I never thought I would be the type to keep a personal diary, but I've been wrestling with a big decision lately and decided to give it a try.
There is a nice free and open source app called Mini Diary that is perfect for beginners like me.
I like that it has a calendar on the side so you can keep track of your diary entries in chronological order.
It also has a search, a few formatting controls, and a word count. And I like that it has password protection.
I'm OK with writing about things — like this app recommendation — that other people could conceivably be interested in, and publishing them on this blog. But the personal stuff needs to stay private.
So far it's been going well. I've done three entries and feel confident that I will write more.
This reminds me of a Netflix series called about the death of a young woman from Vancouver at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Much of it was devoted to voice-overs and screenshots from the woman's Tumblr account. She was open with her feelings, and those thoughts live on as a testimony to her life.
That's not me, though. That stuff stays locked up in Mini Diary.
Sometimes there's a weird disconnect on the Mac App Store — in the section called Apps and Games We Love Right Now.
Let's deconstruct this a bit.
First the "love" part. According to Wikipedia, "mostly commonly, love refers to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment."
To say that you love something is about the highest praise you can give it.
Then there's the "right now" part. I take this to be a way of amplifying the love — that it transcends all other considerations.
Finally, there is the "we". I have a vision of Apple employees making these choices, but that's probably naive. There's no way employees are being trusted to make independent choices without corporate approval. These apps have the Apple seal of approval.
All in all, it's a bunch of marketing bafflegab, but I'm sure most people would agree that the message is that these apps come highly recommended by Apple.
So it's only natural to check them out. After all, Apple, it would appear, has gone through the thousands of apps in the app store and chosen a few of the most outstanding.
The first one I looked was DaVinci Resolve, a video editing program. Maybe this was just coincidentally a bad choice, but it felt like I had entered an alternative reality.
The app has 19 ratings for an average of 3.2 out of 5 — kind of mediocre. And it's a generous 3.2, given the stream of complaints in the written reviews.
"I uninstalled and reinstalled and it still will not load"
"When i try an add things to a project it does not work please fix this"
And these complaints go back three years! In other words, this app suffers from major issues and the developer has apparently not fixed or even acknowledged them.
How, then, did Apple come to love DaVinci Resolve right now? Did Apple employees seriously look at the reviews and decide they loved this app anyway?
A new version came out about a week ago. Did it solve the problems? There is no mention that they even existed.
The most generous thing I can think of to say is that DaVinci Resolve is free, so just download it. Who knows? Maybe you'll get lucky and it will work for you.
I've used pencil and paper to keep track of my habits, and was doing well for a few months. Then came December.
First, I put off printing a new sheet at the beginning of the month, as is required with this method. Then I thought I would just sort-of remember my habits — they were habits, after all.
By the end of December, most of my habits were in disarray. In fact, there was one I couldn't even remember.
So once again, I checked out some apps. There are some really nice ones, but almost all of them want you to register, subscribe or both. I will do neither.
Which leads me to Streaks — you buy it for $7 (price varies by country) and it's yours.
It has a beautiful interface where you set up your habits. Mine are mostly things I want to do once a day, but there are other options and variations, such a certain number of times per week or month. You can also set lengths of time and distances.
Each habit gets its own icon. I was pleasantly surprised to see it choose the yin-yang symbol for my tai chi habit.
As you complete your habits, little charts and calendars keep track by showing your streaks. The longer you keep up the habit, the longer the streak – and the satisfaction that comes with that.
You can set it to send notifications so you don't forget. Another reminder comes in the form of a badge on the icon with the number of habits you still need to fulfil for the day.
I put the app on my phone in the same area as my news apps, which I obsessively check. That makes it even harder to ignore.
So far, I'm pretty happy with Streaks. I wish there were more apps like this — a simple service at a fair price.
Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.
I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo.
So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
It's tempting to think the outcome of a U.S. presidential doesn't have much effect on the small city in Canada where I live.
But that's not true. I can think of five ways Kamloops will be affected — two good, two bad, and one hard to define.
The good
Climate change and wildfires
President-elect Joe Biden has promised to get the United States back in the Paris Agreement, and is in favour of several initiatives to address the climate crisis.
Kamloops has seen disastrous wildfire summers in recent years. These are costly to fight. The smoke creates health hazards. People have lost their homes and their lives. It may be early to say conclusively that climate change is to blame, but scientists says it is a likely culprit.
Tourism and COVID-19
Biden has promised to make dealing with the COVID-19 his top priority. He will listen to the advice of scientists and public health experts.
The tourism industry in Kamloops has been hurt by the lack of visitors from the United States. The sooner we can safely re-open the border, the better it will be for tourism.
The bad
Softwood lumber agreement
Canada and the U.S. have a softwood lumber agreement that regulates how much Canadian lumber can be sold in U.S. markets. This agreement is regularly challenged by the U.S., sometimes to the detriment of Canadian producers.
Washington and Oregon, which are major lumber producers for the U.S., are solidly Democratic and will likely have a more sympathetic ear with a Democratic president in the White House.
