Welcome to the seventh edition of my Every Day Stack Updates.
I’m living life icon free, popping eSIM’s, and tweeting tweets (again).
Off we go.
Removed from the stack
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Icons on my home screen: I’ve had two rows of app icons and one row of folders below them for about as long as I can remember, so moving from that to a widget-only home screen was a bit of an adjustment. Now though, I’m glad I did it. My phone is much better with useful information density at a glance and even more relevant information once unlocked and on the home screen. It also means I have to be more intentional with what I want to do with my phone when I reach for it as I lost all muscle memory of where the apps are.
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Moneyhub: Great finance tracker app for people in the UK and my go-to recommendation in that category. Personally, my Coda finance tracker does the same thing and I’ve come to enjoy the flexibility of my own solution more. The downside of my manual approach is every payday I have to manually “log” my account balances. While some may dislike this, I’ve come to enjoy this (five minute) process as a time to review my finances and adjust my budgets accordingly.
Added to the stack
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Arc from The Browser Company: I mentioned struggling with this one in the previous post. Arc has stuck around my EDS and become my primary browser on my personal Mac so I’m a bit more in favour of it these days. The web as a medium has evolved so much over the years, it’s kind of mind-blowing that browsers haven’t. The biggest shift from memory was when that Chrome update came out that made everything in the UI have rounded corners and wow did I hate it. Surely we (or well, The Browser Company, apparently) can come up with some more interesting features and I’m here for the ride. They have an iOS app now too, but that doesn’t fit my mobile browsing needs so I’ll pass on that for now.
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Eve Room: I got an air quality monitor for my office because I’ve always been curious if it actually matters. Spoiler: nah not really. You can use any air quality online map (assuming you live somewhere with enough sensors about) and maybe open the window a little bit when you cook. Unless you live on a busy road, then move.
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MyFitnessPal: Keeping track of what I eat a bit better as part of 2023 - The year of decree. I mean it’s fiiine? 🤷♂️
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Airalo: Who knew eSIM’s are a thing now! I didn’t. This app makes it super easy to pre-buy a travel eSIM for almost any country so you don’t have to go get ripped off at some foreign airport or try find a “more local” place to buy a simcard without any data or GPS in a foreign city. I used it for a trip to Istanbul recently and it worked perfectly, while being much cheaper than the tourist simcards available locally. Yay technology. Feel free to use my referral code for $3 off if you want
JACOB6888. No pressure. -
iPad Mini: Having a dedicated ebook reader has been more delightful than I thought it would be. I’m reading much more again and slowly making my way back to the properly difficult to focus on titles that have plagued my to-read list for the past five years. In case you didn’t know, I almost exclusively read non-fiction: “self help”, productivity, business, psychology, economics, philosophy; that kind of thing. I feel like I used to be able to focus on difficult content for hours on end (or at least an hour surely), these days not so much. Working on it though.
Proving grounds
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Twitter: Sadly as we all know third-party Twitter clients are no more. Farewell Tweetbot 🫡, you were so much more than we ever deserved. The Twitter iOS app isn’t all that bad to be fair when using the “following” feed. Now if only there was a way I could pay and get zero ads I’d almost be happy.
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Mastodon: I was a late (re)joiner to the alernate universe party. After less than a month trying it as my primary I can already say I’m also an early re(leaver). It was bad four or so years ago when I tried it the first time and its still bad now. The thing most people don’t understand is that the chief-twit/management of a social media company has very little to do with its value proposition. It’s primarily the network effects of the users. Briefly it felt like everyone I care to engage with left Twitter for Mastodon, so I sulked and went along with them, but now two months later almost all of them are back on Twitter. Unless everyone goes somewhere else Twitter’s pull will remain dominant. I’ll keep my Mastodon account open and keep an eye on the development of Bluesky from afar, but for now I don’t really care enough to put more effort in than that.
That's all for now, see you in three months, maybe.
Thanks for stopping by.