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”

Photo by Rima Kruciene on Unsplash

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)

• Wezterm

• Starship

• 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

• Pivotal, Carrot, and F5 for weather tracking

• 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

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

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

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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+.

Steve Padilla @StevePadilla2

As promised, here are Ten New Year’s Resolutions for Editors. They're resolutions you really can keep. Resolution for Editors No. 1: To read every word of a draft before making changes. (Yes, this is hard. But if time permits, a good practice.)

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. ☮