s also hard not to see that this switch to Electron came shortly after 1Password accepted a huge venture capital stake. Investors want their returns. Users who do care, such as myself, are the proselytising acolytes, however. I’ve recommended 1Password many times over the years, as well as being a paying subscriber of their Families edition more recently, after having bought multiple versions of their earlier standalone apps. Rui Carmo at The Tao of Mac echoes my sentiments: This shift away from fully native apps and the fact that they are removing iCloud support from version 8 in order to enforce the use of their cloud sync service (in an obvious lock-in ploy) was the last straw, so I just downloaded Secrets, paid for the Premium version ($19.99 for each platform) and imported all my 1Password data into it. I have access to Secrets for macOS through my Setapp subscription. So I can try this out for a while, and if I like it I’m happy to buy the iOS version. My current 1Password subscription is valid through to April next year so there’s no immediate pressure for me to shut down the 1Password account.

Pfizer jab #2 has definitely knocked me around, but totally worth it. I’m getting awesome 5G coverage, I missed a phone call from Bill Gates and the deep State have sent me a manilla folder with mission details inside! What a day! 💉

I’m maxinated! Starting to perhaps feel the affects of the second dose of Pfizer, but it’s a price worth paying! 💉

Standard signage at the Perth COVID vaccination clinic. 💉

My new R.M. Williams boots getting their inaugural wear.

For the heck of it I’ve installed the demo of Bare Bones' Yojimbo. I bought v2.1 on 26 November 2009 and upgraded to v3.0 on 20 October 2010. Version 4.6 doesn’t look to have changed much. The introductory document still refers to iPhoto.

Great to do some planning with @martinfeld and @Burk for the special live episode of @HemisphericViews podcast as part of the upcoming Micro.Camp. Get around the event! ⛺️

I’m elated. Our Australian Boomers got the monkey off the back and won a bronze medal. 🏀 🥉

I’m having one of those “feels like a Friday” nights. Shame it’s Thursday.

That Olympics basketball game was disappointing. Yet still a chance for Australia’s best ever result - bronze up for grabs!

Extension apps in the macOS menubar may as well be called Tribbles.

OmniFocus vs. Things

I’m thinking about a transition from OmniFocus to Things. I’ve used OF since launch, so this is no trivial matter. This line from a post by micro.blog user @40Tech resonates: OmniFocus almost begs you to add projects and contexts. I never seem to gain value from contexts/tags, but I add them every time, because nature abhors a vacuum. My main area of doubt is templating. I’ve got a nice Drafts template built that populates a standardised OmniFocus project. Does Things offer any form of similar automation?

I don’t love the direction OmniFocus is moving in. SkedPal is full-on and challenging. I’ve never tried Things. Should I?

Great job Boomers, taking out Argentina. Now on to meet USA. 🏀

The FaceTime Centre Stage thing on the M1 iPad is amazing. Used it for the first time today and it was like having an on-site camera man. Mind blowing.

Time Machine just saved my butt. @HemisphericViews

USA Lose Another Basketball Game

This is what Damian Lillard said after the USA lost to France in their first 🏀 game of the Tokyo Olympics: “I think that’s why a lot of people will make it seem like the end of the world, but our job as professionals and this team and representing our country at the Olympics, we’ve got to do what’s necessary and we still can accomplish what we came here to accomplish.” This quote sums up their problem. You shouldn’t be aiming to be be professional at the Olympics. You need to be passionate. You need to have an emotional connection about representing your country. That’s the difference between USA and the other elite basketball teams at the Olympics, and what gives those other teams their edge. Other teams want to do the best in the name of their country. These players aren’t getting paid to be at the Olympics. They’re there because they want to passionately represent their country. It’s not a job. Being professional isn’t the right approach.

I like this quote. Richard Feynman via the brilliant weekly letter from @rishabh

I’ve bought Acorn from Flying Meat Software. It’s 50% off at the moment. Another tool to hang on the software shadow board.

🇯🇵

Watching the Olympics is making me want to travel to Japan again. Not that it is remotely possible, of course, given our close companion, COVID. I love the cleanliness, the order, the food, the hot springs, and the structured culture of the place. The little bit more than one week of my life that I’ve spent in Japan was not enough. Hopefully I can find a way to get back there at some point in my life.

