AITAH for Wanting 50% of Someone's Income, to Drive Them to the Hospital?

Last night I came across a guy, who had been mugged, stabbed, and was bleeding out. He desperately needed me to drive him to the hospital.

First I said: “Well, you shouldn’t have started it, when you allowed yourself to be attacked!”

Secondly, I said I could help him if he promised me 50% of his income, for the rest of his life. And then, for some reason, he got mad??

I said to him: “You don’t have any cards here.” And I told him that keeping 50% his income is better than the 0% he’ll get if he dies…

Am I the asshole, just because I wouldn’t help someone innocent in need, unless there’s something in it for me? Should I be punished, just because I had the means to help, with a car and all the time in the world?

(On a completely unrelated note: Slava Ukraini! ✊🏻🇺🇦)

On the Need for Friction

Imagine talking to a medieval farmer, about the concept of excercise. Giving yourself “useless” physical strain, to improve your health? Let’s call this idea artifical physical excercise. That wouldn’t make any sense to someone who would get more than enough strain through just living their life.

And while it will vary greatly, from person to person, how much artificial exercise is needed, everyone agrees that we need to look after our physical health in today’s society.

When discussing this, people will mention which of these they enjoy the most, which they find effective, how to fit it into their lives, etc. Some of it are games, competitions, sports, and more – and it can be your job, a favourite pastime, a hobby, or just something you tolerate.

It can also be adjustments you make to your life, like riding a bicycle to work, or changing your desk setup. Let’s call this incidental physical exercise, in opposition to deliberate physical exercise.

But, in this context, this is my main point about this: It’s very accepted to talk about doing things for your physical health, even though it might not be the most comfortable, fun, or easy.

And similar to how technological improvements increased the need to look after the health of our bodies, it has now made it important to look after the health of our minds as well.

Learning and AI

If you’re at the gym, there are many examples of how technology can enhance the effectiveness of our artificial physical exercise. However, using a forklift to lift weights might be more effective and comfortable, compared to doing it yourself – but it also makes the action completely useless! The point isn’t that the weights get lifted, but that you do it. This is in contrast with a warehouse, where the point is to get the stuff lifted.

One framework here, could be the difference between a tool and a machine. The former will enhance the user, while the latter replaces it. And when using AI, specifically for learning, some discipline is required to make sure that it remains a tool, and doesn’t slip into becoming a machine. This is one reason why I’m highly skeptical of giving young students unfettered access to LLMs.¹

A custom LLM implementation, with guard-rails that helps with this discipline, could be great for students, though. And LLMs also have great potential for teachers, as a machine can be more useful when the main point isn’t exercise.

It’s quite similar to the way we think about calculators in mathematics didactics. They’re obviously useful, and are a tool students need to learn to use. But they have to be used consciously. And when training your thinking, and establishing core understanding, they can be problematic.

Articles and videos with titles like “Junior Devs Can’t Code Anymore” are popping up, and give an interesting example of a border-case: In this case we are in a professional environment, where the work getting done is an important point. But over-relying on a tool, that might not help you develop as a professional, especially early in your career, can be quite dangerous.

As someone who only dabbles in programming, LLMs has made it possible for me to do and learn much more than I could’ve previously. But I’m trying to be conscious about it, by trying to do it myself the next time, really understand the core concepts and code I get in return, etc.

Cognitive health

I want it to be just as common to talk about doing things that are good for your cognitive health² as for your physical health.

One example of this, was a recent video, by the beautifully nerdy YouTube channel Technology Connections, called Algorithms are Breaking How We Think. He’s talking about the value of friction, and I think it explains why we should be careful not to always do things the easiest way. This can be compared to taking the stairs even though the lift is easier – and would be an example of:

Incidental cognitive exercise

One of the problematic aspects of feeds like TikTok’s (and everyone wants to make those nowadays) is that they remove any kind of friction. And I don’t think it’s a good thing that we’re getting used to just having the apps serve us something, without making any choices. “I want to listen to music. Just give me some, Spotify – I don’t care what.” This is neither great for the arts nor our minds, I think.

I’m not saying that there are no good things about algorithms, and that we shouldn’t ever use them. For instance, discovery algorithms can be great to find new people. But it’s a bit like how it’s no problem for Jane Doe to always take the lift at work, if she’s very active in other parts of her life. But I, being a lazy slob, shouldn’t always default to the lift.

Relying less on algorithms isn’t only good for your mind – it also takes back some power from the platforms. If I follow a page on Facebook, it only nudges the algorithm to give me their content – Meta still decides. However, if I follow a blog via RSS, I will get the things they write – because I made a choice.

Junk food for thought

Incidental cognitive exercise is about making choices for “the future you”. But it does require some more effort to curate a Mastodon or RSS feed, as opposed to just opening an app that always gives you unlimited amounts of stimuli.

I think it makes sense to look at the hyper-algorithmic feeds, especially for video (TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts), as junk food for the mind. And that’s why I’m so annoyed when people over-emphasise “revealed preference”:

Placing this option in the context of Facebook and Instagram actually suggests that this feature won’t matter very much; both services make it hard to find, and revert back to the default algorithmic feed, and for good reason: users may say they want a chronological feed, but their revealed preference is the opposite.

— Ben Thompson / Stratechery

If I had the choice between a salad and a pile of McDonald’s, my stupid brain would want the burgers and fries every day.³ But I wouldn’t use that as proof that McDonald’s “is better”.

I don’t subscribe to every argument of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (some of which can be heard in this Hard Fork episode.) But if we gave our kids free access to McDonald’s, 24/7, how do we think that would affect their physical health? Would they be equipped to regulate that? And how often would they be too full to bother with the healthy dinner their parents have made?

I know that I can’t have candy in the cupboard, and that I’ll eat better if I make sure to have healthy snacks available. Doing this kind of effort can be compared to curating some (finite) feeds, like Mastodon or RSS, so that mindless scrolling isn’t the only decent option. Other things could be to charge your phone away from your bed (and keeping some good magazines and books close instead), and to only have good games on your devices.

Friction is underrated

There are many great parts about modern technology – including algorithms. It’s much easier to just say: “Let’s throw it all out!” But I think we need to strive towards keeping the good parts, like how social media can help to connect us, and LLMs can be great tutors, without being naïve regarding the negative.

And similarly to how it’s very common to discuss artifical physical excercise (both deliberate and incidental), to improve our physical health, we need to be more conscious about our cognitive health. I want more conversations about cognitive excercise – deliberate and incidental.

It’s very natural for us to want to avoid friction, of any kind. But the simple fact is that it’s good for us! And when technology has removed much of both the physical and mental strain, we have to add some of it back.

In Defence of Netflix Not Being in the Apple TV App

I like the Apple TV (box). It’s the only way I watch TV! I like that it’s a competent and fast piece of hardware, without ads*, that gives me easy access to all the streaming I want.

That it’s an app platform, makes it easy for even my niche Norwegian services to be a part of the platform. It can also have things like the excellent Infuse media player (for local files and Jellyfin).¹

Apps can also choose to serve their content to Apple’s frameworks: This makes the content searchable with the global search, and also adds the content to the Apple TV app. A section of the app is “Up Next”, where you can continue watching things from different services:

However, annoyingly, Netflix doesn’t participate.

And before I defend them, I want to highlight the cynical reasons they don’t:

1. It’s better for them if you stay in their app.
   • The reason is that they can advertise new stuff (you’re not watching yet), to make sure you stay with the service. This is also why Continue Watching isn’t always at the top.
   • If you’ve finished watching a show (perhaps through Apple TV (app)), you’ll might go on to something from another service next. And then you’ll might cancel your subscription after a while.
2. They don’t have to.
   • Even though they’re not as dominant as they used to, Netflix is really popular. So they feel like they can get away with not participating.

The mistake

Last week, there was a bit of writing because someone accidentally flipped the switch, and made Netflix actually participate:

Netflix quickly turned it off again – and the take that was the most popular in this cycle, was perfectly summarised by this great quote:

Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers.

— Joe Rosensteel

As someone who uses both Netflix, the Apple TV (box), and Apple TV (app), Netflix participating would be better for me. But I think I have more understanding towards Netflix than most.

The defence

My first thought was that it was funny hearing someone like John Gruber criticising the move. When Apple themselves don’t play nice with others, to instead give users a unified experience (or whatever), he’s usually quick to defend them. And when they do this, it’s also because they’re dominant enough to not have to.

But I also think John Siracusa had plenty of good points on this, in the latest episode of Accidental Tech Podcast. And I’m stealing some of these here.

Control and competition

Because I think this, mostly, is a story about control. Apple is saying to the streaming providers: “Just give us the power and your content, and we’ll take care of delivering it to customers.” And as a user, I can see the appeal of this – but I think it’s a bit short-sighted.

I’ve noticed a major difference between the way antitrust and competition is viewed in the US and here in the Nordics: In addition to looking at things that directly affect consumers, we also think it’s important to make things better for small- and medium-sized companies – as this will indirectly be positive for customers in the long run.

And I get that Apple is far from being all-powerful in the streaming market. But they’ve shown what they do when they are, so I get why Netflix doesn’t want to contribute to this. Being the aggregator really matters.

If Apple’s business model here only was selling Apple TV boxes at a profit, I would 100% get behind blaming Netflix. A hypothetical contrast is the TV box Sonos is making: If I were the streaming providers, It would be much easier to trust Sonos to be fair, as they don’t have their own streaming service, and currently don’t demand a cut of everything.²

But even though Apple do sell their hardware with great profit-margins, you can never have enough money. So they also want to inject themselves everywhere, and think they deserve 30% of every transaction that happens on their platforms.³

But it doesn’t stop there: Apple also intends to compete in as many markets as possible themselves. (A 100% cut is even better than a 30% cut.) They’re investing a lot to build a direct competitor to Netflix, with Apple TV+.

Home screen vs. Apple TV (app)

On the home screen here, the competition between the services is fair.

However, Apple is pushing hard for Apple TV (app) to become the hub of the Apple TV (box), instead of the home screen. And here, there’s no reason to think they’ll fight fairly.

If you look at the screenshot above, from Apple’s own documentation, you can see that Apple TV+ and MLS are up top, while Max and STARZ are relegated to the bottom. And if you search for a movie, that can be purchased both on iTunes and on other platforms, which one do you think the UI will surface..? And I haven’t mentioned the millions of ways Apple can give preferential treatment to its own service in the Home tab.

Netflix could ask companies like Dropbox⁴ how much fun it is to compete with Apple’s services on Apple’s platforms… I’ve written previously about how I’m annoyed that I’m not allowed to use part of the 2 TB I have on Dropbox to store my photo library and automatic device backups. Apple is also the one controlling all the APIs etc.

So, when it comes to the balance between Apple and the other streaming providers, it’s easy to see why it’s more advantageous for Apple to funnel users to Apple TV (app), compared to the home screen. And a great example of how Apple uses its power in other areas, is that they’ve changed what the home button of the remote does by default: It will now send you to the app instead of the home screen. Also notice how this puts pressure on Netflix: As it causes users to need more clicks to go to the Netflix app.⁵ And remember that there isn’t a separate app for Apple’s own streaming service, so this is also a bit like turning one of the buttons on the remote into something similar to the Netflix or Hulu buttons you’ll see on some TV remotes.

If I’ve understood it correctly, services aren’t allowed to have their content show up in OS search unless they also provide the content to the Apple TV app. This is another example of how it’s easier to compete with other trucking companies if you also own the roads.

Don’t worry, Netflix will probably cave in the future.

They’ve obviously built support for this feature (that they accidentally turned on), which might be a part of an ongoing negotiation.⁶ And I won’t claim that this won’t be better for consumers! Because the simple argument is that choices are always good, and you’d then be able to choose to watch through the Netflix app or the Apple TV app. Let’s not forget all the cynical reasons why Netflix wants to keep you in their app!

And I get that it’s tempting to not have much sympathy for any company – especially one as large and powerful as Netflix. But do think it’s a bit short-sighted of consumers to push for even more concentration of power in the tech sector.

As a European, from a country that literally borders Russia, the US feels like less of a friend than someone like China. If you’re an...

As a European, from a country that literally borders Russia, the US feels like less of a friend than someone like China.

If you’re an American reading this, think about your own views on China, and their companies… And perhaps this makes it easier to understand why I’m so bothered about American companies insisting on owning and controlling every part of my life.

(Not that I like the CCP… People are usually fine, though! 🫶🏻 Also, I wouldn’t mind arguments for why I’m wrong. 🙏🏻)

My Blog's Photo Workflow, Powered by Shortcuts

And Thoughts on Alt Text

I use many images on my blog. But that’s not because I’m a photo blogger, or use a lot of decorative illustration images – it’s usually because I want to show and/or explain something.

I’m pleased with where my flow for uploading these, and adding them to my blog posts. So I would like to show what it looks like, and give thanks to Jarrod Blundy over at Hey Dingus, as I’ve built it around a shortcut of his.

The shortcut starting point

Jarrod has shared plenty of cool shortcuts, over at his Shortcuts Library. And the one I started with, was the one called Bulk MB Image Uploader. The point of this was to be able to upload several images at once to Micro.blog – which is the hosting provider we both use. However, uploading in bulk like this isn’t necessary to me. I just used the framework surrounding access to the Micro.blog API/app token, so I don’t have to use the website, and can do it all from shortcut actions.

More features

After being yelled at, by various web efficiency tests because my website used too many resources, I wanted to optimise the way I use images. And this involves two steps: Compress the main images, and add lazy loading (with a temporary lazy image, that keeps the layout while the image loads).

So, my version of the shortcut (which only works with one image at the time), actually uploads two images to Micro.blog:

1. One “full-sized” WebP version,¹
2. and a lazy placeholder PNG version (that has only 24 pixels as its max height/width).

I’m using Jason’s GLightbox plugin for Micro.blog to get a lightbox for the images, and I combined that with this guide for lazy loading.²

So the code my image uploader shortcut spits out, looks like this:

	<div class="lazy-placeholder large" 
		style="background-image:
		url(LINK-TO-LAZY-PLACEHOLDER.png);">
		
		[[<glightbox src="LINK-TO-MAIN-IMAGE.webp" 
		alt="MORE ON ALT TEXT LATER." title="" description="" >]]
	</div>

Annoying conversion journey

Shortcuts has a built-in Convert Image action (shown above) – but it’s really lacking. It can only convert to JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PDF and HEIF (so now WebP), and you generally don’t have plenty of options, for instance for compression. The good thing, is that these work on mobile as well!

But as I almost always do this on my Mac, I went searching for third-party Mac apps to help me with the conversion of the main image.

Both Squash and Permute have seemingly perfect Shortcut actions for stuff like this.

But Squash has an annoying bug, where it will add a “you’re using the free version” watermark, even though I’ve unlocked the app. It’s also very slow. The good thing is that, just like the built-in action, it’s able to just do the conversion and hand off the new images to the next part of the shortcut.

With Permute, I have to save the converted images to disk before passing it on. The thing that bothered me with this solution, though, is that it kept asking where I wanted to save the images, and also open up Permute when it performed the action.

The optimisation app Clop trotted in to save the day, though!

Framing screenshots

As my images will often be screenshots, I’m also a heavy user of the app Shareshot. This will take a screenshot, and either add a device frame, or some padding like on the images I’ve had in this post until now.

My uploader shortcut now asks me, “Do you want to frame the image?”, and will perform this before sending it to Clop etc. I can choose the following:

• No
• Yes, Square
• Yes, Fit Frame (with small padding)
• Yes, Fit Frame (with medium padding)

Alt text

The original shortcut has the option of adding automatic alt text generation with a module and OpenAI Vision. (And this just got a nice update!) However, I’ve turned this off.

Here’s the thing: The generated alt text is very competent – but it doesn’t know anything about the context in which I’m using the image. So I found myself heavily editing the alt text 100% of the times.

It is intended that this image description be used as a starting point for your alt text. You should review it, and edit or add to it as needed. – Jarrod Blundy (creator of the shortcut)

I can see the benefit of this starting point. But for me, it turned out to be faster to just have the shortcut allow me to manually type in the alt text.

My approach to alt texts

When I write alt texts, I like to think of it like I’m reading the blog post out loud to someone (over the phone, or whatever).

I also don’t want to waste the time of those reading with screen readers, so I try to reduce redundant and unimportant details. For instance, the alt text of the Tapestry screenshot above, in this post, is: “An iPhone screenshot with an iPhone frame, and padding that makes it a square.” As the point in this context was to show off that specific screenshot type, I focused on that. I didn’t mention that it was from Tapestry, as that’s mentioned in the caption. And the text content of the screenshot was completely irrelevant.

Mentioning the iPhone frame and padding would’ve been completely irrelevant when I used the exact same screenshot in the post about Tapestry. And this is an example of how alt text completely changes from one context to another.

I’m also not afraid of having the alt text simply be “explained below/above” if I truly give all the relevant information in the blog post itself.³ This is because I imagine it being annoying to get the same information twice.

Another example, from another blog post:

“And I get that many might like the things I don’t. So I think the answer is more customisation – like this settings screen from Mona:”

In the original context, my alt text was “I can adjust text size, text spacing, how much of the display name to show, the shape, size, and placement of the avatar.” — while in this context, it was simply “explained below”.

The o1 model (even more powerful than the 4o from the original shortcut) gave me this, by using Jarrod’s great “complex prompt”:

A smartphone settings screen shows a Mona app preview, displaying a welcome message to @MonaApp with a cat-face emoji, and listing customisation options like text size, username, and profile photo details.

— o1

It is good – but it wouldn’t really help me get to my alt texts faster.

I think it’s more relevant with other types of images, though (not screenshots) – but when I’m in blog writing mode, I don’t think it’s a big issue to just type out the description.

So, this is the flow I get when I hit the global hotkey to upload images for my blog posts:

A bonus shortcut

Here’s a link to the shortcut from above – but I’m not sure how useful it is. It’s very customised to my need, and I like to create module-based shortcut. So, for instance, the WebP Converter and Lazy Image Generator are different shortcuts. This makes it easier to plug-and-play with different ones (like one for Clop and one for Permute). But perhaps someone would like to poke around, and can get some inspiration from the mess…

I’ve also made a much simpler shortcut, for when I just need a quick markdown image (like in a note): This just uploads one compressed image, and then gives a simple markdown image link, with no alt text.

![](https://havn.blog/uploads/2025/img-9719.jpeg)

Now, I haven’t managed to get this shortcut to work with uploaded videos – so I would love to hear if someone has had success with this. Oh, and remember to check out Jarrod’s blog and Shortcuts Library!

✉️ Tapestry Feedback Feedback Feedback

Not too long ago, I wrote some feedback to Iconfactory’s latest app, Tapestry. I just got some great feedback on that, from them, so I wanted to provide a response.

Here’s what they wrote, on Mastodon:

There’s a lot in your post. Thx for such thoughtful feedback, it’s appreciated. Some things like the ability to turn off the service name is coming. The thing to keep in mind is this: just because a particular part of the design doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it wasn’t designed that way for a reason that you may have not considered.

The service name is a perfect example. Lots of people are colorblind or even unsighted. To them they cannot tell posts apart simply by color.

So while we are going to add the ability to turn off the service name, that’s why it’s there by default. Avatars are never going to move to the right side. Their placement was carefully considered as was how they appear with their transparency.

Everything you see is the result of over a full year of design, testing by over 1,500 TestFlight backers & then tweaking to adjust things that didn’t work as well as originally planned.

In the end Tapestry may not be for everyone & that’s fine

If Tapestry ends up looking & behaving like Reeder or Surf or… what’s the point? We designed the app the way we wanted it to look & behave using feedback from our testers as a guide. The design will continue to evolve based on feedback like yours (which is thoughtful) but it can never be all things to all people.

Many have told us they love Tapestry so it seems to be doing a lot of stuff right but it can always be better. We’re gratified but will continue to improve going forward. 👍

— Iconfacory

Here’s my response:

Thanks for reading my feedback, and getting back to me with such an interesting response! And looking back at my own feedback, I see that it was harsher than what was intended… Sorry!

The thing to keep in mind is this: just because a particular part of the design doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it wasn’t designed that way for a reason that you may have not considered.

Yeah, I totally get this! And as I said in the original post, I know that you are great designers (better than me), so I assume you don’t just do things at random, hehe. This isn’t necessarily a 1.0 feature, but that’s why I love being able to do little tweaks and customisations in the settings of apps: Because what’s right for some, isn’t right for others.

And I didn’t mean that I expected every piece of customisation to be there in 1.0. I just meant that, as the app evolves, it’s possible to allow users to tweak things to their liking. (Like how I, in the Markdown app I’m writing this in, can choose if Cmd+I give me underscores or asterisks for italics.) It was absolutely the right move to first launch with both colours and service name. 👍🏻

Avatars are never going to move to the right side. Their placement was carefully considered as was how they appear with their transparency.

(…)

If Tapestry ends up looking & behaving like Reeder or Surf or… what’s the point? We designed the app the way we wanted it to look & behave using feedback from our testers as a guide.

I’d love to hear about your considerations for the avatars. (I assume you’re right, and that there’s just something I don’t see.) I especially don’t understand why you wouldn’t even consider being able to move them as an option, heh…

I did a quick mockup of what it could look like: 👇🏻

And the original, the way it is currently: 👇🏻

And here’s another version, where I’ve taken back some left-margin, and made the avatars small enough to fit the timestamp below (even on short posts, like the second Mastodon post): 👇🏻

And while it’s perfectly fair to prefer them on the left, I don’t think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t still look and feel like Tapestry. I’m “just” advocating for the user to be able to do some tweaks (specifically being able to, as options, turn off service name, adjust font sizes, and move the avatars) – not demanding that it looks just like Reeder. (Even though the specific thing with the avatars on the right is available there.)

There are plenty of things I like about both the app and the design! (I’ve been using it full-time since the last post. I especially like the colourful design, and the way I can quickly move between compact, expanded, and full view of posts.) I guess that’s why the things that bother me matters more, if you know what I mean.

And sorry for not coming with the feedback sooner. I’m also a Kickstarter backer, has had the TestFlight since it launched, and has had these opinions since then, heh. (Not that it necessarily would have mattered, if I’m alone in having those opinions: Loving the colours and vibe, but wishing for tweaks to clean it up a bit.)

You, of course, don’t have to listen to, and spend time on, a noisy customer like me! But I’m genuinely interested in hearing about the considerations – as I both find it interesting to discuss, and something to learn from.

Have a nice weekend!

-Erlend

✉️ Micro Social: A New Third-Party iOS App for Micro.blog

And Some Very Early Feedback

Greg Morris is someone whose blog I’ve followed for a while, but I didn’t know was a developer. But now he has released a third-party iOS client for Micro.blog!

As he’s mentioned, it happened “quite accidentally”, and it’s very early days. So this post is just me letting people know it exist, and providing some very early feedback.

To Greg:

Oooh, I love that you’re making this! I’m 100% in the target demographic for Micro Social. (Someone who uses, but doesn’t like, the default Micro.blog app — and is willing to pay for something better.)

I’ll try to provide some more useful feedback later, as I’ve used the app more, that you can use if you’d like. 🙂

Here are some first-impressions:

(In general I like it! So these “negative” comments are meant to be constructive. 🫶🏻)

I’m currently running an iPhone 13 Mini — so the phone is probably both older and smaller than what you use. ☺️

I had several crashes two updates ago, but it’s fine now. But I’ve noticed that avatars load slowly when I scroll (even if I scroll slowly). Maybe you can have the lazy loading start “earlier”?

I really like that you have avatars and names on a separate line, so you can use full-width content. (Instead of having weirdly large left-margins, that far too many apps has. I have strangely strong feelings about this…)

I also really like the “card look”:

However, on my Mini phone, I wish you were a bit more stingy with the padding, as the content gets too narrow. Especially on the timeline, due to the extra arrow on the right side. Is this needed?

I don’t know if it’s possible, but perhaps consider moving the arrow to the block with the avatar and username, to allow (full) full width for the content? Not as pleasing – but the little arrows take up a lot of space now, as it’s the full height of the entire content (including images).

My blog is proof …

… that I like the look, hehe. And I don’t know if you have as much control over spacing as I have with CSS and clamp. But as I’ve already worked on optimising very similar spacing for my little phone, I wanted to show my work. And then you can steal it if you would like to, or ignore it if not.

We have very similar padding on “the card” – but I went for half that amount on the outside/gutter. I mashed up the screenshots here, to show the effect (but the largest effect is on the right margin, due to the arrow):

That’s it, for now!

I’ll keep using it, and might provide additional feedback later. It’s already better than the official app, IMO. 👏🏻

I’ll also be the first to buy it when you launch that part of the app. Best of luck!

Who needs a striker?? 🙌🏻 Merino does it, for Handsome FC.

Who needs a striker?? 🙌🏻 Merino does it, for Handsome FC.

I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again: On offsides, VAR should get about five seconds. If it’s not clear after...

I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again: On offsides, VAR should get about five seconds. If it’s not clear after that, let it go.

Det må være lov med kompliserte løsninger på kompliserte problemer

Støtte til Høyre (fra en som aldri vil stemme på dem)

For litt siden presenterte Høyre sine forslag til tiltak mot problemer grunnet høye strømpriser. Og i lys av svake målinger for dem, har blant annet Aftenposten flere ganger kritisert forslagene for å være for kompliserte. Dette irriterer meg. Men jeg mener også det er alvorlig.

For, det viktigste med en løsning er ikke om den er lettfattelig, men om den virker etter hensikten.

Selv er jeg noen som nok aldri kommer til å stemme Høyre – og jeg må innrømme at jeg synes det er bra at Arbeiderpartiet gjør det godt på målinger. Jeg er heller ingen ekspert på strøm-anliggende – men for meg virker det som om Høyres forslag har noen gode ting for seg:

• I Arbeiderpartiets forslag, vil de som bruker mest strøm være de som får mest i strømstøtte.
  • Dette er hverken særlig sosialt, eller noe som gir riktige insentiver til sparing, ENØK-tiltak, kraftutbygging, osv.
• I tillegg har de ikke løsninger for bedrifter.

Men hovedpoenget mitt er ikke om løsninga til Arbeiderpartier eller Høyre er best. Jeg bare vil ikke at media skal mase om at politiske løsninger først og fremst må være enkle.

Det er selvsagt helt greit å mene at en løsning ikke er god, og eventuelt forklare hvorfor. Men hvis ikke, vil jeg heller at de skal hjelpe folk med å forstå – ikke kreve fordumming.

Altså, det er jo fryktelig flott når det enkle viser seg å være det beste. Og det er viktig at politikk kommuniseres på en så lettfattelig måte som mulig. Men verden er ganske komplisert (inkludert kraft- og klimapolitikk) – og ikke alt har enkle løsninger.

Jeg synes særlig en avis som Aftenposten burde holde seg for god til å nøre opp under et forenklet verdensbilde, som først og fremst tjener populistene. Det er utrolig viktig at nyanser har livets rett.

En myte om skriveredskaper i verdensrommet

Legenden vil ha det til at NASA på et punkt oppdaga at kulepenner ikke fungerte særlig godt uten tyngdekraft – og dermed brukte mye penger på å utvikle en penn som kunne skrive i vektløshet. De sovjetiske kosmunautene løste det med å bare bruke blyant.

Denne historia trekkes ofte fram for å vise at “det enkle er ofte det beste”. Men, ikke bare er den usann. I tillegg viser seg at romfart også er ganske komplisert! (Noen vil kanskje til og med kalle det “rakettforskning”.) Og grunnen til at de ikke ønsket å bruke blyanter var at de kan brekke, og at flak fra dem kunne komme på avveie og skade utstyr og personale. I tillegg er blyanter brennbare – noe NASA hadde stor respekt for.

Derfor viste det seg at en bedre løsning var en penn av tungsten og karbon, som skrev ved hjelp av trykk skapt av nitrogen, og med tiksotropisk blekk – selv om den er mer komplisert enn en blyant.

Det kan godt være at Arbeiderpartiets løsning er bedre enn Høyres. Og i såfall er det jo en fin bonus at den er enklere! Men “enkelthet” bør ikke være for høyt på lista over kriterier, når vi vurderer løsninger på kompliserte problemer.

The Paper Dev Should Give Their Take on a Tot-Like App

I recently wrote a review of Iconfactory’s great app, Tot.

I like it – but editing text in it does make me miss my favourite places to do this: Paper and Bike.

And this process made me realise that the Paper dev has all* the pieces in place to give their take on an app like this. And it makes sense from a business perspective!

The pieces

1. A best-in-class text engine, that can jump between Markdown (plain-text) and Preview (rich text) Modes.
   • This is also already great on both Mac, iOS, and iPadOS. (No Apple Watch, though.)
2. The UI is made to be minimalistic, mimicking just a piece of paper.
3. Paper ships with several beautiful accent colours, and great support for them in the UI.
4. It also provides good export features. (Including for copy/paste.)

Here’s what I would do:

My suggestion for a name (also to make it easier to discuss here) is Slate.

A slate is a thin piece of hard flat material, historically slate stone, which is used as a medium for writing.

— Wikipedia

The next question is how much it’s OK to copy from others. Let’s pretend it’s fine to take all …

The best parts from Tot:

Fixed number of notes

I really like that Tot only supports 7 notes, that are all “internal” to the app.¹ I also love how they’re distinguished from each other by colours.²

Having exactly 7 would a bit on-the-nose… But one of the reasons I liked the “Slate” name, is that you could one-up, rhyme, and go for 8!³

Perhaps the 8 notes could be regular, accessible Markdown files in the app’s iCloud folder, to simplify automation? But that you can’t create other notes with the app, and it can’t “find” other notes if you place them there.

The business model

Tot is free for the Mac, and a one-time purchase for each extra platform (iOS and Apple Watch). I think something like this could be a good idea for Slate as well.

You could also consider just having it be free, and the business model being to funnel people into Paper. Once people get the taste for the great writing feeling, they might want a more powerful app, that can also edit files.

What to take from Paper

See my full review for why the general text engine is terrific. I’d, of course, bring this over.

Accents

I really like how the accents in Paper colour the icon, scroll bar, caret, and iOS UI. It can also subtly colour the background, text colour, and Markdown syntax. Like in Tot, this can be used to distinguish between the different notes.

The minimal UI, and visuals in general

Opening a new note in Paper, just gives you this:

On Mac, you’re supposed to rely on keyboard shortcuts and Markdown, and on iOS you have the great, customisable toolbar above the keyboard.

