Geek

Selective.

I am super picky about keyboards. I think it’s because I have been an accomplished touch typist since my 10th birthday. We had a borrowed electric typewriter in the house back then and my mother said, “if you’re going to play with the typewriter, you’re going to use the proper fingering”. So I learned how to type when I was in elementary school and to this day I can still type well over 120 words per minute.

So I’m picky about my keyboard. Blame my mother.

Apple does a decent job with their keyboards these days. The keyboard on my iPad Pro Magic Keyboard is one of the best I’ve ever used and the keyboard on my M2 MacBook Air (one year old today!) is quite enjoyable. I even liked the butterfly style keys on Earl’s MacBook Pro back in the day.

But when it comes to PCs I struggle. Being an old guy I like the clicky, mechanical keyboards the resemble something out a 1985 room housing a mainframe. When I worked for Digital (DEC), I found their LK201 and later LK401 keyboards to be absolutely awesome. But the clicky, mechanical keyboards don’t make for good background citizens when it comes to the Zoom work calls.

Enter the Stream TKL (tenkeyless) Keyboard from Cherry (link to Amazon).

As a tenkeyless keyboard it doesn’t have a number pad on the right end of the keyboard, so I don’t have to reach far for the mouse or touchpad. The feel is firm, like a mechanical keyboard, but without the click. The key travel is decent. I can comfortable reach my peak typing velocity on these keyboards. And right now they’re priced right at $25 or so on Amazon (see link above).

Earl doesn’t understand why I have a stack of keyboards in the closet as a result of my quest for the Goldilocks of keyboards.

I just know that I can rapidly type silently about the subject. And it’s an enjoyable experience for me.

Video: Ernie’s Falls.

A video of my hike up to Ernie’s Falls in Saguaro National Park East. We had some impressive rains this week so the water coming over the falls was equally impressing.

Brakes To Break.

I’ve been thinking about stepping away from social media, yes, again. I’ve been somewhat active on Mastodon for the past couple of weeks and I’m realizing that while it is a much friendlier experience than anything else out there (X, Bluesky, etc), there’s still a little undercurrent of something I can’t quite put my finger on that’s requiring more energy than I’m willing to sink into the experience.

When I start writing less on my blog, it’s usually because my energy is being sapped (or zapped!) by something else. And this week I’ve seen my social media participation go up, peak in a little bit of frustration, and subsequently, I’m struggling to write blog entries. This entry will probably sit in the hopper for a few days until I figure it out that’s it’s going to say what I want it to say.

Ironically, I don’t see Facebook as a social media tool anymore; it’s more like a family and friends communication tool. When I post my videos and my pictures there for folks back east to see, I’m basically offering a 1970s style slide show at a family gathering. I’m cool with that.

But coming up with witty remarks and interesting nuggets to engage with others inside a maximum of 500 characters? It’s not working for me as well.

I’m not deleting accounts at this point. I’m going to take a break, probably starting this weekend.

It’ll be a fresh way to start the week.

Monday.

Today has been one of the most productive Mondays I’ve had at work in years. I don’t know if it’s because of the hike, and subsequently clearing of my head this past weekend, or if it’s because of the dream I had last night. The reasoning doesn’t matter. All I know is that this morning I made a list of the things I wanted to accomplish at work and I’ve been checking these items off one by one and it has given me a strong feeling of accomplishment.

Sometimes just having a checklist on a piece of paper that one can modify with a pen is the way to go.

I’ve mentioned before that I keep track of what I need to do via a loose interpretation of the “Getting Things Done” methodology. Everything goes in a bucket, I review the bucket, and then I figure out what I need to do with the things I’ve put in the bucket. It’s as simple as that. There are hundreds of applications out there that are suppose to make this all move in a very easy way by providing an infinite number of ways to slice and dice the information so you can figure out what you’re suppose to do. Many of these applications are quite nice but I get into “fiddly” mode instead of “productive” mode when I use them. So I just have my little text file with a list of everything I want to accomplish someday, and I review it, pick a few things to work on, and go from there. I do have some coding magic so that I can jump onto any of my computers and type the word “inspire” at a command prompt, and it’ll pick some things on the list that don’t have due dates associated with them. Coupling “inspire” with my regular review of my text file helps keep me productive and organized. Plus, it’s free.

