I consider myself pretty old school. I regularly read entire articles and often take notes if something is interesting. Once upon a time I made the terrible mistake of archiving entire articles in my text note archive. It was terrible because in most systems it makes searching more difficult. The better solution for me was to extract only the quotes that I needed for a note. I created an iOS Shortcut that helps with this.

My Secret Sauce of Blogging This is where I give away all of my blogging secrets. I’ve decided to divest myself of any advantages Macdrifter has built over the past 12 years. My hope is that I will see fewer links to the Verge and maybe a few more new ideas from smart and funny people. Secret 1 Save, literally, everything.1 There’s a ton of information on the internet and searching is a very poor way to remember things.

Mac Keepers and Sleepers I’ve discovered a new universal truth of computer purchases. The moment I get a new Mac setup is the moment that I no longer have enough time to use the Mac. That’s more or less the story of my iMac Pro. After several years of neglect I’ve returned to using my Mac on a daily basis and I’ve enjoyed re-discovering what I love about macOS. Here’s a brief list of Mac apps that I truly enjoy.

Hi there fellow traveler. Let me be the first to welcome you to this elite club. It’s a club for escapists, dreamers, fools, and everyone too lazy to unsubscribe from a long dormant RSS feed. I’m no different than you. It’s a small but wonderful joy when a dead blog suddently chokes back to life. I make no warranties for the continued life of this blog but I can tell you that I miss writing.

There are no cogs at Facebook. There are complicit accomplices. The accomplices are not changing Facebook from the inside. If you work at Facebook, stop. If you sell coffee to Facebook employees, stop. If you buy ads on Facebook, stop. If you use Facebook to chat with your family and friends, stop. If you are on the board at Facebook, stop. All of these actions help feed Facebook’s community destroying engine.

One of the worst parts of traveling for work is using Concur for expense report submission.1 The entire system is obtuse and slow. But the worst part is that receipts are not accepted as PDFs. They must be images. While this is insane to me, there’s no arguing with a monolith. So I made an iOS shortcut. This is a dead simple shortcut. I select a PDF with the document picker.

A few weeks ago I was trying to share a link I copied from the Safari sharing sheet on iOS. Every time I tried to paste the link in a web form the clipboard seemed empty. I made this really simple but incredibly useful shortcut to solve the problem. The root cause of my frustration is that iOS treats URL sharing as a special case and the clipboard gets confused if I want text or a web preview, or some other version of a URL.

The Do By Friday podcast has been a highlight of the past year for me. When I felt low they made me laugh. When I felt mad they made me feel normal. Podcasts like Do By Friday are what I wanted from the internet and their success brings me hope. As a $10 patron I occasionally get gifts in the mail from a group of people that really care about what they put into the world.

The Supreme Court has spoken and we can now trademark lots of shit. What the actual fuck. Vulgar terms absolutely express ideas and one’s “mode of expression” indubitably conveys a message. Like the use of “indubitably” right there suggests I’m trying to look smart. Mode and message are often (maybe always?) intertwined.

From Derek Lowe: Neither you nor the mixer will be improved by the HF, which is one of the last things on earth you would want to expose such equipment to, and then there’s the matter of handling the Sarin itself. These process problems have been apparent since the German efforts to scale up nerve agent production during the Second World War, and a good deal of work in the 1950s and 1960s went into figuring out how to avoid them.