I love reading about the tools and technologies people use in their daily lives. I eagerly followed sites like Uses This and Workspaces, which offer glimpses into the digital setups of people. And I even shared my own setups in 2012, 2014 and 2016.

But I want more than a glimpse. A simple desk photo and a list of tools only scratch the surface. I want the ‘why’. What drives someone to select a piece of software or hardware? What features make it indispensable to their workflow?

Manuel Moreale’s People and Blogs sometimes has plenty of detail. But it’s just about people’s blogs, not their digital life.

Stephen Wolfram’s blog post on his personal infrastructure is a prime example of the level of detail I crave.

So for my setup this year I’ve decided to be the change I want to see in the world and have written a deep dive into my digital life. I talk about how I get work done and stay organised. As well as my backup strategies, my adventures in video transcoding, and even my foray into running my own online radio station.

On my work-from-home days I get up around 06:00 with an alarm clock that grows brighter as my wake-up time approaches. It’s meant to mimic daylight and wake you up feeling refreshed, but I haven’t noticed any difference.

As a back-up I have an Alexa alarm too. After I yell “Alexa, stop”, a routine runs that tells me the sunrise/sunset time, weather, journey time to the train station, calendar events, and then turns on my bedroom lamp.

In the summer months I then head out for a morning walk. I’ve tracked my walks in RunKeeper for years now. I don’t do anything with the data, it’s just habit at this point. As I walk I listen to a podcast in Overcast (see a list of my favourite podcasts). I’ve tried other podcast players and whilst they’ve now caught up with some of my favourite Overcast features, like smart speed – a feature that removes the small silent gaps between sentences – it’s still my favourite.

My first-generation Apple Watch served me well for 9 years before I recently upgraded to the Series 9. I’m sure the newer model offers more accurate step counting and heart rate monitoring, but it mostly feels the same to me. I use it primarily for passive health tracking, so I don’t notice things like improved UI responsiveness.

Returning home, I prepare my morning coffee – a blend of 6 grams caffeinated and 12 grams decaffeinated beans – and settle in with my first-generation iPad Pro to begin my morning reading routine.

A two-decade devotee of RSS, I’ve recently switched from Reeder back to NetNewsWire on both iOS and Mac. NewsBlur handles the cross-device feed synchronisation. I love RSS.

For longer articles, I send them to Omnivore, a read-later service in the vein of Pocket or Instapaper. While reading in Omnivore, I highlight notable passages and add relevant tags. Then the obsidian-omnivore plugin creates a text file in Obsidian with the article text, highlights and any tags.

Obsidian serves as my digital brain. It’s built using Electron, so doesn’t feel very ‘Mac’. But it’s very powerful, with endless plugins and customisation options, whilst still being run on simple text files. I maintain a minimal setup: default theme, Omnivore plugin, and an outliner for easy bullet point management.

Aside from being an Omnivore article archive, the other notes I have in there are various, but these are the some of the main categories: notes and highlights from books, what I’ve watched and their ratings, recipes, beer reviews, life logs (a diary), info about me, album reviews, notes on places I’ve visited and just notes on people, concepts and things I’ve learnt. I use Obsidian as my own knowledge base.

The power of Obsidian’s backlinks creates an interconnected web of knowledge. For example, mentioning Peterloo in a film review automatically links to my note on the Peterloo Massacre, which in turn connects to related mentions in books and podcasts.

All my notes are the published at Learnt.me, so feel free to have a poke around. It’s basically as close to my brain in digital form as you can get.

After RSS, I turn to non-fiction reading.¹ To combat my poor memory, I’ve developed a system: important concepts are rewritten in my own words in Obsidian, while notable passages are captured via Readwise. Readwise highlights are then synced to Obsidian through its plugin. Using spaced repetition learning, Readwise show me highlights in daily reviews so I am more likely to remember what I’ve read.

By the time I’m done reading it’s time to drop my girlfriend off at the train station. To avoid traffic I use Google Maps. I prefer the look of Waze, but its arrival time estimation is way too hopeful and its traffic information isn’t as accurate. It knows there’s traffic, but it often underestimates it. It also has a tendency to take you down small, annoying roads and through difficult junctions just to shave 30 seconds off your travel time. Apple Maps is gorgeous and much improved these days, but I still don’t trust it.

On my in-office days I usually leave around 07:20 and get the 07:45 train, arriving at work around 08:30.

I rely on Citymapper for accurate train info. However, it doesn’t work very well whilst I’m offline, which is odd for an app that is so often offline. It also has a tendency to be killed in the background.

I read during the train journey, accompanied by ambient or classical music to create a bubble of focus amidst the commuter chaos. When concentration proves challenging, I switch to RSS feeds – a lighter alternative that still makes productive use of the time.

At around 08:15 I get home from dropping my girlfriend off. I’ll head to my desk and start work. I like to start work early, as my brain works best in the first six hours of being awake. And I try to get my key tasks done before noon.

I’m an Apple user and my main computer is a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019) with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. It has an Intel CPU and a fan in it, so it feels a bit dated now. But it works well and I’m hoping to get another year or two out of it.

I’ve used and had Windows and Linux computers in the past. Linux I quite like, though it lacks some software I use, and a lot of its software looks like it’s still from 2006. Windows is a mess and its ugliness offends me. I spend many hours a day using and looking at my computer screen, I want it to be a nice and pleasant place to be. And a Mac remains the best in that regard.

The desk I use is a IKEA Skarsta sit/stand one. I tried the standing feature when I was having some issues with sciatica, but it didn’t agree with me and the pain just moved from my bum to my back. It’s a perfectly fine desk. It doesn’t shake when I type, nor make any noises. Though I wish it was a bit less deep and little bit wider.

In 2013, after suffering from persistent back pain, I decided to invest in a Herman Miller Aeron chair. I’d heard that spending extra on a high-quality office chair was worth the outlay. But the steep prices deterred me from taking the plunge. The advice was spot-on though. It helped my back pain,² and the chair is incredibly durable, outlasting the typical office chair by a significant margin.³ Despite years of daily use the only sign of wear is a crease on the armrest caused by my habit of resting my chin on my hand whilst deep in thought.

I like to have as much screen real estate as possible and I currently have two 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Displays. They’re 12 years old now and use a lot of power, but they do the trick. They sit atop several books to give me the height I need. I like to position my ‘main’ monitor directly in front of me and the ‘secondary’ monitor to my left, angled to face me. I also often use my iPad in sidecar mode so I have a third display. Though I find sidecar uses quite a lot of CPU power, so when I’m doing heavy work I will often disconnect my iPad to avoid my computer slowing down.

Years of dealing with RSI have shaped my choice of input devices, prioritising ergonomics over aesthetics.

I have a Logitech M570 trackball. I find it less straining to move my thumb instead of my whole wrist like with a mouse. And I like trackballs because they can be used on any surface.

