Have avoided paying for Medium thus far. Some of the articles are interesting to me and I’m considering a subscription for the first time.

Installed ngrok and enjoying the simplicity and power of local development.

Currently reading: Die with Zero by Bill Perkins 📚

Finished reading: Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon 📚

Currently reading: Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon 📚

Turned off Stage Manager on my Mac. Tried it for a few months. Not a fan.

Currently reading: Neuromancer by William Gibson 📚

Finished reading: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller 📚

All the benefits of iCloud go out the window when your ‘work’ Mac is required to have a separate account from your own.

Finished reading: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim 📚

Currently reading: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller 📚

Got my vlans all sorted out. That was fun to learn about.

Our electric/gas bill is killing our pocketbook.

  • Jan $447
  • Dec $408
  • Nov $216
  • Oct $186

Configured a workflow… I see a YouTube video I want to keep while on my iPad. Share the link to Transloader running on my Mac. Transloader hands the link off to Downie which saves it to a specific folder. Next up I’m going to have Hazel move the file to my NAS for later viewing.

In my quest to figure out the most efficient way to transition from iCloud Photos to my Synology, I think I have found the solution that will work best for me. PhotoSync.

Extracting myself from the iCloud. Laborious. Trying to get my iCloud storage costs down Today is the last day of my AppleOne subscription.

Fired up MarsEdit once again. I think I shall post with this fantastic tool.

We got 8” of snow last night in Colorado. I spent a fair amount of time shoveling said snow this morning.

Been giving my Synology some love. Replaced the 1GB ram chip with an 8GB chip and now it’s actually usable. Fired up Plex and now I’m listening to my music from the PlexAmp app on my iPhone.

Added my audiogram to the Health app on my iPhone. Enabled my Airpods Pro as hearing aids. It’s interesting. I love my Audicus hearing aids but want to see what this is like as well.

Currently reading: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim 📚

Hookmark and Craft are now on Setapp. More subscriptions I can ditch now.

Going to give Oh My Zsh a go. My preferred terminal on Mac is iTerm2. Looking forward to a fancier environment.

Digging in on Proxmox and having fun learning. I’ve got a Mac Mini and a Lenovo ThinkCentre acting as two of my nodes. Hoping to add another old Mini to the mix.

This was a fun project. Running Linux on my iPad via a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 w.

The execution of PopClip Extension Snippets is brilliant. forum.popclip.app/t/introdu…

I paid $28 to rent Sing 2. Yeah.

Boom

Wordle 203 2/6

⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Ok, I went ahead and finally configured a Pi-hole. Canceled my eero Security+ which I’ve been paying for since 2016. Liking the Pi-hole. I even installed unbound for extra goodness. All running on my little RPI 3+.

Repurposed an old Mac Mini to run EXSi. Installing MX-Linux now. Fun stuff. Thinking I may mainly use this machine to run pfsense.

Protonmail Todo

Meow Wolf

Hi from Humboldt

Free concert in the park. Feels good to be social again.

Finally successful gaining access to BBVA. What a boring, uninspired banking app compared to the clean lines and thoughtful Simple app.

Simple to BBVA transition. Off to a great start. Not.

I now have a reason to use Pinboard again. Integration with Hook. Brilliant.

State of home buying in Colorado. We’ve put bids in on 2 houses for $100K over list price. We were beat by higher offers both times.

Interestingly, to me anyway, as I build out my Johnny Decimal system, the reality is that most of my ‘files’ are simply links to various locations. Very few of my files are traditional files stored in my file system. All the things I need live in disparate systems.

Minus.app is even better with a Luxafor Flag.

One Airpod is in the case. The other is not. Hmph.

My new mantra. Drafts is for note-taking. Craft is for note-making.

By far, my favorite blogging environment was Radio UserLand. Having an outliner open all day, ready to update and post by simply by hitting Save was easier than anything I’ve experienced to date.

I’m kind of obsessed with Minus.app. Took me a bit to wrap my head around but now that I’ve explored and configured it to my liking, I’m optimistic this is going to be a great tool for focus.

Enjoying my new M1 Mac mini. It’s fast.

I must admit. I have no idea how to install this Alfred Bunch thing but I wish I did. Why do people not include installation instructions? github.com/kjaymille…

Tried switching from Things to Sorted but something isn’t working for me with iCloud syncing. Oh well. Back to Things.

Every time I finally pony up for an app, it ends up on Setapp one day later.

Obsidian, you make me happy.

Discovered the Raindrop.io Alfred integration. Alfred workflows always make me happy.

Back to Things 3. I was wooed by OmniFocus but realized it’s overkill for me. Then I was wooed by Todoist, which was great. However, Things is the to-do app for me. It’s nice to be back.

Just realized that my AirPods Pro have wireless charging.

Grabbed Longplay and for the first time in a long time I’m listening to a full album. Feels good.

About to sign up for a smartfile.com account. Seems like a great fit for our needs.

Added an inverter to our travel trailer

can anyone recommend an FTP platform that will auto-delete files after x days?

