Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 34
October 7, 2018
I’m working on a shortcut that’ll allow me to post “tweet” style posts here.
I’m working on a shortcut that’ll allow me to post “tweet” style posts here. It’ll be under this toots tag.
October 6, 2018
More Things, October 07, 2018
With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.
Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.
An ode to Toronto dance parties of the 00s
A Day In the Life of a Female Incel
iPhone naming: 1 step forward, 4 steps back
Sea Otter Cam
R.I.P., the Celebrity Profile
A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon
How to clean earbuds and headphones
The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites
You’ll Have to Pry My Tiny Smartphone From My Cold, Dead, Very Small Hands
The Old Kanye Was a Rebellious Virtuoso. The New Kanye Is a Hack.
The iPhone Franchise
Adobe Design Summit and Cultural Bias
The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job
September 30, 2018
Cura, Oct 1, 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:
All The Records On The Radio Are Shite By Ballboy
(This Song is Defintely Not About A Boy) By Makeshift Shelters
Blood in Gutters By The Distillers
Here We Go Love By The English Beat
Naturally Pretty Girls By Elle King
More accurate iPhone names
As the iPhone gets older and its naming scheme spirals into marketing nonsense, I thought it might be a good time to give people a better way to describe each generation.
Original Name
More Accurate Name
iPhone (2007)
iPhone No Keyboard. $500?!?
iPhone 3G (2008)
iPhone apps
iPhone 3GS (2009)
iPhone Angry Birds
iPhone 4 (2010)
iPhone You’re Holding it Wrong
iPhone 4S (2011)
iPhone Siri Not Available
iPhone 5 (2012)
iPhone Absolute Jewel
iPhone 5C (2013)
iPhone Plastic
iPhone 5S (2013)
iPhone The Good One
iPhone 6 & 6 Plus (2014)
iPhone Wide Boi
iPhone 6S & 6S Plus (2015)
iPhone Wide Bois
iPhone SE (2016)
iPhone The Good One Again
iPhone 7 & 7 Plus (2016)
iPhone Darth Vader
iPhone 8 & 8 Plus (2017)
iPhone 7S
iPhone X (2017)
iPhone Rich Boi
iPhone XS & XS Max (2018)
iPhone Rich Bois
iPhone XR (2018)
iPhone Touch
September 28, 2018
Morning Pages, September 29, 2018
“What are you playing?”
This wasn’t a serious question, Fourth thought. It couldn’t be. Nobody asks you this.
“Game…boy?” She said, her guard up.
“I know that,” the girl said. “I mean what game.”
“Final…Fantasy VI.”
“Wow, there’s six of those?”
Fourth paused. This woman had no idea what Final Fantasy was.
She said “Yeah, I’m really into it so…” Her gaze went back to the tilted screen above her hands.
“Can I ask you something?” the girl asked.
Fourth took a breath. She closed the clamshell and put the little blue square in her purse.
“Have you read the bible?”
“Nope,” she said.
“You haven’t read it?”
“This isn’t happening,” Fourth said. “Am I being punk’d right now? No, I’m not yet famous enough for that. Am I being Just For Laughs Gagged right now?”
“I’m from the church of…”
Fourth wanted to say “No you’re not. You’re here to fuck me. I have a job interview in less than an hour, this a bus is going slower than it should be, and you’re here to fuck me. You were sent here by my enemies to make sure I fail. Who sent you? Who do you work for?”
But instead she said “Tell me more about your new god.”
September 26, 2018
Good websites, 2018
I share links for individual stories every few weeks, but I thought I’d also take a second and just list some of the websites I tend to enjoy more often than not. Some of these I check every day, and some I only get to once a year or so, but to me, this is my “good” internet.
I’ve got a date up there on the title because I’d like to come back to this next year and see how this list has changed. Categorization kept messy to maximize kismet.
InDesignSecrets - purely for people who work in InDesign and want to know what’s up.
Neverthink - There are good videos on Youtube and these people do a better job of finding them than you do.
kottke - A good curation of modern distractions
XKCD - The only comic worth sharing to everyone.
Daring Fireball - The best writer on the Apple beat.
Anime Feminist - Good recommendations for this sphere.
The Grey Estates - Indie music blog I found this year and fell in love with.
