As my daughter grows up, I’m realizing how much she values the attention my wife and I can give her, and how frustrated she becomes when she realizes that our attention is split. My wife just got a new Kindle yesterday, and we were sitting downstairs trying to get it set up before I left for the evening; my daughter climbed up the couch and attempted to snatch the Kindle away, trying to put herself between it and us.

This is just a small story, but one that really drives home how attached I have become to my devices over the years, and how our daughter is making me a better person for recognizing that and trying to break the habits. But they’re really hard habits to break! So, I’ve been attempting to use some of the iPhone’s built in features, along with a couple modifications to my data consumption, in order to put more of an air gap between myself and my phone.

To wrangle my time and attention back, I implemented a handful of things:

1: Set App Limits for Time-Sucking Apps

This is what I think is the bare minimum that anyone can do to help reclaim their time on their phone. It’s so easy for us to pick it up and mindlessly scroll through a series of apps (mostly social media) - restricting your time you’re allowed to spend on them can certainly help.

Where to enable: Settings > Screen Time > App Limits

Something to note: for my particular limits, Twitter (I refuse to call it X) means both the base Twitter app, but also Twitter’s website (at least, if you’re using it through Safari - can’t speak to how it behaves if you have a 3rd party browser), which is great because that means you don’t have as many workarounds.

I know that there are a few studies out there that say that using App Limits actually causes you to use the apps more; anecdotally, I don’t have that issue, but your mileage may vary.

2: Deleted (most) Social Media Off my Phone

I’m not going to pretend that I’m holier than thou or anything here; everyone has their own reasons for using social media, and you don’t need me preaching at you any more than I already have. That said, the only app that I have left on my phone is Instagram, mostly because a few friends and I use it to send various funny clips to one another. I barely post there anymore. Facebook, Twitter (RIP Tweetbot), Reddit (RIP Apollo), Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads - they’re all long gone. It’s freeing. You should try it. As mentioned above, App Limits will still keep you from logging in on the web and mindlessly scrolling, so these two together have been great.

3: Reconfigure My News Sources

I kept Twitter and Reddit around for ages because I utilized them for getting news about various things, so if I was going to disconnect, I needed to find better sources. (Do we NEED to follow along & live-tweet when Trump gets indicted for the 17th time? Seriously - shit’s unhealthy, y’all, and we need to stop.) I did this in two ways:

• Set up an Apple News widget stack for sports stuff. Red Sox, Celtics, Vikings, F1, and general sports all have their own widgets in the stack, and I can just flip through those to keep up w/ articles.
• Sign up for the Apple News morning email digest (in the app), along with a couple email digests like The Morning News (btw if anyone has any other recommendations I’m all ears)
• Use an RSS feed reader like NetNewsWire or Reeder to keep up with various websites & blogs. RSS readers are great, and I’m glad to have found a reason to bring one back into my life.
• Signing up for more Substacks (or related services). For me, email remains something that I feel in relative control over; I don’t clamor for inbox zero or anything like that (I do stay tidy - there’s only 14 items in my inbox as I write this, and I actually just triaged 9 of them, so we’re down to 5), so receiving long-form messages actually feels nice. If I’m not interested? Delete! All gone!

Ultimately, I’m replacing a live refreshing feed that is constantly in need of my attention to stay current, with something that just shows up and lets me tackle at my own pace, on my own time. Much more optimal.

4: Set Up a Scheduled Focus Mode

These next two are what I started doing a couple of weeks ago, and I must say, I’m VERY happy with how they’ve turned out.

Focus modes are one of those things that I think people know exist, but don’t really grok all that well. I’ve got one that I’ve used for reading; whenever I’m in the Kindle app for longer than a minute, it switches me over to a focus mode that’s a full Do Not Disturb, and gives me a new home screen that only has the Kindle app & my various music apps on it, to keep me from just hopping into some other app and not reading.