Onewheel camping

We should get our mobile internet bundle before our upcoming getaway. Hope the AT&T data plan covers the area we will be hanging out at.

My ATEM Mini Pro arrived today. Waited almost 2 months to get it. Super excited. @aaronpk

My daughter discovered this creature in our front yard this morning.

At first I was like… I use FastMail and Sanebox so Hey can bite me. Then I tried it. Now I pay for it. I am a convert.

My new Onewheel XR arrived today. So excited to ride this thing.

i want to like mailmate. it’s so sluggish tho. and i have a rather fast iMac.

This is me tooling around our campground on my Onewheel.

Been using my kids Osmo stand a lot lately. It’s really handy!

Day One’s On this day reminders, I find enjoyable.

Last day of the school year for our kids. Everyone in the family is relieved. Trying to teach our kids has been rather stressful.

Organize audio cables day

I’m turning to TaskPaper yet again. I keep all text in Drafts but nothing beats the outliner in TaskPaper. I was hopeful that the TaskPaper support added to Drafts would suit me but it’s nothing like the real thing.

who are these people that raise their iMacs? i can’t get mine low enough.

Really enjoying this wallpaper I bought on Gumroad.

I love Drafts.

Aye

Aye. Eh. Write. Er.…

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It gets a bit out of control.

Upgraded HoudahSpot. It asked if I wanted to import license info into 1Password. Hell yeah. Thoughtful touch.

I get the sense that something is going to happen on June 22.

Having fun with the family on our rolly things.

The Magic Keyboard For iPad

Works well for me. I like it quite a bit.…

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Prepping for an internal pilot

We are investigating a remote research platform and will conduct an internal pilot on Tuesday. Our initial testing reveals this solution may go a long way towards solving some of our core needs. Also, this is a post originating in MarsEdit. Woot.…

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Watched Step Brothers. Took a nap. Watched a guy cook a steak on YouTube.

Got my Mac Pro 5,1 and am having a good ol’ time tinkering with it. First order of business, added a 3TB drive so that I can install Mojave. It came with a fairly small hard drive so didn’t have enough room to upgrade the OS.

Happy 7th birthday Tatum Sky.

On the cusp of buying a Mac Pro 5,1 from 2010. What am I thinking?

Tatum with her experiment

Archived 13 years of work emails in EagleFiler

Enjoying many aspects of Fantastical 3. The Zoom integration is not one of them. Keeps asking me for my password every so often even though I have entered it correctly.

Created my first Microsoft Logic App. Receives an HTTPS call and deletes an Outlook event.

Reading Take Control of DEVONthink 3 in DEVONthink to Go on my iPad. Decided I prefer DEVONthink over Keep It .

Pointed my new domain, used solely for unique email aliases, to anonaddy.com. Moving all the things now.

Eager to get my Apple Watch wood band. These things are really cool and affordable.

Bought myself a Onewheel Pint.

Thinking about getting a Nest once again now that I know I can integrate it with HomeKit via the Starling Home Hub.

Voodoo Donuts

now more than ever in my new role i can see the value in using Agenda.

We had a lovely time in the Bahamas

Our family is going on our first cruise. Also, first flight for my kiddos. They are so excited. Not sure how they are going to decide who gets the window seat.

So eager for the new Noteplan for Mac to arrive.

Gave up my AnyList subscription when I switched to Grocery and the promise of native Reminders support. Problem is that for whatever reason, my watch won’t reliably save my requests to my Grocery list. Back to AnyList.

Giving Hook an actual trial. Now that I’ve taken some time to understand it and experiment with how to make it work, I’m truly hopeful that this is going to help my workflow quite a bit.

MarsEdit • Setapp. Nice.

Can’t believe there was a school shooting where my kids go to school today. Thankfully my kids are OK. There has been one confirmed death. We are all in shock.

Back to Things. It works best for my brain.

Got burned by Agenda’s Dropbox sync and lost some files. I admit I foolishly turned on Dropbox sync even though it was in Beta so my bad. However, my trust is gone. Moving all my notes elsewhere. Haven’t heard back from their support at all.

Pulled a g sheet into DEVONthink 3 and my head exploded.

It’s my last day in my role as Manager.

Due to Apple yanking OurPact, a parental control iOS app, my kid is now locked out of her iPad. This is fun.

Successfully followed a blog post to put in place a Slack slash command which draws from an Airtable. Glitch for the win.

After reading a Plex blog article about their amazing Tidal integration I decided to give it a go. Sign up, enter CC info… and error on their server.

Really happy Luna Display got this update…

We’ve updated Luna so it will no longer reset your user preferences when you enable mirroring.

Ready for the hunt.

i’m chali 2na

Easter eggs

Got promoted to Director of Innovation & Process Improvement today. So excited! 12+ years at AnswerLab and I’m eager as ever to make change.

Spent the day at Elitch Gardens.

Reading Code Craft and learning a lot. 📚

It’s time.

Cloud. Check.

Successfully setup a Grav install on a Linode server. Couldn’t have done it w/o the instructions.

Parker Moon had 4 teeth pulled. She’s in happy spirits.

