November was a blur.1 We were preparing for a move (new apartment!) and dealing with a number of things. I didn’t have many spare cycles left for mindful consumption of anything media. 🎮 Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Xbox – GLORIOUS. Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of my favourite games of all time, and Veilguard looks like a worthy follow-up, at the very least! Elle Griffin: Mondragon as the new City-State – Great, clear-eyed independent look at one of the largest group of worker coöperations in the World, the Mondragon Corporation in Spains Basque region.

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Another year has gone by, and my toolkit hasn’t changed much since the last time I did a post like this… 📨 Mail Client: Fastmate 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail (since 2013!) 📆 Calendar: Fastmail via Fantastical 📁 Cloud File Storage: Fastmail, iCloud Drive, and Hetzner Storage Box 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Fastmail via Cardhop 📝 Notes: Obsidian ✅ To-Do: Obsidian for day-to-day business-related work and high-level planning, Linear for (code) project planning and issues, Apple Reminders for personal stuff

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. It was simpler times. 🎤 Gary Gulman: “Born on 3rd Base” (2023) – For me personally, a funnier special than his previous two. 🎮 PowerWash Simulator | Xbox – I have no excuse. I liked it a lot for some reason. At some point my mind turned this game into part 2 of the excellent Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. 🎤 Steve Hofstetter: “Secret Optimist” – Hilarious stand-up special. Time well spent. 🎤 Steve Hofstetter: “The Recipe” – Excellent, very personal stand-up comedy special. This one had me lightly tear up once or twice. I love comics that tell personal stories, not just jokes. 📚 Phoebe_Zeitgeist: “Standard Operating Equipment”, Archive of Our Own – A short fan fiction story, placed in the late, great Iain M.

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Some things I believe might happen in the next few years, in response to the utterly insane 2024 US election that went to Trump. I just want to get this shit out of my head onto another canvas so it doesn’t circle around in my brain the entire time. I need to function, and that ever-present feeling of doom and dread doesn’t help. Preface: These are just the high-level thoughts my brain spit out.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. I was surprised myself, but I spent several hours watching outsidexbox’s videos and live streams on Youtube. Just what the doctor ordered: A great team of adults with good chemistry, playing games I don’t want to play but enjoy watching, bantering. Entertaining. 🎥 Tenet (2020) — Late to the party as usual, but I’ve enjoyed that weird-ass movie quite a bit.

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TIL that when you use the venerable keyboard customizer Karabiner Elements on macOS, Karabiner will emit a USB device key signal for the fn/🌐 key. This is great because I can now tell Keyboard Maestro (and likely BetterTouchTool, too) to use a fn press as a macro trigger! For example, this is how it looks when I configured ⌘fn as such a trigger: Useful!

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. Busy times, so I kind of forgot about this list, so I’m trying to reconstruct it from memory. Which, incidentally, is a good yard stick! If I can remember it, it obviously was “noteworthy”, right? That’s just science, people. 🎥 The Fall Guy (2024) – Loved it. The whole movie just worked for me.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. In May, we were on vacation in Sweden in celebration of our respective birthdays, and I still am/was working a lot on my new macOS app, UI Actions. (Which is coming along quite nicely, thank you!) Redwood Material’s Nevada EV Battery Recycling Facility Attempts to Rival China - Bloomberg (Archive) – Recycling FTW.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. Not much, this time; I am/was working a lot, new macOS app and all. Late Night with Seth Meyers on YouTube – Love it. When he talks about “jackals”, I feel wholly included, which either tells you everything you need to know about my sense of humor, or nothing at all. 🎤 “Live (At the Time)” by Demetri Martin – I had a blast listening to this stand-up special, but it’s a different form than what I’m used to.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. A bit late, as usual, so … not really late. 📚 “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke – A classic scifi work, new to me. Enjoyable, and painted in broad-enough strokes to not feel super-old. I love reading these really old foundational works and then discovering their clear influences in other novels, movies, stories that came later.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. It was a busy month, and I didn’t have much time for reading a book or playing some games. It happens. March is going better already. 😉 🎙️ “Socio” by Daniel Sloss – Funny stand up special by a funny Scotsman, a bit crass at times, enjoyable. I liked his earlier specials a bit more; I think it has something to do with him not being as professionally self-assured as he is now, if that makes any sense.