You would probably have to add something to show that there are different notes somewhere, though, like Tot has:

But in general, I really like the way Paper looks, with square corners, paper texture on the background, sleek caret and scrollbar, and more. You could toy with going for a more stone-like thing, though – if going for the slate metaphor… Skeuomorphism is back, baby!

Formatting

I would have the amount of formatting options somewhere between Paper and Tot. You can also compare with Raycast 🖇️ Notes:

I think not having headers is a good idea. Both to focus the app, and because the Markdown syntax would be messy.⁴

For instance, you could bring over:

• Bold
• Italics
• Ordered lists
• Unordered lists
• Task lists
• Links
• Quotes
• Horizontal Rule

(I wouldn’t mind support for code as well – but support for that is one of Paper’s weak points. I also think quotes and horizontal rule needs some visual work.)

I’d also keep the options to set your own preferred syntax.

Markdown Mode and Preview Mode

I don’t like auto-hiding Markdown syntax (as the text jumps around), and I don’t like separate preview windows, like NvUltra/Marked. So I love how Paper handles its two different modes.

The Markdown Mode is an honest mode, that shows all the syntax. But this is muted and applied (bold text is bold, etc.), for better readability. (You can also place the header symbols in the margin, like God intended.)

In Preview Mode, the app acts and looks more like a rich-text editor. This also has a little UI element helping you know if you’re about to type some bold text (etc.). Here’s an image of the two modes:

What about the rest?

I really like Typewriter Mode and Focus Mode – but I don’t think they’re needed here.

Perhaps keep the Export features, but not the Publish ones?

I’m unsure about the general level of customisability, for things like animations, fonts, spacing, accents, etc. As the options are already made, perhaps just give it?

Or just pick my defaults, which are objectively the correct ones:

• 1.1 Line Height
• 0 indentation
• 0.5 Paragraph Spacing
• 1 Chapter Spacing
• Soft blinking caret, with slow smooth movement (except when typing)

However, I think giving all the customisation options could be good advertisement for the proper Paper app.

I get that it’s harder than it seems…

I’m not claiming that moving forward with my idea would be a negligible amount of work for the dev! Just maintaining two apps would be a hassle – like how, if you made a new feature, you’d want to add it to both apps.

But I really think an app like Slate, could both be a great app on its own and be a good way to funnel people towards Paper. Adding it to Setapp 🖇️, like Paper already is, could also generate some extra income and exposure.

And apart from the UI and logic behind the limited number of notes, it would mostly be about taking features away from an app that’s already built.

Quick Recommendation #6: Arco (video game)

Original, Tactical, Recreational

Last year, Panic published a terrific indie game I’d like to recommend: Arco. I’ve only played the first two acts, but I like it a lot so far.

It has great pixel art, music, writing, and story.

It also has a genuinely innovative turn-based combat, and guilt system, which makes in-game choices interesting.

It’s available on PC, Mac, and Switch. I’m playing it on Mac, with a controller – and it works flawlessly. (If you want to get it for desktop, I recommend getting it through Epic, as the dev gets a larger piece of the pie.)

Click here to see all my quick recommendations!

Birthday boy, Vincent. 🫶🏻🐶🎂

Birthday boy, Vincent. 🫶🏻🐶🎂

App review: Tot

Yesterday, I wrote about Iconfactory’s newest app, Tapestry. Today, I want to do a little review of another great app of theirs, Tot.

“Your tiny text companion”

Tot is a scratchpad app, for fleeting notes. It was inspired by Tyke, which explains the need for this well:

I made Tyke because when I’m working I often need a little bit of scratch paper to jot something down.

Sometimes it’s because I need to paste it someplace or other times it’s because I just want to clear the formatting and edit it.

I used to use a new text editor window for that job. Now I don’t have to.

I use Tot for things like writing down everyone’s take-away orders. I also use it when I need to keep some text in a small Mac window that stays on top, or small pieces of info I might want to look up from time-to-time.¹

The business model is also both clever and fair: It’s totally free on Mac, and then you pay once for iOS (€20) and Apple Watch (€2).

My favourite part of it, is that it allows you to store 7 notes. It’s more than 1, but still limited. You swipe between them, and they are beautifully colour coded.² This makes it so you don’t fall into the trap of wanting to name your notes, or keep them forever. You’re supposed to move on.

These 7 notes are synced between Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with great apps for each.

Purposeful limitations

It supports a limited amount of rich text features: Bold, italics, links, and lists. The latter can either be regular unordered ones, or “smart bullets”, which can be toggled like a task list.

Plain-text

You can also switch it into plain-text mode. (And this setting is remembered for each note.) The app knows about Markdown, so the formatting will be transformed into this in the plain-text mode – and hotkeys, like Cmd+B, works.

Additionally, Tot handles imported text intelligently by doing Markdown conversion:

In plain text mode, any rich text will be converted to its equivalent in Markdown. If you copy “something bold” on a web page, it will end up as “something **bold**” in the plain text.

With rich text mode, the opposite happens. Any pasted text with Markdown formatting will be styled using your selected font.

The same conversions happen during drag and drop. — From the app’s documentation

It also has thoughtful details,

like counters, sharing options, Shortcuts support, colour-blind mode, and more.

Not perfect

I’ve seen Tot being mentioned as “finished software” – but I don’t agree with that.

When I jump between Tot and my favourite text editors, Paper and Bike, there are a couple of things I miss. (And that’s why I would’ve loved it if the Paper dev made an app like this!)

Tot doesn’t really support lists…

Hitting tab will only indent a list item if you have the caret before the list symbol.

When doing text selection, it also doesn’t distinguish between the list content and symbol, like Paper does. And it doesn’t wrap properly.

Formatting issues

Hitting Cmd+B doesn’t just format the text you have selected – it puts you into some sort of Bold Mode. This makes any text you type bold, until you turn it off. The inverse is true as well.

Bike handles rich text ambiguity better than any app I’ve seen:

In Paper, having the caret near a bold section (without having anything selected) and hitting Cmd+B, will turn off bold for the entire section. I love this, as you don’t have to precisely select the section first.

There are also some edge cases, like multi-line formatting, which Paper handles better:

I also miss having hotkeys to move paragraphs/list items up and down.

And wouldn’t mind folding. (Paper lacks this as well, though.)

It’s still a great app! I love the way it looks, and the limitations. It’s just not at the absolute top, when it comes to being a place to handle text.

I highly recommend trying it out on Mac, and maybe buy it for the other platforms if you use it a lot.

Norske mediehus, med NRK i spissen, bør omfavne de åpne sosiale mediene

De siste 15 åra har mer og mer blitt dreid over på lukka plattformer, som Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, Discord og YouTube. Dette konsentrerer stor makt på få hender – og de redaksjonelle og etiske problemene med avhengigheten, blir stadig større.

Den dystopiske maktovertakelsen i USA har gitt oss nye påminnelser om hvordan tech-millardærene ikke styrer etter de demokratiske verdiene som mediene har som oppgave å vokte og styrke. Gode problembeskrivelser er blant annet skrevet av Trygve Kalland i Dagsavisen og Mala Wang-Naveen i Aftenposten.

Jeg ønsker å fokusere på løsninger – som heldigvis ligger helt klare. Vi trenger bare at enda flere tar dem i bruk.

Eier, ikke leietaker

Løsningene jeg skal vise til er bygget på de samme prinsippene som det åpne internettet. Og disse kjenner mediehusene godt til, siden egne nettsider fortsatt er en viktig av nett-tilstedeværelsen.

Her har de full kontroll på blant annet design, funksjoner, serverplassering og håndtering av brukerdata. De trenger bare opprettholde én nettside, som så kan nås av alle brukere, om de bruker Chrome, Safari eller Firefox, mobil, nettbrett eller laptop. Og brukerne kan vite at de er på den offisielle sida kun ved å dobbeltsjekke nettadressa, og sjekke at det er riktig domene.

Mediehusene har også full kontroll over tredjepartstjenestene de bruker, sånn som serverleverandør og domenevert. Og publikum vil ikke merke om deres vante nyhetsnettsted en dag endrer disse.

Grunnen til dette er at det åpne internettet er bygget med standarder og protokoller. Dette gjelder ikke de lukka plattformene.

Sentralisering

Mediehusene har mye mindre kontroll på sidene sine hos de store aktørene. Innholdet kjøres gjennom skjulte algoritmer – og både disse og generelle funksjoner kontrolleres (og kan når som helst endres) av plattform-eieren. Det er også denne som styrer verifisering – noe vi så problemet med da Elon Musk brått fjerna New York Times sin verifisering på X. Det er også et problem at man må ha en viss størrelse (eller betale) for at plattformene skal bry seg med å verifisere deg.

Tredjepartene plasserer seg her mellom innholdsprodusentene og publikum. Og sistnevnte seksjoneres, så plattformene skal opprettholde kontrollen.

For å fasilitere denne seksjoneringa, og for å bedre kunne spore brukerne, dyttes det mot å måtte være logget inn, og å bruke plattformens egen app.

Vi ser altså at de lukka plattformene sentraliserer makt – mens åpne løsninger desentraliserer den.

Det handler om å eie sin egen tilstedeværelse på nett, i stedet for at vi alle, både privatpersoner og bedrifter, er leietakere hos noen svært få utleiere. Å eie innebærer selvsagt litt mer ansvar – men slik er det alltid med makt.

Åpne plattformer for sosiale medier

Derfor trenger vi sosiale medier som også er bygget på åpne standarder og protokoller. Vi trenger plattformer som gjør at mediehusene kan beholde makten over innholdet, og på den måten ivareta de demokratiske prinsippene som journalistikken selv kjemper for.

Den gode nyheten er at dette allerede finnes, og er støttet av konsortiumet for internett-standarder, W3C.

Denne digitale infrastrukturen heter ActivityPub, og er et system som gjør at ulike plattformer kan “snakke sammen”. Og mange er allerede godt i gang med å bygge støtte for dette:

• Mastodon, som ligner på gamle Twitter, er en aktør som alltid har hatt full støtte.
• PixelFed, som minner om gamle Instagram, er en annen tjeneste.
• Ukarakteristisk nok bygger Meta støtte for dette i Threads (med sine 200 millioner brukere).
• WordPress, som over 60 % av alle nettsider kjører på, har også bygget inn støtte,
• og det har også Tumblr gjort.
• Det samme gjelder blogge- og nyhetsbrev-tjenestene Ghost og Micro.blog.
• og nettmagasin-tjenesten Flipboard.

Dette nettverket, av ulike tjenester som snakker samme språk, har norske brukere gitt det flotte navnet Allheimen.

Den nye virkeligheten (hvis vi vil)

På samme måte som mediehus allerede har servere for nettside og e-post, bør de også eie sin egen tilstedeværelse på sosiale medier. Og mitt konkrete forslag her, er at de setter opp en Mastodon-server. BBC er blant mediehusene som allerede har gjort dette.

Mastodon er kanskje den mest modne av de nevnte tjenestene, og er laget av en non-profit basert i Tyskland. Den har åpen kildekode, som også gjør at mediehusene har kontroll og kan tilpasse tjenesten hvis de ønsker.

Opplevelsen minner litt om e-post

Som eksempel, så har jo NRK kunnet lage e-post-adresser som 03030@nrk.no og ytring@nrk.no. Og disse kan fint kommunisere med både brukere av Gmail, Hotmail, og andre.

Med en Mastodon-server, vil NRK fritt kunne lage de kontoen de ønsker, som @forsida@nrk.no.¹ Ikke bare vil denne være tilgjengelig selv om man ikke er logga inn – brukere vil også kunne følge den, og få oppdateringene på sine tidslinjer, med både Mastodon, Threads, PixelFed, og mer. De vil også kunne dele, kommentere, osv. Dette gjør at man, på samme måte som med nettsida, kun trenger å opprettholde én tilstedeværelse på sosiale medier.

Innleggene som legges ut vil alltid nå ut til følgerne (i motsetning til på Facebook), og det er ingen reklame eller sporing å spore. Og dersom man ønsker å bytte tilbyder, kan man også ta med seg følgerne sine. Problemet med å mangle denne muligheten, har TikTok-skapere i USA fått kjenne på, nå som de er usikre på om tjenesten vil forbli lovlig i landet.

Både avdelinger og personer kan ha sine kontoer, slik som @underholdning@nrk.no og @fredrik.solvang@nrk.no – og disse kan fremheve hverandres innlegg. Andre medier, etater og partier kan gjøre noe lignende, og vi kan få kontoer som @oslo@aftenposten.no, @politilogg.vest@politiet.no, @eivind.traedal@mdg.no, og så videre.

Og gjennom domener, kan disse verifisere seg selv – helt uavhengig av noen tredjepart.

Gode funksjoner for mediehus

Vi ser altså en relasjonsmodell som ligner mer på det åpne internettet – hvor innholdsprodusenten har kontroll på egen flate, og med direkte relasjon til publikum. Samtidig har man også fordelene med andre sosiale medier.

I tillegg har Mastodon en fin funksjon jeg tror mange mediehus vil like: Man kan knytte lenker, for eksempel til artikler, til spesifikke kontoer.

Hvis noen (også utenfor redaksjonen) deler en lenke til deres artikkel, kan man se hvem som er opphavet. Her er et eksempel på dette, fra Robb Knight:

Så hver gang noen deler en lenke til en NRK-artikkel, kan det stå “Mer fra NRK”, med lenke dit NRK ønsker.

Sommerfuglen i rommet

Et alternativ, som tross alt er blant de mer åpne, er Bluesky. Men det er et par grunner til at jeg ikke anbefaler dette i denne saken:

1. De har valgt å ikke støtte W3C-standarden ActivityPub, og har i stedet gått for å lage sin egen.²
   • I tillegg er denne er laget på en måte som vil gjøre det mye vanskeligere for aktører som NRK å drifte selv.
2. Og selv om Bluesky nok har edlere hensikter enn de største der ute, så er det likevel risikokapital og Silicon Valley som står bak – som jeg selv tenker ikke trenger mer innflytelse.
3. Det vil dessuten være mulig å sette opp en bro fra Mastodon-kontoer som @p3@nrk.no så Bluesky-brukere vil også kunne følge dem.

Drive utvikling, ikke bare følge etter

Forslaget mitt er ikke nødvendigvis å stenge ned tilstedeværelsen på de lukkede sosiale mediene, slik SVT har gjort. For det er fortsatt absolutt slik at det er flest folk på disse stedene.

Det jeg forslår, er at man starter å bygge opp tilstedeværelse på åpne plattformer nå – som i starten kan være parallellt med de etablerte. Da vil vi redusere nettverkseffektene og sentralisering av makt hos noen få selskaper langt unna oss, og legge grunnlaget for å kunne kvitte oss med avhengigheten av disse.

For, problemet er at man fort kan bli stående og vente på hverandre: Brukere blir værende på lukka plattformer, for det er der det er folk og innholdsskapere, og innholdsskapere blir værende fordi det er der det er folk. Men da blir vi fanget i en sirkel, hvor det kun er tek-gigantene som vinner.

Derfor trenger vi at mange bidrar til å bryte denne. Og hvem er bedre til å gå foran her, enn en allmennkringkaster? Ja, oligarkene er mektige – men sammen er vi ikke maktesløse.

For noen år sida uttalte Laurie MacGregor, sosiale medier-rådgiver i NRK følgende, i en sak om deres tilstedeværelse på Facebook: “Publikums medievaner endrer seg over tid og en allmennkringkaster må endre seg i takt med sitt publikum.”

Jeg forstår denne tanken. Samtidig kan også en allmennkringkaster påvirke publikums medievaner gjennom hvor de velger å være tilgjengelige.

Plattformene vi baserer så mye av livene våre på, har vist sitt sanne ansikt. Og heldigvis fører dette til at flere og flere søker bedre alternativer. Denne bølgen bør mediehusene ønske velkommen, og bidra til. Vi burde nok aldri gitt fra oss så mye makt i utgangspunktet – men det er bedre å gjøre noe med det nå, enn å bare gi opp. Det er også et etisk spørsmål, om man skal bidrar til vekst for dem som selger brukerdata og demokratier, eller om man vil gjøre sitt for å grave oss ut av denne gropa.

✉️ My Issues With the Tapestry Design

The 1.0 of Iconfactory’s latest app, Tapestry, just landed. Like the new Reeder, it’s a “unified timeline app”, that collects feeds from many different sources, like RSS, Reddit, YouTube, Mastodon, and more.

Some really like this idea (for instance for collecting Bluesky, Mastodon and Micro.blog in one place), while others don’t. I’m not yet sure where I stand.

I backed the Tapestry kickstarter way-back-when, so I’ve been able to beta test it. I like a lot of the ideas – and the way it handles feeds/connectors and default apps seems fascinating and robust. But due to some issues with the visual design, I’ve never been able to get into it… This post is my feedback letter to the devs, which might also be interesting to others.

Great designers

I spent €40 on the Kickstarter – but even if I’ll never get into the app, I won’t call it a complete waste. Because Iconfactory is a cool company, that I don’t mind supporting.

And they are excellent designers! So when I disagree with things about their work, I’m, of course, a bit nervous, heh.

Mini Gang, unite ✊🏻

I’m still rocking my trusty ol' iPhone 13 Mini. And I think part of my issues stem from me using a phone that’s probably smaller than what they’ve optimised for. I also get that it’s a 1.0, and that much of the work has gone into some really cool tech on the backend. So I hope it’s possible to see that this feedback comes from a place of love, and hope for the future!

And I get that many might like the things I don’t. So I think the answer is more customisation – like this settings screen from Mona:

Messy and cramped

I like colourful designs. And Tapestry has this neat idea, where it gives timeline entries different colours depending on the type.

It might not come across perfectly in screenshots, but with my Mini phone in hand, I find a combination of things here unpleasant.

Large fonts, lack of space

In general, the app has very little white space – and this becomes worse by the fact that some fonts are larger than necessary. And to save more space, I wish I could turn off the part where it says the type of feed. The colours already communicate this, and it’s especially useless in the feeds of just one type. (So this should probably be a per-timeline toggle.)

In most screenshots, I’ve used Dynamic Type to turn down the font size 1 notch. I like Tapestry the most if I can turn it all the way down – but then all my other apps get too small. Here you can see Tapestry with the default font size, and then the smallest possible:

Edit: You can adjust text size per app!

You have to

• add a Text Size control to Control Center,
• go into the app,
• tap the widget in Control Center,
• click Tapestry Only, and adjust.

This helps – but it’s not perfect, IMO. And now my menus are comically small…

Borders and avatars competing

I like the darker coloured border on the left side, and how it goes all around when you expand the entry. But the lines going through the avatars, that sometimes have plenty of different colours and varying degrees of transparency, makes it very messy, IMO.

I wish I could move either the avatar or the border to the right side – like you can in Reeder:

Having the option to turn off avatars (like in Unread below here), would also be nice. The names are already communicated. (I do see how having the avatars makes scanning more quickly easier, though.)

Some things are better on my 11" iPad.

At least things are less cramped! But I would still like to be able to move the avatar to the right…

It also feels more unfinished than the iPhone version: Expanding and collapsing on the timeline doesn’t seem to work, and it really needs a multi-column view, like the one in Reeder below.

Comparison shots with my RSS reader

Here you can see the title font sizes of Tapestry (purple) and Lire – on the same Dynamic Type size:

Here’s how they display entries:

It’s OK that Tapestry uses less space for an entry – but I don’t think it should then also use a larger font size. (Also, props to Tapestry for having to display one more piece of info: The type of feed (“Blog”).)

And the entire feed screen:

I’m not saying Tapestry has to become as minimalistic as Lire, or that the latter is a perfect example of design. But I wish I could tweak Tapestry, as it currently feels a bit claustrophobic to me.

Summing it up, and looking ahead

Iconfactory told me on Mastodon, that they’ve optimised for being able to quickly scroll through the timeline “and instantly be able to spot a post from a particular service”. And I guess I don’t do that all that much. But even though, I don’t agree with them that “[y]ou can’t do that in those other apps”.

Nevertheless, my wishes, for now, are these:

1. Allow me to tweak the general font size of the app. (And as titles are coloured, I don’t think the difference in font size, compared to the body size, needs to be as large as it is now.) A spacing setting might also be a good idea, as some might want the tighter look.
2. Have an option to toggle the feed type text on/off (per timeline).
3. I also want to be able to display all content in posts on my Mastosky timeline – so settings like this should also be possible to do per timeline.
   • You could have default values in the main settings, and then in the timeline settings, have a toggle for “Custom setting X” and then select what you want.
4. Be able to set avatars to be either left, right or off.
5. On the iPad, it would be nice to be able to browse the timeline with some of the entry visible, and then being able to click to expand for a bit more, and then also be able to open the entire thing. Something closer to what you can already do on the phone, but perhaps with different break points.
6. There also needs to be some sort of multi-column view.

And two, more technical things, I’ve thought about while testing:

1. Using Apple to sign in to Micro.blog doesn’t work for me. Doing that just allows me to browse Micro.blog within Tapestry – I don’t get sent back to the app to finish the connector.
2. My RSS backend is currently Miniflux, which also uses the Fever API. I get that Tapestry isn’t a regular RSS reader, so I don’t expect the feeds themselves to be synced through something like that. But it would be cool if I could sync just which feeds I subscribe through!

I will continue trying out the app, as I like both the company and several of the ideas. But for now, for me, it needs more work before it’ll become a staple in my daily surfing. Which might be expected for a 1.0 product.

I recommend checking out the app for yourself!

Quick Recommendation #5: The Mad Max Video Game

It’s not often I finish video games… One of the reasons, is that I often play games you can’t finish – like Europa Universalis and The Bazaar 🖇️. But I actually just finished, an r/patientgamers favourite: the Mad Max game, from 2015.

And it’s actually at 80% off on GOG at the moment!

It’s not a fantastic game – but if you like Mad Max (like me), I can recommend it. I saw someone on Reddit call it “the perfect mid-budget game”, and I agree.

It’s an open-world game, with a world of great flavour. The car-combat is especially good and unique.

But one piece of advice, if you decide to check it out: Exploring the open world gets quite repetitive – so it’s not worth it to approach the game with a completionist’s mindset. Just treat it as a bite-sized little treat, and do the stuff you find fun and run through the story. If you buy it for like €4, just try to get that amount of money’s worth.

I played in through Steam, and on my Mac Mini. It says it’s not available for Mac, but installing it still works, for some reason. (Not 100% sure about the GOG version, though.)

*⃣Someone writes a polite comment, with decent grammar and punctuation. People: “wtf is this an AI response??1?”

*⃣Someone writes a polite comment, with decent grammar and punctuation.

People: “wtf is this an AI response??1?”

Hmm, Micro.blog is having some CSS problems… Will try to work around it, but for now my blog looks kind of weird.

Hmm, Micro.blog is having some CSS problems… Will try to work around it, but for now my blog looks kind of weird.

Quick Recommendation #4: Ultima Retrospective (YouTube)

I have no prior nostalgia for the CRPG series Ultima. I’ve always known about the series, but never played any of the games. Still, I’ve loved a series by the YouTube channel Majuular: Ultima Retrospective

The videos are long – but well-made, with a combination of story behind the development and reception, plus a complete run-down of the gameplay and story. It’s also not done, so I assume there’ll be more content down the line! (You know, if you’re done with the 14 hours made up until now.)

The last couple of days on MB has kind of sucked… But I think something good can come out of it! I at least know that I’ve become...

The last couple of days on MB has kind of sucked… But I think something good can come out of it! I at least know that I’ve become more conscious about the fact that I should contribute more.

I tried to write something constructive, and more general, about this yesterday. (Feedback appreciated!)

Let's Try to Always Provide a Dignified Way Forward

And a Message to My Fellow Straight, White, Cis Men

It’s been a rough couple of days over at my part of the internett…¹ And this has made me think about something I learned on a teacher seminar once: While dealing with tough student situations, always provide a way for them to come out of the situation with their dignity intact, while still achieving the goal behind the intervention.

It’s not an easy exercise, I can assure you! But I think it’s an important principle, that can be applied to many other situations as well.

We can disagree and still love each other – unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

— James Baldwin (via Patrick Rhone)

It’s a time for vigilance.

Especially for straight, white, cis men like myself. Because, people not like me are under attack (so they’re vigilant whether they want to be or not) – not because of what they do, but who they are. And we can’t let them fight this battle alone.

So here’s a little message to my brethren (and I’ll try my best to do my part):

1. Let’s pay extra attention – both IRL and online. Let’s try to speak up when someone’s harassed – or ask if there’s something we can do after-the-fact. Maybe they want us to talk to the insensitive boss for them, or perhaps not. Let’s not make a scene when one isn’t warranted.
2. Let’s take the time to explain why some things might be hurtful or important – even if it’s not any of those to us specifically. It’s tiring to always have to be the one to educate – so try to pitch in. (But see the last sentence in point 1.)
3. I know it might seem performative to wear a little flag on your lapel, bio, or whatever. But I like to think that it signals, to whomever might need it, that “I think who you are is OK”.
4. Keep learning. There’s so much I don’t know about not being like me – so I want to stay humble and curious. (And this very much applies to this very post as well! Feedback is greatly appreciated.) Kind questions might be perfectly fine – but at the same time: Read the room, and see point 2. No one likes a voyeur, or to be made into something exotic. Sometimes, maybe just let someone be a regular human being, and research a bit on our own. And, for the love of God, when someone shares with us: Listen.
5. And lastly, let’s not make pronouns into a big deal. I get that it might seem unnecessary to share our pronouns, as perhaps no one (including us) has ever been in doubt. But doing it (quickly, and without jokes) is a good way to make others, with a larger need, feel less alone.² And no one will lynch us if we say the wrong pronoun to someone – just say “sorry”, and (genuinely) try our best. (If you’re in doubt, it can be a good idea to ask privately beforehand.) What’s really hurtful is when people don’t care.

Some people are out of reach.

They might have lost the will to care for those unlike them a long time ago. And when it comes to these, spending time figuring out a way forward, is pretty pointless.

But many are not.

And if we are to take this battle seriously, we’ll also be in situations with people whose hearts might very well be in the right place, but could still need a nudge. I’m far from perfect when it comes to stuff like this myself: I sometimes say hurtful things – and don’t always use inclusive language. I also don’t do close to enough concrete action to help those around me. So I absolutely also require these nudges! We are not lost causes – just causes.

And this is a spectrum: From those who need a little nudge, to those who need a larger one, and off to the unreachables. **And one thing I want to see much less of, is people who equate those in need of a small nudge to the lost causes. **

I get that comparing this with a teacher/student interaction can give off a whiff of condescension – but that’s not my intension. I’ve just seen, too many times, how people who don’t see a dignified way out, will harden. And if they don’t see a way back into the community, they’ll strike out on their own (perhaps finding other outcasts). Everyone wants, first and foremost, to be loved. A good second option is to be liked, and a third one is to be accepted. But if all of these feel out of reach, they’d rather be feared than ignored.

To be clear, I’m not talking about letting things slide, or a lack of accountability. And I get that what I’m saying can be hard (and some people just don’t deserve it) – especially if one is tired, scared, or worse.³ That is why allies are needed!

But let’s try to imagine what it would look like if amends were made. What would have to be done? What would have to be said? (Now, and going forward.) Even though we can’t drag someone across them, let’s try to build the bridges we need.

I can only speak for myself: But if you want to be someone who respects, accepts, and supports others, no matter their race, sexuality, gender identity, religion, etc. – you can hang with me. And that door is always open, even though you might’ve said and done stupid things in the past. You do have to be accountable, and walk the bridge yourself – but you don’t have to be perfect.

I don’t want anyone to feel trapped in an identity of hatred.

I’ll end on what I’d categorise as a genuine and beautiful apology someone shared online. It’s easy to fuck up – let’s not make it harder than necessary to make proper amends.

I’d like to apologise what has happened from the bottom of my heart.

I have grossly overstepped the trust and respect of you specifically, the community and all people who identify as LGBTQ+. I made a mistake by my own doing and disregard of other people’s feeling and identity.

It was incredibly stupid, childish, and disrespectful of me to make that comment, which I realised on the day as rightly pointed out by the community. It was irresponsible, insulting, and insensitive to all — and rightly have been called out for.

It was never my intention to hurt you or make you feel this way. It is, and was, very out of character of me to say what I said, and there is nothing I can say here to make you feel better.

I made a terrible mistake. I ask for your forgiveness.

This specific forgiveness isn’t primarily mine to give. But I still give what I have.

-Erlend

I Don't Have to Convince Myself That "The Model Y Is Bad, Actually" to Not Buy One

As we’re expecting a child in May, we need a bigger car. And here in Norway ~90% of new cars are EVs, so we’ll obviously buy one of those.

If I look at price, range, charging, tech, and practicality, the best choice is the Tesla Model Y.¹ I have to pay significantly more to get something similar, or get something significantly worse. However, I do not want to add that much money to Elon Musk’s bottom line – so I won’t buy one.

And to land on that conclusion, I don’t have to first convince myself that “the Model Y is a bad car, actually”. It’s OK to admit that it’s a great car (for the price), and perhaps point out things you wish others could learn from it² – while still not choosing it for other reasons.

But my car purchase isn’t the main point of this post. I use it as an example to point out a fallacy I see too much. Because, the following pattern is both dishonest and (sometimes) counter-productive:

Because, suddenly, your purchasing decision hinges on “Model Y being a terrible car” (which it simply isn’t). Now, this might not matter to you! But if someone hears this, and then finds out that the car is good, they’ll lose the reason to not buy it. So, I think this is a better thing to communicate:

You are, of course, allowed to actually think the Model Y is a bad car! My point is that one thing doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.

And you don’t have to think that everything about SpaceX is lame, due to Musk and other problematic parts about the thing. But you can choose not to fawn over it. In a similar vain, one might decide not to recommend the Model Y.

The way generative image tools have been trained is deeply problematic – and that’s the reason I won’t use them on this blog. I don’t have to also find them useless. That’s a pointless and, for the reasons mentioned, sometimes counter-productive middle step.

It’s a problem when the more ethical choice also has to be the “best” choice.³ I think it’s better to normalise accepting something slightly “worse”, and/or more expensive, because it’s the right choice.

One of the cars high up on our list is the Opel Grandland. Perhaps we would be more happy with that than with a Model Y – or maybe not. My point is that it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to convince myself that Model Y is a worse choice. I won’t get one anyway. And I don’t think you should either.

Det er på tide at NRK, og offentlige instanser, går foran og omfavner åpne sosiale medier

I dag kan jeg gå in på nrk.no uansett om jeg bruker Chrome, Safari eller Firefox.