Jessica Stanley’s READ.LOOK.THINK. - Hasn’t updated in a while, but the gold standard of link blogs.
Swiss Miss - My heart grows back a size every time I visit.
the new shelton wet/dry - Top-shelf miscellany.
BuzzFeed Reader - Don’t sleep on Buzzfeed’s reporting and editorial team.
Black Nerd Problems - Comics and nerdery with great writers.
September 25, 2018
More Things, September 26, 2018
With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.
Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.
A Week On The Wrist Apple Watch Series 4
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media
Cowboy Bebop Wasn’t Afraid To Let Its Heroes Fail
Nintendo’s new Xenoblade expansion eases players into the daunting world of RPGs
Pro Wrestling Is Great, And You Should Try Watching Less
September 20, 2018
IFTTT Audit, Autumn 2018
I’ve got a good number of IFTTT Applets running. I thought I’d update which ones I use and why here, as well as a few I’m trying out and may not keep.
I tend to keep things rather simple, but it’s because I really believe in the forget it part of “set it and forget it.” IFTTT is great when you have no idea it’s there. Think too much about it, spend too much time on the site, and it loses both its magic and appeal. It can too easily become a tinker toy.
If any new item added by ksp_me, then add a private bookmark to Pinboard
When I save an article to Pocket, make a Markdown link in a text file on Dropbox
This is how I make my More Things link blog.
Day One
Fitbit daily activity summary saved to Day One
If New feed item from http://feeds.feedburner.com/SawyerPaul, then create Journal entry
This acts as a blog backup, but I often use it as a “remember when I wrote this?” thing when the “On this day” notification pops up.
Save your Instagram photos to Day One
Create Journal entry with every new Tweet.
Create Journal entry with every new Calendar entry.
Spotify
If New track added to Cura - a weekly mixtape hug playlist, then Append to a text file in Sawyer’s Dropbox.
This is how I make my Cura posts.
Calendar
Track work hours by location
September 18, 2018
More Things September 19, 2018
With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.
Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.
What so many men are missing about #MeToo
A beginner’s guide to the music of Belle And Sebastian
Fidget spinners, weighted blankets, and the rise of anxiety consumerism
Everything Is Worse, Except Your Phone
Your Public Library Is Where It’s At
The iPhone SE was the best phone Apple ever made, and now it’s dead
This Is the Best Time in History to Be a Spider-Man Fan
The Saga of Virtute the Cat: Canadiana, Folk Punk, and John K. Samson
“Punchier and stronger” and with way more women: How Outside Magazine got to be badass online
iOS Shortcuts, September 2018
Shortcuts launched this month, but it doesn’t come with iOS 12 or new phones. You have to decide to download it, which means it’s not going to be as popular as other new and more obvious iOS 12 features. But Shortcuts is the reason to be on iOS 12, and its the most interesting feature set to come to the iPhone in years.
Shortcuts lets you build little instruction sets, and assign them to a single tap (either in the app, on your home screen, or in your widgets menu), or to a Siri command. They can be dumb simple, like my Indoors & Outdoors commands, which just sets the volume to levels I find comfortable for the context. Or they can be more complicated, like an entire morning routine that turns on all your dinguses.
If you’re on an iPhone and have Shortcuts installed, clicking on any link in this post will take you to the Shortcut, which you can install and use.
Here are the Shortcuts I’m using this month:
Play Overcast: Simply begins playing Overcast where I last left it, no matter how long the app has been closed. You have to have Overcast installed to use it.
Copy to Drafts: Copies whatever is in my clipboard to a blank Draft. You have to have Drafts installed to use it.
Spotify Shortcut setup: Spotify doesn’t have Shortcuts support yet, but this method that I found on Reddit is still very useful. You have to do some copying/pasting during the setup, but this Shortcut will build several other shortcuts, allowing you to begin playing Spotify on the last song you played, add currently playing song to favorites, and skip the playing track. You have to have Spotify installed to use it.
If these sound boring, it’s because all they do is take a few taps and swipes and simplify them into a single tap. I think that kind of thing is what computer progress is mostly about, though. As time goes on and people build on one another’s ideas, Shortcuts will become more interesting. It might just give us the Jetsons future our Grandparents thought we’d have by now.
