Matthew Lang

Patrick is now nonline for at least the next year.

As of March 4, 2017 I’ve stopped all online publishing. This includes my websites and social media accounts. No blog posts, no tweets, no status updates. I’m nonline. I expect this to last at least a year. In that time, I’ll be writing. My goal for that writing is to become a book.

— On Sabbatical by Patrick Rhone

I'm glad Patrick is still going to be running his newsletter during this sabbatical. A little opportunity to see how the writing is going and what else he's been doing.

... it isn't.

Bear uses a simple three-paned design. The largest column is devoted to your current note. A smaller column to the left contains your notes in reverse-chronological order, topped by a search bar. The left-most column contains notes that you’ve pinned, as well as any tags you’ve created to organize your notes — #recipes, for example. I spent years trying to sort my notes into notebooks in Evernote, only to learn that what I really needed was a faster search box.

— Why I finally replaced Evernote with Bear by The Verge

I've been a user of Bear for a few months now. Previously I used Simplenote but I found it lacking in a few features. Bear has these features along with a much more pleasant interface.

... re-imagined.

via BoingBoing

When Ricardo Bofill stumbled upon a dilapidated cement factory in 1973, he immediately saw a world of possibilities. La fábrica was born, and almost 45 years later, the structure has been completely transformed into a spectacular and unique home.

The factory, located just outside of Barcelona, was a WWI-era pollution machine that had closed down, and came with many repairs to be done when Ricardo Bofill and his team purchased it. After years of partial deconstruction, the determined architect proceeded to lace the exterior of the property with vegetation, and furnish the interior as a modern living and work space.

— Architect Turns Old Cement Factory Into His Home, And The Interior Will Take Your Breath Away by BoredPanda

Amazing.

At the start of this week I was visiting a client for a catch up and a chance to go over a project I'm working on with them. It was great to hear from the client that they're exceptionally happy with the progress, but that's not what this post is about.

During my visit I couldn't help but notice the two Surface Pros in my client's office. It was the first time that I have seen these devices out in the wild.

After quizzing my clients about them for half an hour and a quick demo it was fair to say that the Surface Pro have not only been really well designed but also specced well. Each of the devices were being used for the usual office tasks but they were also used as development environments and in each case plugged into a dual-monitor setup. As a portable device it's light years ahead of the iPad and in my eyes better than the iPad Pro.

As an Apple fan I've been disappointed with the distinction between the iOS operating system and macOS. While iOS was made to drive portable devices, it is certainly not the ideal environment to be doing any kind of software development. Apple have been expanding their mobile products to be bigger and faster and now we have the iPad Pro as the ultimate touch device that Apple offers. The problem is that the device still uses iOS.

When you're limited to the apps that you can install and the amount of access you have to a device I think it's hard to justify the label of "Pro" on the iPad. When I first heard about the upcoming release of the iPad Pro I assumed that a touch version of macOS would be offered. Sadly that wasn't the case.

When I look at the Surface Pro I see a portable device that can replace a desktop and a laptop but is also really effective when you're on the go.

Will it replace my MacBook Pro?

Not in the near future. I still love working in macOS and it's where I've invested my time to get a range of apps and tools that work well for me. I'm not about to give that up in a hurry.

It's fair to say though that I've now been put off from purchasing an iPad Pro. I don't see the benefit. If I can't run a terminal client and a text editor to write code then it hardly qualifies as a "Pro" device.

at Cultural Offering.

While I am giving something up for Lent, I am also adding something. I am going to add more books. I am going to add longer articles, listen to entire albums. I am going to add more of the long form element back into my life.

— Lent and amusement by Kurt Harden

It's always good to give something up for Lent, but it's even better to also add something that makes your day better.

We launched Ghost about 4 years ago with a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign. Today, it's a sustainable healthy independent business with $750,000 annual revenue and a team of 10, and users including NASA, Square, Vevo, Sky News, Mozilla, Zappos and so many more.

— Ghost on Indie Hackers

Proud to be a Ghost user and looking forward to seeing what else the Ghost team can add to an already great blogging platform.

... coffee.

Once I start the coffee I have five minutes to make sure the dog doesn’t chase the deer into the woods of get sprayed by a skunk. I shine the tactical flashlight over the yard and then open the screen door…

Then I wait for the coffee. This is a important routine.

— The first thing I do by Kurt Harden

The sequel to Alto's adventure is coming soon. This will be one sequel that I know won't disappoint.

I've been having a successful run with the bullet journal and implementing Mike Rhode's daily plan bar but as a weekly view rather than a single day's view. Daily plan bars go on the left while a list of tasks for the week goes on the right. I'll do a better write up of this in time complete with a more annotated description.

... deserve great content.

I would love to see a return of some great quality and slim netbooks.

I'm in the middle of assessing a new iMac to replace my MacBook Pro which means I still need a device that I can take to client's to do the odd bit of on site programming. Unfortunately the iPad Pro is a lousy programming device, which leaves a gap for an affordable netbook that I can run Linux on and take to clients.

... with Patrick Rhone.

I’ve recently re-adopted something I learned in a high school creative writing class. I’ve been keeping a Field Notes notebook in my back pocket and capturing stray interesting thoughts that pop into my head and things I overhear from others (conversations, movies, reading, etc.) There’s no specific reason or purpose for these random snippets, for now. Just listening, observing, waiting, and writing down anything that catches my attention.

— Capturing the Wild Snippet by Patrick Rhone

with Execupundit.

For a long time I've wrestled with a number of different terminal apps and tools in the hope of improving my productivity at the command line. Initially I used iTerm2, a terminal emulator for macOS, as my preferred terminal app. Then I also started using tmux, a terminal multiplexer, on top of that. Then came along Vim, the open source text editor, and I started using that as well.

This was the first time in a long time that I had started using all three again. The benefit of using this combination of tools is that I could run both my command line and text editor within a single app and very rarely have to switch away from it.

One huge pain point I couldn't get round though was the simple act of copying and pasting text between Vim and other apps. Despite a number of attempts to get it working I've decided to call it a day on this trio of tools.

• Vim is a great text editor, but to be honest I'm faster coding with Sublime Text or even Atom for that fact. Yes, I use the mouse and yes I want to have features and plugins that don't require me to mess about with command line.
• tmux is great for managing different command line sessions within a single terminal emulator but I don't think it's a necessity. Lately I've been doing away with split panes and using multiple tabs.
• Which brings me to iTerm2. As great an application as it is, there's nothing that it offers that I can't get from Apple's own terminal emulator, Terminal.

So I stopped using Vim, tmux and iTerm2 and fell back to using Terminal and Sublime Text.

I've went full circle from starting with the basics, adding more tools to the stack, before reducing the tools I need for the terminal right down to the absolute basics. One app for the terminal and one app for editing source code.

I can see the case for using tools like tmux and Vim. Maybe you spend most of your day in a terminal as a system administrator and you're faster with Vim. Maybe you need to manage multiple servers on a daily basis so splitting panes in tmux suits your line of work. I get it. I understand why these tools exist and why you would use them.

Sometimes though scaling back is just as much a benefit.

The complete list from Nicholas Bate.