BBEdit 14

I want to use and love BBEdit. I bought version 13 with a similar thought and feeling. That purchase seems like it was only a few months ago - in fact, I checked to see if I was eligible for the free upgrade. According to my receipt stored in 1Password, however, my v13 license was acquired on 21 December 2019. Time flies, especially in 2020, the year of our COVID. I am not a coder. I don’t do any development. I understand the theory of regex and grep but rarely use them. I write an occasional blog article in Markdown, such as this one. I have a bunch of well-designed Markdown editors that are purpose-built for writing blogs in Markdown. They have grammar-checks and nice management of links, images and feature great preview modes. They feature typewriter mode. As best I can tell, this is still not implemented in BBEdit 14. But BBEdit is a Mac classic. It can do virtually anything with text (if you know how to drive it). That brings up the real weakness of BBEdit - a lack of support for the new user, and modern tutorials. BareBones, the developers, are old men. They write great documentation1 but offer zero modern promotion and support. The manual is great, but how about a YouTube channel with some tutorials? Where does a beginner start with this application? The features added to BBEdit 14 seem helpful to developers. That’s not me. Jason Snell demonstrated some clever manipulation that can be achieved to help produce blogs. I don’t know how he did it. He talked about AppleScript, but didn’t provide the code. I presume this trick wouldn’t work out of BBEdit’s box. Herein lies the problem with BBEdit. It’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s built for people who already use it and know how to use it. However, I would say this to the team at BareBones: if you’re building a software application, perhaps at some point you need to turn an eye to the new users. The ones that might otherwise choose the free Visual Studio Code. The ones who might already use the copy of iA Writer they own, or Drafts, Craft or Ulysses. Users like me? I want to use BBEdit. But why should I? Perhaps I shouldn’t. BareBones 14. I’m sure its great. But I can’t know, because I’m not experienced enough to say. The manual for BBEdit runs over 400 pages.↩︎

I’m ‘meh’ about Brisbane winning the Olympics. They’re expensive, a security challenge, and the Olympics are in my view an event that has become too large. Is there the same sense of exhilaration about Brisbane winning as there was for Sydney 2000. I don’t think so.

I did the Today at Apple tutorial and drew myself as a Peanuts character.

BBEdit 14.0

I barely scratch the surface with my use of BBEdit. I’m not a coder. I use it for a bit of Markdown text editing (when I’m not using one of the other myriad Markdown apps I own) and for doing other small pieces of text manipulation. So when I saw that v14 was released, I figured I could skip the upgrade. Reading through the features, I was sure I could skip the upgrade. Then I read this tidbit from Jason Snell at Six Colo(u)rs: But there are some new Markdown features, regardless! Dragging an HTML file or an image into BBEdit will now generate appropriately formatted Markdown. Markdown footnotes are now properly syntax colored, for those monsters who put footnotes in their Markdown. Also, a new feature that I inspired makes its debut: BBEdit now lets you attach a script in order to provide control over the text generated when you drop an image file into a BBEdit editing view. In short, I have modified the AppleScript script that I use to upload images to Six Colors so that if I drag an image into my story in BBEdit, the image is automatically resized, uploaded, and the proper HTML is inserted at that point in the document. (It’s magical.) Hmm, so I might have to upgrade after all.

🔗 Link Post: “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” SF Gate: “From this vantage, “Office Space,” the Gen-X slacker paean that came out 20 years ago next month, feels like science fiction from a distant realm. It’s almost impossible to imagine a startup worker bee of today confessing, as protagonist Peter Gibbons does: “It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.” Workplace indifference just doesn’t have a socially acceptable hashtag. " Office Space was my North Star. How am I so old?

I like being outside when it’s raining but not cold.

With this much sleep, how is it that I still feel tired and run-down?

In the latest episode of @hemisphericviews we learn that I’m an expert in cooling your home, @burk discovers an app that no one has ever heard of and @martinfeld gets hung up on spelling and grammar for a moment (surprise!). Pocket Casts episode link

Coffee time. Today it’s that weird Western Australian coffee, “skinny long mac topped up”. Fortunately I’m friendly with the barista else I’d have felt like a complete dick ordering that.

The newest recording of @hemisphericviews is in the can. Or on the SSD. In the iCloud data centre. Look, it’s done, okay?

Vaccination jab 1 of 2. ✅

Boomers beat USA again! 🏀

Another Crack at Git

Not long ago on this site I stated that I was fed up with git and that I was switching back to Dropbox. I did. It was still infuriating because I refuse to install the Dropbox client for this one measly application. So I’m back to git. Instead of using Atlassian’s Sourcetree for managing the files on my Mac, this time I’m going with GitHub Desktop. I chose Sourcetree the first time around because it was a native Mac app whereas GHD is an Electron app. Problem with Sourcetree was that I didn’t like it. Doesn’t matter how standards-compliant something is if it’s unenjoyable to use. So, despite the Electron-ness of Github, here I am. If you know of something better, let me know. There is an app called Gitfox in Setapp but I remember it didn’t wow me when I looked at it previously. So this time I’m using GHD and have connected it to BBEdit. Last time I tried to use iA Writer. iA Writer offers a lovely writing environment but I felt I was fighting against it and iCloud sync the whole time. I never quite build the mental model for how it all hooked together. BBEdit is a code editor at its heart and it still a fine, stable writing application. It will do the job just fine. On the iOS side of things I’ve reinstalled Working Copy. The problem is which text editor to use. Last effort I was using iA Writer. Do I stick with that? My friend Jason uses Textastic. Maybe that’s what I should go with? Of course, the thing that none of this software shenanigans solves is actually writing. That’s still on me to do.

DAD | A film about autism and fatherhood

Today I’ve experienced Lebanese dessert delights from Youssef Sweets. Amazingly delicious. I could become a regular customer.

So what you’re telling me is, patrons of @HemisphericViews also get a monthly “Hemispheric News” newsletter? And if I want to get that, plus all the other perks, I simply go to oneprimeplus.com? Amazing!

Why do dishwashers take so long?

It was fun to watch Ash Barty win Wimbledon tonight. What a great player. The level of skill needed to play tennis well is crazy.

