One page. Mail and Messages out of the dock.

Definitely a Bourbon kind of day.

I think the time has come for my „Weekly” posts. While doing those posts, the number of my drafts for real blog posts grew quickly. I wanted to merge everything in the „Weekly” format but I wasn’t really satisfied with it. That‘s why I‘m shifting to full, single topic posts again.

Ok bye.

Lagkagehuset. Pizzeria Cavallino. California Kitchen. Christiania. København.

Concert in Berlin

Wow, I guess it‘s a 14-day cycle now. That‘s not the plan moving forward, just a coincidence.

Jaguar

I mentioned before that I‘m a huge car fan. This past weekend I booked a VW Golf type of car from Sixt and upgraded to a Jaguar XE. I was hyped to get in the car and drive. In my head, Jaguar was one of the super luxurious brands. The experience itself was rather disappointing. The car did not feel that sporty, the interior quality and the computer system also had nothing special to it. If the temperature dropped below 0 degrees Celsius, it would take a few minutes until the car decides to start it‘s engine, because some sensors where frozen. I think in hindsight I would have even preferred the new Opel Insignia, I drove a few months ago. Or of course a Golf GTI, or really any other car in the same category. I get it, with a car like the XE, Jaguar is appealing to a way bigger audience. It‘s competing against BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. But the brand gets devalued as well. I will no longer be super curious when I see a Jaguar drive by. I think this is a good example why Apple should not compete in the sub 300€ phone market or with the 50€ Ladys-in-a-tube.

Plainy

My plain-text editor library App for the Mac, Plainy, is still in development. I still use it many times a day and so far it works just for me. Over the last weeks, the public development was rather slow, as I was working to integrate a whole new syntax-highlighting system. I extracted the logic out of the super great open source text editor Cot and integrated it in Plainy using a git submodule. The highlighting is fast and already works for many file types. A UI, settings and some tweaks and improvements regarding Markdown will come!

Until the next, I’m not giving a date here. 🤐

It was a matter of time: Last week was the first Weekly I skipped since I started this series of posts. I don‘t feel bad about, it‘s just how it is.

Work cycles

I noticed my task management, file management and general productivity in my spare time comes in cycles. There are months where I‘m on to the top of Things, publish posts and write code without trying hard. Then there are the low cycles. I‘m in such a cycle right now. I think this was also the reason for the not published Weekly last week. But this must not be an excuse to slack off and just play video games in my spare time. In these low cycles, I heavily rely on my task management system, even though I have no interest in opening it by myself. It needs to push me to do the required tasks. It must not fail in such a cycle. After a few days or weeks, I can be certain that another productivity cycle will hit me. During this time I will prepare my system to be able to handle another low cycle without failing. I will work through my doc inbox in DevonThink and a work on all my projects again. It‘s easy to fault the task management system for such a low time, but for me, this happens independently from the Apps. It‘s just important to be aware of the way you work and plan accordingly.

Running

Today was the first time of the year I went running. I was never good at it, but every time I tried, I really enjoyed it. I hope I will form a habit to go running at least 3 times a week.

Until next week, maybe. 🦊

The latest Apple rumors indicate that the launch of the HomePod is coming closer. Over the time span from the announcement at WWDC 2017 until now, I completely lost interest in this product. This feeling is not only toward the HomePod itself but all tubular speaker voice assistants. I consider myself an early adopter but this product category is just not for me.

Trackpad

I had to switch my working setup again, as a light daily wrist pain emerged every evening. To prevent this in the past, I regularly switched back and forth from using the MacBook keyboard and trackpad to extended keyboard and a Logitech mouse. This no longer did the trick and I introduced a third variation to the mix.: the Magic Keyboard and the Apple Trackpad. So far I really like this setup as it further reduces the movement my wrists have to make. The pain vanished almost from one day to the other!

Decluttering

This weekend we assembled our new wardrobe. I used this opportunity to further declutter and get rid of loads of stuff. I constantly try to get rid of no longer needed belongings but I always hesitated to get rid of one unnecessary type of things: Old tech product boxes. This changed this weekended and I kicked out many old boxes for things I’m not planning to sell: Boxes for headphones, Apple Watch, wireless router… This felt good and made some space in our cupboard!