I like mechanical keyboards and previously used a Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2. But one day at work I had to use a crappy Dell keyboard and I noticed my RSI pain lessened. Mechanical keyboards are often tall and require force to hit the keys, which unbeknownst to me was causing my hands issues. I now prefer a thin keyboard with basic switches that can be hit with little pressure. I have the Cherry Stream TKL. It’s just the right size, lacking a numeric keypad but still featuring full size arrow keys.

It’s important to mix things up when you have RSI. So to give my right hand a rest I use a Apple Magic Trackpad with my left hand. Having a trackpad also lets me use multi-touch gestures for things like quickly switching between Mac virtual desktops. I love virtual desktops and use them extensively.

The only other thing I have on my desk is a Anglepoise 1227 lamp. It’s a good lamp, but I wouldn’t recommend it too strongly these days now that the on/off switch has been moved from the lamp head to the cable.

At my desk at work⁴ I have a somewhat similar setup. There’s some sort of 1080p Dell monitor that’s attached to a monitor arm. The monitor is fine. It’s a bit too big to be 1080p, so everything looks zoomed in to my eyes. But it’s got a small bezel and you connect to it via USB-C. The monitor arm on the other hand I strongly dislike. I can’t relax if my monitor isn’t level, and the arm makes that difficult. It also doesn’t have the reach to make the monitor high enough for me, which I hate.

My ‘second monitor’ is just my propped up laptop. And again, I’ll often use my iPad Pro in sidecar mode as a third monitor. The trackball and keyboard remains the same.

The position of my work desk is in a nice spot. It’s by a window, with a good view. I get distracted easily, so I like being in the quietest spot I can. Mine is in an okay location. There’s not much to distract me outside the window, as I’m too high up. And whilst there is a TV mounted in my line of sight, I turned it off 6 months ago and no one has turned it back on.

I also have large pillar directly behind me. This means prying eyes are less likely to see my screen. I don’t have anything to hide. I just get oddly stressed if my screen is clearly visible.

The office chairs at work are very poor. But there’s a single nice one on my floor. A Herman Miller Aeron chair – the same chair I use at home. The head of my department used it, but when he got a promotion I put it at ‘my’ desk ands its thankfully remained there ever since. People don’t seem to notice it’s a nice one, so they don’t try and pinch it.

I start my work day with an hour or so of focused work.⁵ Then at around 09:30 I launch Todoist and begin my ‘Review & Preview’ routine where I look at my previous days notes and tasks. I’m a long term and loyal user of Todoist – I love it. It’s been a consistently great piece of software.

The first thing I do is go to my ‘Today’ filter page, which shows me all to-dos due today that are work related, grouped by team and organised by priority. To combat ADHD task paralysis there will only be three tasks there, otherwise I get overwhelmed.

I will then take those three key tasks and add them to my Field Notes 56-Week Planner (see pic). Three work tasks, three personal.

Todoist filters are wonderful. Especially if like me you use the same account for personal and work tasks. It really makes separating or combining things easier.

I use labels too. For example, if someone has asked me to do a task for them I’ll put their name as a label as I don’t often remember what the task someone gave me was, but I remember who asked me. I also use labels as a way to remove tasks from my filters. Non-important tasks are given the @someday label so I don’t have to see them until… someday.

Todoist now supports task durations and they also have a 7 day calendar view, making time blocking possible.⁶ Time blocking is vital. A long list of todos with no plan of when I’m going to do them ends with me getting nothing done and feeling guilty about it. Time blocking keeps me honest and not over stretched.⁷

My work emails are in Gmail and I try to practise Inbox Zero. Whenever a new email appears I will label it with either action, later, or waiting and then archive it to keep my inbox clear. I find this system works well for me.⁸

I’m not a fan of how Gmail looks. So I use the Simplify browser extension to improve it and get rid of some features that I don’t use. It also narrows the width of the emails. Something I hate is long lines of text. I like about 65 characters per line. Anything much more than that I find annoying to read. And I despise any software thats job is to show text but that doesn’t let me narrow the width of that text (👋 Slack).

Talking of browser extensions. In my work browser I also use Markdown Here so I can write emails in Markdown, and Todoist One-Click so I can quickly add links to Todoist.

On my personal browser I use:

• 1Password, for auto filling in passwords
• Auto Refresh Plus, to refresh pages at set intervals
• Bulk Media Downloader, to download things like images from sites that stop me from doing so
• GoFullPage, for taking full page screenshots
• Omnivore, for saving pages for later
• Reddit Enhancement Suite, for making reddit bareable
• Save Image as Type, so I can save .webp images as .jpg
• Shut Up, so I don’t have to see any comment sections

As I mentioned, I’m a fan of time blocking. So my calendar is important to me. I use Google Calendar. I like its clean design. When I look at my day in other calendars it just makes me feel terrible. It looks overwhelming and a total mess. Google Calendar handles things like events that overlap very gracefully.

But the main reason why I use it is because it greys out past events. When I launch other calendars I always have to take a moment to orient myself to just work out what day I should be looking at.

Like email, Slack presents its own problems. It’s harder to organise messages and easier to lose things compared to email. And its instant nature can be distracting.

To combat this I turn off notifications for anything but direct messages and mentions. And when I want to focus I’ll put my device in ‘Focus’ mode, and that turns off notifications for things like Slack and Gmail.

I actually find the best way to keep up with all the various Slack channels is in the app. The ‘catch-up’ feature° on their app is great. You can quickly swipe away unread messages, or keep them unread for later.⁹

My first meeting of the day is a stand-up at 09:45. My company is in the Google ecosystem (thankfully), so Google Meet is used. It seems to lack some features compared to Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but at least it isn’t a bloated mess. I have to use Zoom and Teams from time to time and hate them jointly.

The webcam I use is a Anker PowerConf C200. I don’t have any compliments for it or complaints against it. Though it’s so high quality that I lower the webcam settings to 720p, so my colleagues don’t have to see every detail of my lit up face.

My microphone is just the mic in my Soundcore P3i earpods. AirPods are too expensive for me to just loose within 12 months. And their battery lifecycle is too short for the cost too. The Soundcore’s are cheap and basic, but still offer solid noise cancellation and if I lose them it’s not the end of the world.

With my memory being terrible I have to take extensive notes during meetings. So I have Meet taking up two thirds of my main monitor and Roam the other third. I quickly move and resize windows using Divvy.

I use Roam – which is similar to Obsidian – for work notes. I have a note for each day. Each evening before I log off I auto-populate the next days note with a daily template via the SmartBlocks plugin. The template has a list of meeting notes, a work log section for work I’ve done, and also a ‘currently’ section for general current info or issues I want to be kept aware of. Every recurring meeting has its own note, so I can see my notes from the previous meetings.

I hate having to constantly re-type the same words all day. So I use Typinator to speed things up. So when I type ;bq it turns into BigQuery. It’s also useful to avoid remembering commands in the Terminal. For example, if I type ;ytdl and it enters a youtube-dl command to download a YouTube video.

