17/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I’ve spent the day diving in to the Swift programming language that runs all modern Apple apps.
So far it’s really similar to JavaScript which is great. Computer languages are a lot like spoken languages: if you already speak Italian, Spanish isn’t far away. But Hungarian or Finnish are totally different.
Fortunately JavaScript and Swift feel like Mediterranean cousins.
I’m using Hacking with macOS: SwiftUI Edition by Paul Hudson and really enjoying it.
I’m looking forward to the bit where we start to build a UI; so far we’re just in text-function mode. One step at a time.
I haven’t given this deep thought…
This might be a rash decision. To write an app. But watching Lucy create her index in Apple Notes the other day really made me realise how much I could do if I had my own thing.
I think this deserves its own thing. And yes, this means yet another app. In the crowded PKM market.
But actually I’m not trying to compete with the Obsidians or the Notions. I made a decision a while ago to focus my efforts on the tools that anyone can use. Not just the PKM nerds. Obsidian isn’t that.
I want my app to sit in this space; where someone who has no idea what ‘PKM’ is, but has a bunch of files on their desktop, could start to use it and have it be immediately useful, familiar, comforting.
That probably means design over features. Simple to start.
But let’s see what SwiftUI can do first, and then think about app design.
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16/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Chatting to a friend yesterday made me realise that I really want to write software to help you manage your Johnny.Decimal system.
It’ll be Mac initially, and iPad/iPhone maybe later. It can’t be web — not enough system integration — and I’m sorry if you use Linux or Windows but I’m just one guy and Apple is what I know.
I can already code to a meh standard. I know JavaScript. So I don’t need to learn the fundamentals of programming.
I listen to ATP, so I have a good high level understanding of the state of Mac development. I’d like to learn whatever’s as default and future-proof as possible. So I guess that means Swift UI? (I know this might come with some trade-offs.)
So! What I’m looking for is a list of the best resources. Including but not limited to:
- YouTube channels.
- Courses, paid included.
- Blogs or other personal sites that will tell me what to do.
- Podcasts? Though I don’t see audio as the ideal medium here.
Who’s the Wes Bos of Swift? Who will mainline me information as fast as I can absorb it?
What’s my fastest path to getting a minimally functional Mac app working?
Throw me suggestions via email or on the forum post associated with this entry, or on Mastodon.
Thanks! 🙏
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15/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Today’s a day off. I had lunch with a friend and a lovely walk back in to the city through my old neighbourhood.
See you all tomorrow. Heading back to Lucy and the chickens.
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14/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I’m heading to Melbourne to see an old friend. Just a short trip, so a tiny bag, enabling me to fulfil a life’s dream: I’m going to cycle to the airport.
Marie saw me off.
A strange dream, you might think. It’s just a small thing, but I love the idea of being able to do something so big — fly to Melbourne — without having to get in the car.
Also I don’t own a car, so it’ll save me at least $50 on Uber rides.
There aren’t many cities you could do this, and there certainly aren’t many capital cities. But Canberra’s a funny little place. A lot of people don’t even realise it’s the capital — they assume that’s Sydney.
At the top of our street you hit Anzac Parade. That’s the Australian War Memorial at the left/north, then you look down the parade and over Old Parliament House to Parliament House at the right/south.
A tiny panorama doesn’t really do it justice. It’s better on street view.
At the bottom of the parade you do a left, turn in past ASIO (our FBI), and you hit Lake Burley Griffin.
Over the lake there is the Parliamentary Triangle. It’s a delightful part of the world; whenever we’re there we can’t quite believe that it’s where we live. It’s like a scene from the original Star Trek, one of those episodes where they land on some utopian world and everyone is young and beautiful and they’re all exercising with a big smile and they’re rolling hoops and wearing lilac leotards and then later you realise actually it’s really sinister because actually everyone’s a lizard and they eat the old people but on the surface it’s an idyllic paradise.
That’s what it feels like when you cycle round Lake Burley Griffin.
Over the way there you’ve got the National Gallery of Australia, the High Court of Australia, Questacon (the science museum), and the National Library of Australia. We work in the library sometimes, it’s lovely and the Wi-Fi is epic.
So then you ride along the lake for a bit…
…and you get to the airport. By now my hands and toes are a touch cold — it’s about 7°C — but not too bad.