Free is good.

Speaking of free… I’ve been working on cleaning up some audio lately and I was beyond stunned when I saw how much Adobe is charging for their sound editing application, Adobe Audition. I remember buying this application for the radio stations back in the late 1990s when it was called “Cool Edit” and it was a very cool application for its time, and more importantly, it was affordable. These days Adobe doesn’t allow you to buy their software, one can only rent it via a subscription model. I considered subscribing for Adobe Audition for a hot moment, until I learned that it was nearly $35 PER MONTH if I didn’t buy a year’s worth of entitlement at a time.

The heck with that.

This whole notion of renting software from a software company rubs me the wrong way, and that’s probably because I’m an old school geek that remembers the delight I felt when someone bought my shareware cash register program back in the late 1980s. I would never think of renting that software to a business. They bought it, they owned it, and if they asked I’d give them the code so they could do what they wanted with it.

So, no Adobe Audition for me.

There are plenty of fully paid or open source sound editors out there. Audacity comes to mind and it runs on just about anything. I’ll just stick with that.

Wonder Woman 1984!

I really didn’t enjoy “Wonder Woman 1984” back when it came out a few years ago. I thought it was all over the place. The best part was the Lynda Carter cameo in the post credits scene.

However, I stumbled upon this fan made intro based on the ’70s series but for the movie and it is awesome! Enjoy!

Content.

For some reason that I absolutely can not figure out, Reeder 5 on my iPad Pro stopped showing the content of articles coming to me via RSS. Everything works fine on my iPhone and my Mac, but the iPad version just shows me the title of an entry and no content at all.

This is not the way I want to consume data.

So, I moved away from Reeder 5 on my iPad Pro and introduced NetNewsWire to the mix.

The only reason I liked Reeder 5 was the Bionic Reading, the special font that is suppose to keep the distracted mind from wandering, but other than that I wasn’t particularly attached to the application.

I like NetNewsWire thus far, especially since it’s an Open Source application. I’ll be swapping out the app on my iPhone and Mac this weekend.

My RSS feeds are aggregated by a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS. Installation, administration, and maintenance is pretty straightforward, and my control freak side really enjoys not relying on a 3rd party service that usually costs money.

Redundancy?

With the new year I’m giving using my iPad Pro as a primary computing device another go. I’m not using my iPad Pro exclusively, but I am using it as a “sidecar” during my workday. While work has me trying to do things on a Windows 10 all day long, I can swivel to my iPad Pro to take care of personal tasks that pop up during the day, play music, etc.

So far the experience has been acceptable.

One of the frustrating things about my iPad Pro is that it’s still running a glorified version of iOS, which was originally designed for the iPhone, and it seems stuck in that paradigm. I’m really hopeful that Apple will change direction on this soon, as the iPad Pro line feels very overpowered for what’s generally asked of it to do.

Another thing that slightly bothers me about my iPad Pro is not Apple’s fault at all. The YouTube app on iPadOS doesn’t allow me to use plugins to hide comments and their idiotic “shorts”, something I always do in all web browsers on all platforms when I’m in YouTube land. I detest shorts and with the rapid degradation of society, comments in general are really not worth my time. It takes a little more brain power to ignore these things when using the YouTube app. My solution is to just not watch videos from YouTube on my iPad Pro.

That’s probably better for my mental health all the way around.

Plain.

Jack Baty at baty.net recently referenced an old post around Productivity. In his original post, Jack talked about his cycle of trying different ways of maintaining his productivity workflow, or his to do list.

99% of that post could have been written by me.

