marco's µ.blog

In addition to week 50, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week 51 and 52, 2023:

• 🖼 Many new iPhone wallpapers made the rounds: Gameboy style, iPod style. On Reddit, there are some simpler versions available for free (Original, iPod Mini), and moreover, Basic Apple Guy has recently released some very nice ones, Aurora Gradient and Ugly Christmas Sweater Wallpapers (Mac Edition), and just published his Rewind 2023: Wallpapers.

• 📝 Blake released a web app for omg.lol: write.omg.lol - A simple notepad in your browser backed by omg.lol’s Pastebin feature.

• 🖥️ Found this on baty.net: So you got Setapp… make the most of it: A Terminal script, “which will tell you what apps you have that also have a Setapp version”. This way you can “contribute part of the monthly subscription fee you’re already paying to the developers of the apps you love”.

• ✏️ Canion posted about another nice-looking plain text/markdown note-taking app I had never heard of before: Notebooks. I now use Obsidian with its Dataview plugin and Actions for Obsidian so intensively that I can’t imagine switching, but in principle, native macOS/iOS apps of this kind are extremely welcome.

• 🎵 Installed Tuneful - a native macOS menu bar playback control app for Spotify and Apple Music.

• 🖊️ Sindre Sorhus has released just another new app: Memo Widget - Sticky notes on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, and desktop.

• 🎉 KeyJerk Reactions lets you bind the new macOS' Video reactions via a nice UI or a script.

• 🔗 Bookmarked SharePal - Lightning speed sharing. Add. Organize. Share. I don’t have a specific use case for this app yet, but should it come to that, I now have an idea of how I could make the task easier.

• 🌏 This one looks interesting: ‎Globetrotter - “a location-based travel photos app, providing a fast and fun way to share your travel highlights with your friends and family”. Now I just need to get around more, which is not so easy for a household that doesn’t own a car and for some reason doesn’t fly.

• 📱 Additional apps for iOS, many of which with a free lifetime license thanks to the Indie App Santa promotion: Cheatsheet, Joy, Keybot, Mindr, Peaks, Photo Route, Pretty Progress, and Replica. It remains to be seen which of these I will actually use on a regular basis.¹

• 📱 I installed ‎finity on my iPhone and enjoyed playing it now and then during some trips over the Christmas holidays.

• 🎮 Finished Super Mario Advance (Super Mario Bros. 2 port for GBA) on my Analogue Pocket.

• 😈 Started playing Diablo 4. I absolutely do not understand yet what one has to do here and especially when and why, but I enjoy it so far ;-)

• 🕹 I checked out ‎Resident Evil 4 on my M2 MacBook Pro and was pleasantly surprised at how well and smoothly it plays. I imagine I see clear differences to the PS5 version I already own, but if I didn’t, it could have been a good purchase for the Mac as well. (I’m not sure if it’s such a clever idea to sell games that have been available for established gaming consoles for years to “real” gamers, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Apple.)

• 🤖 Funko Box- So many of them almost everywhere. Awesome; did not let Microsoft Designer create my own, though.

• 💿 I’ve signed up to Album Of The Day and enjoy the daily recommendations so far.

• 🎙 I’ve deleted Overcast and moved to Apple Podcasts.app. Just added only a few shows back in. I’ll try to listen to less Podcasts at 1,0 x speed and more music.

• 📖 I read the countless annual reviews and outlooks² with great interest and was pleased about the (perceived) renaissance of blogging. Of course, a large part of this was due to Rob’s App Defaults overview page, which now offers > 300 individual blogs as RSS feeds for simple import into your own feed reader.

• 🥰 Speaking of it, my Hemispheric Views Defaults Laptop Sticker arrived.

• 🍿 Watched Barbie (2023) with the family. Was fun!

• 🙏 Thank you for reading my Weeknotes in 2023! I didn’t quite manage to consistently follow through on the resolution I made at the beginning of the year to write down a few things each week, was briefly on the verge of giving up entirely, and still find it a bit odd, but I had a lot of fun with it. I registered with omg.lol at the beginning of 2023, moved my then only a few weeks old Mastodon account to social.lol, and became a member of micro.blog. I am very happy to have discovered this part of the net. I have actually gotten to know several people who have become dear to me, even though I do not know them personally. Thank you for that! It actually made the year 2023 better, although otherwise, it wasn’t really a year I look back on with much joy. So, I wish everyone a Happy New Year, stay healthy, and see you soon. Looking forward to it!

