After loosing my Kindle Paperwhite in London a couple of weeks ago I have been a bit lost. I did order another one, but when posts started popping up about a colour Kobo Libra I decided to return it and try something new. Granted I have only had it since Friday, but I am already in love with it.
I will no doubt write a longer post about it later, but there are not many downsides to this new device.
In my work to recreate my 11ty blog on micro.blog I wanted a better search experience for readers, and also myself when searching for posts to link to. Manton did a great job with his search page plugin, so I adapted this to be able to appear on any page.
This plugin for micro.blog will allow you to add a search bar to any page you wish.
Set Up This plugin is available from the micro.
Finally launching with iOS 17.2 Apple’s new journal app immediately received criticism. Whilst some of it was valid, most of this focused on features Apple did not promise. It delivered a very barebones app that gives me the impression it was for nothing more than showing off the new Journaling API. My thoughts are a lot more positive, and I thought I would run through how I use it.
I have been journalling on and off for a while, but only really got serious in January 2023.
The fun little service omg.lol is the new hotness on micro.blog and seems to be seeping out into the wider internet. Not only is it ridiculously cheap for what you get, the developer Adam seems to be making constant updates and offering more and more value for money. For just £5 per year you get access to a landing page for your social media, mastodon instance, email forwarding and my favourite service — statuslog.
I woke to an email about an ancient Shortcuts repo I had stored old backup files in. They were available as a place to save Shortcut files I had written about because the iCloud link sharing can be a bit flaky. They were so old it contained loads of .wflow files and I had forgotten it even existed, but they now need to be signed to work with iOS15.
Of course, I felt no need to update these, but thought it should be pretty simple, so tried to get them updated anyway.
Never one to be left behind, I am continually looking for a way to speed up my theme development. Call it desire to be cutting edge, or near of missing out, whatever it is I love to play around with it. One thing that gets loads of attention is Tailwind CSS, so naturally this was on my list to play around with.
They call it “A utility-first CSS framework” but what it actually means is you can style all of your classes right in the HTML.
Since first trying Ghost, one of the best things about editing my theme is the ability to host on Github. Through a simple integration I can easily edit my theme to make changes from almost anywhere. If you want to do this too, this guide should help you out.
Ghost Integration First set up the Github integration on your Ghost install, this provides you with an API Key that you will need when using Github.
My blog is currently hosted on the excellent micro.blog service. I could go on about why I chose this place to host, but my thoughts are summed up on my post here. It suits me perfectly because I publish everything to one place, from short ‘tweets’ to photos and also all of my writing. Due to this ease of posting I do most of it mobile from iOS with the help of some Shortcuts.
Despite it being a standard feature in many Android phones it took Apple until the iPhone XS to implement a dual sim of sorts. Even then you need to have one as an eSim and that limits the networks that can support it. Thankfully EE were one of the first, so for the last few years I have been using two sims in my iPhone, one for work and one for personal.
As with everything I get invested in I like to go in deep and see what it can really do. One of the easiest ways to start to mould Roam Research to your will and make it unique for your use case is to add in CSS or JS. These are two official supported ways that are easy to implement and can also be removes at your will.
Roam/css You can easily change the look and feel of Roam by tweaking the CSS of the pages.
I am currently experimenting with moving all of my social things to micro.blog. I know I have tried this before (twice) but this time I don’t want it to be my blog I just want a place to hang out and post everything to. This will mainly be an Instagram replacement, posting checkins as most importantly books and films I have watched.
I can’t quite work out Goodreads yet, but by using Letterboxed I can post watched film easily using Micropub.
I would hope that no body starts morning that I am not writing about enough technology lately, but I’m finding it hard to write about anything at all. Never mind getting motivated to write about the very little news going around. I have been spending my time riding my bike when weather allows, but when the bad weather comes I have to take it inside to the virtual playground of Zwift.
So. No apologies here, but I ripped off this idea directly from Matt Birchler’s write-up on his Things set up. Even though he is a strong believer in the ability of Things, and also everyone in the repliesseems to think the Todoist design is trash, I think very much that we have the same outlook on GTD. The basis of this revolves around “offloading your brain” so you can focus on other things.