I have been an on-and-off again OmniFocus user since late 2009. I like the application very much, and if I was still completely in on Apple’s ecosystem I’d probably use it full time. But I don’t have an interest in being any corporation’s ecosystem completely and full-time, and work has deemed that I must use a Windows 10 laptop, so that all falls apart in my mind. Now, the fine folks at The Omni Group do offer a web portal for their software, but it costs an extra $50/year and while I have paid for it in the past, I’m reducing subscriptions and I’m no longer interested in paying $50/year to do something at work. Work should be paying me (and they do, let’s keep it that way).

Plain text has always been my jam. If for some reason I want to use a VIC-20 to get to a plain text file, I can. So these days I am using todo.txt, a plain text productivity system originally written as a bash script by Gina Trapani. With this specific plain text format, I am able to get to my todo list from any computer, remotely, locally, and with confidence. And further more, I am able to write my own automations to generate tasks on a schedule or as needed.

Now, with OmniFocus and Apple’s Shortcuts platform, there are automation opportunities there as well. In that regard, OmniFocus is a strong player in making sure you have access to your data. I have always found Apple’s Shortcuts to be maddening and illogical to a certain degree. Perhaps it’s because I’m old school, but dragging and dropping blocks in a GUI is not automation, it’s doing app things.

With todo.txt, I am able to write my own little snippets and scripts to work my automation magic. For example, as a private pilot, I’m all about checklists in all parts of my life. I like being able to check things off as I complete them. Not only does it give me a sense of satisfaction around the actual completion, I’m also able to put something on a list and forget about it until it has to be done, build reminders, and make sure I do all the things I need to do by looking for a mark of completion or not. The paradigm keeps me safe in the cockpit and keeps me organized throughout my entire life.

When I’ve scheduled a flight, I create a bunch of tasks in my todo.txt file, the one bucket that manages all parts of my life, and have them waiting for me at prescribed times to prepare for that flight. I can log into my personal server from any computer in the world, get to a command prompt and type “flight”, answer a couple of prompts, and off we go. And even though I’m not a fan, I’ve built a little shortcut in Apple Shortcuts so I can say “Hey Siri, next flight…” and give the relative details. From the command line, it ends up looking like this:

A few lines of code, a few data points, and some logic, and voila, I have a project called Flight03TUS in my todo list for a flight I have scheduled for the 3rd to Tucson. I don’t even need to know the exact date, I can tell the script I have a flight on Wednesday and it figures it out for me. Magic? No, just simple code.

If you’re interested in the format of each of those entries in the screen shot, the todo.txt website has all the details.

Ah, but what about the iPhone and iPad? Simple! A very smart developer named Michael Descy created the Swiftodo app, which works great on iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. A lot of what I do with plaintext productivity was inspired by his website Plaintext Productivity.

And in case you’re wondering, yes I do use Dropbox to keep my plaintext productivity work all in sync between all my devices. Because Dropbox works with just about everything and the files are very small.

So, while there are plenty of pretty, robust, wonderful proprietary, for pay applications out there, as an old-school developer that is trying to keep it simple in 2024, I feel like I’ve settled on this approach to keep track of everything I have going on in my life.

Testing 1-2-3.

So, this is typewriter mode on IA Writer on my iPad Pro. The editor is clean and simple and best enjoyed with some breezy, easy music in noise cancelling headphones while one is composing their latest missive.

Is that the correct word, missive?

I like idea of a digital typewriter, especially when paired with a mechanical keyboard reminiscent of the 1980s IBM Model M keyboard or something equally poundy.

The only issue with my Velocifire mechanical keyboard is the spacebar has a certain rattle that I don’t enjoy. I need to figure that out. Or, I need to buy a new keyboard, something that would not please my husband. He doesn’t understand these things.

I’m typing away and acting like this is going to be a blog entry. It’s more exciting than “Hello, World”. And it’s much more exciting than typing out the script for an American test of the Emergency Alert System. I can do that by memory, you know, because 30 years ago it was my voice that recorded that for the group of radio stations I worked at. My claim to fame.