You can mute yourself in Meet with a keyboard shortcut, but Meet has to be the active window (which it rarely is for me as I’m typing my notes in Roam). So I have an automation set up in BetterTouchTool so that when I hit ⌘ + Shift + M my microphone is muted system wide via an AppleScript.

I also use BetterTouchTool for quickly launching apps. ^ + ⌥ + O launches Obsidian, ^ + ⌥ + R launches Roam, ^ + ⌥ + S launches Slack, and so on.

Talking of Slack, I hate how to add a link in a message it’s ⌘ + V, not the usual ⌘ + K. So BetterTouchTool fixes that too.

The other keyboard tool I use is Karabiner-Elements, as I use a Windows keyboard that isn’t Mac friendly. It helps me turn the ALT key into ⌘, amongst other things.

Morning meeting over I’ll try and get some more work done. It’s amazing how much you can get done in a browser these days. It’s rare for me to see my colleagues have anything other than Chrome and Slack open.

I don’t use Chrome, but Brave instead. The main reason being that I always have many open tabs and it supports having them as a vertical list to the side of the window, rather than at the top. Once you have more than 20 tabs open in Chrome you see nothing but favicons, making it tough to find things.

Aside from that though Brave is Chromium-based and very similar to Chrome. Though it does it have ad blocking built-in.

Other browser based tools I use at work are Miro for mind-mapping and Google Docs, Sheets, etc. That’s about it really.

I’ll occasionally listen to music whilst I work. I avoid using my Soundcore earpods as their audio profile is set up for voice, and music doesn’t sound too great. So I use my Beyerdynamic T90 headphones. They sound great. Though Beyerdynamic’s famous treble-heavy sound profile isn’t my favourite and I find it a bit tiring on my ears at times. I’ll also sometimes listen to music through a truly ancient set of Bose speakers, the model number of which has been lost to time.

I continue to miss Rdio, my favourite music streaming platform. So I use Spotify. I think it’s perfectly good. I’m a light mode kind of guy (don’t send me abuse), so its colour scheme isn’t my ideal. But I think its music recommendations are solid and it’s rare for them not to have an artist/album I want to listen to.

At around 17:00 I’m done with work for the day.

Part of my ‘power down’ routine is backing up Roam. When the .zip file hits my downloads folder Hazel unzips it and squirrels it away into my Dropbox ‘backups’ folder.

Hazel is a incredible time saver. I use it mostly to auto-move/rename files and run shell scripts.

LLM’s like ChatGPT have really unleashed the power of shell scripts for me. I used scripts in the past, but sparingly. They were too much bother to write. Now I can just ask GPT-4 and it will create one in seconds. It’s amazing. And that flexibility is one of the reasons I will always love a computer over a phone. It opens up the power of computing, instead of holding it back.

A shell script is like a mini app, made just for me, that sits there until called upon. It doesn’t cost money or take up CPU in the background. And I can customise it exactly how I see fit – no begging a developer to implement a feature.

I have about 30 shell scripts. This is what some of them do:

• Moves files from my main drive to my server via rsync
• Auto-download videos once they’re added to one of my YouTube playlists
• Removes spaces from file names to make them more web friendly
• Compress and resize images
• Remove GPS EXIF data from photos
• Post to Micro.blog (and thus my other social networks) from the command line
• Look for non-local image URLs in my Obsidian notes, download them and replace the link with the local image copy
• Auto commit and push various GitHub repos when there’s been changes
• Auto upload files to S3 for easy sharing of things like screenshots
• Transcode FLACs to MP3s
• And others that I’ll get onto to

I used Dropbox back in the day, but I had a hiatus of several years where I opted for cheaper and more open-source alternatives. I relied on SyncThing and Resilio for a while. They worked well, but their poor mobile apps meant I switched to back to Dropbox. I simply got sick of not being able to access my files on the go.

The Dropbox client was consistently using 1 GB of RAM for me though, so I use Maestral instead – it’s a lot more lightweight.¹⁰ But in general Dropbox does exactly what I ask of it.

After work I might write a blog post on my other blog, blot.blog. So I hit ⌘ + SPACE and Alfred pops up, my current launcher of choice,¹¹ and I get up iA Writer.

iA Writer is where I write. It’s your bog-standard minimalist Markdown editor. But I like how I can have various saved folder locations in the sidebar, meaning all my various blogs posts are easily to hand.

My blogs are all powered by Hugo (aside from my Micro.blog, Clowes.blog). I like how it creates static pages, which means my blogs are easy and cheap to host, and endlessly backupable.

The only downside is that you have to go into the Terminal and run some commands to preview, build and deploy your blog. It also makes it close to impossible to blog on my phone. So I’ve used my close friend the shell script to get around that.

Once I want to publish a post I’ve written on my phone I just need to rename the file to pub. A script will then rename pub to whatever the posts title is in the front matter, build the blog and then deploy it to AWS S3.

Nearly all my sites are hosted on AWS now. The user interface is terrible and it’s easy to spend too much money. But it fits my needs well enough. I used a Linode VPS in the past. But when I outgrew the $5 plan and had to upgrade to the $12 one I realised it would be cheaper to switch to AWS. With Linode I was also worried about backups, CPU usage and running out of disk space. Whereas S3 is an endless bucket.

On admin days I have a few recurring things to do.

I work my way through my archived items in Omnivore and bookmark them in Pinboard.in too. I’ve been using Pinboard since 2010 and I wish I’d remained a bit more dedicated and loyal to it down the years. I would often bookmark things in Evernote, DEVONthink, or whatever was the flavour of the week. And as a result when I want to find a bookmark I have to look in several places – it’s all a bit disjointed.

Pinboard isn’t sexy, but it’s simple. Just a place to bookmark URLs with tags. It also saves a cached copy in case a link ever dies (which is often). I have just over 20,000 bookmarks there. And whilst Pinboard feels totally neglected by its owner in recent years and is very slow nowadays, it’s still my default place for bookmarks. Though I may switch to Raindrop if Pinboard continues to be neglected.

Pinboard’s cached copy doesn’t always work or look right. So I did attempt to create a workflow of downloading my own copy of each bookmark, uploading it to Amazon S3 and linking to it in the Pinboard bookmark description. But it was all a bit manual and it didn’t stick.

I did keep part of that workflow though. When I don’t want to lose a webpage I will download it locally too, using the SingleFile browser extension.

I’ve tried many tools for keeping local copies of webpages and SingleFile is by far the best and simplest. It’s not in a weird format, it doesn’t require complicated software to download and view, and it can be shared and stored easily, as all the images, CSS, etc. are stored in a big HTML file.¹²

Hazel auto-sorts it once its downloaded. And the end result is that if I hit a dead link in Pinboard and the cached copy isn’t very good then I’ll look locally and I’ll likely have it.

I also use SingleFile so I can have cached copies of any sites I link to on my blogs. I’ll add a ° symbol next to any pages I link to. When ° is clicked is shows the cached copy.