🤖

No real Weekly post this week. It was a pretty busy working week. More importantly, I spent every free minute continuing the work on Plainy. I noticed that having a solid syntax highlighting is very important to me, so that feature got my main focus this week. There are many great open source project out there that solve this issue to 90% and I’m now working on modifying one project to fit my needs exactly. Those changes are not public yet as it’s still far from finished, but my cutting-edge build already has syntax highlighting for almost all popular languages. It feels great to be really excited about a personal project, especially when it’s open source.

🖖

The first full week of the new year is already over. It’s just a reminder that within the blink of an eye it will be Christmas again and 2018 passed.

micro.blog

It felt like there was a lot of activity on micro.blog this week. The reason for this might have been the combination of the now opened up registrations and the major fuckups happening on Twitter in regards to certain CEOs and world leaders. Nevertheless, it’s great! I’m also testing now an already good looking 3rd party iOS client. Please everyone, let 2018 be the year of a comeback of the open web. The year of desktop Linux can wait another year.

Upgrading ram on my Mac Mini.

This week was the first time I opened my 2012 Mac Mini to upgrade the ram. I replaced a 2gb bar with a cheap 8gb one I bought online. I know, in a perfect world you are supposed to have the same type of ram in all the slots but so far the machine is totally fine. I might replace the other smaller one with also an 8gb one if there is no new Mac Mini after WWDC. The upgrade process itself was glorious. Unplugging the machine took longer than opening it and replacing the ram. User-upgradable hardware still is very nice, even in 2018.

The Echo Friendly

Thanks to Apple Music I discovered the indie rock band The Echo Friendly this week. I listened to their 2017 album countless times this week. These days I don’t discover a lot of indie bands I really enjoy so this is a great exception!

Until then!

It‘s the second day of 2018 and the perfect opportunity to look back at the products that stood out to me in the past year.

Apps

Things

In the middle of 2017, I switched my complete ToDo-System from OmniFocus to Things. Before Things 3, switching Apps happened almost monthly. Since then I did not even consider switching to a different system again. The UI/UX is beautiful and the whole idea to focus on „Today“ works perfectly for me. I never feel any sense of dread or panic when looking at my todo list.

DEVONthink

With DEVONthink, I finally found a way to manage and sync all my private documents and files across devices and platforms. I was no longer happy to store my most sensitive data on cloud providers like Dropbox. Now everything is managed and distributed by my Mac Mini and DEVONthink.

Apollo

I already wrote about the Reddit client Apollo. It‘s still great and I use it every day.

Hardware

iPhone X

I love my iPhone X. The hardware feels so great, I still notice it every day. After one month of use I can‘t really think of any major problem…yes yes the control center gesture is still bad, but this will be easily fixed in the next iOS version, I hope.

AirPods

Technically not a 2017 product, but I got my AirPods in April this year. They are so convenient, the thought alone of using plain old wired EarPods while walking around drives me insane. No cable cluttered, no longer yanking out one EarPod because the cable got stuck somewhere. I use them almost exclusively for listening to podcasts while walking around outside or in my apartment. For this use case, the not completely mind-blowing sound quality is not an issue.

Mac mini 2012

Almost the opposite of a 2017 product but I have to mention my Mac Mini. Almost every day I find another use case for it. It really is now the center of my digital life. It’s almost like the 2001 digital hub story all over again.

Web

Micro.blog

I love the idea behind this service. A Twitter-like stream of micro-blog posts but where the content actually belongs to the user and not the closed-off social networks. At the moment the community is still too small and not diverse enough but I hope this will change in 2018.

Backblaze B2

I was using the now deprecated Amazon Drive Unlimited storage with Arq to backup all my machines. I forgot the rule, that if something is too good to be true, it’s probably a scam or will fade away soon. Amazon Drive Unlimited was an offer too good to be true, unlimited online storage for 70€ a year, and it faded it away. As an alternative, I switched my Arq backend to Backblaze B2. It’s a good deal compared to other bucket like storages out there and very reliable. Backblaze knows how to handle large amounts of data!

Lifestyle

PinqPonq Cubik Medium

I never leave the apartment with my backpack and this year I discovered this nice brand called PinqPonq. I bought the Cubik Medium, it’s reasonably small backpack but a 15” MacBook Pro 2017, an iPad, Kindle and a lot of cables fit inside in a very structured way. If my would break down now, I would immediately order a new one.

Bellroy Micro Sleeve

It’s a nice super slim wallet. Same argument as for the backpack: If I would lose it or break it now, I would already have placed an Amazon order.

I intentionally didn’t include any links. No affiliation or anything!

