2023

Been using Artifact a few days now. It’s mostly just a better curated version of Apple News. AN provides a better reading experience in terms of UI though. I’ve always found AN horrible at curating content I want to see. Artifact does better here by miles.

Signed up for a YouTube TV trial for 2 weeks, and I’ve really only watched one show and one event. Can’t say I miss cable TV at all. Will not be continuing once my trial is up.

The speed with which Ice Cubes development occurs astonishs me. Great app and developer!

I wish I could take my Audible and Kindle books with me to another service to get somewhat less reliant on the Amazon ecosystem.

Anyone using Homebrew on macOS? What are the benefits?

THINGS I DISLIKED ABOUT OBSIDIAN

As an Evernote user I gave Obsidian a heartfelt try over Q4 of 2022. Here’s why I’ve gone back to Evernote as of this week.

What I didn’t like:

  1. Obsidian is too complex. There are plugins on top of plugins to customize Obsidian for pretty much every single use case. I found this getting in the way too often and instead of getting things done, I was spending time learning how to make it work within Obsidian.
  2. While it is nice the plugins are open source and hosted on Github, it is cumbersome to go to each Github repository to learn about the plugin and how to change it to your liking. Obsidian needs better plugin support within the UI itself. This is partially on the plugin developer, but Obsidian should put an emphasis on making this easier.
  3. Adding files - in particular PDFs - to notes just never worked great and looked great when viewing the file. I like other productivity systems/apps handling of PDFs much better.

What I liked:

  1. Markdown support. Markdown makes sense, it is easy to learn, and compatible with more and more apps every day. I know there are ways to make Markdown work natively in Evernote, but I will miss the simplicity of having it work natively in the text editor like it does in Obsidian.
  2. Files sizes are small and storing everything as a .txt file is amazing. This makes it so easy to move your files from one cloud provider to another.
  3. Obsidian is free and has a massive developer community. This is good because there is likely someone who has the same use case as you and created a plugin for it. But for general note taking and Second Brain capturing, I just don’t think Obsidian is for me.

Been utilizing Readwise more and more. It unearthed a fantastic quote from Man’s Search for Meaning, that I had to share. Highly recommend this book.

Today’s Apple announcement implies there is only the Mac Pro left that offers Intel-based configurations. Makes me wonder if they will continue to offer Intel-based for Enterprise customers or not.