What caught my attention in week fourteen, 2023

This week we were on holiday together with my wife's family, with a total of 15 people and a dog. There was a lot of hustle and bustle, good food and nice hikes. There was also a bike tour. Our dog learned the most.

Although I didn't have a laptop or iPad with me, just my iPhone, there were a few things (in the Fediverse) that caught my attention in week fourteen, 2023:

• 🔗 Lately I have been looking at whether I should use a link service other than Anybox. I've been looking at the new Raindrop version and the soon-to-be-released Interlink. Compared to Anybox, what I like about Interlink is its speed and the fact that the share sheet doesn't crash even with several thousand tags. It will be a bit more expensive though and I miss a few features for organisation and sharing. Raindrop almost won the race, but then it came to my attention that it comes from a Russian developer. I'm actually having a hard time transferring data and money to Russia right now and I kind of feel sorry for the developer, but I deleted my account because of that.
• 🛑 And speaking of choosing a little more carefully which service I use, I've also deleted my feedly account, where I haven't logged in a while. Their strike-breaking AI marketing can be supported by someone else. I should do this with my obsolete twitter account as well.
• 🤖 Still lots of AI / llm / ChatGPT stuff:
  • A LaunchBar Action to interact with ChatGPT
  • Petey 2.0 was released and now supports iOS as well. If you don’t want to subscribe in addition to its base price you can use your own OpenAI API token.
  • Federico Viticci (@viticci@macstories.net) introduced S-GPT: "a shortcut that lets you have conversations with ChatGPT via text or Siri. […] has native integrations on Apple platforms."
• 📚 Bought the $1 cookbooks-for-coders-books bundle.
• As previously mentioned I started trying out Logseq and Readwise Reader. I also joined the Bear 2.0 beta. I will certainly continue to use Logseq on the Mac, but the iOS version is still raising my blood pressure too quickly. Readwise Reader is expensive and still has a few rough edges, but I've been using it daily and with pleasure for weeks. Therefore, I think I will subscribe to it after the trial period is over.
• 🙂 Bookmarked Emojisaver, a macOS screen saver "that presents and animates emojis."
• 🏎️ Learned that you can use Sindre Sorhus (@sindresorhus@mastodon.social) Speediness to check your internet speed and let it display it in the macOS menu bar. You will need ‎Shortery for it to "run your Shortcuts automatically". By chance I discovered that in my youth I spent a lot of time in the skate park with Lars, the programmer.
• 💻 Rediscovered Homerow - Spotlight for the macOS user interface and stumbled upon Klack. I haven't fallen down the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards yet, and maybe this will keep me from doing so? 🤣
• 🐘 Really happy about the Automadon-Beta for iOS. It allows you to do lots of Mastodon related stuff with Shortcuts. This way I could concoct a shortcut that extracts the URLs from all of my bookmarks and exports them to Anybox.
• 🖼️ Strava art is so cool and these guys have taken it to the extreme: Notre Velociraptor a remporté un record du monde 🦖 - Maxime B.'s 1.024,7 km bike ride
• 🚴‍♂️ Planing a bicycle ride for the vacation, the online GPX file editor was very handy to combine two separate komoot tracks: It lets you "view, edit and create GPX files online: add, move and delete points, merge multiple files, reverse, add timestamps, edit waypoints and more" and this for free 🥰 (I therefore took the opportunity to donate a little money.)
• 🥾 While hiking, I was finally able to use Work Outdoors on my Apple Watch, which I had bought a long time ago. Really very practical.
• 🗺️ ‎Organic Maps might be an alternative to Guru Maps or OsmAnd.
• 🎮 ‎Scenic Route's Generations was released for iOS. The Playdate version is still on my to-buy-list for my playdate. But I’ll wait until it will be released in the Catalog store.
• 🤣 I laughed about 0xDesigner (@0xDesigner)‘s weird volume control interface thread 🧵
• "After Weirdo Walls, a collection of phone wallpapers generated with Midjourney" a set of desktop wallpapers was released: Wide Weirdo Walls
• 🎧 Dark Noise 3.0 was finally released and covered widely. Charlie made the transition from paid upfront to subscriptions. As a user I still don't like it, but it is the way. I'm curious to hear what he has to say about it in his Launched podcast, which is IMHO still very much worth listening to. BTW the last episode once again had an extremely likeable guest.
• 📝 Brett revisited his script Find which of your favorite apps are on Setapp. It's a way to forward a little amount of the Subscription fee to those developers.
• 🤬 By the way, as I'm typing all this on an iPhone keyboard: text selection on iOS is still so... in need of improvement.¹ Oh, what am I talking about, all this keyboard, never mind.
• 😀 I've started subscribing to more and more of the little blogs of the lovely people I follow on Mastodon in my RSS reader and have been very pleased to see other people, like Adam Nowak, reading mine too.
• 📺 No movies, no TV shows this week.
• 🪫 Even my new Playdate suffers from battery problems. This seems to be a firmware / OS thing.
• 🎙️Podcasts for this week: Hemispheric Views: 081: I Am Not in Texas!, Launched: 59: forScore - Justin Bianco, The Talk Show With John Gruber: 371: ‘The Skin of Your Pants’, With Daniel Jalkut, Mensch, Maschine!: GPT & Co (1/3) — Haben Large Language Models eine „Theory of Mind“?, and Mensch, Maschine!: GPT & Co (2/3) — Was verraten uns LLMs über die Zukunft der Arbeit?
  • The last two episodes are in German but highly recommended for those who understand it.

1. I just tried for 1m30 to select an URL in Bears and switched back to Drafts. It's so much easier. So, it's not only this really bad iOS keyboard but its implementation as well. Speaking of Bear, besides the keyboard desaster I like what it is offering, but I still prefer apps that use plain text files I can access with other apps as well, esp. on macOS. And yes, I know Drafts does not do this, but Obsidian and Logseq. Update 15.04.2023: The latest Bears 2 beta totally fixed the problems I had with text selection 🥳↩︎