Matthew Lang

Over at The Cramped, Shawn Mihalik shares his experiences of switching to a flip phone for a week and, not surprisingly, it was fine.

Turns out, life without a smartphone is fine. It took me all of a day to learn how to use T9. Plus, this phone has voice-to-text, and it’s way better than the almost-always-wrong can’t-turn-it-off auto-punctuation in Apple’s new “smarter” (read: dumber) A.I. dictation. Like, way better. Like, it gets my sentences, including the punctuation, right nearly every single time.

— One Week with a Flip Phone by Shawn Mihalik on The Cramped

Shawn’s takeaway is that the practical side of going without a smartphone is easier than you’d think.

I think I could definitely go without my smartphone for a while, and I get why people want to get rid of their smartphones, and there are plenty of reasons not to have them. I do believe, though, there is a way to get the balance right with a smartphone.

I’m not a role model for this, and I still pick up my phone more than I need to, but I try to limit my screen time on social media apps. I disable as many notifications as I can and let only the essentials through. On top of that, I keep one home screen with email, browser, calendar and the bullet journal app in the dock, and four other apps I use most days. At night, I keep my phone on mute and set it on the fireplace or the dining room table so I am less inclined to pick it up.

Not picking up your phone is a hard habit to break, especially when you’re idle and perhaps waiting for an appointment or for someone. Everywhere I go, I see people on their phones, and sure, some of them might be doing a puzzle, writing something, or reading the news or an article. Still, I’m willing to bet that most of the time, people are scrolling through a social media timeline.

I sat in the doctor’s reception room last week, and everyone waiting in the room, except an elderly lady beside me and me, was looking at their smartphones.

Looking out from the front of our house, I often see dog walkers going up and down the street. Most of them walk their dog while looking at their phone. Now, we don’t have a family dog, but I would like to think that if we did, I could walk my dog without looking at my phone. Don’t you need to present for your family pets as well?

Maybe the flip phone isn’t the dumb one here. Maybe we’re the dumb ones, because if a device can make us spend so much time on it, we’re definitely not smart, and what we’re using can’t really be called a “smartphone”.

When I decided to host my own blog, I honestly didn’t think I would get this far in building a tool that allows me to publish through the browser. I’ve tried a couple of times before with different approaches, but each time I failed to get something I liked.

Now, I’m having a lot of fun building one for my Jekyll blog. It was initially called PostPress, but over the weekend, I renamed it to Wren. I’ve always liked the old Twitter bird as a symbol for publishing, and we’ve had a lot of small birds like these in the garden this year. Along with the rename, I also gave it a fresh look.

Built using Ruby on Rails, this little application has gradually evolved into quite a capable publishing tool.

Over the last eight months, I’ve been able to include the following features:

• Compose drafts
• Publish drafts as posts
• Manage the categories of my blog
• Manage my book collection on my reading page
• Upload images and include them in posts
• Upload images to my /photo page
• Post links to my link blog
• Run an audit on my blog to check for missing alt text and broken links
• Update pages such as my now and about pages

Over the winter, I hope to add the ability to update existing posts, which will be quite a task in itself. I also plan to keep adding little tweaks and features as I need them.

These changes to how I blog have let me post a bit more often over the last few months, and I hope that continues into the new year.

I really love these social network ideas, especially the allotments idea.

A social network built like an allotment. The whole network is a grid of 128 plots. Each plot is a possible user page for someone to write posts and share images. If all 128 plots are occupied, new users join a waiting list. Each user has to tend to their plot once every 7 days by posting something. If they don’t, after a grace period, their plot gets composted and offered to the next person on the waiting list. But beneath that new person’s posts, visitors can still see the compost of all previous people who tended this plot. There’s no ‘wall’ or ‘general feed’ - visitors can visit individual plots and see what’s growing there.

— Some ideas I’ve had for social networks by Raphael Kabo

I floated an idea for a social network made up of a very limited number of people. Each member of the network is given the ability to post something to the network. Once they post something, the next member of the network is given the ability. Members keep taking turns until they decide to leave. I still needed to work out some specifics, but I liked the idea of taking turns posting.

The last few weeks have flown by. A good measure of just how quickly time has moved is the week number of the NFL season. We’re already coming up to the halfway mark, and the next few weeks will decide who’s got a serious chance at making the playoffs.

The halfway mark is when teams take stock, so it feels like a good time to do the same. I’m going to start posting my intentions each month as a little written commitment for the weeks ahead.

Dailymuse, my personal newsletter product, is motoring along nicely, and I’m really enjoying using it every day. This month’s focus is finishing the upgrades to the payment gems. I put off updating these for too long, and now I’m paying for it, one version at a time.

Laurel, my bookmarking manager, has been quiet of late. I haven’t been saving much to it, partly because its admin screen is separate from the web app I use to update my Jekyll blog. That extra step is enough to put me off. So for November, I’m going to add bookmark saving to that web app. Once that’s done, I’ll give Laurel the same CSS as my blog and move it to a subdomain.

I’ll check back on my progress in another post in December. I hope to keep this going through next year.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t start the week planning to build my own Markdown editor for macOS, but by Thursday night, I already had something that worked.

I’ve jumped the gun. Let’s rewind a bit.

My skill set is in web development: Ruby, Rails, Hanami, CSS, JS, and HTML. It’s been my bread and butter for the last 15 years. Building a macOS app has always been on my radar, but I never got round to starting one.

At the start of the week, I was split between VS Code and Obsidian when editing a file in my personal work wiki. I record the tickets I work on, any information that might be useful later, and other important bits. For a while, I’ve wanted a Markdown editor to maintain a few Markdown files separate from the wiki, something other than VS Code or Obsidian. They’re scratchpad files I keep around and usually clear out at the end of the week. Sure, I could use another text editor like Zed, but I wanted a plain-text editor, not a code editor.

Dozens of Markdown editors could serve my purpose. Then I thought, “What if I tried to build my own?”

And so, Margin was born. I didn’t spend long on the name. All I knew was that I planned a feature involving the margin itself, so the name stuck; the feature will come later.

Armed with Claude, I decided to build the absolute basics: type Markdown on the left and see it render on the right. The first prompt delivered a rather basic but working Markdown editor. After an hour or two, I had a small macOS app with a couple of additional changes: themes and file loading and saving . That was version 1.0.0.

After a few more tweaks, I added menu bar formatting options and syntax highlighting in the text editor, and fixed a couple of bugs with dashes and quotes. Not bad for two evenings. The experience has been quite an eye-opener, and I am slowly getting used to reading Swift code. Don’t get me wrong: I’m never going to build the next big thing for macOS, but being able to build my own app, even slowly, has been quite liberating.

The application itself is mostly SwiftUI. The only exception is the text editor, an AppKit view embedded in the SwiftUI layout. For the most part, Swift isn’t far removed from other languages I’ve used, but it will definitely take a while to get familiar with it.

For those interested, Margin is open source, but it’s not a typical open-source application. You can read the code, download it, and even run it if you choose, but I am building Margin just for me, so I’m not looking for contributions.

I’ll keep working on this a couple of hours a week and see where it takes me.