The End of Media by Paul Wells is an important and surprisingly entertaining series on the decline of media and corresponding rise of issues management in Canada
Finished reading: Dust by Hugh Howey is a good ending to the trilogy with a nice note of hope. I hadn’t enjoyed the second book in the series as much as the first, but Dust put it in perspective and I appreciate it better now 📚
Finished reading: Although very strange, I enjoyed The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. There’s no need to read the book to understand the rest of the series and it wouldn’t make much sense as a standalone. Nonetheless, learning more about Auri and great writing make it worthwhile 📚
Finished reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson is a satisfying end to an entertaining trilogy. I enjoyed the creative world building and interesting characters across the three books📚
A fun day on a challenging course for the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka. I managed to cut 15 minutes from my PB. So, I’m happy, if rather sore
Hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 20 years. I’ve never been prolific and there’s a big dip through 2013 to 2016 when Twitter dominated. But, I’m really glad to have stuck with this.
📺 Silo (2023) - ★★★☆☆
A good show. I’d enjoyed the first book (not so much the 2nd, haven’t read the 3rd). The show is consistent with the book, while making good changes
Fun to see Toronto playing itself, rather than New York, in S2E3 of Strange New Worlds, complete with the omnipresent construction cones 🖖 📺
Finished reading: Shape by Jordan Ellenberg is a delightfully meandering book about geometry and why it is important. The book is much more about people than math. Well worth reading 📚
The Three Body Problem series is one of my favourites for mind-bending ideas. So, I’m really curious to see how this new Netflix series portrays the books.
Simplifying my personal iPhone
Now that I’ve separated my work and personal iPhones, I’m taking some time to simplify my personal device.
The biggest change is that for work, I’m now fully into the Office 365 product. So, email in Outlook, tasks in To Do, and notes in OneNote. Although I really liked using MindNode as my project and task manager and Apple Notes for my notes, I have to admit that this just works so much better for work tasks and with my office Windows PC. This has significantly reduced the demands on my personal phone, which was part of the point.
On the personal side, I’m sticking with Apple Notes and Reminders. These apps have seen lots of improvements recently and are more than sufficient for my needs. I’ve found that sharing notes with my family has been really useful, both as a way to work through family projects and to share reference material.
For music, I’m back to the Apple Music app. I liked the concept and design of the Albums app. I just found that I rarely used it. I am keeping MusicBox as the place to track albums I want to listen to (stuff gets lost in the Recently Added section of the Apple Music app). I’m also tagging albums there for particular moods, since I never seem to be able to remember relevant albums in the moment. MusicBox is a really nice, lightweight companion to Apple Music for these use cases.
For podcasts, I’ve switched back to Apple Podcasts from Overcast. This is really just an experiment with standardizing on stock Apple apps. I don’t expect it to last. Overcast has so many nice refinements and now also has better access to OS integrations that used to favour the Apple Podcasts app.
A couple of things that haven’t changed are getting news via Feedbin in NetNewsWire and journaling in DayOne. Although I’m intrigued by the new Journal app from Apple and will certainly test it out, I expect that I’ll keep my DayOne subscription and the close to 9,000 entries I’ve added.
Knowing my predilections for fiddling with my setup, I’ve intentionally kept my homescreen stable for a couple of years now. No doubt there will be further tweaks once iOS 17 is released. After that, I look forward to another stable setup that I use when necessary and otherwise leave alone.
🎵 I’ve been enjoying New Mythology from Nick Mulvey.
🏃♂️ Today’s run had no distance or pace goal. A run with no plan is usually a bad idea. This one ended up being longer than it likely should have been
Training Peaks integration with Apple Workouts in WatchOS 10 is a big deal! I’ve been creating custom workouts on my watch for a while now. This will be a lot easier.
I like the new design direction in WatchOS 10. I always wanted the Siri watch face to work and this new approach seems similar and, hopefully, will actually surface relevant details.