A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays.* Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ The Libby app is a true joy, and I’m always glad to see people, like Victoria Song here, discover that they can read just about any book legally, for free.[Link - Victoria Song // theverge.com]

2️⃣ BasicAppleGuy voices my own frustrations with Apple’s new ad initiative:

And when I constantly have to dismiss and scroll past ads to get to the content I want, you know what I do? I stop using it. And I stop using it because I no longer feel like I’m in a valued relationship with the company. Instead, I feel like a means to an end, a set of eyeballs that can be squeezed for an extra nickel of ad revenue each month.

[Link - BasicAppleGuy // basicappleguy.com]

3️⃣ Would you believe that the Oregon Trail was being first travelled at the same time that the first faxes were sent? Me neither. And there’s many more mind-blowing facts here. [Link - Jason Kottke // kottke.org]

4️⃣ These AI generated profile pictures are truly impressive. And also true horrors. [Link - Stephen Hackett // 512pixels.net]

5️⃣ From Apple’s reorganization announcement that also marked Scott Forstall’s impending departure from Apple:

Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include the semiconductor teams, who have ambitious plans for the future.

They weren’t kidding!

[Link - Apple Newsroom // apple.com]

6️⃣ I’ll plug Apple News Today as a news source that I’ve found really valuable over the past few years. Short, to the point, fair, and with great interviews. It’s been especially on-point with recent election coverage. 7-10 minutes every weekday morning. [Link - Apple News Today // pods.link]

7️⃣ Seth Avett (of the Avett Brothers) has a new solo album out. It’s the just the right calming, centered music I needed this week. [Link - Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown // album.link]

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Trust Click

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*I was extra busy this weekend climbing down at the Red River Gorge, and couldn’t get the issue out. And then was extra busy catching up with life after getting back. So here are an extra 7 Things (which are some of the routes I lead climbed in the Red) This Week:

1️⃣ Caver’s Route (5.4, 4 pitches)

2️⃣ Vision (5.7)

3️⃣ Edge-a-Sketch (5.11b)

4️⃣ Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’ (5.10d)

5️⃣ Glory and Consequence (5.7+)

6️⃣ Moots Madness (5.10a)

7️⃣ Bedtime for Bonzo (5.6, 2 pitches)

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know.

7 Things

A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ You may have heard about Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, giving away the company to help fight climate change. This NYT article does a great job explaining the deft way the deal went down to both protect Patagonia’s future, but also ensure that any profits it makes go directly into conservation efforts — all without tax benefit to the Chouinard family. [Link - David Gelles // nytimes.com]

2️⃣ Some guys I knew back in college have a band called Paddlebots and they released their second album called Working Backwards. It’s smooth, jazzy, a little trance-y, and a fun listen. [Link - Paddlebots // album.link]

3️⃣ I can’t tell if this tweet by my buddy Taylor is a bit, but either way, it’s hilarious. [Link - @TDesOrmeau // twitter.com]

4️⃣ I swear this video of a wild gymnastics routine is far scarier than most rock climbing videos. [Link - @fasc1nate // twitter.com]

5️⃣ The folks behind iA Writer (my favorite text editor) are putting effort into creating a presentation-maker that takes text files and turns them into beautiful slides and includes a built-in teleprompter feature. I think it’s a cool idea, and if I needed to make a presentation, I’d give it a shot. [Link - iA Inc. // youtube.com]

6️⃣ Just today, I learned that Mountain Project (the popular online catalog of rock climbing routes all over the world) has a Partner Finder feature to help hook you up with a climbing partner in your area. You can specify a climbing style and difficulty skill level to complement your own, and they’ll try to find someone to match. It seems very helpful for people climbing in a new area and seems reputable coming from Mountain Project, which is a ubiquitous tool among climbers. [Link - Partner Finder // mountainproject.com]

7️⃣ Another awesome tool that I used this week is Mountain-Forecast.com, which, as you can imagine, gets you detailed forecasts for mountain peaks around the world. Since alpine weather can be so drastically different than the lowland towns around the peaks, I’ve started checking it before any trip. The wind forecasts alone are worth their weight in gold. [Link - mountain-forecast.com]

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Thanks for reading 7 Things! If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know!

7 Things

I just discovered wall.blot.im, which appears to be a web app for writing out blog posts for Blot via the web. All it takes is a browser and a connection to your Dropbox account. After logging in to Dropbox, the page lets you type out a new post, export it, or publish it directly.

