Weeknotes 2024 W38: Sequoia letdown

Quick bits:

• I fell sick on Tuesday. That luckily passed quickly, and I’m not sure what happened. Exhaustion could be an answer, as I’ve been experiencing unusually many sleepless nights — and I’m not sure why that is the case either.

• Not a lot of progress on the play I’m writing. I feel like I keep going sideways rather than moving forward. I had to skip the Shut Up & Write this week as I was sick, which didn’t help with progress either.

• I upgraded to macOS Sequoia, and I’m not sure the new version has anything really interesting. iPhone Mirroring would’ve been the most interesting addition, but that feature is not available in Germany. Apple’s excuse of it being because of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) feels like bullshit to me.

• I entirely forgot that I was supposed to plan a birthday picnic. Today is probably the last nice, sunny day of the year. A missed opportunity, alas. (Unless anyone wants to have a last-minute picnic today?)

• Acting class continues, but I’m struggling to keep up my motivation. Why am I doing this? There’s no real place where I can put my learnings into practice in Berlin. What is even the point?

• I found a bug in Google Docs where checking/unchecking one to-do item would also check/uncheck other to-do items. Very annoying.¹¹1 At least for personal use, I have the much more reliable Things 3.  I couldn’t reproduce the bug, unfortunately. Am I dealing with gremlins again?

• I usually keep politics out of my week­notes, but this one’s worth saying: Israel debasing themselves further by using terrorist tactics with civilian casualties is appalling.

Shower thoughts:

• If potatoes in Dutch are called aardappels (lit. “earth apples”) then it stands to reason that apples can be called “air-potatoes” in English.

I’ve started a new isotretinoin treatment once again, in the hope of quelling the acne that’s been plaguing me since, erm, hitting puberty. It never really goes away! Perhaps this time is different?

My dermatologist isn’t covered by my health insurance — I’ve got public health insurance, not private — and so it’s a little expensive. But it is worth the extra cost: finding a dermatologist covered by public health insurance seems nigh impossible in Berlin.

Also, the medication (the isotretinoin) isn’t covered by my health insurance either, so I’m having to pay that entirely out of pocket. Not great, but… I hope it’s worth it.

I really, really want to be acne-free for once.

I use Firefox as my main browser, and I use its Reader mode rather often, but I’ve never been happy with what it looks like.

So I customized the CSS, and I think it looks significantly better:

With a better typeface, font size, line height, and content width, I think I’ll find myself using it even more.

With a new Bear update dropping, I took the opportunity to tweak it to my own needs.

• I created a “Start new week­note” shortcut, which creates a new week­note, with the proper template, and the year and week number pre-filled. I hadn’t really used the macOS Shortcuts app. It’s quite neat!

• I remapped the “Quick Open” menu item from ⌘O to ⌘P. The latter is the key combination for “quick open” that I am more familiar with from code editors like Zed and Visual Studio Code. Remapping Bear’s “Quick Open” to ⌘P means I don’t have to retrain my muscle memory.

  Any keyboard shortcut can be remapped in macOS, which is neat! If you want to do this for yourself, follow these steps: open System Preferences, navigate to Keyboard, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts… button, navigate to App Shortcuts, and click the “+” button. Now you can select an application, a menu title, and a keyboard shortcut to remap to.²²2 The keyboard shortcut remapping functionality is pretty deeply hidden. There are pop-up windows on top of pop-up windows! 

I’m pretty happy with this updated setup. But with my personal lapto being so customized by now, it is no wonder that it takes me ages to set up new laptops — my new work laptop is still mostly using the defaults.

Entertainment:

• I am slowly progressing with Satisfactory.³³3 Satisfactory (Coffee Stain Studios, 2024), published by Coffee Stain Publishing. 

Links:

• The Ruthless Edit (Jim Nielsen)

• It’s Not Just You. Everyone Hates Dating Apps Now. (Fads)

• Größter Obstsalat der Welt kommt aus Berlin (in German): That’s a lot of veggies.

• Former MoviePass CEO admits the $9.95 ‘unlimited’ ticket scheme was fraud (Emma Roth for The Verge)

• I rode the 'worst bike lane in the world': This honestly doesn’t look that bad — but perhaps I’m used to Berlin cycling infrastructure.

News links:

• Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea (bunnie’s blog): Well, that is unsettling.

• Paging The Hague: Israel’s Exploding Electronics Might Be War Crimes (Jonah Valdez for The Intercept)

Tweets and toots:

• Scientists Reveal Their Most Embarrassing Fieldwork Fails (Rusty Bertrand, Jim Jourdane)

Tech links:

• gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website (eva): Yikes.

• Every webpage deserves to be a place (Matt Webb, via Robin Rendle)

• What price? (Jeremy Keith)

• PayPal has a new logo that makes it look just like everything else: Groan.

• Everything’s the same, they say (Jim Nielsen commenting on Baldur Bjarnason’s article): I love this line" “a data-driven mindset encourages the suppression of novelty, because there can be no data for the novel.”