I was given the most hilarious product tour of Big Mail today by @Burk. Highlight of my day! He needs to do a video recording of it for all to see.

Doing the Switch SD shuffle getting data off two small SD cards in favour of one big one. My attempts to transfer via computer failed, so now I’m switching cards like I’m playing Wings on an Amiga 500 with one floppy drive.

The Tomorrow War, 2021 - ★★★½

A fun romp with some requirement on behalf of the viewer to be “hand wavey” about time continuity. Perhaps ran a bit long. I enjoyed it though.

Sunset on a drizzly evening.

Business is picking up!

Three Things Today | tyler.io

Three Things Today | tyler.io: So what is Three Things? Well, it’s a calendar that lets you schedule tasks on each day. It’s meant to be excruciatingly pragmatic and realistic about how life works. (At least my life.) It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day. This is a nifty little application. Pick three things. Do them. If you don’t, defer them. That’s about it. I like it.

Seeing as @Burk and @martinfeld have shared their desktops, here’s mine.

Played Skip-Bo tonight after buying it on a whim today. Hadn’t played it for about 25 years. Backed it up with some Uno. Wholesome family fun.

I’ve unsubscribed from the Dithering podcast. The reduction to two episodes a week, plus the lack of interesting topics over the past couple of months, led to me the decision to save my money.

Finished reading: So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport 📚. A more realistic approach to finding enjoyment from a working life. I still feel stuck in my career, though.

Introducing Windows 11 | Windows Experience Blog At a time when the PC is playing a more central role in our lives… This article starts boldly - the PC is more central in our lives? Really? iOS and Android say hi.

I dived into a pool that is 13.6°C. 🥶

Big Mail. Not good. This release looks to be a giant fail. Only have one chance to make a first impression, and they’ve not done well with me.

I hate migraine days.

Excited to have @netnewswire available on iOS with Inoreader syncing. Now I can use it everywhere. Thanks @brentsimmons. Reeder has been good to me, but NNW has my ❤️.

I’ve been trying to use Firefox and while there are elements I like, it’s so much slower to load pages than Safari. I have no idea why.

Have received news that a former colleague of mine passed away a couple of days ago. Rest in Peace, Geoff. He was a great bloke.

Perth Wildcats 🏀 have made their 9th Grand Final series in 12 years. That is a ridiculous record of success.

I have purged my iPad and am setting it up as new.

I’m thrilled to have recorded an NBL basketball podcast with a sports journalist hero of mine, Boti Nagy. So much fun. overcast.fm/+P5TsxZpx…

I already have a Drafts subscription. Do I need Tot?

I woke up in the middle of the night to watch the WWDC live stream with my @HemisphericViews co-hosts and a group of Hemispheric Viewers(?). It was the first time I’ve co-watched an Apple Event with friends. Discord made a great platform for it. So much fun.

I’m booked in for my Pfizer vaccination! Thank you science. 💉

Without a doubt, the best drawing I’ve ever done. 🖼

Wardrobe Management

This article originally appeared in the May 2021 Hemispheric News as part of One Prime Plus for the Hemispheric Views podcast. Become a member today! What is there to manage about a wardrobe, I hear you say. “A lot”, I respond. You’ve got your hanging section, drawers and maybe some open shelving. What goes where, and how do you manage this space effectively and efficiently? When I was younger, jocks and socks were thrown relatively haphazardly into the top drawer. Now I’m old with a wife and things can’t be as simple as that anymore. Now, I fold jocks. Left over middle, right over middle, then a fold in half. They become a little square of underpant. Now they tesselate and stack. Perfect. Organise by colour. You know it makes sense. Socks are folded in half into one another, forming a rectangular shape. I went through a period of high-level sock management; now I’ve reduced it to left-side of the drawer for business, right-side of the drawer for sport. When does a pair of pants hang, and when is it folded? Do jeans hang? Not in my world. For some reason, jeans are folded and placed on a shelf, but chinos get the hanging treatment. Dress pants? Well, of course they hang. Shorts are folded too. I’ve grown to almost be able to fold a shirt like they do in the shops. But not quite. They always end up being a little crooked. Then they are placed in a drawer. In piles. However, with my kids clothes I’ve been taking a different approach. For their clothes I’m employing the Noguchi Filing System. This is something I learnt from my work with the Lean Thinking, and deployed in personal clothing management. Apparently, others have already thought about this. How Should You Organize Your Closet? Exactly Like a Computer Organizes Its Memory Essentially, clothes get stacked in side-by-side, rather than on top of one another, and always get placed on one side. Naturally, more often used clothing ends up towards one side of the drawer. Eventually, you will know that the kids have grown out of the stuff at the other end of the drawer. I don’t consider my wardrobe management to be optimal. There is still work to be done. But I think about it. Which is probably more than most people. Of course, I’m not normal.

Legislation Bill 2021

Do you want to hear my wife talk about a legislation bill to better manage legislation? Then I’ve got the video for you!

I’m giving Firefox another chance as my default browser. My major concerns issues are: battery impact and lack of Touch ID/Apple Pay support.

The most depressing food court in the world.

