At C Bar a few days ago.

☁️⛅️🌦🌩⛈🌧🌤. Repeat. #pdxtst

Mac Pro always felt like something I didn’t need but would be nice if I were to upgrade to it. With this new one I’m like, yea, I’m not even in that ballpark anymore.

I will add it to my Amazon wishlist though, along with that $10,000 lens, in case someone wants to be bffs.

Anxiety and Unhealthy Side Effects of Activity Streaks

I’m feeling a love-hate relationship with activity streaks. While it is nice to have a streak and motivating to keep it going, I feel some anxiety coming along with it.

March activity streak

So, in an effort to avoid the unhealthy side effects, I am going to willfully break streaks.

April activity streak

This one has gone for some time. And today I’m ending it.

May activity streak

A positive effect of a streak is that it helps to develop a habit, and I’d like to think that it has been the case this time. Let’s see if that lasts.

P.S. For those unfamiliar, these charts show the activity tracking that is done by my Apple Watch.

Sunset on Foster Road. Portland, Oregon. 26th May, 2019.

We made a raised gardening bed last weekend, filled it with dirt yesterday, and Jenni planted yummies today.

Mail and Keys Organizer

Our new mail and keys organizer

The mail and keys organizer located just inside our home entrance had to go. It couldn’t handle our lifestyle, by which I mean, hold a bunch of mail of varying sizes for a bunch of days. Oh, and some keys and the super long IKEA shoehorn (the best!).

I began to dream up a new replacement as a woodworking project. I made a Pinterest board to get some design inspiration. Then one day I just sat down and sketched it out using GoodNotes on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil.

Initial sketch of the organizer

I’d imagined that the plywood would be 1/2" thick, but after some discussion with Jenni, we decided to go for the chonk look that was distinctive of the tabletop shelf/box I made a couple of months ago. This lowered the costs as well since I already had enough scraps of the baltic birch plywood. All I needed was the dark walnut stain, a birch dowel, and hanging hardware. The mail holders are held together by glue, and attached to the back by screws drilled in from behind. The pegs are held in by glue. There were a couple other changes as evident from the sketch and the photo of the final piece.

The groove detail in the pegs was Jenni’s idea. I tried a couple of ways to cut it out and landed upon just keeping the table saw blade low and using my crosscut sled to spin the dowel in place over the blade. That worked wonderfully!

Groove detail in pegs

I finished the build a few weeks ago but the hardware I bought to hang it didn’t work well. Then other things took up some time so I finally procured some new hardware and hung it up this week. We’re both very happy with how it turned out.

And in parting, here’s a photo of the old organizer trying hard to keep up.

The old organizer 🤮

So Nationalism tightens its grip on India as well.

PSA: Something ripped a big hole in the Milky Way, and we have no idea what it is. This happened “recently”. www.newsweek.com/huge-hole…

When you get to the gym and realize you forgot your headphones at home 😞

This new composite photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud created by amateur astronomers is gorgeous! lowell.edu/astroaler…

Hiking at Coyote Wall

Kyla, Herbie, Jenni, and Kelly near the top

Last weekend we went hiking at Coyote Wall. Jenni and I had never been to this hike before but our friends were familiar with it.

There are multiple trails that meet each other at various points. Some are gentle slopes, while others are steeper. One can pick and choose paths based on how much of a workout one wants and switch that around as needed.

There are beautiful vistas all along the way to the top of the wall. I could see myself bringing family and friends here that are not used to hiking much, to just go for a bit, enjoy the views, and head back.

Herbie was happy to lead us for a bit

There are cute little waterfalls and streams as well along the way.

Spring flowers, sunny weather, and spotty clouds, made everything look a lot more beautiful.

At the top, we hung out for a bit to have snacks and enjoy the views some more.

On the way down we took the steeper route for a bit. Some folks were mountain biking along the cliff and down the steep trails, which was incredible to watch but not something I see myself doing 😅

I can see myself coming back to this hike again in the spring, and probably in other seasons as well.

Activity stats:

Distance: 7.5 miles
Elevation Gain: 1662 ft
Time (including breaks): 4h 45m

Friends, especially those in Portland, this is great project by good people. Back them on Kickstarter and let’s get them to the finish line! www.kickstarter.com/projects/…

It’s that time of the year in the neighborhood.

PSA: It’s about time to cancel Apple News+ if you signed up for the free trial at launch and haven’t used it enough.

I just did.

Got some yard work done on this lovely day.

A short break on a muddy spot. From a few weeks ago.

Importing Foursquare/Swarm history into Day One

I’ve been journaling in Day One for some time now. I like it for a lot of reasons, and it’s working out great. So far I’ve been using it as a plain old journal, where you write what’s on your mind. Recently, I decided that I wanted to get my digital history into it as well. One of the first things that came to mind was my Foursquare/Swarm checkin history which goes back to 2009. I decided to start there.

I exported all my data and wrote a script in Python to extract what I needed from it to make journal entries. The two relevant files were checkins.json and photos.json. You can get my script on Github by selecting here if you’d like to use it, or dig into it. It should also appear embedded at the end of this post. First the script pre-processes the data to get all the photos attached to checkins. Then it goes over the checkin history to extract most of what I want, but since the exported data doesn’t include venue coordinates, it has to do a little more.

It makes calls to the Foursquare API to fetch the venue coordinates for each checkin. Then it puts everything together and makes the actual entry using Day One’s command line utility. I had several thousand entries but the free plan for the API has a daily limit of 500 calls, so I manually ran it a few times over the course of a couple of weeks until they’d all been imported. I could’ve automated that but I wasn’t keen on spending the time on that.

Day One does allow one to link it to IFTTT so that all new checkins get logged automatically, and I enabled that a while back, but I’ve not been happy with that integration. Now that I’m familiar with the flow of data, I plan to create new entries every couple of months or so, perhaps with a new script that works entirely with the API.

I’d love to hear if you have automated any journaling as I’m keen to explore other ways of doing so myself.

Initial experience with Setapp

I signed up for Setapp for a free trial week. Setapp is an app subscription service for macOS where you sign up for $10 a month to gain full access to a catalog of over 100 apps.

This is not a review of Setapp, but rather my initial experience with it after having heard about it a few times on the Mac Power Users podcast. Many of apps in the Setapp catalog are well known and as such I was already aware of them. But there are several that are new to me.

Apps that I found myself using often during the trial:

  • Marked
  • Mindnode
  • Flume
  • Timing
  • iStat Menus

Apps I installed and use occasionally and would expect to use occasionally in the future:

  • WiFi Explorer
  • World Clock Pro

Apps I tried but then uninstalled after using just one or two times:

  • CleanMyMac X
  • IconJar
  • Luminar Flex

Apps that are included in Setapp but which I’ve previously bought individually and use anyway:

  • Screens
  • Paw
  • Sip

So with a very rough mental calculation I think the math would work out alright. Of course the main hook/promise of Setapp is the potential of all the other apps. Many may not be relevant today but may become relevant tomorrow. Their stated goal:

We have 100+ apps in the stack and are steadily adding more of them to cover all of your main needs. Eventually, Setapp is to deliver about 300 Mac apps, all per a single $9.99 fee (+ taxes).

I have already identified some apps that I plan to use soon but just didn’t have a chance to use during the trial period. I’ve now subscribed for one month, and if it still seems useful after that, I will likely switch to the annual plan for 10% off.

If you would like to try out Setapp, select here to use my referral code.

It’s that time of the biennial.