The flowers are finally blooming in my yard.

Ron Chester There are no visible scores on Microblog. This is a very good thing. It means I can just concentrate on posting things others might find interesting and then being interested in things I might find posted by others. There’s no way to tell who’s popular, nor a way to game a system to look more popular. I hope that doesn’t change. Social networks benefit greatly from encouraging users to “game the system” any way they can in order to bump their “score”.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I bailed on TextExpander and moved my text snippets to Alfred. It felt good to be rid of a monthly subscription and to run one fewer app on my machines. But, and Dr. Drang nailed it, I miss having text expansion on my iPad. I’m writing this in Ulysses on the iPad and just wanted enter the date and time for the post.

I spent the morning trying to make it easier to get things done using my iPad. It went pretty well. I now have a workable Vim setup using Blink Shell. I have Bear all synced and organized. Tasks are back in OmniFocus. And so on. In a stroke of ironic misfortune, the hard drive in my iMac died shortly after doing all of the above. This left me with the better part of a Sunday having no desktop machine, so I went for a walk.

In “Why you should quit reading paper books”, Andy Sparks writes: When you read on Kindle and highlight passages that you find beautiful, interesting, or challenging, you’re sending your future self a hell of a gift That’s true, but here’s my version: When you read a paper book and write in the margins or highlight passages that you find beautiful, interesting, or challenging, you’re sending your future self and generations to come a hell of a gift.

I love trying new things, but I’m not sure why bother. I’ve had most things figured out for years. Here’s a quick, incomplete list of software and hardware that have continued to work for me, doing what they were designed to do, without much fuss or trouble, for a very long time. In no particular order. Software Apps and formats that have been around a long time and have burned themselves into my life.

I spend what many would call a ridiculous amount of time tinkering with my “systems”. I enjoy it, but I also like to think it helps me work smarter and faster than those unfortunate saps who just toss a bunch of files into a folder and keep a single TextEdit document open. Or worse, people who manage their lives by setting and un-setting flags and unread statuses in their gmail or whatever.

I’ve had a new Echo Show since the day it was released. I wish I could trade it in for an Echo Hide. This, believe it or not, is how I use my Echo Show in the kitchen. Every time I walk into the kitchen the device lights up with a screen full of wonders such as “World Class Restaurant Servers Moldy Apples” or “It’s National Hot Dog Day!” or some other annoying buzzfeed-ian nonsense.

ox-hugo is an Org exporter backend that exports Org to Hugo-compatible Markdown (Blackfriday). That also includes the generation of front matter (in TOML or YAML format) required for Hugo posts. What that means is that I can have an org file and each headline will become a hugo-compatible markdown file with all the appropriate front matter? Awesome! I’ll have to think about whether to use it regularly for baty.

I’d been using an old click-wheel iPod for listening to music in the car. It’s nice having music ready to go without futzing with hooking up my iPhone and cables every time I get in the car. Unfortunately, it stopped working a few months ago. When I heard Apple was discontinuing the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle, I hustled to Best Buy and bought a brand new Nano before they were gone.

Rands: And I’m not even worried about this one meeting. I’m worried about all of the meetings and the collective compounding impact of all the small seemingly inconsequential decisions in a company where the business is selling advertising versus a company where the business is selling product. I switch to using Chrome once in a while, even though I generally prefer Safari. Chrome has collected all the energy and the ecosystem and is better when doing any sort of web development.

After nearly 25 years I’d sort of given up on seeing a new solo record from Roger Waters. Then, surprisingly, here comes “Is This the Life We Really Want?” He’s still angry and writing about the same basic things he has for the last 40 years or so. Fine with me, that’s what I’ve always liked about him. For example, this bit from “Broken Bones”: When World War II was over