One evening after the event, as they were walking down O’Keefe Avenue looking for dinner, Steve—a notoriously fast walker—pulled to a halt. Someone in a store window was working on a Macintosh.
He had to take a closer look. How was this person using the Mac? Steve is so curious, so lasered in on trying to understand, that he is bent nearly double.
[…]
This is Steve at a pivotal moment. He’s about to turn 29. Apple, which he co-founded and chairs, has recently become one of the youngest companies ever to reach the Fortune 500. The Macintosh has been met with rave reviews. He is on top of the world.
I’m about to turn 29 myself, and though our trajectories are wildly different, I, too, know the keen excitement of seeing someone use, read, or experience something that you’ve poured yourself into. There’s nothing quite like it, and I hope Steve was proud to discover his creation in the hands of a customer that night.
The rest of my day was a bit of a mess. I didn’t feel creative, competent or clever. I mostly just floundered around for a few hours trying to fix bits and pieces but didn’t accomplish much. Largely, just feeling sorry for myself.
[…]
If I try to take a step back and be thoughtful about why I might feel like that today I think it is because I didn’t wisely match my choice of task to my physical state. I didn’t sleep well last night and think that put me at a disadvantage when I started working. Then by tackling one of the most challenging and frustrating things in programming (fighting the frameworks), I was setting myself up for disaster. From there it was just a progressive digging myself into a deeper hole productivity-wise. The smart thing likely would have been to recognize where I was cognitively/emotionally and then go after easier, quick win tasks today instead.
David professes so plainly what is monstrously difficult to do: listen to yourself.
For the first time in many years, I didn’t install any beta software on my devices. Rather than live on the cutting edge, testing features, and trying the new hotness before the rest of the world, I stayed on the on the public releases of Apple’s OSes last summer.
As if that wasn’t odd enough, when September rolled around, I felt very little desire to upgrade my phone to the latest and greatest. Indeed, I’m typing this very post out on my iPhone 13 mini — a device I’ve had for nearly a year and a half now — despite having the option to swap it as part of the iPhone Upgrade Program.
I don’t deceive myself into thinking that this is any sort of accomplishment. Sitting out a few months of beta testing, and holding onto a perfectly great phone for — swoon — more than 12 months is something that effectively everyone does. It’s truly a privilege that I have the opportunity upgrade each year if I choose to.
And yet, it’s been a bit odd. I’m used to jumping at the chance to try the new OS features, write about them, and provide feedback. But this year I felt satisfied to read others’ first impressions while living in the stable mainstream. I sought the delayed satisfaction of “unwrapping” the new software along with the rest of the world when it was “finished”.
Back on the physical side, my iPhone 13 mini has been my favorite iPhone, full stop. I longed for a smaller device when using the 12 Pro, and was rewarded with the nearly perfect 13 mini. The longer battery life, upgraded cameras, smaller notch, faster chip, and cooler design (👍 to the diagonal rear camera lenses) are all improvements over the 12 mini that make me glad that this is the phone I have and want to keep using.
This isn’t to say that I wasn’t interested in new features this year; I was! Stage Manager, Lock Screen widgets, Live Text, better Dictation, and the Dynamic Island all pulled at my heartstrings. But with my day job no longer relying on using my personal tech, or teaching others how to use theirs, I have less time and mental capacity for tech news, no matter how much I try to deny it. These days, I’m experiencing how more of the world uses their gadgets and finding the smaller, less drastic ways that they can make my life better. I’m not pushing the envelope so much as I’m using it as intended.
Maybe it’ll last, or maybe I’ll be enthralled by a compelling new shiney that will drag me back in. But I’m content for now, and hope my “content”1 will still offer good, if different, insight.
The weird and wonderful AI projects are start to come fast and furious. Spotify got a mic drop moment today announcing a personal AIDJ. It’s a product I feel like I should have predicted, but also find completely shocking. Here’s how Spotify describes it:
Ready for a brand-new way to listen on Spotify and connect even more deeply with the artists you love? The DJ is a personalized AI guide that knows you and your music taste so well that it can choose what to play for you. This feature, first rolling out in beta, will deliver a curated lineup of music alongside commentary around the tracks and artists we think you’ll like in a stunningly realistic voice.