It‘s the last day of the year. The year ending on a Sunday and therefore the next year starting on a Monday gives me an unexplainable joy. I‘m not a huge party animal, especially not on New Year’s Eve, so going for a nice dinner and some drinks at home sound perfect to me.

Hello Jekyll my old friend

I moved this site back to Jekyll. Kirby is a great and slim CMS but I was only editing the plain txt files in markdown so it literally gave me no upsides. I quickly imported the Kirby posts, fired off my deploy script and here we are again. I‘m still very happy with my Wordpress instance running on micro.hartl.co. Posting from inside the Micro.blog.app is just too convenient.

Mac Mini

I can‘t emphasize enough how much I enjoy having a Mac Mini running as a server. I now moved even more folders full of notes to private git repos on the Mac Mini. I can access all the files and folders with git clients on the iPhone as well. If conflicts emerge, I can just resolve them fully transparent with git. My MacBook Pro and iPhone almost feel like terminal windows now. The true data always is sent to the Mac Mini. Local and online backups are automatically created constantly. If Apple would release a new Mac Mini tomorrow, chances are high I would order a pretty maxed out model.

Plainy

I‘m currently working on a post explaining why I‘m building a plain-text editor for macOS. I realized that it should also come to iOS. I didn’t‘ even create the new project/target yet but I have some basic ideas in my mind. Can‘t wait to continue working on it.

Be safe tonight and have a great 2018.

It‘s Christmas. I‘m not religious but I still enjoy those holidays. Time to visit the family and eat a lot.

Rental cars

This time of the year also means a lot of driving. I love cars but it makes no sense for myself to own on in Berlin. Every time I need a car for a few days, I rent one from Sixt. It‘s like a small fun lottery, as you don‘t know what actual car you will get in the end. You just book a category from a big range of different car types. What car you will get in the end is not only determined by the chosen category but also availability, the salesperson behind the counter, if you are a regular customer… So far I was happy with every single car I got!

Music

I fell into a London Grammar hole again this week. Their debut album is still my favorite but I listened to everything London Grammar this week.

RSS

This week I discovered the RSS reader lire for myself. It feels and behaves like a true iOS App and has a few very unique features like offline readability caching. I like it a lot. Also, Brent Simmons is building another RSS reader for the Mac. Evergreen. I can‘t wait to use it when the Feedbin sync feature is finished.

Happy holidays.

It‘s getting clearer that busy weeks for me will correlate to shorter Weeklys…and this week was busy!

Star Wars

Even though this week was exhausting, I managed to watch the new Star Wars movie two times this week. At 12 in the opening night and yesterday evening. I‘m still not sure how to feel about but I‘m looking forward to seeing it again, so that‘s a good sign at least. Star Wars and Christmas are merging more and more in my recent memory and that‘s a great thing. I hope it will continue for quite a while to have a new space opera a few days before the holidays. If you like to hear more about Star Wars, check out the latest The Incomparable episode.

iMac Pro

The new iMac Pro looks really good. I can‘t wait to see the black finish in a store. It‘s too bad that this device makes absolutely no sense for me to buy… or maybe not, at least I save thousands of Euros.

Wrap-Up

I‘m trying to compile a „Top“ list for this year. It will include movies, music, tech, games and, podcasts. It gets clearer to me that 2017 was a good year, at least for those categories.

😶

It‘s company Christmas party time. This means, dressing up a little and drinking while it‘s cold outside. Everything could be worse. We even spent this evening at a traditional German Christmas market when it started snowing. Berlin in the winter also has its upsides.

iPhone X

Finally! I got my iPhone X. I played with this phone a couple of times before, but now I have one for all for myself. The build quality feels amazing again. My Jetblack iPhone 7 felt great, but this X handles like it‘s made out of one block. I love it. So far there is not a single aspect I don‘t like. We don‘t talk about the control center placement here.

Bitcoin

I remember back in 2011 when I first heard of Bitcoin. I liked the idea of an open and distributed currency for the internet. I installed the main Bitcoin App and even mined for a few days. After a while, I lost interest, didn’t want to be involved in trading and deleted everything. I was sure there is no future in it. And here we are in 2017…I‘m still not sure what to think about it. The environmental impacts are significant but still, the idea of a hard to regulate currency is still intriguing.

Music - Warpaint

I listened to Warpaint almost exclusively this work. It works really well for me as background music. It’s comforting and relaxing.

Until next week!