I’ll also backup my emails on my admin day. I use FastMail for personal email and am a big fan. I pay them and they handle my email – no fuss, no ads. FastMail has an export tool that gives me a zipped copy of everything. But I’ll also launch MailMate, which downloads all emails locally. I don’t use it as a client anymore as I’m satisfied using the FastMail website. I just launch it periodically so it can sync and download any new emails for easy backup.

With admin tasks finished I might watch a TV show or film. I have streaming services, but most of what I watch is on Plex – which is like Netflix but for your own local video files.

Plex is run on a server I built named ‘Zola’. Using Unraid as its OS, it has a AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, 16 GB of RAM, a 500 GB SSD, 52 TB of Western Digital Red drives, and is housed in a Fractal Design Define R5 Blackout Edition case. It has various pieces of software on there, but Plex is its main job.

One my favourite tech hobbies is video transcoding. When I ‘buy’ a new BluRay I place the large 30-160 GB video file(s) in a folder monitored by SyncThing, which uploads them to a server I rent in the cloud. Based in Paris, it has an Intel Xeon E3-1220 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage and a 1 Gbps unmetered connection.

A HandBrake Docker container is installed on that server, and it watches the SyncThing folders. The Handbrake encode settings vary based on the folder the video is in.¹³

This is of course a lot of bytes being moved across the internet. But my broadband these days is 650 Mbps up, and 100 Mbps down, so the process of uploading/downloading these large video files between my local and cloud server doesn’t take too long.

The videos are encoded in HEVC/H.265 10 bit. It’s a lot slower compared to AVC/H.264, doesn’t have good browser support, and doesn’t handle grain very gracefully. But its file size savings are hard to ignore, especially at low bitrates.

I use CRF (Constant Rate Factor) 20-25 for HD and CRF 18-21 for 4K content.¹⁴ Using CRF for high grain video can cause massive bitrates. So I will choose the bitrate manually for grainy films, setting 6-8 Mbps for HD and 20-25 Mbps for 4K.

I encode the surround sound audio in E-AC-3 (Dolby Digital Plus) at 740 Kbps. HandBrake’s E-AC-3 encoder apparently isn’t much better than its AC-3 one, and certainly not as good as the commercial E-AC-3 encoders that streaming platforms use. So I give it some extra bitrate to compensate.

If the audio is Dolby Atmos I will just ‘pass it through’, keeping the original audio file, as Handbrake’s E-AC-3 encoder doesn’t support encoding Atmos.

One of the reasons I don’t like SyncThing is that I often run into file permission issues. For some reason either SyncThing or Unraid doesn’t like the files HandBrake produces. So I use a shell script to auto download the videos once Handbrake is done, and that gets around the issue.

On my admin days, I drag the weeks transcoded files to FileBot, which then nicely renames them and downloads subtitles and artwork. From there Plex picks them up and they’re ready to play.

I share my Plex library with friends and family. With the videos being compressed to a reasonable size, when they hit ‘play’, the video is often sent to them as-is, meaning Plex doesn’t have to transcode it into a different format or to a quality level low enough to not buffer. That speeds things up and saves me on electricity. Plex also has to transcode in real time, meaning the quality isn’t great. Whereas Handbrake transcodes things lovingly on the ‘slow’ setting. So a 4 Mbps H.264 file Plex produces will look many times worse than a 4 Mbps HEVC file HandBrake produces.

One of the downsides of having all these terabytes of videos is backing it up. The plug-and-play solutions the average person and their several terabytes of data would use simply won’t work for me – unless I’m happy paying $5 per TB per month (which would be $260/mo in my 52 TB’s case). So I have to get creative and embrace a slightly hodgepodge solution.

I have another server that helps me. An old Mac mini (late 2014, 2.6GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 500GB SSD). It used to run Plex, but it now mostly runs a lot of those shell scripts I mentioned. And it also helps me with backups.

Connected to it is a 5 TB external drive which has a backup of my most important files from my Unraid and my Mac. That is backed up to Backblaze. Then the most important 1 TB of that data is also stored on Dropbox Backup, as well AWS S3 Glacier via the app Arq. Arq also backs up my Dropbox folder to AWS S3 Glacier too. Though Glacier costs a fortune to restore data from, so it’s there as a worse case scenario option.

Before I had the Unraid server I used a Synology DS1815+ NAS, and it still works. So I’ve thrown in various older, smaller capacity drives to give me 24 TB of storage. So at midnight each night the most important half of the Unraid server is backed up there. The less important half? Sadly I just have to get comfortable with that disappearing if my Unraid server dies. At the end of the day it’s just films and TV shows, nothing life altering.

I’ve got too many photos and videos to store locally on my iPhone nowadays. So I pay for 2 TB of iCloud storage. It’s great, but it’s a single point of failure. If I or iCloud messes up and mass deletes my Photo Library then they’re lost forever. You can have Photo.app on your Mac store all of the photos/videos locally onto an external hard drive, which I do. But the folder structure is weird. So every now and again I’ll run icloudpd, which downloads a copy of all my photos/videos from iCloud in a nice, easy to understand folder structure.

Another thing the Mac mini powers is my own online radio station. I like to listen to music when I work. But I don’t want to think about what to listen to.

So Swinsian is used to shuffle a playlist on a loop. The music is laid-back ambient and electronic stuff.

Audio Hijack then takes the audio output, encodes it at 128 Kbps AAC and sends it to a Shoutcast radio server that’s hosted on a $5 Linode VPS.

I tune in using RADIO on my Mac and Triode on my phone.

I prefer ethernet wherever possible. So everything with an ethernet port is connected via a TP-Link 23-port switch. The Wi-Fi in my house is delivered by two Ubiquiti UniFi Long Range access points. Both of which do their job quietly and without fuss, which is all I ask.

My house is prone to power cuts. So I have a APC Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to give me time to gracefully power down things in case of a power cut.

Nearly all the equipment I’ve mentioned is housed in a Samson SRK21 rackmount case. I chose it as I wanted a central place for everything, but I didn’t need the depth and height of a normal rack.

Sitting on top of the rack is a BenQ GW2470HL 24 Inch monitor that I use for gaming. The majority of the games I play are online shooter games, so I don’t like playing on TV’s due to their input lag.

I’m not much of a gamer these days. For the past several years the only game I’ve really played has been Battlefield 1. I love it (see a list of my favourite video games).

I have a PlayStation 5, but I rarely use it. I’m still playing Battlefield 1 on my old PlayStation 4 Slim.

In the rack is also a Windows computer in a 2u server case. It spends most of its life powered down. I only turn it on to do something Windows-specific or when I want to play Age of Empires II, which isn’t supported on Mac.

My TV is a LG OLED55B9PLA 55 inch OLED 4K. I’m a big fan of the picture quality. OLED, whilst not great in bright rooms, is gorgeous. And this is my first 4K HDR TV, which is the main reason I upgraded. More for the HDR than the 4K. Some films have poor transfers and look worse in their 4K release compared to the HD one, but for the most part I prefer 4K and I’ve upgraded as many films as possible in my Plex library to 4K.

