House of Jacob

Welcome to the first (hopefully) quarterly update on some of the stuff I’ve been using and some that I’m definitely not anymore.

First order of business: hat tip to Julian for his Inventory Update which finally introduced me to a format for this that I like. I’ve been thinking about creating a /now page for a while and even though that hasn’t come to be (ain’t nobody got time) this feels manageable.

I’ll be calling mine the Every Day Stack since, well, these are the tools that help me on the daily.

Off we go.

Added to the Stack

• Roam: Do I even need to say anything more? We spoke about Roam on the RP podcast All Roads Lead to Roam episode and back then I was dipping my toes in the Roam sphere. Now I’ve fully dived in as part of another ongoing project I have. So far it’s been good, although Roam definitely isn’t everything (soz #RoamCult) and I’m still using Coda a lot.

• Anki: I’m probably the absolute last person to discover the power of Anki. I’ve known about Anki for years and I use (and highly recommend) Memrise for language learning so I know that spaced repetition really works for me. Yet for whatever reason, I never gave Anki a go until I found myself struggling for weeks to learn Hiragana so I thought I would give it a try. It’s honestly magic and scary.

• Applicationize: Install any website as an application, even if it doesn’t support the whole “Chrome App” thing. Seems like these days everything I use are web apps, and that’s fine except I have to have five tabs open at all times just to do basic work. Also it’s pretty annoying having to jump between them without Alt-Tab. Not anymore! And all the normal Chrome extensions work within the installed “app” versions as well. 10/10.

• Scriptable: Custom. Javascript. iOS 14. Widgets. 🤯. These things are ace and probably the best thing to come out of 2020. I’ve blogged about it and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted. Repo here.

• Spark: While I still don’t love email again like they claim, I’m part of the #InboxZero club now. I’ve actually always been, but now I’ve got a pretty interface for it. Joking aside, I really like the snooze email function that has been the biggest upgrade to emails in a long time for me. I know Gmail has had it since forever but I barely use my Gmail email address.

• TOFU 65: A custom mechanical keyboard. No link as I’m doing your wallet a favour. Honestly, don’t DuckDuckGo it, just move on with your life.

• Apple Magic Trackpad 2: See back in normal times I would spend a good part of my working day in meeting rooms/sofas/hiding with my laptop doing some work, so my input method would often switch between my desktop mouse and the trackpad on my laptop. I can’t do that anymore and the more I started constantly using a mouse the more I wanted to give something else a go. Turns out I really like the trackpad, and with some custom Mac gestures it’s honestly far superior to any setup I’ve had before.

Proving Grounds

• Bear Focus Timer: Some days it can be really hard to get my head down and focus on one thing with a million things trying to get my attention. So I’m giving the Pomodoro technique a go plus this app design is just lovely.

• CARROT Weather: It’s got widgets™ and since Apple bought DarkSky I don’t see that living on too long. I’ve heard good things about CARROT and they still use DarkSky for data. So far it’s okay.

• New Scientist: I’m trying to add some more general knowledge about what’s going on in the world to my stack. Unsurprisingly it’s quite difficult barely being on social media AND not being able to talk to people in the office/pubs/events to pick up on the latest happenings. I’ve already decided the New Scientist clickbait headlines are too much and I won’t be renewing the subscription, they should know better. The search continues (for something that isn’t as expensive as SCIENCE, which is what I really want).

Removed from the Stack

• Mail: For some reason the standard Apple Mail client refused to send emails using my new eco hosting provider. No clue why, so I took it as an opportunity to shake it up. Happy that I did.

• DarkSky: It’s official, it’s dead, or at least it is to me until they (hopefully) add in some iOS widgets. I still prefer the app interface over CARROT but we can’t always get what we want.

That’s all for now, see you in three months, maybe.

Thanks for stopping by.