Phil Bowell

I proved a very well known hypothesis in UX/UI design this morning. Users don’t read. I also proved that primary buttons need to be very carefully chosen, especially when they don’t do what the user thinks they will do. On a somewhat related note, Bitbucket’s commenting system is very poorly designed.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From For the Fallen By Laurence Binyon

After finishing work for the day I spent a little time futzing around setting up an MCP server with my Obsidian vault and it seems like a fascinating way to interact with the notes I have in there.

The initial setup wasn’t as smooth sailing as it should’ve been. The MCP server plugin requires installing another plugin which creates a secure Local REST API for your vault, try as I might, I couldn’t get it to enable. Of course this meant I needed to get it working more than ever! Turning off all the community plugins and turning the REST API one on first got things working and when I enabled the rest of the plugins again it continued to work.

As a test I asked Claude if it could see my Obsidian notes and it came back with a summary of my vault. Huzzah!

The next step was to ask it to find a recipe note, take the ingredients from it, and then make a groceries project with the ingredients as tasks in Things. It worked and was a much smoother process than finding the recipe in Mela and adding the ingredients to Reminders.

What I like about this is that it all happens locally and none of the conversations are used to train Claude’s models. This kind of connection between local apps is the first time I’ve felt like these AI tools could become useful for me.

An interesting thread from Jessica Hische about the new Affinity.

I’ve been using the Affinity suite for a few years and looking forward to kicking the tyres on this new version. Some of my fears of free have been dispelled by threads like this and the elsewhere. They aren’t using any of the IP created in it to train AI.

Matthew Smith is sharing the photos he took on his recent trip to Japan and there are some lovely shots that capture both the people and the place. Well worth a scroll if you’ve any interest in Japan and it’s culture.

Last week Cheltenham hosted it’s annual literature festival and I was able to make it a long to a couple of events. First up was a discussion on Agatha Christie featuring Poirot himself, David Suchet.

It was a fun evening hearing about the efforts Mr Suchet went to in order to portray Hercule Poirot consistently over a period of 25 years. I would’ve loved to have seen the notes he made after reading all of the Poirot books that culminated in a list of 92 things he would need to bring his character to life. The most famous one for me…

Poirot doesn’t run.

The second event I made it to was to see the wonderful Charlie Mackesy. He has a new book out, but hearing about his creative process was both inspiring and humbling.

I’ve come across many artists and designers in my life. Most have a common trait, they are generally very self effacing, preferring for their work and others to be in the spotlight. Charlie takes this to a whole new level. As far as he is concerned he is just a man who like to draw and made a book.

The fact people enjoy his work so much speaks to it’s quality, but also it’s message. I first came across Charlie just before the pandemic when he released his first book, I had been through a difficult time and his work was comforting and encouraging. It seems I was not alone in finding that.

Finished reading: Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy 📚

We always like to imagine mastery as a kind of arrival. You work and work and work, you practice something for 10,000 hours or – in the case of the violin – even longer, and then, one day, you’re there. You’ve reached the peak, the struggle is over. You can lean back and enjoy. But it’s not really like that, is it? And wouldn’t it be a bit boring as well? The gift of mastery is that it sharpens your senses. The cost is that you never again hear things the same. Because you care.

Matthias Ott writing about the true meaning of mastery and its impact on your life. I would add one thing, true masters require great humility. The ability to understand their current limits and to honestly look at themselves and figure out where they can get better.

Blogtober is forcing me to put more thought and effort into posting to my blog each day. I haven’t managed to post as often as I wanted so far — last week I managed two in a row, and then things ran away from me. I posted yesterday, though, so here’s to a new streak.

I’ve noticed a new pattern of behaviour is starting to establish itself. I’m using Obsidian more than I have for a long time and with it the new unique note function. When I realise I haven’t written for the day I hit Cmd-N which triggers a new unique note that sets the title to YYYY-MM-DD HHmm and I start typing. That’s how I ended up posting yesterday’s post They’re home at last.

At the very least, it gets me writing and I keep going until I’ve formed some kind of idea. If I can’t make anything coherent I leave it and come back to it another time. Once I’ve written something I’m ok with I will give it a title and publish it to my blog and then file it into my blog posts folder. If it doesn’t get that far, then I leave it in the root of my vault and I can come back to it when I’m ready.

I’ve always been conscious of not posting for the sake of it and I hope that this pattern of behaviour that I’m developing will help that. It gives me a space for ideas to incubate and I expect that if I can’t formulate a post from today’s writing, I can revisit one from another and see how that evolves.

It takes time to find what you want to say, and allowing the space for that to happen is important. In the past, I’ve not allowed that space and have consequently lost the initial post idea to the black hole of the rubbish bin. Equally, I’ve often rushed something and posted before a thought was fully formed—putting it out into the ether and then failing to return to give it the attention it deserves. I would like to change both of those things which is the aim behind making a belated start to Blogtober. I want my blog to be a place to share thoughts and ideas as well as events and activities. In order to achieve that I need to give myself the space to ruminate on things.

Apple renamed Apple TV+ to Apple TV and everyone is up in arms. They’re just reflecting reality, no one outside of the Apple nerds calls it Apple TV+ it’s just Apple TV to them. The new F1 Movie is coming to Apple TV in December is much simpler.