One thing I despise about the LG TV is that when there’s a firmware update a notification pops-up covering a third of the screen every single time you turn it on. And it stays there for about a minute. I don’t like updating firmware. I’m sure they’ve improved the picture quality and all that. But I’m also sure they’ve added more tracking vendors and cruft I don’t want. So I never upgrade. And as a result I see that pop-up every single time.

The TV’s connected to a Sony HT-CT381 soundbar. Soundbars often quite rightly get a lot of hate. But I needed one as I had limited space, and this Sony one is actually very good. It has deep bass and clear dialogue. And it sounds many times better than the built-in speakers. My only complaint is that the difference between the quiet parts and the loud are too wide. I either can’t hear, or I’m deafened.

My streaming box of choice is the NVIDIA Shield. I’m not a big fan of the UI, or Android TV in general. But I can’t complain about the Shield. It’s now nine years old and I see little reason to upgrade – aside from Dolby Vision support. It’s still as snappy and as powerful as the day I bought it.

TV show or film finished its time for dinner.

Whilst cooking I might listen to some music. I have a few Denon smart speakers (2 x 250’s. And one much older Denon HEOS 1 HS2). They sound good and are reliable.¹⁵ Though the app is slow and rather poor. Though it’s probably better than Sonos’ current app.

I’ve tracked my calories in MyFitnessPal for many years.¹⁶ It’s a terrible app and website. But it I like it more than the alternatives and it seems to have the biggest library of food.

In the post-dinner energy dip I might spend some time on social media.

I love Micro.blog and spend a lot of time there these days. My micro blog, Clowes.blog, is powered by it and I’m a big fan of it as a service. It’s the perfect combination of Twitter and blogging. And thanks to the fediverse I can follow people from Mastodon and Bluesky in there too. And I adore how when I post on Micro.blog it’s automatically cross-posted to my accounts on Mastodon, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky and Threads.

I don’t use Xwitter now that Elon Musk owns it. Threads has filled the gap. I’m not a fan of Meta,¹⁷ but Threads is an okay social network. It does sadly default to the algorithmic feed, rather than your ‘following’ one. And it has a huge problem of posts being stolen or being there for engagement).¹⁸ I do have an Instagram account again now, but use it sparingly. It’s mostly just so my Mum can send me cute animal videos.

My girlfriend introduced me to TikTok when we met. It is without doubt the most addictive form of social media I’ve ever come across. That app is purpose-built to take over your life. ¹⁹ And I let it engulf me for a while. I now use iOS’s ‘app limits’ feature to limit my usage. And try not to touch it at all if I can. Me and my girlfriend still have our ‘TikTok time’ though, where we’ll watch it together and she’ll show me ones she thinks I might like.

I don’t spend too much time on reddit these days. On a Saturday morning I’ll brew a cup of coffee and work through my favourite subreddits one-by-one. I find that’s a better way to use it, rather than constantly refreshing.

Having said that I do use it on my phone sometimes, via Narwhal. Reddit recently massively increased their API prices, so Narwhal charges £4/mo now. I thought I’d stop using it on the go after that, but I didn’t. I still use it once or twice a day. Usually whilst waiting for the train.

To make it a less toxic place I utilise filters liberally, blocking certain words and subreddits. I also don’t follow any subreddits that have a negative lean.

In the past I might journal in the evening, but the habit never really stuck. I briefly managed to do 750Words.com each day. And I’ve occasionally flirted with Day One. But I just find it too much work.

So I keep a ’log’ instead. All throughout the day I use jrnl to say what I’m up to. It’s a command line tool that stores what I write in a text file, and automatically includes the date and time.

To make input easy I just hit ⌥ + ^ + J and iTerm – the terminal emulator I use – is automatically launched and the jrnl command is pasted in and I’m ready to type. I’ll include what I’m up to, web articles I’ve just read or my general thoughts and feelings.

There isn’t a jrnl iOS app. So whilst on the go I log what I’m up to in Funnel iPhone app (App Store link), which then sends it to iA Writer, which saves it as a text file in iCloud. When my Mac mini sees this text file it will extract the text of what I’ve written and run the jrnl command. It’s a janky system, but aside from occasional duplicate entries it works quite well.

There are some things I prefer in physical/analogue format.

In the past six months I’ve started using notebooks. I’m quite particular about what I use. They need to be a pocketable size, not too thick, and feel high quality. It’s important that they’re a pleasant object, as the visual and tactile niceness of them is one of the reasons I use them. I use Field Notes and occasionally Moleskine pocket notebooks.

I use the notebooks for to-dos and writing occasional jrnl log entries.

Once I’ve completed a notebook I need to get the ‘jrnl’ entries I’ve handwritten actually into jrnl. So I’ll scan all the pages and then get Claude 3.5 Sonnet to OCR them and give me a shell script to add them into jrnl.

I like to read books (when I can). I wish I liked eBooks. It would be nice to easily highlight passages. But I love the book as an object. I love the look of the type. The feel. The smell. So sections I want to highlight are photographed in Readwise which OCR’s them.

My first iPhone was the 3GS and I’ve used them ever since. And whilst I flirted with Android when I used a HTC Wildfire and HTC Desire Z for a few months, I much prefer iOS to Android.

This is what my lock screen and home screen currently looks like:

The left hand side widget on my lock screen is my current/next calendar event. And the right hand side one is my top priority Todoist tasks. When my phone is in ‘Personal’ focus mode it shows personal tasks. When in ‘Work’ it shows work ones. It’s also a quick way to get something into Todoist. I just tap it and the app is launched.

My home screen does lose some screen real estate by having the calendar widget. But I find it useful as it makes it tougher to forget what’s up next.

The widget is from Readdle’s Calendars, as I prefer the design compared to the Google Calendar one. Though I still use Google Calendar for actually seeing and altering my calendar.

The apps on my home screen aren’t the ones I use the most. They’re the apps that I want to be able to quickly launch when I need them.