Apex trail

Went for a hike with my buddy on the Apex trail.…

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Paid for Airtable Pro

My kids

Jordan Merrick’s Mocktail is amazing. www.jordanmerrick.com/2019/03/m…

Playing around with Grav tonight.

reinstall Luna iOS app. restart mac. all is well again.

luna display will not open on my ipad pro. :(

I’ve been adopting the practice of maintaining a change log in the notes section for my Zaps.

CleanShot 2019 03 25 at 09 00

Boostnote looks like an interesting editor. As if I don’t have enough of those. boostnote.io

My new Squarespace site will be a CV of sorts, focusing on my role as UX Research Manager/Geek. I think it’s an interesting intersection. I plan to post mainly about the geeky projects I work on with a splash of manager realities.

Listening to Blurryface by twenty one pilots once again. it keeps drawing me in.

Started a Squarespace site to host my projects/CV.

using omnioutliner to track a project and i’m remembering how awesome outliners can be.

Been trying to solve a Zapier challenge for the past week and a half. I awoke at 4am with a potential solution, tried it out, and it works! So excited to have finally cracked it.

Escape fail

Learned that one has to wrap the JSON payload with “blocks”: [] when using code generated from the Slack Block Builder.

Been poking around the Slack API. Learned about Postman, which is a handy tool. www.getpostman.com

Stumbled upon my Newton.

Jumped on the yearly micro.blog plan.

Can’t decide.

I wonder why my Sunlit posts do not appear on micro.blog? The odd thing is that it does appear in my feed reader.

Had a great time in Mexico for our annual company summit.

www.answerlab.com

How to Incorporate UX Research into Every Stage of the Design Thinking Process

Milo The Sleeping Unicorn Bulldog

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Pointed my email newsletters back to Stoop. Having them in Feedbin didn’t suit my fancy.

flickr data requested

Scapple is one of my favorite Mac apps.

Surprises me that Manton emails me personally to let me know that my ssl cert is enabled. That can’t possibly scale.

I learn something new about Fiery Feeds every time I launch

The problem with Org mode is that it’s not Markdown.

I’m so going to pi-hole

I want to try BBEdit

sometimes i wish i didn’t have credit cards. they just get me in trouble.

As much as I’m intrigued by tiddlywiki on glitch, I’m going to keep my work related tiddlywiki on my laptop. I feel more secure tiddlywikin’ on my laptop. The open web scares me.

Enrolled in Clear which should help speed things up at the airport. I’m already a TSA-Pre lemming but my wife is not. I’ll do anything to not wait in a line.

surprised that i can only select BBEdit or TextWrangler for ‘Edit With’ editor in MarsEdit. why not let me choose whatever editor i want?

heading to cancun, mexico for 5 days. 3 days for company retreat, 2 days for personal time with my wife. so eager.

realized/acknowledged that micro.blog is where i blog. so, i pointed my domain to micro.blog and that’s that. not sure why i held out so long. micro.blog is perfect for me.

woohoo. ssl for my site now in effect.

bought some fresh duds from gap tonight. hello bomber jacket.

To the person who added TiddlyWiki to Glitch, I salute you. Not so much for the act but for the documentation…

Probably sign in to Glitch I think anonymous projects get like deleted after a while. So.

when will DNS get easy?

Evening with Dad Dance was fun. My kids had a blast.

This is cool. Hover has an easy way to configure Micro.blog for your domain.

To point www.donovanwatts.net to my micro.blog, is this correct for my CNAME record? donovanwatts.micro.blog or should it point to pages.micro.blog?

Spent a few hours trying to get an interactive slack bot up and running with a glitch template. No dice.

TiddlyDesktop for the win.

trying aquamacs

watching uncle dave in order to learn org mode www.youtube.com/watch

dabbling in VS Code Org Mode github.com/vscode-or…

Created another slack slash command. This one searches Box and dishes up a link. Simple and very well received from my teammates.

this org mode for beginners page is helpful orgmode.org/worg/org-…

added the Org Mode manual to Dash. Now we’re talking.

the org mode manual is actually very good. my gripe is that for a total beginner, it is lacking in clarity.

So, eero is out. Can I trust NETGEAR?

Learning Org mode is comedic. The manual is a joke. How about her’e how to start at step zero? Activation chapter is especially funny for the uninitiated.

Exlax. LatEx. Emax. Betamax. Max headroom. ET. All the same to me.

Amazon buys Apple. Crap.

So what’s next. Is Amazon going to buy Casper, my friggin pillow?

Remember when you didn’t know jack fucking shit about Emacs or Org mode? Yeah.

Obviously, the Emacs docs I am reading are not created by Mac/iOS sheeple. Again, not complaining, just sayin’.

OK, so Meta is the Option key on a Mac. Got it. Emacs instructions are challenging.

In Emacs, we formally define a key sequence (or just key) to mean a sequence of keyboard (or mouse) actions and a com- plete key to mean one or more keyboard sequences that invoke acommand

What?