It’s hard to imagine a time these days where I would need to write on a device that wasn’t mine, but it could happen. It’s a good tool to have on the belt. The real question, though, is how I’d remember my Dropbox password without a personal device. And if I have the personal device to look up my password…I may as well write in one of my preferred apps? Like I said, probably not a critical find, but I’m glad to know it exist, nonetheless.

UPDATE: It’s not ideal, since any YAML front matter gets published as literal text, but still useful in a pinch, I suppose. And the post gets synced back to the Dropbox account, ready to be edited in any of the usual ways. For example, this very update was edited within the Dropbox app itself on my iPhone.

Blogging

Juli Clover, reporting at MacRumors:

Apple today introduced an overhauled design for the iCloud.com website, which is available in a beta capacity on Apple’s test site, beta.icloud.com.

Great to see more fun and functionality come to the site. Even on an iPhone, where many features have historically been limited.

It looks like Apple is expanding what can be found through the webpage, like HomeKit Secure Video, Private Relay, and Data Recovery.

John Voorhees has an in-depth look at the new beta site over at MacStories.

Go to the linked sites:

• Juli Clover // macrumors.com →
• John Voorhees // macstories.net →

Linked

Tab Groups were introduced last year to Safari¹ in the iOS/iPadOS 15 and macOS 12 releases, but it’s only just now dawned upon me the extent to which that feature has crept into my life. If you’re not familiar with Tab Groups, they’re basically collections of tabs that stay in whatever state you last left them regardless of if you close your browser window or switch to another group. You can have many different Tab Groups, and the group takes over the browser window when you switch to one. Even better, the groups sync across devices — so I can open a Tab Group on my iPad, add a new tab to it there, and then it’ll be waiting for me on my Mac or iPhone later.

That’s the concept, and in practice, it’s been working great for how I like to browse the web. You see, I’m a tab closer. When I’m done with the site — be it a restaurant webpage, an online article, or a shopping site — I banish it. I can’t stand to leave dozens of tabs open when they’re no longer in active use. But…sometimes I’m working on something that needs a tab, or tabs, open for days or weeks at a time. In the past, that meant going against my natural grain and leaving a breadcrumb trail of tabs without any context of what they were for. The best I could do was drag the relevant tabs next to each other. Tab Groups have rescued me from that tab-glutenous hell and helped me to be more productive.

Project Groups

I’ve been using Tab Groups mainly for ongoing projects, or to save pages that I want to view specifically in Safari as opposed to a read-later or to-do app. For example, the Tab Group I’ve been coming back to most often is titled ‘Blot Migration’. It holds my Squarespace admin page, Blot backend pages, an FAQ, and my new Blot site. Whenever I sat down to move a few more posts or tweak the site’s code, I switched over to that Tab Group, and everything’s right where I left off. There are no miscellaneous tabs lurking around to distract me. It’s a clean workspace, like switching to a purpose-built Focus mode on my phone. (Which, incidentally, Focus modes and Tab Groups do play nicely with Focus Filters in iOS 16.)

Some other Tab Groups that I’ve been using include a House group for home listings that my wife sends me. I load them into that group and then close the ones that don’t appeal to me. Then when she asks what I think, I can just pull up that group and know they’ve been curated to potential winners. I also have a Reading group for long-form articles that have special formatting that looks best on a native webpage (like Federico Viticci’s iOS reviews for MacStories). My Shopping group is useful for comparing items that I’m actively researching to purchase. (Otherwise, bookmarks to potential purchases get saved to Raindrop.io.) And when I was going through all the rigamarole necessary to apply and test for my New York State guiding license, keeping all of the obscure government webpages, study guides, and regulations together made it easy to get back into the thick of it when the Department of Environmental Conservation finally deigned a return call or email.

All in all, I’m up to nine Tab Groups that house various projects I’ve got in various positions from front to back burners. They don’t take up mindshare like a huge line of tabs used to, and I’m less likely to close a tab by mistake. When a Tab Group is no longer needed, it’s a very deliberate right-click and delete to close everything out.

Give Groups a Go!

If you haven’t yet tried out Tab Groups, there’s no time like the present. They’ve gotten better integrations with the latest Apple OS releases, like the aforementioned link to Focus modes, new Shortcuts actions, and collaboration support to share and manipulate tabs live with others. I think shared tabs will be perfect for collaborating on that House group with my wife.

