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Never mind "vibecoding" (whatever it is) - quite a few free, paid or subscription apps can actually be improved for your own purposes by recreating them in a spreadsheet.

Could it actually be significantly lower than $5? Isn't the real benefit not the money, but that the payment creates a bit of friction plus a paper trail tied to an individual?

You could then build a reputation system, much like a spam blocklist, using some sort of hash of the payment details.

Hmm - that's a point. Thanks.

IRL you can actually grab the middle of the plate to move it

Really wouldn't recommend it though, all sorts of consequences for the food (if present), your hand, the hygiene of the plate and potential damage to underlying surfaces. Generally preferable to pick it up and put it down again.

It's not just that I haven't upgraded my Mac, but also I'm actively avoiding buying a new or refurbished one until (if) they fix all this stuff, because there will be no way to downgrade to an earlier version…

Although I don't use iNaturalist that often (because I don't want the hassle of photographing the species I definitely know) I'm always conscious of the fact it has a relatively modern stack (Rails and PostgresSQL) whereas iRecord is still limping along on Drupal (very sub-optimal DB schema and quite a few front-end annoyances due to module limitations).

Firstly, I really liked the way you wrote your blog post.

FWIW, I experimented with dark theme extensions (paid and free) and gave up on them after a while: it just all felt a bit too clunky and unreliable, the flashes of unstyled pages were annoying too.

I've now standardised (this is in Firefox) on a combination of:

- Reader mode

- a very simple extension that allows per-domain custom CSS…

- …and another that lets you disable Javascript completely per site (which adds a bit of security, generally improves the experience, including the side effect of removing cookie popups.)

If this really is attributable to ADHD (and I’m sceptical) perhaps the opposite is those of us with (very mild, undiagnosed) OCD who insist on cleaning our tabs up several times a day?

I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.

What I don’t understand is:

(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”

(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.

c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.

Some Moleskine cahier notebooks are wrapped in a paper sleeve that has a ruler printed on the back. Inches on one edge; centimetres on the other (a slight improvement for non-American users over Field Notes notebooks, with a ruler on the inside back cover that’s inches only - also the sleeve is rather longer, 28cm in fact).

EDIT: hmm, actually the screenshots on Apple.com show a card with a chip, so how come contactless doesn’t work? Deliberately disabled?

—-

Wearing my ecology hat, you could argue if barely any of their customers will use it for contactless, then it’s a waste of resources manufacturing a chip.

(Of course there are plenty of other areas of Apple’s business where they thoroughly undermine this - persuading people to buy wireless in-ear headphones, iPads that have so much glue inside when you ‘replace’ the battery they just give you a new device because it’s too much hassle etc.)

Or… maybe insisting on using Titanium means it’s an PITA adding a chip as well, versus plastic? (At least one of my UK cards claims “made from 100% recycled plastic” now).

(UK reader here too).

You could well be right, though I have a couple of theories why they Apple haven't rolled it out here:

- maybe they think it'll just be too messy, having to market different cashback reward rates and so on for the US and UK, due to the capped interchange fees - too much "it's not fair" style moaning like everyone did about Black Friday, even though we don't even celebrate Thanksgiving here.

- Apple have somewhat de-prioritised UK/Europe generally given their dealings with the EU

- (as others have hinted) most banks simply aren't interested

From the outside it does seem as though there was basically nothing in it for Goldman Sachs, other than perhaps useful spending data (they must surely have got some data, regardless of Apple's privacy claims) and a bit of industry prestige for being the ones to work with Apple?

What's also sad about this is all the e-waste; everything is massively over engineered, loads of unnecessary radio chips, having to build it all to handle pairing, wifi logins, firmware upgrades etc.

Yes.. bought a Miele Complete C3 Auto Comfort Boost getting on for a decade ago. Really nicely designed. The one bit of 'questionable' tech it has is a remote control in the handle for power and controlling the suction level.

However you quickly realise that's logical, as otherwise you'd need a second cable, or to embed it in the tube somehow.

What's less defensible is not duplicating the +/- buttons on the vacuum itself, so if the coin cell battery fails you can only turn it on and off.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in here – e.g. the Polish trains and the ventilators.

Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.)

It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software.

But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly.

I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..

On the one hand, this was a lab based study, so doesn't reflect their diet in the real world.

Let's hope nothing further up the food chain eats crickets in large quantities. You know, like birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, inverts...

As I think I’ve posted previously, they’re one of those companies that have gone to great lengths to made themselves impossible to contact. Try finding a way to get in touch with them. I’ll wait. Except for billing queries, you won’t. Granted, some of the queries will be language questions you might not have the resources to answer, but that’s a consequence of being a language learning site.

Anyway, to me, it’s a big red flag. (For the record I did use Duolingo for over a year as a paid member with a 365 day streak. At which point I stopped.)

TLDR/advertorial halfway through: “But we at Synaptics think that we’ve met those challenges.”

One addiction to watch out for is the desire to read articles about other people's attempts to conquer their phone addiction. They seemed to start about 2-3 years ago - surely we have passed the peak by now?