This whole Emacs endeavor is totally foreign to me. Emacs and Org mode documentation do not make it easy. You have to work for it. That’s for sure. Not complaining. Just sayin’. Out of the box apps are easier. I don’t mind.

Learning about Emacs and Org mode from scratch. I’m a babe in the woods. Loving it.

going org mode

Reminds me of that scene from The Shining @jack

awesome @cheri

I find the Micro.blog app to be rather slow.

As I move my email newsletter subs to Feedbin, I’m wondering what happens after I read one? Does it disappear? I kind of like being able to pull up old issues like I normally do in my email app.

So, replying to a post kicks me back to the top of my feed? That’s lame.

I’ve lost ~15 lbs since Jan 2, thank to Keto, a drinking hiatus, and exercise. Tonight, however, I eat pizza, drink beer, and live life!

Made my first Slack bot. /supervisor takes a Slack username, looks it up in BambooHR and returns the person’s title and Supervisor. Geek creds solidified at work.

Um, ok. Forget about stoop. Now that i know that Feedbin can handle my newsletter emails, I’m all in. Thanks @ablaze for making me aware of this feature. It’s awesome.

We went to see art in Denver the other night. Always eager to get a peek behind the scenes like this studio.

Creating a manager training video at work. Busted out my Yeti, Audio Hijack, and ScreenFlow. Fun stuff!

Went to see A Star is Born this morning. Fantastic movie.

Keychron keyboard arrived last night. Initial thoughts not good. Bluetooth not working. Battery not staying charged. Sigh.

Waiting for the delivery person is like watching paint dry.

Wrapping up the day

enabled time machine backups (with quota of course) on my synology.

giving uBar another shot

just imported a tiddler from @jack’s wiki. this tiddlywiki stuff is indeed fun and exciting.

tiddlywinkin’

Often I consider mapping donovanwatts.net to Micro.blog and calling it a day.

If only there were a way to automatically mirror displays upon connecting to my MacBook Pro with the Luna. Alas, doesn’t seem possible based on my hours of research. :(

The Luna Display blows my mind

I’ve tried Blot with Dropbox and then git mode. I think I’ll go back to Dropbox mode. Far less friction.

Command-Shift-P in fman no longer works for me. Hmph.

Snow day today. I don’t have to take the kids anywhere. YES!

i wish touche, the mac app, floated.

Orderd myself a Keychron keyboard www.keychron.com

∞ Additional Application Support in Marked

This is pretty slick. Now that I’m back on nvALT, I needed to figure this out. You can drag an entire folder to the Marked icon and it will open a window which always shows the most recently edited text file in the folder. Marked watches for changes in all files, then looks for the newest text file and displays it. If the file is the same as the last check, then it scrolls to the edit position and works as usual.…

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∞ 7 easy Instant Pot recipes

While these recipes would typically require hours in a slow cooker or Dutch oven, the Instant Pot cooks these up in an hour and a half or less. We use our Instant Pot constantly. Always on the lookout for easy, quick recipes. Butcher Box is a fantastic source for recipes lately. ∞ “7 easy Instant Pot recipes” on Butcher Box…

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∞ Marked 2 gets handy update

Anyway, the latest version of Marked 2 (2.5.30) is available on all channels now (Mac App Store, direct, and Setapp). I’ve been holding off posting about it until the MAS review finished, and I’m pleased to announce that after 3 weeks, it finally has. ∞ “Marked 2 gets handy update” on brettterpstra.com …

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i am thankful for zapier paths

The upcoming clamp down at work has prompted me to remove all the personal things from my work laptop. Quite an adventure. So much intertwined. It’s going to take some getting used to.

OK, Blot is awesome. I ponied up the $20 annual fee.

I really, really want to delete my IG account. The only thing holding me back is that my IG photos integrate with the Gyroscope app. I wish the Gyroscope people would offer an alternative to adding photos.

discovered fman. wow. exactly what the doctor ordered.

Happy fucking new year

Moved all my notes into NotePlan

Ugly Xmas sweater party. Check.

Posting to Micro.blog from MarsEdit. Now we’re talking.

determined to rid myself of a graveyard of todo’s. it’s exhausting. going to purge my things backlog and try living day by day.

i’m late to the party. just discovered grimes and really diggin’ her music.

trying to convert my everything to NotePlan

though i’ve been on the beta of marsedit for years, i ponied up for a license yet again. time to pay. love that app. wanted to start blogging again. this time to slack so my coworkers can follow along.

Ordered a 2nd homepod from B&H for $250. Absolutely loving my homepod.

Zzzzzzz

Fun bday night with Michelle and friends.

Been playing Exploding Kittens with my family. Kids can’t get enough. Neither can I.

Got to have my Pandora. Grabbed Anesidora for my Mac and immediately left a tip. itunes.apple.com/us/app/an…

bought a homepod. selling my sonos. happy with my decision.

As I considered which keyboard to purchase for my iPad, it became clear to me that it was going to be a smart connected (or whatever it is called) keyboard. I am not interested in a dongle. I am not interested in Bluetooth. I like Apple’s keyboard but figured I’d give Logitech a shot.