Here’s some of my favourite iOS apps:

• Anki. A spaced repetition learning app. I prefer using it on my phone than Mac. It’s more productive than going onto social media and can be done in stolen moments.
• AutoSleep and Sleep++. I wear my Apple Watch to bed. These two apps use my sleep data to tell me how well I’ve slept. I use them both to get an average.
• Carrot, Mercury, Met Office, #uksnow. I use Apple’s Weather app by default, but I like to double check the weather in the other apps. Especially Carrot, which is good at rain. #uksnow is very good at snow as it’s crowdsourced by X users.
• Dropbox. I use this often as I need to access my files more than I suspected. It also is good for recording audio and scanning documents/receipts.
• Flightradar24. I enjoy knowing where a plane above me is going and has come from.
• Flo. For tracking my girlfriend’s reproductive cycle. It helps me know how she’s feeling and know when to be extra nice to her.
• IMDb. Mostly for finding out where I recognise that actor from.
• Letterboxd. A new arrival. I used it when it launched, but stopped using it. I like Letterboxd for its average user rating. If a film has a rating above 3.5 I will watch it.
• Poe and Perplexity. For AI answers on the go.
• SomaFM. A great online radio station. Their stations “Groove Salad” and “Left Coast 70’s” are my favourites.
• Speedtest. I use this weirdly often. I like to see how fast the WiFi/5G is where I am.
• Swarm. Technically social media. But it’s just an app to ‘check-in’ to places. I use it because I like knowing what I was up to in days gone by. Whenever I’ll check-in to a place I’ll also add it into jrnl too.
• Timer+. I need to have multiple timers at once. This app gives me that.
• Trading212. My pension and savings are in low cost index funds. But in the past I’ve dabbled with active stock trading. I’ve started doing it again recently and use Trading212. I used Freetrade previously. But they now lock too many companies behind their premium plan.
• TunnelBear. I have a British-based VPN. But this one is handy for other countries. I take advantage of the monthly 500 MB they give you for free.
• Varys. This app tells me what people are watching on my Plex server. It works away from my home network, unlike Tautulli.
• VSCO. For add filters to photos/videos. This used to be great back in the day. It’s not expensive and a bit crap. I still like their filters though.
• WolframAlpha. To do maths that a calculator can’t.
• Zero. I do intermittent fasting. This apps tells me how many hours I’ve been fasting.

On the Mac, this is some of my favourite software that I haven’t already mentioned:

• 1Password. The password manager I use. I tried replacing it with Dropbox Passwords, as I already pay for Dropbox and I wouldn’t have to pay for 1Password anymore. But it wasn’t quite polished enough. And when it comes to passwords you don’t want to mess around. 1Password’s app aren’t the greatest and are often buggy. But hey, they’re yet to leak my passwords.
• AppCleaner. This is the best app I’ve found for uninstall Mac apps. It manages to leave almost no files hanging around.
• Bartender. So many apps put icons in the Mac’s menu bar. Bartender is a very useful app for hiding the ones I don’t need. I have: Dropbox, Sound (for quickly changing audio output), WiFi, Battery, and time.
• Calibre. An eBook manager. It’s ugly, but powerful. It can convert books and put them onto your Kindle.
• DaisyDisk. Useful for seeing what’s using up you Mac’s storage.
• Invisor. A media file inspector. I mainly just use it to see what the bitrate is of my transcoded video files.
• SuperDuper! Creates whole-disk backups of my Mac.
• WhatsApp. I communicate with friends/family almost entirely through WhatsApp. It’s nice not having to pick up my phone to message.

And that about sums it up.

If you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you – this turned into a deeper dive than I was expecting.

It’s amazing how constantly shifting my digital life is. After two decades of using technology, I saw myself as a bit of a cautious adopter – someone whose experimenting days were over. It’s true in some ways. I no longer sign up to multiple new start-ups a week or download every new shiny app. But I still regularly try out new things and I’m frequently seeing what I can do to make my digital life easier, faster and more delightful. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop. I expect my 2026 update to contain many changes.

I also continue to be curious about how others live their digital lives. So, I encourage you to write up the tech that powers your life. And when you do, please send it my way and I’ll link to it below.

Foursquare split into two apps in 2014, and now they’re killing one of them°.

What you need to know:

• Foursquare City Guide (restaurant finder) = shutting down
• Swarm (check-in app) = stays alive

Swarm remaining alive is good news for me — I use it daily to track where I’ve been. It builds a nice personal location history without any effort.

The City Guide app had value. When traveling it often pointed me to restaurants that weren’t in the top Google or TripAdvisor results — useful when struggling to book a table.

Foursquare as a company isn’t going anywhere. They’ve transformed into a location data provider, powering features in apps like Snapchat and Uber. The City Guide shutdown just makes that B2B shift a bit more official.

You should have your own ‘Permanent Public Folder’ folder for files you want to share.

Don’t use something like Dropbox or Imgur. They might work now. But eventually they won’t.

Instead, have them hosted in a folder on a domain you own.

And then:

• Never change the domain.
• Never delete/rename/move a file.

In my case, I use elliotclowes.com. It’s not the shortest or coolest domain I own. But I’m never going to get rid of it.

I use the folder /cold. It doesn’t make much sense. Cold storage is storage that’s not frequently accessed and is often stored on offline drives or CDs. But it makes sense to me, and I know to never delete it or touch it. Use whatever works for you.

Avoid using subfolders. There’s too much temptation to then move or sort files later on. I originally put files in yearly subfolders based on the year I uploaded them. I don’t anymore. But I won’t move anything. I’ve done it now and I’m not going to change it. Remember: never delete/rename/move a file.

Also avoid checking the folder. You’ll inevitably see a file called UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_thumb_69b5.jpg that is an image of a grape and be tempted to delete it.

I admit, this isn’t the right solution for everyone.

If you’re sharing large video files, the storage and bandwidth costs might be too high.

When you share a file with something like Dropbox, it will often nicely copy the link to your clipboard. That won’t happen here.

Uploading from your phone can be annoying – though there are now plenty of apps for uploading to SFTP servers or S3.

It can even be annoying on a computer, to be fair. But software like ExpanDrive and Mountain Duck will let you access your server from the file system. Then you can just drag and drop files.

You could also ask an LLM like GPT-4 to create a shell script for you to upload the files. That’s what I do. When Hazel sees a new file in the folder it runs a shell script that uses the AWS CLI to upload it (here’s my .sh file).

In 2002 the music industry was in a slump. Declining CD sales and rampant piracy had eaten into profits and labels were desperate.

Steve Jobs saw an opportunity. Apple had launched the iPod the year prior and he wanted a digital music store to pair with it. So meetings were held with record labels and a deal was struck with the five major labels – Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI, and BMG.

But in their piracy panic and desire to get profits back the labels undersold themselves. Firstly, they gave Apple control over the pricing. iTunes could sell songs individually, at $0.99. Users didn’t have to buy the full $9.99 album anymore.

But more importantly they simply underestimated how big digital music would become and sold the rights for what in hindsight would be a fraction of their true value.

In 2007 a similar story unfolded when Netflix launched their streaming platform. When they went to studios and networks about buying digital rights they were more than pleased to sell them at a low rate. To them it was free money. Streaming was seen as a perpetual secondary market to DVD sales and cable TV. And most of the rights Netflix wanted were for back catalog movies and TV shows. Content that didn’t produce much income anyway.

Hollywood made the same mistake the music industry made. They didn’t realise the value of what they had because they underestimated what a new technology – digital streaming – would become.

Web publishers are now in a similar position. Their profits have been dwindling for years and they’re searching for new revenue streams.

So when the AI companies that had been scooping up their content for free started getting $80 billion valuations the web publishers wanted their piece.