Parasite, 2019 - ★★★½

Watched on Tuesday June 1, 2021.

Hemispheric Views Mentioned in the Wild

What an honour for the podcast Hemispheric Views I create together with Jason and Martin to be included in Michael Camilleri’s podcast queue. Podcasts I’m Listening To: Spring 2021: Hemispheric Views: Did we need another three-white-guys-talk-about-Apple podcast? Probably not but the difference here is that two of the hosts are Australian. Andrew Canion, Jason Burk and Martin Feld have a great rapport and listening to a tech podcast with more of an international focus is a refreshing change. What a thrill to be mentioned!

Following the example set by @Burk, I too have expunged TextExpander from my macOS life. The shortcuts I need now live in Keyboard Maestro. Jason put his in Alfred.

My kingdom for a good mouse that works with macOS. Logitech MX Master 3 - garbage drivers cause lag all over the place. Razer Viper Ultimate - doesn’t work with macOS. Apple Magic Mouse - ergonomic hell. Why is this so hard?

Solve-A-Mystery Games by Society of Curiosities looks like it could be fun. Thanks @Burk for the recommendation.

Contributing members of Hemispheric Views received their special One Prime Plus bonus podcast content today. If you’re curious what you’re missing out on, check out oneprimeplus.com.

I’ve also enabled Tap to Click on the iPad Magic Keyboard. The civilised way to click on all Apple trackpad devices.

I’ve remapped the Caps Lock key to be Escape on my new iPad Magic Keyboard. That seems much more useful.

Finished reading: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. 📚 Some good ideas that fortunately I’ve already implemented but the book has encouraged me to take it further.

Stickers! @hemisphericviews @manton @burk @martinfeld

Finished reading: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 📚 An interesting book that draws heavily on Thinking, Fast and Slow: Kahneman, Daniel which I also recommend you read. We humans need to apply back-stories to stochastic events in an effort to make sense of the world. This makes events logical and explicable to our mind. Yet if they were so logical, why would we have not predicted them?

Installing macOS apps from the Terminal with brew install appname is so much quicker and easier than browsing to a website, finding the download, messing with the .dmg, deleting the .dmg… I love it.

This looks to be an interesting podcast @jean @Burk overcast.fm

A fresh cut for the little guy. All ready for school photos this week.

The @hemisphericviews empire has grown to include an Apple Music playlist featuring favourite songs from your three hosts, @martinfeld @Burk. Sorry Spotify listeners - we can’t help you.

How good does this look? @vincent @hemisphericviews

Oh no. I’ve got a bung eye. 👁💥

Give People Space

The Neuroscience of Busyness - Study Hacks - Cal Newport: You want more out of your employees? Radically reduce their responsibilities, then leave them alone to execute. You want your small business to grow? Focus your attention on a single target, and give yourself the space to do it better. This sounds right to me.

What happened to all the Milton Friedman acolytes? The business lobby has fretted for years about national indebtedness. Now it’s not an issue. I’ve always been a Keynesian so it makes sense to me, but where’s the backbone of those that argued tooth and nail for austerity for such a long time?

It’s cool when you see your podcast’s colour scheme specifically made available in an app. Thanks @vincent - Gluon is the best!

Changing the Mac HD Icon

Does anyone know where I can get a decent icon file of a MacBook Air (Space Grey)? I want to replace the hard disk icon of Macintosh HD. I’ve finally been able to get rid of the stupid mechanical disk icon. My Macs don’t even have those sort of hard drives. Now I have nice icons that represent the computer I’m using. Source: Quick Tip: High quality Mac icons are coming from inside your Mac! – Six Colors

The new Gluon app icons are amazing @vincent 🔥🔥🔥

This weekend’s obsession has been SkedPal - notably the beta 3 version. It takes over from the previous weekend’s router analysis and before that, Craft. Special interests and links with autism. 🤔

SkedPal

SkedPal - the smart calendar app that schedules your to-do’s: Do you thrive on schedules and action plans? Tell SkedPal the things you want to do and advanced algorithms will build a smart schedule for you. I’m digging into this planning software, despite the 🚨 around some elements. Those concerns, namely being: the current release v2.9 is creaky and ugly. the beta v3 has been in development for over a year. the last blog post was in mid-2020. the user forums are quiet. No CalDAV support so I have to do a Google two-step into my Fastmail experience. it’s expensive. Despite all of these misgivings, I am enjoying using it to schedule my days. It’s value proposition is the way it automatically time-blocks days based on all the task criteria while still taking into account your fixed calendar events. This is basically the solution I’m looking for. So despite all the misgivings, I might throw my money at the company and see if it works for me. At least as a paying customer I will apparently get access to the beta 3 software.

A simple bookmarklet to post links to Micro.blog based on the current page in your desktop browser. Supports text selections.Source: Micro.blog Posting Bookmarklet – Colin Devroe Seems to work a treat. Thanks @cdevroe.

Announcing Hemispheric Views “One Prime Plus” on Patreon!

Don’t worry… the regular @hemisphericviews podcast isn’t changing, moving or going away! Our new One Prime Plus membership option is simply a sweetener for those who wish to gain extra content and show support for their favourite podcast and its hosts @martinfeld, @Burk and I. Pledge your support directly from our Patreon site.

