Jamie Thingelstad

My friend David Hussman likes to reference his age with a version number. He does a divide by 10 so at 32 you are version 3.2, and 47 you are version 4.7. This always makes me chuckle a bit, but I think there might be more to this than a geeky joke.

Reference Semantic Versioning:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
3. PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

I think the version metaphor works. You are a different person in your 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. Your life changes in meaningful ways! MAJOR version! Each year we tend to think of new things and new goals, but we don’t break backwards compatibility. MINOR version! And I think most people try to make each day a bit better than the last. PATCH level!

Today I’m v4.6.52 of me. I decided the patch version is the days since your birthday. In fact, I made a Birthday Version script for Workflow to calculate the version of people in your address book.

How will v4.6.53 be different? I don’t know, but I hope ever so slightly better. 🤞

macOS Photos app grinds my laptop to a crawl. Fans blaring, everything sluggish. Very frustrating. Seemingly doing nothing and it’s taking 280% and more of CPU.

At Feed My Starving Children to pack meals. Tyler wanted to come here for his birthday. Love this handmade graph of progress.

We packed 22 boxes at Feed My Starving Children this morning! 🙌🏻 Tyler picked a great event for his birthday!

We made 34,344 meals, enough to feed 94 kids for a year!

This weekend I made some significant improvements to the automation and template for the Weekly Thing. I’ve always had reservations about the template I was using since moving to MailChimp. It just didn’t fit me, and even more frustrating I didn’t have any ways to make simple changes to the styling. I use quotes extensively in the Weekly Thing, and it wasn’t possible to get those quickly styled.

I got a lot done over the weekend to make this better.

Template

I used a very basic HTML template and extended it as I need it. I wanted it simple and didn’t want a lot of decoration. I like how it ended up.

You will notice that quotes look significantly better in the links section, with indentation and a left border. I’ve also added the hostname of the link, so you know what site you are going to go to if you click on that link, something I appreciate before I click on a link.

Automation

My automation is now complete again. I figured out the MailChimp API’s and my workflows now format all the content for me and then create the campaign in MailChimp, set the body content and I even got the photo uploaded with the API.

Now I can once again publish entirely on my iPhone if I want to.

Microblog

While I was working on the template and the automation, I decided to make the microblog section better. I’ve never liked having those posts be a list of links. Often the only content is the text itself, and it feels disappointing to click on a link to get nothing new. But sometimes there was a photo there, so people did.

Microblogs are now directly in line with the Weekly Thing. You no longer need to click out to see an image, and you don’t get disappointed by clicking on a status post to only see a web page with nothing more than the status you already read.

Thank you for the time, and I would appreciate any feedback you have. 🙏 I finally feel like I can change this with some confidence and make continual improvements.

Alto’s Odyssey is a beautiful game experience.

Eero update today to support IPv6 and I can now go full IPv6 all the way online. Very nice! 👏

It’s all twizzles on the Olympic Ice. ⛸

Using the Get and Set Clipboard actions in Workflow to pass more than just “Workflow input” between different workflows is great (and a total hack). 🤓