What I did for this experiment was to set up a Personal focus mode on a schedule, from the time I’m up until the time Violet goes to bed, with small gaps to catch up & a bigger gap during her nap time. I’ve only allowed notifications from a select group of people (wife, family, really good friends, and my boss at the brewery) and apps (anything related to work, money, or our smart home, plus a few others - note that if you have a Mac, you’ll want to go in and whitelist your Mac apps that should peek through as well). I’ve found that this really helps keep me focused, while simultaneously reminding me to take little breaks in the morning and afternoon when the notifications come in, so this is working nice as a dual-purpose solution.

Where to enable: Settings > Focus

5: Set Up Notification Scheduled Summaries

The final thing I did was to set up a scheduled summary of notifications. I’m still trying to play around with whether or not having both this and a Focus mode enabled are really necessary, but this setup seems to be working ok for me, so I’m going to stick with it for right now and see how it goes.

Basically, I’m telling all of the notifications that aren’t getting whitelisted in my Focus mode to get sucked up into a big summary every 60-90 minutes. Instead of being blasted with a ton of notifications every time I come up for air, it’s all rolled up together in one nice-looking summary, with the best feature being that I can dismiss all of them all at once.

ESPN is one of those apps that I have a love/hate relationship with. I love staying up with all of the sports news that happens throughout the day; however, I’ve come to realize that I just do not need to have this all right in front of my face at all times. So the Focus mode keeps it all contained throughout the day, and then my scheduled summary rolls it all up together so I can speed through all of them at a pace more suited to what I want. Think like when Stranger Things drops - they give you all the episodes so you can binge them, instead of having to go one at a time, week by week.

Where to enable: Settings > Notifications > Scheduled Summary

Ultimately, how you want to set these sorts of things up is totally up to you. I’ve found a couple things that have been working out ok for me, and thoughts I’d share to see if they might be able to help you as well. Do you have any suggestions for what I could do better, or differently? Get in touch! I’d love to hear from you.

I work from home every day, and have a TV hooked up in my office. I also love watching baseball. On days with day games, this tends to be great for me… unless I don’t realize that there are any day games being played (like today).

Enter: Apple Shortcuts.

I was attempting to figure out how I could pull down the schedule every day in a way that a) gave me the info automatically, instead of having to seek it out, 2) didn’t clutter up my calendar, and III) wasn’t costly to implement. Now that Heroku’s free hosting has gone out the window, I wasn’t exactly sure what the best method would be. And then, someone suggested Shortcuts.

I fully admit that I’ve never been a user of Shortcuts. I have 2 (one to automatically pull up directions to home, and one to generate a QR code for my guest WiFi network) that I have never used. But I thought, how hard could this be? (Answer: a lot more of a pain in the ass than I anticipated.)

If you are interested in installing the shortcut for yourself, here is a link for you to download and install it. You will be prompted to put in your email address, and then you can run it to generate the games for the day. I then went ahead and set up a daily automation to generate the schedule at 7am and email it to myself.

Give it a try, and let me know if you run into any problems, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve it. I already have plans for a version 2 that’ll include the up-to-date standings as well.

Shout out to the three biggest twatwaffles in tech these days, as they have actually conspired to make my life better!

As someone who spent decades being “chronically online”, the last month or so has been really weird for me. And it’s all thanks to the brilliant (lol) decisions made by the heads of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.

I should back up a bit.

My online experience started with AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM. Everyone seemed to have it back in my junior high, and I remember racing home from school to hop online and chat with my friends that I’d spent all day being around. We all had the cryptic away messages, about info, and all that. I can’t remember most of my screennames over the years, but I do remember my last one: ihatelockers. (I got in a very minor scuffle the final week of 9th grade, and my punishment was that I had to come back for 4 hours the day summer started and help clean out lockers. The other guy showed up an hour late, and had to stay all day + come back the next day. Sucker.)