Maiden Speech of Hannah Beazley MLA, Member for Victoria Park

My wife has presented her maiden speech to the Parliament of Western Australia, as the Member for Victoria Park. It was an honour to be in the public gallery to watch her deliver this speech. It’s been a long journey, but the reward makes it all worthwhile!

I have such a blast recording @HemisphericViews with @martinfeld and @Burk. A consistent highlight of my fortnight.

Resistance was futile… iPad Pro.

I’m loving my new Asus ZenWifi mesh devices. Way faster than my old Google Wifi. It took an entire weekend of research and a lengthy Craft document with input from @Burk but I’m sure it has paid off. My internet is now the best it can be.

As an update to my last post I’ve stress tested my wifi signal and I feel relieved. My crappy router is still crappy and a mesh network is necessary. Money not wasted.

A New Internet Stack

My entire internet stack is being rebuilt. I changed ISP. The new ISPs connection uses a different protocol which wasn’t working with my Google Wifi, so I’ve temporarily reverted to my modem/router which has been in bridge-only mode for the past 3 years. Now my wifi is faster than it has been in ages. Problem is, I don’t know whether it’s the new ISP or the removal of Google Wifi. So much for A/B testing. I do know that the last few firmware updates for Google wifi have been reported as being terrible for impacting overall speeds.Last night, before this change and after a weekend of research, I ordered the Asus ZenWifi XT8 to replace the Google devices. So Google Wifi was always going in the bin, but now I don’t know whether I’ve set fire to a bunch of 💵 by buying the Asus, when I may have been able to keep the household running on my clunky D-Link DVA-2800 DSL modem/router. Isn’t hobbyist computing fun?

So with all my wifi research, I haven’t bought any new hardware, but I have signed up to a new ISP. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Wifi Options…

I’m losing confidence in my Google wifi mesh setup. Is Eero any better? If I spend on a network upgrade I’d like for it to be appreciably better.

I’ve got new glasses. I hate getting new glasses. Everything looks wonky through them and there’s always that feeling the prescription is wrong. New glasses are an anxiety creation machine.

Thanks for your post about Daily Notes in Craft, @toddgrotenhuis. I’ve switched to Craft after trying Obsidian, and also being a Dynalist user.

I hate slide decks.

Soul, 2020 - ★★★★★

A beautiful surrealist movie that was pitch perfect. Elements of Mr Holland’s Opus in the story.

Fixing the Big Sur proxy icon delay globally

Brett Terpstra: I had previously bemoaned the fact that the proxy icon is now hidden behind a hover delay in Big Sur. Listeners of Hemispheric Views will be aware of my love for the macOS proxy icon. I am overjoyed to learn that macOS-magic-man Brett Terpstra has found a way to have the proxy icon ready for action without delay. Thank you, sir, for fixing what Apple broke.

Look at this wally, repping the @hemisphericviews merch.

Crap. I think I’m getting into Obsidian. Just when I thought I’d settled on Dynalist and DEVONthink.

Donnelly River in the south-west of Western Australia features kangaroos and emus that are not at all fussed with people.

I had my first drive of a Tesla. It was the Model 3. I want one now.

I’ve discovered the ability to install GUI-based apps via Homebrew Casks. Saves mucking around with .dmg files, dragging and dropping to the Applications folder. Still fun to learn new things about computing!

Discovered my internet was slow. After factory restores and firmware updates for all my networking devices, I’m back to full speed. I wonder for how long my network had been non-optimal?

My Version of the MacSparky Status Board

Recently David Sparks has posted a number of blog entries about his status board creation1. This takes the form of a kanban board of significant projects that he manually updates, providing a graphical overview of his work and life. I’m a big fan of tools based around the lean methodologies, so I was immediately taken by his idea. I’ve done similar things in the past, but David inspired me to build one with a new approach. HyperPlan is my Preferred Software Whereas David uses OmniGraffle, I have chosen to use HyperPlan. I have previously written about my love of HyperPlan. What makes HyperPlan great for the construction of a status board is that it is data-driven and dynamic. David takes time each week to edit and change his status board in what is effectively a graphics application. By using HyperPlan, I can change database entries and the software intelligently reconstructs the status board. I have freedom to change the variables I want to ‘pivot’ the table around. I can create and save ‘views’ of my data, which allow me to construct a status board that has the three key elements of my life: work, family, and me — and elect to view all or some of these. I can focus only on work by hiding the others, or I can view them all together in one kanban board, but still split by these roles. The following image shows the card layout of a status board displaying key projects across all three of my areas of responsibility: Whereas this redacted image shows my work projects, and demonstrates how the fields can be shown on each card: System-based URLs for Contextual Computing HyperPlan has the ability to add hyperlinks to each card. This enables me to adopt David Sparks' contextual computing linking. I am able to add links to OmniFocus projects, Hook references, or DEVONThink locations all within the relevant card. A right-click on the card allows me to jump straight to any of these locations. Fun and Engaging I appreciate David sharing his thoughts and ideas around the construction of a status board. In building my own, it has been a reminder of how I can make work fun and engaging. The efficiency and pure project-processing of OmniFocus is great, but it doesn’t do visualisation. This status board is nice to look at, easy to update, and allows me to consider how loaded up my life is at any particular point in time. I’m going to make this a key part of my personal management approach. Project Status Board, More Status Board Details & Useful Complexity ↩︎

Alice, 2019 - ★★★★

Brilliant performances from the cast. An emotionally impactful film.