My week of iPad only was such a success that I decided to buy myself a Logitech keyboard. Going all in.

Last week I worked exclusively from my iPad Pro. There was only one time that I need my Mac… to export a PPT to JPEG, which I’ve never had to do before. Ultimately it seems that 99% of what I need for my job I can do from my iPad. I’m going to keep it up.

Today we celebrate Friendsgiving.

WAT

Learning to Fly

My awesome colleagues

Parker had a wonderful birthday party with lots of friends.

Milo wanted in the wagon

Guess where I’m at

Happy 8th birthday Parker Moon

Digging this. itunes.apple.com

Controlling Farrago via TouchOSC app for some spooky halloween sounds.

PDFpen is now on Setapp. My subscription keeps getting better and better.

i voted

keen to start adding logic to my zaps. thus far they’ve been fairly rudimentary.

There must be a way for me to efficiently move a bunch of sheets from Ulysses to Drafts on my Mac.

So, this post has been stuck at the top of my feed for a few days now.

coming to grips with the fact that very few of my friends share my political views.

There is much cleaning (surface mainly) going on before my wife’s return from a three day getaway with friends. The kids are even pitching in.

reinstalled Group Text+ on iPhone. such a great app for quickly messaging my wife.

Trying this on for size

Tatum Sky likes to color

Parker Moon can’t get enough of the stingrays

Which one looks more crazy?

oh hello Drafts for Mac beta. i’ve been anticipating your arrival.

Kickstand

Snuggle

BFFs

Drafts –> Zapier –> Trello. loving it.

Watts up

Tatum Sky

Parker Moon

Really happy to have discovered Yoink for Mac - Usage Tips

Super excited that BambooHR is now integrated with Zapier.

Milo

Three dogs

Most sour face you can make

Setup my first one-time password in 1Password. I’ll be moving away from Lockdown to 1Password soon.

Cloudflare Registrar Wave 8. I have been happy with Hover but I’m going to switch.

Going minimal

Every receipt I scan into my ScanSnap iX100. It goes automatically into Hubdoc.

Switched to an iPhone X case which doubles as a wallet recently. I think it’s called a Jimmy or something like that. I’m sold. No more wallet for me. Driver license. Debit card.

Two worlds collide. Undebt.it integrates with YNAB. undebt.it/blog/new-…

Bad Daddy’s Bad Ass Margaritas

Me. 2018.

Break dancing angel

David Byrne

www.answerlab.com

Celebrating Women-Led Businesses

Happy with our Rachio sprinkler system. Today’s watering was skipped automatically because my smart sprinkler system knew it is going to rain.

My wife and I came up with a new motto. Don’t do anything stupid.

It’s only 9:14pm yet it feels like 11:48pm.

My kids love to play Toca Hospital.

Installed Ecobee Switch+ and it works! Unfortunately now none of the plugs in my living room work. Sigh. I wish I was handy.

Really happy to see RapidWeaver v8 on Setapp. For some reason when major upgrades happen, I think that might be the end of the road for that app on Setapp.

YNAB just went down.

Whole home energy audit happening now. My energy bills are out of control. Hope they can help figure out what’s going on.

Created a Zap today that attaches a Zoom recording link to a particular Trello card and then moves that card to a new list. In one Zap I’ve made the card more useful and eliminated a manual step from our existing workflow.

Got my Luna and am quite impressed. Easy setup and incredibly fast display.

Double rainbow tonight

Ran the BolderBOULDER 10K today. Last time I ran in a 10K was 30 years ago. Feeling great.

Got tickets to see David Byrne at Red Rocks. Need I say how excited I am about this?

Took our kids to the North Pole, Santa’s Workshop, in CO today. Yes I know it’s late May.

I love Scapple. Helps me process my thoughts better than any other mind mapping tool.

Growing tired of all my Synology woes like Drive, Cloud Sync, and Cloud Station Backup. Oh, and the never ending indexing process. All of these give me some level of grief. I may just route around all that crap and basically go back to using Synology as a huge hard drive.

Reduced my Services menu down to one item. It’s all I ever use.

Path Finder upgraded

Ponied up for Audio Hijack 3. Got it for 25 bones since I had a previous license.

Reconfiguring Synology Cloud Sync from scratch. Fun.

As much as I 💌 my new Shure mic, there’s nothing like tossing my Bose earbuds in and hitting record.

Hello Squirrels

always proud of myself when i google rogue amoeba and i spell it right

Setapp is one of my favoritest things

Part of me wants to blow up my Jekyll blog and go all in on micro.blog as my main blog. No more github and all that. Just good old micro.blog. Would simplify things for sure.

Hazel for the win

Digging Plexamp

got the shure mv88 microphone. love it. wish i didn’t have to remove my iPhone case to use it so i may just use it with my iPad only for now.

Added my music library to Plex and then added Plex to My Sonos. Good times.

Why is it that my Apple Watch can unlock my laptop yet I still have to type in my password all the time for websites, etc?

