Fun stop at Whitetail Woods Regional Park.
Midsommer Festival at American Swedish Institute.
Family selfie! @ Mill City Museum
Dan Wilson hinting at new Semisonic album? New song “Basement Tapes” sounds great!
Introducing the Weekly Thing
A while back I tried a way of sharing links to things that I found interesting every week. I did it by making a link blog post and then sharing links to that blog post. I got more positive feedback on those posts than I expected. People really liked them and found value in what I was highlighting.
But I didn’t like the link posts cluttering up my blog. They felt different and I eventually decided to stop doing the posts mostly because I was frustrated with how my website was coming along.
Email Newsletters
I enjoy a number of weekly newsletters. I subscribe to MacStories for the members only Club MacStories newsletter. Patrick Rhone’s One More Thing is a very well written personal newsletter and a treat whenever it comes. Sitting down with an espresso and my iPad to casually read through weekly newsletters is a treat on the weekend.
Email newsletters are ‘old school’. There is something about the medium that feels more personal and more conversational than others. I wanted to try this out, and realized that those old link posts were the right foundation to build upon.
Next I wanted to see how hard this would be. I quickly looked into TinyLetter and realized it would be pretty easy. I like that TinyLetter exists as a way for personal email newsletters. It’s very easy to use.
Weekly Thing
With the basis of my links I decided to put together a newsletter. I
went with the somewhat goofy name of the Weekly Thing playing off my
last name. Total aside, but I used to own the domain
thing.org in the mid 90’s. I was at the U of MN at
the time and I got an email from The Thing, a museum
in Germany, asking if they could have the domain. I transferred it to
them, seemed the right thing to do. My future as a domain squatter was
determined at that time.
I’ve been quietly publishing the Weekly Thing for a few weeks now to an invited group of friends. I’ve been testing out my automation and the structure. I’m very pleased with how it’s working and this week put the subscribe page live and started sharing it. My first goal is to get to 100 subscribers and continue to flesh out the content. I hope you all enjoy it!
Go to the Weekly Thing to subscribe!
Excited to see Semisonic playing Great Divide tonight!
Cool to have Jeremy Messersmith open for Semisonic. His voice reminds me of Dan Wilson.
It’s amazing how many bands are still playing from the 90’s. Pixies. Dinosaur Jr. many others.
Semisonic - FNT!
Minnehaha creek tonight.
Last day of school for both kids, last day of T-Ball and Daughters birthday to boot. 🤩
Withings getting acquired, and the brand merging in with Nokia, makes me worry about my Withings products. 😕
Looking up.
Beef tenderloin on the Big Green Egg tonight.
Asparagus too for the steak. Big Green Egg makes everything delicious.
Put the archive of the Open Loop podcast that Garrick Van Buren and I did in 2012 back online. Fun stuff. Lot’s of Kubb. 👍🏻
Monument Valley 2 is really nice. High quality puzzle game.
OmniFocus Tip: Using Context Notifications
I use OmniFocus as the core of my GTD system. I also keep notifications on my phone to a minimum, including for OmniFocus. OmniFocus on iOS has the ability to give you a notification when you enter or leave a context with a location. This is pretty handy and I’ve used it for some specific locations associated with my Errands context. Errands : Hardware store gives me a nudge if I am nearby and have tasks available. I’ve never used this feature with Home and Office contexts because it would be very noisy.
There are times however when I would like OmniFocus to be in my face at home or at the office. I may have a task in OmniFocus that I need to do when I get to work on Monday morning, or when I come home on Friday evening and a notification would help. I realized there is a really simple solution to this.
I have a Office context, and inside that context I created a Office with notification context. The context with notification has a location and notification with it.
Now I can easily put a very small number of tasks in the Office : Office with notificaiton context and know I will be notified when they are avialable. I’ve created a similar context for Home with notificaiton. This has already allowed me to not forget a couple of time sensitive things.
Nice evening in the neighborhood.
Attending my first GTD workshop today. Have been doing GTD for a long time and am looking to reinforce and deepen core concepts.
The David Lynch Documentary Kickstarter I backed in April 2012 with a delivery in May 2013 may finally get to me in June 2017! Better 4 years late than never? 🙃
Good morning espresso! ☕️
Thinking in Decades
This week I worked with Yahoo! customer support and deleted my Flickr account. I had deleted my Yahoo! account a couple of months ago when they had their second massive security notice of compromised accounts. When I got a notice letting me know that the Privacy Policy for Flickr was changing in association with the sale to Verizon I wanted to delete my account. I have no interest in Verizon hosting my photos, and frankly I don’t use Flickr anymore.
That was when I realized I had no way to access my Flickr account since the Yahoo! account was used to connect to it. I was happy thought that Yahoo! customer support was quick and made this easy to get done.
My Flickr account is no more now. I created that account probably a decade ago. Long before it ever became part of Yahoo!, back when Flickr was amazing and cool. Looking back this is a good reminder of how long our content lives online. Yet another example of how companies come and go and services come and go. To all of you using Facebook to keep family photos and pictures of your kids, think about this. This is why I feel so strongly about owning my content. It really isn’t that hard.