Cooked perfect steaks on the barbecue tonight. Delicious!

Frenzic

Frenzic: Overtime – Coming Soon to Apple Arcade • The Breakroom All of us here at the Iconfactory have dreamt of creating a sequel to the original Frenzic, which first debuted on the App Store thirteen years ago. Thanks to Apple Arcade, that dream is about to become a reality. Has it really been 13 years since Frenzic? I played it constantly on my iPod touch taking the bus to work. Excited to see it returning. I like this new approach from Apple Arcade.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 - ★★★½

Not as tightly managed as the original but still fun. The Almanac is a classic MacGuffin.

World Autism Awareness Day

Today is World Autism Awareness Day. Our eldest son, now 9, was diagnosed with autism at age 5. This was young enough for him to benefit from early intervention support which has made a huge difference to his life. It was not, and cannot be, a cure. There is no such thing, nor would I want there to be one. Being on the autism spectrum is part of what makes him, him. Yet if you suspect your child of having autism, push for an early diagnosis because it unlocks help and support pathways. Most of all, it helps build an understanding of what is going on with your child’s lived experience. Autism doesn’t go away. My boy continues to face struggles. Likely, these struggles will impact him throughout life. The effects often appear cyclical. We have good weeks and bad. The last few weeks have been tremendously difficult for him. It has been hard for him getting through a school day, without a rift appearing. It’s hard for us as parents to get the loving and supportive parenting right all the time. It’s not easy for anybody. For our son, emotional disregulation is a daily challenge. We have learned to always be on the lookout for triggers. That might be a loud environment, or too many stimulators inputs, or the need for him to make consecutive decisions. We are sure to get through this current difficult phase, but we have the knowledge that this is a challenge that will always be present for him. Our job as parents is to equip him with the skills and tools necessary to be able to have a good life, whatever the definition of that might be for him. We keep working at that. Days like Autism Awareness Day help remind us of this important task.

My second trial of HEY is ending and I’m happily retreating to my Fastmail/Sanebox combo.

🎙Coming in at less than 7 minutes, a show that’s highly relevant to our situation today. I would go so far as to call it a must-listen. Hemispheric Views 024: The Truth about Big Avocado!

I like the idea of imputation - too many businesses miss this vital component.

Dealing with my 9-year old’s autistic meltdowns is hard. 😓

🔗 Link Post: "{macro}Dungeon"

Game Crafter Deal of the Day: “Up to 4 players take turns drawing cards and making movements through one of four caves in an attempt to outpace their competitors on the way to the treasure room.” This board game has been designed by my friend Jason Burk. It’s on sale today; grab it while you can!

Hannah Beazley MLA

I am immensely proud of my wife, Hannah Beazley, who has been duly elected as a Member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, representing the District of Victoria Park. As the WA Labor Party won the State Election, she is now a member of our State Government. While the result was known on the evening of the official polling day on 13 March 2021, the WA Electoral Commission cannot formally declare a result until it has done a full count and exhausted all the preferences of those candidates who did not win. This is a complex system so counting the complete set takes some time, at which point the election is declared. For the District of Victoria Park, that time has come and the result has been officially declared and published. Victoria Park was previously held by the State’s outgoing Treasurer, Ben Wyatt. Before him, the seat was held by Premier Geoff Gallop. Now, my wife, Hannah Beazley, has the opportunity to represent the people of Victoria Park in the State Parliament. Hannah has worked for many years towards this goal. She has previously fought and lost elections, but never given up. Now, she is a winner, and it’s fantastic! Result Summaries Western Australian Electoral Commission Results: Victoria Park ABC News: WA State Election Results: Victoria Park

The Archive

The Archive owes its heritage to nvAlt, which owes its heritage to Notational Velocity — a unique piece of software that broke new ground by integrating new note creation with search in an Omnibar. I’m old enough to remember using the original Notational Velocity. The Archive is true to the heritage of the OG, but moves it in a direction specifically suited to the zettelkasten philosophy of note taking. What’s zettelkasten, you ask? It’s too much for this software review, but in short it’s a note taking methodology that sees the deconstruction of source material broken down into atomic facts/points, expressed in its own words by the note taker, and given a unique reference link such that it can be tied to other items of knowledge held within the corpus of notes. A key to the zettelkasten, and thus key to The Archive, is the generation of a Note ID. Upon creation of a new note in The Archive it is given a Note ID which is a concatenation of YEAR MONTH DAY HOUR MINUTE. This ensures that every note can be identified as a unique item, because each note will have a different ID. To tie these notes together, The Archive supports wiki-links, in the form of [[Note ID or Note Title]]. This makes it possible to create a web of notes, where each atomic note can be tied to others: a key requirement of a zettelkasten. The app is a good Markdown citizen, and it supports the streaming API to Brett Terpstra’s Marked app. It can also be configured to use an external editor, should you have a preferred one. Given The Archive is quick and efficient, and supports typewriter mode, I don’t bother using an external editor. The Archive allows you to generate and keep saved searches in a sidebar. This could be useful if you want to show all notes tagged with a particular #hashtag. I use it to break down my notes into years - by relying on the first element of the Note ID, which is the year. A fun element of The Archive is the range of Keyboard Maestro add-ons that have been built for it. My favourites are the ones that search the notes corpus and allow for quick creation of wiki links. Make sure Keyboard Maestro has full disk access to guarantee some of these work, though. The user community has built a range of alternative themes so the app is customisable to a point. It also supports multiple text corpuses (corpi?) but only one can be loaded at a single time. A corpus simply represents a folder of text files in the standard filing system, which means The Archive can be complementary to other Markdown/text editors. It doesn’t lock you in. While it doesn’t have an iOS app, the ability to work with files stored on a cloud storage platform means it works nicely with unrelated iOS text editors. The Archive can be used as a replacement for nvAlt if that’s all you need. It feels more stable than that app. Of course, there is nvUltra in development - but that has had a very long gestation period, whereas The Archive is here and now.

