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.

When Star Trek: Voyager originally aired, I was too distracted with grad school to pay much attention to it. Many years later, thanks to @jean’s comprehensive Viewer’s Guide I’ve finished the series. The show is very good (certainly better than the reputation it seems to have), especially when you follow @jean’s advice and skip the bad episodes. Many great characters, interesting plots, and ethical conundrums with a good episodic approach, rather than the long narrative arcs of DS9 and Discovery 🖖

Switching to iCloud+ Custom Email Domain 📧

I’ve switched my personal email over to Apple’s custom email domain with iCloud Mail. A roughly ranked list of reasons for the switch is: One less account to worry about. Not that it was a big deal, but now I don’t need to know the various setup details for my personal email. Once I’ve logged into my iCloud account, my email is ready. I appreciate Apple’s commitment to privacy and trust that they’ll apply this commitment to my email account.

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