David Sparks on his journey To Day One and Back Again. I’ve been on a similar thought cycle recently. I have been a long time sporadic user of Day One, and I’ve journaled for a while in Obsidian as well as pen and paper. But recently I’ve decided it’s back to Day One.

Similarly to David it is about ease and access for me. I am a legacy Plus user which means I have sync across all my devices, I can save photos and other items as and when I feel it’s right to do so. Ultimately, I know that if I am going to journal regularly and it be of any use it needs to be easy for me to do so and Day One presents the least amount of friction.

Removed Twitter from my iPhone last night, not because of the Musk thing but because I can’t take all the culture wars. Talking to my counsellor last night I realised how much of a toll it was taking on my mental health. Not worth it at the moment.

My Arc experiment is over. It broke my long established flow for reading RSS and turned what is normally an enjoyable part of the day into an annoyance.

It baffles me that you still can’t make a reminder from an email message in Mail.app. Reminders is becoming very powerful yet still feels crippled by this.

The sad demise of the smartly dressed traveller…

It’s not just the smartly dressed traveller that’s disappeared. I recently saw a film of the streets of London in the late 1930’s, everyone looked smart, well dressed, and respectable. Yesterday a trip to buy some groceries revealed a man in a baby pink tracksuit and a woman wearing pyjamas, bathrobe, and slippers… not all progress is positive.

The iPhone 14 Pro is still massively hard to get hold of. Delivery is not until 8th November, and collection is non-existent.

All in on Micro.blog

A little under four months ago I made a decision about my blog and moved it to use Ghost with the aim of building a more regular posting habit. Needless to say it hasn’t really happened. So I’ve decided to make another decision and go all in on Micro.blog.

Recently I’ve been on a slow and considered drive to simplify things in my life mostly in the digital realm, but not all of it. As a bit of a geek I’m prone to finding things, trying them out, or trying to build systems to enable me to do things. More often than not I abandon them (Notion, I’m looking at you) and return to something that does one thing well. For me it is Things for tasks, Craft for work notes, and Obsidian for my personal notes. There are no doubt other app of similar veins that don’t spring to mind right now.

Last week as I sat at my Mac a thought popped into my head. When I first started blogging back in 2005 the tools I was using were of a similar vein. At the time Wordpress was a much simpler blog focused CMS, there were no block editors or extra baggage to try and wrestle into submission. I could post quickly from my browser. Eventually I settled on using MarsEdit as my posting mechanism. It did exactly what I wanted allowing me to post to my blog without the need to fire up my browser. As I dwelt on that thought I realised that over time my blogging ideas have become more and more complicated. I wanted to create link posts, quote posts, or long form articles, all on a website that was well structured and looked good. Alongside that I had Twitter, and then ultimately Micro.blog. Small posts went into those places and soon enough I didn’t really know where I should post what. The resulting side effect? I stopped posting.

This saddened me. Blogging is a hobby, one I’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, and money into. I decided it was time to simplify. So I began looking around at setting Wordpress up again, then I realised, it’s too complicated and I need something simpler. So here I am. Micro.blog has more or less everything I want from a blogging engine. A simple posting engine, it looks good and I can customise it myself at a later date. So now I have one place to come when I want to post something. No matter what it is it will go here, one place to share what I want with as little friction as possible. Let’s see how it goes.