Og jeg kan sende et nyhetstips til 03030@nrk.no uansett om e-postadressa mi er noe@gmail.com, noe@hotmail.com eller noe@mittnavn.no – og uansett om jeg bruker Outlook, Apple Mail, eller Fastmail.

Jeg kan også melde meg på nyhetsbrevet til regjeringa uavhengig av hvilke e-post-leverandør jeg bruker. Og når de sender ut e-poster, så vet de at alle følgerne vil motta dette. Dette er fordi det åpne nettet, og e-post, er bygget på åpne standarder og protokoller.

Internett-domener er også ganske sterke saker: Et kjent tips for å unngå phishing, er å se nøye på domenet – enten i nettleseren eller i e-post-adresser. For det skal ganske mye til at utenforstående får tilgang på noe som slutter på nrk.no eller regjeringa.no.

Men de fleste sosiale medier er ikke åpne på samme måte.

Likevel så synes jeg absolutt det er relevant for både tradisjonelle medier og offentlige instanser og personer å også være på disse.

La oss bruke NRK som eksempel – og først deres Facebook-side, som et eksempel på manglende åpenhet og kontroll:

Fra et brukerperspektiv, er det ikke bra at jeg må ha en Facebook-konto (med alle personvern-implikasjonene dette medfører). Jeg kan ikke følge sida med en SnapChat- eller TikTok-konto – eller en konto som ikke sporer meg. Vil jeg følge NRK der, må de lage (og opprettholde) separate sider der.

Så det er ikke optimalt fra NRKs perspektiv heller! I tillegg er det slik at det er Meta som er ansvarlige for verifiseringen (i motsetning til med domenet). Og selv om NRK har 474 tusen “følgere” på Facebook, så er det algoritmene som bestemmer i hvilken grad det NRK poster når ut. Og det er Meta som har kontroll på disse følgerne – NRK kan ikke ta dem med seg et annet sted.

Tech-milliardrene fra Silicon Valley er ikke våre venner. De holder våt offenlige samtale fanget. Det er en direkte trussel mot demokratiet vårt. - Trygve Kalland

Kallands ypperlige innlegg går mer i detalj på hvorfor dette er noe det er viktig å gjøre noe med. Jeg vil fokusere litt mer på hva vi kan gjøre med det.

Alternativet

• Men det kan være sånn at jeg, uansett hvilket type sosialt medium jeg foretrekker, kan følge @forsida@nrk.no, eller @underholdning@nrk.no, og så få hva enn de velger å legge ut der.
• At NRK da kun trengte å opprettholde én flate ut mot sosiale medier – en flate de selv har kontroll på og eierskap til.
• At brukere kunne vite at det var de offisielle kontoene, ikke fordi et stort selskap langt borte har bestemt det, men fordi at NRK (og andre) kan bevise det gjennom domener.
  • At det er NRK selv som har kontroll, så det ikke blir som da Musk plutselig valgte å fjerne verifiseringa av New York Times.
• Og at NRK kan velge å flytte følgerne sine til en annen tjeneste, hvis de skulle ønske.

Protokollen

For, på samme måte som e-post, og nettet generelt, er åpent på grunn av protokoller og standarder, finnes dette også for sosiale medier og nærliggende tjenester. Og den mest åpne av disse, som også støttes av W3C (nettets kontrollorgan) er noe som heter ActivityPub.

Det er selvsagt ikke like mange brukere på medier som støtter dette. (De største aktørene har, av åpenbare grunner, kraftige insentiver for å låse ned innholdet sitt og brukerene sine.) Men nettopp derfor er det viktig at allmennkringkasteren og offentlige instanser, som ikke har de samme profitt-drevne kravene, går foran.

Og det er ikke som om dette er noe bare noen ytterst få driver med: Meta selv bygger faktisk ut støtte for dette i Threads (med sine 200 millioner brukere), mens Mastodon¹ er en annen aktør, som alltid har hatt full støtte. Instagram-alternativet PixelFed er an annen tjeneste. WordPress, som over 60 % av alle nettsider kjører på, har også bygget inn støtte, og det samme gjelder blogge- og nyhetsbrev-tjenesten Ghost og nettmagasin-tjenesten Flipboard.

I sterk motsetning til Meta, så er Mastodon er non-profit basert i Tyskland – og hele kildekoden er åpen og tilgjengelig for alle. Så NRK kan altså for eksempel kjøre @nrk.no (og så legge til alle slags brukere og undersider de vil) gjennom Mastodon og ActivityPub – og da vil de ha full kontroll selv, mens brukere kan følge dem med kontoer fra både Mastodon, Threads*, Pixelfed, Micro.blog, valgfri RSS-leser, og mer.

Kollektivet av alle disse tjenesten, som kan snakke med hverandre via ActivityPub, har fått det hyggelige navnet Allheimen.

Sommerfuglen i rommet

Et alternativ, som tross alt er mye mer åpent enn X og Instagram, er Bluesky. Men det er et par grunner til at jeg ikke anbefaler dette i denne saken:

• De har valgt å ikke støtte W3C-standarden ActivityPub, og har i stedet gått for å lage sin egen.
  • Og denne er laget på en måte som vil gjøre det svært mye vanskeligere for aktører som NRK å drifte selv.
• Det vil dessuten være mulig å sette opp en bro fra ting som @forsida@nrk.no, så Bluesky-brukere også kan følge dem.
• Og selv om Bluesky har mye edlere hensikter enn de største der ute, så er det likevel risikokapital og Silicon Valley som står bak – som jeg selv tenker ikke trenger mer innflytelse.

Svaret er ikke å lukke ned, men å åpne opp

NRK har snakka om viktigheten av å ikke være for avhengige av tredjeparter, og om å styrke egne plattformer – og dette støtter jeg. Men måten NRK “løste” dette med egne podkaster, var helt feil. For i stedet for å omfavne den åpne standarden bak podkaster² så valgte de å tvinge folk inn i egen app. Dersom de ikke ønsket å bidra til Apple og Spotifys bunnlinje med sitt eget innhold (fair!), så kunne de gjort sånn jeg måtte gå inn på NRK-brukeren min på nettet for å få podkast-strømmene. Da kunne jeg fortsatt hørt på dem i podkast-spilleren jeg foretrekker, men NRK beholdt kontrollen.

I saken nevnt over, sa også rådgiver for sosiale medier i NRK følgende:

Publikums medievaner endrer seg over tid og en allmennkringkaster må endre seg i takt med sitt publikum.

Men jeg vil i tillegg si at en allmennkringkaster også påvirker sitt publikum. Og derfor er det problematisk å basere tilstedeværelsen i sosiale medier på platformer som bidrar til at brukerne låses ned og spores. Og da har jeg ikke en gang nevnt de andre tvilsomme aspektene ved firmaer som Meta, X og ByteDance. NRK kan kombinere det å ha sterke egne flater og det å være til stedet der folk er (som i sosiale medier) – så lenge de velger riktig teknologi.

Offentlige instanser

I tillegg til allmennkringkasteren, så er mye av det jeg har nevnt også aktuelt for offentlige instanser (og personer). Og her vil jeg bruke Politiloggen som eksempel: For det var bra de sluttet å basere seg på en X-konto! Men de valgte altså å lage en egen nettside og egen app (som sikkert ikke var helt gratis). Denne løsninga skalerer dårlig – for det ville være irriterende å måtte laste ned en egen app for hver eneste instans man vil følge.

Hvor mye bedre hadde det ikke vært om politiet satte opp en løsning med for eksempel Mastodon? Politiet ville fått masse kode og infrastruktur gratis (på grunn av åpen kildekode), og likevel hatt full kontroll. Og da ville brukere kunne følge @loggen@politiet.no eller @oslo.loggen@politiet.no, fra den tjenesten de ønsker, og få oppdateringer. Og i motsetning til X, vil man også kunne se strømmen uten å logge inn, og det er ingen reklame eller sporing å spore.

Jeg kunne også abonnert på @skred@varsom.no, og så videre, uten å måtte ha en ny app eller sjekke en ny nettside.

Vi har gjort oss alt for avhengige av noen svært få selskaper – som blir mer og mer problematiske. Heldigvis lages det gode alternativer! Men monopoler og lock-in er fryktelig vanskelig å bryte. Og derfor trenger vi at allmennkringkasteren, og andre offentlige instanser, går foran.

Makspris på strøm er en årlig idé

Fra “strømstøtte” til “strømbonus”

Støre, og Arbeiderpartiet, kom nylig med forslag til strømstøtte. Noen jubler – men makspris (som en fastpris er en variant av), og flat momskutt på nettleie, er ikke optimalt.

Jeg snakker absolutt ikke om at vi bør “bruke” mindre på å gjøre strømregninga grei å håndtere for folk! Men vi bør bruke den samme summen annerledes.

Problemet med makspris og momsfritak

La oss si man går for fastprisen på 40 øre per kWh, at den egentlige prisen er 90 øre per kWh, og så se på noen konsekvenser av en slik ordning:

• Familien Andersen (fire medlemmer) skulle gjerne hatt et stort hus, hvis de hadde hatt råd, men bor i en leilighet, og bruker 900 kWh en måned. Dette koster egentlig 810 kr, men de vil få 450 kr i strømstøtte og betale 360 kr.
• Familien Hansen (også fire medlemmer) bor i en stor villa, og bruker 2.400 kWh en måned. Dette koster egentlig 2.160 kr, men de vil få 1.200 kr i strømstøtte og betale 960 kr.
• Familien Pettersen (også fire medlemmer) bor i en like stor villa – men har jobba for å spare litt på strømmen, så de brukte 2.100 kWh i stedet. Dette koster egentlig 1.890 kr, men de vil få 1.050 kr i strømstøtte og betale 840 kr.

Denne løsninga har et stort problemer: Folk som bruker mindre strøm, enten fordi de ikke har råd til å bruke mer, eller jobber for å spare på den, får vesentlig mindre i støtte.

I eksempelet over så klarte Pettersen å spare 300 kWh av strøm til 90 øre per kWh. Men i stedet for å ende opp med 270 kr mer på konto, så sparte de bare 120 kr! Hvor ble det av de siste 150 kr? Jo, de havna i lomma til Hansen, som ikke gadd å spare.

Og idéen om momskutt på nettleia har det samme problemet. Hvis vi skulle sett på momsen der, ville jeg heller gått for en løsning a la elbiler: At man har momsfritak på de første 500 kronene av nettleia, eller noe sånt.

Strømbonus (eller strømutbytte)

Familiene fikk altså til sammen 2.160 kr i strømstøtte. Hva skjer om vi fordeler det litt annerledes, og på andre premisser? La oss si at vi gjør støtta likere, men at man får litt mer om man har større bolig:¹

Men her er den viktigste forskjellen: Familiene beholder støtta uavhengig av strømforbruket. Det betyr at familien Pettersen, som klarte å spare strøm for 270 kr, faktisk vil sitte igjen med denne summen!

Idéen er enkelt og greit at når inntektene fra norsk kraft går opp, så øker bonusen strømforbrukerne i Norge får. Strømmen vi forbruker vil jo også bli dyrere – men vi får mer igjen for å spare strøm og å gjøre ENØK-tiltak, og vi har fått hjelp til å betale for den.

Et viktig punkt: Jeg tror bonusen ikke bør være kobla til strøm_prisen_, men strøm_inntektene_. Fordi det bør være insentiver for å bygge ut mer kraft, som kan gi større salgs-volum, og som da også kan bidra til inntekter.

Det er mange detaljer som må finnes ut av, og diskuteres, ved denne idéen!²

• Skal utdelinga skje gjennom strømselskapene eller annet hold?
• Hvis ikke alle skal få nøyaktig samme sum, hvordan skal fordelingsnøkkelen være?³
• Hvordan kan vi sørge for at de som blir “lidende” av utbygging av kraft-infrastruktur får noe igjen for dette?
• Skal det deles ut like ofte som strømregninga? Hadde det vært mulig å kunne søke om et forskudd for å gjennomføre ENØK-tiltak?
• Hvordan kan man likevel sørge for en rimelig forutsigbarhet?
• Og hvordan løser vi alt dette for næringslivet?

Den norske kraften kommer fra vår felles natur, og er noe som må komme alle til gode. Den genererer også mye inntekter! Men med strømstøtte basert på forbruk, så har vi lagt opp til at noen med villa, badebasseng, oppvarma oppkjørsel og tre hytter, får mer av dette overskuddet, enn en familie i en vanlig enebolig. Kan noen forklare meg hvorfor dette så selvfølgelig er riktig og rettferdig? Jeg sier ikke at man skal “straffes” for å ha disse tinga! Bare at det ikke gjør en fortjent til en større del av fordelene ved norsk kraft-produksjon.

Mange er i en situasjon hvor det ikke er så voldsomt mye strøm å spare. Klær må vaskes, og mat må lages! Men en slik ordning som jeg skisserer, vil disse få mer hjelp med strømregninga enn i dag.

Å kun basere støtten på forbruk, er en veldig upresis måte å gi mest støtte til dem som i størst grad trenger hjelp med strømregninga – og den gir gale insentiver. Så la oss heller knytte den til inntektene fra å være en del av strømmarkedet. Og så bør heller politikerene diskutere hvordan vi best gjennomfører en løsning basert på et slikt prinsipp.

En løsning som:

• Gjør strømregninga relativt forutsigbar, og grei å håndtere for alle,
• fordeler inntekter fra vår felles natur på en rettferdig måte,
• og som samtidig insentiverer tilstrekkelig kraftutbygging ENØK-tiltak, og å ikke sløse strøm generelt.

Hurrah: My Favourite Markdown Editor Just Dropped on Setapp

The magnificent Markdown editor Paper just became available on Setapp 🖇️, making it more accessible for more people to try out! I’ve written a thorough review of it previously, but here are the things you need to know:

• It’s simply the best Markdown editing experience I know of. (And I’ve tried a lot.) Only Bear comes close.
  • And it’s excellent both on Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
• It’s very minimalistic (just opens as a blank, white “sheet of paper”).
  • At the same time, it has a bunch of hidden advanced features and customisation options.
• It’s a file-based editor, as opposed to being library-based.
  • One good thing about this, is that it can be used in conjunction with other Markdown apps,
  • like using it as a nicer editor for notes stored in NotePlan, Obsidian, etc.

So, I wouldn’t primarily say it’s a “notes app”. It’s more of a “writing app” and “Markdown editor”. You could, of course, use it as a notes app – but then you have to rely on Finder/Files and x-callback-URLs for the organisation.

I highly recommend giving it a go, and play with the settings to make it behave like you want! Perhaps my favourite feature, is the combined Typewriter Mode and Focus Mode:

The Terminal – For Noobs (Like Me), Part Three

A More Noob-Friendly Terminal

This is the third, and final, part of my terminal guide.

• The first one was about basic concepts,
• the second about why you might want to use and become familiar with the terminal,
• and this is how you can make your terminal more noob-friendly (regardless of what you’ll end up using it for).

I’m not saying these things are stuff everyone should do – but they are things that have helped me like the terminal much more. And feel free to just pick-and-choose the things you want to try out.

Also, as I’m a Mac user, this might be a bit Mac-centric. But I think all of the programs I’m mentioning also exist for Linux – and many of them for Windows as well. (And installation is probably similar.)

Choice of app

One thing that has tripped me up quite a bit, is that terminals adhere to different text manipulation conventions than the rest of the OS. For instance, Shift+Command+Left will usually select text from the caret and all the way to the left – but it doesn’t in terminals. To be fair, the hotkeys in the terminal are probably better, if you know them. But to me, it’s just impractical that they’re different when I spend so much more time with “regular” bindings. (Here’s a video showing some of the default bindings in most terminals!)

The only terminal I’ve found that behaves like regular apps, when it comes to text, is Warp 🖇️. It also has several helpful AI tools integrated. However, this is a controversial recommendation. Among other things, it has gotten a lot of flack for the fact that you used to have to log in to use it, and that it’s quite bloated compared to other terminals. But I still think it’s a good choice for beginners!

If you want something leaner, either to start with or if you’ve graduated from Warp, I recommend Ghostty.¹ I’m currently using Ghostty – and the screenshots in these posts are from it. I don’t miss the AI features, as I prefer to keep a chat going in Raycast 🖇️ anyway. And I’m getting by with the, in my opinion, poorer text manipulation.

Customising

In this world, programs typically don’t have a regular settings screen, where you can hit buttons to make your choices. Instead, they’ll usually have a text file, where you add the changes you want to make to the default settings. These settings files often start out empty, or perhaps not even made at all (so you have to create it manually).

Let’s use the code editor Zed as an example: The settings.json file starts existing, but empty. To show you the things you can change, how what you need to write, they show you the default settings in a “filled out” file.

You can see what that looks like at this link – and one way you can adjust settings, is by copying and pasting everything from the default into your settings.json, and then change what you want.

But you can also just write new values for what you want to change, which is what I have done. Below is my entire settings.json for Zed – and you can probably understand what every line does!

{
  "uifontsize": 16,
  "bufferfontsize": 13,
  "bufferfontfamily": "FiraCode Nerd Font Mono",
  "theme": {
    "mode": "system",
    "light": "macOS Classic Light",
    "dark": "Quill"
  },
  "indent_guides": {
    "coloring": "indent_aware"
  },
  "git": {
    "inline_blame": {
      "enabled": false
    }
  },
  "journal": {
    "hour_format": "hour24"
  },
  "scrollbeyondlastline": "verticalscroll_margin",
  "softwrap": "preferredline_length"
}

Some config files use json, like this. Others use toml, other languages, or something proprietary. In general, it’s a good idea to open these files in code editors, with syntax highlighting (like Zed).

.zshrc

A file you need to create yourself, is the config file for the shell (zsh). In your home folder, create a file called .zshrc (with no extension or anything). This is where you customise the shell itself. And a nice thing about this, is that these settings follow you between different terminal emulators (like Warp and Ghostty).

Later in this guide you’ll be asked to add stuff to this file. Furthermore, the order of lines usually doesn’t matter in files like this – but hierarchy might.

When you’ve changed the .zshrc file, it won’t be apparent in your terminal immediately. You can restart the shell with exec zsh, or by just quitting and re-opening the terminal window.

Starship

There are many ways of configuring your prompt – and one of them is Starship. For it to work optimally, you need to have a nerd font installed, and used as your font in the terminal. These are fonts that have a bunch of extra, specialised, glyphs. I like FiraCode! (Click here for a preview, and here to download. You can also do brew install font-fira-code-nerd-font)

• To install Starship, first just run brew install starship,
• then paste the following into .zshrc: eval "$(starship init zsh)",
• and lastly, create a config file, if you want to customise it.

Let’s look at the command, from the documentation, to create the config file:

mkdir -p ~/.config && touch ~/.config/starship.toml

The && separates two different commands, and states that they should be performed one after another. So first mkdir -p ~/.config, and then touch ~/.config/starship.toml.

mkdir creates a directory/folder – and the -p is there so that it won’t throw an error even though the folder exists. You might already have the .config folder!

touch is a command for creating files, and it will create the starship.toml file, where you’ll add your settings.

I’m explaining this to show that it isn’t magic! And you can also manually create the file and folders in Finder, if you’re more comfortable with that. You also need to locate the file, to be able to open and edit it.

Starship also comes with presets, which are snippets you can copy into your config as starting points. The only thing I’ve done is adding command_timeout = 1000 to the top (I got some errors related to this), and adding the Nerd Font Symbols preset.

Helpers

These two apps are little helpers that will make life in the terminal a little easier.

thefuck

You install this simply with brew install thefuck. (See how easy Homebrew is??)

Then I’d add the following to .zshrc: eval $(thefuck --alias)

Now, if you get an error, after giving the wrong command, you can just type “fuck” – and it will suggest a fix.

Here you can see that I wrote “brwe” instead of “brew”, so I got an error. Just writing “fuck” gives a suggestion for fix, and hitting enter sends it. I can also go up and down to see other suggestions, and ctrl+c cancels.

tldr

This is installed with brew install tlrc²

Typing man brew will give you a complete manual for Homebrew. But these are sometimes very long!

Typing tldr brew instead, gives me this neat little thing:

zsh-autosuggestions

As mentioned, Warp has built-in AI suggestions. However, you can add something similar to Zsh (so all terminals) as well! And one option is zsh-autosuggestions.

• First run brew install zsh-autosuggestions,
• and then paste source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh into your .zshrc.
• I also added this, to change the colour of the auto suggestions: ZSH_AUTOSUGGEST_HIGHLIGHT_STYLE='fg=10'
  • Many terminals operate with themes that have 16 colours, numbered from 0-15. So you can try adjusting the number (from 10) to find something that you like, and that fits your theme.

Alternatives to common tools

Some of the most common commands aren’t the most user-friendly. Luckily, you can swap them out for more modern alternatives!

What I’ve tried to focus on is not to make them more advanced (which you also can, of course) – but simply doing the same thing in a more user-friendly way.

bat

An example of this is the command cat, that will give a preview of a file. However, it doesn’t have things like syntax highlighting, so it’s harder to read. But someone has made something named bat! (“A cat clone with wings.")

As you perhaps could guess, you install it with brew install bat.

OK, so now you can preview things, in a nicer way, with bat instead of cat. But we can improve things further! Because, if you’d like to, you can paste this into your .zshrc:

alias cat="bat"

This means, that if you write the old command (cat), it will automatically use bat instead! Making aliases like this can be really useful – so please remember it! The syntax is simply alias command="What should be done instead".

In addition to man and tldr, another way to get help with a command, is things like brew --help. And bat can make that help text nicer as well! Add this to your .zshrc:

alias -g -- -h='-h 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'
alias -g -- --help='--help 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'

Now, both --h and --help commands will be highlighted.

In general, these apps will often be able to improve other parts of the terminal! For instance, you can use bat to improve file previews of programs I’ll get to later.

micro

As mentioned, as I’m not used to it, I don’t like the way the terminal handles text differently than every other part of my OS. So while I get that things like NeoVim can be very effective when you learn it, I try my best to edit text outside of the terminal.

Another of the classic terminal text editors is nano. But a more user-friendly alternative is micro.

brew install micro gives you this, of course. Typing micro path_to_file opens a file in this editor. And if you’d like, you can create an alias in .zshrc: alias nano="micro"

You can also make micro your “default terminal editor” by adding this to .zshrc:

export EDITOR='micro'

However, you can also do this:

export EDITOR='open'

That makes the default editor to open the file in the default app set in macOS.

eza

Another classic command is ls (list), which shows you the content of the working directory. But here’s what my messy Dropbox folder looks like with the default command:

Then take a look at what it looks like if I use the tool eza instead:

However, the command I’ve run above isn’t just eza. It was the following:

eza --icons=auto --group-directories-first --no-symlinks -x

So here I’ve also made an alias (in .zshrc), so that writing ls instead gives me that:

alias ls="eza --icons=auto --group-directories-first --no-symlinks -x"

You can, of course, tweak the variables to fit your taste!

fzf and zoxide

You’ll often use ls in conjunction with cd (change directory) – and it’s a common way to get around via the terminal. However, this can also be improved – with zoxide. And it gets even better with the help of fzf (fuzzy finder).

• Install both, with brew install zoxide fzf³
• Add these lines to .zshrc:
  • source <(fzf --zsh)
  • eval "$(zoxide init --cmd cd zsh)"  (They say this needs to be close to the end of the file, to override other cd command definitions.)

Now using cd will use zoxide instead. This will get smarter with use. And among other things, it makes it so you don’t have type the entire path to a folder you’ve been in before. Take a look at this video for more on this! 👇🏻

You can also run fzf by itself, by just typing fzf. However, hitting enter on a file will just print⁴ the path.

But let’s combine some things we’ve already set up. For instance, we can do the following:

fzf --preview 'bat --style=header --color=always --line-range :50 {}' --preview-window=right:60% | xargs open

This will run the fzf fuzzy finder – but it will preview the files with bat. And hitting Enter will open the file in the macOS default. You can create an alias, and adjust the parameters, if you like. For instance:

alias fz='fzf --preview "bat --style=header --color=always --line-range :50 {}" --preview-window=right:60% | xargs open'

A nice file manager

Now, this is a bit more advanced. So feel free to skip it for now, and perhaps come back to this later!

yazi

Lastly, I want to show a nice file manager – that you can use for things like changing your working directory, opening, copying and moving files, etc.

In addition to a nerd font, it also becomes better with multiple other tools (some you might have already). So I recommend installing all of these:

brew install yazi ffmpeg sevenzip jq poppler fd ripgrep fzf zoxide imagemagick

Then you should add this to your .zshrc:

function y() {
	local tmp="$(mktemp -t "yazi-cwd.XXXXXX")" cwd
	yazi "$@" --cwd-file="$tmp"
	if cwd="$(command cat -- "$tmp")" && [ -n "$cwd" ] && [ "$cwd" != "$PWD" ]; then
		builtin cd -- "$cwd"
	fi
	rm -f -- "$tmp"
}

Now you can just type y to open it.

All actions can be found here, but here are some of the more important ones:

• Move around with arrows.
• q = Quit, and change working directory to where you were in yazi
• Q = Quit, without changing the working directory
• Space = Toggle selection of a file.
  • o = Open selected file(s)
  • y = Copy selected file(s)
  • x = Cut selected file(s)
  • p = Paste file(s)
  • P = Paste file(s) (and overwrite)
  • d = Trash selected file(s)
• z = Jump to a directory, using zoxide
• Z = Jump to a directory, or reveal a file, using fzf
• s = Search files by name, using the program fd
• S = Search files by content using the program ripgrep

This app also has a similar config story. You can copy the default config files, and then play around with the variables. Personally, I’ve adjusted the column widths, and made it open files in the macOS default!

This app is quite new for me, but I like it so far.

Phew – OK, that was a lot… But hopefully this guide has been of some value to other noobs like me. Would love to get feedback! From noobs, or pros.

Oh, and for reference – here’s my current .zshrc file:

eval "$(starship init zsh)"
eval $(thefuck --alias)

export EDITOR='open'

source <(fzf --zsh)
source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh
ZSH_AUTOSUGGEST_HIGHLIGHT_STYLE='fg=10'

alias cat="bat"
alias nano="micro"
alias ls="eza --icons=auto --group-directories-first --no-symlinks -x"
alias -g -- -h='-h 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'
alias -g -- --help='--help 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'
alias fz='fzf --preview "bat --style=header --color=always --line-range :50 {}" --preview-window=right:60% | xargs open'

eval "$(zoxide init --cmd cd zsh)"

function y() {
	local tmp="$(mktemp -t "yazi-cwd.XXXXXX")" cwd
	yazi "$@" --cwd-file="$tmp"
	if cwd="$(command cat -- "$tmp")" && [ -n "$cwd" ] && [ "$cwd" != "$PWD" ]; then
		builtin cd -- "$cwd"
	fi
	rm -f -- "$tmp"
}

The Terminal – For Noobs (Like Me), Part Two

The Why and What

In part one, I tried to establish the basic concepts, like terminal emulator, shell, prompt, and CLI. In this part, I want to go into why people use the terminal – and in the next part, how to make it more noob-friendly.

“But why do people use this archaic thing?”

As mentioned in part one, I’m absolutely not one of those who live in the terminal. But if I were to guess (and this applies to my basic usage as well), I’d say two things are the most important: It’s fast, and it’s powerful.

One way it can be fast, is that CLI programs are computational efficient, as there’s a lot of stuff (like graphics) they don’t need to render.

Another way is that you can do quite complicated tasks in a single* command. For instance, I’ll sometimes run this:

for dir in */; do
(cd "$dir" && mkdir -p .Originals && cp * .Originals/)
done

This will

• run through all folders in a parent,
• add a hidden folder in each, named .Originals,
• and place a copy of each file in that hidden folder.

I use this to create backups of files before editing them (in a specific workflow), and it happens instantly. 👌🏻

CLI tools are both powerful in terms of what they can do, and also in that they’re usually highly customisable. They’re also generally easy to combine with each other, because they often do one thing.

And the combination of being fast and powerful, if you know what you’re doing, makes it a valuable tool in which to invest.

“But what can you use it for?”

If you’re a programmer, you can become a beast (with plenty of bragging rights) by using the text editor NeoVim, that runs in the terminal.¹ But I’m not, so I’ll only say that if you find yourself stuck in something you can’t exit, try hitting q, ctrl+q, ctrl+c, or type :qa.

And if you use many terminal applications, you’ll might want to use stuff like Tmux, which is a sort of window manager within a terminal.

But as I don’t know what I’m talking about, I want to stick to more basic use cases:

• Random commands
• Package management
• Navigate and search the file system
• Git
• Control other computers/servers
• Set up, and run, background tasks

Random commands

After a while, you’ll collect several little snippets that do useful stuff for you, like the examples with .Originals I mentioned above. There are also tools for converting files, batch renaming, and other little things that might be annoying and repetitive.

You can also control OS settings that might not be available elsewhere (or are impractical). One example here are the ones I use to swap the dock layout depending on whether I’m using an external monitor. Another one is a command to turn off font smoothing (which you should):

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

I like to keep these as snippets in Raycast 🖇️.

Package management

This is just a fancy way of saying “installing, updating, and uninstalling apps”. And Homebrew is a good one for Mac, which I’ve written a guide for.

Navigate and search file system

A nice terminal setup for this can be a great alternative to Finder, and also file search with launchers like Raycast or Spotlight. I’ve given an example at the end of part three.

Git

Git, and version control, is another area where I want to write a For Noobs (Like Me) post someday… Because I only almost understand it! And one of the reasons I find the text editor Nova to be more noob-friendly, is that it has built-in support for Git in a GUI, so I don’t have to use it in the terminal.

However, as long as I don’t have to deal with conflicts, it’s really fast to just do it in the terminal! So I’ve (mostly) graduated to this now.

Control other computers/servers

I’ve written previously about having a M4 Mac Mini as a secondary computer. And the only monitor I have connected to it is our TV – and I don’t really have a mouse and keyboard connected to it either. This means I mostly have to control it with my MacBook.

And while I can share the entire screen and control it like that, it’s also really practical that I can just type ssh erlend@192.168.12.34 into my terminal, and suddenly, it’s like I’m running a local terminal instance on the other Mac.

SSH is a way you can securely interact with something remote. In addition to the above, I use it when I use git, and when I have to access a Digital Ocean 🖇️ droplet that runs a Discourse forum I run. It’s also really nice that 1Password handles the SSH keys flawlessly.

