Put my recent language podcast on my flip phone. It’s a lot harder to uncontrollably consume media, so trying this out to make it easier to get down and up faster.
4
Just lost all of my Chrome tabs from the past year, extremely frustrating. I am going to try to make some positive out of this, and try closing Chrome every day, and putting important links in my notes from now on.
Really quite pissed that there's no partial saving of current state of the browser without external tools.
4
Current status of desk. I have some TODOs on a notepad I want to deal with. Also keyboard situation for swopping between Windows and Macintosh desktops isn’t ideal.
I did get the area in front of the mon tidy though.
Thinking on what my ideal desk environment is, I want to feel like I’m visiting. When you use a public computer lab, you spread all your documents and peripherals out, and everything is packed up when you’re done for the session. I want to have that relationship with my working area.
3
Took all my recycling that was sitting in the middle of the floor for the past couple of weeks and put them in their place.
It's easy to let stuff spill over, but having to tidy up for the Robo at least helps with that. I think starting tomorrow I might try taking daily phots of my desk status to force myself to do a sweep every day.
2
Testing out a few integrations to give myself notifications for new RSS feed updates. Surprised that there’s not too much out there.
Keyboard Maestro seems to have the ability, but I’m still trying to learn how to put together the right pieces.
Another one, “RSS Bot” on the Mac Application Store, works most of the way, though a bit basic. There’s no filtering or highlighting specific fields.
Might be a fun exercise to build one.
2
In the digital realm, I finally updated my work laptop from Mojave to Big Sur. Things are taking some getting used to, but the jump was made once I saw that my budgeting software was ported o ver through the use of a hack.
There ‘s not too much wowing me so far, but being on the latest is helpful to trying software that uses SwiftUI. Will be fun to try that out on MacOS once I get some time.
7
Installed iOS 14 on my pad, and the global search feature feels just like I’m on a computer. Will be interesting to see how this can be sued.
Also installed Futureland iOS version on my iPad. The UI works really well so far, feels quite native. There does seem to be a small delay when typing on a keyboard though.
1
Have been making it a habit to update my day/week/month/year goals again. I would really like to start my day on this.
One of the SWIFT projects I did was to show a checklist every day, but I think just showing this would be more valuable. That's maybe an idea for a Swift project that I could try knocking out this weekend.
The way I use this TODO list is by having a few broad goals of categories for the year, then supporting that into smaller and smaller layers. Sometimes things get a little blurry, as in specific tasks go into the month file.
Each day, I will mark off tasks as completed/skipped/partial, and then copy the non-completed ones, or delete them if I decide I don't want to do them anymore. It is really helpful to reconsider things when I keep having to copy them every week and see them skipped.
One thing that seems to be an obvious thing, is that if I'm tired, I tend to update this less. That also translates into me starting to copy a same task over and over. That's maybe where making this the only application visible after I'm AFK for a while will help. It'll put be back in context every time I leave the PC.
Today, I also fixed my mosh server so that I could access it on all my computing devices easier. It was a little silly, as I had already written a zsh function to do it, but had forgotten it existed.
Have been thinking of ways I can just keep one desk for work and play and other uses. I don’t know of a good way for a desktop computer Setup to be “multi context” without having To move everything all the time.
Do I need to look into cheaper swivelling arms that can swivel out of the way, and put everything onto those? I could also utilise that pan holder I have so that all input devices can be stashed easily.
One thing I’m looking for is the ability to spread out on my desk and have a bunch of papers onto it. @InternetVin had mentioned recently about printing out articles to read, and I really enjoyed it when I had a full table to use. Now that I don’t, I find it a lot harder to get into that mode.
Another option would be to use temporary tables like a folding table. This could be put away every day, and could be used for laptops, reading, eating.
This is the only closet I have now, even for clothing. I also can’t put too much on top of the heater, as thats probably not a good idea.
I’ve recently started paying for a storage unit and I think it makes daily life a lot simpler. Maybe it’s just a cheap transition until I get less stuff, but right now it’s eased the pain of moving into a smaller place.
Preparing desk for a move. This is my end goal. I really like how this feels. I want to keep it like this in the new place. Having an empty desk makes me feel how sitting down to work in a public space like a cafe or library feels. Spreading out into your workspace is a huge “I’m about to start working” cue for me.
I’m noticing that a lot of the problems I have with organisation is deferring anything that requires a decision until later.
Maybe I need an approach to organising that makes the decisions for me. What would that look like? Maybe some kind of catch-most decision like “put it in its proper home, or off to trash”?
Going to play with that today as I deal with some old organisational debt.
Took me a long time, but I got mosh running on my macintosh computer. There’s a whole bunch of weird caveats on what you would think is a common platform. This sets the groundwork for me being able to get into my TODO system anywhere, as well as a basic environment for coding. It’s not the IDE that I normally use for work, but it has the power of the CLI search utilities and text editor.
I especially like how mosh keeps my tmux session, so I don’t even need to reconnect to that when I open the pad.
Trying to get better at structuring my day, which often gets derailed from lack or poor quality of sleep. OSCAR, a sleep tracking software I've begun using, shows the stats of my XPAP machine. I'm still getting used to it, and unconsciously removed it for 4 hours last night.
This was a television I picked up off the side of the road. I finished diagnosing it’s issues today and was able to install a new firmware to get it going. Normally I’m trying not to pick up new projects all the time, but I’m happy I was able to “open” this loop, and get it closed again. Thanks @alxndr for this phrasing on loops.
Now to get onto other loops I’ve left around and either discard them or get them finished.
2
A task I've been putting off for almost a year is digitising and archiving photos. Today I've started by choosing a set I'll get through. I've mostly put it off to avoid learning a new process, since I had a convenient and cheap lab nearby.
I'm hoping to use this project to document my progress through better cleaning up and finishing tasks.
