Drop #169 (2023-01-03): Starting Off The New Year Right
My 2023 “Defaults”; Copyright Catharsis; Ten New Year's Resolutions For Editors^WWriters
I spent a non-insignificant part of 2023-01-02 finally re-arranging my iOS home screen for optimal usage. I won't go into those (dreadfully boring and possibly embarrassing) details. However, I thought it might be helpful to drop what my “defaults” are for 2023 in terms of operational environments, then add some actually useful info on things that can save you some time and enhance your comms in 2023.
My 2023 “Defaults”
As noted, thanks to the New England multi-day power outage, we ended up cutting my time with #2.1 a tad short. Since we had very manageable damage to the Maine compound, I spent some time preparing my daily compute environments for optimum configurations (for now) for 2023. Here's what I'm running with on the daily:
I'm still a macOS user, since we will never have a “year of a useful and beautiful Linux desktop” in my lifetime. I run Ventura with:
Homebrew (duh)
zsh
(no official mods b/c they are all skanky resource hogs)Rust, JavaScript, WASM, R, C/C++, Python (in that order)
Everything by Objective-See
Raycast (replaces Spotlight)
Sublime Text (GPU rendering and muscle memory FTW)
VS Code (if you need a link you've been living underground for half a decade)
Ground News (paid) & Semafor (new “news” sources)
Raindrop for bookmarks
Arc — best. browser. ever.
ublock origin extension
Ground News extension
Raindrop.io extension
Language Tool extension
BitWarden extension (w/self-hosted server)
Quartize extension (which I wrote)
Kagi (paid) (b/c it's leagues better and more private than Google)
Spyglass for personal search
Notion for “knowledge graph management” (b/c “$WORK”)
Inoreader for RSS (b/c Feedly owners are greedy SOBs)
Feedle for new blog/content discovery
Observable for all “new” datavis projects
Substack b/c I use them and have enough paid subs for highly useful content
Metaphor (b/c it is often way better than anything else)
ArchiveBox (b/c there are highly active campaigns on the “right” and “left” in the West against archive.org)
Quarto for language-agnostic data-driven content generation
Whoop (I no longer even glance at Apple “Fitness” rings) + Peloton gen 1 bike and creepy weight camera tracker thingy b/c they've actually helped me be healthier and stronger
Duo (iOS) for MFA
Overcast (iOS and Apple Silicon) for podcasts
Metatext for Mastodon
Audible for audiobooks b/c I'm way too invested in that ecosystem and the Apple Watch app no longer sucks
Tailscale for “VPN” and ubiquitous private network access
Ubiquiti kit for network, Wi-Fi and doorbell cam
Ecobee for thermostat and household sensors
Eve for other general cams and automation b/c of EPIC Thread/Matter support
I've likely missed some. Def drop a comment if you have q's about other, specific categories or need legit links to ones I’ve left off.
Copyright Catharsis
Hey! It turns out we don't really have to waste any cycles re-upping copyright notices on content of any kind!
Ten New Year's Resolutions For Editors^WWriters
Steve Padilla (@StevePadilla2) is Column One editor for the Los Angeles Times. He was gracious and sober enough (to be fair, it was December 30th) to drop a Twitter thread on some practical guidance for editors (that all of us writers can also use) going into 2023. I highly recommend using some Twitter thread unroller app to keep a local copy of this around if you generate any content whatsoever in 2023+.

FIN
Since item #2 in this drop was so short, I feel compelled to add this epic post on "brute force colors" to today's drop. ☮
Preslav from Feedle here. Happy new year and best wishes from our small but enthusiastic team ;) Thanks for featuring Feedle on your newsletter! We'll make sure to add you to our index.
It looks like you like and use everything Rusty! Notable missing, Warp?