The bike gets parked.
And I’m in one of the loveliest airports you’ve ever been in.
The flight was on time (actually we’re running early), I’m in 5A on a lovely QantasLink A220 which feels like it’s been recently renovated. Seating is 2+3 so there’s loads of room.
Whenever we fly Qantas we wonder what Americans would think of Australian domestic flights. No offence, America, but I’ve done a cross-country economy flight on one of your main carriers. We do it better.
Oh and this is cool! I’ll publish this from the plane, which has Wi-Fi. Better hurry up, we’re coming in to land.
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13/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Yesterday I repeated something that I first said at the start of the year: some of my own systems are disorganised.
So here I am, this guy with a site and a blog, and my stuff’s a mess. Seems odd. Why should you trust anything I say?
I didn’t take my own advice
The simplest explanation is that, in this instance, I didn’t take my own advice.
I quit my job a year ago and that’s when this system, D85 Johnny.Decimal business
, started.
I didn’t really know what I was doing; there was no plan for the business. I just quit one day! So I knocked something together out of necessity, as I went. The system just evolved.
And, to be clear, it’s not a bad system. It works. We’re here, working, and we can find things. I just know that it can be a lot better.
I hadn’t written my own advice
It would have been hard to follow the step-by-step procedures that I outline in the workbook because I hadn’t written it yet!
So that’s not a bad excuse.
Also, working it out is instructive
I don’t pretend to have a perfect solution to all of this. My thoughts are evolving; the Johnny.Decimal system evolves; and the very nature of the work that we do evolves.
I’m just listening to Cal Newport’s latest podcast. He’s giving a rundown of the state of productivity advice since the ’90s.
There’s the ‘sage advice and optimism’ era of Stephen Covey, then the ‘productivity pr0n’ era, defined by David Allen’s Getting Things Done® and Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders.
Then in the late 2000s we got sick of working so much and we move in to the era of ‘lifestyle design’, defined by Tim Ferris’ The 4-hour Workweek.
And that’s where I’m up to. The point is, this stuff shifts. Whether it needs to or not, who knows. Is it all a fad? To some extent. Is it generational? Probably a bit of that.
So I’m trying to think about the type of system that I want Johnny.Decimal to be. I don’t actually see myself as a ‘PKM’ nerd. I’d like to help normal people — who have no idea what that acronym means and don’t care — to be more organised.
Because we have no option these days. In the late 2000s you could plausibly get by without using a computer all day. Then they invented the iPhone and everything changed.
So now you have to use a computer, for essentially everything, whether you want to or not. I’d like to find a way to navigate that fact without burdening the world with yet more procedures; without it having to be your hobby.
Most people don’t have a deep passion for knowledge management. They just want to know where they saved that receipt when the thing breaks.
Anyway. A work in progress.
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12/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
At the start of the year I declared ‘organisational bankruptcy’.1 I haven’t had time to do anything about it since then (recording the workshop is a full-time job), but I started today.
My scope statement is up.
In scope
- Anything to do with the running of Johnny.Decimal as a business.
- Specifically I’m going to bring
30-39 Coruscade
over from my personal system. That’s the company that the business operates under.
Out of scope
- Anything that is 100% website related. I have a separate system for that,
D01 johnnydecimal.com
.
- You’re looking at that system: it’s what gives structure to the site.
- But if we create non-text content that then gets published on the site — a video, say — that’s not in
D01
. That’s part of D85
.
And here’s the first bunch of Post-its. These have come from the things I’ve done over the last week, which I’ve been writing down.
Next up I’ll go through our file system and get everything represented there on the wall.
Note that I’m doing 20-29 Discovery
(ref. workbook/workshop) by myself, but when it comes to 30-39 Build your areas & categories
I’ll do that with Lucy as this is a system that we both use.
Of course if she also discovers some stuff and sticks it on the wall, that’s cool.
It’ll all be documented
Here at the very least, and I expect we’ll do some videos for the YouTube channel.
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11/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Saturday feels like the day I talk about stuff that I do round the house, so here are a couple of really easy recipes.
They both come from my mam. I’ve been cooking them both for about 30 years; or, she has, and I used to hang around and help.