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1. By the way, I saw an update splash screen in Google Chrome on a work PC a few days ago that mentioned Tab Groups. I haven’t looked into it, but I imagine the Chrome version works similarly to what I’ve described here for Safari.↩︎

Apps

David Pierce, writing about Google’s latest messaging platform fiasco for The Verge earlier this summer:

As the two services become one, Google is leaning on Duo’s mobile app as the default. Pretty soon, the Duo app will get an update that brings an onslaught of Meet features into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet app will be called “Meet Original,” and eventually deprecated.

Fool me once…

Let’s check in on how that merger is going. Here’s Chris Welch, also writing at The Verge, just a couple of months later:

But apparently, not all customers have been happy with Duo’s sudden identity change. With the latest update to the Meet app for Android, Google has brought back the original Duo icon and name as a separate shortcut that appears in the app launcher. Tapping on Duo opens Google Meet. So you’ve now got two ways of accessing the same application.

I wish Google the best of luck, and a strong will to actually see a vision through.

Go to the linked site (David Pierce // theverge.com) →

Linked

Eric Slivka, writing for MacRumors:

As an example, Best Buy cites a base M1 MacBook Air priced at $999.99. Through the Upgrade+ program, a customer can pay $19.99 per month for 36 months toward the machine. At the end of 36 months, the user has the option to make the remaining $280.35 payment and keep the machine, return the machine and leave the program, or upgrade to a new Mac laptop. If they return the machine, either to leave the program or upgrade to a new Mac, no final payment is required. 

Wow! You can use a Mac for three full years, and then return it having paid less than the retail price (or re-up and get a brand new laptop). I suppose that’s how almost all leases work, but this strikes me as a particularly good deal for folks who are already on a regular upgrade cycle. Kudos to Best Buy for beating Apple to a non-iPhone hardware upgrade program, but, with everything they’re doing in the finance space these days, my gut says we’ll see a first-party version from Apple soon enough.

Go to the linked site (Eric Slivka // macrumors.com) →

Linked

Jason Fried:

They ask me to rate my “experience”. Thing is, I didn’t have an experience. The delivery person just left the package by the mailbox and I grabbed it when I got home. And what does it mean to even rate a delivery like this? It showed up, it was correct… Is that a 5-star experience? Would it only be worth 3 stars if the package was lying on the ground instead of propped up against the wall? There isn’t enough there there to even establish a value.

If you’re going to ask anything, a more apt question might be “Did the correct prescription show up on time?” Then I can answer yes or no. But rate the experience? And every time I get a prescription, it’s the same question about the experience.

He’s right. I’d be way more likely to tap a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ link if you ask me a single, simple question. And then, if I answer “no”, you’re welcome to follow up with more questions. But just ask what you actually want to know, and make it easy.

Go to the linked site ( Jason Fried // world.hey.com) →

Linked

A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ Cards Against Humanity is back on their shit. [Link - clams.lol]

2️⃣ Amy Pechacek surfaced 20 super cool websites that you should tuck away into your back pocket. Some of them I knew about, but others blew my mind. My favorite is doesthedogdie.com. [Link - @pechacek_amy // twitter.com]

3️⃣ Other people are talking about a different album this week, but I was more excited to discover that dodie dropped a great new EP recently. It was sneaky; I hadn’t known it was coming up! [Link - dodie // album.link]

4️⃣ I’ve never known how the humidity settings on fridge veggies drawers were supposed to work, but this chart is helpful. [Link - Optimal Storage Conditions // engineeringtoolbox.com]

5️⃣ How is it that Nathan Fillion looks younger in his latest role starring in The Rookie than he did in Castle? The guy’s got a thing for police shows. Also, Nathan Fillion is a national treasure. [Link - The Rookie // imdb.com]

6️⃣ If you happen to be developing a website, this speed test tool from Pingdom is pretty neat. Oh, who left this performance grade of A/99 here? 😉 🙌 [Link - Website Speed Test // tools.pingdom.com]

7️⃣ I can’t believe I haven’t linked to this before, but the ‘BEATstrumentals’ playlist from Apple Music is my go-to while writing — or really any time that I need to focus. No lyrics, cyclic rhythms, and still being updated years after its debut. It’s what I’m listening to right now. [Link - BEATstrumentals // music.apple.com]

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Thanks for reading 7 Things! If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know!

7 Things

A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ HTML.

2️⃣ CSS.

3️⃣ ‘Open as Blot Page’ shortcut.

4️⃣ Inspect Element.

5️⃣ HeyDingus Archives.

6️⃣ URL Redirects.

7️⃣ Blot.im.

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Thanks for reading 7 Things! If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please hit me up on Twitter or send me an email!

7 Things