Matthew Lang

I spent my teens and many years after reading through the Discworld books and now I'm passing them onto my oldest to read. It was too soon for such a remarkable author.

via XKCD

It's been quiet of late on my blog and for a good reason. While my daily posts have ground to an almost complete stop, I do have a good reason for it.

Today I'm officially (and nervously) announcing a micro-service of mine, DailyMuse. So what is DailyMuse? Well, let me first take you back to a post that Patrick Rhone made on App.net.

Maybe something like this exists but, if not, someone should build it: I want to type a bunch of things into a place and then have that place pick a thing at random and email it to me once a day.

I made a note of this post with the intention of building something, but I never got round to it. Patrick's tweet in October was finally the nudge that I needed.

"Making cool stuff for our friends that they would like" sounds like a solid, successful, business plan to me.

— on App.net by Patrick Rhone

Now while I don't know Patrick personally, having not met him in person, he is someone who is a great influencer on how I work. His books are great source of reflection and I've long been a fan and user of his Dash/Plus system. So having established that I'm not friends with Patrick in the traditional sense, I still wanted to make this "thing" for him.

Having toyed with a few ideas before the end of last year, I started putting something more concrete together that Patrick could use. After a couple of weeks I had the basics of the service working. After a brief introduction by email, Patrick became the first user of DailyMuse.

That's the story behind the idea, but what is it? I think it can be best summed up as this:

DailyMuse is your own personal email subscription. You're the curator and audience.

Using DailyMuse you can collect quotes, phrases, lists and links in your own collection of snippets. DailyMuse then sends you one of these snippets at random, once a day.

Snippets are written in plain text or using Markdown. You can tell DailyMuse to pick a snippet at random or to pick from a queue of previously unsent snippets.

Receving the same snippet on consecutive days doesn't offer much value, so I added the ability to pick from snippets that hadn't previously been sent. There is still a lot to be done with it, but with the it's core value in place and working, it didn't make sense to hold on to it and never ship it.

So if getting the right start to the day sounds like your thing, and you don't mind curating your own collection of content to start the day with, then why not give DailyMuse a try? It's free for 30 days after which you can subscribe for $2 per month or £20 per year.

via FGGT

Here you go.

Can't wait to see this being available. It will be interesting to see if snippets can be saved to other tools like Dropbox.

via Wired

Last night, round about 5pm, I closed down my work apps, shut the lid on MacBook and left my iPhone at my desk. I checked my son was doing his homework right and proceeded to get the dinner started for the rest of the troops coming home. Not much different from most weekday nights really. Other people had different plans though.

Last night Apple announced more information for their Apple Watch and a new MacBook, as well as a few other things I guess. Don't worry, this isn't a post analysis of the event. It's a few words about my increasing indifference to Apple media events.

I like my Apple products. They help me make a sustainable living, they make the daily grind easier, they make connecting with remote family easier and they can even go with me everywhere letting me capture those little moments in life that you always want to remember. I could buy alternatives to them, but the prospect of getting different platforms and apps talking to each other and working isn't something I want to do. I just want my devices to connect and work so that I can get on with more important things. That's all they need to do.

At no point last night did I feel the need to watch Apple's event or even read the flood of nonsense tech journalism that followed it. I skimmed through my timeline on Twitter and I saw a couple of hundred tweets mentioning the Apple Watch and about maybe twenty or so tweets mentioning the new MacBook. So the Apple Watch is a given, but I'm not interested in that in the slightest. The new MacBook was interesting though, so I checked the specs on the Apple website. Job done. It probably took me a couple of minutes to do that. I refused to spend any more time digesting the why and how of Apple announcements or read any of the associated articles with the luring headlines by technology news sites that at the end of the day just want people to click through to their site for advertising.

The reason why I'm becoming so uninterested in the actual Apple media event is that anything remotely Apple related is over hyped to the point where you would think that Tim Cook was announcing world peace on the stage. Last night's event announced information for a product that we already knew about and information on a new product as well as other minor announcements. If this was made by any other tech company it would have got a minimal amount of coverage at best, but because it's Apple we get flurry of tech sites falling over themselves to be seen to be reporting on the event. Live blogging the event, doing a post event analysis and then making their final predictions on whether the product will be a success or notand usually whether it will make or break Apple. It's too much and thats what puts me off them. Not necessarily the even itself, but the inflated media interest around it.

Next time Apple make an announcement, I'll do the same. Leave all my gadgets at my desk and get on with the rest of the day, because even though I've bought into the Apple world of products, I can catch up with the changes in their product line-up on their website and in my own time.

... carefully drawn up by Execupundit.