After switching from recording my cycling on the Apple Watch to a Wahoo Element Bolt my activity levels seemed to suck. After previously smashing my move goals I was left short on some days even after a reasonable ride. Simply because Strava wasn’t calculating my calories and it took me ages to find out why.
After a few days of Googling around and finding all sorts of weird information I eventually discovered a fix.
Updated: Added in non-jQuery code snippet
This problem is a reasonably simple one if you know what you are doing with writing Javascript. Unfortunately, I am not, and this feels like an issue that shouldn’t need some script, but here we are.
After loads of Googling, looking at Github Gist, and trial and error, I finally found a solution to opening new links in a new tab thanks to InsidersByte.
To motivate myself to write more, I’ve been reading more. Not just online posts but magazines and books. Looking to subscriptions service and news aggregators, despite my initial hate – Apple News won me over.
It turns out I didn’t need to use it more; I didn’t need to ‘train the algorithm’, I just needed to turn off the news part! You see, I hate viewing or reading the news – it is that simple.
I still blame Matt Birchler for putting the idea in my head, I was quite happy on WordPress (not completely but pretty happy) and then he comes in and introduces Ghost to me, and I moved within a few days. On first look it seems like a ridiculously expensive option, and more suited to larger companies, but if you don’t want to splash out the $29/per month there are other options.
First off – this is no guarantee, but it should help.
The secret sauce to finding you iPhone after you’ve looked in the obvious places is Apples trusty ‘Find My’ App. Previously called find my iPhone, it will also track your Apple Watch, iPad, Mac’s and even AirPods. To do this is need location access and many people don’t give it enough access to be able to do the best job it can.
For the last few weeks, I have been throwing my life into Agenda, I’ve played around with it previously, but this time it seems to have stuck. I’m one of those people that like to try out an app or service just because people are using it, and this is what I did in 2018 when Agenda won the apple design award. I think I had signed up previously to use it on Mac but didn’t hang around very long.
I’m new to drones, but decided to try one out to get some more interesting video and I’m glad I did. However because it is so new to me I didn’t really want to spend loads of cash on one if I wasn’t going to use it, so I decided to pick up a usedDJI Spark and DJI Spark controller one.
I managed to get a fly more kit with a few extras for a bargain price, but when it turned up I had issues connecting and paring.
Sharing previews are yet another thing missing from WordPress which should really be included by now. It’s dead easy to install a plugin and have it all done for you, but why bother with slowing down your site with needless plugins when you can add a tiny bit of code to your functions file.
//Add Twitter Cards Meta Info function add_twitter_card_info() { global $post; if ( !is_singular()) return; echo ‘’; echo ‘’; echo ‘’; echo ‘’; echo ‘’; //optional: username of website echo ‘’; //optional: username of content creator if(!
In my journey back to WordPress, there are lots of little modifications I need to make the website my own. One of which is the addition of micro and link posts.
I do not like all posts showing in the main RSS feed nor on the main index page of my blog. Many options and guides tell you to install plugins or add in code to your functions to exclude categories to all feeds.
It has only been a few days since Rode updated its Rodecaster Pro to utilise Muti track but it has already proved to be a brilliant upgrade. The ability to output upto 14 tracks simultaneously for post editing is quite frankly a ridiculous feat, but may take a little time to get your head around.
Here’s how to take advantage of the update and record using Audio Hijack – which is my podcast recording software of choice.
After a few days of false information, forum posts that have half truths in them and a couple of telephone calls – I have managed to set up my iPhone XS with dual sims and here is how to do it.
Preparation If you want to go dual sim on your iPhone XS there are a few ways, but one of your sims is going to have to become an eSim.
After exploring other options to sharing on social media and using Micro.blog I’m stuck. There doesn’t seem to be the perfect option out there to fulfil all of my needs so for now I still to my own blog.
Now comes the issues with posting lots of updates and where they need to go. Ultimately there are a few things I want to achieve.
Keeping content mine as much as possible post to other social media platforms not clog up longer blog post streams or RSS Since my blog is already built on Jekyll and hosted on Github I set to work to hit as many of these goals as possible.