Finished reading: Matter (Culture) by Iain M. Banks. This was a straightforwardly entertaining read 📚
A misty run this morning 🏃♂️
Humid out there 🥵. Good thing there was a breeze by the river 🏃♂️
Second vaccine doses administered! 💉 👍
Might as well try another one from Kensington Brewing
Trying out a new (to me) brewery: Kensington Brewing
This episode of the Mindscape podcast was a nice mix of my interests in math, politics, and voting theory
Finished reading: The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (And What to do About It) by Michael E. Raynor 📚
Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is a good second book in the Mars trilogy. So much great detail, you really get a strong sense of Mars as a place that is distinct from Earth 📚
I’ve listened to a few Spatial Audio songs on Apple Music and I’m impressed! If you listen to a familiar song, you can really notice the difference. Lots of space and previously unnoticed details in these new mixes 🎧🎶
Switching from Agenda to Craft, for now 📅🗒
In my corner of the internet, there’s a well trodden, twisted path of searching for the one true notes app. I’ve reached a fork in the path between Agenda and Craft. As I wrote earlier, I’ve been using Agenda for a while now and its date-based approach really suits my meeting-dominated work. Now, though, Craft has added calendar integration and I’m testing it out.
There are several things I really like about Craft, relative to Agenda:
- Document syncing is far more reliable. This isn’t entirely Agenda’s fault. I’m restricted by corporate policy from using iCloud Documents, so have been using Dropbox sync for Agenda. I often have to wait an indeterminate, though long, time before documents sync across my devices. Craft sync has been instantaneous and very reliable.
- Having access to my documents from a web browser is great. I’ll be back to working from the office on a Windows laptop soon and won’t have access to my iPad. So, web access will be important.
- Performance is much better on Craft. Agenda often freezes in the middle of typing and suffers from random crashes. This could very well be something about my particular setup, though it doesn’t happen in any other apps.
On the downside, I do miss Agenda’s simplicity. Craft has lots of ways to organize notes (such as cards and subpages). Of course, you can mostly ignore this, but I like Agenda’s well-thought-through approach that didn’t require much deliberation about where to put things.
Of course, having just made this switch, Apple announced Quick Notes and I may well be back on Apple Notes in a few months.
The new Focus feature in iOS 15 looks promising. I already hide and show home screens based on context and this looks like it will help make this even more effective. Lots to unpack from WWDC
After thinking it over for a few years, Lucy has finally decided to try the outdoor couch
Thanks to a wifi range extender, I’ve improved my office location
I now live with two teenagers
Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof. | Quanta Magazine
It appears that simple creatures — including, now, the brainless hydra — can sleep. And the intriguing implication of that finding is that sleep’s original role, buried billions of years back in life’s history, may have been very different from the standard human conception of it. If sleep does not require a brain, then it may be a profoundly broader phenomenon than we supposed.
Starting the long weekend a day early
Andrew Potter: My fellow Gen Xers don’t appreciate our great gift: we were ignored - The Line
In retrospect, it is obvious that the Gen X obsession with authenticity was anxiety caused by the growing rumblings of a culture in transition. The old technological ecosystem that fuelled the counterculture was gone, but the new web-enabled environment that made authenticity irrelevant hadn’t quite yet arrived. Gen X was the last generation to possess genuine subcultures that were able to remain somewhat unmolested by the digital meat grinder.
Sounds right to me
A good “in the zone” song: Persona
Kids are vaccinated!
