I’m not a person who normally uses dark themes, but with all the hoopla around Dark Mode in Mojave I thought I should try it for a month and see if I liked it as much as everyone else seemed to. Nope, I don’t like Dark Mode. I guess one person’s “eye bleach” is another person’s “proper contrast and color” 🙂 When I switched back to Light Mode (or “Normal Mode” as I like to call it), I felt a sense of relief.

Is there such a thing as an addiction to “being on the computer”? If there is, I suffer from it. I sit here staring at a screen for hours with no real goal or plan. I just click things and read things and move things around. Eventually, I’ll get bored and “go do something” but that doesn’t last long. The whole time I’m off doing things in the real world I’m thinking about getting back to the computer.

Easy Hugo is a handy Emacs mode for posting to Hugo-based blogs. One difficulty I had was that I have many content directories, and easy hugo only included methods for moving through directories one at a time. In a related bug report, I suggested that being able to quickly select the content directory would be useful, and the author, masasam, just added the feature. Works great.

After several interesting email-related discussions this week on Micro.blog, I was reminded of MailSteward. I like the idea of having a local copy of all my email, and I’ve done this before with tools like mbsync but decided to buy MailSteward as an easier way to maintain a searchable, up-to-date email archive. MailSteward worked great. It’s not the prettiest app on my Mac, and $49 might seem steep to some for a such a utility, but I think it’ll turn out to be worth it.

A Good Place: Where nothing is fake and there is no news | The Outline: Some people cruise through Wikipedia links like a community car wash, letting the always-churning trivia brushes scrub their worries away, but I want my brain powerwashed by AskHistorians. AskHistorians is a subreddit run by a strict community of historians that don’t tolerate your internet nonsense. You make jokes? You don’t cite your sources? You’re history.

We love taking photos. Privacy concerns – and the wish to properly archive them for the next generation – brought us to the conclusion that existing cloud solutions are not the right tool to keep them organized. That’s why we started working on an easy-to-use application that can be hosted at home or on a private server. I’m excited about this. I’ve been trying to use “Moments” on the Synology but it’s slow and has been a bit unstable for me.

What I wanted to do was to use Apple Mail on my Macs. I even did it for a while. Mail’s simplicity is comforting and it makes mail look nice. What I ended up doing instead is to go back to MailMate. I have 3 mail accounts; Gmail, Fastmail, and Protonmail. I would like to manage Gmail and Fastmail from the same app. I tried using their respective web apps but I just don’t enjoy it.

Brent Simmons: Nothing in my entire career has ever matched Frontier for how it enabled me to make things quickly. Things that are difficult in other environments — persistence, debugging, seeing the results of a script — are so simple in Frontier. It’s just how the app works. It still feels to me like it comes from the future. The bet I’m making is that there was something special in this design, that this particular tool was capable of unleashing a level of creativity capable of changing the tech world.

I sometimes drift away from using a paper notebook for taking notes. This usually happens when I become infatuated with some new computer workflow or app and decide that paper is just too much work and too inconvenient. Then something happens that makes me miss my notebooks. Today, for example, I was trying to remember something about the sale of my house and even though I took lots of notes on my computer, I couldn’t seem to find what I was looking for.

The Verge: So to review: it’s a tiny phone to keep you from using your big phone, but it could do all the things your big one can do if you wanted (but you shouldn’t because the whole idea is to get you to be a little less obsessed with your phone). It’s like a phone for your phone. And Steph Curry helped design cases for it so you can strap it to your forearm during workouts.

PureForm: Diary – Your Digital Diary: Beautiful, Safe and Secure – Diarly is designed so that you can focus on journaling. Pure in it’s form, powerful in it’s functions. This looks like a nice option for journaling.

Avery Pennarun | USENIX: Many projects have poorly defined (and often overridden) priorities, hopelessly optimistic schedules, and overflowing bug trackers that are occasionally purged out of frustration in a mysterious process called “bug bankruptcy.” But a few projects seem to get everything right. What’s the difference? Avery collected the best advice from the best-running teams at Google, then tried to break down why that advice works—using math, psychology, an ad-hoc engineer simulator (SimSWE), and pages torn out of Agile Project Management textbooks.