Set up, and run, background tasks

In the post I linked above, I also mentioned that I managed to replace Feedbin as a host for the RSS feeds I read. Currently, everything is hosted on my Mac Mini, with Miniflux – and I had to set everything up using the terminal and CLIs.

But now it’s simply a background task that starts up with the Mac.

There are lots of YouTube videos out there, like “7 essential CLI tools”. And the things mentioned are often cool – but often not relevant for a noob and non-programmer like me. But I’d love to hear about other use cases out there! And especially if you think they can be useful for me and my fellow plebs.

Click here to go to part three, about making your Terminal more noob-friendly.

The Terminal – For Noobs (Like Me), Part One

The Basic Concepts

If you’re like me, from time-to-time you’ll come across tasks that should be done in the terminal. But as you’re not very familiar with it, you wince a bit, and then just paste whatever they say, and hope for the best. The guide might also assume you know a bunch of concepts, that you don’t really understand. Like, why do some commands start with $?

Hopefully, this guide can answer some of the questions you’re too afraid to ask, and make you less afraid of the terminal. I’ll never be a person who lives in the terminal (especially as I’m not a programmer) – but I’ve managed to get to where I like it, and will be happy if a task can be done there.

Sorry that this will be a bit Mac-focused. But hopefully, it can be useful for more than Mac users!

• Part Two: The Why and What
• Part Three: A More Noob-Friendly Terminal

Basic concepts

To me, things get much less daunting if I understand some basic concepts. And here are some of the basic things you won’t necessarily see explained on guides that include some terminal stuff.

CLI vs. GUI

Most programs we use today, rely on graphical user interfaces, or GUIs. In general, this means things like buttons, graphical icons, and more – and they can usually be operated by clicking around with a mouse (or finger, on a touch screen).

A command line interface, or CLI, is an alternative way of interacting with a program, where the main way is through lines of text called command lines.

Example

Let’s say I want to install Bitwarden.

A typical GUI way of doing it, is by going into the App Store, and click a button to install:

A CLI way of doing it, could be to use HomeBrew (which I’ve also written a noob guide on, here):

Writing brew install bitwarden will tell the program brew to run the command install, with the argument/parameter bitwarden. I like this because it can be faster. But you do have to know what to write!¹

Terminal (emulator)

A bit simplified, a terminal is a way to give data to, and/or read data from, computers. And in the early days, this was the only way to do this. (The computer literally printing the data on paper, is also a type of terminal.)

If you’re in the GUI environment macOS, you can open the program Terminal.app. This is colloquially called a terminal, but is technically a terminal emulator – because it “only” emulates a terminal (within a GUI environment).

Some examples of terminal emulators (which I’ll get back to more later) are Terminal.app, iTerm 2, Warp 🖇️, Ghostty, Wezterm, and Alacritty.

Shell

OK, so:

• You type command lines into a terminal emulator (like iTerm)
• to use CLI programs (like HomeBrew).

But there’s one more piece of the puzzle: The Shell

As far as I understand it, a shell is a sort of interpretation layer between the operating system on one side, and user input and other programs on the other.

This can be for GUIs – like how the Quartz Compositor is a shell for windows on macOS, and Wayland can be a shell for Linux et al.

But there’s also a shell in the terminal² which will interpret your commands.

The image above shows the installation instructions for Homebrew. The thing I want you to look at, is that it starts with a $ symbol. This is related to a shell called Bash. It’s not meant to be part of what you copy and paste, but to let you know that it will work in that shell.

The default shell on macOS is a different shell, called Z shell/Zsh, sometimes indicated by the % symbol. But this is made in a way that everything that works in Bash will work in Zsh. So if you see the $, just copy everything after the symbol, and you’re golden.

Prompt, working directory, and path

The image above is an example of an “empty” terminal window. And it, sort of, “asks” you for a command. Like, “What do you want me to do? Type it in here:”.

And the part that “asks”, is called the prompt.³

The parts I’ve highlighted are the prompt – and I can then type in commands below and after it. Currently, the prompt tells me the following:

• The folder Tiny-Havn-theme is the working directory – which is where I “am”.
• It has noticed that it’s a git repo – and this is currently on the main branch.
• It’s also showing that node.js (the icon) v23.6.0 is present.

What is included in the prompt, and how it looks, is highly customisable – and is something many enjoy tinkering with. I will go more into this in Part Three.

Working directory is a crucial concept when it comes to working with the terminal! The way I think about it, is that you are always somewhere on your computer when you’re using the terminal. You are always in a folder, like with Tiny-Havn-theme above.

The example above is what things usually look like when you open up a fresh terminal window. And here the working directory is your Home folder (“Erlend” in my case). But as this name varies from user to user, the tilde symbol is used to indicate the home folder. So that’s why the working directory is just ~. And something like “~/Downloads” means the Downloads folder in your Home folder.

The command mkdir will create a folder. And without further specification, it will create it your working directory. This is one way the working directory matters.

But here’s another important way: By default, you can only issue commands to programs within your working directory.
This can be beneficial – however, some programs you absolutely want access to from everywhere. Luckily, you can tell your terminal: “Hey, programs in these folders are accessible from everywhere.” This is called your PATH.

You can run echo $PATH to see a terribly formatted result of the current folders. Among other things, I have this folder there: /opt/homebrew/bin.⁴ Both Homebrew itself and the programs I install with it gets placed into that folder. And as it’s “in my path”, I can run brew commands (and everything I install with Homebrew) from any working directory.⁵

Basic concepts, summarised:

• After a prompt (which tells you a bit about your context) you type command lines (and read outputs) in a terminal emulator (like iTerm).
• These commands are then interpreted by a shell (like Zsh),
• before getting passed on to things like CLI programs (like Homebrew).
• You’ll always be “in” a folder on the computer, while using the terminal. This is the working directory. But you can move around, of course!
• In general you can only use commands related to programs located in the working directory. If you want to be able to use a program from everywhere, it has to be placed in your PATH (which you’ll often do!).
• For some commands (like brew list, which shows you a list of the apps you have installed with Homebrew), your working directory doesn’t matter. You have access to it from anywhere, and the action doesn’t do anything to your working directory.
• However, sometimes a command (like mkdir) will do something to your working directory (unless you specify otherwise) – so then “where you are” is relevant.

Now, click here to go to Part Two, to read about why people use the terminal voluntarily, and some things you can do with it.

Or, you can jump straight to Part Three, to learn how you can make your terminal more noob-friendly.

More on Using a Mac Mini as a Secondary Computer

Remote Access, RSS, and Storage and Backups

Last November, I started using an M4 Mac Mini as a secondary computer. I’m still pleased with it! And I wanted to provide a little update with some more things I’ve learned.

Remote access

Using the Mini, has been pretty simple. I’ll usually use Continuity, via my MacBook or iPad, if the TV the Mini is connected to is on. And I’ll use Screen Sharing if not.¹ (I can recommend keeping something like an integrated keyboard and trackpad nearby, if you have the space – which I don’t.)

But I’ve also figured out something else! And I get that this is very basic for many of you, but probably not for all.

On the Mini, I’ve gone into System Settings → General → Sharing → Advanced → Remote Login, and turnet it on. Now I can paste in something like this, in my Macbook’s terminal: ssh erlend@192.168.12.34

The terminal instance, on the MacBook, will now be like if I was running it locally on the Mini. This allows me to reduce the number of times I have to control the Mini directly – as it’s nicer to just use the MacBook.

I also think this is an important setting – even though it’s not as secure:

This means you can’t have FileVault turned on – but it makes it so the Mac will log in (and start all login items) on a restart. This is important to keep services running – but if there’s another (more secure) way of doing this, I’m interested in hearing about it.

RSS

Speaking of things I’ve done in the Terminal…

My Feedbin plan, for $50/year, was up January 10th – and I wanted to see if I could cancel it and run it from my Mac. I noticed that my RSS client of choice, Lire (and several others), had support for something called Miniflux, so I wanted to install that.

With the help of Claude (via Raycast AI 🖇️), I managed to install it via MacPorts. I also had to create a database, and user, with postgresql. Quite quickly I got Miniflux up and running locally – but I struggled much more to get access remotely.² Because, you obviously don’t want to be able to just type in a public IP and get access to what the Mac is serving.

Classic LLM problem…

Claude suggested Cloudflare as a free option. I do have a couple of domains I could use, but I would rather not move them over to Cloudflare. However, Claude said I didn’t have to with their Zero Trust service. I then spent 6(!) hours trying to make it work, before I learned that, no, it doesn’t work without moving the domain. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Tailscale <3

The reason I didn’t use Tailscale, is that I thought the cheapest option there was the $6/month plan – which is more than I paid for Feedbin. However, it turns out that there is a free plan for personal use!³ Setting this up, and thus getting remote access to my Miniflux instance, was ridiculously easy.

I also had to follow this guide, to activate both the Miniflux API and something called Fever API (within Miniflux). I was then able to add Miniflux as my syncing service in Lire.⁴ (But Lire for Mac has an annoying bug, where you can’t paste into the login window. So I had to type everything, including a long and complicated API key, manually…)

Exporting an OPML file from Feedbin, and importing it to Miniflux worked like a charm – and I only miss one feature from Feedbin: Miniflux supports folders, but not tags – and I prefer the latter. But still, I’ve been more than happy with the experience and performance so far.

Storage and backups

I recently wrote about being annoyed because it feels like Apple is forcing me to pay for much more iCloud storage than I need. I already have a lot of Dropbox storage, so I wish I could only use that. My photo library takes up the largest portion of my 200 GB plan, and it’s annoying how hard it is to reduce how much I use, and that the next option is 2 TB.

iPhone (and iPad) backups

One way I’ve tried to reduce my usage, is to store my iPhone backups on my Mini, instead of in iCloud. And connecting the phone with a cable, finding it in Finder, and turning this on gets me somewhat along the way:

However, I can’t find a way to have the backups happen automatically!

• Apple has made a way for you to access your iPhone via your Mac.
• Here they’ve made a way to back up the entire phone,
• and also sync (which is not as complete as backups) the iPhone and Mac.
• They’ve also made a way for the sync to happen automatically (when locked and connected to power),
• But they’ve not made a way for the backups to happen automatically.

When you know that iCloud backups can happen automatically, it’s hard not to think that Apple’s motivation for developing the same for Mac backups is being hampered by that sweet, sweet service revenue…

Internal vs. external storage

My current setup is only 256 GB of internal storage, but 2 TB of (quite fast) external storage. And one thing, I don’t think I mentioned in my original post, was that why I chose not to move my Home folder to the external drive.

The thing is that, it can create numerous problems – so it has to be worth it. And with the way I use my Macs, a minimal portion of my storage use has to be in the Home folder.

All of these are on my external drive:

• Apps larger than 1 GB (from the App Store)
• Steam games
• iCloud Photo Library
• My Dropbox folder (which is most of my stuff)
• Most backups, including Time Machine backups of our family’s two MacBooks.

Annoyingly, one of the things taking up the most space on the internal drive, is the aforementioned iPhone backups. Because, of course, Apple isn’t allowing those to be placed on an external drive…

More cold storage

While the amount of internal storage works OK, I’ve learned that I could use more external. But that doesn’t mean I wish I bought more than 2 TB for the Thunderbolt enclosure (even though I do intend to upgrade that down the line). I’ve just learned that I want a bunch of slower storage as well.

As mentioned, I’ve placed my photo library on the external drive, and asked it to download everything (about 150 GB). And then I’m currently using ChronoSync Express (via Setapp 🖇️) to create an extra copy of the library every night (and not to not delete files, even though they’re removed from the original).

• That means that the two copies take up a bit over 300 GB.
• The Time Machine backups take up about 500 GB each,
• and the Dropbox about 450 GB.

That means I’m pretty close to the 2 TB – and I wish I could have an extra copy of my Dropbox folder. So I want to add another drive, with slower and cheaper storage. (Suggestions are welcome!) In addition to apps, games, and media for Jellyfin, I think I might want to keep the Time Machine backups on the faster drive. And move more of the “extra” stuff to the slower drive. Here I’m also planning on keeping a remote backup for a friend of mine.

If you’re considering going down this road, I can still recommend it! I’ve also had fun playing the Mad Max game, and UFO 50. 👌🏻

Sharing an Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

From Pixelfed – an Open Alternative to Instagram

Link to the post.

Dear Mark,

I hope this finds you well. I noticed something interesting today - it seems Instagram is blocking links to my little open-source project. You know, the one that lets people share photos without harvesting their personal data or forcing algorithmic feeds on them.

I have to admit, I’m flattered. Who would’ve thought a small team of volunteers could build something that would catch your attention? We’re just trying to give people a choice in how they share their memories online. No VCs, no surveillance capitalism, just code and community.

Remember when Facebook started? It was about connecting people, not maximizing engagement metrics. Our project might be tiny compared to Instagram, but we’re staying true to that original spirit of social media - giving people control over their online presence without turning them into products.

You could’ve ignored us. Instead, by blocking our links, you’ve given us the best endorsement we could ask for. You’ve confirmed what we’ve been saying all along - that big tech is more interested in protecting their walled gardens than fostering genuine innovation.

Every time you block a link to our platform, you remind people why we built it in the first place. Your action tells them there are alternatives worth exploring, ones that respect their privacy and agency. So thank you, Mark. You’ve turned our little project into a symbol of resistance against digital monopolies.

Perhaps one day you’ll remember what it felt like to be the underdog, building something because you believed in its potential to make the internet better. Our doors are always open if you want to remember what that feels like.

Best regards,

Daniel Supernault

P.S. Keep blocking those links. Every error message is just free advertising for the social web.

My Adaptive Smart Light Setup

A Guide, and a Glimpse Into the Mind of a Madman (Me)

I’ve previously written about why I think Smart Bulbs > Smart Switches.¹ And one of the reasons I think that, is that I (for some reason) really love having the colour temperature of my lights change throughout the day.

Sadly, I’ve found the automatic systems for this really lacking. But here I wanted to show how I’ve created a system I like.

The goals:

• Be effortless to use (and relatively easy to adjust)
• Both provide a good experience with simple switches, and with dimmers.
• Working with different brands of switches and bulbs.
• Keep everything in HomeKit.²

I want a smart home. But, in use, I want it to be as simple as a dumb one. I want guests to be able to operate things at, at least, the same level as they would in another unfamiliar home.³ And then I want to add smart benefits on top of this, like colour temperature, automations, some hidden button features, and being able to override stuff with things like a phone.

My most used switch is the Flic 2. And when the light is off, I want one click to turn on to a setting that’s almost always the right one. But as the “right setting” changes throughout the day, I have to do some adjustments in the background…

While you can adjust the brightness in Home.app, I also wanted to be able to do it with a dimmer switch at some places. So I’ve bought a couple of Flic Twists 🖇️ as well.⁴ HomeKit/Matter, sadly, hasn’t delivered support for dimmers, though – so I had to be a bit creative to get these to work as I wanted.

The principle

I’ve created three “moods” (which correlates to brightness and colour temperature):

• Glow (warmest)
• Cream
• Glass (coldest)

And, currently, my home moves through these moods at these times:

• From the night before 🌙: Glow
• 1 hour after sunrise ⛅: Cream
• 3 hours after sunrise ☀️: Glass
• 3 hours before sunset 🌥️: Cream
• 1 hour after sunset 🌙: Glow

If you turn on a light during “Cream time” it will turn on to that setting, and so on. And when the mood changes (during the day), it will go through the lights that are turned on, and adapt them to the current mood.

The how

Be warned: It’s a very fiddly setup process… But when you’re done, you can easily change when the mood changes, and also what a specific light will look like during a specific mood.

Prerequisites:

• HomeKit enabled bulbs (that can change temperature) and switches
• A bulb that can always be on⁵
• The app Controller for HomeKit⁶
  • This is able to do more advanced stuff with HomeKit than Home.app, while still not having to move things out of that system.

1) The always-on bulb

I have this outdoor lamp, that’s always on:

And I’ve created an automation that will change the brightness like this:

• From the night before 🌙: 25%
• 1 hour after sunrise ⛅: 40%
• 3 hours after sunrise ☀️: 60%
• 3 hours before sunset 🌥️: 40%
• 1 hour after sunset 🌙: 25%

What I’m doing here, is using this bulb to help my automations know which mood we’re in.⁷

If that lamp is at 25%, we’re in Glow,
if it’s at 40% we’re in Cream,
and 60% means Glass.

This means that if I, for instance, want Cream to start 2 hours after sunrise instead, I’ll just adjust that one automation controlling that one lamp.

There are a million ways to fill this need, though. It just needs to be something that can be checked, by automations, to see which mood we’re in.

2) 4* scenes per lamp

Now we’re starting to get to the fiddly parts… You see, automations works the best with scenes. So we have to create a bunch of these, for each light.

Let’s use a “kitchen light” as an example. You could get away with 4 scenes:⁸

• Kitchen light Off (yes, you need this)
• Kitchen light Glød (both brightness and temperature)
• Kitchen light Cream (both brightness and temperature)
• Kitchen light Glass (both brightness and temperature)

If you at a later time want to change how the light looks in a certain mood, you’ll go in and adjust the specific scene(s).

Here you can see a scene, in Controller, that includes both setting the temperature and turning it on, and setting the brightness: (I think it increased the reliability to have both brightness and power state together.)

3) Switch automations

Next, you’ll set up automations related to the switches. The basic idea is this:

• I click the switch:
  • If the light is On → Set Kitchen light Off
  • If the light is Off → Check the outdoor lamp
    • If at ≤25% → Set Kitchen light Glow
    • If at 40% → Set Kitchen light Cream
    • If at ≥60% → Set Kitchen light Glass

Sadly, I think you have to create 4 separate automations, though. One for off, and one for each mood.

Here you can see examples of an Off automation and a Glow automation:

I know it sounds (/is) convoluted – but this method has proven itself to be fast/responsive, and very reliable!

And speaking of convoluted…

I know that I’m crazy – but in my next home, I want to break up the scenes in two: One for brightness, and one for the temperature.⁹

Then we’ll end up with the following scenes:

• Kitchen light Off
• Kitchen light Glow B(rightness)
• Kitchen light Glow T(emperature)
• Kitchen light Cream B
• Kitchen light Cream T
• Kitchen light Glass B
• Kitchen light Glass T

And the basic switch automations are the same – but they only set the “brightness scene”:

• I click the switch:
  • If the light is On → Set Kitchen light Off
  • If the light is Off → Check the outdoor lamp
    • If at ≤25% → Set Kitchen light Glow B
    • If at 40% → Set Kitchen light Cream B
    • If at ≥60% → Set Kitchen light Glass B

Then we create even more automations, that work like this:

• If Kitchen light gets turned on:
  • Check the outdoor lamp
    • If at ≤25% → Set Kitchen light Glow T
    • If at 40% → Set Kitchen light Cream T
    • If at ≥60% → Set Kitchen light Glass T

Separating it like this, means that we’ll get the correct temperature, no matter how we turn on a light. For instance, with a different switch, with voice, or through Home.app. Automations like that looks like this:

But yeah, that means we’re up to 7 scenes and 7 automations per light! 😰

4) Adapt lights that or on, when the mood changes

This step is optional, but I like it. Because, let’s say I turned on a light during Glass time, and kept it on until the evening. I wouldn’t want it to be stuck on this bright setting (even though I could fix it by turning it off and on again).

I’ve fixed this with automations like this:

And here’s another reason why I would break up the brightness and temperatures: Because, I’ve learned that while I want the temperature on lights that are on to change, I don’t want the brightness to change. So for the automation above, I would want it to only set the scene “Kitchen light Glow T”, and not do anything about the brightness.

This brings us to the final sum: 7 scenes and 10 automations per light…

And that’s it! No sweat…

Yes, you have to create a million scenes and a billion automations…¹⁰ But you’re left with a system where you can (relatively) easily choose what each light will look like during each mood, and quickly change when the different moods are.

So, to sum it up:

1. Find one thing you can use to indicate to the rest of your home which mood you’re in. (The numbers below are for the use of three moods.) Then add an automation, for instance based on the sun, to this item.
2. For each light, create scenes related to each mood (in addition to Off) – preferably separated into brightness (and power state) and temperature. 4 or 7 scenes per light.
3. Create switch automations. One for Off, and one for each mood – 4 automations per light.
   • Then, preferably create automations for setting the temperature when a light turns on. One for each mood – 3 per light.
4. Create “mood checks” for each light. One for each mood – 3 per light.
5. Don’t worry about it ever again (except for making tiny adjustments to moods and timing).

Bonus guide: How I got the Flic Twist to work with this setup

I don’t know if this part is relevant unless you have my exact setup. But I wanted to share it anyway, as it could be useful for a similar setup as well – specifically if you have some switches that doesn’t play nice with HomeKit. And it also highlights another reason why I’ll use separate brightness and temperature scenes in my next home.

I backed the Flic Twist on Kickstarter a while back. But when it finally arrived, Matter support for dimmers had not. This button has the following gestures:

1. Push (AKA “click”)
2. Double Push
3. Twist
4. Push & Twist

However, if you add it to HomeKit you’ll lose the last two, as they’re not supported! So, for now, I have to keep it totally separate.

The setup in the Flic app:

Here’s how I’ve configured a Twist to control two lights:

Push will just toggle it – and it will turn on to the last used brightness and temperature. Twist adjusts the brightness. Double push and Push & Twist does the same, but for a different light. Twisting when the light is off will also turn it on, from the lowest brightness possible.

However, currently this doesn’t factor in my precious moods! I don’t mind that it doesn’t care about the brightness, as we’re literally using a dial that can set it to whatever we want. But I do want it to go to the correct temperature! Luckily, if you have the “When this light turn on, set it to the correct temperature” automation, this will already work flawlessly. 👌🏻 And that’s the last reason why I, even though it sounds insane, recommend going that route.

My Wishes for NotePlan

I like and use NotePlan (via Setapp 🖇️), and feel good recommending it to people. But there are a couple of reasons why I don’t love it. So while I keep all my notes and tasks in Markdown files in the NotePlan folder, I prefer editing those in other apps – like Paper. Below are the changes and improvements I would need for me to love it.

The basics needs to be improved

The NotePlan developer is very active, seems like a great guy, and is pumping out updates. Some of these are really ambitious (like more collaboration and a web editor). But the app is, at its core, a Markdown editor – and I think this core requires some improvements, and that getting this right is foundational for the rest.

I get that I can’t expect it to be as good here as the dedicated Paper, and some of the more advanced features, like the Typewriter Mode:

But NotePlan should be better…

Bold and italics

Let’s say I have a bold sentence, and I then want the middle word to also be in italics. I should be able to select that word and hit Cmd+I. But NotePlan completely messes this up.

I also wish I could say that I want hitting Cmd+I to give me _underscores_ instead of *asterisks*.

Ordered lists

Another thing it can’t handle, is manipulating ordered lists. Neither adding something in the middle of a list, nor moving items around, works as it should. (I’ve shown what I mean here.)

Selection

A couple of updates ago, the NotePlan dev improved how selection works when you’re editing a task or checklist item. Let’s say I’ve written a task, and the caret is at the end of the line. I now want to select the text (to rewrite it, make it bold, or whatever), so I hit Shift+Cmd+Left:

I like that it doesn’t select the task list element here! And if I do want to select it, I just hit the hotkey again:

I really like this behaviour – but the improvement needs to make its way to regular lists and headings as well.

Links

Links look quite nice in NotePlan:

And you can create them easily by selecting the text you want to become a link, and hitting Cmd+K. Then it will paste the link from your clipboard. But there are two problems:

1. I don’t think you can edit a link, or see which link is actually there.
2. I use the clipboard manager Paste a lot – and occasionally, I don’t want to use the last thing I copied, but something previous instead. This is clunky in NotePlan.

I prefer the way Paper (and several other apps) works here:

If you select some text and paste a link, it will create the hyperlink. This is sort of like how NotePlan works with Cmd+K – but you can also paste something from earlier (with a clipboard manager).¹ Hitting Cmd+K in Paper works like this:

If you’re in Preview Mode (which acts more like a rich text editor), you’ll get a regular link dialog box – and if you have a link in your clipboard, it will pre-fill the link section. If you’re in Markdown Mode, it works like NotePlan. However, there you can always see the link content. And in Preview Mode, you can hit Cmd+K or left click to see/edit the content.

I wish NotePlan copied the paste behaviour, and that Cmd+K opened a dialog box. And, the compact Markdown link appearance is neat, but I wish it would expand on focus – even though I, in general, really don’t like it when Markdown syntax does that. I’ve made my own NotePlan theme (you can download the light mode here, and the dark mode here). And the only syntax I have auto-hide on for is for headings – but that’s only because I can’t place the # symbols in the margin, which I wish I could.

More advanced stuff

I honestly think the stuff I have mentioned until now is table stakes and should be prioritised. However, when it comes to the things I’m getting to now, I get that priorities differ. But the following are my main wishes.

Synced blocks/sections

This feature is currently planned, and is discussed a bit here. But I wanted to add some nuances – and I’m not sure what’s the best solution would be.

Sync vs. transclusion

Let’s say you have a “master note” on a subject, and you want to add info to it from several other notes. For this, Obsidian supports transclusion, which is quite cool. The way it works, is that if you write [[Name of a note#Heading]] you’ll create a link to that note (and heading), but if you instead write ![[Name of a note#Heading]] the app will display the content under that heading directly in the current note.

However, here’s an important detail (that can both be a positive and a negative): The actual content of the master note file will only be the shortcodes (![[Name of a note#Heading]]), and not all the things that will be displayed in the app. The preview of the content will also usually be read-only, and you have to go into the original note to edit it.

NotePlan currently has a Synced Line feature, which works a bit differently:

This allows you to sync a line (like a task) between two notes. The difference here is that the line actually is in both notes. NotePlan will add a little code at the end (which it then hides), to tell the app to sync all instances of that line/code. So a task could look like this:

- [ ] A synced task #Tag ^8r1x8v

A benefit of this, is that the line is equally there in all instances, and you can edit it everywhere. You could also share a file with a collection of those, and the content would be included (without you having to also share the other files).

However, the duplication can create problems with things like search and tagging. For instance, if I check for tasks with #Tag, I would see all the synced lines individually.

My question is, when NotePlan wants to expand in this area, should it go for syncing or transclusion? I guess an answer would be to work towards both. And being compatible with things like Obsidian is an important argument for at least supporting transclusion. But I would’ve loved it if synced blocks/sections could be a thing, and that the duplication issue could be addressed somehow.²

Smart folders and lists, and a more flexible sidebar

I love the way NotePlan has two separate systems for #Tags and @Mentions,³ and that you can give them to both notes and tasks. But I think it’s underutilised – and an improvement here is one of the largest wishes I have.

Currently, you can create Filters, which have a cool rules system. However, the problem I have with this, is that in only works on tasks, and that the layout takes up a lot of space because it uses a lot of it on margins and showing where every note is placed:

I get that this might be preferred for some⁴ – but I wish I could create a Smart Section or Smart List that would just display it as compact as a regular list:

If you went for the Smart Section option, it would be a part of a regular note. And in the example above, it would fetch (and create synced lines) with all tasks matching the criteria. (In this example, having the tag @Hjemme.)

Here’s what a regular folder looks like in the sidebar:

I really wish I could create a smart folder (maybe with the same rules system), and have the notes that fit the criteria just show up as a similar list. I think the only thing I can do now, is to go all the way to the bottom of the sidebar, select a single tag, click it, and then see a clunky list of the instances of the tag.

A more flexible sidebar would also be needed.

The developer recently released an update with a cool Notes Tables feature, that I’m sure many will love. But it’s not for me…

Personal collaboration

Something like this is also planned, I think – and I won’t go into it too much. But currently I only use Apple Notes and Reminders.app for things I share with my wife, and it would be neat if I could move that stuff over to NotePlan. It does have a team feature – however, that’s more of a professional tool. But I get that that’s where the money is…

A bright future

In general, I’m excited about NotePlan’s future! Especially because the developer is so active. And it feels better investing in it when I know that everything is just a folder of Markdown files. However, I really wished I loved being in the app… But I might someday!

Why I Value Doing Stuff on My Mac With One Hand

And How I Do It

I get that it sounds shady¹ or like a great accessibility story, when I talk about being able to use my Mac one-handed. But it’s neither. Allow me to explain!

My default mode for using my Mac …

… is with my right hand on the trackpad, and my left in the home row position – for instance like this:

I totally get that both hands on the keyboard is the default for many. And I’m there quite a lot as well, and love keyboard-driven software.² But, for some reason, the tasks I’m doing call for the above even more.

So I’ve optimised my Mac to be able to do a lot with only that left hand on the keyboard, and only that right hand on the trackpad.

I really like the Magic Trackpad, as I can have the “desktop” setup be really similar to the laptop one. I do have a gaming mouse at the ready – but if I had to use a mouse, I guess I would try to recreate as much as possible on the Magic Mouse.³

The right hand and trackpad

I’ve used BetterTouchTool (and some default options) to have the trackpad be extra useful. (I can also recommend Swish, even though it doesn’t fit what I want to do with the trackpad.)

Here are the main gestures I’ve set up, and that work in “every” program:

• I like both Exposé and Mission Control, so these are four-finger swipes up and down.
• Four fingers to the right is New Tab,
• and four fingers to the left is Close Tab.
• Three fingers to the left and right move between tabs.
• Three fingers down will give me the menu from the menu bar where my mouse is (via the app Menuwhere). This is especially nice on big monitors.
• One-finger tap is obviously Left Click, and two-finger tap is Right Click. But I’ve also set it up so three-finger tap is Middle Click (like pressing down on a mouse wheel)– which will open links in new tabs in browsers.
• Three-finger click will send Cmd+R, to refresh stuff.
• Four-finger click will send (Forward) Delete. (For being able to select something, and delete it, without moving from the trackpad.)

While browsing, it’s just so smooth to be able to three-finger tap a link to open something in the background, then (when I want to check it out) just tree-finger swipe to change the tab, three-finger click to refresh it (if needed), and then four-finger swipe to close it when I’m done. Especially while chilling with the laptop in my lap (as God intended), it’s really underrated to have a great browsing experience with one hand! Also neat while drinking coffee. 👌🏻

The left hand and keyboard shortcuts

The two main things I’ve optimised for here, are opening apps and window management. I also use Paste quite a lot (with its paste stack feature). To be able to do this, I’ve had to set up a lot of custom hotkeys. And to have them not conflict with the default ones, most of them use two “modifier keys” that aren’t used normally:

• The ✦ Hyper key (Shift+Control+Option+Command)
• The ¬_¬ Meh key (Shift+Control+Option)

I’ve used Karabiner-Elements to set it up so holding Caps Lock gives me ✦ Hyper, and holding (not tapping) R or U gives me ¬_¬ Meh.

