Connor Beaton on the Modern | Wisdom Podcast:

Grief is the Natural Way We Honor What Love Misses

There’s much more to this episode, including the connection between grief and success. Worth a listen.

Modern Wisdom #890 – Connor Beaton – A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings

I noticed that I got a copy of Steven Sinofsky’s latest Hardcore Software Substack post in my inbox, and realized that I hadn’t moved it over to Feedbin. After doing this, I wondered: could I just email myself something at my Feedbin newsletter email address and have it show up in my feed?

Lo and behold, you can indeed. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this, but it’s a cool feature. A didn’t see that it was documented, but I guess the mechanism is the same.

I made an unschedule for today just to build the habit. I should have made one for tomorrow but bed calls.

I took Aaron to the University of Delaware today for a tour. It was cold and still empty from the break. It was my second visit; I took Joe a couple of years ago.

I don’t remember college tours being so cold. I do remember enjoying them though.

We followed up with some hot pot at Kungfu Hot Pot. It was the lunch special and there were two kinds of broth (we settled on spicy sichuan and beef broths. I told the guy, “first time.” He was patient.) We also ordered some kind of spicy Korean beef, pork belly, another kind of beef, and something else. There was an adjoining room with all kinds of grizzly bits and tripe and noodles and fish cakes and there’s too much to mention. Oh veggies too. And sauces. All kinds of sauces.

I had no idea what was going on, save for the idea that things should be dunked in the roiling broth before us.

We tucked in hard.

As I write this, the joint is still open. What sort of boozehoundery must ensue at this late hour?

I got a pound of coffee, too.

Whew it’s kinda late. Here’s this week’s list of things to check out.

Forever Notes

Since diving back into Apple’s Notes app, I’ve wondered about how best to organize the notes. I don’t subscribe as fully to the magic of search as I used to; it’s necessary, for sure, but not sufficient.

I set up Notes using Tiago Forte’s PARA Method and, despite my continuing confusion of what, exactly, goes into the “Areas” folder, it’s working out pretty well. But me being me, I always wonder…

Forever Notes doesn’t suggest much in the way of organization, but focuses more on linking notes and using some characters to enhance your search powers. It reminded me of some of my early uses of TaskPaper as a kind of project anchor document. Hookmark largely obviated the need for this kind of document for me, though. It’s a good way to learn all the goodies in Notes you’re not using.

Half Growlers

This adorable upstart is, as its name suggests, half of a standard wine growler at our favorite local haunt. I neglected to bring our one liter growler to fill up on their Lynx wine, and was about to buy a new one when I spied the halflings on the shelf below. I drink exactly 100 grams of wine with dinner most nights of the week, so 500 ml will be just about right. Started this evening in fact with the sous vide chicken drums and Mac and cheese we had.

ChatGPT tells me that they got the name “growler” from the gurgling sound they made when people sloshed them around in buckets.

The Unschedule

That I’ve been trying to read Neil Fiori’s The Now Habit since I purchased it long enough ago that it’s not even ironic any more. It’s an interesting take on procrastination, but some of the core strategies Fiori recommends are purely behavioral, and in the case of the Unscheduled, cribbed from the practice of BF Skinner himself.
Without getting into it too much, the Unscheduled shows you have to track how you spend your time each day in discreet blocks of time, blocking out commitments and things you have to do (like commuting, making coffee, prepping dinner) and then build in time for things you like to do (reading, writing, socializing, gaming…whatever it is that you do intrinsically). It’s effectively time blocking, but a little less granular.

(For my part, I cannot understand how someone who’s properly using a to-do app to time-block with the surfeit of very short tasks that inevitably populate your system.)
For example, you might pick a project that you’re having a hard time getting started on and block out just one half-hour to work on it with uninterrupted focus. You then track the minutes that you spend doing the project, and reward yourself for completing the 30-minute dash by doing something preferable.
The larger point of all of this is to help you see that you don’t have to work interminably to make progress, and that planning for play will make you more, not less, productive.

OmniOutliner

It inevitably comes to the mind of any good tech nerd that unscheduling begs for the creative application of software. I looked at some PDF templates and set something up in Notes, but I also cobbled together a quick OmniOutliner document that totals up the time logged in a cell. I love using OmniOutliner but don’t often find a good use for it. It sits in a weird space between outliner, notes app, to-do list, planner, and spreadsheet. It’s impossible not to love, a kind of Emacs for Mac nerds . It’s dense and challenging, although this has improved to some degree in this regard over subsequent releases for me (mostly around formatting). I suspect OmniOutliner doesn’t sell in anything close to the volume of OmniFocus, and so might not be as actively developed. But it’s fantastic on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and sync is fast over iCloud.

Back before the holiday, I found myself reviewing OmniFocus and decided to, apropos of nothing, change the name of “Office Christmas Party” to “In the Spirit of the Season.” It occurred to me that I must have read or heard that somewhere and my mind dredged it up from my long-term memory. That’s pretty interesting on its own, cognitively speaking.

It also occurred to me that I might be getting soft and corny now that I’ve turned the page to the age of 50.

