Tech
- 📨 Mail Client: Fastmail
- 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail
- 📝 Notes: Craft
- ✅ To-Do: Things and GitHub
- 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Apple Camera
- 🌅 Photo Management: Apple Photos
- 📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar
- 📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud
- 📖 RSS: NetNewsWire and Feedbin
- 🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
- 🌐 Browser: Firefox Developer Edition (development) and Arc (everything else)
- 💬 Chat: Messages and Slack
- 🔖 Bookmarks: Crafts and my own Raycast plugin
- 📑 Read It Later: Things and Craft
- 📜 Word Processing: none
- 📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets
- 📊 Presentations: Keynote
- 🛒 Shopping Lists: none
- 🍴 Meal Planning: just started using Paprika
- 💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: YNAB
- 📰 News: My RSS feeds, newsletters (mostly NYT and The Athletic) and some podcasts. This would deserve its own post.
- 🎵 Music: Spotify
- 🎙️ Podcasts: Overcast
- 🔐 Password Management: 1Password
- 🤖 Code Editing: Xcode and Visual Studio Code
- 📚 Books: none
- 🌎 Blogging: Micro.blog
- 🗒️ Scratchpad: Drafts and Boop
- MySQL over PostgreSQL. I already run a PostgreSQL DB. I don’t want to run another one;
- All the built-ins (SEO, analytics) are lost when Ghost is used as a headless CMS;
- Poor markdown support: line breaks are preserved in posts;
- Lack of control over the HTML that is being produced;
- No support of multiple websites for small publishers.
Following up on Manton Reece’s default apps post, here’s my list for 2023:
I added the Scratchpad category at the end. 💻
Great excerpt from Under the Radar, the podcast of David Smith & Marco Arment:
And my family is very well trained at this point that if they see a bug happens in one of my apps, they must immediately drop everything and bring it to me because we all know the old adage “a bug in the hand is worth two in the report.”
💻
I just posted a new post about software design: “Get rid of types you don’t control early: a lesson (re)learned”. Some Rolling Stones jokes included. 💻
remix.run/blog needs a RSS feed. https://github.com/remix-run/remix/discussions/7506 💻
I love open-source code, but when I come across something that needs improvement in an open-source repository, I sometimes hesitate to point it out because I don’t want to be seen as overly critical or ungrateful. However, I recently felt it was the right thing to do when I raised the issue that vapor-community/bcrypt may no longer be relevant in a somewhat positive manner. Most importantly, I want to express my gratitude to @[email protected] for their time and dedication to the Swift Server Workgroup. 💻
Bandcamp Schadenfreude. I was offered a deal to become an employee for Bandcamp back in 2011. Then the deal was off for reasons that didn’t make sense. Since then, I had mixed feelings: I liked the product as a listener, not so much as a musician, and I resent founders and managers from then — I know I shouldn’t but I do — and I am not sure they are genuinely nice people. 💻
I have a songbook GitHub project that contains chordpro files and creates my own PDF songbook. I geeked out a bit so that the PDF is generated by a GitHub action and uploaded to my new web home that I am slowly building brick by brick. You can see the final result on my Guitar Songbook page. 🎸💻
I used to love Evernote so much. I had to log in to access old content today, and it made me upset to see how bad of a product it is now. For instance, I could not find a way to see who were the people having access to a shared note. 💻
Renewal costs for .net domains on Gandi are going through the roof. Transferring to CloudFlare now. 💻
GitHub - aaronpk/Meetable: an event listing website
I just found out this project by Aaron Parecki. I just moved to a new city and trying to find local events forced me to spend time on Facebook, which is the de facto solution for venues to advertise events. An alternative would be great so I love that Meetable exists. I know nothing from the tech stack though so not sure I could contribute or tune it for my needs if i was willing to invest time on it for a side-project. 💻
Celebrating the 200th pull request on my Statium monorepo. So much more gratifying for solo side-projects. 💻
Writing on the web post-Jekyll, Ghost edition
Jekyll does not seem to do well. Despite being used by GitHub for GitHub pages, largely used plugins from the community — such as jekyll-assets, — are falling behind Jekyll 4 or the end of life of Ruby 2.
Ghost has very convincing pros: it is easy, fast and beautiful. It also has everything one can need fully integrated when you just start publishing.
But for a technical person such like me, who has an history of web publishing behind, it also has major cons:
As such, Ghost does not sound like a good CMS solution for me. To be continued. 💻
👨💻 Yesterday, I pulled out my Sortmash iOS app code off dusty shelves as I needed to sort a large amount of data by order of preference — namely my Sorare cards 🤦♂️ — and it was a very fun experience. Exploring a pre-ARC Objective-C with embedded dependencies — TouchJSON and ASIHTTPRequest — felt like traveling in time, and made me so grateful of where we stand now. Making the code run again was surprisingly easy but visually very buggy since the code was from an era where iPhone and iPad had each a unique screen size.