I lived through the LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, and Tumblr eras. I was a leader of the grassroots effort to keep Facebook from opening itself up to people without .edu email addresses back in 2006. I was on ESPN multiple times because I interacted with the various show hosts on Twitter (or because I stuck my face in front of a camera at my school’s token appearance).

I’ve made friends, gotten jobs, joined WoW guilds, first interacted with my now-wife, and more all because of social media. There are so many amazing experiences that I know people have had purely because of the networking abilities these various apps have provided to people.

But now? Now, the landscape has been fractured, and I’m Very Tired™. I can’t keep up with everything that’s going on nowadays. Everyone was on Twitter, and now it’s all split up, because Elon Musk is a giant manbaby. Mastodon has the tech conversation. Bluesky has the ultra-liberal gamers that are (apparently) trying to tell Dril how to post. Facebook has the family. And Twitter still has all the sports stuff (and, let’s face it, pretty much everyone else from Bluesky too, because we’re in that phase where nobody wants to pull the plug). Plus, there’s Discord, which is full of a handful of communities and friend groups that I interact with more than anything else. And finally, Reddit recently made changes to their API, effectively killing the best 3rd party apps, and resulting in a lot of subreddits I followed going dark indefinitely.

I had a folder on my iPhone home screen for ages that was full of all the various apps. I caught myself just flipping between 5 or 6 of them nearly non-stop a few weeks ago, and got really mad at myself. None of this was serving me. None of this was even fun anymore. It was a chore to try and interact with any of the people I wanted to interact with.

So, I went… what’s just under nuclear? Whatever that is, I did it. I still have all my accounts across the various services, but a lot of them (Ivory for Mastodon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter) got deleted, and a few others (Instagram, Bluesky) got relegated to the App Library - accessible if I need them for something, but out of sight/mind the rest of the time.

I can’t believe that the thing that finally broke the social media chokehold on me was the various owners being complete garbage humans… and yet, here we are. I have no idea if any of these services will ever return to my life in the capacity they were before. I sure hope not. I do miss a lot of the people I would interact with, and I’m trying to be proactive about connecting with those that I really appreciated (if this is you, hello, come talk to me), but I’m doing best to not let the allure of what once was suck me back in to a space I know is not good for me.

Friendly reminder: if you’re not paying for it, YOU are the product.

I am laying on a beach.

It’s not a particularly nice beach. It’s got sand, and water, but that’s about it. It’s lonely; no birds are circling around. It’s cold; there’s a breeze coming off the water, and it’s a little chilly.

I am laying on a beach, on my towel, where the waves can reach me. They come rhythmically, but with a timing I cannot predict. Some are gentle, swirling up underneath my back. Others are forceful, crashing over me with a violence I am not prepared for.

I could move, if I wanted to. All I have to do is stand up, pick up my towel, and move back to where the waves cannot reach me. But I just feel… heavy. Tired. Sad.

The tide comes in. I am swallowed by the sea. The waves continue to pound overhead. I should really move. I finally stand up, and make for dry land. The waves pummel me as I strive for solid footing. Every step is treacherous. Why did I stay here? I don’t want to drown. I want to breathe.

I make it to dry land. The waves continue to break upon the beach behind me. I towel off, and go down the boardwalk. Check out some shops. Grab a bite to eat. Wow, this is a really good donut.

Then suddenly, as I’m enjoying this little round delicious sugar bomb, I feel guilt. How could I possibly be enjoying this moment when there are waves I need to feel on the beach? I throw the donut down, run back to the shore, and dive headlong into the oncoming crest.

It smashes me flat. But somehow, that feels right. I don’t enjoy it, but this is where I belong.

At 2:45pm on Thursday, June 8th, 2023, my wife and I put our beloved cat Pixel to sleep. He was one week shy of his 5th birthday.