I hit the basketball court for the first time in a long time yesterday. My free throw percentage was better than ever, but three point range was a struggle! 😩🏀

Fastmail

My mate Jason is digging into Fastmail, and liking what he sees. Fastmail. Who Knew? - //Jason Burk: Recently after a discussion about email on Episode 023 of Hemispheric Views, I dug into the settings and configuration of Fastmail and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more than a simple host they truly are! I’ve been again trialling Hey for the past week or so, but I still don’t think it matches the combination of Fastmail & Sanebox.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Canal

Jamie Thingelstad - Container Ship Queue: They normally pass 50 ships a day through the canal. With so many backed up, it will be a few days before things get back to normal. The linked article includes some cool graphical imagery of the shipping impact of the Panama Suez Canal1 being blocked. It goes to show how fragile our trade system is; and the economic value inherent in the canal. My thanks to Steve Snider for pointing out my dopey mistake of calling out the wrong canal. Geography, eh? ↩︎

There’ll be a new episode of Hemispheric Views podcast dropping soon. Best catch up on the last episode then. The episode is named Perthonalities! as we reference people from my home town of Perth, Australia. 49 minutes of top-quality audio enjoyment!

I’m enjoying getting to know @mandaris who sounds like one of the happiest people on Earth. A great episode! pca.st

I want an email app that works with standard IMAP, but is well-designed and something different, like Hey. Is that too much to ask?

A quick test post straight from Ulysses 22 to micro.blog. Awesome to see Ulysses supporting the best blog host on the internet!

Artemis Fowl, 2020 - ★★

Watched on Sunday March 21, 2021.

My HEY experiment is not going well. For some reason, forwarding from Fastmail to HEY isn’t working. But I can’t be bothered figuring out why.

The battery of my iPad Pro 2017 has reached that point where it drains rapidly, even in standby. It does everything I need of it, so I could probably get a battery replacement. Or, I could buy the upcoming new iPad Pro or the current iPad Air. Prudent decision versus fun one. 🤔

Me and my boys. Benji refuses to smile for any photo.

Dammit Microbloggers, now I’m trialling HEY again.

Do you listen to @hemisphericviews podcast? Are you a member of our Discord chat room? You should do both, because at the moment I’m giving away a free license of The Archive for macOS.

My wife has a Wikipedia entry. I’m only a tiny bit jealous.

This is very clever and helpful - @Hemisphericviews Media Corner reference page. Thanks @Burk. micro.burk.io

Downside of no Covid-19 lockdowns: stuffed nose/cold.

An Interview with Nick Elam (of Elam Ending Fame) 🏀

My friend Joe and I had the opportunity to interview Nick Elam, who is the creator of basketball’s Elam Ending, for the NBL Pocket Podcast. We are on a mission to bring the Elam Ending to the Australian NBL. Having the opportunity to speak with Nick was a genuine honour. If you like basketball, I think you will like this podcast.

Johnny•Decimal

Johnny•Decimal: A system to organise projects: There are a couple of core concepts, and they’re so simple you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of them before. It’s worth mentioning at this point that all of this is free, and it’s possible to implement it without any additional tools. I was introduced to the Johnny Decimal filing system by @jack. I’m going to give a go with my own computer document filing. As organised as I think I am, I certainly struggle to find digital files on a more regular basis than I would like.

I’m in today’s paper, smooching my wife! ❤️😘

My wife is the incoming Member for Victoria Park in the Western Australian State Parliament!

I love, love, love creating the @Hemisphericviews podcast with @Burk and @martinfeld. If you haven’t given it a chance, this is a fun one to start with. Performance reviews to pickles,episode 22 has it all.

Not often that I’m awake early enough to hear the kookaburras doing their morning laughs. Such a great sound.

That feeling when you wake up at 3:15am to record a podcast interview, then figure it’s not worth trying to go back to sleep after it’s done. I appreciate what @Burk deals with when we record @HemisphericViews now.

Calendar Hero

Calendar Hero » tyler.io: It sits on your Desktop, below all of your other windows, and…shows your weekly calendar. It highlights the current day, the current hour of that day, and shows a countdown until your next event. That’s it. That’s all I want. This is terrific for somebody like me who is guided through life by his calendar.

