I’ve always loved listening to Prince, although for a while I wouldn’t let myself admit it to anyone. In high school and for some time after, my friends and I listened to Metal and what is now called classic rock. Other than the occasional power ballad or “make out” songs, that was all I played. It was all I was allowed to play. In public, I would never have been seen listening to Prince.

Marco Arment on raywenderlich.com: It’s easy to look at successful, painstakingly crafted, impeccably designed apps from well-known developers like Panic or Omni and attribute their success to their craftsmanship, design, and delightful details. Far too many developers believe that if they polish an app to a similar level, they’ll be successful, too. And then they pour months or years of effort into an app that, more often than not, never takes off and can’t sustain that level of effort.

Linus Edwards: I’ve been on a mission lately to minimize my digital life. I want the minimal amount of devices, running simple software (usually stock apps if I can) that easily sync with each other, and have everything backed up to the cloud automatically. Basically, I want to be able to lose any of my devices and pick up exactly where I was with a brand new device. Everything swappable, stock, minimal.

Mike Johnston I do 95% of my music listening from files on the computer; but the other 5% is vinyl, and if that 5% were to be subtracted from my life it would leave a terrible hole For me it’s more like 75% digital and 25% vinyl. And losing that 25% would leave a terrible hole.

I finally got around to framing my Elliot Erwitt print. It’s the only signed photograph I own and I love it.

When Smile Software announced their new subscription pricing model I was initially incredulous. I don’t like paying subscriptions and theirs was a significant increase in pricing while offering nothing compelling for me as a user. I bailed and moved my most important snippets into Keyboard Maestro. KM is not as slick for doing expansions as TE but it works and I already own it. (“Own” being the operative word). Today Smile announced that they were updating pricing.

Me, from earlier today…  Working to drastically reduce the number of adjustable dials in my processes. Also, reducing the number of “processes” while I’m at it. — Jack Baty (@jackbaty) April 11, 2016 I’m exhausted. Everything I do seems to involve making dozens of tiny unnecessary decisions. It’s my fault. I love “workflows” and “processes” and tweaking and exploring software and sitting at the computer figuring out (presumably) better ways of doing things.

ServerPilot handles SSL via Let’s Encrypt and will configure it automatically. All it took was a couple of button clicks and I have a cert configured and all non-SSL requests are automatically redirected to their https counterparts. I can’t think of a good reason not to use it.

I recently provisioned and configured a new Linode VPS for hosting my sites. This replaced an aging VPS that was running Ubuntu 8.xx and I didn’t feel like upgrading the kernel so I built a new one and moved everything over. I am capable of configuring a new LAMP or LEMP stack and installing what I need on Linux, but I’m not good at it. I also don’t have the patience for constantly keeping up with security/system updates.

David Rees started an Artisanal Pencil Sharpening service and kept a mostly straight face about it the entire time. The execution was brilliant. Of course I bought one: My artisanally-sharpened pencil from David Rees He wrote a book on the subject: “How to Sharpen Pencils” Chapter 11 of “How to Sharpen Pencils” includes an in-depth discussion on mechanical pencils, which is included here in its entirety: Mechanical pencils are bullshit.

I’ve tried dozens of WordPress themes over the years and I’ve not liked any of them very much. There’s always something that spoils it for me. I end up creating a Child Theme and farting around but I never end up with what I really wanted. I’m not talented enough and I’m too lazy to spend the time it would take to create something perfect myself. So, I’ve settled on the Independent Publisher theme for now.

I’m thinking more about microblogging and trying to figure out if it belongs here on my main blog or somewhere more suitable for shorter, title-less posts. For example, this post is short. How does it look?