I remember times when BMW used to build relatively “reasonable looking” cars.

Due to my Covid infection, I was only able to publish my Weeknotes for week 49 quite late, so here are just a few more thoughts and things that caught my attention in week 50, 2023:

• 💶 I published my State of App and Services Subscriptions 2023 and read similar posts from other people with great interest.

• 🎙 Canion tried MurmurType on Setapp - Transcribe your speech and I plan to take a closer look at the app soon as well.

• 🤖 LM Studio - Discover, download, and run local LLMs: It feels like the AI hype has significantly flattened, but of course, chatbots are here to stay. The possibility of running them locally on your computer is naturally tempting. Bookmarked.

• 🧵 Awesome thread initiated by Dave with lots of Indie Mac and iOS Apps. I’ve bookmarked Bartleby, DoMarks, Cheatsheet, Bridges, MeterStats, Ride Stats, Walk Routes, and some others to evaluate them when I get the chance.

• I love Hyperkey and therefore started evaluating Superkey. I am not sure yet if I will use its added functionality but it would be a way to support Ryan’s work nevertheless.

• 🎮 Finished Stray on PS5 and now I’m looking for a non-open-world game to tackle next. Any ideas?

• 🖨 I finally managed to upgrade my Anker Make M5 to the All Metal Hotend; of course, I had two screws left over in the end and had to take everything apart again. But now it’s up an running again. 😅

• 📺 Started watching Loki S2 and continued watching The Bear S2.

Those were the days …

I use a variety of different apps and services on iOS and macOS. Most of them are based on subscription models, and even though I try to make sure that each program doesn’t cost more than 5 € / month, a not insignificant monthly amount¹ quickly adds up.

Here is a table of all the apps and services I’m currently subscribed to:²

In total, they cost well over 140 € a month, which is 1700 €³ a year! 😱

Time to go through all the apps one by one and consider whether I really need them and whether they are still worth their money to me.⁴

