Okay look, it has taken me far too long to get one of these out, but I’ve been busy! I had a bit of a shock having some fans of this format come out of the woodwork, but I’m glad you like it. Why not start your own EDS updates? 😉
I put clack labs on hiatus, moved to a proper flat, got a motorcycle for road trips, and wrote a looooot of Typescript.
Off we go.
Removed from the stack
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Moody: Finally decided to call it a day. No real complaints with the app, but mood tracking is just not something I find value in. Good to know that the data proved what I thought all along, most of the time I’m a pretty upbeat and content guy.
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About 5000 pub apps: Difficult to express how happy I am about this. I’ll just order at the bar, thank you.
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Instagram: Goodbye and thanks for all the memories. No actually. IG has always been my favourite social media and due to my past life as a band/festival photographer, I had some fantastic times exclusively because of my IG account. Unfortunately, the experience has been on a steady decline for the past, well, forever and that makes me quite sad. I’ve done many “no Instagram for a month” type resets to combat this as boy are they great at getting you hooked on their dopamine casino, but at some point the personally perceived value-to-sacrifice (in whatever terms you measure) ratio just gets too extreme for a reset to be able to handle.
Added to the stack
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HomePod mini: No more Alexa spying on me for Bezos. Actually the only thing I used her for was playing thunderstorms at night and she kept losing connection or playing the wrong random other thing. Turns out with a homepod I can schedule it automatically and also use Shortcuts to trigger all kinds of other things. The sound quality is muuuuch better too so more impromptu air-guitaring takes place which is probably a net positive.
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Apple Watch Series 7: Having had the Series 6 I had no strong desire to upgrade, then my birthday came around and a treat yo self was required so I went for a bit more mature option this time by going for the shiny stainless steel with the Milanese loop. Other than for vanity it turns out the Series 7 has some really nice incremental improvements with fast charging (actually noticeable) and the bigger screen (super noticeable) making it by far my favourite watch to date.
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Lightroom for iPad Pro: Proper photo development on the go for when I’m travelling has been amazing. It even has the proprietary camera manufacturer specific presets built-in so I can make my Fuji shots look like Fuji shots without having to burn in the Fuji on the Fuji. Great stuff.
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Midori notebook and a fountain pen: One problem I’ve been trying to solve for years now is how to do good (okay better/some) meeting notes. As I can quite easily find myself more in meetings than out of them I really wanted a better way to capture this ephemeral knowledge and reasonings for those meetings that aren’t quite as formal to get recorded or have someone send a summary afterwards. I tried a lot of things in my work knowledge base Coda and all of them ended up being just too distracting so I’d drift away from them after a few meetings. Can’t say enough about a good (Japanese) pen and a proper (Japanese) notebook.
Proving grounds
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Matter: There seems to be a new wave of thinking in the newsletter renaissance we’re in and that’s that newsletters don’t belong mixed in in your email inbox. I’m really not sure I agree but I thought I’ll give it a go and Matter seems to be one of the nicest options out there. When I read using it I do enjoy it a lot, but I’m really struggling with keeping up with the habit. Being an inbox zero person means the newsletter just being there (or snoozed until the next appropriate window) is a really strong incentive to either read it or decide the contents don’t appeal to me so I can delete it and move on. Now they are in their own app/feed and that push to actually read them is gone. I’m open to getting into the new flow, but time will tell. More next time.
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Kosmik: This is something I’m super excited for. Visual representation of thought processes is something our digital tools really are still in infancy with. Mostly I always fall back to Concepts on the iPad or Miro on desktop for work stuff. I dream of some sort of a Concepts/Roam/recent-quotes integration and Kosmik is the closest I’ve seen that being possible.
That’s all for now, see you in three months, maybe (I’ll try harder this time).
Thanks for stopping by.