I’m mostly using Raycast 🖇️ to actually set the specific hotkeys (including launching shortcuts).

¬_¬ Meh

This key is used only to launch apps. For instance, I used ¬_¬ + W to open the terminal Warp 🖇️. However, I’m currently using Ghostty – but I’ve kept the same hotkey. So that’s why some make sense, and others don’t.

Here are my current hotkeys:

• ¬_¬ + 1 = 1Password
• ¬_¬ + W = Ghostty
• ¬_¬ + E = Apple Notes
• ¬_¬ + R = Finder
• ¬_¬ + T = Telegram
• ¬_¬ + Y = Tot
• ¬_¬ + U = Ulysses
• ¬_¬ + I = Photos.app
• ¬_¬ + O = Obsidian
• ¬_¬ + P = Paper
• ¬_¬ + A = Tidal
• ¬_¬ + D = Affinity Designer
• ¬_¬ + F = Zen
• ¬_¬ + L = Trello
• ¬_¬ + Z = Zed (or Nova)
• ¬_¬ + C = Shortcuts.app
• ¬_¬ + B = Bike
• ¬_¬ + N = NotePlan
• ¬_¬ + M = Mail.app
• ¬_¬ + , = System Settings.app⁴

Now, one can, of course, also open apps with a launcher and typing – but that requires two hands to be done effectively. And you can also use Cmd+Tab or something similar – but it’s just much faster to immediately launch (or switch focus to) the app you want with a single stroke.

✦ Hyper

This key is both used for window management (which I go more into here and here) and for more general global hotkeys.⁵

When it comes to window management, I’ve (sort of) made a grid under my left hand:

• ✦ + W = Top Left
• ✦ + E = Top Right
• ✦ + A = Left Half
• ✦ + S = Fullscreen
• ✦ + D = Right Half
• ✦ + Z = Bottom Left
• ✦ + X = Bottom Right

As you can probably understand, I can rapidly launch the app I want, and then place it where I want:

Some other uses of the ✦ Hyper key:

• ✦ + V = Activate Paste
• ✦ + C = Activate TextSniper
• ✦ + I = Blog image uploader shortcut
• ✦ + N = A new document from Bike shortcut I’ve made
• ✦ + P = Launching Raycast AI chat
• ✦ + Ø = Run a (low-creativity) English grammar check on the selected text (Claude)
• ✦ + Æ = Run a similar Norwegian check (Claude)
• ✦ + Å = Define the selected word, with examples of use (Claude)

Try it for yourself!

I can strongly recommend setting up (at least some of) this for yourself. The easiest parts are the Hyper key (with something simple like this) (with a bunch of Raycast hotkeys) and some trackpad gestures in BetterTouchTool:

I’ve added some as global gestures (like four-finger swipe right sending Cmd+T), while others (like changing tab) needs to be set per app. But as long as you have a backup of the setup, it’s really a set-and-forget-thing!

Some feedback I’d love to get:

• Have you tried any parts of my setup?
• Do you have a similar setup yourself?
• Is Swish working for you?
• Do you have any advice for me on how to improve the setup further?
• Or doesn’t this make sense to you at all? (Maybe because you’re more of an all-keyboard person?)

Rumble Nation – a Terrific, Minimalistic, Japanese Strategy Board Game

Comparison Between the Old, Regular Version and the New, Deluxe Version

A couple of years ago, I got a great recommendation from the Board Game Barrage podcast: The minimalistic area majority board game, Rumble Nation. It only takes about 30 minutes to play, is easy to learn, and is cheap and compact. And all of this while still offering a lot of player interaction and interesting choices.

I ordered the original version from Japan, and it’s been a treasured possession. But recently, I was looking at some other games from Japan, and saw that they had made a deluxe version 🖇️ of it – so I ordered it.

I got it in the mail today, and wanted to show how it compares to the original, as I haven’t seen this done anywhere.

The rules

The only gameplay changes compared to the base game is that one tactic card is nerfed a bit,¹ and that the deluxe version includes a Daimyo variant/mini-expansion.

While playing with the latter, you’ll remove two armies and instead be able to place your extra large token as an army.² At the beginning of the game, you will have drafted an ability, you can use once, related to this Daimyo piece.³ So this adds a third option in phase 1, in addition to throwing dice and placing armies, and using one of the publicly available tactic cards. It seems interesting!

But an important difference is that the deluxe version is Japanese only, while the regular version was both Japanese and English. Luckily, the BGG community has come through, and English rules can be found here. Also, only the daimyo cards are language-dependent (but they also have iconography you can learn).

The components

The yellow cubes are armies, and the kabuto is just for the player to keep in front of them to indicate their player colour. In the regular version, there are only 3 dice, which gets passed around. The token with the katanas are used for the mentioned tiebreaker.

In the deluxe version, every player gets their own dice set, and they’re really nice. I also like the new armies (even though I do have a soft spot for cubes in board games), and that the big piece gets game time. The card art is also nicer in my opinion – but the tactic card quality is about the same (while the daimyo cards are in an even higher quality).

Hexagons are huge in board games – but I think this is the first time I’ve seen heptagons! In general, I’d say the tokens in the middle are a more sideways move, compared to the others, though.

I’m someone who does value how a game looks and feels. But I also value it being compact – both on the shelf, during transport, and on the table.

However, the only thing I think is a pretty pure downgrade, when going to the deluxe version, is the board. (I’ve added the English names to the original board – so disregard that if you’d like!)

• The original board gets somewhat congested in the end, and the deluxe components are larger. But it’s still a bit annoying that the game now needs more board space.
• I think I like the palette less (even though it fits nicely with the rest of the art direction, which I do quite like).
• Even though it adds boats, it lacks some interior details from the original.

What I would give it, though, is that the combination of size, colours, and lack of details makes it even more readable. But that wasn’t a big problem with the original.

All together now

Verdict

The good:

• Nice box- and card-art.
• The box isn’t that much larger.
• The daimyo variant seems like a decent addition.
• Good player components.

The bad:

• Larger board presence.
• Only Japanese rules and components (we’ll see whether I’ll apply a fix for this or not)
• Duller board art.

In general, though – Rumble Nation is a terrific board game for the price and complexity, that I greatly recommend picking up 🖇️. And the deluxe version is good – which is fortunate, as it’s the only one I can find at the moment.

Bonus images

As a side note, here are the other games I ordered from amazon.co.jp:

I’m especially happy with the addition to this little collection:

Quick Recommendation #3: What Makes This Song Stink (YouTube)

In general, I prefer positive content. So I prefer the vibe of CinemaWins over CinemaSins. But the series called What Makes This Song Stink, by Pat Finnerty, is an absolute treasure of YouTube content.

I think it can work for anyone – but it’s especially funny if you’ve spent any time on “Music YouTube”. (The series is packed with Rick Beato beats.)

I recommend starting at the beginning (of the playlist linked above), with Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down, and watch them in order. Then you’ll see the evolution of the form, and be in on all the terrific in-jokes. And already the third video, on Weezer - Beverly Hills, is a highlight.

It’s hard to explain, but the series just has so much heart, and Pat is just delightful. I highly recommend giving this series a try! (Also, he releases like a couple of videos a year – so its easy to stay on top of.)

Quick Recommendation #2: Better Markdown Preview in Finder

Hitting space to preview files (Quick Look) is one of my favourite Finder features. However, it does a pretty mediocre job with Markdown files. QLMarkdown is a little utility that makes these previews richer.

You can install it from this link, or by using this Homebrew command:

brew install --cask qlmarkdown

The app isn’t signed – so you need to do the little dance to convince macOS that you want to run the app. (This is detailed in the original link share up top.)

You need to open the app once for the utility to work. And that’s also where you change settings.

I get that many Markdown contexts are outside of Finder – but if you do use them there, I hope this little tool can be useful!

Is Apple Forcing Me to Pay Them for Much More Cloud Storage Than I Need?

It’s pretty well-known that the 5 GB of cloud storage Apple includes for free (when you buy a €1,000 phone) is quite pathetic. However, I’ve actually found the 200 GB plan for 39 NOK (€3.33) a month to be decent value. But as I’m close to reaching the limits of that plan – I think it’s highlighting some anti-competitive issues.

My use

I’m currently using 86.7% of my storage.

• Photos.app is the largest culprit, using 128.7 GB.
• Backups use 27.3 GB – but I intend to set this up to back up locally to my Mac Mini.
• iCloud Drive only uses 4.5 GB, as I’m babying it quite a bit.
• Messages uses 3.8 GB – but this could probably be removed as I don’t use iMessage as my default chat app.
• My wife is currently on her own 50 GB plan – but we do have an iCloud family. (So I wouldn’t mind combining these.)

My default cloud storage provider is Dropbox

In my opinion, the largest tech companies have far too much power already. So I like to use services from other companies if I can.¹ I also like how, in general, using third-party alternatives can give you flexibility. So, since we’re using Dropbox in my band, and I think it does the job, using this is my default cloud storage provider makes sense to me.

However, some pros of using third-party alternatives can be thwarted by first-parties, like Apple:

Problem #1: Backups

I’m “lucky”, in that I’ve given Apple even more money, by buying an always-on Mac mini – so I can actually resolve this problem. But Apple has conveniently (you know, for your own security) made it so you can only use their products and services to make complete device backups.

Because things are as they are, I really think the vast majority of people owning an iPhone should pay at least some money to Apple every month, for cloud storage – no matter how much cloud storage they might have elsewhere. And I think this reality is a concern.

Problem #2: Photos

I’m using iCloud Shared Library with my wife – and I think it’s a pretty good experience. (Even though it’s baffling that you can’t create shared albums there yet.) And that’s lucky – because no one is allowed to create a full-fledged competitor on iOS.

And this makes it extra annoying (and problematic) that I’m not allowed to use some of my 2 TB of Dropbox storage to store my photos.² Because it could be an argument that it’s fine that Apple uses its investments in Photos.app to funnel people into buying iCloud storage (in addition to Apple’s hardware products), and that Dropbox should make their own Photos.app competitor. But Apple is literally barring them from doing just that.

This is the issue with the ever-increasing bundling of markets: To be able to properly compete in cloud storage (which could be a healthy market in itself, as long as APIs and software hooks are good enough), you need to have your own little monopoly³ to leverage.

Problem #3: Lack of options

Even though I’m able to trim away everything else, in time, my photo library will become larger than 200 GB. And all of these problems make it all the more frustrating that the next tier in Apple’s offering is to 10x my storage, from 200 GB to 2,000 GB (2 TB), for 3.3x the price. And it’s not like I can go for a competitor, that might offer a 500 GB plan, instead…

Please let me know if you have other ideas for me! But I know that it would be very unpopular at home if I wanted to move our family photo library to something like Nextcloud…

It’s problematic when one company sits on so many parts of the table:

• Why should the Apple, the software maker, build a way to use Dropbox as the cloud backend, when Apple, the cloud storage provider, wouldn’t like this?
  • And how does this affect their incentive to support better image compression (like JPEG XL), etc.?
• iMessage gets special treatment on Apple’s platform, and has a firm hold on the American market.⁴ But what are their incentives, when it comes to making it be more kind to both your local and cloud storage, when the same company also earns money when you need to pay for more storage of both those varieties?

I’m not saying Apple, and other companies in similar situation, always exploits these things to its fullest. I don’t think there are people at Apple, twiddling their fingers, and saying “Muhaha, let’s make things terrible for Dropbox customers. And let’s make every photo take up twice the amount of space. 😈” And I know I’m harping on Apple here – but to be clear: The reason I do that, is that I use vanishingly few products from the other giants, as I like them way less than Apple. I’m not saying they’re the worst offenders.

It’s just that my recent cloud storage woes have shone another light on the problematic competitive landscape surrounding the tech giants. And I really think it’s important to keep an eye on incentive structures – especially when it comes to things that affect all of us (like the mobile market). Because these structures have effects on priorities and small choices, which compound when the companies making them are multi-trillion-dollar ones.

Quick Recommendation #1: Cheap Strap Locks for Guitars

Why buy expensive (or just kind of cheap strap locks, when you can go old school and just order a bunch of rubber gaskets for bottles??

Here’s a link 🖇️ to the listing I used on AliExpress – but there are probably plenty of others that are just as fine. 👍🏻

I know it’s silly – but for some reason I think it’s a bit more rock ‘n’ roll to use something not meant for the purpose. 😎

App Defaults and Home Screen Update – January 2025

I wrote a bit more in-depth about it in my original post here – but here’s my update at the beginning of 2025! A bunch of these are paid apps I probably wouldn’t prioritise if I didn’t already subscribe to Setapp 🖇️ – so keep that in mind.

Headers with * have some changes.

Mac dock

I use an automatic shortcut, activated with Shortery, to switch between the dock being “hidden at the bottom” (on the laptop screen) and “shown to the left” (on my 27" monitor).

Here’s what it looks like by default:

iPhone home (and lock) screens

My home screens, and backgrounds, change with my Focus modes – but I wouldn’t say I’m great at maintaining these modes. I’ll often use different variants of the same background, for instance from Wallaroo. Some of my modes have traces of this – but I’ll also mix it up, like I have now, with things like photos of my wife.

I always use just one home screen – so I always have one swipe to the Today View and the App Library.

Today View and App Library

No mode

Do Not Disturb

Work

Chill

Sleep (lock screen not relevant)

Driving (home screen not relevant)

Systems and productivity

📓 Notes, tasks, and writing*

Most of this happens in a folder of Markdown files, which I access both through Paper, NotePlan, and Ulysses. At the same time, I just love using Bike (and always think in outlines), so I use that a bit as well. But it’s a big con that I can only access those files on the Mac for now…

I’ve been dabbling with Godspeed 🖇️ for tasks – and I can recommend it, even though I just don’t need a separate task manager.

I’m also using Obsidian for my band, and Notes.app for stuff I share with my wife. And I use Tot as a sticky note and when I need to keep some text floating on top on my Mac.

📖 Journaling*

I’ve switched from Everlog to Diarly because the latter is included in Setapp. But I still don’t journal a lot, and I’d say they’re about equally good.

🛒 Shopping list

My wife and I are using Bring.

📅 Calendar

Still using, and liking, BusyCal.

🌦️ Weather app

The free (because it’s run, and paid for, by the Norwegian state 👌🏻) weather service and app Yr is great, and a true hidden gem (for people outside of Norway).

📮 Mail server

Fastmail 🖇️ still works great!

📨 Mail client

Mail.app is still aggressively fine.

💬 Chat app

I don’t love the people behind it, and I don’t use the more “social media”-like features of it at all. But as a simple chat/call app for friends and family, nothing beats Telegram. And the fact that it’s cross-platform is great, as my social circle is that as well.

🌐 Browser

Even though it’s an Alpha product, I’ve used Zen as my main browser for the last couple of months. And I really like it, and the fact that I can use (and enjoy) a Gecko browser.

I currently use Quiche Browser on iOS, and Safari on iPadOS.

🔎 Search Engine

Kagi is still one of my favourite tech products. Luckily, I don’t know what people are talking about when they’re discussing how web search has become bad…

🔖 Bookmarks

Anybox is my box for anything.

🔐 Password management

I strongly believe that it’s a good idea to store your passwords (etc.) in a third-party manager. And I like 1Password – especially as it works great to use with my family.

📶 RSS backend

I still use Feedbin – but I’m looking at the possibility of hosting in on my new Mac Mini!

📰 RSS reader

Lire is still my favourite here. 👌🏻

📁 Cloud File Storage

I try not to use services from the absolute largest companies if I can help it. So that’s one reason why I’m mostly using Dropbox – and I quite like it as well. But I’m fearing that Apple is forcing me to pay for more iCloud storage as well…

🌅 Photo storage and management

I just use Photos.app.

📷 Camera app

I think I would’ve liked something like Obscura or Halide if I had a better mobile camera. But as I’m still rocking my iPhone 13 Mini, Camera.app works OK.

⏲️ Time tracking

Timemator works perfectly for my use.

Tools and utilities

🤖 Automation and settings

The trifecta of Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, and Karabiner-Elements makes every other Mac seem broken. PopClip, Hazel, and SoundSource also contributes.

🔩 Text Editor*

I mostly use Nova – but occasionally (including now) I try to run Zed as my main. Nova is more feature-rich, (arguably) prettier, and noob-friendly.¹ But Zed is faster and more minimal!

📟 Terminal*

There’s a similar story here: I’ve mostly used Warp 🖇️ recently – and I love how noob-friendly it is! Especially how it handles text like a normal frickin program! (Instead of doing it in the special terminal-way.) But I’m currently trying Ghostty, which is more sleek and less bloated.

📦 Package manager

I just love installing (and uninstalling) apps with HomeBrew. So I always use that if I can.

🧮 Calculator

On the Mac, I’m using the launcher or Soulver. And on the iPhone, I can’t recommend the weirdly named SC-323PU enough! Take it from a maths teacher: It’s the best – even for simple calculations.

🖼️ Screenshots (and screen recordings)

Cleanshot is just so good. 👌🏻

🚀 Launcher (and more)

I still use, and love, Raycast 🖇️ – both as my launcher, and general LLM interface. It’s really fast, and I love how I can set hotkeys to everything. For instance, I have hotkeys to open numerous apps, different AI commands, running shortcuts, and searching Anybox.

I’ve bought a license for the (even more) indie alternative Monarch – to support the development. The dev is working on the ability to Bring Your Own Key (AI) and support for (Raycast) extensions – and I’ll be interested to see if it can replace Raycast at some point.

🪟 Window management

I mostly use Raycast, combined with Apple’s default actions. (Here’s a post on how I set up the hotkeys, and here’s a post on how I manage windows.)

I also use Lasso when I need something more specific.

📋 Clipboard manager

Paste is terrific.

📄 PDF tool

Nitro PDF is a perfect example of a nice “better default” I would never pay for, but am glad I have access to through Setapp.

🗜️ Zip tool

Archiver is another little Setapp gem.

🍸 Menu bar organiser

I’m interested in the development of something like Ice – but I’m currently happy with Bartender. Especially how it can change dynamically (both when things change, like battery status, and depending on whether I’m using an external screen.)

🗑️ Uninstaller

PearCleaner is great when HomeBrew can’t be used.

🌍 VPN

I don’t use this a lot – but ClearVPN (through Setapp) works well enough.

🖌️ Design tools

Still liking the Affinity suite!

Entertainment

⚽ Football scores

If you follow football, no matter the league, I highly recommend (the Norwegian app) FotMob.

🎬 Media player and server*

Another enjoyable “Setapp default” is Elmedia Player, which I use for local music and video files.

A new addition is me running a Jellyfin server on my Mac Mini, and watching stuff there through the great Infuse player.

🎤 Podcast player

Overcast got (temporarily) worse just after the recent rewrite – but now we’re into the phase where it’s better than it was before, and where the developer is (and thus we are as well) reaping the rewards of going through with it.

🐘 Mastodon client

Mastodon is my social media of choice, and there are so many great apps for it out there! But my favourite, is Mona.

👥 Reddit client

It’s not as good as Apollo was (RIP) – but Narwhal 2 is pretty good.

🎵 Music

I’m still on Tidal, after being on Spotify for a decade. Still don’t like it as much – but it’s OK.

That’s it!

My absolute favourite parts about Apple’s platforms isn’t stuff they do – but all the great software available for it. (Even though I know some of the things I’ve mentioned are cross-platform!) It’s almost like, sometimes, the work of others gives them more business – and not just the other way around…

Telegram-tips for nye brukere

Jeg har tidligere skrevet litt mer grundig om hvorfor jeg synes Telegram er et godt alternativ for chatte-app. Der har jeg også gått mer i detalj når det gjelder gode funksjoner (og noen negative aspekter) – men jeg ville samle noe kjappe tips i en kortere artikkel her.

Komme i gang

Ikke alle disse punktene er obligatoriske – men jeg anbefaler alle:

1. Start på telefonen din, og last ned og lag deg en bruker (gjerne med profilbilde). Denne sida har lenker til apper for alle platformer.
2. Pass på at appen har varslinger og andre tillatelser.
3. Last ned, og logg inn, på andre enheter du bruker, som PC og nettbrett. Jeg liker å ha varslinger her også – men ikke like nødvendig. Den viktigste grunnen er at jeg liker når “meldinger” ikke bare er noe som lever på telefonen. (Er jo også mye bedre å skrive på ordentlig tastatur!)
4. Gi appen en sjanse. Prøv å bruke den litt, siden den sikkert er litt uvant i starten. Sjansen for at du liker den blir også større om du gjør siste punkt:
5. Tilpass utseende og slikt til din smak og ditt behov.

Tilpasninger

Jeg anbefaler generelt å trykke litt rundt inne på Innstillinger – men særlig disse to er kjekke å sjekke:

Der kan du tilpasse varslinger (og lyder), og hvordan chattene ser ut. Du kan også tilpasse til enkelt-chatter, hvis du ikke vil at alle skal være like.

Vanlig kommunikasjon

Noen bruker Telegram nærmest som et sosialt medium – men jeg bruker det bare til enkel kommunikasjon, tekst-chat og video- og lydsamtaler, med familie og venner. Og her er noen gode funksjoner man kan benytte seg av til dette.

Formatere, og planlegge, meldinger

Dette er tinga jeg savner mest når jeg må bruke andre chatte-tjenester! (Noen har noen av disse funksjonene, men ingen andre har alle.)

For eksempel på Mac, så kan man formatere deler av en melding ved å markere teksten, høyreklikke, og så gå på Transformations. (På telefoner marker man teksten og trykker på Formatér.)

Her kan du se at man har følgende muligheter:

• Strek gjennom tekst
• Understrek
• Spoiler (som vil si at teksten skjules fram til mottakeren holder inne over den)
• Monospace (teksttype man ofte bruker til koding)
• Kursiv
• Fet
• Hyperlenke
• Sitat

Jeg synes dette er en undervurdert funksjon, som kan gjøre meldinger lettere å lese. Særlig det å kunne legge til hyperlenker kan være nyttig her – så ikke lange lenker roter til teksten.

Når du har skrevet ferdig en melding, kan du også holde inne sende-knappen for å få disse flotte valgene:

• Man kan legge til en emoji-effekt,
• sende uten av mottaker får varsel,
• sende når mottakeren åpner appen,
• eller planlegge et tidspunkt for sending.

Jeg liker særlig den siste, hvis jeg for eksempel skriver en melding etter vanlige folks leggetid, men tenker den gjerne kan sendes klokka 09:00. Da kan jeg likevel få den ut av hodet.

Svare på, og redigere, meldinger

Hvis du holder inne på en melding i en tråd, får du disse valga:

Hvis du trykker Svar kan du også velge å sitere deler av teksten.

Dersom du holder inne på en av dine egne meldinger, kan du også trykke Redigér. Jeg liker at man både kan redigere og slette meldinger!

Lyd- og video-meldinger

Hvis du trykker på dette ikonet, bytter du mellom å sende en rask lyd- eller video-melding. Hold inne for å spille inn. Du kan også velge om den kan høres mer enn én gang eller ikke. (Dette kan du også velge når du sender vanlige bilder, a la Snapchat.)

Organisering

Dersom du har mange samtaler gående, kan det være fint at man kan sortere dem i ulike mapper. Her er et skjermbilde av mappa jeg kun har gitt et emoji-navn (👨‍👩‍👧‍👦), som er for grupper og enkelt-samtaler med familie:

Man kan også feste enkelt-samtaler, så de(n) alltid er øverst. Jeg har gjort dette med samtalen med kona, for eksempel.

Jeg liker også at man kan gå inn på en enkelt-bruker og få oversikt filer og lenker man har delt med hverandre, hvilke grupper begge er med i, osv. 👇🏻

Deling

Dersom du trykker der jeg har satt blå pil, kan du sende emoji, klistremerke eller GIF-er.

Trykker du på under den røde pilen, får du opp denne menyen:

Video, bilde, m.m.

Du kan trygt dele media fra Galleri der – siden Telegram ikke komprimerer så mye at de blir ødelagt. Men dersom du sender dette via Fil, sendes de helt uten komprimering. Derfra kan man dele filer helt opp til 2 GB!

Posisjon

Hvis du trykke Posisjon, får du opp dette:

Jeg liker at jeg kan dele direktesendt posisjon, i en begrensa periode, for eksempel så folk kan følge med på hvor langt unna jeg er. Dersom begge deler slik live-posisjon, kan man også sette på varsel av typen “gi meg et pling når vi er 200 meter unna hverandre”. Veldig kjekt!

Grupper

I tillegg til solide grunnleggende funksjoner når et gjelder chatter, har Telegram i tillegg noen ekstra fine funksjoner til gruppe-chatter. (Og dette er hvorfor jeg ønsker meg så mange som mulig på plattformen!)

Emner

Dette er ikke nødvendig å skru på for alle grupper – men på noen, kan det være veldig kjekt å dele opp i Emner/under-grupper.

Her har jeg laga et eksempel på en inndeling man kan ha:

• 🎄 Gaver – for å dele ting som ønskelister
• 🏠 Samlinger – for å avtale å møtes
• ❓ Hjelp og råd – for tech-support, praktiske spørsmål, osv.
• 🧳 Minner – for å dele bilder etter en samling, gamle bilder man har funnet på loftet, osv.
• # Generell prat – for øvrig kommunikasjon

Jeg synes slike inndelinger gjør det lettere at ting ikke forsvinner i en strøm av meldinger – men det er jo ikke krise om man ikke alltid legger ting “riktig”!

På samme måte som med enkelt-samtaler, kan man enkelt få oversikt over hva som er delt. Og både dette, og ting som varslings-innstillinger, kan både være på hele gruppa, eller kun ett enkelt-emne.

Avstemninger

Telegram har også fine funksjoner for å lage avstemninger, som blant annet kan være nyttig om man skal finne dagen flest kan møtes i romjula!

Generelt en god app

I tillegg til at jeg liker at appen ikke har reklame[^1] og er enkel å bruke, så liker jeg at den generelle kvaliteten på appen er god. Det merkes i en del små-detaljer. Men både for å oppdage disse, og for å generelt bli vant til den (for noen småting vil jo være ulikt fra det man er vant til), så må man jo gi appen en sjanse.

Selv mener jeg jo oppriktig at den er vesentlig bedre enn ting som Messenger og iMessage – så jeg ville prøvd å bruke den med alle som også er på tjenesten! Også viktig å huske varslinger, tillatelser, og å gi den er grei plassering på hjem-skjermer og slikt.

[^1] Utenom i store, offentlige kanaler (jeg aldri bruker). Og disse bruker ikke sporing for å tilpasses.

I Tried to Design an Icon for Zen – My Favourite Browser

I’m one of those who really likes the Arc browser. But at the same time, I’m quite worried about Google’s web hegemony (and the general trajectory of The Browser Company) – so I want to use and like Firefox/a Gecko browser. Sadly, I just don’t think Firefox is very good…

However, I’ve used Zen as my main browser for the last six months – and I’m pleased with it! (By the way, click here, to go straight to the new icons.)

In short, it’s a Firefox fork, that has copied a lot of the things I like about Arc – like vertical tabs, split-views, workspaces, and nice padding 🤤. It also has some original ideas – and my favourite one takes advantage of the great customisability offered in Firefox:

Zen Mods

You can easily install, and adjust the settings of, community created mods. These are mostly little tweaks, like themes, having the close button on the left side (and hidden without hover), cleaner extension menu/right-click menu/navigation bar, etc.

I really like that the browser is enjoyable out-of-the-box, but that I can still customise a lot to my liking.

But be aware: It is alpha software.

This means that not everything is polished, and that things change quite frequently. But, as mentioned, I’ve used it as my primary browser for six months, and I’ve still liked it more than most browsers.

One of the things that has just changed is the graphical profile, logo, and icon.

I like the direction and idea – but I don’t love the execution

The profile used to be harsher and more based on black and white – and with a Z logo. Now everything is a bit more chill, which fits the name better.

I assume the circles are meant to represent zen garden patterns – that sometimes come in circles:

Even though I’m not a designer, I tried my best to create a logo/icon, based on the same idea.

And these are the goals that I had:

• Have the circles be of consistent thickness, as this appears to be more common when it comes to the zen patterns.
• Add some more depth, to give a more sand-y vibe.
• (But as I know that Zen has to only ship one version of the icon, it can’t be too detailed – as it must also work in small sizes.)
• Have versions for the 10 accent colours you can choose in Zen. (And light and dark versions of each.)
• Try to make it a bit less generic.

The last one is especially difficult, as “a bunch of circles in a quite minimalistic style” isn’t the easiest to differentiate…

Here’s my best try:

Desktop icons

As this is just an early proof-of-concept, I just made it for my two favourite accent colours: A light blue, and a dusty pink. (Oh, and remember that you’ll probably watch the images much larger than they’ll be in use.)

All icons, for Mac, PC, and Linux, can be found through this Dropbox link, if you want to try them out.

Would love to hear feedback if anyone has any!

And, have you tried Zen for yourself? I greatly recommend it, or (the terribly named) Floorp, if you want something nicer than Firefox, but still see the value in bumping up Gecko market share.

Guess What Apple Paid to "Buy" the Firefox Extension for iCloud Keychain

Good news! As of today, there’s an official Firefox extension for Passwords.app / iCloud Keychain.

“What? There wasn’t one already?" you might say.

Fair question! Maybe it was a bit much to ask of the famously cash-strapped company to take care of those of their users who want to use the only* independent* browser. (To me, this reveals one of the reasons why I think you should rather store your passwords with a third party you trust.)

Luckily, the lonely lad (or lady) Aurélien has been maintaining an unofficial add-on for years! 🫡

“But now Apple has managed to scrape together the cash to build one themselves??"

Not quite… Apple reached out to Aurélien, through Mozilla, to ask if Apple could simply get the code of the unofficial plugin. (Source)

“Ah, so instead of starting from scratch, they instead bought a good starting-point. Smart."

Well, not quite… From the GitHub thread linked above:

The user Hakusaro: “Thank you for all your hard work. And I really hope Apple at least paid you a little for this."

Aurélien: “Unfortunately not. I suggested a $1 one-time GitHub sponsorship as acknowledgement before the transfer, but didn’t get an answer."

This comment was last week, and there hasn’t been an update on this since – but I really, really hope it’s just due to slow processes within Apple. Because fuck them if they can’t contribute a single dollar to someone who has helped Apple’s users for years, and Apple directly now.

