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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Japan pharma startup developing world-first drug to grow new teeth
Most people have “tooth buds” that have the potential to become a new tooth, in addition to baby and permanent teeth, although the buds usually do not develop and subsequently disappear.
The team created an antibody drug that inhibits the protein that suppresses the growth of teeth. The drug works on these buds and stimulates their growth.
Hey #Flensburg’er, ich hätte mal wieder Bock auf Kaffee oder Kaltgetränk mit Menschen, die ich noch nicht oder noch nicht so gut kenne. Nix Großes, halbe Stunde oder so, vielleicht beim Onoma oder Plan B oder gern auch irgendwo Richtung Mürwik.
Hat eine:r von Euch Interesse?
Slowly regaining some energy. I think I got a bit of a cold a few days ago, which went nicely with my existing general exhaustion. Took a few days off for the most part, even though that means I’ve to push the TestFlight for #BrowserActions back a few days.
My health is more important than my apps.
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, yes, and I was so proud about that. At the same time, I was way too stressed all the time, and was struggling so. fucking. hard. Still, I kept pushing through, day by day, but very often I felt like I was a week away from going Hindenburg 1937.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Beim letzten Besuch bei meinen Eltern erzählte mein Vater von einem Bekannten, der auch aus dem Harz weggezogen ist und seit über 20 Jahren in München lebt. Die Mutter, seine letzte Angehörige, hatte vor einiger Zeit das Elternhaus im Ort verkauft und war in ein nicht weit entferntes Dorf umgezogen. “Das muss ja seltsam sein, wenn man dann so heimatlos ist." Ummm. Ich finde nicht, dass er heimatlos ist. Für mich ist Heimat der Ort, an dem ich lebe und mit dem ich mich verbunden fühle, also mein Lebensmittelpunkt — daher ist für mich diese Aussage falsch.
Ich weiß nicht, wieviel Zeit ich noch habe. In den 5 Monaten, die wir jetzt in in Flensburg wohnen, hatte ich bereits einen Hexenschuss (in der ersten Woche! Verhoben beim Einzug) und COVID (inkl. einer harten Erkältung über Wochen hinweg), und die letzten zwei Wochen plagte mich auf der linken Seite ein sog. Tennisarm, der meine Zeit mit Schreiben und Programmieren durch Schmerzen hart verkürzte. Diese Probleme wurden am Schreibtisch verursacht durch die Verwendung einer ergonomischen Maus (!
Anfang Oktober wird in vielen Gegenden Erntedankfest gefeiert, und am morgigen Montag macht Canada den Auftakt mit Thanksgiving.1 Eigentlich ein schöner Brauch: Innehalten und einfach mal freuen, dass es läuft. Let’s do this, then. Wofür bin ich dieses Jahr dankbar? Wir haben eine trockene, saubere, schöne, adäquat große, wirklich bezahlbare Wohnung. Meine Ehe. ❤️ Wir können selbstbestimmt leben und unseren Wohnort frei und unabhängig wählen. Ich bin mit mir selbst ziemlich im Reinen und weiß, wer ich bin.
🚀 After a few weeks of foundational work I’m literally quite excited to finally lift the lid on my new app… It’s called Actions for Obsidian and adds, well, Obsidian actions to the Shortcuts app on macOS and iOS. If you want to better integrate your note taking with Obsidian and your other workflows, I think you’ll enjoy it. Check it out @ obsidian.actions.work. Actions for Obsidian Yes, it's just a promo image, the app is still very much a WIP at this point.
Zeit verfliegt, wenn man Spaß hat. Und im Moment habe ich viel Spaß: ich habe mehrere Plugins für eins meiner meistbenutzten Tools veröffentlicht, und arbeite an einer kommerziellen macOS/iOS-App, die auf einem davon aufbaut. Das wird sicher nicht die Welt verändern, aber hoffentlich weltweit vielen anderen Nutzern dieses Tools das Leben vereinfachen.🤞🏼 Die Tage bestehen also hauptsächlich aus Zeit am Schreibtisch, aus Grübelnd-aus-dem-Fenster-starren, aus stundenlangem Rumhacken auf der Tastatur und gelegentlichen zufriedenem Grunzen, wenn etwas nach Plan läuft.