Giraffe at Perth Zoo

Giraffe It was amazing to be able to see the giraffes at Perth Zoo close-up yesterday. They have big heads!

Egg Face.

Audio-Technica ATH-M50x

I bought a set of Audio-Technica ATH-M50x to replace my ageing Bose QuietComfort 15s. I’d already replaced the earmuffs on the Bose’s a couple of times. Now the headphones have the exterior coating of the foam flaking off. I was also getting sick of having to replace the AAA battery on a regular basis. My headphones are basically restricted to desk use only these days, so I was happy to buy new headphones that didn’t feature Bluetooth - wiring into my EVO4 audio interface is fine, and in terms of latency and audio quality, preferable. So far, I’ve only listened to a bit of music with these new cans. To my ears, they sound great! A crisp, clean and rich sound. As they are monitor headphones, they’re not designed to adjust the music, such as adding additional bass or anything. I like this, and I think it suits my needs perfectly. I do notice they sit more tightly on and around my ears than the Bose and that the pressure on my ears is stronger than the Bose. I think my ears are getting hotter wearing these. I may find the need to take them off to give my ears some fresh air. I need to keep listening to these to see how they perform over a longer time, with a greater variety of music - and when I record podcasts. So far, though, I’m giving them two thumbs up.

Back to the Future, 1985 - ★★★★★

It’s been years since I’ve seen this movie. The editing is great; no scene is wasted. Christopher Lloyd is slapstick gold. Why don’t they make films like this anymore?

I love this album. It makes my wife contemplate an early death. music.apple.com

I’ve settled into a great ’daily notes and other documentation’ system using Dynalist. I’ve never had this much consistent success with any app, except for perhaps Day One, which I also still use.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge: Day 31: ‘defiance’ 📷

This app, TextBuddy makes me giddy.

How good is this offer? An opportunity to win free stickers from the world’s leading podcast! Hemispheric Views - Blog - Hey everyone! Who’s up for a sticker giveaway!?

Micro.blog Photo Challenge: Day 30: ‘privacy’ 📷

Wall

Take two at publishing via wall.blot.im. When did this become a thing? Fascinating.

I Forgot About 1Writer

I also own 1Writer, which also plugs directly into Dropbox, and is, arguably, a better editor. It’s certainly a more fully-featured one. Yes, I own many text editors. It’s the curse of the tinkerer. I also forgot that you can pretend a file name with _ in Blot and it won’t publish it as a live post. I’ve done that with this entry, so ideally it will publish when I’m finished and ready - not when I’m just getting started. So many different ways to skin this cat.

Posting here using Byword

I’ve owned Byword for many years. I think it was the first Markdown editor I bought, for both iOS and macOS. I abandoned it a long time ago as well, as it seemed to pale in comparison with other Markdown editors. In looking for an easier way to post to Blot via Dropbox, however, Greg Moore suggested Byword. I’ve installed it here on my iPad, and it does connect neatly to Dropbox - bypassing the futzy iOS Files.app interface. I’m typing this directly into Byword into my live Blot site. That may not be the ideal workflow - perhaps a non-published draft might be a better option, with the file then dropped in as a finished item. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that a very old tool such as Byword may be the best one for the job. That job being, making it as easy to publish to my Blot site as it is to publish to my micro.blog. If it’s not easy, I won’t do it. That much I know to be true.

Micro.blog has been on fire the last few days. I’ve really enjoyed the interactions. Thanks everybody! 🔥 💯 🤚🏻

I do a weekly Australian National Basketball League (NBL) podcast, NBL Pocket Podcast. Today’s episode is out and I think it’s a particularly fun one. 🏀 🎙

Micro.blog Photo Challenge: Day 29: ‘light’ 📷

Alfred on macOS seems to be much more dynamically developed than Launchbar. As a long-time Launchbar user I’m wondering if it’s time to invest in the Alfred PowerPack and retrain my fingers?

A question for the micro.bloggers: What is the website you most often visit, and why? Mine is probably ABC News - Australia because I’m old.

Unexpected events today: Credit card details stolen and $1,500 of fraudulent transactions incurred. Our 5-year old boy decided to wander off to fight criminals by himself. Eventually found, thanks to neighbourhood community and police.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge: Day 28: I cleaned ‘up’ the front porch. 📷

I’m feeling the urge to add a bookmarks manager to my workflow. I already use Instapaper, but now I’m thinking about adding either Pinboard.in or Raindrop.io to the mix.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge: Day 27: ‘pompasetting’. Hemispheric Views is the best podcast in the world. 📷

MailTrackerBlocker for Mail on macOS

Block tracking pixels in macOS Mail.app with MailTrackerBlocker for Mail on macOS: I generally use MailMate which has pixel blocking built-in, or Fastmail apps which also block tracking. But it’s good to have an option for Apple Mail as well.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge: Day 26: My ‘favourite’ sight of today. 📷

Always a great day when a new episode of @HemisphericViews podcasts drops. In Hemispheric Views 021: Ad Lib! we work without notes. And end up talking about restaurants, neck ties and Mars. It’s compelling!