We took Pixel to the vet on the 1st, and discovered that he had bladder stones, 2 of which had caused a blockage. We were going to try and bring him home on the 4th, but he got blocked up again early that morning. He had an emergency cystotomy on the 5th, and we were able to bring him home the evening of the 6th. He had a somewhat normal day on the 7th, just wandering around the house and trying to be as much of his normal self as he could. I spent the 6th and 7th sleeping in the office with him in my sleeping bag, so that he didn’t have to worry about being alone as he healed.

On the 8th, we realized Pixel hadn’t eaten or drank anything since early that morning, and he was extremely lethargic and didn’t want to wake up from naps. We took him back to the vet, and discovered that he now had 6 or 7 stones causing another blockage. We made the decision to forego another rough and potentially complicated surgery, and let him rest.

Pixel knew it was time, I think. At home, he’d pawed at my lap for attention and basked in some belly rubs before stealing my office chair and drifting into his deep slumber. At the vet, he crawled straight into my lap after his x-ray, and stayed there until he took his last breath.

Pixel was an amazing cat. He was an orphan, off by himself when we saw him, and we knew we had to bring him home with us. He melted the cold heart of our eldest cat, Bearcat, and was the bridge between him and our 3rd cat, Beau, when he joined our family. He was mischievous, always diving into open closets or attempting “freedom runs” onto the patio when we slid the door open. It took a long time for him to enjoy and seek out cuddles from us, but once he did, he’d share every bit of his warmth with your lap. If you ever met Pixel, there’s no doubt that he flopped down in front of you demanding you pet his belly. Pixel taught all of us how to love everyone unconditionally (but still hiss at a motherfucker who needed to be hissed at [this was usually Beau]).

My final happy memory of Pixel is maybe one of my favorites of him ever. He was laying on the couch sleeping, and our daughter V (who is 15 months old) was sitting next to him. She reached over and gave him a few pets on his side. I said to her “V, can you give Pixel a big hug?” and with no hesitation she went face-first into his belly, giggling and hugging him tight. It was so precious, so perfect, and I couldn’t ask for a better lasting memory that I’ll cherish forever.

I have never felt grief like what I experienced Thursday, or what I’ve been struggling with ever since. Not when my mom passed, not when my dad was going through a bunch of severe medical stuff, not when my childhood dog died… they all sucked, and I felt sadness, but Pixel passing just ruined me.

I did a speed run of the grief stages Thursday at the vet, and then have been going through them again slowly over the last few days. Denial that this was as serious as it was. Anger at the vet for not getting all the stones during the surgery. Bargaining for just one more day, one more meow, one more belly rub. Depression about… well, everything.

They say that grief comes in waves. I’ll probably get better throughout the week, and then I’ll see the notification of Pixel’s birthday this coming Thursday and get sad again. Or I’ll hang a photo I have of him. Or I’ll go to close a closet door and instinctively check to see if he jumped in. Or I’ll fire up Zelda and find my horse Snowball (what I was adamant about naming him before we settled on the name Pixel [also, fun fact, his original name was Ralph]).

I’ve found myself feeling a lot like the guy on the beach these past few days. Friday I went to Target, trying to go about life. I had a podcast on that made me laugh. I was, in that moment, happy. And then I was like “oh shit, how can you be happy, your cat just died” and I went spiraling downwards.

I know that’s not what Pixel would’ve wanted for me, or for us. Pixel was a beacon of joy. He was there when we were sad, or mad, or sick, or busy, or tired, and he gave every ounce of his energy to bring us back to level. He made me laugh with his antics constantly. All he ever wanted was to share his joy with everyone he encountered. We were so lucky to have him with us for 1,744 days, and I’ll cherish those memories of him forever.

Am I ok? Hell no. Shit sucks, I’m sad, and I’m gonna be sad for a while. But I also know that I don’t have to punish myself for moments when I don’t feel sad by diving headlong into the grief. We just have to handle the waves as they come, and not stand on the shore waiting for the tide to come in. As the Dr. Seuss line says, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” Pixel brought me joy every day; the best way to honor his memory is to continue to live joyously.

