What caught my attention in week twenty-two, 2023

In continuation to week twenty-one, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week twenty-two, 2023:

Centered, a single, beautiful, red poppy in a field.

🚶‍♂️ This week I somehow had a lot on my mind and only walked 22 km and only biked 100 km.
🏎 Andrew.mp3, //Jason, and Martin of the one and only Hemispheric Views podcast are running their "3rd annual Arcadia June, where the[ir] audience competes for renown and glory". You could win a free copy of ‎Arcadia: "‎Arcadia is a collection of 22 arcade games for Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV." And I was so lucky to win the game. 🥳 Now, I have to practise a lot I guess, especially because my first highscores were really not that promising. 🤣
📖 If I hadn't recently signed up for an annual subscription to Readwise (Reader)¹, I would definitely be using Omnivore. Its development really seems to be progressing by leaps and bounds.
🐘 Trunks for Mastodon is out of beta - but I'll for sure stick to Ivory and Mona - despite the terrible icons² - for now as my Mac and iOS clients.
🗺 Holger asked for an iOS app, which allows you to quickly and easily add updates to OSM. Michael suggested Every Door, which I will definitely have a look at. OSM is so cool, but so far it was always too complicated for me on the road to correct / update the data and back home I usually don't have the energy for it anymore. (Sometime once I took out a construction site that no longer existed for a long time and it's kind of magical when then all of a sudden a few days / weeks later the bike route planner start to avoid the supposedly not passable passages no longer).
📆 There is a another calendar app in town, calendar & planner – timing.is: this time it's personal. I've tested a very early beta a few month ago and should look into it again. I was looking for a some sort of integrated event and task planner that I could use occasionally together with Apple's calendar and reminders services anyway. I've received great suggestions but was not 100% happy with both of my chosen contenders.
- Sorted3: Sorted³ combines your tasks, calendar events and notes into a unified timeline so you can hyper-schedule your entire day in one place. You can assign a duration to at task and that is what I was looking for. This way you can visualise and plan your day and easily see where the tasks fit in your schedule. But it imports all your tasks (from a given reminders list) and completes them there. You have to deal with them in Sorted afterwards.
- Structured: Split your day into small tasks and get a visual timeline of your day. The UI looks quite playful, unfortunately it is also quite clumsy and a bit buggy. Tasks in Structured are synchronized with those from Reminders on demand. But you have to confirm this for every single action. Pretty annoying, in my opinion. Also, it's not really elegantly solved to integrate new tasks into existing free spaces. In addition, you can't easily see multiple days at once on either app on iOS.
🗺 I saw maiquie's impressive list of countries he visited so far and I felt like writing mine down as well. And it was interesting to see the lists of other people I follow on Mastodon / micro.blog:
- Alexandra,
- Andrew,
- Andyn,
- Michael,
- muhh,
- otaviocc.
📱 When I bought a new iPhone last year, I didn't order a case because in the past it had sometimes caused delivery delays on launch day. (Although I believe Apple now ships accessories separately, but I wanted to play it safe.) The day after delivery, I went directly to Hamburg for a conference. There, I realized that the iPhone 14 Pro absolutely does not want to be placed with the back facing down. The camera bump is just too big. So on Monday, I went to the Apple Store on Jungfernstieg. However, they didn't have any leather cases, which I always had before. So I ended up buying a silicone case. With that, I could lay the phone more or less flat, but it really annoyed me to put it in my pocket. The case is so "sticky" that it becomes a hassle every time, and I was afraid of dropping the phone when taking it out. Eventually, I started using the iPhone without a case again and considered Apple Care as my protection. However, after three-quarters of a year, I have countless small scratches on the display (since I usually lay the iPhone with the top side down) and some other flaws because it has naturally fallen once or twice. It's all a bit of a mess. That's why I ended up buying a leather case this week - and it's so much better!
📊 iA Presenter came out of beta. The next time I have to give a presentation away from a conference, I'll definitely take another look at this app. I had already played a bit with the beta and it's a refreshing, different approach. So far I've been using Deckset, which I still really like.
🤖 I looked into GPT4All: a free-to-use, locally running, privacy-aware chatbot. No GPU or internet connection is required. It runs locally on my M1 MacBook Pro, although it crashes occasionally, the gpt4all-113b-snoozy LLM sometimes provides reasonable answers. It doesn't appear to be ready for prime time yet, BUT it seems to have enormous potential.
🐍 Slide to unlock: I had lots of fun trying to solve these finger puzzles. As always, my son beat me, as he does with every game.
🟨 For the Playdate I bought Tochi [T.U.N.R]: a remake of an Action-Adventure game made exclusively for the Panic Playdate and Stream. Had not much time with both but I only heard good things about them.
🎮 Finally found some time playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. What a great game this seems to be. After a couple of minutes I already felt right at home.
📺 Again, no time for a movie but we finished Ted Lasso. 🥰
🎙 Podcasts this week:

I am basically very satisfied with the service. Only that tags are case sensitive drives me crazy.↩︎
There was a little bit of upset going on regarding Mona's icons 😎↩︎

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What caught my attention in week twenty-two, 2023

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