The forest industry remains important in the Kamloops region, with many jobs depending on lumber mills. They could find themselves under more pressure with more challenges to the agreement.
Oil and gas workers
Biden is opposed the Keystone pipeline, which Canada considers crucial to the viability of the oil and gas industry. In fact, the federal government has signalled that this will be its top priority in relations with the Biden government.
Many Kamloops residents depend for their livelihood on oil and gas jobs in northern Alberta, where they commute. The industry is going through a downturn that could be made worse if the pipeline is stalled. More jobs will be lost.
The undefinable
The president of the United States, whoever that might be, has an outsized influence on the world. It's like we're passengers on a bus, and we depend on the driver to be cautious and obey the rules of the road.
It's one thing for the driver to take us somewhere we didn't want to go — that's expected in politics. But it's another for the driver to be rude and rash. It turns us into nervous wrecks.
There's a chance the current driver could crash the bus before he leaves, but at least we have the relief of knowing the next driver will stop at red lights. We will at long last be able to let go of the death grips we have on the arm rests.
There is a free service so important in these troubled times that it deserves its own post.
It's siftrss. Use it to weed out the news you've had your fill of. A couple of examples that come to mind are trump and covid.
If anything truly important happens in either of those areas, the news will find its way to you. Meanwhile, enjoy a little less stress in your life.
You can apparently use regular expressions if you want to match more than one term, although I didn't have any luck with it. The developer, Ryan Gitten, says on Reddit:
You can do that with a little regex magic. In your specific case, the regular expression you'd want to match would be /Android|iOS/. If you don't want it to be case-sensitive you'd add an i to the end of the regex (after the slash), but in this case I'd leave it case-sensitive. Otherwise, the "iOS" part would match "Bioshock" or anything else containing those three letters in that order.
News-cation is over. Now begins trump-cation, with unfortunate collateral damage.
When I checked my RSS news feeds this morning, I found 5,199 unread stories. I figured I could ignore the folder with the world news feeds, and avoid infecting myself with the latest from the Idiot-in-Chief.
Unfortunately, he has a way of seeping into other feeds as well. Daring Fireball, a blog by John Gruber about Apple and technology, slips in several examples his president's idiotic behaviour, including edge cases that might might not be covered by mainstream outlets.
I hate the idea of deleting this feed, because Gruber has a lot of great insights, but I'm going to have to do it — at least for a few more months.
Another feed that will have to go is The Atlantic. This outlet provides intelligent in-depth analysis of the news, but unfortunately delves into topics such as the pathology of the Orange One. That's a dark place I do not want to know about.
Ideally, I would be able to filter my feeds based on a key word. Feedly offers this service, but wants $12 a month for it.
Update: I found siftrss — a free service you don't even have to sign up for.
My news-cation comes to an end tomorrow, but not completely. I'll continue my detox from world news. I'm not yet ready to stomach whatever is going on in the United States.
Speaking of which, I have long wondered why many Canadians use U.S. networks such as CNN as their primary source of news. How do they know what's going on in their own country? Why do they care about events in a foreign country that have no effect on them?
I suspect it might be the same reason many Canadians prefer the NFL over the CFL. It's more entertaining.
The U.S. news consists of one major crisis after another. You can't help but wonder what crazy thing is going to happen next. And because it doesn't affect us, we can behave like bloodthirsty spectators at a wrestling match.
Political debates consist of little more than opponents shouting over each other. You learn precious little, but they can be fun to watch.
Aside from that, what transpires is on a scale Canadians cannot match. American outdo us at every turn, from COVID-19 deaths to mass shootings. It makes our news seem sedate.
So powerful is the influence of U.S. news that Canadians will organize protests over events that happen there. The George Floyd killing is a perfect example. While that death was undeniably a tragedy, there are plenty of injustices happening right here in our home and native land. When was the last time there were nationwide protests over the treatment of Indigenous people that included non-Indigenous Canadians? Outright racist behaviour in this country is excused and nuanced.
Despite this, I will again be tuning into Canadian news when my news-cation ends. For one thing the toxicity levels are more bearable. For another, it affects me as a citizen. I can get involved, I can cast a ballot.
How does Poolside.fm pump out free music on a website, a Mac app and an iPhone app?
Deep down in side, I feel like they're doing something with my email address that I might like. On the other hand, their privacy policy claims they respect my privacy.
In any case, this is one time I was happy to register, because not only do I get a lot of great music, but also the ability to create a list of favourites. I've got 16 so far.
They have five channels: default, Indie Summer, Hangover Club, Tokyo Disco and Friday Night Heat. As you can tell, this is music to party with.
The exception is my favourite, Indie Summer (and maybe Hangover Club). It's dreamy and spacey. Chill. It transports you away from your troubles.
They say the music is "lovingly curated with the sole purpose of lifting your spirits."
It took awhile to get used to the idea of positive music during these troubled times. Now hardly a day goes by when I don't accept this gift.