Finally automated Box folder creation with many sub folders based on a trigger of a new Opportunity in Salesforce. This is going to allow me to dismantle lots of little pieces I had cobbled together which required me to act on the final step. So happy about this. Zapier has been great for so many things like this. ⚡️

Reimagining donovan’s thoughtStream

Signed both of my kids up for the [Kids Obstacle Challenge]. (https://www.kidsobstaclechallenge.com).

Oh, Hi IFCOMPANYNAMEI,!

Excited to watch my kid run in the annual Fun Run at her school this morning.

Lovely Day

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Today’s Walk

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Bought a Slice Planner. Eager to check it out. The 1 star reviews of the app have me concerned but hey, it was only $20. So, if the app sucks as much as the reviewers say then at least I still have a functioning notebook.

Took my five year old to a birthday party at Jungle Quest today. She had no interest in participating in the ‘harness required’ events which left two slides and a cave to enjoy. Maybe next year she’ll be up for it.

TrainAsONE is my 10K AI running coach www.trainasone.com/training-…

This morning’s run.

Why did it take me so long to install the Things 3 PopClip extension? pilotmoon.com/popclip/e…

Threshold Run

Total: 55 min…

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Finally! Using my Bose headset plugged directly into my iPhoneX produced a good quality microcast via Wavelength/Auphonic. I guess this means I should not be using wireless like my Airpods/BeatsX? Bummer.

Today’s Be Healthy Update

Checking in and hoping my audio issues are a thing of the past.…

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It’s rainsnowing today.

I think I’ll try my third Wavelength microcast later on today. This time, rather than using my Airpods or BeatsX, I”ll just speak directly into the iPhone. Perhaps that will produce a better quality result.

After a computer swap, I finally got back up and running with RapidWeaver. What a friggin’ frustrating experience that was to get stacks and foundation pieces back in their proper place.

Entered The BolderBOULDER 10K

Super excited to run this race.…

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I’ve created two microcasts. Each time, I’ve gotten this message from Auphonic… ‘The input file of your Auphonic production has a very low bitrate (25.14kbps)!’ The first time I used my Airpods, this time I used my BeatsX. Should I not be using those for my microphone?

Accomplished My Goal

I met my weight goal after years. Hitting 11k steps per day.…

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Just Walking Around The Neighborhood

The girls were having a good ol’ time on our walk. We came across this cool chalk drawing. Tatum got a piggy back ride from Parker.…

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Trees are showing their colors.

Clay Basket was my first introduction to creating a website. As I surveyed the available options at the time, it was clear that Clay Basket was built on a powerful foundation. Frontier treated me well for years after that.

And now I have a microcast. Thanks @manton!

Let’s Do This Thing

Whereby I find my micro casting purpose.…

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25 MPH winds here today in Littleton, CO.

Excited to learn about iPad Collective – Handpicked apps and accessories for the iPad. by Jordan Merrick.

What good’s a computerized note? - Lou Reed

First They Were Happy.

Then they melted down.…

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2018-03-07

The kids had a blast at Chuck E Cheese.

2018-03-10

Tatum’s party at Jump Street was so
much fun.

Finally found a minimal meditation Apple Watch solution in Still: Meditation tracking for your iPhone and Apple Watch

Making peanut butter cookies out of the blue

Music videos detract

Tried Lire. Not sure it is a fit. My goto is Fiery Feeds and I think I will stick with that.

Was attempting to reconnect my ecobee3 to Homekit. Accidentally deleted my Home from Homekit. No way to recover apparently. Sigh. 🏠

Christmas time. It seems that the box full of wrapping paper trash is her favorite thing.

Vegan chalk bomb. I cracked up during that podcast episode. My wife thinks I’m losing it.

Blue Jeans. The official pant of IndieWebCamp Austin.

Setup our ScanSnap ix100 to scan directly to Hubdoc. My wife did a little happy dance.

For whatever reason, Quadro decided to start working properly again. I shall now carry on with setting up my iPad Dashboard.

soma.fm I listen to daily.

I had no idea that TaskPaper had a Palette Command (or whatever it’s called). That is awesome.

Revised my Pinboard feed so that only links I tag as ‘microblog’ will post here.

Looking into how I might best use TaskPaper and Reminders.

Intrigued by LinkLocker. linklocker.co

Need to get a new magic keyboard so I don’t have to keep swapping batteries all the time.

Been using Parseur to parse emails. Really well done solution. app.parseur.com

Had to ask Zapier for help with my most advanced Zap yet. So close yet so far. Their support rocks.

Been turning to Keyboard Maestro more and more lately. Today I’m working on a macro to quickly delete a Box folder when a particular email arrives.

Reptilicus

The lack of a TransLoader share sheet when I need it most is deflating.

Would like Drafts for Mac.

Would like to be able to post to Micro.blog from Drafts.

In one Pinboard, out the other.

Zapier driven by Alfred is pretty much my holy grail. zapier.com/blog/zapi…

Experimenting with Twist as a Slack alternative. I do believe that Slack is not conducive to focusing on doing great work.

