A tremendously productive day today. Overgrown weeds in the backyard cleaned up, TV in the RV rewired, toolbox cleaned up (a little) and, thanks to Claude Code, great progress made on a new Mac app I’ve always wanted to write. It was a good day.
Notes
As a Claude Code test this morning, I spun up an empty Xcode project, gave a short prompt about the history of my old Mac maintenance app, Yasu, and then provided it a screenshot, telling it to write me the SwiftUI code for it.
Holy moly, the results were pretty darned good…
When using chat (Teams, Slack, etc.) at work, if you react to a post with a 👍🏻 emoji or similar, don’t post a message that says “thanks” too. It’s totally redundant and is just as bad as the one line “thank you” email that I rail against.
I chose to nuke all of my RSS feeds in NetNewsWire this morning, save one (try to guess which - it’s not one of mine), with the plan of starting fresh. I was marking most feeds read without even bothering to even skim over them. It seemed pointless to keep such noise around.
I just subscribed to a year of Anthropic’s Pro Plan. Let’s see what kind of trouble Claude Code can get me into…
My RSS VibeReader project turned out pretty much how I wanted it to, and I learned a lot. I use it daily to read certain feeds. But, now that it’s done, I need a new “something” to put my energy into. I think I need to start a podcast and learn all about that now. Searching for a subject…
I spent some time away from Micro.blog, intentionally not viewing my own site. I did today and realized that mnml actually ended up being a pretty good looking theme…
I’ve been considering making a move from 1Password to a Bitwarden Enterprise subscription. Having been a 1P user for a very long time, I’m hesitant about making a change, but would like to save the $18 a year. Someone talk me off the ledge – one way or the other…
Usually, I’ll leave the outside Christmas decor up until New Year’s Day. It’s been a tradition of my family since I was a kid. But since rain is forecast for SoCal from Wednesday through Sunday, I quickly took it all down yesterday. Surprisingly, I’m a little sore because of it today.
Sometimes you simply need to declare bankruptcy on your RSS feeds and just mark them as all read…
Speaking of Kagi; I’m a little late to the party, but I get it now. I didn’t think I’d have use for a paid search engine, but I think I’m sold on it. The only challenge is being mindful of the number of searches per day. If I stick with it, funding for other online things will need to take a hit.
I’m taking a look at the Orion web browser this morning. I like it so far, though I know I’ll probably end up sticking with one of the well established browsers for my day to day. I like that Kagi is the default search engine.
I’ve decided to move me and my wife away from iCloud mail with custom domain over to Fastmail. Both are pretty secure, but Fastmail does better in the privacy department overall, plus it has a whole bunch of other benefits. I think that’s worth $96/year.
If you’re a mnml user and you’ve tried adding the new PageFind action to a search page, but got nothing, well, it’s because some of mnml’s existing search styles conflict. I’ll work on fixing this soon. Sorry if this has tripped anyone up.
After eating more than just a little bad over the Thanksgiving holiday, I somehow managed to weigh in at the exact same number this morning as last Wednesday. How I managed to pull that one off I’ll never know. I’ll just take the win on this one…
I’m considering running a FreshRSS server instead of iCloud sync for RSS feeds. The options are spinning up a Pika Pod, or a low-power VPS on Hetzner. Two questions: Do you have experience with Pika Pods? And do you, or have you, run your own FreshRSS instance? What are your thoughts if so?
Today is the first day in 30 years, apart from the one year we didn’t host, that I will not cook a whole turkey for Thanksgiving. This year it’s just my wife, youngest son and me for the holiday. Instead, we’ll just do a single breast. The rest of my famous side dishes are still on the menu though…
If you’ve been waiting to buy that Micro.blog t-shirt, or any other Cotton Bureau merch, now is the time to do it. CB is waiving shipping (international 50% off) when you use discount code THANKYOU25 at checkout. Hurry though. This offer expires Monday, 12/1.
I love the process of setting up a new workstation from scratch as I slowly figure out which apps I rely on for my day to day workflows.
I had check-ins with two different doctors today who both pronounced me in fantastic shape. It’s only been five months since my heart surgery, but I can barely remember it now. I think clouding memories like that is the mind’s way of healing from the trauma.
There is someone, or some bot out of Singapore that’s hitting URLs on my site from a very old index (we’re talking 10 years ago) nearly every day. I wish there was a way to block this behavior on Micro.blog.
My wife and I are heading to Houston, TX for a nephew’s wedding. I’m more excited about going to a blues club tonight than anything else. It’ll be great to see what the scene is like there as opposed to the west coast “LBZ”.
With the recent update to NetNewsWire, I thought I might move my RSS feed syncing from BazQux to iCloud. So far it’s been impressively responsive and always seems to be up to date when browsing feeds on my four different devices. That’s $30 saved a year.
I’ve begun reading the next installment in the Bosch universe: Trunk Music by Michael Connelly 📚. I think I remember this episode from the Amazon series. We’ll see how well they align.