I love cooking. It keeps you busy: gives your hands something to do but allows your brain to wander a bit. It’s great thinking time.
Anyway, neither of these will tax your skills (or wallet) too much.
Vegetable soup
It’s getting cold, and that means soup. This is so easy anyone can make it.
Ingredients
- 50g knob of butter.1
- One large leek.
- One large head of broccoli.
- Two large carrots.
- Three large potatoes.
- Black pepper.
- Powdered vegetable stock.
Instructions
- In a really big pan (mine might be 5 litres?), heat the butter.
- Chop the leek in to 1cm rounds and fry until soft. Don’t brown.
- Chop the carrot, broccoli including stalk, and peeled potatoes in to chunks. It doesn’t really matter how big. Add to pan.
- Add 2 litres of boiling water.
- Add a really good amount of freshly ground black pepper. I do about 1tbsp of peppercorns but I like it spicy.
- Add 3tsp of the vegetable stock, or adjust to taste (it’s mostly salt).
- Boil gently for at least an hour.
Eat with fresh bread slathered in really good butter.
The rest will keep in the fridge for a few days, or it freezes really well.
Corned beef and potato pie
This has been a favourite as long as I can remember. When I was in my early 20s I had cool jobs where I’d fly all over the world. Mam used to make a pie to take with me. It’d be in my luggage, wrapped in silver foil.
So I’d land in Nigeria, check in, and eat a slice of pie.
One of the first web pages I ever made was this recipe. It would have been at http://york.ac.uk/~jen101/pie.html
or similar. 1995! Lost like tears in rain, alas.
Ingredients
- 2 frozen puff pastry sheets. If you can find the stuff made with butter vs. vegetable oil, obviously it’s better.
- One 340g tin of corned beef. (The ‘lite’ variety works great.)
- One medium onion.
- Three potatoes.
- Black pepper.
- An egg.
Instructions
- In an 8” shallow pie dish, blind bake the pastry base at 180C for about 15 minutes.2
- Boil the peeled, chopped potato. Drain.
- Chop the onion: half quite fine, half a little larger.
- Add the chopped onion, corned beef, and a good helping of black pepper to the pan with the boiled potatoes. Mash roughly.
- Add the beefy-potato-mush to the pie. Top with the other pastry sheet.
- Bake at 180C for about half an hour. I find turning the top oven element on at the beginning puffs the pastry a little better; then I switch back to regular fan oven.
- Near the end, beat the egg and brush over the top.
It’ll be thermonuclear so let it cool a touch before eating. Best with mushy peas and gravy.
I think I prefer this cold the next day. But I’ve always been a cold-savoury person. I like the way that everything congeals. I could eat a kilo of this for lunch the day after (with a bit of hot English mustard).
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10/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
The phone rings.
Hello, this is John Noble from the late 1980s.
Hi John, it’s you in 2024. They call us Johnny now. What are you up to?
Oh hi. I’m just messing about with ELIZA on my Amiga 500. It’s an AI, you can ask it questions and stuff!
Cool. Honestly I thought you’d be a bit more surprised that I called you.
Anyway, I remember ELIZA. Hey I’ve got news. We have actual AI now!
No way! Real AI?
Well, kinda. They call it ‘AI’ but there’s nothing intelligent about it. Setting that technicality aside, it’s pretty amazing.
You can talk to it and it’s basically indistinguishable from a human. You can ask it almost anything and it’ll give you a pretty good answer. It can translate language essentially flawlessly, instantaneously, and you can speak that text out loud and have the translation read back to you. Some studies have shown that it’s as good as your GP in diagnosing medical issues. It’s being used to design new antibacterials, which we really need. It can make therapy more accessible. It can enhance education by personalizing learning experiences for students. It’s revolutionizing customer service with chatbots that offer instant assistance. In fields like agriculture, AI-driven solutions optimize crop yields and reduce resource usage. It’s also contributing to environmental conservation through predictive analytics to combat climate change. Additionally, AI-driven robotics are advancing manufacturing efficiency and safety standards.
It’s so good, I wrote the first half of that paragraph myself and I asked ChatGPT to finish it off with ‘more very positive things that AI can do’ and it did that, instantly, for free.
Wow! That is amazing. So how does everybody feel about it?
We all hate it.