Just like the record labels, they wanted the ‘piracy’ – AI web crawlers scooping up anything and everything free of charge – to be stopped. So deals have started being made. The Associated Press, News Corp, the Financial Times, reddit, Stack Overflow and Vox and more have all done deals.

But the question remains: have they underestimated the value of their content, just as the music industry and Hollywood did before them? It’s tempting to think that with the current mania for AI, a $250 million deal over five years might be a win for a publisher like News Corp.¹

But history tells me to doubt it. Media companies rarely value their content accurately in the face of new technologies. My bet is on the AI companies knowing the true worth of this data and the publishers are selling them the very content they need to eventually supersede them. Publishers are giving away the keys to their own kingdom.

Financial Times°:

The lack of a “killer app” to encourage customers to pay upwards of $3,500 for an unproven new product is seen as a problem for Apple.

Apple said recently that there were “more than 2,000” apps available for its “spatial computing” device, five months after it debuted in the US.

That compares with more than 20,000 iPad apps that had been created by mid-2010, a few months after the tablet first went on sale, and around 10,000 iPhone apps by the end of 2008, the year the App Store launched.

The iPhone had third-party apps that made me want really want one. Angry Birds, Flipboard, Evernote, Shazam, Reeder, RunKeeper were all apps I couldn’t wait to try. There isn’t any for Vision Pro.

And that’s a problem. Especially when the iPhone 3G costed £200 (£358 in todays money). Vision Pro costs close to 10x that at £3,500.

Early data suggests that new content is arriving slowly. According to Appfigures, which tracks App Store listings, the number of new apps launched for the Vision Pro has fallen dramatically since January and February.

It certainly feels like there was some momentum for app releases, but that momentum feels a lot less now. You worry it’s going to come to a standstill.

Nearly 300 of the top iPhone developers, whose apps are downloaded more than 10mn times a year — including Google, Meta, Tencent, Amazon and Netflix — are yet to bring any of their software or services to Apple’s latest device.

Forget about innovative and wonderful apps from indie developers, Vision Pro doesn’t have available the behemoth ‘default’ apps you’d expect, like Netflix.

I get the sense that developers are tired of Apple’s 30% cut and strict app store rules and they’re showing them the finger. And it’s a finger that’s easy to raise when there’s so few Vision Pro’s out there.

Will the Vision Pro be a success? I don’t own one. But I got to briefly use one at work. It was magical. But there wasn’t much to do. And it was big and heavy. But give it five years and it will be lighter and there should be more apps.

It still has the has the anti-social issue that all current VR headsets have. But I’m hopeful, and believe that with time it will be added to the pantheon of devices you really need to own, alongside the computer and phone.

Or maybe it will forever remain a nice-to-have, like the Apple Watch. Who knows.

The New York Times° reports on the Biden administration’s efforts to reshape the global semiconductor supply chain:

If the Biden administration had its way, far more electronic chips would be made in factories in, say, Texas or Arizona.

They would then be shipped to partner countries, like Costa Rica or Vietnam or Kenya, for final assembly and sent out into the world to run everything from refrigerators to supercomputers.

The US government wants to transform the world’s chip supply chain. It’s a two-pronged approach: lure foreign companies to set up shop in the States, and then find partner countries to handle the final assembly.

The goals are clear: blunt China’s growing influence in the semiconductor industry, reduce supply chain risks, and create jobs on home soil. It’s not just about chips either – they’re aiming to do the same with green tech like EV batteries and solar panels.

The numbers are impressive. Over $395 billion in semiconductor manufacturing investment and $405 billion in green tech and clean power have been attracted to the US in the past three years.

But it’s still going to be tough. East Asia still has the edge in cutting-edge tech, skilled workers, and lower costs. Taiwan alone produces more than 60% of the world’s chips and nearly all of the most advanced ones.

And the US semiconductor industry is facing a potential shortage of up to 90,000 workers in the next few years.

One of the most intriguing parts of this whole endeavour is the countries being brought into the fold. Costa Rica, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Vietnam, and soon Kenya. Not exactly the first places that spring to mind when you think “high-tech manufacturing”.

And if these efforts pay off, the US share of global chip manufacturing could rise from 10% to just 14% by 2032 – according to one report. Not exactly world domination. But it’s a start, I suppose.

TechCrunch°:

Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models.

“Customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly,” the company writes on its official blog. “We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection.”

Cloudflare’s stepping into the AI scraping fray with a new tool to block sneaky bots. The tool uses machine learning (ironically) to spot AI bots trying to masquerade as regular users.

It’s a timely move, given the recent kerfuffle over AI companies like Perplexity° playing fast and loose with web scraping ethics.

AI companies really need to start being more respectful of content creators. Because I can feel the tide turning against them. More and more people and companies who publish on the web are becoming anti-AI.

After the story broke about Perplexity not respecting robots.txt° it felt like loads of people started thinking about how to block AI web crawlers for the first time. Before that they hadn’t even thought about it.

Cloudflare’s tool might help. But the real solution needs to come via the AI industry taking a long, hard look at its data practices and quite simply, not being dicks.

In the grand tradition of web hostility, SoundCloud has made a bold move.

They’ve decided that your time isn’t valuable. That your experience doesn’t matter.

Want to skip ahead 30 seconds in a podcast? Sorry, you’ll need to sign in for that privilege.

It’s essentially a throwback to the days of linear radio. No control. No choice. Just sit there and take it.

How many listeners will try to skip, hit the sign-in wall, and never return? It’s a textbook example of prioritising metrics over user experience.

I get it. They want more sign-ups. They’re chasing those “monthly active user” numbers.

But in the race for engagement they’ve forgotten the most important engagement of all – the one between the listener and the content they love.

If your sign-up growth strategy involves frustrating users, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

FastCompany (Gary Smith):

Today, AI is being increasingly integrated into scientific discovery to accelerate research, helping scientists generate hypotheses, design experiments, gather and interpret large datasets, and write papers. But the reality is that science and AI have little in common and AI is unlikely to make science obsolete. The core of science is theoretical models that anyone can use to make reliable descriptions and predictions.

The core of AI, in contrast, is, as Anderson noted, data mining: ransacking large databases for statistical patterns.

The hype around AI replacing science is getting a bit out of hand. This article does a cracking job of puncturing that bubble a bit.

The core argument is spot on: science is about building theoretical models that anyone can use to make reliable predictions. AI, on the other hand, is just glorified data mining - finding patterns without necessarily understanding why they exist.

It’s not that AI isn’t useful in science - it clearly is. But it’s a tool, not a replacement for the scientific method. The real test is whether AI actually leads to new products and services being developed faster and cheaper. So far, the evidence is pretty thin on the ground.

The most telling quote comes from the CEO of an AI-powered drug company: “People are saying, AI will solve everything. They give you fancy words. We’ll ingest all of this longitudinal data and we’ll do latitudinal analysis. It’s all garbage. It’s just hype.”

AI might be changing the world, but let’s not get carried away. Science isn’t going anywhere.