I know that large corporations are notoriously bad at sponsoring the open-source projects that they depend on – but this is just so blatant.¹

OBS: If anything has changed since I wrote this, or if I’ve misunderstood something, please let me know! I’ll gladly update the post.

✉️ Feedback on the The Verge Subscription

The excellent tech website, The Verge, just launched a subscription – which I know they’ve worked on for a while.

Generally, I think the way they’ve approached it seems pretty sensible – but I still have some feedback. And hopefully, the fact that I’ve subscribed for a year will increase the odds of it getting better, and not decrease it.

Some quotes from the launch, to get you up to speed

All the emphasises are mine – meant to guide you towards the most important parts.

Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It’ll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.

Our vision has always been to build The Verge like a software product, and we have a big roadmap of features to come, like a true dark mode toggle, the ability to personalize the homepage feed, and a lot of wacky ideas about what it might mean to follow authors, topics, and streams across the site and — eventually — decentralized social platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

In general, it seems OK

I get that most people want “everything online to be free all the time”. But if you want people to do high-quality journalism,¹ they need a way to do it while putting food on the table. And I think a freemium model, of sorts, seems like a good way to go about it.

Some problems with only going ad-supported:

• It doesn’t align the incentives of the writers and readers as cleanly,
• and it makes most people subsidise the product (by seeing ads and worsening their privacy) for the people who’s just saying “Nah, I’ll just harden my LibreWolf and block all the ads, to make sure the people making the content I want, doesn’t benefit at all from me consuming it.”

If you’re against this move and want to read stuff from The Verge, I’d love to hear how you envision the creators should benefit from you consuming what they make.

Some feedback, though:

The biggest, is that I absolutely think paying should get rid of all the ads. No mucking about.

One of the benefits they list, is a full-text RSS feed. But if this isn’t included already, I want an option to also get it without the sponsored/affiliate posts, like Apple’s AirTags are cheaper than they’ve ever Benn for Cyber Monday. Firstly, these are ads as well. Secondly, as a Norwegian, these are relevant about 0% of the time. I think they always categorise them as Deals – so shouldn’t be too hard.

I also think they need to offer ad-free podcast feeds.

The print magazine

From the launch post:

(…) and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design.

Now, guess if it’s possible to get this magazine if you live outside of North America (even if you’d pay for shipping)… And guess if you get a further discount instead if you’re not eligible for this reward, or if you have to pay the same price as those who do get it…

I don’t love that it now feels like I’m subsidising rewards I’m not eligible for.

Open standards

From the launch post again:

Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

I wholeheartedly agree with this point – and that is why I love that they embrace open standards like RSS (for both text and podcasts), and good ol' links.

However, the reason the things they mentioned in the quote happens, is that it often doesn’t make sense, from a business perspective, to support open standards. So, if I’m to renew my subscription, I want them to make good on their promises to also invest in open social media.

And even though I like several of the ideas behind Bluesky and the AT Protocol, I think, when we’re fighting an uphill battle for openness, improving the W3C standards is better than fragmentation. In other words, I want them to spend “my money” on ActivityPub – even though other things could make more business sense. The ability to do that, comes with people being willing to pay you out of loyalty.

Some ideas on how to do it

I absolutely don’t mind them having a presence on other platforms/protocols! But I think they should base things around ActivityPub.

I’m sure they’ve cooked up plenty of possibilities on the inside – but I wanted to provide some thoughts anyway:

• I don’t think they should do something like hosting a Mastodon instance open to the public,²
• but having a server³ so we can follow accounts like @nilaypatel@verge.social, @frontpage@verge.social, and @liveblog@verge.social⁴ would be great.
• I also want the Quick Posts to be native ActivityPub posts, that I can get in my timeline.
  • (If posts are this, I would use ActivityPub services as the main “comment section” – but that’s just me.)
• Micro.blog could serve as an inspiration (or you could just use the service⁵) for setting up the Quick Posts: Users can follow the account directly – but you can also set up automatic cross-posting to numerous services.⁶

The biggest thing for me, is that I think The Verge’s main home should be their website (they got that right) – while the hub for their social presence (both for brand stuff, journalists, and readers) is based around ActivityPub. In time, I’m sure Threads users would be able to follow these accounts! And with even more time, they can probably be bridged into Bluesky as well! But again: I don’t mind cross-posting elsewhere.

I get the notion that creators (of all kinds) have to “be where the audience is”. But if you have “a massive loyal audience despite industry-wide declines in Google referrals and big social platforms downranking links” and “the most popular single page at all of Vox Media”, you can influence where the audience is!

Some people, and organisations, are in a position where they can choose to put their thumb on the scale – and push the web towards a better future. A future where network effects aren’t hostage effects, where you can follow people from your preferred platform, and where creators can move without losing everything they’ve built up.

The Verge, and Nilay Patel specifically, now that you have the subscription revenue of people like me, I hope you do your part to promote the web I know you want as well. I’m not saying The Verge has been, or is being, bad for the health of the web. I’m only saying you can be better. And especially after this change.

I'm Getting a New Car, and I Don't Care About CarPlay

Am I insane?

Time and time again, I’m hearing people say that they wouldn’t buy a new care without Apple CarPlay/Android Auto.¹ (The after-show on the latest episode of Mac Power Users was the last example.) I also hear how stupid some companies are for not including these systems in their cars. And I just don’t get it. Or, to be honest: I think I know some reasons why my opinion seems to differ from most people’s.

I live in the land of EVs

Norway has been subsidising EVs heavily for many years. And I think this statistic shows the effect well:

To put things into perspective: The EV market share in the US is currently at 8.9%, which is well below the 13% we had all the way back in 2014 – ten years ago.²

A welcome effect of this, is that we also have a healthy used-market for EVs – so I literally can’t remember the last time I talked to someone who weren’t buying an EV.³ I’ll come back to why this is important!

My experience

The car I’ve had for the last 3 years, is a 2019 Tesla Model 3, which I bought used. My wife and I are expecting our first kid in May, and we have a large dog – so we need something larger in the next 6 months. That’s why I’ve been looking at new cars again.

I’m pleased with my Model 3! And the Model Y would probably be the best purchase for us. But I simply don’t want to buy one, due to *gestures in the general direction of Elon Musk*. Luckily, we have tons of options over here. But when I started doing my research, I found myself not caring about whether the cars had CarPlay – even though I’m heavily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.⁴

The reasons I haven’t missed CarPlay

A big caveat is that I haven’t owned a car with CarPlay – so maybe I’m missing something obvious! However, I’ve never really missed it either.

Another important factor is that the software in the Tesla is pretty great. I entirely understand that CarPlay can be a hotfix for crappy infotainment, though.⁵

But anyway, I just don’t miss CarPlay when:

• I already get my phone calls etc. in the car,
• the map and navigation is great, and picks up events from my calendar automatically,
• I have radio right there,
• and I’m logged into my Tidal account (which changes to my wife’s if she’s driving).

The only things I don’t have access to, is things like podcasts and audiobooks. But when I’m alone, I just listen with my AirPods (on transparency of course!) as I go in and out of the car. And if I’m with someone else – that’s the only time we use the bluetooth connection to the phone. So, yeah – having access to those things would absolutely be a little bonus of having CarPlay. But it’s really minor!

Could a factor be that, since we’re not English natives (and these tools are much worse in Norwegian), there’s some voice stuff I’m missing? For instance, if some like having access to texting by voice. Genuinely confused!

Overlooked negatives about CarPlay

Again, I get that CarPlay can be better than a crappy built-in infotainment – or if you’re borrowing or renting a car. But there are some things that make me dislike the idea of carmakers resting on CarPlay bailing them out:

Disconnected look and feel

Let’s take navigation as an example:

• My car has only one massive screen. And I really like that when I use navigation, it takes up a lot of space. It’s a bit like how the iPhone revolutionised things, by being able to prioritise area.
• Another nice example, is a car that has a decent screen in the middle, a smaller screen behind the steering wheel, and a HUD (head-up display). While navigating, you’ll get a decent showing in the middle, while you also get some information behind the steering wheel. When you should make a turn, you also get notified in the HUD.
• Compared to both of these, just having navigation in a little, disconnected CarPlay window, seems like a substantial downgrade.⁶

With an integrated system, every part of the software (also the non-infotainment ones) can be cohesive. Apple fans should be able to see the appeal in that!

Battery woes

Last year, my wife and I really put the EV lifestyle to the test, when we drove from Norway to Toulouse in southern France. That was a three-day drive – but navigation and charging was effortless:

1. We put in where we wanted to end up,
2. the car calculated when (and thus where) we needed to charge – which it also changed on the fly if things changed,
3. and, importantly, when charging was near, it started pre-heating the battery.

That last point is important for the charging speed – especially in colder climates. And it’s something I think many people are missing, if you’re not used to EVs.

Now, please correct me if I’m wrong here – and I know all of this could be fixed in the future, but:

The thing is, for the longest time, CarPlay didn’t know about your battery’s state of charge. And hopefully the example above shows why that’s a big nerf to the navigation! They did start to roll out support for this a year or two ago – but I don’t think many cars support it yet. And I don’t think there’s a way for the CarPlay navigation to tell the battery to start pre-heating.

Maybe I’ll eat my words!

As most cars I’m looking at do support CarPlay, and also might have worse built-in systems than Tesla, I’ll might become a convert in a year…

Some big pros for CarPlay:

• I stand by the idea that the ceiling is higher on integrated systems – but the floor is much lower. And, in general, carmakers are far from having earned our trust, when it comes to creating good software.
• As someone who uses a more niche music streaming app, in Tidal, in lucky that my car supports it natively. CarPlay provides a much larger variety of services.
• It also, probably, provides more longevity – compared to the very real fear that the carmaker just “forgets” about your car.
• I’ve already mentioned the benefits if you’re borrowing or renting a car.
• And it’s also way easier to create more thorough integration with things like messages, calendars, etc.

And as my most important con regarding CarPlay is exclusive to EVs, I genuinely understand it being important if you’re buying an ICE car.

My conclusion

If I were to sum it up, I think there are two main points I want people to think about:

1. I want more people to be aware of the significant cons of CarPlay when it comes to EVs.
2. And I think it would be more nuanced if people went from saying “my next car has to have CarPlay” to: “My next car has to have CarPlay – unless the built-in software is great”.

And I kind of get why car company CEOs chooses not to integrate it:

• As the ceiling is higher on integrated systems, it can become a differentiation.
• And if they don’t have CarPlay to lean on, they have to work harder on making their own software great. I mean, imagine the pressure on GM to deliver a software experience customers like!

Perhaps you could say that, people who are really serious about making hardware should make their own software?

✉️ A Recommendation for the Great Note-Taking and Task Management App, NotePlan

In the latest episode of AppStories, Brendon Bigley filled in for Federico Viticci. Among other things, they discussed the apps he used, and he said he had research (and some writing) in Obsidian, while using the neat little post-it app Tot for “task management”. By task management, he meant that he kept his daily tasks in a note, and just deleted it at the end of the day.

This workflow made me want to recommend an app I like: NotePlan. And this post is a letter to him, about why I recommend that he takes a look.

Hi, Brendan! I’ve been listening to NPC on and off – but as I’m slightly more interested in the stuff AppStories focuses on, I’m glad you got the chance to bring your voice there as well. I enjoyed the episode!

When listening to your workflows and tastes in apps, I felt the need to throw a recommendation your way (which might also fit someone else who stumbles upon this letter): NotePlan. I think this app would be a nice upgrade over the way you use Tot, while, at the same time, also having the potential of replacing Obsidian. The writing experience is nicer than Obsidian’s – so it might even creep up on iA Writer! However, the writing experience isn’t absolutely top-tier, so I have to admit that I write my blog posts in a different app – while the files are in the NotePlan folder. (My favourite writing Markdown experience is Paper, which I wrote a review of here.)

Furthermore, it’s a bit expensive on its own, so if you don’t already already subscribe to Setapp 🖇️ (where the app is included), it might not be worth it, depending on which apps (if any) it manages to replace.

These are the ingredients the app is made up of:

At its core, it’s an Obsidian-like, as in just-a-folder-of-Markdown-files.

It does have plugin support, but it’s still far from as customisable as Obsidian.

However, if you’re mostly on Apple devices, it’s much more native-feeling than most Electron apps.¹

As I heard you use Windows at work, it could be valuable that NotePlan has a web app as well – even though it’s not as good as the native experience.

It offers powerful note-taking features, like

• templates (with Javascript support!),
• backlinks,
• embedded images,
• code syntax highlighting,
• foldable headers and list items,
• synced lines,
• (light) front-matter support,
• voice notes,
• sketching and hand-writing transcripts,
• sharing live links to notes with others, and more.

I also like that it has a command-bar interface (with a fast search), and powerful custom themes.

But the Secret Sauce is the way it handles tasks and calendar notes! But before I go into that, I wanted to touch on …

How you can use it in conjecture with other apps, like Obsidian:

As mentioned, the NotePlan library is just a folder, that looks like this:

The Notes folder holds your regular notes, while the Calendar folder holds the calendar notes. If you wanted to dip your toes into the app, while using Obsidian in parallell, you could just add your Obsidian vault to the Notes folder. Then you just point Obsidian to either just folder, or the whole NotePlan folder (so you’ll get access to the Calendar folder as well). I think note links are cross-compatible between Obsidian and NotePlan.

This folder can be synced in two ways:

1. With CloudKit,
2. or with iCloud.

If you’re using NotePlan exclusively, the former is recommended – as NotePlan can sync this on command. However, it doesn’t sync without you opening the app. (Thanks, Apple.) So if you’re editing the content of the folder with other apps (like I do), it’s probably better to use iCloud.

But let’s get to the good stuff:

Tasks and calendar notes

This Calendar Notes section is located above the regular folder structure.² Clicking on one of them, like the Daily, will take you to today’s daily note. If it’s empty, you can choose to have it autofill from a template – or it can just be empty (with a button if you want to add a template manually). From here, you can easily swipe to the left and right, to get to yesterday’s or tomorrow’s note. The same applies to the other types of calendar notes.

The 7-Day view shows you today + the next 6 days' daily notes in a single view – where you can edit, and move stuff between, all of them.

NotePlan has this nice way of being powerful if you want it to, while staying out of your way, and just being a nice plaintext editor, when that’s your preference. So, you could simply do exactly what you do in Tot today, by doing stuff like this:

Compared to Tot, I think it would be a pleasant little bonus that it’s a full-fledged Markdown editor under the hood, and that you don’t have to delete the note every day (even though that can be a neat thing to do as well!). It could be useful that yesterday’s note is just a swipe away!

But let’s take a look at what we can add, if we’d like to:

Two layers of tasks and tags

One clever thing that NotePlan does, is that it, for some features, has added two separate layers.

Tasks³ are a bit more “serious”, and will do things like appearing in an overdue list (more on this here), while checklist items⁴ are only there for you to have something to click on.

You can also add both @mentions and #tags, which both can be nested. This can be used to bring up “every task with the chosen tag”, or every note with a mention. Personally, I use the @mentions for context (like @Home or @Office), while I use the tags for the subject.

Advanced, but optional, task features

If I like, I can add things like time (or a time block), or importance to a task as well. I can also schedule it for another day (with or without time).

Adding the time stamps creates a notification and/or a time block, which you can decide if you want to appear in your regular calendar app as well. Notice that the cancelled task also had a time block – cancelling it removes the calendar event.

The two at the bottom are scheduled to another day tasks. This can also be used to “send” a task to today (or any other date), from a regular (non-calendar) note.

This task, from my weekly note, appears at the top of my daily note, because I added today’s date at the end. (It’s hidden in this view, though – which is nice.) I can click it, to complete it, right there. But I can also Command + Drag it, to create a synced line somewhere in my daily note.

The purple asterisks signify that the line is synced – so both editing the text, or changing the completion status, would get synced between the two placements.

The big thing here, is that all* of this is accomplished just with plaintext.⁵ This makes it straightforward to automate, and perform manually. Like, just writing

- A task @Home >2024-11-30 17:00

will create the task, give it the tag, and schedule it – with no extra clicks.

This screenshot, from a screen capture from the creator of the app, gives an impression of the possibilities:

Notice the calendar sidebar on the right, and the library sidebar on the left. These are nice to have access to, but can also easily be hidden (with a hotkey).

Now, much of this can be accomplished in Obsidian as well! But I do think that they’re mostly smoother here, as they’re built in. It’s also much easier to set up, and the app just feels better. It also doesn’t mind just being a simple Markdown editor, hiding its more advanced features, if that’s your style.

I’d love to hear about it if you’ll give the app a chance, or if you’ve tried it before! And if you do give it a go, this is my recommendation:

• Start by just using the daily notes just like you use Tot today,
  • and just keep the more advanced features in the back of your mind.
• Also try adding your Obsidian vault to the Notes folder.
  • Please don’t hesitate to continue using Obsidian like you do today,
    but know that you have access to the notes in NotePlan as well (if you want to dip your toes),
  • and that you can write >2024-11-26 (etc.) anywhere, to “send” a line to your daily note.

Some things could be better about the app, though

As mentioned, I prefer the writing experience of Paper. I go into detail on why in my review – but some things NotePlan handles suboptimally are, numbered lists (moving items around, adding to the middle, etc.), and complex combinations of bold and italics.

You can create custom filters for tasks – but I wish I could create smart folders, that would show a list of all notes that meets the criteria in the sidebar, like regular folders does now.

I really like the synced lines feature – but I wish it was a bit more powerful: It would be cool if syncing a heading also synced the content beneath it, and syncing a list item also synced its sub-items.

But it’s still an app I highly recommend checking out! Especially if you already subscribe to Setapp, and also because it’s so friction-less to move in and out of, due to the file-based approach. 👌🏻

"Julie", a New Single From My Band

I play bass in a band – and today we released a new single.

It’s called Julie, and I would love it if you gave it a whirl! 🫶🏻 It includes a modulation, an outrageous guitar solo, a fade-out, and good vibes.

Please Care About the Factory's Effect on the River

No Matter Where You Live

Let’s imagine a town, where the river is the main source of fresh water for everyone. Then, one day, someone builds a factory, near the middle of the river. A side effect of what the factory produces, is that it releases toxic waste into the river. The owners are aware of this – but they won’t do what’s needed to clean it up, as it would cut into their profits.

• How would you feel about buying the factory’s products?
• And would it matter if you lived upstream or downstream from it?

Blog posts about Substack

Today I read John Gruber’s blog post Regarding – and, Well, Against – Substack, which also linked to Anil Dash’s post “Don’t Call It a Substack”.

We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.

Anil Dash

This is a great point – and all three of us are in agreement here!

A slight disagreement

However, while I have a slight (and perhaps unimportant) disagreement with the next quote from Dash, I strongly dislike Gruber’s comments on it.

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.

Anil Dash

Substack is the factory in my simple analogy at the top. And “normalizing a radical, hateful agenda” is the toxic waste in the river. My small disagreement, is that I don’t think the factory was made with the purpose of polluting the river.

Some might say that’s an unimportant distinction, and that what matters is that they don’t care that they’re doing it. And I get that! My point is that I don’t want to give people the opportunity to think, “Of course they didn’t create an entire factory just to pollute 🙄 – so let me disregard all the points about the factory’s effect on the river."¹

Gruber’s post also shows another way this type of hyperbole can be unhelpful:

I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

John Gruber

Technically, I think he’s right here.² But Dash’s (I believe, exaggerated comment) allowed the discussion to be dragged into Substack’s intent rather than effect – which is not unimportant, but way less important.³

A large disagreement

However, I really don’t like where Gruber goes next:

What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.

John Gruber

Gruber doesn’t even try to dispute that the factory is poisoning the river. The only thing he’s saying is that, as someone who lives upstream from it, he doesn’t care whether it pollutes. His water tastes good, so why should he care?⁴

He also adds a footnote, saying that he doesn’t judge a social media platform on whether there are objectionable people on them, but whether or not he notices. And, again, I think he overemphasises his own experience.

Let me be clear: Everyone’s personal experience does matter. Choosing not to be a platform, for instance because you’re getting harassed, is of course perfectly valid. What I’m saying is that the total amount of harassment happening on a platform (or other negative consequences something produces) should also matter, even though you aren’t affected by it personally. And this is especially important if you’re, say, a straight, white cis man, like myself (and John Gruber).

Joaqin Windmuller said it well, in the blog post, Just Because You Don’t See It Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t There and Doing Harm.

Alternatives to Forcing Apple to Provide Solutions to Their Competitors

On Anti-Trust, APIs, and Market Participation

This week’s episode of the Upgrade podcast, was a good one as usual. I especially liked the discussions surrounding a potential pair of Apple smart glasses, and the way this connects to the regulatory scrutiny Apple is under currently.

Jason refers to the fact that Federico Viticci loves the Meta Ray Bans, but still really wants Apple to create a pair. And he then asked what I deem to be a crucial question:¹

Do we want smart glasses from Apple because of what they do better than the competition, or because of what they are allowed to do, but that they bar their competitors from doing?

Let me use earbuds as an example, as they are more common. I’m delighted with my AirPods Pro – and they’re a better fit for me, and my Apple hardware, than a pair of Sony buds (for example). But when looking at the reasons why I pick one over the other, here’s something I think it’s crucial to distinguish between: Which of them are due to things Apple does better, in fair competition (maybe I prefer the sound, or noice cancelling), and which of them are due to things Apple blocks Sony from doing (like pairing fairy dust)?

This brings me to a clip I wanted to share from the podcast, where I agree with a lot, but wanted to add something:

More solutions

What I wanted to add, was that there are more solutions than Apple being forced to make stuff for its competitors. And I think the European Commission holds this opinion as well.

Solution 1: Don’t block

Because, I don’t think Apple would’ve been forced to share their work with Meta, if Meta was allowed to do it themselves.²

Solution 2: Don’t participate in every market

I know this is a crazy question, but: What if being a super-profitable trillion-dollar company was enough? What if we didn’t require growth at all cost, and these behemoths didn’t feel the need to be everything to everyone?

Let’s say Apple mostly focused on their main hardware, like the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Maybe it would have been healthier if they competed against their competitors in these markets on playing nice with peripherals (in a privacy-minded way), instead of creating their own?

I’ve written about the need for un-bundling and smaller markets before (and also the beauty of third-party services)!

Solution 3: What Jason said

Now, if Apple insists on participating in every market, and on maintaining total control, I do think they need to be forced to create open APIs. And honestly, this might be the best solution for consumers! AirPods are great, Apple doesn’t need to “cheat” – and it would be a shame to lose them. And I don’t think they should be forced to sell the H2 to someone like Jabra. The problem is that competitors literally can’t make something that works as well with my phone. (And the “Jabra should just create their own trillion-dollar phone ecosystem” argument is so bad, that I don’t even want to address it.)

I don’t think my preference for phone should dictate (or at least influence) as many things as it does today. Things like choice of earbuds, smartwatch, cloud storage, note-taking app, etc.

• I’m paying every month for an iCloud storage plan (200 GB), as I need it to back up my devices and Photos library. But why can’t I instead use some of the 2 TB of Dropbox storage I already pay for?
• An argument for using Apple Notes, I hear from time to time, is the reliability of the sync on iOS. But the main reason for this, is that it’s allowed to sync in the background, while something like NotePlan has to be brought to the forefront to sync. I get that every app on my phone can’t get background privilege – but why can’t I swap Notes.app for NotePlan?

Regulation is suboptimal.

It’s ofter better if things shakes out without politicians meddling. However, sometimes, it doesn’t. And I’d say we’re currently at a place where it’s almost impossible for new players to thrive in, and define, emerging technology markets.

AI as an example

For instance, I think the Humane AI pin can both serve as a lesson on hubris, and one on how some ideas have* to come from a company that’s already dominating.

Perhaps a better example (even though I have several issues with the state of AI) is OpenAI. Will they manage to become an important, and independent,³ player, or, when all is said and done, will things concentrate around Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Google?

Matt Birchler wrote an interesting post, pointing to some quotes about Apple stepping into the AI space:

It happens all the time. Tech giants ship exciting new technology while Apple’s projects stay veiled in R&D, leading to the constant narrative that the company is ‘behind’ in that area.

With AI, that story may have actually had some truth to it—but things are starting to change.

Apple shipped major AI features to potentially hundreds of millions of devices with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 last month.

(…)

Before the end of the year, I have no doubt Apple’s AI features—especially what’s coming in 18.2—will become more mainstream than any other existing AI product.

Ryan Christoffel

Judging by the early impressions of Apple Intelligence: If Apple ends up being the most successful player in this market (too), it won’t be out of merit – but due to their position in other markets. And that’s not a good thing.

Monitor Resolution Guide for macOS

Seeing as Apple just released a great monitor-less Mac, in the new M4 Mac Mini¹, it makes sense that there’s more external display discussions surrounding Macs. After answering a couple of questions on Reddit here, I thought I’d try to write a guide. Because, if you don’t use a screen made by Apple, things get a bit complicated…

To make this as timeless as possible, I won’t discuss specific monitor models. Instead, I’ll do my best to foster understanding, that will help in your research.

Two uses of the term “resolution”

One way of using it, is when discussing the actual number of pixels a screen has. For instance, a regular 4K screen has 3840 ✕ 2160 pixels. This can be called the physical resolution.

However, look at this image, where I went into settings to set my 4K TV to display as 540p:

Changing the setting, luckily, doesn’t delete a bunch of pixels on my TV. So in this context, it can be useful to think of the resolution more like the size of the rendering. This can be called the logical resolution.

The relationship between the physical and logical resolutions matters

The physical and logical resolution can be the same. But for high-resolution screens, this will usually make things too small. And in this context, the resolutions 4K (3840 ✕ 2160) and _1080p_ (1920 ✕ 1080) have a special relationship: The former is exactly 2x the width and 2x the height of the latter. This is why you’ll see people mention 4K being “2x” that of 1080p. But keep in mind: it technically has 4x the number of pixels (since it’s 2x two times).

Let me try to explain why that’s important

Here’s an element on a screen with only 6 ✕ 4 pixels (let’s call it “4p”):

If we swap out this screen with one with 2x the resolution, 12 ✕ 8 (“8p”), we’ll get this:

Without changing the logical resolution, the element became tiny! So let’s have each physical pixel be 4 logical pixels, so the element will look the same:

OK, they look the same now – but then we haven’t really gained anything by doubling the resolution…

Let’s take advantage of the extra pixels, without changing the logical size, by filling in some pixels to make things nicer:

So now we’re running the 8p screen at 4p logical resolution, but nicer. This can be called 4p HiDPI, and is what Apple refers to when saying their screens are Retina.

I won’t go into why here² – but having the physical resolution be exactly 2x (so four times the number of pixels) the logical resolution, is the best. Knowing this, we end up with the following, for some common resolutions:

The 14" MacBook Pro, I’m writing this on, runs its 3024 ✕ 1964 screen with the logical resolution of 1512 ✕ 982 HiDPI. The thing is, what you want is ~220 PPI – no matter the screen size.³

Apple made a choice

The table above applies to both macOS, Windows and Linux – but it applies more to macOS. That’s ‘cause Apple has prioritised making the optimal resolution look even nicer, to the detriment of suboptimal resolutions. As screen types vary way more on the other platforms, these have (understandably) prioritised making suboptimal resolutions looking better. This is the source of the confusion surrounding monitor resolutions for macOS – while Windows users just buy a 4K screen at a random size, and get on with their life. Personally, I don’t think any of the platforms have made the wrong choice here, as the realities differ so.

However: Sub-optimal ≠ Trash

It’s not that running a 4K screen with a logical resolution of 1440p will make your eyes bleed. But you’ll might get some of the issues shown here – and running it at 1080p HiDPI will look better.

And just like with hi-refresh screens, some people are simply more picky on things like this than others. It also matters what you’re used to!

Oh, and both advice 1 and 2 above can be good if you have a monitor that does have the optimal resolution, but is not from Apple!

Two examples

1) Let’s say you want a 4K screen:

As mentioned, the logical resolution of 1080p is the friend of 4K. And in general, I’d say this logical resolution is great for screens ~21 inches.

This image is from my band’s studio, and the screens are 24 inches and 4K, running at 1080p HiDPI. In general, this is a bit too zoomed in for my taste – but as the screens are further away than with most setups, it ends up being pretty perfect.⁴

By comparison, Apple’s own iMac is 24", and has a 4.5k resolution. If you’re ever in doubt about the optimal resolution for macOS, just check Apple’s products.

What I hope is pretty obvious by now, is that 4K 27-inch screens aren’t optimal for macOS – which is too bad, as these are very common and affordable.

2) Let’s say you want a 27" screen:

A nice logical resolution, for 27", is 1440p. And 2x 1440p is 5k – so that’s what you want for a screen of this size.

“Ugh, but those are rare and expensive. Can’t I just get a 4K screen?”

Well, of course – I’m just saying it’s not optimal. And while it might feel like “it’s only one K less”, 5K has almost twice the number of pixels:

• 1440p = 2 560 ⋅ 1 440 ≈ 3.7 million pixels
• 4k = 3 840 ⋅ 2160 ≈ 8.3 million pixels
• 5k = 5 120 ⋅ 2 880 ≈ 14.7 million pixels

So, let’s sum it up:

1. Start by figuring out your preferred logical resolution – which will greatly depend on the size of the monitor.
   • For instance, 1440p.
2. Figure out which physical resolution you need to get 2x that. (Four times in total.)
   • If 1440p above, that will be 5k.
3. Find out how ungodly expensive that solution is, and go for BetterDisplay, DisplayBuddy, and accessibility settings, to compensate for ending up with a suboptimal monitor.

Good luck!

My Setup for the M4 Mini as a Secondary Mac

NAS, Media Server, and Light Gaming

I spent the weekend setting up my little new Mac – and I have to say: it went pretty smoothly! Here’s what I did, and how you can do it yourself if you like.

The hardware

As Apple’s upgrade prices are certified insane, I went for the absolute base model. I did briefly consider getting 10 gig Ethernet – but I had to change too much about my setup to get any benefits from it. And I don’t really need that fast a connection for my use case.

16 GB of ram is enough for me, but the built-in 256 GB of storage is obviously too little. But as it’s a stationary machine, getting external storage works great.

Some drives will use regular USB speeds (for instance USB 3.2 Gen 2). These are cheaper – but if you go for USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3+ you will get about three times the speed. If you, like me, want to run programs (like games) straight from the disk, you’ll probably want the latter.

Instead of getting a regular external SSD like this 🖇️, I went for getting an enclosure + a separate drive. These are much less compact – but they’re flexible and upgradeable down the line.

