2021 iPhone Home Screens

My iPhone Home Screen continues to evolve and, now that we have Focus Modes, I’ve made some further adjustments. From left to right, I’m using three different Focus Modes: Personal, Work, and Fitness. The first two are entirely widget focused, while Fitness has a few app icons as well. The dock has Drafts which, as the tagline says, is where text starts. This hasn’t changed from my earlier setups. The second icon launches a front-end Shortcut for Apple Notes.

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I really enjoyed season 1 of Foundation. Definitely a departure from the books, which was totally necessary. The companion podcast was interesting too 📺

I picked up Artifact by Gregory Benford at my local used bookstore on a whim. I’m glad I did. It is a fun mix of archaeology, theoretical physics, and espionage 📚

Integrating Micro.blog Highlights with Apple Notes 📒

Now that I’m committed to using Apple Notes, I wanted a way to download my Micro.blog Highlights into Notes. I like using Bookmarks as a read-it-later service and the highlighting feature is great for quickly blogging excerpts from articles. For longer-term storage, though, and integration with the rest of my notes, it is much better to have the content of the highlights stored within Notes. So, here’s a Shortcut Micro.blog Highlights to Notes that does exactly this.

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I’m enjoying the redesigned Waking Up app. The new design is much cleaner and easier to use. The original design was interesting when the app debuted. A couple of years later, with all the additional content, it had become rather complicated to navigate. After 941 “mindful days”, I’m still finding the app really helpful.

Okay, these automated email signatures are getting silly. I just got a meeting invite with 6,000 characters in 500 words. None of which were actually written by a person. It included:

  • A note that anyone attending an in-person meeting needs to be vaccinated
  • A warning not to open any attachments from unknown senders
  • A confidentiality warning with direction to delete the email and all attachments if I’m not the intended recipient
  • Lots of details about how to join the Teams meeting

Lessons from using Apple Notes for three months

Back in September, I committed to using Apple Notes for three months. The goal was to focus on my use cases for writing, rather than fiddling with new apps continuously. Here’s what I’ve identified so far. Many of the approaches and features that I’m using in these use cases are readily available in other apps and often Notes is not the most efficient choice. Now that I’ve documented these use cases, I’d like to use them to assess alternative apps.

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I’m standardizing on using Micro.blog Bookmarks as my read it later service. To make this easier, I’ve created a Shortcut for sending links from Safari to Bookmarks. Now I can keep the Micro.blog app set to posting, instead of having to switch back and forth in settings. You’ll need an app token as part of the setup for the Shortcut.

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous in the New Yorker is well worth a read

The most radical change to our shared social lives isn’t who gets to speak, it’s what we can hear. True, everyone has access to their own little megaphone, and there is endless debate about whether that’s good or bad, but the vast majority of people aren’t reaching a huge audience. And yet at any single moment just about anyone with a smartphone has the ability to surveil millions of people across the globe.