Tag: Technology

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I’m an infrequent user of Discord, but I do hop in there from time to time checking in on various communities I’ve joined that are hosted there…But the new ability in macOS Sonoma to add any website to the Dock as a web app has drastically changed my Discord experience for the better. You see, the Discord website, which looks and works exactly like the Mac app, doesn’t ever require an update. That’s because it just loads the webpage fresh every time. By simply logging into Discord in Safari and choosing File → Add to Dock…I now have the web version on my Mac as a pseudo-application.

Can’t believe I never thought of this. I had the exact same issue, and often put off checking in on the very few (2) Discord communities because the updates are so annoying.

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Why go looking for something else when Apple gave me all this stuff included in the price of my machine? So yeah, I tend to use the built-in default for most things.

I have this thought constantly when I’m trying out new apps that I think will solve a problem I’m having or will make a workflow better. Most of the time, the cost of an app or subscription doesn’t justify the often minuscule improvement a non-default app provides.

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Thought it would be fun to take part in this! Thought I’m not sure my list is much fun considering I mostly just use default apps unless I feel like I have a good reason not to.

One of the reasons I find myself reading a bunch of these lists is I’m not entirely satisfied with Apple Notes. I like its simplicity. I like its quick note feature. I like that it’s the default app on all my devices and it’s integrated nicely with MacOS and iOS.

But notes aren’t as portable as I’d like them to be. I have a shortcut that converts Apple Notes to markdown, so I’m not that worried about it, but it would be nice to have my notes in a more future-proofed open format.

I feel like I’ve tried almost every app at this point, but every app has made me feel like I’ve had to compromise in some other way. I’ve tried all the usual suspects, but I wonder if anyone out there has any suggestions?

(EDIT: oops forgot Raycast)

📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail
📮 Mail Server: iCloud
📝 Notes: Apple Notes
✅ To-Do: Todoist (I run my entire life, work and personal, in Todoist. To call it my “To-do” app doesn’t really do it justice!)
🟦 Photo Management: Apple Photos
📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud
📖 RSS: NetNewsWire
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
🌐 Browser: Safari
📑 Read It Later: Todoist
🍴 Meal Planning: LoseIt!
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Intuit Mint
🎵 Music: Apple Music
🎤 Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
🔐 Password Management: Apple Passwords
🚀 Launcher: Raycast

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Monaspace is a family of monospaced fonts with some interesting features. The fonts are sized to be interchangeable, and they have something called “texture healing.” With monospaced fonts, wide (w, m) and narrow (i,l) letters are the same width, but texture healing widens the wide letters when they’re adjacent to a narrow letter while maintaining equal spacing.

I’m not sure I actually love any of these enough to switch from my usual fonts, but the tech behind them is super interesting.

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Looks like the WordPress Webmention Plugin hasn’t been working for me for some time now.  I’ve been trying for a while to troubleshoot it but I’m coming up running out of ideas.  Seems like I can send them fine manually, they won’t send when posts are published.

I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but when I send them manually using Telegraph by Aaron Parecki they only send when I don’t include www before my domain name?

In any case, going to try and catch up on a whole bunch of Webmention sending in the next little while.

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In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying. The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.