Farewell, little buddy. You’ll always be my first kitten. You were the best cat. I love you so much.

I’d like to present to you a new project I’m working on called ClackTrack. ClackTrack is a new application coming out in Fall 2023 for iPhone and iPad, allowing users to catalog their mechanical keyboard collection.

This honestly all started early 2022, when I asked myself, “why haven’t I learned how to make iOS apps yet?” I’ve been a web application developer for most of my career, but the prospect of making apps for iPhones has appealed to me since the day I got my iPhone 4S¹. But at long last, I finally took the plunge and started learning SwiftUI.

It’s been… slow? Having a child will definitely stunt any hobby progression, but I’ve also never really been a person that makes software in my free time. That all changed this winter; for someone that rarely has any project ideas kicking around in my head, I went on a tear where I had a whole bunch of them back to back. Mostly small, script-y things that I could do to improve my life, or extensions that I could write for apps like Alfred.

But then I got one really fun one in my head: “What if I made the Hurley Number app in SwiftUI?”²

That quickly spiraled out of control - what if it had this feature, and that feature, and, and, and… and then, the idea of a cataloging app just hit me full on. A lot of people I know do theirs in a Google spreadsheet - functional, but not really elegant. What if I took that and made it, well, Better™?

So, this is a post announcing the announcement of the release of ClackTrack. It’s to build hype, to keep me honest, and to share with everyone what I’m working on. If you’d like to stay in the know about it, you can sign up for emails on the site.

In years past, I would sleep in on February 13. Today, I’m up at 5:15am, a full hour and a half before my wife and V, which is odd (the being up before anyone else part, not the 5:15 part).

In years past, I’d take the day off of work and play video games all day. Today, my game time will start when V goes down for the night. Could be 6:30. Could be 8. Maybe I’ll be too tired to start anything and I’ll just fall asleep instead.

In years past, I’d get a phone call from my dad at 10:54am, so he could sing me an annoying rendition of “Happy birthday” at the time I was born. Today, I’m crossing my fingers he remembers, given everything that he’s had happen to him over the past 3ish months.

In years past, I’d have no plans for my day. Today, I’m calling an orthopedic surgeon for a consult on my messed up shoulder, and my wife and I are going to try and go for a walk.

In years past, I’d have no responsibilities to attend to. Today, my daughter is everything and all-encompassing, and I’ve spent the whole morning with her and my wife playing in the living room.

In years past, I’d be blogging from my laptop. Today, the only way I can write 350 words is on my phone in short spurts.

In years past, I’d be annoyed that it’s always snowy and cold on my birthday. Today, I’m loving that I get to bundle up and stay inside.

None of this is to complain (ok I’m a little pissed about my arm, so that one might be). All of this is just change. Not good change or bad change. Just change. For years, I’ve been so resistant to change. I’m stubborn and selfish, and I was nervous about having a child because of it. But now? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This is February 13, 2023. This is the 44th day of the year. This is Monday. This is a day ending in “y”. This is another day where my family is healthy, my daughter is happy, and the house is warm.

This is thirty-six.

Taking a cue from a few other people, like my good friend Patrick Rhone, I’ve gone ahead and implemented a new Now page.

I have my own personal lists of things that I try to stay on top of in regards to what my current priorities are, but exposing them to the world allows others to keep me accountable (“hey, how’s Project X going for you?”), or invites people to read/play the same things I do, or just shares info with the world about what my life is all about. I’d encourage you to share your Now pages with me - I’m always curious what types of things people are working on.

I found a post on Reddit a couple of weeks ago about a great playlist to listen to while programming or coding. So far, I can say that it’s been doing a great job - lots of ambient, chill, yet still energetic music that’s helped me be less distracted throughout the day. The original URL from the Reddit post is dead, but I’ve managed to rescue & recreate the playlists in both Apple Music and Spotify using a slick service called TuneMyMusic.

