Software

Canceling things brings mixed feelings

A list of my current subscriptions, priced per month.

Mike mentions disabling Alfred and going back to using Spotlight as an app launcher. I’ve been having similar thoughts. I use Raycast, and its latest release notes are mostly around features of the $8/month subscription version. I thought, there’s no way I’m paying monthly for what’s basically a glorified app launcher, which brought me back to thinking about Spotlight. My first app launcher was Quicksilver and it immediately became an intregal part of using a Mac....

The other day I wrote this: Knowledge should reside in the notes, not in the software used to manage the notes. I’m feeling like software has been hindering me more than helping me. I spend too much of my time building overly complex workflows in Emacs or Tinderbox or Obsidian or whatever. These crazy workflows often introduce dependencies and push the actual knowledge up into the process/software. This seems like a bad idea....

Mike Hall wrote about friends, a personal CRM for the command line. It’s a ruby gem that does most of the things I was trying to do using Emacs. It seems worth a try, so I installed the gem and created a few shell aliases to make things faster: alias faa 'friends add activity ' alias faf 'friends add friend ' alias fla 'friends list activities'

This is not a review, but I wanted to jot down some notes after a few days in a new app that I’m enjoying very much: Wavelength Messenger. You might like to read John Gruber’s post for details. My wife believes that I have some kind of processing disorder that causes me to quickly become overwhelmed by too much simultaneous input. She discovered this after several visits to the local Costco....

UPDATE: I’ve had trouble getting GoAccess to parse the logs consistently after changing the date format. I’ve been using GoAccess on the VPS running my static sites for keeping an eye on web server access logs. It works great and requires no tracking scripts. I run a cron job every five minutes to process my site logs and generate an HTML report. This is fine, but GoAccess always processes the entire log file and offers no way to filter the results....

I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004 and a SmugMug user for nearly as long. For some reason, I prefer looking at my photos via online galleries rather than, say, my Photos library, and both Flickr and SmugMug have helped me do that. I’ve also kept standalone static web galleries for the odd side project, such as a memorial to my dog Leeloo. Recently, I’ve been creating more of these, so I started looking for easier or better ways of generating static web galleries from a selection of photos....

You all remember Evernote, right? For years (beginning in the late 2000s), Evernote was the note-taking tool for many of us. Then, they got weird, started selling merchandise and branded scanners, and made odd tangental mobile apps for some reason. Evernote seemed to have lost focus. After a couple of years of that I, as someone who loves trying new software, didn’t hesitate to move on to newer, shinier tools for my notes....

For example, currently, we don’t have likes. If and when we launch a feature in that vein, it’ll be private. We’ve intentionally avoided any public counts. We don’t want Glass ever to become a popularity contest. We’re not home for influencers. We are a home for photographers. Tom Watson – On my Om Wouldn’t it be nice to have a reasonable alternative to Instagram? I wish it could be Flickr, but I doubt that’ll ever happen....