🔗 The Algorithmic Diet for Your Mind

I’ve been there, stuffing YouTube junk food into my brain and actual junk food into my mouth at 1 AM, watching some idiot react to another idiot’s reaction to more idiots. And that’s fine, sometimes.

🔗 Shot on iPhone Controversy | Chris Hannah

To think that using an iPhone to film a video suddenly mean a camera dolly isn’t needed, or that an iPhone torch can replace flood lights, is pretty stupid.

This guy gets it!

Despite my outward appearance, I am a massive introvert. I do enjoy socialising sometimes, but I have to refill my battery often and that requires some peace and quiet. Something that is at times really hard to come by in my life. Like everyone, I have to work to earn a living, and then I have a family to look after. So I have to try to grab bits of it as a when I can. There is nothing I enjoy more than reading a good book once everyone has gone to sleep, or getting up really early in the morning and sitting outside with a coffee.

At the minute, I have a strange prickling in my brain. An annoying sensation that starts as soon as I try to grab a moment’s peace. It is as if my mind cannot bear to be alone with its thoughts and as such has to distract itself as it looks to avoid it. This is the point where grabbing peace and maintaining it becomes the most important to me.

To feel my best, I have to force my brain to relax, to be alone with itself even more so than normal. I have written before about my tendency to always want to be on the move, and my failure to give myself enough of a break. Despite knowing this, and seeking a resolution for years, there is no peace in my brain. There are short periods of relief, where I put in some work towards helping myself, but these practices never become habit. There is too much life to cram into my time.

I don’t see a point where I schedule in time to stare at a wall, or detox myself from dopamine. I feel as if I can never attain true internal peace, despite how much I crave it. By accepting this, I would like to tell you that I have some resolution in my life, but alas I do not. No rest for the wicked, nor me.

🔗 Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters — by Craig Mod

social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do.

And then Nottingham for some shopping

One of the big missing parts when iOS 17 launched, at least for me, was Apple’s new journalling app. It’s something that I have been doing for the past few months, and it has proved a real benefit in numerous areas. Although I’m a happy Day One subscriber, having a free stock option is an excellent edition.

It was conspicuous by its absence, and although Apple eventually announced it was coming “later this year” that didn’t really help. The app did not appear in any of the beta cycles nor the public iOS 17.1 release this week, but it is finally available for beta testers on 17.2. You can view the app on the App Store, but not download it without the needed software.

Features

If you’re expecting a fully featured Day One rival, you will be disappointed at the moment. The app is very bare bones with a minimalistic interface. Which does make it straightforward to add an entry and scroll through the entries you have made, which is the whole point of a journal. Remember this is beta software after all.

When tapping the plus action button, you can choose between using AI-generated prompts to fuel your entry or to be greeted with a blank entry waiting for your thoughts. You can add in pictures, locations, and even voice notes, but there is a distinct lack of styling options. There is no way to add in subheadings, quotes, or anything other than basic text.

If you were expecting to be able to treat the Journal app as you would a regular journal and place in all manner of things, currently you will be disappointed. Wherever you decide to add in an image doesn’t matter because they automatically jump to the top of the page and display in a square grid. This simple oversight, which I must stress could be improved as the beta cycle goes on, will put many journal users off. A Reddit thread linking to the app shares similar feeling towards the basic styling, lack of tagging or ability to have multiple journals.

With that said, I think this is a great addition to iOS. Most users stick to using stock apps and if by launching this app Apple can get more people journalling it is worth it. If and when users want more features they can go looking for ‘better’ apps, but the simple titled Journal app is a great, if restrictive, starting point.

I wrote a post yesterday, not a particularly long one, but one that I felt, was important. It discussed the way I make notes from listening to podcasts and the improvements that practices has made to my life. In it were screenshots of the particular podcast in question, and I purposely didn’t publish it because of the creator of that show.

That weird, right. The fact that I do enjoy the podcast, but the host is a bit of a mine field due to his peculiar takes on things. No, it’s not Joe Rogan, but I think he is a typical example of this inability to separate people from the things they create. I don’t usually have an issue, I can watch Harry Potter films but think the views of J. K. Rowling are wrong. I can listen to Kanye West’s music, and still be aware he’s a bit of an idiot.

However, this podcast host has said some things that have directly prodded at my emotional core, so my feelings feel different. I understand now why some people cannot do something I thought was simple and separate the creator because it has directly affected them. This is just a simple podcast, one that I still listen to because it good guests, many of which I haven’t come across anywhere else. So, in many ways I have separated the two things, but I would rather not be associated with their thoughts on some topics.

Much like listeners of Joe Rogan, there’s an association that if you consume the product, then you reflect the thoughts of the creator. There is a fear that others may think less of you, or you may suffer backlash because of these associations, and that is not something worth risking. Perhaps I will just change the screenshots and not worry about it.

I mean, everyone likes my blog posts, but one follow up that I got from publishing how I set up links to cross posting is about the thumbs up. Some people are surprised you can ‘like’ my blog posts straight from the page, and I think it’s really cool too.

Technically, it’s called Kudos, and is the work of awesome developer Vincent Ritter. His analytics platform, the aptly named Tinylytics, includes the ability to add a dopamine boating feedback mechanism right into your blog posts. I’ve made this the simple thumbs up emoji because I’m simple, however others have made it all sorts of things. See Maique blog and the lollipop icon. This achieves the same thing.

Usually, the reserve of social media platforms, it’s actually quite nice to receive the occasional bit of feedback. A little nod to say people have read it and like it, rather than just bouncing off the page. I don’t think it should be the basis of why you publish to your blog, but thanks to Vincent’s work, it really helps. It is simple to set up, and you can try Tinylytics out for free at Tinylytics.app. I’m not affiliated with the service whatsoever, I just think it’s cool and people asked about it.

Patrick Rhone, writing on For You about choosing how to feel:

If you don’t like what you find within, only you can change that. No one can make you happy. No one can make you unhappy. Only you can do that. No one can make you angry. You choose to react angrily. How you feel is a choice that you make.

There’s a tendency to dismiss someone talking about your feelings because “they don’t understand”. More so when a common reaction to depression is often “just cheer up” which is frankly a ridiculous statement. But I do think it is important to realise why you react or feel like you do and examine it closely.

The best tool I have at my disposal when I am having dark times is myself. To ask myself “what reason do you have to feel like this” and a surprising number of times there isn’t one. Even if there are reasons, more often than not some examination of what you are reacting to is enough to bring in some light.

Listen, there is no amount of thinking that can solve mental illness. However, there is a lot of personal responsibility to also bear, and that is typically hard to hear. You control your thoughts, feelings and how you display them. Even when the piggyback guy is around, trust me, it works.

At the end of Robert Rackley brief overview of Matter adding podcasts:

The FAQs for Matter’s new podcast feature are contained in a tweet (or whatever you call posts on X). What happened to actual product documentation? It’s not uncommon these days for software to gain features with little to no documentation that actually explains how to use them.

I was always shocked when companies chose to host their product documents on Medium instead of their website, but this is a new low.

Having your guides and tutorials on a social media platform is bonkers. What happens when Elon decides you are. To log in to view. Or rate limits views. Or just deleted it ‘accidentally’.

The manual on how to use your product, and how you communicate this to your users, should be as valuable as the product itself.