Setting up my oldest son with my old MacBook Pro today. It’s ideal for him for his studies and I hope it helps him get better grades in his prelims and highers this year.
I’m Playing Ticket To Ride Europe with the rest of the family before the bells. My niece and I aren’t quite winning, but we’re a close second.
The migration to my new MacBook Air is almost complete. I liked the opportunity to start from a clean slate, so most of the process involved copying files across. I thought iCloud would have helped in this respect, but it was not always functioning on my old Pro.
My new Air arrived to replace my ageing Pro. Ten years is a long time to have a laptop. I definitely had my money’s worth from the Pro. Lots of setup to do over the next couple of days.
It’s the first of three days back at work before New Year. The upside is that being back at work today for a few days means that I’ll be a bit more prepared starting again after New Year.
I have been wrestling with the Vips library for Ruby for most of the afternoon. I am trying to get multiple PNG files with alpha channels to layer on top of each other to produce a final image. So far, my only success has been combining a single PNG file with a JPG.
I may have found the perfect place to order practice golf balls for Ethan. Ayrshire Discount Golf Balls. A reasonable price for practice balls, and some of my money for each order goes to a children’s cancer charity.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
Well Spent Days
Patrick Rhone’s plan for measuring his days in the future is definitely something I can get on board with.
One day, I hope not to measure my days in minutes or hours, but in miles walked and pages read.
And on that note I finished a book this morning and just finished an hour walk with Jennifer through the trees where we live. A great day so far by any measure.
A Cratchit Christmas
Wally Bock shares an ideal model for present-day Christmas in a time when, there’s a demand and push for us to spend and consume beyond our means.
What I’ve always liked about the story is the way Dickens portrayed that dinner. Dickens had been poor and he didn’t romanticize the poverty.
Instead, he showed a family enjoying each other and the day. There would be time for work and old man Scrooge soon enough. They knew that Tiny Tim would probably die soon. But there was still joy and refreshment to be had.
It’s not a bad model for us today. For a day, surely, we can set aside our smartphones and turn away from the worries, maybe even turn off the news. For a day, we can enjoy some time away from stress and bathe in the joy of being with people we love and who love us.
And yes, my Christmas tradition of reading A Christmas Carol continues this year.
Kurt Harden shares his essential mix for Christmas. Perfect background music while I finish work today and get the house into some order.
Drew finished the Home Alone build a few days ago. It’s a fantastic build with plenty of detail. A great set for the holidays.
I finished today’s NYT Spelling Bee over some coffee and eggs. An excellent start to the day. 😀
Sticking with tried and tested
Over the weekend, I decided to give Readwise’s Reader application a spin. After seeing several tweets about the product, I thought it might be a way to combine my Instapaper and Feedbin subscriptions. After exploring the product over the weekend, I’ve decided to stick with Instapaper and Feedbin.
There’s nothing majorly wrong with Reader. It’s a fine read-it-later product and has many great features. It’s still in beta, though, but there’s nothing there that would stop others from seeing the value in it.
My main gripe with Reader is that it tries to do this and several other things, all in the same product. Saving articles for later is known, but it also allows you to subscribe to feeds and newsletters, send emails to Reader and upload PDFs and EPUBs. That’s a heck of a feature set, and while it can do all these things, I already have these features covered elsewhere.
My Kindle and Books apps handle any books that I might be reading. Instapaper is my go-to read-it-later service. Feedbin is what I use to subscribe to Youtube channels, RSS feeds, email newsletters and Twitter lists. Finally, between Hey and Basecamp, I have places for keeping emails.
The main difference I found is that while Reader does all these things, I am happier with the products I already use. That might be harsh comparing established products to Reader when it is still in beta. I did find Reader tricky to navigate through, and it just didn’t flow for me in the same way that Feedbin or Instapaper does. I’ve no doubt that Reader will improve over time, though I’m content with the setup I have now.
I went out for a quick six holes with the boys this afternoon. Glad to see the boys still playing great.
The Lego Home Alone build is coming along nicely. Not much progress this week though as Drew has been in his bed with a virus this week.
Good to see Jason Kottke back at kottke.org.
I just discovered that the Bear blogging platform has its own discovery feed. Love this! It would be good to see a similar feed on Micro.blog.
Winter ready
The boys pitched in this afternoon and tidied up the back garden. Leaves were raked away, patio furniture cleaned down and stored away, golf nets and mats put away, and we topped up the bird feeder.
We then got the Christmas tree and decorations out and put them up all around the house. It’s nice having to look forward to over the next few weeks.
The Lang household is ready for winter.
I am almost ready to migrate Dailymuse from Heroku to Hatchbox. Once migrated, Dailymuse will start receiving some much-needed updates on both the front and back end. The core feature will remain the same, but I will add a few additional features.
Happy Thanksgiving to folks in the US! Have a fantastic day!
Curtis McHale shares his weekly planning process in Things 3.
Drew and I started the Home Alone build from Lego last night. We finished the van last night and started the first bag of the house this morning.
Better off without Twitter?
There is a lot of online chat about why losing Twitter might be okay.
I’ve read a few threads on Reddit, Micro.blog and Twitter itself that we would be better off without Twitter. It’s a convincing argument.
Twitter has become different from its early days of tweeting by text with 140 characters. The platform has grown into a platform for the world. It broadcasts news updates, provides coverage of sporting events and scores, updates on critical political events, and acts as a marketing platform for thousands of organisations and millions of people.
In the last few years, though, Twitter has become something else. A battleground. A place where discussions can often fall into threads of trading insults at each other. A place where people, governments and organisations can pedal lies with minimal accountability. A place where people can hide behind their avatars and threaten others without being held accountable. Twitter has tried to deal with these negative experiences over the years with content moderation and enforcing the platform’s rules, but it still happens.
I might be painting Twitter as a terrible place, but there are positives to Twitter. Although I’m not a frequent tweeter, the content from the people I follow on Twitter is of value.
I’m under no doubt that many others are happy with their Twitter experience. They follow the accounts they want to, scroll through their timelines and share and interact with others on the platform as they want to. If the world is better off without Twitter, will these people be better off without it too?
Regular bloggers and those who know their way about the web will largely agree that the world is better off without Twitter. They can continue writing and posting from the platforms they enjoy using. What about the people who genuinely want the ease of Twitter and what it brings to them?
If Twitter were to disappear, I’m sure I would find alternative means of following others through different platforms and means. What about those who are not so Internet savvy? They might need help finding an alternative means of following others, which leads me to think that we’re not better off without Twitter. Well, not at the moment. The web is still an excellent platform, and this could change.
I’m curious about hosting my own Mastodon instance. More so to see what’s involved in running it and how it integrates with other instances.