Welcome to the third edition of my Every Day Stack updates, even I can’t believe that I’ve been this consistent with it to be honest with you.
I’ve been very busy creating custom mechanical keyboard content on my Youtube channel clack labs and I also wrote an article for the work blog five tips for becoming a senior software engineer. Busy quarter.
Off we go.
Removed from the stack
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Bear Focus Timer: I’ve tried for six months and I think this is a good point to call it: the Pomodoro technique doesn’t work for me. It’s a shame as sometimes I really could use a technique to keep me focused on one task at a time, but recently I’ve been doing a lot better on the self-management front in this aspect again. I’ll revisit this in the future when I start slipping too much in the other direction towards Scatterbrain Ville.
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FirstLight: I said last time I’m not convinced by the interface and the actual need for this app in the first place. I wasn’t able to consistently use this over the built in iPhone Camera app which already does everything I need well.
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Apple AirPods & Sony WH-CH700N: I got rid of my standard AirPods and dedicated Sony noise cancelling over-ear headphones to replace them with the AirPods Pro (below) which is the best of both worlds.
Added to the stack
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Logitech MX Master: I had to get a new mouse since my desk is also now a set for the clack labs videos and my previous mouse didn’t meet A E S T H E T I C goals. It never occurred to me how much of a difference a good wireless mouse can make and I absolutely recommend this mouse to everyone, although I picked it up during a 50% off sale which seems more reasonable price wise since there are two newer models out.
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Splitwise: Yay splitting expenses means doing fun activities with other people! Unfortunately that also means you have to go with the existing app said people use for this kind of thing and that’s exactly what happened here. Fine, ok, it works. Half of the time I end up logging expenses or payments wrong and have to re-do it so obviously I blame bad design instead of my not understanding the interface at all.
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Discord: Absolutely everything has a Discord now and it’s even more annoying than the Slack boom we had a couple of years ago. At least the Discord interface is a lot faster than Slack could ever hope to be (they would have fixed it by now surely!) and it works well. I fundamentally disagree with the no inline threads design decision, but what do I know I’m just another tech guy with a blog.
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Audeze LCD-2 Classic: Planar. Magnetic. Technology. What more do I need to say here? I’ve wanted some planars ever since I got into proper audio gear and these consistently blow me away. I guess my only gripe is they tend to sound best right around the loudness level that I use as my listening upper limit, so depending on track loudness I need to ease it back a bit sometimes and keep an eye on it whereas with my HD600’s I can hit play and forget about it.
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YouTube Studio: Running a Youtube channel on the go can be challenging but this app is actually really nice and lets me do all I need to from my phone. Well done team. If I had one feature request I’d ask for an easy way to get the video URL only as currently the “share” option gives me the video title and URL combined as text which is basically pointless.
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AirPods Pro: Worth every single penny/cent/satoshi. The noise cancellation is really good and they fit extremely well. Absolutely no complaints from me here.
Proving grounds
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Clubhouse: Like most people I got swept up in the Clubhouse boom early this year. So far it’s been really interesting and quite polarising. Seems like the “rooms” can either be complexly worthless ego-stroking or filled with deep and profound knowledge, with the main struggle being finding less of the former and more of the latter. Time will tell how long this will stick around.
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Audible: Armed with the very noise cancelling AirPods Pro (above) and too few podcasts to cover my time spent on public transport recently I thought it would be a good idea to give audiobooks another go. Eh I’m starting to come to terms with that this form of content may simply not be for me.
That’s all for now, see you in three months, maybe.
Thanks for stopping by.