For enclosure, I have seen this 🖇️ from HyperDrive and this 🖇️ from Satechi receiving numerous recommendations – and I found both of them in Norway. The only difference between them (apart from looks) I could see, was that the HyperDrive is rated for a maximum of 4 TB, while the Satechi can handle 16 TB. I could only afford a 2 TB drive currently (and don’t need more currently) – but I still went for the Satechi, also because I’ve had good experiences with the brand previously. (BTW, they also have a much cheaper, enclosure 🖇️ for regular USB-C.)

My drive is a Samsung 🖇️ 990 EVO 2 TB SSD. It’s rated for 5000 MB/s, which is probably more than needed (but it was about the same price as slower drives here). Especially if you’re going for regular USB-C, the drive doesn’t have to be fast. (But perhaps get something name-brand, to make sure it’s stable.)

Drive setup

When I then connected it to my MacBook, I got this:

But don’t worry! Hitting “Initialise…”, or launching the Mac app Disk Utility, brings you here:

Hitting Erase up top, and formatting it to APFS, is all you need to make it work. (APFS isn’t the best for cross-platform-ness – but it’s the best for Mac, and needed for Time Machine.)

The speeds

Here are the speeds I got from different devices. 👇🏻 I ran a couple of tests, and these results were representative. Not too bad, IMO!

The SSD enclosure is absolutely warm while in use, but not hot. I assume that’s OK? 😅

My placement

Next, I unboxed the Mac, and placed it where it’s supposed to be. The Mac setup would’ve been easier if I took it to my office, where I have my external screen, keyboard, and trackpad. But I made do with my TV and what I had at home.

The following are permanently connected to the Mini:

• Power
• HDMI to the TV
• Ethernet
• The SSD Enclosure
• The 8BitDo dock

I’ve previously made a quick reviewed of the 8BitDo controller here – but things are even better with my current setup: The dock being connected to the Mac, not only gives it power for charging – it also makes it so the 2.4 GHz dongle in the base is connected to the Mac. Out-of-the-box the controller, sadly, doesn’t support Mac – but 8BitDo support sent me a beta firmware for the dongle, which makes it work! So now it’s connected to the Switch via Bluetooth and the Mac via 2.4 GHz – and I can easily change connection with a switch at the back of the controller.

But I had to connect some temporary peripherals as well:

I think the last image, including the USB-C adapter on the mouse’s USB-A cable, shows why the front-ports are nice, and why the lack of USB-A ports is a total non-issue.

Sadly, I don’t think I could set up the Mac Mini by only using my MacBook – so I had to connect some peripherals. I could probably have made do with only the keyboard – but I didn’t know the following: When you tab through to select things like Confirm buttons, you have to hit Space (and not Enter/Return, for instance). So a mouse was practical – even though I didn’t have a wireless one.

Mac setup

As mentioned in the subtitle of this post, my use cases for this Mac are NAS, media server, and light gaming. And here’s the software stuff I did to make it happen.

Screen setup

My TV is a pretty average older Philips 4K TV (with the, IMO, underrated feature Ambilight) – and I had a couple of issues regarding resolutions in macOS. What I wanted was to run it in 1080p HiDPI, which means that the screen has the size as if it is running in 1080p, but it’s technically running in 4k. Every “pixel” in the 1080p is actually four pixels. (I’ve written more about this here.) However, I could only choose between regular 1080p or 540p HiDPI!

I did find a fix for this, though, by installing (and buying) BetterDisplay Pro. This allowed me to override the given resolution, making sure macOS knew the screen was 4k, and allowing me to select 1080p HiDPI.

File and screen sharing, and remote control

Quickly, I wanted to find a way to control the Mini from my MacBook. And here I’ll outline the two ways I do it.

Doing it via Screen Sharing is nice because then I don’t have to be able to look at the TV while doing it. However, initially, that method was really unstable for me. I think it was because the network was being taxed by initial setup, downloads from cloud storage, etc. So, in the beginning, regular Continuity was the way to go. This meant I could just move my mouse up and above my laptop screen, to have the built-in MacBook trackpad and keyboard control the Mini.

Here’s a video of me moving from my iPad, via my MacBook, and to my Mini, with Continuity:

You’ll set up screen and file sharing the same place: System Settings -> Sharing

This last screenshot is of the File Sharing options – but I forgot to show one thing: I added the home folder (named “erlend” in my case) as being shared. It’s the folder icon you can see in the background. I then right-clicked that folder, and turned on Share as a Time Machine backup destination.

All of this, leads to the following, when I select Erlend’s Mac mini in the Finder sidebar:

As you can see, both my home folder, internal disk (Macintosh HD) and external disk (Satechi SSD) are available. I can also hit Share Screen… up top to take control of the Mini.

Time Machine

If you haven’t enabled Share as a Time Machine backup destination, you’ll get this when trying to set it up:

But by following the steps I outlined above, it becomes possible to select the external drive connected to the other machine here.

Other uses of external drive

As the internal storage is so paltry, I have to set up the Mini to use the external drive as much as possible. And here are some ways I’ve done this:

Dropbox

Due to Apple depreciating some APIs, you can’t have your Dropbox on an external drive if you use the default client. But if you use Maeastral, this becomes possible.

Be warned, though: Running the initial Time Machine on two laptops, while also syncing iCloud and Dropbox on a new machine, is best done overnight…

App Store

Recently, Apple added this new option to the App Store:

I don’t think I’ll install anything over 1 GB on this Mac – but I thought I’d shout it out anyway!

Steam

I’ve installed two versions of Steam on the Mini: A regular macOS install, and a Windows version via Whisky. And if you go to the Steam settings, and Storage, you can select a default destination for your game installs. This can also be on an external drive, so I chose that, of course.

Media server – Jellyfin

The last step in my setup, was to set up the Mac up as a media server. I’ve used Plex previously, but I wanted to give the open-source alternative Jellyfin a shot. And I love it!

The installation was relatively easy. The only hiccup I had, was that when I followed this guide to turn on hardware acceleration, I also turned it on for AV1 – and this broke stuff. I posted in the forums here, and in minutes I got a reply telling me to turn off AV1, and everything worked.

But the best part about Jellyfin isn’t Jellyfin. It’s that I can use Infuse as a client. I just love un-bundling and third-party options, as I’ve written about here and here. It’s great that the people writing Infuse can be laser focused on making a delightful video player, while it’s OK if the people behind Jellyfin focus on creating a good backend. I love that I don’t have to choose media server software based on whether I like the player!

Pretty painless

… is how I’d summarise the process. And I bet I’ll discover new things to use this machine for as times goes by! Will keep you updated – and please don’t hesitate to ask questions!

And I have a question for someone who knows: Can the Mini do its job even if I let it go to sleep? 🤔

Today's Plan: Setting Up My Mac Mini NAS

I just picket up my new Mac Mini, which I intend to use as a server (backups and media) and light gaming machine, connected to my TV.

Upgrade prices are a joke – so I went for the base model + a Thunderbolt enclosure, and a Samsung 990 EVO 2 TB SSD (which speeds might be an overkill – but it was on sale). Wish me luck! (Will report back later.)

Something is off about the performance on my blog… Especially on Chromium! While part of me would enjoy saying “Works best on...

Something is off about the performance on my blog… Especially on Chromium! While part of me would enjoy saying “Works best on Firefox”, I still have to do something about it.

Well, I have been looking for an excuse to rewrite and optimise my CSS! I’ll start tomorrow. 💪🏻 (Wouldn’t mind advice!)

Early Mac Mini Takes From Someone Who’ll Probably Get One

For a while now, I’ve thought that I’ll most likely get a Mac mini when it gets refreshed. My intended use case is pretty specific — and not as my main computer:

• Connecting some external storage, and using it for
  • backups,
  • and as a media server. (Jellyfin, perhaps?)
• Maybe use it for some smart home stuff.
• And I’ll also connect it to my TV, via HDMI, for some light big-screen gaming. (Like UFO 50! But also things that I want to play with a controller that’ll run at least as well as on my M1 Pro 16 GB laptop.).

Thoughts regarding my use case

I got to say, the update is pretty perfect for me. The new form-factor is great for my TV furniture, and I can probably get by with the absolute cheapest one. The only upgrades I’m considering, are 24 GB RAM and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Would love input on this!

General thoughts

In general, I think this is a great update at a good price. And at last we’re finally out of the 8 GB hole! 256 GB is pretty rough, though… But it’s OK for me! So, in principle, if Apple had non-criminal upgrade pricing, I wouldn’t mind it starting that low. But they don’t.

They made the right choices regarding the ports

The new Mini has the following ports on the back:

• 3x Thunderbolt 4/5
• HDMI
• Ethernet
• Power

And the following in the front:

• 2x USB-C
• Mini-jack

There are two questions we need to look at:

1. How many ports should the enclosure size account for?
2. And then, which ports should those be, and where?

Partially I think, in a world where the Mac Studio exists, they went for a sensible size and port number (9 — one more than the M2 Mini, and one less than the M2 Pro). It’s OK to disagree with that — but I think we have to keep that separate from the port types and placement.

I’ve seen some disappointment voiced about the jack being on the front. And while I have zero issues with someone preferring that for their specific setup, I still think it’s wrong to say that Apple made the wrong choice for the majority of people. For those with speakers connected permanently, there are _so _many options for connection. And which port on the back should’ve been moved to the front instead, then?

I also think it would’ve been a travesty if they sacrificed USB-C ports for USB-A ones. Just get over it…

The power button placement is fine

I mean, it uses very little power while in sleeping, so how often do you need to turn it off? And it’ll probably be OK to reach anyway. (Remember that the back of the Mac will be closer to you than with the last one, as the footprint is smaller.)

I’ll have to think about it some more, but I think this will be my next purchase. And I think this will be a great Mac for many people for many years.

I Got the Opportunity to Build My First Wet/Dry/Wet Guitar Pedalboard

I was lucky enough to be allowed to make this cool rig this week! It’s made to work well with one amp, but great with two. And if you’re a certified mad lad, you can even run it with three amps!

Allow me to explain:

When a signal has effects on it, it’s called “wet” – and when it doesn’t, it’s called “dry”. However, sometimes (like here), only some effects, like chorus, delay and reverb, are categorised as making the signal wet. And whether effects like overdrive and compression are on, the signal is categories as dry.

The board has four jacks in its side panel:

• Guitar in
• Dry signal out
• Wet out L
• Wet out R

Rigs that have those three outputs are called wet/dry/wet rigs.

The first part of the signal is TC Electronics Polytune 3 > Xotic SP Compressor > Van Weelden Royal Overdrive (🤤). This is the “dry” signal, and it’s split (with a JHS Buffered Splitter under the board), and sent to the dry out and into the Musicom Labs Parallelizer II. Via the latter, the Eventide Tricerachorus, Boss SDE-3000D and Strymon Cloudburst are run in stereo parallell – before the signal goes Fulltone Supa-Trem2 > Lehle Little Dual 2.¹

After the Lehle, the signal goes to the wet outputs on the side of the board.

The Boss delay requires its own power supply – but with a cheeky splitter beneath the board, both this and the Strymon Zuma powering the rest of the pedals, get power from one IEC plug on the side of the board.

I did add some cable management and stuff – but in general, I don’t like the Instagram friendly practice of custom fitting everything, as I want the board to be easy to adjust and work with. Here you can also see the splitters and different power supplies:

I try to do things “nice, but still pragmatic”. So, I want to make it less messy, while still making it workable. My favourite way to fasten things under the board is via the pedal’s (or whatever) own bottom plate screws or similar. I’ll then screw it out, and screw it back in through the board. But when this isn’t possible, I really like using cable ties, actually – especially when you can’t see them up top. They’re light, cheap, flexible, and stable – albeit unromantic.

So, one IEC plug, jack from the guitar, jack to dry amp, and jacks to stereo amps, and you’re good to go! I also love how snugly it fits into the Peli.

Really cool rig, I’m glad I got the opportunity to work on. If you’re in Norway, feel free to contact me if you want some help with a board! And check out the artist I made it for: SJ Sveen!

Homebrew – For Noobs (Like Me)

I do not know what I’m doing when it comes to the terminal on my Mac. But one use-case, I really like, is Homebrew. So I wanted to explain what it is, and how to use it, to other newbies!

How to install it

I get that I haven’t told you why yet, but to install it, you just copy this into your terminal: $¹

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then you just follow the quick guide. (I think you only have to copy and paste one set of commands.) For Mac, you can also go here to download the latest .pkg file.

It’s a “package manager”

And this just means that you use it to install, uninstall, and update other apps. These can both be command-line software (called formulae in Homebrew parlance) or what most would recognise as regular apps (called casks).

And here’s how you use it:

Installing something is as easy as typing brew install firefox. That’s it! No going to a website, no downloading of installers, no dragging and dropping, no nothin'! And you uninstall by typing brew uninstall google-chrome. Even though you’d be surprised by how many apps support installation through Homebrew, not every app does. Furthermore, every “app name” has to be only one word – so brew search chrome will help you find out if the app you want is there, and how you should address it.

You type brew update to update Homebrew itself. But this leads to something a bit confusing: To update apps installed by Homebrew, you have to type brew upgrade.

Taps are a thing as well.

The main source of casks and formulae are the Homebrew catalog – but sometimes you need to add a different source. This is often a custom source for a specific app, and those are called taps. For these apps, you first have to add the tap by pasting in a command – but the app will include this in its guide.

My favourite consequence of using Homebrew:

Recently, I did a fresh reinstallation of macOS. And one annoying thing, especially if you (like me) have numerous apps installed, is to hunt down every app and reinstall them. But with Homebrew, you can just keep a text-file (script) of the apps you want to install on a fresh OS'. Here’s mine. 👇🏻 I know it’s long, but the only thing you need to bother with is the lists of formulae and casks.

#!/bin/bash

# Array to keep track of failed installations
failed_casks=()
failed_formulae=()

# List of formulae to install
formulae=(
		bat
		eza
		fzf
		zoxide
)

# List of casks to install
casks=(
		affinity-designer
		affinity-photo
		affinity-publisher
		bbedit
		bike
		calibre
		daisydisk
		discord
		dropbox
		fmail2
		hazel
		karabiner-elements
		keyboard-maestro
		lasso
		linearmouse
		memory-clean-3
		menuwhere
		nova
		obsidian
		pearcleaner
		raycast
		setapp
		slack
		soundsource
		squash
		steam
		telegram
		tidal
		transmit
		vivaldi
		warp
)

# Install formulae
for formula in "${formulae[@]}"; do
		echo "Installing $formula..."
		if ! brew install "$formula"; then
				echo "Failed to install $formula."
				failed_formulae+=("$formula")
		fi
done

# Loop through each cask and attempt to install it
for cask in "${casks[@]}"; do
		echo "Installing $cask..."
		if ! brew install --cask "$cask"; then
				echo "Failed to install $cask."
				failed_casks+=("$cask")
		fi
done

# Check if there were any failures
if [ ${#failed_formulae[@]} -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "The following formulae failed to install:"
		for failed_formula in "${failed_formulae[@]}"; do
				echo "- $failed_formula"
		done
else
		echo "All formulae installed successfully."
fi

if [ ${#failed_casks[@]} -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "The following casks failed to install:"
		for failed_cask in "${failed_casks[@]}"; do
				echo "- $failed_cask"
		done
else
		echo "All casks installed successfully."
fi

Here’s what I then do:

1. Drag the text file to an accessible location – for instance, in a folder called “scripts” in my home directory.
2. Install Homebrew.
3. Make the script executable, with the command chmod +x ~/scripts/installs_erlend.sh
   • The ~ symbol in the path means the home directory, which in my case is called “erlend”.
4. Run the script, with ~/scripts/installs_erlend.sh

It will then install everything in one go! Together with the ability to “install every favourited app” in Setapp 🖇️, getting up to speed is effortless.

An alternative interface

If you’re more comfortable with an interface that looks more like a regular app store, you can install an app called Applite.

This is just an interface over Homebrew, that can make installation and discoverability easier for some! And this, and Homebrew in the terminal, can be used in parallell.

As mentioned up top, I’d love comments on this! Either from people actually knowledgeable about the subject, or from beginners like me. Do you see the value of something like Homebrew?

Edit 1: Cork

Another GUI app I’ve used a bit for Homebrew, is Cork. This app can also search and install stuff – but also makes a bunch of surrounding admin easier to do. Personally I’ve found I don’t need to do the aforementioned admin, so I haven’t used it all that much, heh. But it’s still a good app! I recommend the AppAddict Lou Plummer’s review of the app for more info!

Edit 2: Brewfile

Brendan Thompson gave me a good recommendation: Brewfile. I haven’t looked into it that much, but it seems like a way better version of the noob script I wrote above, that makes bulk installation with Homebrew easier. I’ll definitely use that myself next time! It (and my script, tbf.) also support mas, which is a tool for installing things via the App Store. 👌🏻

Keep the tips coming!

It's Not Too Late to Listen to the October Trilogy

Terrific Albums for the Autumn

For any Norwegians reading this, this recommendation will be categorised as very cliché. But clichés are just that for a reason – and if you haven’t listened to these albums, you’re in for a treat.

The albums I’m referring to, are the following, by the Norwegian artist Thomas Dybdahl:

• … That Great October Sound (2001)
• Stray Dogs (2003)
• One Day You’ll Dance for Me, New York City (2004)

They were all released in October, and are the perfect companions to wool jumpers, a fireplace, and warm soup. But I get that listening to three albums is a big ask. So as a taste, you can listen to his shortest song, which is also one of my favourites: Dice

A Shortcut for Automatic Mac Dock Changes

For When You Switch Between Screen Sizes

I switch a lot between using my MacBook as a laptop, and in clamshell mode in my office. And in general, I keep every setting the same between the setups. However, I have different dock preferences:

• While in laptop mode, I want it at the bottom, with automatic hiding.
• But while on my 27" external display, I want it to be on the left, smaller, and always showing.

The great Rafael Conde has made a solution, with his app HiDock. But sadly, in my experience, it’s simply not stable enough (probably due to some esoteric macOS restrictions) – so I’ve made a crude shortcut to replace it. But before the guide to try it out for yourself, a little thing I recommend you paste into your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0;
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 1 ;
killall Dock

First, create shortcuts for setting the different preferencesmore

In general, I like creating modular shortcuts: Instead of making one monster shortcut, you break it down into modules. So the first shortcuts I created are one called “Dock — Laptop” and one called “Dock — Display”.¹

They only consist of one action: Run Shell Script.

And my laptop variant runs this script:

#!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation -string "bottom"
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 36
defaults write com.apple.dock magnification -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock largesize -int 45
killall Dock

I’d say every line is pretty self-explanatory! Just change the variables to fit your needs, and run the shortcut to test. (My preferred way to quickly run shortcuts is with Raycast 🖇️.) The last line, killall Dock, restarts the dock. This will make it blink – and there is a tiny chance that it will remove the little separator in the dock. This comes back on a restart, but that’s a reason to not run this command more than necessary.

My Display variant is like this:

#!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation -string "left"
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false
defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 30
defaults write com.apple.dock magnification -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock largesize -int 36
killall Dock

For a long time, I didn’t bother with automating this; I just ran the corresponding shortcut when I had changed setup. This works fine!

But here’s a shortcut to have it happen automatically

There are different ways to get shortcuts to run automatically – and one of them is the utility app Shortery. I’ve set this up to run my shortcut, HelloDock, when I unlock my computer.

First a bit on how it works, and then how you can use it if you’d like.

How it works:

1. First, it runs a script that checks whether an external display is connected.
2. Then it checks which mode the Mac is currently in.
3. Lastly, if things have changed (and only then), it will run the correct shortcut of Dock — Laptop or Dock — Display.

Step one is done by this script (made with the help of an LLM):

#!/bin/bash
# Get display information using system_profiler
display_info=$(system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType)
# Count the number of "Display" entries, which generally indicates a connected display
display_count=$(echo "$display_info" | grep -c "Display:")
# Check for "Built-In" display, which indicates the laptop's internal display
builtin_display_present=$(echo "$display_info" | grep -q "Built-In")
# If there is only one display and it is built-in, output "Laptop"
if [ "$display_count" -eq 1 ] && [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  echo Laptop
else
  echo Display
fi

I struggled a bit with how I could do step two – but I found a solution that, although not pretty, works well.² The shortcut creates a little text file, called hellodock.txt, that currently only consists of the word “Laptop” because that’s the mode I’m currently in. When the shortcut sees that the script output and the current mode is the same, it will just do nothing. Only when there’s a mismatch will it run the correct shortcut action (Display or Laptop), and then change the text file. So the text file should always display the current mode.

How you can set it up for yourself

Here’s a link to the HelloDock shortcut that’s meant for running separate shortcuts for the dock modes. With this, you need to create the mode shortcuts, and point the “Run Shortcut” actions to them.

And here’s a link to one I’ve named HelloDock One, that has everything in one. It comes loaded with my scripts for Display and Laptop mode, and you can just edit them right there in the shortcut.

It should create and handle the text file in the Shortcuts iCloud folder by itself.

That’s it! Hopefully, it works fine. Feedback appreciated!

Waste Your Money on Things That Last

A Defence of Buying Things

A couple of years ago, I was working full time as a teacher. And even though the pay in that profession is far too low, I was still quite comfortable (economically). However, the last few years, I’ve had way less spending power. I wanted to take a master’s degree, which (sadly, and luckily) led to my mind sort of rupturing, and me getting diagnosed with ADHD.¹ Now I’m learning how I really work, while trying to get a freelance lifestyle up and running. I’m lucky in that I know that I can get a teacher job if I like (and need) to.² And even luckier: I’m in a position where I can survive on less income for a while. So, we’ll see what the future holds – but nonetheless: Currently, I don’t have a lot of money to waste.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to spend your money on things like holidays and experiences. And you can absolutely argue that these things last in their own way! But I just wanted to give a little shout-out to something I feel like gets recommended less than those.

Pre-purchased luxury

If my “luxury” habits (you know, from when I worked as a teacher 😅) consisted of things like going to restaurants a lot, which is expensive here in Norway, going to my current lifestyle would be a large downgrade. However, here are some things I’m glad that I bought, as I still get great enjoyment from the money I spent.

“Re-usable” entertainment

Personally, I, in general, don’t love rewatching movies and TV shows. So in terms of “entertaining hours per krone”, other forms give me more bang for the buck. As probably many others, I have a way too large backpack of video games – on both Mac and Switch. I also have plenty of board games. Some of them I haven’t tried, and most of them have tons of plays left in them.

Equipment

Even though it’s not the latest and greatest, I have more technical equipment than I need. I also have what I need to work on music, go outside, build and repair things around the house, etc.

Now, I have a really small flat, and I don’t like clutter or having too much stuff. (And neither does our planet.) What I’m talking about is mindfully investing in useful stuff, not impulsively buying everything you fancy.

Well-made clothes and items

But this post was originally inspired by how lucky I felt, being able to put on clothes I love (that keep me warm and dry), and use good backpacks etc., that I’ve invested in a long time ago.

I like slow fashion (in opposition to fast fashion). And the two most important principles here, are things that have the quality to last, and a timeless style that works for years.

Style is, of course, subjective – but personally, I like things inspired by workwear and classic fits. However, I have more advice when it comes to:

Spotting quality

Construction (how they’re made) and materials (what they’re made of) are, much, much more significant than where they’re made.

Go for things made of (preferably only) natural materials, like cotton, wool, linen, leather, etc., and constructed in a way that makes them repairable.

When it comes to brands, it can be a good idea to go for small brands with close relations to the factory. I’d also primarily buy a brand’s core competency: Know-how when it comes to making jackets doesn’t necessarily translate to making shoes.

What you want, is to find things where the people who made it were provided great materials and the time to do it properly. Sadly, this happens more often in some countries than others, so where it’s made can be an indication. But it’s absolutely not a given! For instance, there are people running (more or less) sweatshops in Italy and the US, and you have brands like Grant Stone making items of top quality in China. See this thread for more on this!

Here’s what I wore yesterday:

For those who are interested:

• You can’t see my T-shirt, but it’s a white loop-wheeled cotton T-shirt, from Warehouse.
• You can’t see my baseball cap, from Poten, either.
• The jumper is a wool jumper from the Norwegian brand Hunting Lodge.
• The vest is a wool vest from Filson.
• The watch is a Vostok Amphibia.
• The jeans are from Tender, and the only thing I bought on holiday to Stockholm this summer.
• I have socks from Decka, in mocs from Rancourt.

I know these things are costly, and not something everyone can afford! But by buying used, and by buying less, most people can push up the quality of the items they own. “Own fewer better things” is always* good advice.

Winter is coming – and in Norway, that matters. So I’m glad I already have both boots, a raincoat (for layering), thick wool shirts, etc.! So even though I don’t have much money to waste these days, I’m glad I wasted the money I had on things that last. I’m still living in abundance.

How to Change macOS Keyboard Shortcuts for Window Management

Or Any Other Keyboard Shortcut, for That Matter (With Extra Added Fun for Multilingual Users)

This year, Apple decided to upgrade the default window management on macOS, from terrible to OK. However, I’ve heard some complaints about the keyboard shortcuts, as they use the Globe key, which can cause some problems if you want to automate the hotkeys somehow.

But I have good news: You can change these, and any* other, keyboard shortcuts!

16/10-24: Now updated to work with weird apps, like Discord!

Here’s (one way) how:

If you go into the System Settings app, hit Keyboard and then the button Keyboard Shortcuts…, you’ll open up a screen. In this, you can then hit App Shortcuts to come here:

This screen is for changing the keyboard shortcuts to the items in your menu bar (or adding to those who don’t have one already), like those shown in this image:

You can either add them only to specific apps (like you can see I’ve done), or to All Applications – and when we’re dealing with this window management, we need to do the latter.

Hitting + gives us this screen:

When writing the menu title, you have to be very specific. Here’s what it could look like: Format->Bulleted List

The spelling and capitalisation has to be exact – and you need to separate levels with a - and > and no spaces.

Here’s what it looks like if I want to set a hotkey for tiling a window top left:

Window->Move & Resize->Top Left

As the option sits two levels deep, I have to add a bit more – but it works!

Yes, the hotkey is Shift + Ctrl + Optn + Cmd + E, heh. But I use Karabiner-Elements to set up Caps Lock as all of those keys at once.¹ Doing that creates a separate modifier, not used by any apps. A word for this, is Hyperkey, and it’s sometimes denoted by this symbol: ✦

The easiest way to set it up is probably with this little utility by Ryan Hanson, and I greatly recommend doing it.

I go more into how I manage windows here – but this is the short version:

• I always resize with just my left hand
• I’ve made a “grid” that uses Hyperkey (Caps Lock) + a letter:
  • W and E is Top Left Quarter and Top Right Quarter
  • A is Left Half, S is Maximise/Fill, and D is Right Half
  • Z and X is Bottom Left Quarter and Bottom Right Quarter

The grid isn’t perfect, as I couldn’t set Hyper + Q as a hotkey, and I like to keep Hyper + C as OCR Copy. But I still really recommend this setup! For the rare cases I need something else, I use Lasso (launced with Hyper + Space).

Cons of the System Settings method:

• Pretty fiddly – you can’t even paste text, as it will think you’re trying to set Command + V as the hotkey
• Doesn’t get backed up – you have to do it again if you reinstall macOS (Pro tip: Take a screenshot to “back up”!)
• Only works on menu bar items

Pros of the System Settings method:

• Works without third-party software
• Will change the displayed hotkey in the menu bar – making it easier to remember

An alternative: Keyboard Maestro

You can also use the excellent Keyboard Maestro for the same task.

Here you can see I’ve set it so hitting Ctrl + E will perform the View->Toggle Sidebar action. I think this would work on the window management as well. The Keyboard Maestro action you’re looking for is called Select or Show a Menu Item.

However, sometimes the hotkeys aren’t in the menu bar. And then you can use Keyboard Maestro to simulate a different screenshot. In the example above, hitting Command + K will simulate Command + U in a specific app.² However, I don’t think you can use this method to simulate the Globe key – as it isn’t available to third-parties. This Keyboard Maestro action is called Type a Keystroke.

Cons of the Keyboard Maestro method

• Needs third-party software
• Doesn’t change the displayed hotkey in the menu bar

Pros of the Keyboard Maestro method

• You can duplicate actions, etc., to make the workflow easier
• Keyboard Maestro setups can be backed up and shared
• Other powerful features are also readily available

For multilingual users (like me)

As could be seen in the screenshots, I’ve only added hotkeys for the corner options ³ I added these because they have nicer animations than what Raycast 🖇️ has access to – which I use for the halves. The reason is that it’ll cycle between 1/2, 2/3 and 1/3 when you repeat the hotkey. 👌🏻 Please add this within 10 years, Apple!

But anyway – my settings, for Top Left, look like this:

Window->Move & Resize->Top Left

Vindu->Move & Resize->Top Left

Window->Flytt og endre størrelse->Øverst venstre

I had to add all three version separatly – because, for some reason, the wording isn’t consistent depending on whether the app in question is in Norwegian or not. And I’ve no idea why there are two versions with a mix… If I wind an app where it doesn’t work, it’ll probably be one where everything is in Norwegian.

The morale is: You have to check what your menu says.

For apps that doesn’t have the menu options

Update: OK, so I’ve been running my setup for a couple of weeks now. And while the addition of the nicer animation has highlighted the lack of them in Raycast, it has worked perfectly… until I used Discord. For some reason, the (crappy Electron app) doesn’t have the windowing options in its menu bar. 🤷🏻‍♂️ However, Raycast can resize it!

So, here’s the workaround:

First, I added back the corners (and fill) to Raycast, but on hotkeys I never use/don’t like. For Top Left I used Hyper + 7.

Then, in Keyboard Maestro, I created a group called “Window Mangement Fixes”, which I said should only work in certain apps. Currently the only inhabitant is Discord, but I’m sure I’ll discover others to add later.

Then I added macros for the broken hotkeys. Remember, Hyper + W is the hotkey I’ve set to be Top Left (the default way, with the nice animations) – but this doesn’t work in Discord. But hitting Hyper + 7 will work, as this uses the Raycast method. So, what I’ve done, is telling Keyboard Maestro: “When I’m in Discord and hit Hyper + W, please simulate Hyper + 7”. I do lose the animation, but it works!