• 🟢 1Password: Until last week, my standard password manager. I am currently considering whether it could potentially be replaced by Apple’s Keychain; however, I am not fully there yet.
• 🟢 Anybox: My current bookmark manager of choice; I could possibly live with the free version of Raindrop.io; but even though the developer probably no longer lives in Russia, the proximity is somehow still too uncomfortable for me.
• 🟢 Arq: I use Arq since 2016 together with the countless TB of free OneDrive storage space available to me as part of the MS Office subscription; I couldn’t sleep peacefully without offsite backup.
• 🟢 Chronicling: I use it a lot lately, especially to fill my Daily Journal in Obsidian via Shortcuts.app; I really don’t want to miss it.
• 🟡 DayOne: Since I moved my Daily Journal to Obsidian in the middle of the year, I don’t really use it anymore. But I still let it be filled (automatically). My first entries go back to the year 2008, although I can’t figure out when it was actually published. Would feel strange without it.
• 🟢 Drafts: I used the app extensively in the past, then didn’t understand it for a long time, and currently, I can’t imagine life without it again.
• 🟢 Epic Weather Ride: An indispensable weather tool for planning bike tours.
• 🔴 FDDB: I regularly fail to track my calories consistently and thus control my weight. Most of the year an unused app because it is too exhausting to constantly weigh your food. I should cancel and only resubscribe when I really (for a month or two) want to use it.
• 🟢 HealthFit: One of the few ways to get .fit files from the Hammerhead Karoo 2 into Apple Health and much more. Subscription is even voluntary and IMHO extremely well invested.
• 🟡 iConnectHue: An alternative way to program and control Philips Hue lamps. In the past, the things I wanted to implement could only be set up properly through it. However, I should take a look during the brighter time of the year to see if most of it can now also be done via the native app.
• 🟡 ifttt: Oh, I actually only use it to import various things into Day One automatically. I don’t really need it but I love automating things 🤔.
• 🟢 Ivory: There are a number of alternative Mastodon clients like Mona etc. that do not rely on a subscription; also, the development speed is not very high at the moment. On the other hand, I’ve gotten very used to these very polished apps for iOS and macOS.
• 🟡 Kagi: A really good Google alternative. But ultimately “only” for the conscience. It’s not that I achieve anything with Kagi that wouldn’t be possible with google.com or duckduckgo.
• 🔴 Up Ahead: Incredible nice-looking app, but I feel like it hasn’t been updated for almost a year now. (How nice it would be if you could simply add entries from the calendar.) It’s hard, but
• 🟢 Mastodon: Completely voluntary and actually too small an amount.
• 🔴 Mercury Weather: I really like it, it has even won big at the MacStories Selects, but since I rarely travel to other places/countries and the Weather app is also getting better…
• 🟢 Micro.blog : What can I say …
• 🔴 Mindnode: Used to be one of my most used apps; it is now also available via Setapp and I only have the subscription because of the iOS version; however, I use the latter very rarely ATM.
• 🟡 MS Office 365: In the meantime, my sons through school as well as my wife and I through work theoretically have free access to Office at home, however, I paid for several years in advance a long time ago and now the subscription just runs. I use the storage space intensively with Arq (see above); I should check at some point whether it can be realized more cheaply.
• 🟢 Neptunes: Costs almost nothing and I use it daily on the Mac.
• 🟢 NordVPN: Everyone should have a VPN service, right?
• 🟢 Obsidian Sync: Without Obsidian, my computer life would be meaningless right now. There would be alternatives to synchronize the content between platforms, but the Sync subscription is a good way to support Obsidian in its entirety.
• 🔴 Overcast Premium: I never understood the UI concept of Overcast. However, it has Shortcuts support and I have automated a few things with it. Are they really necessary? No.
• 🔴 Personal Best: Nice, but the UI is still a bit too confusing for me and the actual benefit may be too small.
• 🟡 Play: I’ll take a look at it again in a year. Right now, I really enjoy the channels feature introduced in 2.0.
• 🔴 Photomator: Great app, but I don’t use it often enough.
• 🟡 Reader Readwise: The price is at the upper limit of pain for me but only thanks to an educational discount. I use the app very extensively; if it were more expensive, I would switch to Omnivore.
• 🟢 Setapp: Worth the money thanks to the Edu discount.
• 🔴 Söka: I like it. I travel too little to really take advantage of it. Maybe I’ll subscribe for a month or so before the next vacation?
• 🟡 Timery: I use it professionally, but I pay for it privately because it helps me keep a little better track.
• 🟡 trakt.tv: Actually, I watch too few series to justify a VIP account. But in this way, things can be automated very nicely and transferred to Day One via IFTT, etc. Oh …
• 🔴 Training Today: After the app once attested to me the best fitness despite fever and malaise, I believe it is just an (expensive) random number generator.
• 🟢 TV Forecast: I love this app.
• Waterllama: I have now bought a Live Time license.
• 🟢 YNAB: Without YNAB, we would be heavily in debt, I would have even more pointless stuff, and my wife would have left me with the kids and dog.
• 🟡 Zenitizer: The subscription reminds me that I damn well need to work on overcoming my inner laziness more regularly.
• 🟢 Apple One Premium: As a family, we need a large iCloud storage tier just for the photos. In addition, we use Apple Music and Apple TV+. In total, still more expensive than Premium. It’s a pity, really.
• 🟢 Disney+: Marvel, Star Wars, etc. - we can’t do without it.
• 🟡 Nintendo Switch Online: Necessary just for my son’s ZELDA backup, although 😈 …
• 🟡 PlayStationPlus: If I could understand what exactly happens to my 300 previously “acquired” games through it if I were to cancel it, it might even be conceivable to do so 🤷‍♂️.
• 🟢 wahoo X: The Zwift UI has too negative an impact on my blood pressure; I have therefore been looking for a long time for an alternative to indoor cycling that just works reliably. The Sufferfest / wahoo SYSTM does this. My way of exercising in the winter months.

Well, there are a few programs / services that I have now canceled as a result. I still have to think about the other 🟡 apps. It would probably be wise to cancel them as well and after the subscription expires, see if I can bear their loss and if not, just resubscribe.

But basically, nice things cost money and all these services and apps make my day easier or enrich my life. At least now I know where I stand at the moment. 😀

P.S. I totally forgot to include omg.lol, my e-mail provider, and Hemispheric Views' One Prime Plus, but those are all no-brainers for me. 😅

P.P.S: This list only covers tech related stuff. Charity and other related expenses are not listed here.

Update 2023-12-14: If you’re interested in other people’s subscriptions, you can have a look here: Robb, Canion, Kev, and Numeric Citizen.