Additionally, I also discovered MusicForProgramming.net, a very cool looking site that has a bunch of shorter playlists of music for this same purpose. I haven’t dug into this one much, but I will, and thought y’all might be interested in this as well.

I think by now, most people have heard the phrase “quiet quitting” floating around, though some may not know what it means. The way I see it, “quiet quitting” is when you aren’t feeling invested in your job, so you do juuuuuust enough to get by. Got something that’ll take 5 minutes to do? Maybe I’ll get to it after a 15 minute walk to the coffee machine and a 10 minute bathroom break. Someone needs help? Eh, that’s not really my problem, is it? They’ll figure it out. People get their core responsibilities done, but nothing more. They don’t show up early, they don’t stay late, they don’t attend any meetings that aren’t mandatory, and they don’t do any work outside of what’s expected of them.

There’s been a lot of talk as to why this is a thing. Mostly, it stems from burnout at work, especially during the pandemic & return to “normal”. We’re becoming more aware of toxic behaviors, and less forgiving of them. When the job doesn’t care about us, why should we care back?

I think I inadvertently stumbled on to another possible reason as to why this burnout might be happening: the death of the third space.

What is the Third Space (or third place)? Per Wikipedia:

In sociology, the third place/space refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops and parks. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

If I think back on my own life, I’ve had a lot of third spaces. I spent countless hours in church from age 10 to age 29. I’ve been Chronically Online for most of my adult life. I spent a lot of time playing video games with my friends. I moonlighted as a bartender at a brewery in my city, both to make some extra money, but also to be around people I enjoyed.

None of these third spaces exist for me right now. I left the church for a myriad of personal reasons. Twitter is dying a loud & obnoxious death, Facebook is already a toxic cesspool, and Mastodon is still new enough that it still feels like everyone is just making noise for the time being. Now that V is here, I don’t play games with people online anymore, and I don’t bartend anymore. I’m sure I’m not alone in this; while not everyone had kids, we all had to deal with the pandemic throwing a wrench in our personal lives, basically eliminating this Third Space for a lot of us.

Additionally, lots of people (myself included) stopped going in to the office, leading to a growing number of people merging their First and Second Spaces into one weird mishmash. Many people have tried to put physical limits on their time at work in various ways (dressing in work clothes during the work day, having a dedicated office for doing everything, going to a co-working space, etc.), to a wide range of success.

But think about it - people no longer have their Third Space, so they don’t have any sort of outlet to relax, vent, and unwind after a long day. And now their First and Second Spaces are overlapping more and more, so any sort of toxicity from their job is having a more direct impact on their home life. All of the individual spaces have become compressed down into one space.

I’m suffering a lot from this right now. My org was one of the many tech firms that announced layoffs earlier this month, and while I survived, my morale and mental state has definitely taken a hit. I can’t help but bring that home with me any time I use the restroom, or get water, or check in on the family. My separate spaces no longer exist, and it’s very frustrating.

I don’t have an answer for this. I wish I did. It’s just something that’s forefront of my mind, and something I need to make sure I’m thinking about & being proactive at trying to rectify. Perhaps you’re going through something similar and didn’t realize it; if so, I hope this helps you.

Yesterday, I posted about how I consolidated some of my Mac helper apps. I was talking to members of the Relay.FM member’s Discord when going through this exercise, and I happened to mention an Alfred workflow that I had helped create for work. Enough people seemed interested in it that I went through the whole process of getting it set up for other people to download.

Introducing: the GitHub Repository Helper workflow for Alfred.app

This workflow is pretty straight-forward. You first scan all of your repos tied to your GitHub account, and then you can pull them up using Alfred with the command gh {repo_name}. At that point, you can press enter to go straight to the repo in your browser, or hold various keys to copy the repo’s URL, or jump straight to the repo’s pull requests, issues, or projects page.

You can download the latest version of the workflow on GitHub, or view the latest release.