Watch the video below for a taste of what the AIDJ experience will be like. Personally, my first impression is that I’m blown away. Spotify has long worn the crown for music recommendation, and it looks like DJ will provide more insight into why certain music is served up. That’s always something I’m curious about, wondering, “Why this song?” What a useful idea to use the AI to “explain itself”.
However, I think it was intentional that the listener in Spotify’s video was wearing headphones. I see this a solo way to experience music. To me, music is deeply personal and emotional. I can’t imagine I’d love “X”, the DJ, sharing commentary about my listening history with others at house party or on a road trip.
Paul Graham, with some striking thoughts on how writing focuses, refines, develops, and communicates ideas better than most anything:
Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that’s why I write them.
[…]
I can to some extent write essays in my head. I’ll sometimes think of a paragraph while walking or lying in bed that survives nearly unchanged in the final version. But really I’m writing when I do this. I’m doing the mental part of writing; my fingers just aren’t moving as I do it.
[…]
The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
[…]
Putting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they’ll be right. Far from it. But though it’s not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one.
My remaining grandfather passed away this past week. He was a foundational figure in my life, a role model who stuck to his values and principles. He loved his wife fiercely, and never, ever stopped caring for her, even as his own health declined. I’ll always remember Grandpa’s mischievous grin, which appeared when he got away with a joke that you didn’t expect from his typically serious demeanor. I like to think we share many things in common, the least of which are our unusual middle name and our inability to blow our nose without sounding like a blaring horn. I’ll miss him.
Here are just a few life lessons I gleaned from his 91 years of voracious life.
1️⃣ To balance goofy and serious like a master.
2️⃣ To put your partner and family first.
3️⃣ Work hard, play hard.
4️⃣ It’s okay to enjoy the things that you enjoy.
5️⃣ Given the opportunity, people will rise to meet your expectations.
6️⃣ Independence is a thing to be cherished. But it doesn’t last forever, and it doesn’t do to resist help when those who care offer it.
7️⃣ Going fast in a boat brings a smile to anyone’s face.
They say you learn something new every day. But it’s not every day that you newly learn an old thing. Or rather that a thing you learned as child, and have done every day since, well, you’ve been doing that thing wrong.
Yes, I recently learned that I’ve been tying my shoes wrong for over 20 years.
You know, I’ve always had a nagging feeling that other people’s shoes looked neater and stayed tied better than mine. I’ve actually been double-knotting my shoes every time to avoid their inevitable loosening. But I convinced myself, “You’re a Boy Scout, you know knots,” and kept on keeping on. Then, at the age of 28, when watching a YouTube video1 about alternative ways to lace boots to avoid hot spots, I heard the sentence that split my life into Before and After: “If you wrap the loop the opposite way, your knot will be cockeyed and not hold tight.”
For anyone else out there who thinks their shoe lacing method might also be wrong, here’s was my old process:
Cross one strand around the other, and pull tight.
Make a loop (actually called a bight) with the lefthand strand.
Cross the righthand strand under and around the loop.
Push a loop/bight through the loop created between the two strands.
Pull both loops to tighten the knot.
Tie the two loops in an overhand knot to double it.
Can you see my fatal flaw? It turns out that by going over and around the loop with the righthand strand instead will get the knot to sit perpendicular to the shoe, rather than the awkward parallel nonsense that I’d been doing for two decades. It had never occurred to me to try a different method.
If there’s a profound takeaway to be extracted here, it’s this: It sure is easy to get stuck in our ways of doing things and then never reconsider them. But I wanted to share how, even the simplest bit of knowledge that I took for granted — like how to tie my shoes — could be reevaluated and improved. Even for someone who literally ties life-preserving knots for a living. It’s always good to keep an open mind.
I regret to admit that I can’t find the life-changing video to share. Trust me, I’ve tried.↩︎
I’ll be honest, I stopped reading the version 8.10.0 update release notes after getting to the second line and started to write this post because it addressed my one real gripe with the redesign of 1Password:
The release notes are long, and after going back to read the rest of them, I’m impressed at how much AgileBits has fixed and improved in this “minor” release. 1Password continues to be the only password manager I recommend to folks if they’re not getting what they need out of iCloud Keychain, or other built-in password management features.