Update 2023-12-17: And here is a post by pratik.

Update 2023-12-18: Posts from Otávio, Maique, and Zachary.

In continuation of week 48, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week 49, 2023:

• 🦠 Yes, I had already feared it, and unfortunately, it happened: My wife’s Covid-19 infection did not pass me by. Therefore, my weeknote is regrettably appearing a little too late “this week.”

• 🔫 You may not necessarily like the content, but technically, the trailer for GTA VI definitely blew me away.

• ✏️ Another PDF editor that I will look at in my long search for an alternative to Preview¹ is PDFgear - PDF Tasks Made Easy.²

• 🪟 Gruber released An AppleScript for Safari to move all tabs in the frontmost window, from the current tab to the rightmost (last) tab, to a new window: Split Tabs to New Window.scpt. But even better is the tip from Jack Wellborn, that you can easily drag and drop multiple tabs into a new window.

• 📝 I have been doing most of my (transformative) text work with BBEdit for decades. I really wouldn’t know what to do with my life without Multi-File Search and Regex, but sometimes I also like to use TextBuddy or Text Workflow. Another nice app that does something similar is by Chris Hannah and now apparently even free for iOS and macOS: Text Case.

• 📝 While I’m on the topic of text editors. CotEditor now also has a Quick Action Bar - if only the programs could agree on a uniform shortcut!

• 🕹 For the 30th anniversary of Doom, I bought it again and immediately installed it on my MacBook and Miyoo mini plus. In keeping with this, John Romero released SIGIL II. Speaking of Miyoo mini plus - there is now a native pico-8 wrapper, too 🥳.

• 👾 I started playing Super Mario Advance (GBA) on my Analogue Pocket. I noticed that I definitely never played Super Mario Bros. 2 before. (I could have sworn that I had at least tried all the major releases.) You can tell that the second part is a reskin and somehow it doesn’t really fit into the series. I also find it absurdly difficult already in the third / fourth world. Let’s see how far I will get in the game.

• 🎮 I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or due to the recently released firmware updates, but lately my Playstation Portal has been running absolutely smoothly 🥰

• 🧵 Unfortunately, I now have to crawl out of my European library again, because soon the fun begins here too! (However, I will continue to ignore Threads, just like Facebook and Instagram, for the time being.)

• ↔️ In terms of features, it’s not yet an alternative to Kaleidoscope, but it’s affordable: Text Differ - Meet Text Differ, a native macOS app that shows beautiful differences between 2 texts.

• 🎙 Lately, I was a little annoyed by the ever-same content in my overflowing podcast subscription list. I think I will actually export all my subscribed podcasts, delete Overcast, and in Apple Podcasts, subscribe to Ruminate and Hemispheric Views, and then consider whether and which other two of the usual suspects I choose. Also, I followed Robb’s advice and turned off Smart Speed and reset the playback speed to 1.0.

• 🛑 I have now forbidden 1Password on all my devices from wanting to fill anything anywhere and only use it as a (backup) vault. I have exported all my passwords from 1PW into the Apple Keychain³, and my life has become significantly less annoying. I’m going to look at this for a few weeks now and then consider whether I completely get rid of 1PW or keep it running alongside.

• 🖊️ iOS 17.2 was released, and with it the Journal.app. I can’t do anything with the app itself, but DayOne is allowed to use the same API and can suggest the same things. That’s cool!⁴

• ⌚ watchOS 10.2 has brought back the ability to change Watch Faces by simple swiping. Thank you, Apple! I had to search for quite a while until I finally understood that this setting can only be made on the watch itself: Settings > Clock > Swipe to Switch Watch Face

I just realized that I’m slowly getting old and tired. In the past, I knew at least a little bit about every (Apple) thing. Nowadays, I’ve lost track and have no desire to understand whether I can simply integrate Matter devices into my existing Homekit setup or if I need to make some fundamental changes and then everything implodes. I’d rather not touch anything and just let it continue as it is. And what is this RCS? Does it also run on mobile data or does the provider charge a fee for each message, like for an SMS? And if so, why does anyone believe that it could somehow be an alternative to WhatsApp? And these passkeys; is there really no way to copy them from Keychain to 1Password or vice versa? Do I have to think in advance about how and where to save them? Seriously? Then I’d rather stick with conventional passwords. Oh man 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️