In my experience you get a degree of dopamine from the inevitable schadenfreude felt reading of the author's difficulty or perceived "failure", but there is a steep law of diminishing returns when it comes to learning anything new, until eventually you realise this and that, even if you are not addicted to your phone, you are almost certainly addicted to something else yourself (e.g. Wordle, some podcast you could almost certainly live without, websites you would be ashamed to admit to using, damaging personal relationships, the spotting or collecting of pretty much any real or virtual object and so on.)

The secret is to (a) tell yourself not to click on the stories in the first place and reward yourself for doing so (b) look but quickly scan them. Also, actually check who wrote the article, so you can decide whether or not you know or care who they are.

My own phone tips are:

- deleting apps (especially anything social but also YouTube and anything that feeds you random content - the advice from another commenter about considering the business model of the app is good) - inserting gaps between apps on your home screen so it's not cluttered (iPhone users: do a search for "Invisible iOS Home Screen icon Template" - it's ridiculous Apple don't let you add blank spaces, but we are (still) where we are) - turning all the badges/counters off - massively pruning notifications - having a mobile browser home screen filled with icons for 'meaningful/useful' favourite sites - using text only news sites (less distracting) - placing the phone face down or across the room - keeping it in silent mode the entire time - putting it in airplane mode at night - books/audiobooks (because more effort's gone into them but also they're longer, so there are far less frequent occasions when you have to decide/browse what to listen to next) - personally I'd also recommend turning screen time etc OFF - on iOS at least you can get a decent enough idea of usage just from looking at the battery page and time limits inevitably never work.

I'm aware if I was truly free of any addictive behaviour myself I'd have skipped writing a comment about it, but I don't comment on this issue that often and the above have genuinely worked for me for quite a long time.

I stopped after a few seconds because I thought will staring at a black circle just give me eye strain (again)?

A lot of people are focusing on the feeds etc, but I think the genius of this is that no-one can start a conversation with anybody else.

How about each time you post it replies with an advertisement? (although that would just increase costs...)

(as a PHP web developer...)

This is interesting, though of course it's only a partial picture: it doesn't talk about database optimisation or caching, and most of web development efficiencies for large sites are from things improving your table indexes, caching or periodically generating frequently consulted output etc.

Also (personal opinion) I think people often over-engineer projects which might sit comfortably on a single box, and of course that contributes to overall energy use.

Finally, this is all for the birds if everyone remains obsessed with mining crypto, training AI models and watching videos when reading a bit of text would do.

Newton, apparently. But it’s subscription. https://newtonhq.com/

An observation: I switched to mainly reading my email in a text client (vi-cmdg, which is a fork of cmdg, a Gmail client that uses the API rather than IMAP - the fork has vim keybindings).

I’m finding I can process email quicker and it’s less stressful than using say Apple Mail, which in turn is always less stressful than the Gmail web client.

I think it might be because: - black and white and effectively dark mode due to my terminal - much less furniture on the screen - not seeing images in the emails (there’s a shortcut to render stuff with a roughly HTML-equivalent line wrap) - its slightly more work to click links (keyboard shortcut which adds numbers next to each link for you to press) but that doesn’t seem to irritate me too much - you get a simple list of attachments - you can write replies in Vim, which I quite like

Interested to hear if anyone else is doing this…

I do a mix of both. Top posting when I’m making a general comment, but if I’m responding to several questions, I pare the original mail back as much as possible and reply underneath each.

My logic is there isn’t any benefit to bottom posting if all you’re doing is making someone scroll.

Also, I refuse to ever use a signature or Out of Office reply.

(Full disclosure: I only use public transport.)

My approximate journey (7,500 notes, 13% markdown, remainder .txt)

(pc, circa 2010) notepad > Evernote > notepad > (mac) > vim > Notational Velocity > NVUltra (still in) beta > "The Archive" (Zettelkasten) > (n)vim

- notes synced with Dropbox folder (could just as well use iCloud) - with vim fzf/telescope plugins for search

What finally flipped me back to vim was using a setup script to give me a useful set of plugins that did nice markdown highlighting out of the box, and then working out how to do things like auto-indenting, opening URLs in browser, renaming files more easily etc.

Slight annoyance: yet to find a way to search both filenames and file contents at the same time

Do systems that link from one note to another help me? Apparently not much. Quite a lot of effort to maintain the links, better to express hierarchy in filenames.

(still using Omnifocus for todo lists, but it can import/export Taskpaper text format)

In the UK we have the “BirdTrack” app, which is run by the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) and also something called iRecord (actually a massive Drupal database…) which covers everything including mammals.

This piece feels almost like an advertorial, and clearly without any sort of hands on review.

Everything I’ve read about attempts to embed a camera in a pair of binoculars suggests previous results have been poor (given the optics are entirely different).

I’m not a binocular expert, but about the only tech feature I can think of in active use is image stabilisation?

I don't particularly want any appliances that connect to the internet, but it would be quite fun to have a washing machine API that reported sensor data like water temperature, weight of load, drum rotation speed during the spin cycle, door lock/unlock status etc.

I guess it might be quite fun to graph that and overlay the graph of the current cycle over an original benchmark - it might indicate when, for example, the heating element was no longer working as efficiently.