Made my Chuze Fitness barcode my Apple Watch background. Should work, right? The date stamp is persistent but I don’t think that should be an issue. Will find out tomorrow.

Added my Pinboard.

Trying out Spark email client again. Really nice touches throughout like exporting an email to Reminders, beautiful calendar invites, and Prefs syncing across devices.

Figured out how to use Keyboard Maestro’s URL scheme to solve a particular need at work. I’ve been able to reduce a several minute manual chore down to one click on a notification in MacOS.

Trying out GoodTask and loving it. Thanks to SetApp, I already have access to it and am now thinking this may be what I move to from Daylite.

Surprised there is not a Reminders app PopClip extension.

Fantastic benefits coming in December for Eero Plus members.. VPN, 1Password, and anti-malware software.

Popmaker is handy. I created a Box.com search popclip extension. I am going to use this daily I imagine.

Tonight concludes Halloween week for my kids. Any remaining candy gets sent to the elves who will then thank my daughters by pushing their toys to the front of the queue.

Just switched to the Professional plan for Zapier. My most useful tool lately.

Micro.blog set Text size to Large.

Planning to use Brett’s Planter project to help solve for a Box folder template challenge.

The neighborhood pumpkins on Halloween were quite spectacular this year.

Having fun mocking up a client portal. Using RapidWeaver and Foundation for rapid action.

Happy 7th birthday Parker Moon.

Today I need to write a report documenting the findings from my recent UX study. On days like this, I always turn to the Pomodoro technique.

Discovered TextSoap is part of SetApp. I used to turn to this app years ago. Going to come in quite handy.

Off to Skate City for my oldest daughter’s 7th birthday party.

Panobook arrived today. Pretty nice piece of work. Going to be handy having a pad of good old fashioned paper at my fingertips.

My daughters made a leprechaun trap. ‘It is fine if you take the candy even no you are small!’

Tinkering with netlify. I want to expand my Jekyll plugin options and learn about continuous deployment.

Poking around regex for the first time. I finally have a clear need. It’s fascinating learning this stuff.

I wonder when Daylite triggers will be available for us Zapier users? I’d like tasks I complete to push to I Done This.

Playing music on my Sonos from our Echo. This is fantastic.

Now sharing my iCloud storage plan with my family. That will save us $2.99/month.

Can’t grasp how Apple can be so privacy minded yet allow Uber to grab screenshots of your iPhone even when it is not the active app.

Switched from Path Finder to ForkLift for 6 months or so. Worked well enough for my needs but I’m going back. Partly because I’m just familiar with Path Finder.

Picked up a used freezer for our garage. We sold ours when we moved to Colorado and have missed that luxury. My wife is baking again so now she is a happy baker.

I have a hard time comprehending how drastic the change has been with iOS 11 and this 10” iPad Pro compared to iOS 10. It is incredible. I feel like a magician as my digits slide about on the screen. Drag and drop, the dock, the way split view now works are some of my favorites.

Pretty sure I am not going to get my refund from Mellow. They said no problem but have since not refunded me nor responded to me. It has been weeks.

I love Scapple. Restriction-free mind mapping.

Going to try Mailgun yet again. Goal is to take an auto-generated email that gets sent upon status field change in Salesforce to ‘Completed.’ Need to parse select info and post the result to a Slack channel.

The Moves app has stopped working again. Time to move on I guess. Unfortunate since it is the preferred location integration for Gyroscope.

Looking forward to putting an hour or so into learning more of a course I’m currently taking.

My kiddos standing next to a huge mobile phone. mobile phone girls

Was presented with the opportunity to lead several exciting initiatives at work. My mind is racing. These are right up my alley.

Now that I know how to create hooks that allow me to control Zaps from Alfred, my mind won’t stop thinking of new ways to get all the things done. Next I’m going to make it so that I can post to my Slack channel from Alfred.

I want to see a documentary about Ken Burns

Listening to Dusk by The The this evening. ‘True Hapiness this way Lies’

Mapping out a report I’m writing. Using iThoughts on my iPad and it is wonderful.

Created a five step Zap this morning. My Zaps are getting more complex and powerful.

Company assigned MacBook Pro crapping out on me. Will be taking a trip to an Apple town hall soon.

8th UX Research session coming up. There have been clear trends.

Went fly fishing on the South Platte today.

Spent some time today creating some Zaps that are going to really help me get some things done more efficiently.

Enabled Two-Factor Authentication on yet another service.

Just sold strangeways.com, the first domain I ever registered. Was hanging on to it for sentimental reasons. Which is weird. Show me the $$!

Oh boy. That was not good.

Animojis are kind of crazy amazing

Spider man movie looks really lame

iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X iPhone X

Here we go….

Created a Zap that allows me to add a contact to Salesforce from my Mac using Alfred. I’m tickled. I have to do this often enough that this is going to be an easy, efficient way to get ‘er done.

Selling some Airport Extremes/Expresses to Mac Me An Offer. Figuring out serial numbers has thus far been the most challenging part.

Should I go for it?

Zero

When I add microposts to my Jekyll blog, I don’t want a ‘Read more’ link since the entire post is usually the same thing. This site has a solution to my Jekyll excerpt issue.