BBC News:

This year, software firm 37signals will see a profit boost of more than $1m (£790,000) from leaving the cloud.

“To be able to get that with such relatively modest changes to our business is astounding,” says co-owner and chief technology officer, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). “Seeing the bill on a weekly basis really radicalised me.”

37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey, has moved away from cloud services and seen a significant boost to their bottom line as a result.

For 37signals, owning hardware and using a shared data centre has proven substantially cheaper than renting cloud resources. But cost isn’t the only factor at play. DHH also raises concerns about the internet’s resilience when so much of it relies on just three major cloud providers.

This trend isn’t limited to 37signals. The BBC reports that 94% of large US organisations have repatriated some workloads from the cloud in the last three years, claiming issues like security, unexpected costs, and performance problems.

And if you’re a company using a lot of storage and bandwidth the cloud can be incredibly expensive. There’s a reason Netflix and Dropbox use AWS for things like metadata, but use their own servers for large files.

That said, cloud computing obviously isn’t going anywhere. The key takeaway comes from Mark Turner at Pulsant:

“The change leaders in the IT industry are now the people who are not saying cloud first, but are saying cloud when it fits. Five years ago, the change disruptors were cloud first, cloud first, cloud first.”

It seems we’re moving towards a more nuanced approach. The future might not be all-cloud or all on-premises, but a mix of both. A sensible evolution I’d say.

Figma’s had to pull its new AI-powered app design tool after it started churning out clones of Apple’s weather app.

The ‘Make Design’ feature was quickly called out by someone on Twitter, showing the AI’s ‘original’ designs were dead ringers for Apple’s Weather app.

Figma CEO Dylan Field owned up to the blunder:

“Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline.”

It’s another reminder that AI-generated content is always a remix of its training data. But more often than not that ‘remix’ can be really be essentially a copy.

Figma reckons designers need new tools to “explore the option space of possibilities”. Let’s hope those tools can come up with something more original than a weather app that’s already on millions of iPhones.

404 Media has the full story.

Meta’s having a bit of a wobble with its AI labelling. They’ve gone from “Made with AI” to “AI info” after photographers got a bit miffed about their regular photos being tagged as AI-generated. Apparently even basic editing tools were triggering the label.

The new tag’s supposed to be clearer, indicating that an image might have used AI tools in the editing process, rather than implying it’s entirely AI-generated.

But it’s still using the same detection tech, so if you’ve used something like Adobe’s Generative AI Fill, you might still get slapped with the label.

The whole thing’s a bit of a mess, really. We’ve got social networks trying to label AI content to inform users, editing tool makers adding AI features willy-nilly, and photographers caught in the middle doing their best to straddle the line between originality and AI.

It’s a classic case of technology outpacing policy.

TechCrunch has the full story.

Like a lot of bloggers I have a small, but quiet audience. So I’m a fan of using analytics to see who’s visiting my site. It’s a delight to discover the various corners of the globe that have stumbled upon my writings.

However, most analytics tools don’t cater to this niche market. Google Analytics (GA) is the behemoth of tracking – it’s free but overkill, privacy-invading, and has a confusing web interface. Other choices are limited and often expensive, charging £10-£20/month, which isn’t justifiable for many small bloggers like myself.

As a result I simply haven’t used or cared about analytics for many years. The last time I regularly used one was when Mint was still alive.

That’s why I was thrilled to discover Tinylytics. Their free plan offers 1,000 page hits/month, which is perfect for many bloggers. And if you need more, their paid plan is a very reasonable $5/month – a price I’d gladly pay.

And one of the best features is that you can track up to 5 sites on the free plan and unlimited sites on the paid plan. As a web tinkerer with multiple small sites, this is a game-changer for me.

Also I love the page that explains why they offer a free plan, as it pretty much sums up what I’ve been saying:

A lot of analytics software is too expensive. Period. Heck, I just started a small side project or a personal site and I don’t want to shell out $9 - $14 per month just for analytics that looks pretty.
[…]
There are free options from big providers, but guess what… they’re probably using your data to better meet their own needs and most likely advertisers.
[…]
Having a free plan, from someone that deeply cares, and from an individual, not a huge corporate or venture funded company, is the best start you can give yourself without worrying what will happen with your data. It sits on my server, and is backed up hourly to an offsite encrypted backup. That’s it. Oh and you won’t break the bank either. I think that’s a win win.

If you’re a small blogger looking for an affordable, privacy-focused, and user-friendly analytics solution, I highly recommend giving Tinylytics a try.

I used to be a newsletter hater. My email inbox is a wasteland of work, spam and things I don’t care about. It’s not the place I go to when I want to be entertained or delighted. And why would I use email when I have RSS?

For those that don’t know, an RSS ‘feed’ is essentially a plain text version of a blog that an RSS ‘reader’ will then process and nicely display for you. It’s an ad-free, dedicated reading place with no tracking, offline functionality (once synced), and customisable font size, text width, etc.

It’s great. And during the heyday of blogging it was a popular way to read blogs as you didn’t have to visit a site to get new posts. But when Google Reader, the most popular RSS reader, shut down in 2013, it effectively killed off RSS for mainstream users. Its usage has been declining ever since, and blogging declined with it.

Meanwhile social media rose and people shifted from writing on blogs to Twitter. Gone were the days of a chronological list of blog posts, neatly organised in folders, and in its place was an endless feed, organised by opaque algorithms designed to maximise engagement at any cost. It was sad.

So when I started comparing newsletters as an alternative to social media rather than a replacement for RSS I began to see them more fondly – and even root for them. Because to encourage people to consume higher-quality writing and spend less time on social media, there needs to be a good, easy alternative. RSS isn’t it. Email is.

In many ways, email is similar to an RSS reader. Both have read/unread flags, folders/labels, less ads and tracking compared to the web, and customisable font sizes if you’re using an email client.

Then there’s the matter of writers getting paid. For years writers struggled to make money on the web. They could maybe make a bit of money via ads, sponsored posts or membership schemes. But they needed a lot more than 1000 true fans support themselves because there wasn’t a system or a culture for those fans to pay them. Email newsletters solve this problem, as every newsletter platform allows writers to charge subscribers. And with the rise of Substack and paid newsletters in general, people are more accustomed to paying.

Older web users like myself may still pine for the RSS glory days and look down on newsletters and email as a poor alternative. But the fact is they are a practical way for people to read and a viable way for writers to find an audience and get paid for their work.

A simple trick that gives you the minimal Google search results of old — no ads, no ‘People Also Ask’ boxes, just a clean list of links.

You just need to add &udm=14 to the end of your Google search URL.

Though you don’t want to do that manually each time obviously. So in your browser create a ‘custom’ search engine and make it your default.

The URL you need to use is: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

Here’s how to add custom search engines for:

• Chrome. Guide.
• Safari doesn’t let you. But you can just use a launcher like Alfred on your Mac instead.
• Brave. Go to your settings page, add a ‘site search’ and then press the three dots on the right to make it your default.

via Tedium.co