Links for September 24, 2024
Marko Blažević, Unsplash
It's the Autumn Equinox [at the time of writing, anyway], the day of the year when day and night are equal in length! From this point forward, at least here in the Northern hemisphere, the nights will be getting longer. (inserting an edit: I mean, they were already getting longer… oh my god, you know what I mean.)
This week's links are all about, in some way or another, striving for simplicity.
First off, you can pry my Palma from my cold stiff swollen hands and, second, you'd follow similar steps if you just wanted to dumbify your iPhone for distraction-free focus. You could try it!
Somewhat related, a lot of the kids these days are using obsolete iPhones in lieu of iPods: a 3.5mm audio jack means the device is its own DAC, no expensive dongle required. (Man, using a decent pair of headphones has become pointlessly complicated anymore — I now have three DACs and an mp3 player, two bluetooth dongles, and multiple headphone jack adapters for my Apple devices. I’m so over it.)
- what’s in your bag ? pt. IV (2005 – 2011) (slideshow)
@indiesleaze is an Instagram account glorying in the halcyon days of millennial hipster dirtbags on unprescribed stimulants. But some things really were better then, and it has to do with the not-yet-widespread adoption of the smartphone. Back then, posting on Twitter was hard, and that's how we liked it. It was supposed to be effortful to tell everyone with a phone that you were headed straight from work to the bar. Anyway. I don't know about you, but the inside of my purse — which I no longer “unpack” at the end of the day — is starting to look like the insides of these purses, and that's called progress.
I periodically go back to reread this CNet article. I've included it here to make a point.
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.
- I turned my house into the 1987 TMNT lair. (Reddit slideshow)
Reddit user Lingonkart is brilliant. Disney or Universal (or Efteling??) should hire them.
LTTP but I hate how much I am enjoying the web browser Arc.
Arc's big UI difference is its side panel where bookmarks live. I imported all of my bookmarks from Vivaldi in one nice, tidy folder, then set about reorganizing them. About a half an hour later, I created a top bookmark folder in Arc called “to-do,” and then I bookmarked all the tabs that have been piling up in Vivaldi for the past month. (I will miss Vivaldi's side panel, though, which is presumably for productivity apps like Todoist and TickTick, but which let me endlessly read RSS feeds and scroll through bluesky and instagram instead.)
I don't think Arc would have clicked with me if I hadn't also started using Notion last month, which has been especially useful for [https://www.notion.so/templates/link-manager-knowledgebase](managing my open tabs). What the browser really does is alleviate tab anxiety. It's great like Spark is great: There's nothing wrong with a “classic view,” but all the open tabs and unread emails are gonna be psychically bringing you down.
But it's also bad in the same way Spark is bad: A.I. tries to anticipate what you'll want to name your bookmarks and downloads. If you're bulk-downloading your past Humble purchases, as I was, you'll end up with a mangled mess of files — exactly what Arc purports to prevent. No, Arc! Bad Arc!
Time will tell whether I pack up and return to my true love Vivaldi; for now, it’s a really great browser if you write drafts in a browser.