What caught my attention in week twelve, 2023

In continuation to week eleven, here are a few things that caught my attention in week twelve, 2023:

• 🦴 I experienced some kind of spinal disc issue while standing in the kitchen at some point towards the end of last week. It was very painful, I found it very difficult to walk and sit for several days and I felt like I was moving through life as a snail all week. However, it is slowly getting better. Should have bought a family pack of Voltaren though. My mood has of course suffered and I could again not really cycle regularly.
• 📺 Finished Shrinking - what a great show - and watched the first two episodes of Ted Lasso S3 with my family. We had much fun with it so far.
• 🤖 AI is not really new. ChatGPT has been around for months, but this week it felt there was even more news than before. I watched a video about Midjourney V5 prompt generation with GPT-4 and have taken notice that Google opened up access to Bard AI, Microsoft's AI-powered bing gained image creation functionality, and Adobe plays along with Firefly. IFTTT added AI stuff, however, I have not yet understood what this is useful for. Raycast's AI features are in beta, and there is a youtube video from @matt about it. Notion has AI support and there is a lot going on for Obsidian. In addition, there were several updates to MacGPT, which I use on my Mac. BTW it finally (I hear you @gruber) features an auto-updater. DuckDuckGo now has Duckassist, that summarizes Wikipedia articles. This sounds much more useful, than asking ChatGPT or Bard, Sydney / Bing a question and just receiving well written bullshit in return. So far, all these services definitely do not serve as fact suppliers. But maybe it will get better with such approaches as the integration of Wolfram Alpha. At the moment, Bard can't even count to 9. Last but not least I've tested Shortify - Summarize Anything. The app does exactly what it is named after. You can test it a few times for free, before you have to buy new passes.
• 💻 A consistent theme this week for me has been that I have once again questioned programs and workflows that I have been using for a long time.
  • I am a happy Soulver user but Numi might be an appealing and free alternative.
  • I use Reeder for RSS and Read Later purposes now for several years. I was with it since day one. I tried other programs every now and then for a short time, e.g. the native client of Feedly, of course NetNewsWire and many others. I have now started a 30-day trial period of Readwise / Reader. It's not cheap (luckily I could probably get an Academia discount), but basically I like the service so far. I have actually used their GPT summarizer a number of times, I also like their text to speech feature, and the ability to import Apple Books highlights is actually helpful for me personally, since Apple has unfortunately extremely limited export recently. (Many thanks at this point probably to the publishers.) After a week, however, I don't yet see that I'll be moving my RSS feeds permanently and I don't know if it's worth the money to me just for a Read Later service.
  • As if that wasn't enough, I also installed the new Testflight beta of Fiery Feeds. I can already see where this is going. But at least I can use Reeder as my only app for the next few years with confidence then 🤣.
  • I looked into Magnet – Window manager for Mac and Lasso but will stick to Moom.
  • If I weren't an avid YNAB user, and was looking for a much simpler approach, I might look into Pockity.
• 💻 Thanks to maique I stumbled across this nice list of macOS Apps (most of them under $20) in the show notes of the Mac Power Users #684: podcast. Out of them I personally already use AirBuddy, Moom, Tot, KeyboardCleanTool, Marked 2, EjectBar, Name Mangler, Menuwhere, Downie, Tembo 2, ImageOptim, HazeOver, Acorn 7, Scapple, CleanShot X, Retrobatch, Bike Outliner, Piezo, Bartender 4, and PCalc. Lots of them are available via Setapp as well!
• 💻 Stumbled upon Mackup, that back ups your application settings in a safe directory (e.g. Dropbox), syncs your application settings among all your workstations and restores your configuration on any fresh install in one command line. It's available via homebrew.
• 💻 Another free app that was updated recently was The Mac Library, "the app library Apple should have made for your Mac".
• 💻 Signal Shifter (homepage)

  Signal Shifter is a small and free macOS Menu Bar App that lists all your input, output, and Bluetooth audio devices in one place. It allows for easy toggling between different devices, including enabling or disabling Bluetooth devices.

• 💻 AudioSwitcher seems to play in the same ballpark.
• 🔗 Hookmark, an app I find indispensable in the meantime, now supports Keyboard Maestro, and Bookends deep PDF linking!
• 🖼️ The Iconfactory released their Wallpaper App Wallaroo for the Mac, too. Still not convinced, one new wallpaper a week is worth $ 2,50 / month for me but I subscribed anyway. Will see ... BTW there is one with a cute little elephant available for free somewhere else.
• 🛑 I read this toot and deleted Brave. Maybe I'll use Arc a little bit more now. But Safari is for sure still my number one browser.
• ㊙️ Learned about the best-kept retro-mac secret.
• 💖 There is now a great omg.lol CLI client. And adam obviously does not sleep but made progress on Terminal Land instead.
• 📱 Some new Testflight builds to check out: Zenitizer, Fedigardens, Bear 2.0, and Drafts.
  • Checked Please Don't Rain but this is definitely not for me, nor is Mineral (@mineral, testflight).
• 📱 I play far too few board games, unfortunately, but next time I'll definitely have Skores: Game Night Leaderboard on the App Store ready.
• 📱 Caset - Playlist Collaboration looks interesting, but I don't have any friends, and therefore, unfortunately no use for it.
• 📸 Hipstamatic is back! Definitely not worth $5 / month for me. It features a gorgeous design and I find it interesting that it supports app clips. A few weeks ago, I had once wondered if this was supported by anyone at all, or if it was an absolute pipe-drop. So far, I had only come across one other app that uses this: Lysten Podcast Player.
• 🐘 Woolly was released but yeah, I happily pay for Ivory and next to Mona (beta) and Ice Cubes I don't need another Mastodon client. I feel a little bit sorry for the developer of this nice app.
  • Apropos Mona, as usual there is a lots of theming going on, now even with automatic theme shuffling via Shortcuts
• 📺 CouchPal 2.0 is out in the App Store. I was on the beta and I really like this TV and Movies tracker. I was evaluating a few of them lately and this is one that stuck so far.

  It includes check in and see the watched progress in the Dynamic Island and Lock Screen, updated profile screen, Watch Now screen, and unified History screen.

• 🎮 Got Metroid Prime Remastered as a birthday present from my sons. (Crazy times, that I get something like that and anything at all.) I did play the original, but the game got very good reviews and I was actually very happy. I now play such games on difficulty light, in the past I would have been ashamed of it. You can tell that this is indeed a remaster. No auto-safe, no fast travel and lots of A to B to C and back to A, then C running. I already don't know what to do in the second level, after 2% of the game. But I am sure, that it will be with me for a bit. Another reason not to buy a PS5, which I really do not need and would no longer take advantage of but I somehow really desire.
• 🚗 Sorry guys, but as a cyclist and father I'm definitely on the SUV-are-extreme-shit front.
• 🐛 Over 15 years ago, we once caught bed bugs on an overnight train ride. Very bad months followed after that. I still have nightmares sometimes and I don't know why I watched this video. 😱
• 🚁 This video on Zipline was much more fun to watch.
• 🍳 Podcasts: Hello Playdate Podcast: Episode 27 - Post Hero + Catalog, Hello Playdate Podcast: Interview 02 - Nick F, ATP: Food Comes From Cans, Launched: 58: Tripsy - Rafael K. Streit, Upgrade: 451: I’ve Come Around to Reality, Hemispheric Views: 080: Hemispheric Yolks!¹, Accidental Tech Podcast: 527: The True Siri Experience, Really Specific Stories: Jason Snell

1. loved that yolk discussion 🤣↩︎