I’ve really been enjoying Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan. I’ve enjoyed Nick’s music for a long time, but I especially love The Red Hand Files. Sean is no slouch either! A respected journalist and musician in his own right. I hadn’t listened to Sean’s band High Llamas since the 90s, when I worked the Gideon Gaye album at Sony Music. It’s such a great album. Spent some time with it today.
This Jazz Quartet LEGO set is amazing!
In Kim Gordon’s book, Girl in a Band, she says “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” I love this notion. It was brought to my attention by David Meerman Scott. I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Kim, making it all the more interesting. She has a really lovely voice.
My kids really fuck up my algorithms on music and video services. I hate it.
This was some truly fascinating research.
Inspired by @joshua’s post on his defaults, here are some of mine.
📨 Mail Client - Mimestream mostly, but also Mail.app and the Fastmail app
📮 Mail Server - Google and Fastmail
📝 Notes - Drafts + Obsidian and Notes.app for family shared notes
✅ To-Do - Things for personal and work, Reminders for family
📷 iPhone Photo Shooting - Camera.app and Halide
🟦 Photo Management - Photos.app and Google Photos for redundancy. I find that Google is a lot better at search.
📆 Calendar - Calendar.app and Google Calendar
📁 Cloud File Storage - Google Drive and iCloud
🙍🏻♂️ Contacts - Contacts.app with Google and Fastmail
🌐 Browser - Arc, Safari and Quiche Browser
💬 Chat - Beeper, which provides a secure single interface for the many chat apps I use.
🔖 Bookmarks - Raindrop.io
📑 Read It Later - Readwise Reader
📜 Word Processing - Google Docs
📈 Spreadsheets - Google Sheets
📊 Presentations - Google Slides, Pitch and Canva
🛒 Shopping Lists - Notes.app
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance - Tiller
📰 News - Plain text, web-based sources like 68k.news, NPR and CNN
🎵 Music - Mostly Spotify, Bandcamp, but trying to shift to Apple Music
🎤 Podcasts - Overcast, but I’m thinking of switching back to Pocketcasts
150 is a neat idea. I’d really love to see a novel approach to social networks like this be wildly successful.
The day has finally arrived. Mailchimp is shutting down Tinyletter, a company they acquired in 2011 and haven’t touched it since. It was a great service that I used extensively. It was one of the simplest services ever. Even in its frozen-in-time vibe, it was good enough. I’ve since moved a couple of my active newsletters to Paragraph, which I like, but not really as much as I once liked Tinyletter. Given the news of its impending demise, I exported all of my newsletters and mailing lists and deleted the accounts. We knew this day would come.
And for those of you wondering why I didn’t switch to Substack? They have a Nazi problem. No thanks!
There’s only one book filled with ads that I would probably ever purchase. Classified: Local Ads from America’s Small Towns is that book. It’s from the fine people at Standards Manual so you know it’s going to be great.
I’m not used to seeing Polly Harvey sing. Her recent Tiny Desk Concert is beautiful. I can’t say her latter releases do much for me, but I have a lot of admiration for her and would definitely go see her perform live.