A south-facing office window has its ups and downs.
On the upside, bright sunny days like today are great for looking outside, and the office is well-lit throughout the day. On the downside, it means some serious squinting of the eyes is needed to read the code on my monitors.
It’s a big coffee morning.
My favourite feature of iOS 18 is the changes to the home screen. Dark mode icons and the ability to place apps freely on the screen are welcome additions.
Another great Sunday afternoon golfing with Drew.
I’m pre-ordering two new iPhone 16s today and giving my old iPhone 14 Pro to my youngest. This is my first time pre-ordering an iPhone.
Still scrolling through Reddit’s /r/coolguides group thanks to @Annie’s earlier post. So many good guides!
It’s that wonderful time of year when I can golf in the afternoon with the boys, head home for a Sunday roast dinner, and watch a couple of NFL games in the evening.
Office for this morning. Refereeing the junior club championship.
TIL, there is no sensible way to transport helium-filled balloons in the back seat of your car when you’re the only one in the car.
Sadly, Reeder no longer supports other RSS feed clients like Feedbin and Feedly.
Why doesn’t this version of Reeder support third-party sync services?
With the new Reeder, tracking what you’ve read is based on your scroll position rather than traditional read/unread states. This design makes integration with most third-party sync services non-trivial, so support for these services is not currently planned.
This change away from unread/read states on posts is probably my biggest concern with the new Reeder app. Scroll positions have been used in similar applications to determine how much you read. From my memory, I didn’t use this feature in the applications that implemented it. I was happy to start scrolling from the latest posts and scan back as far as I wanted. It’s early days, though, and I haven’t even added any significant number of feeds to Reeder to see how effective this will work.
That is the beauty of unread/read states, though. Minimal thinking is required to determine what’s left to read. I know from a glance what I need to catch up on. Scroll positions require me to scroll to catch up to the point where there’s nothing left in my timeline to see. I would much rather click through collections of feeds and see precisely what’s left to read.
For now, though, I’ll keep Reeder Classic on my iPhone, but I can see myself using Feedbin’s iOS app instead of Reeder Classic over time. I imagine there will come a time when Reeder Classic won’t be supported. When that time comes, I would prefer to use an alternative to Reeder Classic daily rather than be forced to make the change away from it.
This week, I learned how to build my own reporter for Minitest and rolled my own feature flag manager. I love programming in Ruby!
I’m unsure how I feel about the AI Chatbot feature in the latest Firefox release. Granted, it’s part of Firefox Labs, an optional experimental feature, but I still don’t see a real need for it.
I’m still following 25 people on the bird site. I check in here once every few weeks to see what’s what. On a slightly related note, I still can’t understand why more organisations are not running their own Mastodon instances. Too complicated? Unproven technology?
Is anyone a user of Hyper? I am looking for recommended plugins and themes. The Hyper homepage seems a bit sparse. I was hoping there might be more themes and plugins out there.
After six months of use, I cancelled my Pro subscription with Raycast. I can get the same functionality using Spotlight, Pastebot, Rectangle, and a mix of ChatGPT and Copilot for GitHub.
Starting the morning with coffee and some trip-hop. Need the coffee after having spent most of the night listening to a neighbour’s car alarm continually going off, and well, who doesn’t like trip-hop?
The downside to getting some new tech in the house is the need for follow-up purchases: screen protectors, cases, and sleeves.
We upgraded our youngest’s old 7th-generation iPad to a new 10th-generation iPad. I reset the old one, which I now use for reading and surfing. Usually, we re-cycle devices down the way to the boys, but our youngest needed a new one for high school. Happy to take the old one!
Not a bad day so far today. A cooked breakfast, to begin with, played golf with my Dad and then headed home to get a few chores done before the rest of the family gets home. I could do with a few more days like this through the year.
Took the wee guy to the driving range for a session today. Weather has been awful this week for golfing.
I love Michael Wade’s reason for using a fountain pen.
Thoughts flow more smoothly and there is an artistic aspect to the handwritten page.
— Return to Old School by Michael Wade
This morning, I received a nice little haul from Field Notes. A few items I saw in a recent sale.
I’m always hesitant about using AI tools while coding, but I have found one good use for AI while coding: naming things. I’m terrible at naming things.
This week, though, I’ve been using Copilot to see if I can improve on the names of the objects and methods I have. I’ve had good results so far.
I like the new Journal feature by 37signals included in their Hey product. I’ll explore this for a few weeks as I’m also trying Apple’s Journal app instead of Day One.