Intrigued by the lofree keyboard.

Thinking about getting Alfred for Mac now that I know Alfred integrates with Zapier. LaunchBar has been my goto for years but the ability to control Zaps from my Mac is too enticing.

Of course micro.blog supports split view. Loving it.

Seems odd that I cannot link to an album on Apple Music. I must be missing something. Anyhow, listening to Funeral by Arcade Fire and can’t stop. Been hooked for years.

Micro.blog on a 10” iPad Pro exhibits a glitch on the right hand side. Force quitting seems to help but it comes back.

Yeah.. definitely want a Micro.blog share sheet extension. Sure, I can and likely will whip up a Workflow but like I said.. I definitely want a Micro.blog share sheet extension (or whatever the hell that is called).

Slowly following more people on Micro.blog. My timeline is getting interesting!

Thanks to Ulysses X-Callback-Support I can open a particular sheet quickly on my iOS devices. Is this same type of thing not available for the Mac? Really want to open a particular sheet but no idea how to get a link to it.

Switched to Synology Cloud Sync for my Box connection and it’s working well. I prefer not to have Box Sync running on my Mac.

Waffling on where to post micro posts. I can post directly to Micro.blog or I can post to my Jekyll blog and have it pushed to my Micro.blog site. Any best practices here?

Github Pages hosts my blog, Donovan’s Brain. Today I decided to install Jekyll locally to close the loop. Wasn’t too painful.

Github Pages hosts my blog, Donovan’s Brain. Today I decided to install Jekyll locally to close the loop. Wasn’t too painful.

Turned off Activity notifications on my watch. I am eager to escape the daily reminders.

Trying out TodayPoster.

Not happy with Hyper Backup to Amazon Drive. Switching to Arq –> B2. Didn’t want to have to mount the Synology to the Mac but I think I’ll be happier with this setup.

Thank you @manton

happy friday!

Though I’ve been a Ulysses user for a while now, I still felt compelled to sign up for the Learn Ulysses course from @thesweetsetup. Check it out at thesweetsetup.com/ulysses.

Follow someone on Micro.blog or subscribe to their Micro.blog feed and read their posts in my feed reader? I can’t decide.

Transloader by Matthias Gansrigler solves my need to download things to my Mac from my iOS devices. I try alternative approaches from time to time. Always comes back to Transloader.

Watched a documentary on Voyager spacecrafts on PBS. Thoroughly enjoyed it. They’ve been cruising through space almost my entire life. Glad I finally learned a few things about how special both spacecraft are.

Redesigning the company employee portal. Quite pleased with it. Looking forward to pushing it live soon.

Took me kids for a rock climbing introductory class. My oldest went way higher than we expected.

Created a custom page on my microblog.

My colleague wrote ‘5 Customer Journey Improvements Increase Bank Customer Loyalty’ [http://www.answerlab.com/insights/5-customer-journey-improvements-increase-bank-customer-loyalty]

That was fantastic. The genuine excitement Casey displays is fun to watch. Also, impressive how much footage he got in such a short amount of time.

I just backed Luna Display on @Kickstarter kck.st/2wARSOz

Interested in the freshly announced Zapier for Alfred integration. I use LaunchBar. Hopefully that’ll support one day as well.

We went to the fair. Also, testing out posting an image from MarsEdit.

Kids and goat

Been going to the gym with my wife Mon-Fri for a while now. Feels fantastic to be focusing on our health on a daily basis.

99% done with backup from my Synology to Amazon Drive. Encrypted, of course. That took a while.

Wired up MarsEdit. Testing, one, two, three.

Finally mapped a sub-domain to my micro.blog. That feels better. Next I will likely push to github pages for a backup.

Today was the day. The eclipse from our vantage point in CO was pretty good. Partial but good. Clear skies for the most part.

My daughter Parker Moon having fun at the CO state fair.

Is it Feed Wrangler or FeedWrangler

It’s snowing.

Feels good to be able to discover people now.

OK, just closed my DreamHost account. No more WordPress for me. I don’t need a WordPress site. I just need Github Pages. I feel lighter already.

Actually, it was after using OPML Editor, not Radio UserLand. My blog was located at dwatts.opml.org or something like that. One day it came time for Dave to move on and all my posts disappeared into the ether.

It’s fantastic that Manton offer up micro.blog to those who want it. I’m just experimenting though and will soon move over to my new Jekyll site with my own domain. I vowed never again to use someone else’s domain for my posts after using Radio UserLand.

I stopped subscribing to scripting.com a long time ago. However, I do pop in from time to time to see what Dave is up to. I see Electric River is happening. May have to check that out. http://scripting.com/2017/03/28/comingSoonElectricRiver.html

Proud to work for AnswerLab, a company that helps employees with infertility. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/293205

Spent just under an hour and five phone calls to cancel my trip due to waking up sick. Took a good bit of effort but I got the job done.

Though I’ve committed to a Github Pages/Jekyll blog, I thought I’d try out a pure Micro.blog account to start.