Big Milestone for Me: First One-a-Month Member

My little blog is added to the One-a-Month Club’s website. It’s “[a] collection of blogs and other web projects that make supporting them both simple and inexpensive by offering access to everything for as little as $1 per month.” The site is run by the excellent Jarrod over at Hey Dingus, and inspired by Manuel Moreale:

But I recently realised that tiers are the wrong approach. At least for me. I believe in kindness. I believe that if you decide to support something I do, you should get all the benefits, no matter how much you pay.

I also realised that 1$+/month is the best price possible when it comes to supporting online creators. The 1 part means you can set it up and forget about it because it’s a low enough amount that won’t make too much of a difference for the majority of people who are considering supporting online creators. The + part allows you to contribute more if you want to do so. And that’s just perfect.

And recently, I achieved two milestones is one, thanks to Numeric Citizen: Get a mention on a blog I follow, and my first donation.¹

I honestly choked up a bit, as I read his kind words in the latest edition of The Ephemeral Scrapbook:

While browsing my Micro.blog timeline, I met Erlend from Norway. I came across his Micro.blog hosted website that I have found to be gorgeous and unique in its design and appearance. At first, I didn’t believe this website was hosted on Micro.blog using one of the available visual themes, but yeah, it is. Browsing his website is a delight both visually and with the content. I decided to support him via his Ko-Fi page.

This is the first website I’ve ever made, and I’m very new to this whole “posting things I write online” thing – so encouragement like this really means a lot. But I promise to be very happy with my second One-a-Month member as well, so don’t be afraid to go over to Ko-Fi.org and consider it. ☺️

Also, please check out Numeric Citizen – I recommend it! Here are some links:

• To follow him on the Fediverse:
  @numericcitizen@micro.blog
• Micro blog
• Micro.blog account
• YouTube channel, where he especially have videos on Craft and Micro.blog.

App Review: Paper

The Expensive, but Best, Place to Write Markdown

As mentioned previously, I love writing in Markdown – and especially when it’s in normal .md files. I like the clarity of what’s formatted and not, the portability,¹ and that I can use different apps on the same document. However, different Markdown editors are far from being created equal.

Paper is an app, for Mac, iPad and iPhone, that “only” opens/creates .md files and edits them. But it does what it does better than anything else.

Mini-tier list of some editors I’ve tried

To set the stage, I’ve made a little tier list. As I prefer writing about Good Stuff, my list doesn’t include bad editors – but Good, Great and Terrific ones. Here I’m not talking about the features of the app, but the writing experience. (The lists are alphabetical, not ranked.)

There’s been plenty of memes about how long the team over at Shiny Frog spent on Bear 2.0. But holy croak, it shows – the editor is extremely polished. The app does have good export features, so your notes aren’t held hostage.² But the main reason I, personally, don’t use it, is that the note files aren’t easily accessible to other apps. It also doesn’t have as robust publish features as Ulysses, or task/calendar system as NotePlan. However, as a general note-taker for Apple devices, I highly recommend Bear.³

Panda is the Bear editor as a stand-alone app, to simply open .md files – so it’s closer to Paper in terms of functionality. However, it’s not readily available for mobile, and isn’t technically a proper product at the moment.⁴

I don’t recommend my favourite pair of boots

I love my pair of Alden Indy Boots. I haven’t found a single boot I like the look of as much, and the last (being rather narrow at the back and wide in the front) fits my weird feet perfectly. However, I don’t generally recommend them – as they’re not technically “worth it”. They’re simply too expensive for what they are, as you can get better made shoes for the same price, or shoes of similar quality for less. But that doesn’t change the fact that I love them, and am happy I bought them!

I could say the same thing about my Filson Journeyman backpack: Is it too expensive? Yes. Do I still love it? Also yes.

Paper is in the same category: I won’t claim that it’s worth it – because it’s very expensive. But if you end up splurging for the app, you’ll get something terrific. Let me try to explain why.

How I use Paper

As mentioned when talking about my default apps, I currently store my notes, blog posts, tasks, etc. in NotePlan. The app’s database is stored with CloudKit, but is still accessible by other apps. As I prefer writing in Paper, I will do that as much as possible, while jumping into NotePlan and Ulysses for stuff that those apps do better.⁵

For instance, I’ve made different shortcuts for creating a new general note or a new blog post. This creates a .md file that gets saved into the NotePlan database, and then opened in Paper.

What makes it great

The biggest con of Paper, is that it’s a file-based app – and I really prefer the use of library-based ones. I am just not used to/don’t like relying on Finder/Files. I have the same issue with another favourite app of mine, Bike Outliner – which is files-based as well. But here I’ll try to explain why I still jump through hoops to write in Paper. It’s difficult to explain, but it just gets so many little things right, which makes it hard to move to other apps.⁶

Markdown syntax

The first thing it does right, is allowing you to choose your preferred syntax. This dictates which symbols will be used when using hotkeys – but it still “accepts” all variants when typed.

By default, Paper shows the Markdown syntax – but in a muted colour. This is my preferred mode, as I don’t like it when text jumps around with automatic hiding, while finding it distracting if it’s as visible as the text. It also applies the formatting:

However, at the hit of a button, you can enter Preview Mode. This turns Paper into a rich text editor of sorts – while the file beneath remains Markdown. I find this especially useful on iPhone, where space is at a premium.

While in Preview Mode, hitting a formatting hotkey while no text is selected, will bring up this little window, showing which formatting you’re currently typing with:

It also handles selection and combinations of bold and italics perfectly. Have a look at this example:

The middle part of the sentence has both bold and italics applied – but what should happen if I select a word in the middle and hit Cmd + I?

Paper nails it, by turning off italics, but only for the selected word. If my caret had been in the middle, but without having selected the word, it would turn off italics for the entire section. This last option is nice for when you quickly want to turn off the formatting of an entire section, without having to exactly select the whole thing. Ulysses lacks this, for instance.

Obsidian, on the other hand, turns off italics for the entire section even if the word is selected:

While NotePlan just completely messes up:

Paper also rocks at edge-cases when it comes to selection and formatting. Here’s an example, from this article by the developer. (Sorry that you probably have to zoom in to see the text!)

It will also, unlike Ulysses (for instance), always remove spaces before and after syntax. 👌🏻

It also handles links well: If you select text and paste a link, it will create a Markdown link with the selection as the text. However, if you paste without any selection, you can choose whether it should create an empty Markdown link or just paste the URL. Personally, I prefer the latter.

Lists

OK, let’s say I’ve written a numbered list, with three items – but then I want to add something between 2 and 3. However, maybe I regret it, and want to delete it again! Let’s see how three different apps handles it:

As you can see, Obsidian and Paper both handles adding a new item in the middle. However, if I delete an item in the middle, things break in Obsidian.⁷ Neither NotePlan nor Obsidian handles deletion in the middle of a numbered list.

I couldn’t find this hotkey in Obsidian (don’t know if it exists – it’s a big omission if not), but both NotePlan and Paper has a hotkey for moving the paragraph with the caret/the selected paragraphs up or down. (I have it mapped to Ctrl+Cmd+Up/Down.) Let’s compare what happens if I move List item 3 up:

This, and the things regarding formatting, are examples of how Paper just works.

Another thing is how it always seems to copy and paste like I want. And if you like, it has options for copying and pasting between Markdown and HTML.

The app also has rudimentary support for task lists.

Looks and feel

In addition to working well, the app also looks and feels great.

There’s no UI – the app is just a white square (which can even be without rounded corners) with your text. However, notice the paper texture on the background, and the sleek and matching caret and scroll bar. The caret can also be set to blink softly, and move smoothly as it moves from line to line (at a customisable speed).

These are in an accent colour I’ve chosen:

All the accent options look great – but you can set your own colour as well. You can also have it give a slight tint to the text and background – and it also changes the selection colour and even the app icon (which also has a dark mode variant, of course).

It can also be set up to have proper paragraph spacing. (But I do have some notes on this, which I’ll come back to.)

Of all the apps I’ve used, there’s only one app which I like the feel more of than Paper – and that’s Bike Outliner.

Navigation

The scroll bar doesn’t just look good – it has a hidden trick: If you hover over it, it expands, and shows you “chapters” (which are your headings).

Some more neat navigation features, can be seen here:

Moving words within sentences, and paragraphs within the document (also list items in a list), works on where the caret is currently, or on what you have selected (even partially).

Rearrange Chapters opens a screen, where you can drag your headings (with its content) around, in a list. You can also change the heading level of them.

However, my favourite navigation feature is the excellent Typewriter Mode. All other typewriter modes I’ve tried, work something like Ulysses here:

So, as you type, and create new lines, the vertical position of the caret stays constant. This can be nice – but I don’t like that it moves every line. That’s a bit too disturbing for me.

I’ll show it in action afterwards – but have a look at the options for Typewriter Mode in Paper:

• That I’ve set Offset at -10% means that I’ve set my sweat spot to be a bit over the middle of the screen.
• However, you can set it to not move every line! As I’ve set the Window to be 21 lines, it only moves when I’m more than 10 lines away from the sweet spot.
• Speed is how fast the scrolling is. I like to keep it slow.
• Delay is how quickly it reacts when I go outside the window. I think I prefer 0.
• Focus on Click is whether it should only move while typing.

The results is a Typewriter Mode that just feels like a human is scrolling up and down for you, in a natural way, to always keep the caret at a nice vertical position.

It also has a cute Move to Center and Hide Others feature, shown here:

Great iOS and iPadOS counterpart

Until now, I’ve mostly shown examples from the Mac app. But the mobile counterparts are also great. And here’s an important point: Most of the things I’ve mentioned are customisable. So it’s great that you can set different options on different platforms.

Both apps also has a completely customisable toolbar, with numerous clever buttons – like this one, for Soft Returns:

I like the third-party keyboard SwiftKey – even though Microsoft hasn’t done an impressive job with it since they bought it. But for some reason, it doesn’t play nice with some Markdown apps, like Drafts. However, it does play nice with Paper!

Other, and things I don’t use much myself

Another little thing Paper just nails, is undo/redo. The developer touches on it in this article – but yeah, it just works. He’s also made a nifty touchpad gesture, where you can rotate to undo/redo! That looks like this:

You can also pinch to change the size of the window – and holding Command, while scrolling, changes the text size.

Paper also has some rudimentary exporting and publishing features.⁸ It’s not as robust as Ulysses', but I like that they’re there.

Some will be happy to know that the app is far from trying to be an “AI app”. But it does have an AI hotkey! If you don’t have any text selected, you’ll get this:

And if you have selected some text, you get this instead:

When using the latter, it will edit the text, while also providing an explanation. Both right in your document. Yeah, and as it uses native text tools, the Apple Intelligence features can work out-of-the-box as well (when they eventually ship).⁹

Two other features I don’t use much, but that some might, are a Focus Mode and Counter. The first allows you to mute the parts of the document your caret isn’t in – and you can choose if it should focus on the current line, sentence, or paragraph. You can also decide if you should exit the mode on click.

Some other niche features are the option to not be able to edit or delete text (only write), typing sounds, and showing hidden characters. It’s also supposed to smartly handle switching between non-alphabetic languages (like Chinese or Hebrew) and alphabetical ones (like Norwegian) – but I can’t really test that.

Lastly, it also has a Callback URL Scheme, which also makes it work nicely with Hookmark. I also recommend checking out the overview of the keyboard shortcuts, which gives an impression of how much can be done with those.

But there are also things that could be better!

I’ve focused heavily on the positives until now – both to show why I really do love this app, and as I hope it can serve as inspiration for other apps. But that doesn’t mean the app is perfect. Some of the things I’m mentioning here, I know are hard/impossible to implement due to how the app is built. Nonetheless, I still think it’s a good idea to point them out here, as they are things I miss with the app, and that others might miss as well.

Price

I get that it might be easier to capture fewer customers at a price of €200 than 10 times as many with a €20 price… Nonetheless, I still think the price is wild – and it makes me a bit sad, as it keeps the app niche.¹⁰ Another thing that bums me out, is that the dev told me he had pitched the app to Setapp, but that it got rejected because they already had enough writing apps. I really think Setapp made a mistake here, as they might not have realised how high quality the app is. If you agree with me, or are curious and have Setapp, join me in sending them a friendly email to ask them to reconsider.

Personally, I view Paper as a luxury writing instrument – like a nice fountain pen. And if you write a lot, and have the funds, it’s not that crazy to spend a bit to provide more joy to that experience!

Surrounding features (and name)

I don’t like how generic the name is – as Paper is hard to both talk about and search for, heh. However, it does suit the app well: Not only does it look like a piece of paper (with its paper texture and square corners) – it also simulates single pieces of paper, as opposed to something like a notebook. This brings me back to a con I’ve already mentioned, that it’s a simple files-based app, with little to no surrounding features. I would’ve loved it if I could get the writing experience of Paper, with the extra chrome of apps like NotePlan or nvUltra!¹¹

A quick thing I would love, would be if I could point it at a folder and say “Hey, please know about things in this folder”. (It would have to create a hidden .paper folder in it.) This could be a way to make links [[like this]] work. I’ve pointed both NotePlan and nvUltra at the same folder – so both of them follow those links, regardless of which of the apps I made it in!

It also doesn’t have any dedicated shortcut actions, for automation. But as we’re dealing with plain-text files here – it’s far from impossible to work around that!

Lastly, in this section – the dev has made a choice, for the Mac app, that I don’t agree with: To keep with the minimalist approach, the app doesn’t have a settings screen at all. And every option is accesses via the menu bar. The basic ones are visible all the time, while the more advanced ones require you to hold Option. I love a good settings screen, so I think having one of those would be better – at least in addition to the current menu. When I’ve evaluated this app, I’ve often found myself thinking, “That would be a good option to have in a settings screen – but it would be overcomplicated if it were just in the menu bar”.

Looks, and formatting features

The app’s simplicity can also be sensed in some formatting options, or lack thereof. And while I do love how the app looks, it could be even better, in my opinion.

Headings

Here are some headings – in Preview Mode on the left and Markdown Mode on the right:

So, the app does acknowledge h1-h6, which is good. But I have two problems with it:

1. In Markdown Mode, all headings have the same size and paragraph spacing. (However, at least the spacing is larger above than below, as it should be!)
2. And Preview Mode has the same size for h3-h6.

I know that several markdown editors, like iA Writer and MarkEdit, do the first thing as well – but I still don’t like it. I get the principle of wanting to stay true to the original plaintext file – but I don’t see any philosophical differences between “showing bold text as bolder than regular text”, and “having heading 1 be larger than heading 2”. It should at least be an option.

Here’s a mockup of how I would like it to be:

I’d also love it if the headings could be collapsible, like in NotePlan (and many others). Collapsible list items would also be great!

Some niche things that haven’t got much love

Paper’s main focus has been on doing the basic Markdown things extremely well – and do them well it does! But that means that some more niche features haven’t got the needed attention. But I hope they can get it eventually!

The app has little support for tables and images. It will show images, but only ones that are hosted online, and only in Preview Mode. It will also show Markdown tables in Preview Mode – but I don’t think it really has a way to make them.

I know it’s not trivial to add support for images in .md files when you’re not a library app. One improvement could be to show the images in Markdown Mode as well. And maybe the app could offer to convert the file to TextBundle if you want to add a local image? Or perhaps the “Hey, please know about this folder” suggestion from earlier would make it possible to add attachment folders, like NotePlan does?

I also wish footnotes were improved. Hitting the hotkey only creates this: [^] While I wish the app used its terrific logic from numbered lists, and did the following:

• Add the correct number in the footnote syntax [^3]
• Then moved to the bottom of the document, and write [^3]:

Then you could quickly add the footnote content at the bottom – and if the number was clickable, to quickly go up and down between them, it would be even better.

When writing blog posts, I’ll mix in some HTML here and there – like when adding images, callouts, etc. And I prefer the way Ulysses displays this, as Paper doesn’t really recognise it. Here’s an example:

In Paper, the HTML is just there, while in Ulysses, it’s recognised as what it calls “Raw Source”. The latter makes it easier for me, at a glance, to see what’s text and what’s code. This, together with the “Built-In Proofreader and Editing Assistant” and publish features, is why I finish up my blog post in Ulysses.

Some apps, like Obsidian, will try to render the HTML inline. This can be a cool option to have, but it can also be a bit messy.

A possible implementation could be to recognise, and render, things that start with < and end with > as code:

Paper’s doesn’t love code blocks either. Let’s compare it to Ulysses and NotePlan:

I don’t think Paper has to be as good as NotePlan here – but it should be better. This also brings me to an example where a settings screen would be nice.

Variants lets you set weight for Heading, Body and Bold – but that’s it. You can’t set the font for code and have a different font for headings. And the letter spacing is the same for everything. Having this be more robust would be much easier if not everything had to fit within the menu bar…

Block quotes, horizontal rules, and more accents

The Markdown Mode has a very strict paradigm, where it won’t hide or show any elements that aren’t there in the plain-text file. But an effect of this, is that horizontal rules look very rudimentary:

They do look a bit better in Preview Mode – but I would want them to be in the accent colour and match the caret and scroll bar.

Block quotes are also too simple:

Here’s one idea for how it could be improved (in my opinion), without adding anything:

But I would also like a line, that matches the thickness of the caret and scroll bar:

The accent colours are so beautiful, that I would like to see more of them! I also think having sharp lines in those colours, like the caret and scroll bar has now, as part of the branding is a cool idea I think could be developed further. But I get that not everyone wants the accent colour everywhere – so, again, a settings screen would be nice. For instance, here are some accent ideas I’d like:

Here are the changes I made:

• The list bullets are bold, like originally, but I gave them the accent colour. I’ve also given them more transparency as you move up indent levels.
• The asterisks around the bold word isn’t bold. (Just to make them a bit less prominent.)
• With links, I’ve given the square brackets and underline colour the accent colour, to “link them together”.¹² One idea is more transparent and another is less.
• I’ve also muted text in parentheses a bit, which is just a thing I think is a bit fun.

A way to present the options, could be to have a list of the different Markdown syntax (maybe the same place as you choose your preferred syntax), and the option to pick between regular, muted, accent, and muted accent.

Another option could be to just have a toggle that says “Tint syntax”, and choose a pleasant default. For instance something like this:

Edit 14/11-24:The ability to tint all Markdown syntax has been added now! This is quite nice. To keep it simple, all syntax (except finished tasks) gets the same tint – but you can adjust the amount. It's slightly less nice (as I want a strong accent on some things, and little or no on others), but still a neat addition. I've set the tint percentage to 40% on the image below – but personally I use just 20%.

I also had fun playing with an icon idea that took a bit more from the app itself. Being literally the only app on my Mac who has square corners, I think the icon should be the only one with the same. I also tried to incorporate the caret in the P. I think my favourite is the one with it being slightly thicker than the letter – but in general, I’m not claiming that the icon is better than the original, hehe. And now we’re firmly into spitballing territory, and out of the review.

Conclusion

Paper is simultaneously one of my favourite pieces of software, and also pretty hard to recommend. It has a rather narrow use case and a very steep price. But if you write a lot in Markdown, and value excellent tools, there are worse ways to waste your money! Personally, I think it’s worthwhile to spend money to make things we do every day more enjoyable. Both if it’s work-related, as it could make you more productive, and if it’s (like it is for me) connected to something that’s just a creative endeavour – as it makes me pursue it more. The app has also got meaningfully better in the six months I’ve used it, so I’m excited about the future as well – including any other projects the developer might build.

I'm Anti Anti-Growth and Anti-Commerce on Open Social Media

I don’t like it when people say “People on this platform are like this” – because all platforms contain multitudes. However, one quite prevalent multitude on Mastodon, and other open social media platforms,¹ is the idea of being against growth and commercial activity on these platforms. And while I agree with some parts of these notions, in general, I really don’t agree with them.

The reason can be summed up in three points:

1. If we agree that open social media, free from ad-tech monopolies, is a good thing, everyone deserves the chance to take part in it.
2. This includes those who use online platforms to make a living, and those who want to follow them.
3. And resources flowing through the ecosystem, makes it more realistic to achieve this goal.

Let’s name this abstract “good thing” after something else most people agree is good: Cake

I think everyone deserves cake! But we might have to bake more of it to have enough to go around. And being able to do that, and delivering it in a safe and timely manner, is a big challenge.

Nuances on growth

So, the main reason I think there should be some focus on growth, is that everyone deserves things like good privacy.² And to achieve this, we need to focus on accessibility, usability, communication, actually being enjoyable, and more. Now, some of those who argue against growth, are really talking about being against “growth at all cost”, “growing past the security measures”³, etc. And with that, I’m 100% aligned.

Nuances on commercialisation

Lots of the commercial activity online is toxic, in many ways⁴ – and we absolutely shouldn’t welcome everything. But there’s also lots of commercial activity that’s absolutely fine! Some examples include promoting art, creating content, offering services (IRL or online), and selling products.

The current landscape is dominated by ad-tech, lock-in and opaque algorithms.⁵ But we’ll never get past this, and to a better place, if we don’t allow commercial activity. Instead, we must work on making this activity healthier. That is why I strongly agree on being critical towards ideas!

A good example of someone trying to build something healthy, is Sub Club, for creating paid subscriptions via ActivityPub. This post, by Anuj Ahooja, sums it up well:

Three neat features of sub.club:

1. You can post to premium subscribers by DMing your sub.club from your existing Fediverse account. 🤌🏼
2. There's already an API, so devs can integrate with the platform from day one. 🔌
3. Ice Cubes and Mammoth are the first clients to have a 'subscribe' button for sub.club, and it'll show up on other apps soon. 💲

The long-term goal is standardised "Subscribe" button for every premium subscription platform on the Fediverse, not just sub.club.

As it’s built on ActivityPub, users would be able to follow the creators on whichever platform they prefer. And I also like the long-term goal.

But of course, there were comments like this beneath the launch post:

I’m not sure what you’re on, but late stage capitalism will NEVER work on the fediverse.

That is not the culture here, never has been, and almost definitely never will be.

And this is the notion I just find so misguided. Like, if you have specific criticism of sub.club, that’s fine! But by lumping it together “late stage capitalism”, without giving any justification, it just seems like anything related to making money = evil. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the only alternative to open social media is the ad-tech monopolies. And I think it’s pretty crummy to demand that those who make money online, and those who want to follow them, stay there.

Sub.club also plans to be useful for making it easier for instances to be funded. I love amateur instances, funded by donations, as much as the next guy. But if we want cake for everyone, safely, we need people to be able to do the necessary work. And people require money (to eat and stuff). So it’s a good thing if donations can become easier.

But also, it’s next to impossible to challenge the giants with just those servers. So I think services like omg.lol and write.as, that offers a Mastodon instance as a part of a paid service, is nice as well. I also think Mozilla.social could’ve been a good thing if they gave a damn. And the client, Mammoth (which is freemium) running an instance, is also cool.

Now, let’s take Mastodon accounts as an example.⁶ For the reason mentioned above, I think there’s room for all of these types:

• Randoms just talking about their day and interests
• Small blogs and publications
• Journalists and official accounts for larger publications and newspapers
• Politicians and government entities
• People who are personalities on other platforms (like YouTube), who want a social media presence
• Heck, even brands and influencers

It’s perfectly fine in some instances to not allow self-promotion – and some might demand that it’s marked with a hashtag. Others might demand that ads for others (like sponsorships) are marked as well. (I’d say most should do this.) This would make it trivial for users to create their own ad blockers, by simply ignoring #ad.

For an example of useful “brand accounts”, have a look at the instance indieapps.space!

Now, I’m not saying I love the idea of more commercial activity on “my” part of the web. But categorically being against it kind of screams of NIMBY, in my opinion.

Oh, and if we want large accounts (which I think we should), we need good tools for them. Technology Connections has has several threads about the short comings of Mastodon in this regard.

My message:

If you’re finding yourself being a fan of open social media, but also be against growth and commercialisation, I have a few questions for you:

1. Why doesn’t everyone deserve to take part in the thing you think is good?
2. Do you think it’s OK for people to make a living doing things like making videos, selling art online, writing blogs, etc.? And if so, why should the people doing that, and those who follow them, be forced to stay on the ad-tech platforms?
3. How do you expect open social media to compete without resources? (And again, we all know what the alternative is if it can’t.)

Nah – my message is instead: Let’s work on healthy and secure growth, having the open social media be a flexible and private place to both sell and buy, and getting enough resources into the ecosystem to provide cake for everybody.

The Idea of Marques Brownlee's App Panels is OK

But I Have Several Problems With It

With the review of the latest iPhones, Marques Brownlee/MKBHD also revealed his latest project: The app Panels.

And I don’t mind the idea:

He’s hinted at expanding it in the future, but currently the app is an app to get wallpapers. You can get some of them for free (and by watching ads), but you can also buy packs of them, or subscribe to the app to get access to everything. The money is split between the app and the artists.

Wallaroo, by Iconfactory, is already a paid app for wallpapers, and Walli is an example of an app with a model where artists can upload their work.

In general, I feel like people’s expectations of stuff being free online is too high, so I don’t mind a new paid option in the market.

But these are my problems:

1. The name
2. The price
3. The split
4. The privacy

1) The name

I get that it’s difficult to come up with an original name, as there are so many apps and companies out there. And, yes, “panels” can refer to screens – but it can also refer to comic panels. And the name Panels is already taken, by a great app for reading those!

2) The price and 3) The split

Panels (the wallpaper app) splits the income with artists – kind of like what music streaming apps do. So let’s compare it to, say, Spotify:

• With Spotify, you get access to all* the music in the world, for $12/month | $144/year.¹
• And they get a lot of flack for “only” giving 75% of revenue to artists.²

Panels also cost $12/month – but has a heavily discounted yearly price of “only” $50/year. But that’s still far too much. 1-2/month | $10-20/year would be fair, IMO. I’d value “all music” more than three times higher than “some wallpapers”…

However, the worst part is the split: Where Spotify gives 75% of revenue to artists, Panels give 50% of profits. The difference between “revenue” and “profits” is important here! And in what world is that a fair assessment of how much value the app maker and the artists provide!? What would the app be without content?

He might say (or secretly think) “Pff, my name is so big – and if you want access to my audience, you have to pay up.” But anyone who thinks that, has forever lost the right to complain about Apple’s 30%, or YouTube’s cut, ever again…

If the app took about 20% of revenue, I’d say that seems about right.

4) The privacy

This The Verge article touches on some of the criticism of the app, including on privacy. And it also includes a post from Marques addressing some of it.

In short: It collects more than it should and needs to. But the data disclosures were also a bit overzealous.

For me, his answer to the criticism is far from hitting the mark. In terms of pricing, he only talks about improving the free version. But in general, the free version is challenging to combine with decent privacy – as the ads are tracking. And he doesn’t address the two things I’m most offended by at all: The pricing of the paid version, and the slap-in-the-face ratio of the split.³

My Biggest Small Gripe With Apple Notes

And (Obviously) Objectively Correct Principles for Paragraph Spacing

I think Apple Notes might be one of the best pieces of software Apple ships. They’ve nailed creating a simple app, with great ease-of-use, that still has more powerful features hidden, for those who want it. There are a couple of reasons why I don’t use it much, though:

• In general, I like to rely on third-party services.
• I also like the portability of Markdown, and being able to use several apps on the same files.
• I like that, in NotePlan, I can use the same app for notes and tasks.

However, Notes has numerous nice features, like:

• Good apps on both Mac, iPad and iPhone, while also being accessible on the web
• Pretty good collaboration features, with shared notes and folders
• More than enough options for formatting

• Collapsible headings
• Embedding of files, photos, and illustrations (especially good with PDFs)
• Audio recordings
• Links between notes (no backlinks, though)
• Tagging and smart folders
• Quick notes (which Apple, selfishly, reserves for itself)
• Math notes.

So I’ll gladly recommend it to most people!

However, as most Apple software, Notes is pretty inflexible. If you don’t like their choices, you’re out of luck. And I really don’t like their choices when it comes to paragraph spacing.

My paragraph spacing commandments

Have a look at this screenshot from Notes:

I really don’t like the lack of spacing around the headings, and that it’s difficult to tell that there are two separate paragraphs below Heading 1.

A way to fix this, is by adding newlines before headings and between paragraphs. But I think this both looks a bit inelegant, and is annoying to have to do.

So, I’ve made four commandments, that I think every text editor should adhere to. (And one extra, for Markdown editors.) Apple absolutely isn’t the only sinner. But most(?) other apps can at least customise these things!

The image above, is an example of what I want to see in terms of spacing¹ – and none of it is created with newlines.

1) Paragraph spacing must be larger than the line height

This makes it easy to see that there are two separate paragraphs below Heading 1. To avoid complexity, if the app has an option for adjusting line height, you could have the paragraph spacing be a multiple of the line height.

2) There must be a separation between hard and soft returns

Many text contexts on our computers distinguishes between hitting Shift+Return or just Return. For instance, in some chat apps, Return will send the message, while Shift+Returns creates newlines.

In most text editors, Return creates a new paragraph – and usually a new regular body paragraph. (So if you were writing a heading, the next one would not be a heading.) However, if you are writing a list, it creates a new list element. This is a hard return.

However, if you hit Shift+Return (or Ctrl+Return in some contexts), you will create a new line within the same paragraph. This is a soft return. It can be used like this:

1. This is the first list element.
2. This is the second,
   which goes over two lines.

If I had made a hard return after “second”, I would have created a new list element (3.) instead of just a new line. This also works in headings, etc.

Adhering to the first commandment can be annoying if your app doesn’t support soft returns. Because occasionally, you want a new line without the extra paragraph spacing. For instance, while writing things like this great pop song by the Norwegian artist Astrid S:

From everything to nothing at all.
From every day to never at all.
And everyone says that I should be sad.
Is it normal that

I don’t feel sorry for myself,
care if your hands touch somebody else.
Wouldn’t get jealous if you’re happy.
It’s okay if you forget me.
I don’t feel empty now that you’re gone.
Does that mean it did mean nothing at all?
But I’ll tell you what the worst is:
It’s the way it doesn’t hurt,
when I wish it did.

You need soft returns to be able to separate between line changes and new parts. Supporting these on mobile apps is a bit more complicated – but as not everyone needs it, I like the approach by the excellent app Paper:

Apple Notes does have this distinction. But you require a keyboard to type soft returns – and it’s less useful when they don’t have paragraph spacing.

3) Scale paragraph spacing to heading level

To help with distinguishing heading levels, it’s a good idea to give more paragraph spacing to level 1 than level 2, etc. Here’s my example from earlier, but with added pixel values:

In this example, I’ve used 16px between regular paragraphs, and also below headings.² And this leads me to the next commandment:

4) Make sure headings are closest to the content it applies to

Notice that I’ve added the scaled spacing above the headings, while keeping the spacing below them the same.