But then I woke up on Sunday, on my side of the bed, and looked at the wall next to my warm spot, and saw this:

It’s our wedding invitation, framed, which has been hanging on our wall ever since we got it. It think my mom had it done for us. And it opens, “In the Spirit of the Season.”

Nice.

This a powerful video that echoes a line of thinking that’s currently ascendant around the web. Call it “antifragility,” Stoicism, productive struggle, or not giving a fck. I do like Vivek Murthy’s twist on it, though, in that he highlights relationships as the antidote. The more you look into the productivity literature, the more you read about managing stress and other internal states and cognitions.

Fulfillment is not the lack of hardship and it’s also not lack of stress in your life and I think sometimes we assume that we got to get rid of all stress in order to be happy but when we’re truly rooted in relationships and purpose and service that foundation actually makes us more resilient in the face of stress.

in life there are going to be some stresses and struggles that come our way and the question is can we be in a position where we’re more able to manage them and handle them because we’re not alone…because we have folks around us to support.

Speaking of automation, I used Jason Snell’s excellent tip to make a shortcut to list all of the USB devices connect to my Mac, in plain text.

AppleT6000USBXHCI
Portable SSD T5
AppleT6000USBXHCI
Scarlett Solo USB
AppleT6000USBXHCI
AppleT6000USBXHCI
MagSafe Charging Case (USB-C)
AppleEmbeddedUSBXHCIASMedia3142
USB3 Gen2 Hub
Razer Kiyo Pro
USB2 Hub
Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Cable

Quick Tip: Which USB devices are currently attached?

I’m way late to the home automation game.

My usage is very basic but emblematic of my style

One thing: I can absolutely see where a HomeKit thermostat would come in handy. I did in fact once attempt to replace ours, but it’s an older style of wiring that I’m not messing with.

All of my automations control the two HomePods Mini I have. The first Homepod I bought is in our bedroom; we use it as a white noise machine to replace the din the window air conditioner makes during the summer months. My custom, for years, would be to say, “Hey Siri… play white noise.” And that she would.

And that was pretty much all I did with it.

I decided to get another HomePod mini for my “office,” such as it is, for music and maybe some voice-command action while I worked. I started by automating it to play music when anyone came home, and then pause when they left. It just seems to play most of the time, though, which is fine.

My second automation was a little more specific. I set up the bedroom HomePod to play white noise starting at 10 pm on Monday through Friday, and then switch to music at 6:40 am, which is around when Rhonda and the dogs are rousing. It plays music until 9 am, at which time it pauses. For some reason, I have it resuming music an hour later. Not sure why I did that. I’ll have to update it.

Sad news, but I suppose with four-cylinder turbos being so ubiquitous, this made more sense. Rhonda had one of these that she bought in like 2002 if I remember correctly. It was an Indigo Blue VR6 GTI with leather and some kind of fancy speaker system. It was a blast to drive, powerful and throaty. It was, sadly, plagued with electrical problems, so between that and the difficulty of putting an infant travel system in the back of a hatchback coupe, we traded it in for a more practical grocery getter.

I can only find this picture of the GTI. It was pre-iPhone days, so casual photography was still a more purposeful endeavor than it is today. My favorite part, though, is that you can see my 2000 Toyota MR2 Spyder on the other side of the GTI. Look how tiny! That was a fun car: mid-engine, rear-wheel drive, light, and of course, a drop-top roadster.

Volkswagen Has Ended VR6 Production, Silencing Its Six-Cylinder Song

Tonewood Brewing’s Revolution Coffee Porter

2 Row, dark specialty malts, dash of flaked oats. Cacao Nibs and Coffee from Revolution
Rhonda and I stopped at Tonewood last night after dinner for Joey’s birthday at Fuji (for his 20th 😯 birthday) while the boys shopped the House of Fun, and I got one of these. It was delicious and I’m glad I got to try it. I wanted to last weekend but I tried two other styles instead. Rhonda got the Stratocaster, which was also good.

Humboldt FogGoat Cheese

I can’t believe that I haven’t written about Humboldt Fog here on Uncorrected yet! This soft-ripened goat cheese from Cypress Grove has a brie-like rind and a creamy outer layer, with a more traditional goat cheese center. We get it at Bagliani’s when we go, and when it looks fresh. When it’s looking old, it gets really runny in the brie-like section, and loses some of it structural rigidity. You can tell for sure. It’s worth getting if you like brie and goat cheese. I like it just by itself, but it pairs really nicely with a drizzle of honey.

ChatGPT Integration in iOS

I’ve been using ChatGPT, and before that, Microsoft Copilot, for my chatbot needs. I really really like ChatGPT, but I want the deeper OS integration that would come with a more fulsome Siri… or maybe something else. Whatever it is, I hope it’s a lot like the chat I had Friday on the commute home. I was asking ChatGPT, via the iOS app, some questions, which led to my learning about a CLI for the Mac App Store, mas-cli. (One of my favorite things about using Windows is using Winget instead of their GUI-based store.) I was asking about Honebrew and our “chat” led me to find out about mas-cli. That wouldn’t have happened outside of that chat. I’m pretty excited for Siri to work this way… I just hope that happens. I’ve been waiting for Siri to be more useful for a long time. The integration of the Apple ecosystem is one of the defining experiences of using the platform.