It’s Been A While

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I haven’t written in here for a while. Regular writing is the key to both making writing easier, and retaining readers, so I’ve read many times. However, I haven’t found any that I felt would be of interest to you so why bother, just for the sake of it? I welcome your thoughts and opinions on that.

I’ve been looking at some productivity apps recently. I need to make sure that I start, and maintain good habits, such as regular exercise, journal writing, reading, taking photographs and the like. One way to do that is to get into the habit of such things. I thought a little help in that wouldn’t go amiss so I’ve installed Tick Tick on both my iPad and my main iPhone. Now, when I get up in the morning there are calendar events there to remind me what appointments I have during the day, and also a list of the aforementioned habits. I simply check them off as I complete them during the day. I can have the calendar events pop up at an appropriate time, and the habits can appear as a reminder, in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening.

So far so good, but I’ll write some more when I’ve run them for a couple of weeks

Play It Again?

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I have just set up a brand new pair of HomePods, 2nd Generation. I made sure I got all the updates and everything done, and this evening I am sitting on the sofa listening to some music.

It went through my mind how my late grandfather was taken aback by CDs when they first appeared in the second half of the 1980s. I got my first CD player in 1987, and my grandparents had come to visit. I wonder what he would make of this technology now when I don’t have to move off the sofa all evening; where I don’t even have to lift a finger, but just tell Siri what I want to hear next.

OK, it’s not perfect. Apple Music might state that they have 100 million tracks on offer these days, but there are still a few old favourites that the streaming services have passed by. Nevertheless, it’s a fun evening, and, for me, mostly preferable to the TV!

Read It Later

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I often see a website or email article that I would like to read. I don’t have time, or inclination, to read it at that moment, but I know I want to at some point. Way back, I would simply set a bookmark in the web browser, and come back to it later. It quickly became messy though, and there pretty much wasn’t any way to tag articles so I could easily find the information later if I couldn’t remember the name or even the URL of the website that I had found it on.

Evernote came along and with it, the ability to forward emails to it. Great it works fine. Instapaper came along with the ability to do a similar thing with web pages, as well as Evernote too. I never really got into Pocket a great deal, but there are some things stored there too.

A few months back I downloaded Readwise, which allows me to save highlights from books that I read. I find that useful as some passages in books can be very inspiring and it’s good to save them in one place. Now, though, Readwise has brought out Reader which allows me to save web pages, emails, PDFs, RSS feeds and even YouTube Videos in one place as a single library and feed source. I’m going to go with this, and we’ll see how it pans out over time.

If it works out, then I’ll only be paying £7.99 a month for Readwise instead of paying for both Instapaper and Evernote, so I’ll save a few quid too.