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. 📺 For All Mankind: Season 3 – They don’t let up! The farther the show goes into speculative territory, the broader it gets. And it felt a bit rushed at times. High points: everything on Mars, even if the timing and logistics of the North Korean capsule don’t make sense to me (did they travel from Earth to Mars in that bucket?

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A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. 📺 Star Trek: Discovery: Season 2 — Hoo boy, that was way, way too much. Everything was on fire, all the time, all at once, everything was at stake yadda yadda yadda. I think if it had 5-10 story arcs less the season would’ve been better. I’ve realized once again that Disco is not made for me, and that’s okay.

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Inspired by Assaf and Maique. 📨 Mail Client: Fastmate 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail (since 2013!) 📆 Calendar: Fastmail via Fantastical 📁 Cloud File Storage: Fastmail, iCloud Drive, and Hetzner Storage Box 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Fastmail via Cardhop 📝 Notes: Obsidian ✅ To-Do: Obsidian, Linear 🔖 Bookmarks: Obsidian 📖 RSS: Feedbin 📑 Read It Later: Feedbin 🌐 Browser: Brave (macOS/iOS) 💬 Chat: Telegram, Signal, Messages, Slack 🛒 Shopping Lists: Apple Reminders 🎤 Podcasts: Pocketcasts

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This day in 2021 was the first day of my 3-month burnout sabbatical. I had been increasingly overworked for 2-3 years at this point, we were building a sensible and sustainable company, I was way too stressed all the time, and was struggling so. fukken. hard. Still, I kept pushing through, but I felt like I was a week away from going Hindenburg 1937. Then, that Friday evening, my good friend and co-founder Florian showed up unannounced at our doorstep, and told me, “Buddy, you’re toast.

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Actions for Obsidian v1.1 for iOS is finally here! Many thanks to all the testers who sent in bug reports and feedback over the last months! 🙏🏼 Hey — if you're as elated right now as I am and have a Product Hunt account, why not upvote the launch on Product Hunt? 😎 TIA! How much does Actions for Obsidian cost? Short answer: Just like the macOS app, the iOS app is free to download from the App Store.

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One of my biggest small wins this month: learning how the macOS security CLI tool works. It can store and retrieve Keychain entries: 1️⃣ security add-generic-password -a czottmann -s "My secret API key" -w asks for the PW and stores it. 2️⃣ security find-generic-password -a czottmann -s "My secret API key" -w retrieves and outputs it. Super useful: if you store a password like this, security automatically whitelists itself for password-less access to that particular password, meaning it’s trivial to fetch passwords from the Keychain in scripts.

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Every now and then I record an audio file for a tutorial or some such. I always do it in the same place, with the same equipment. And then I have to clean it up using VST/AU plug-ins in a DAW (digital audio workstation). Today I learned how to automate this process using REAPER, a very nice, very scriptable, very powerful DAW. Because TIL that Reaper comes with a CLI!

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In the last month, a few TestFlight pre-release builds happened. I’ve documented all 38 Shortcuts actions in the new Actions Library (part of the brand-new Knowledge Base!). I’ve implemented the payment and licensing! Then there were a few rounds of the fabled App Store review process! Very exciting. Oh, and also …  It’s Launch Day on macOS! 🚀 Actions for Obsidian v1.0 is finally here! Get it from the Mac App Store or read on to learn more.

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What I came to understand a few years ago: when it comes to writing software, I love creating “visible plumbing”. Let me explain. When I talk about software development, I use the term “plumbing” to describe backend systems, all the usually invisible infrastructure stuff that makes things work. Sexy headline stuff? No. Important? Absolutely. “Visible plumbing” is the stuff that helps people achieve their goals and do their jobs, like personal automation.

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