What caught my attention in week twenty-seven, 2023
In continuation to week twenty-six, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week twenty-seven, 2023:
- 🔥 This week I was shocked to see how the farmer's entire grain crop burned down within minutes in a field adjacent to my workplace.
- 🩸 The extreme heat for our latitudes was probably also the reason for the fire. I have nevertheless cycled three times a medium tour together with my wife and have helped on two days of the weekend on the place of our dog club to weed and make clear. It was very sweaty and I got countless bloody scrapes from it, but in the end everyone was happy about what was done.
- 🚴 This week I cycled 164 km and walked 73 km, including 20 km with the dog.
- 🤘 The Club is still growing - it still makes me smile.
- 📝 As mentioned before, I have recently begun writing daily notes in Obsidian, in addition to using it as my personal knowledge management (PKM) tool.1 Furthermore, I have started to explore the fundamental concept of BASB (Building a Second Brain). For my primary inbox, I rely on Drafts on macOS, iOS, and extensively on watchOS while walking our dog. Another crucial service in this context is Readwise Reader.
- With podcasts, there was a significant amount of information that I would listen to, but until now, I couldn't easily integrate it into my "Second Brain". When I walk the dog, I don't have a free hand or the time or leisure to export any passages with Overcast and later process them with MacWhisper, for example. (Moreover, while I find the export function of Overcast quite nice, I find the interface for it rather cumbersome.)
- This week, I stumbled upon Snipd | AI Podcast Player: The podcast player to unlock the knowledge in the podcasts you love. Discover the best podcast highlights, save any moment with a tap on your headphones, and share or export your highlights with the world. Similar to Readwise's TTS feature in Reader, you can mark sections by "tapping" on your AirPods, which are then saved, transcribed, and automatically exported to Readwise, and from there to Obsidian, if desired. Unfortunately, this feature doesn't work with non-English podcasts yet, and I also find the user interface to be somewhat overloaded and not very intuitive. However, it already works surprisingly well. While Snipd doesn't support shortcuts and doesn't have a visible business model yet, I will see if I can save more information from podcasts for my future self and listen to selected podcasts through it for a while.
- 🤖 My OpenAI API key now also supports ChatGPT 4. Therefore, I will likely cancel my subscription for ChatGPT+ and switch back to using the native mode of MacGPT. ChatGPT+ is far from cheap at € 20 per month. I was very curious about the plugin infrastructure, but so far, I haven't been able to derive much benefit from it, especially for work related stuff. Additionally, the Bing / surf feature has been temporarily disabled. Ultimately, it's not worth the money for me.
- 🧵 The AI hype seems to be flattening out anyway, and last week, Threads was mostly talked about as the new trend. Since I deleted my Facebook account years ago, no longer have the Instagram app installed on my phone, and it's currently not easy to install Threads in the EU, I'll let the hype pass me by. I also don't see a personal reason to provide even more of my data to Meta.
- 😡 I was actually a little annoyed by John Gruber's post about Threads and the EU. I know he can troll, but until now, I hadn't perceived him as being so America-First and unreflective.
- ❤️ I enjoy trying out Apple Health companion apps. Currently, I mainly use HealthFit and Training Today, but I also use Fitness Age and Sleep Recovery.
- 📈 I last mentioned Fitness Stats in week 13, and I still use it regularly, including generating data for the summary at the beginning of these blog posts. However, I find it a bit disappointing that the developers haven't responded to questions / feature requests so far. It tends to dampen my enthusiasm for smaller indie apps when contact attempts go unanswered. But never mind! What I still miss is an app that can answer simple questions for me, such as "when was my longest bike ride?" or "how many times have I completed tours over 200 km?".
- 🏋️♀️ As a result, this week I took a look at Peak by Harshil Shah and Personal Best – Workouts. I quite like the first one and I'm considering keeping it. The second one is well-made as well, but it doesn't (yet) provide the kind of overviews that I'm personally interested in.
- 📊 This week, Rebecca Owen released Chronicling: a lightweight and flexible app for tracking and visualising anything that matters to you. It’s everywhere you want with widgets, full Shortcuts support and iCloud sync. With it you can "track anything you can think of - habits, chores, health metrics, moods, medication, significant events and more.…". It's a fantastic app with nice statistical pages. I'm not entirely sure yet how I'll use it. Will it be in parallel with Streaks or as a replacement? I'll have to see. In any case, I'll spend some more time exploring the app and see if it sticks.
- 🎵 Simone Montalto (@simonemontalto@mastodon.social), the developer of Book Tracker is working "on Music Tracker, a new app for iPhone, iPad and Mac to catalog your Vinyls and CDs. The app is currently under development and will be released later this fall. If you want to try it out and give me some feedback, sign up to the public beta".
- 🎧 For those of you who still has room in their (secondary) menu bar thanks to Bartender (also on Setapp), can take a look at WaveBar: real-Time Audio visualization for Mac Users - compact on your menubar or grand fullscreen.
- 🗺 Söka Version 1.2 now has an interactive Scratch Map. Will have to update my Where Have I Been post I guess. 😎
- 📺 If you have been searching for a TV and movie tracker app that syncs with trakt.tv, your search is finally over. 🥳
- @mattcomi has released version 2 of his incredible TV Forecast, and IMHO, it is just the best tracker available, yet. He has achieved the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality. It has always been my preferred app for TV shows, and now it has become just twice as impressive! 😍
- 👨💻 I received a new MacBook and for the first time, I decided not to do a clean install and then copy the data over but instead used the Migration Assistant. I wanted to transfer the data via a Thunderbolt cable, but it wasn't recognized. The displayed data rate for the P2P connection was faster than over Wi-Fi but not really impressive. So, I searched for another cable, found one, plugged it in, and voila, the cable was working and the stated speed was insane. I then watched the back and forth progress bar for almost 20 hours and eventually canceled the process. Although the Migration Assistant had created the user, it hadn't copied a single file. On the second attempt, a real progress bar appeared within a few minutes, showing the number of files still to be copied and an estimated duration. After about an hour, everything was done, and then I had to spend another hour assigning file access permissions and accessibility rights to all the apps —oh, macOS, you are so broken! TL;DR: Never change cables after you have already started the migration assist. 🤷♂️
- 📺 Again, no TV and no movies for me this week.
- 🎙 Of course, listened to some podcasts: