Over the past few years I have been writing on and off for several websites. Some small, some slightly bigger, never successfully but I enjoyed it all the same. I flirted with writing if you will. During this time I never really cared about my words, I never really gave a second thought to what happens to them in a few years, but I have noticed a trend of taking others words and putting someone else’s name on them.
There are so many things I don’t understand about technology companies, and even more I don’t understand about users. We are almost predisposed to pick a side and sick with them to the bitter end (not being a fan boy is hard). Yet the companies we stick by make the strangest of decisions for us, locking down customisations, installing default apps or even ripping off brands users claim to hate.
As I work on producing more and more podcast audio headphones are becoming one of the most important things in my tech arsenal. My trusty wood backed over ear wired headphones that I have been using since EuroTech Talk (I have no idea what they are they came free with a subscription to wired) are no longer cutting it.
My requirements are as much noise cancelling as possible, a wired connection for the times I’m using a mixer, and most importantly they must be over ear.
This is becoming a bit of a regular occurrence, I’m on a roll creating Workflows to make my writing easier. This latest one uses my new todo app Things and my favourite notes app Bear to make sure I catch all the ideas I have for blog posts.
Thats not to say it can’t be used for other things, reminders that you need to add a lot of text in. An idea you need to expand on later, whatever it is this Workflow will make sure you don’t forget about it.
Wow, well this adventure into the possibility of using Things as a replacement for Todoist is proving fruitful. That is not to say I couldn’t do most of these things in other apps, but the automation seems much more approachable. It also helps that people like Federico at MacStories keep giving me inspiration for more Workflows. This Workflow simplifies one shared with MacStories members, and allows me to quickly add webpages that I want to read later, or ones I want to write about to Things.
As you might have gathered already I have been playing around with Things 3 from Cultured Code. After being a long time Todoist user it has taken a little getting used to, but the recent updates have made the app provide almost everything that I am looking for. One major missing piece is natural language processing, and once you have started using things in this way it is hard to go back.
I am now a little over 3 years with the iPad as my computer and nothing much has really changed. I wrote about one year of using the iPad Pro as my computer last year but I started with an iPad Air 2 in 2015. Don’t get me wrong, the power of the iPad has improved, the level of apps has taken a huge leap forward and even the OS is easier to use – but in reality things are pretty much as they were.
The HomePod itself it deceptively small, but surprisingly heavy. It comes boxed in the usual Apple style – paying particular attention to the experience of sliding off the top and uncovering the HomePod it all its glory. Bar the device itself there is little else in the box apart from a small information card and a single Apple logo sticker.
Particular attention has been paid towards the power cable. The braided cord fitted to the HomePod is not detachable, some seem to think this is user hostile, however you are not likely to be unplugging the unit very often.
After exploring other options to sharing on social media and using Micro.blog I’m stuck. There doesn’t seem to be the perfect option out there to fulfil all of my needs so for now I still to my own blog.
Now comes the issues with posting lots of updates and where they need to go. Ultimately there are a few things I want to achieve.
Keeping content mine as much as possible post to other social media platforms not clog up longer blog post streams or RSS Since my blog is already built on Jekyll and hosted on Github I set to work to hit as many of these goals as possible.
So. Deep breath and we will begin my attempt to leave Twitter and still be social. Timothy Smith summed this up perfectly when talking about micro blog by saying “I wanted to get away from Twitter. If you don’t get why, that’s ok”. For my attempt I decided that I needed something that would still allow me to share blog posts and BYOD podcast episodes, but keep me away from the cesspool that is Twitter.