Oh. That doesn’t make sense. The technology sounds extraordinary.
Yeah the technology is. But it’s been rammed down our throats and we’re all sick of it already.
I use this platform called Thinkific to host my course videos. I spend hours and hours thinking about how to teach people these skills that I have; meticulously crafting these lessons so that each flows cohesively from the next; so that the message is clear, so that the viewer is taken on a journey from concept to concept.
But now there’s this massive button that you can’t turn off that wants to create your course for you ‘with AI’. As if you, the cretin, have signed up for this teaching platform but actually you’ve no idea how or what to teach. It’s demeaning. And so the internet is being filled with this dreck, this tedious, banal slop, to the point where real human content is becoming hard to find.
Right. That seems like a sha— And then you’ve got these companies that basically steal all of your data to make these new AIs. Because they need to be trained on actual human data.
The problem is that we’ve structured society so that in order to make anything, you eventually need it to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So rather than having normal companies that pay normal prices for things and treat people like humans, you’ve got these absurd structures whose only purpose is to pay back their investors, at all costs. So they’ll just shaft their users in service of these billions of dollars.
I can sense your frust— So the whole world has been taken over by these assholes and what should have been an amazing, transformational technology — I haven’t even mentioned the internet yet have I? that’s a whole other thing — anyway so it feels like what should have been transformational is just being ruined because a bunch of dudes have to be absurdly, offensively rich at everyone else’s expense. It’s not like they can even spend the money, they just want it so they can say that they have it. And so everything’s screwed and it’s only getting worse.
…
Sorry. Are you still there?
Yeah. Look, is there anything I can do from the late 1980s?
Yeah. There are these thing called emoji. In October 2010 with the release of Unicode 6.0 there’s a new one: it’s called ‘sparkles’.
I need you to find whoever designed that emoji and cut their hands off…
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9/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I cycled up to the inaugural Canberra CBR Small Business Expo today.1 Here is my report.
I got lucky: crystal show!
Who doesn’t love sharing a conference centre with a bunch of pseudo-scientific woo.
And it turns out that the ‘Canberra Crystal Show’ was just a guy selling a bunch of crystals. So, a shop.
It’s a shame that the people who think crystals “…can help one attain ‘Lemurian awareness’ — the balancing, nurturing, loving, spiritual and sensuous consciousness…” have ruined what would otherwise be a perfectly lovely rock.
It’s all pretty ‘regional’
Lucy and I have this term for things that are a bit, well … regional. You know. Not quite big-city-lights. Like, you’re not going to stumble across David Letterman at this thing.
We find ‘regional’ things tremendously endearing. The whole of Canberra — the capital of Australia, I will remind you — is pretty regional. This expo was super regional.
I met the Minister for Something
May I present Mick Gentleman, Minister for something to do with business, they said. It’s not really clear what?
Anyway, he was available, so he gave a little welcome speech and I asked him for a selfie. He was very obliging.
That’s the Grease Monkey chicken van over my shoulder. When I first started travelling to Canberra (as a weekly FIFO from Melbourne) we’d go to Grease Monkey every week.
Every subsequent week we’d say, shall we try somewhere else tonight? And we’d say, yeah. Then we’d finish work and go to Grease Monkey.
I got sushi today because if I got Grease Monkey for lunch Lucy would have given me the stink-eye when I got home.2
Conflicting advice
I saw a talk given by Emily of Ivy Social. I went in to the session thinking, I’d already cancelled my Facebook account by the time Emily started high school, there’s nothing Emily can teach me about social media.
I was wrong. It was a great session and I wrote a bunch of stuff down.
One of her key messages was: be authentic. I really liked Emily.
The next guy’s talk was about how small business can use AI tools. He explained how you could just give Meta AI a web page and ask it to write you a month’s worth of blog posts and social media.
I wasn’t sure how authentic that was. I wanted to shout “nobody will read this turgid dross!” from the back of the room but I was eating a fried chicken burger my sushi.
He was one of these older blokes who can’t actually explain anything very well. “Yeah then we just load up AI and tell her what we want”, he said, and yes he called the AI “her”.
I don’t know who invited him. Maybe I’ll have a word with Mick.
He said that ‘prompt engineers’ get paid $300k. I really don’t think they do.
Anyway. I really liked Emily.
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