I keep re-reading this article by Tiago Forte. It starts with a line that I fundamentally disagree with and gets better and worse from there: Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement. I like the overall concept of the article which is why I keep re-reading it. I’m torn. From one angle I feel like the concepts are a complete mismatch.

A couple of months back I was looking for an application to manage art assets. I’ve been creating logos and websites for my business and didn’t love the experience of browsing these in the Finder. I eventually just stuck with the Finder because it was too much effort to test alternatives. This week I discovered Eagle which is a macOS and Windows app for managing all kinds of art assets. I’m still in the demo phase but it seems nice.

Am I the only one that’s noticed a rise in app developers pushing customers into mandated relationships through Discord and Slack as “support” channels? It feels like a trend and I am not onboard with this investment in other people’s business. Sure, I love a good user forum, but Slack and Discord are garbage user forums. Not to mention that Discord is a privacy disaster. It feels lazy and opportunistic and I don’t like being cattle for developers.

I found the idea of a minimum viable self interesting. Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same. I was reading a bit about the Rust programming language and found a nice article about the community around Rust. Without people who have it as their personal goal to make something happen, things just don’t happen.

I recently mentioned MarginNote as part of a list of Mac apps that I enjoy. It’s a very good app with powerful features like mindmap creation and research tools. There’s just one big problem. MarginNote does not embed annotations in a format I can use. Many other PDF annotation tools embed the content as a PDF meta layer. Opening the PDF in any other app means the annotations are still there.

A few days ago I needed to line up some time zones so I could coordinate a phone call. On my iOS devices I’d normally bring up CalZones but on my Mac, I didn’t have a simple tool. That’s when I remembered that we can now install iPad apps on macOS. It’s always a surprise to me when it works but many of the iPad apps I’ve tried are reasonably well behaved on macOS.

I learned about a python library named Arrow that makes time stamp handling better I stumbled on a new web app called Utopia that seems a lot like a modern DreamWeaver I read “Modern Python Developers Toolkit and found a lovely page of VSCode plugins I’m all in with the new Loki series from Disney and CNet had a good explainer for The Variant I sure hope FLoC is a flop but I feel weird rooting for Amazon

Well that was a weird year. While 99.9% of the past year was terrible the one thing I did enjoy was working from home in my own office with a desk, chair, and monitor that I like. I made some tweaks to my office setup after the pandemic lockdown and I couldn’t be happier with the arrangement. I bought a Jabra wireless headphones based on a recommendation from a friend.

I learned a bunch this week and feel somewhat happy with how I used my time. I guess Google FLoC achieves its goals The idea that “FLoC IDs are an additional dimension of how you resolve identity is definitely true,” said Desai. He said he expects identity tech and ad tech providers to incorporate FLoC IDs as another signal they might use to help resolve identity or to inform what companies know about people they already have identifiable profiles on.

Great blog post about the burdens of running a tiny piece of software that became a critical piece of global infrastructure. There was a phase for a few years where malware authors kept writing malware that would call out to icanhazip.com to find out what they had infected. If they could find out the external IP address of the systems they had compromised, they could quickly assess the value of the target.