Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 33

I can tell I’m beginning to feel a bit better because I’m enjoying the book I’m writing.

I can tell I’m beginning to feel a bit better because I’m enjoying the book I’m writing. I’m enjoying thinking about the book. I’m planning it better. I’m seeing problems earlier. I just ironed out a plot hole I’ve had for six months. I Know Your Real Name Now is so much less of a bummer than the last one.

Cura, Oct 17, 2018

Note: The playlist embedded above will always be the most recent playlist and might not match the list below.

Cura is my Spotify mixtape. You can listen to it and subscribe here. I keep it as one playlist so it’s easy to subscribe to. I update it fairly frequently, but I also keep an archive playlist so you don’t have to miss a thing.

I hope you like it. I made it for you.

Here’s the track listing for this week:

Korean Food By Frankie Cosmos

These Lips By The Smittens

All I Wanna Do By The School

Brite Boy By (Sandy) Alex G

All to Myself By Amber Coffman

Walking All Day By Graham Coxon

Warned You By Good Morning

I Don’t Wanna Be Okay Without You By Charlie Burg

Small Talk By Courtney Barnett

Left Handed Kisses By Andrew Bird

Shortcuts news and help

I’ve been thinking about putting together a nice summary of where to keep up with Shortcut news, but Rene Ritchie beat me to it with a few I would have included and many more. This video explains it all very well.

Halloween ideas 2018

Edward g scissorhands
Ed wood scissorhands
Edward scissor handmaids tale
Edward scissor Hans Christian Anderson
Eduardo scissorhands (just a Gomez Adams moustache)
Max Headward scissorhands

Best Windows Phone Apps, late 2018 edition

Hahahahaha. Yeah, I know. It’s super dead. Not coming back. No way.

This isn’t a list to get people to buy one of these or use them or whatever. It’s a list for people who have one lying around and still might find use for a second (or third) device that does some neat things. Windows Phone was good. It had great ideas. Apple is using lots of them.

Windows Phone was, and still is, just like this weird fetish object for me. I’ve owned six of the suckers. The one I carry around these days is the Lumia 1520. I pair it with a bluetooth keyboard and it’s basically a laptop.

This’ll probably be the last of these kinds of lists. Pulling double duty: all of these apps work with Windows 10, and they’re often the best solution in their class.

OneNote. If you don’t think Project Andromeda isn’t just about making OneNote the centre of your digital life, you’re crazy. Windows Phone owners have known that secret for years though. Hell, if you have a Windows Phone 7 Series, OneNote still writes and syncs and it’s butter. It’s where I do all my first-draft writing, blogs, and other things.
Outlook. Baked into WP10, it’s still faster than anything on iPhone.
Cover: if you’ve got a Lumia 1520 or any of the big Windows Phones, cover reads comics, PDFs, and other formats well. Syncs to Onedrive for seamless file additions.
Ouga. Best Tumblr app on the planet.
Tweetium. Still going strong!
Readit. Is it weird that this is still my preferred way to read Reddit?
Poki. If you use Pocket as a read-later service, Poki is a breath of fresh design and readability air.
NextGen Reader. Still the most stable RSS reader.
Windows Central. I’ve somehow had this app on my Windows start screen since 2010.

We’re in the Fart Apps period of Siri Shortcuts.

We’re in the Fart Apps period of Siri Shortcuts.

quick book update

I wrote the part 2 arc for Fourth and Ram this weekend. Hopefully I can hammer out Hall and Banks this week, and then begin part 2 outlining this weekend. I have a goal to have part 2 done by New Years.

Siri Shortcut Alert Timeout

As with everyone it seems, I’ve been working on a “morning” routine shortcut. I tried to make mine using “Show Alerts”. Basically, an alert would say “Go shower,” “Water plants,” “Feed cats,” etc. Then I’d hit “OK” on the alert and it would go to the next one, all the while keeping my phone with a pop-up alert so I wouldn’t waste time on it in the morning.

So I tried it this morning, and found that if I waited too long to hit “ok” on an alert, the shortcut would just time out and I’d have to start it over. I wonder if there’s an internal time-out on alerts after, say, ten minutes?

And with a clever Siri Shortcut, I can send a quick little message like this to my blog in as many taps as it used to take to tweet.

And with a clever Siri Shortcut, I can send a quick little message like this to my blog in as many taps as it used to take to tweet.

This has been the most relaxing thanksgiving of my entire life.

This has been the most relaxing thanksgiving of my entire life.