Following its history-making, back-to-back Emmy Award wins for its freshman and sophomore seasons, Apple TV+ today revealed that season three of its global phenomenon “Ted Lasso,” will premiere around the world with the first episode on Wednesday, March 15, followed by new episodes weekly, every Wednesday. Moving to its new weekly Wednesday premiere, “Ted Lasso” marks the first Apple TV+ series to launch midweek.
First of all, 🥳⚽️🟦🤩!
Second, I’m glad to see Apple try a new premiere night. Fridays are really full already, and it makes it more difficult to choose what to watch. I mean, I would have chosen to watch Ted Lasso first anyway, but now TV+ can own my Wednesday night watching for a while and I’ll still check out what’s new on Fridays.
Thirdly, I notice that the press release didn’t mention anything about this season being the series finale, as it did with Servant. Could mean nothing, but I’m choosing to be optimistic that Apple, Jason Sudeikis, and Co. are leaving the door open for more in the Ted Lasso universe.
TL;DR: You can now subscribe to HeyDingus posts by email to receive my blog posts in your inbox. I’m using Feedrabbit, and you can subscribe right here.
Tired: Getting emails via RSS.
Wired: Getting RSS via email.
Since starting HeyDingus, I’ve wanted folks to have the option to subscribe to my blog posts via email. Personally, I think RSS is the best way to keep up with a website’s updates, but not everyone is down to finding a feed reader or even knows what RSS is. Especially after considering blog posts as emails to the internet, it seemed appropriate that people should be able to receive my writing through that medium.
The bummer is that neither Squarespace nor Blot offers email delivery as a “free” feature. When I put the question to the Blot forum, I got recommendations for Buttondown. I’ve explored their newsletter platform before and both it looks great and features an RSS slurping mechanism to make it dead simple to get your content in without having to copy and paste or recreate it.
That all looked promising, and I might consider Buttondown more seriously if I decide to supplement HeyDingus with a premium newsletter. But for now, I didn’t think that adding another full-blown host for my writing was a complexity that I wanted to take on. And their free plan only allows for 100 subscribers. I don’t know how popular getting blog posts as emails will be, but I didn’t want to have to start paying for additional subscribers if it took off. Luckily, I found a free tool that requires no extra effort on my end.
Feedrabbit does exactly what I wanted. Give it an RSS feed plus your email address, and you’ll start getting every new entry as an email. It’s a consumer product, so all of the power is in each user’s hands. I have nothing to manage on my end. I can’t adjust formatting, nor the speed of delivery, and — like RSS — I have no idea of who or how many people subscribe using Feedrabbit. And their basic plan is completely free for everyone.
If Blot adds a native email subscription feature, I’ll probably switch to that. But until then, I’ll point readers to Feedrabbit if they want an email delivery option. And even if/when I do switch, Feedrabbit should continue to work for anyone subscribed in that way.
(For other bloggers, you can make it easy for readers to subscribe by entering your RSS feed into Feedrabbit’s search box, hitting ‘Subscribe’, and then copying and using the resulting URL which will point to your feed. Then readers only have to enter their email address to subscribe to your site. They won’t have to root around for your RSS feed.)
No extra work, no extra hassle. If you’ve wanted to have my writing (or any other site with an RSS feed) delivered straight to you by email, I recommend giving Feedrabbit a shot.
P.S. Blockquote formatted text gets rendered a little funny in Spark, but looks better (though not perfect) in Apple Mail. I sent feedback about it along to Feedrabbit, but you’re welcome to also let them know if you want.
P.P.S. I fed this article to ChatGPT and asked it to summarize it:
The author of the HeyDingus blog wanted to offer email subscriptions to their posts, but their website platforms didn’t have this feature. They received recommendations to use Buttondown, a newsletter platform, but it was not ideal due to its pricing and complexity. Instead, they found Feedrabbit, a free tool that delivers new blog entries to subscribers via email using RSS feeds. The author recommends it to other bloggers as a hassle-free way to offer email subscriptions to readers.
👍👍
P.P.P.S. I should have mentioned that you can find the email subscription link in the footer of any page on this site:
