The other day I have confessed my failure to create a habit of mediation. I don’t imagine I’m alone in this struggle. I also know that many have successful.

I don’t expect there is a magic secret. Everyone is different. Every life is different. I do wonder what are the small little things that might take one over the hump.

I cannot tell how many times I have tried getting into mediation. I lost count. There have been times when I’ve been practicing for months. Then stopped.

I feel that I’m facing three challenges while attempting to get into meditation. First, I need to use my will power to start. I couldn’t find any natural trigger to attach meditation to.

Second, meditating in the evening usually means having to interrupt myself from a relaxing activity. After I finish work at night, I tend to read to relax before going to bed. Or watch an episode of a TV show. This sounds like an ideal time for meditation. But only theoretically.

Yesterday I have installed iTerm2. The main reason might sound a bit strange though.

The idea was seeded in my mind a few days ago, when after a long time switching between different terminal file navigators, I decided to remove all but one from my system.

“What terminal file managers?” you may ask. I had quite a few installed over time:

• ranger
• nnn
• lf
• superfile
• yazi

ranger was the first file manager/navigator I’ve learned about; it’s been a long while since. ranger was also the one that I used the longest contiguously.

1. Anil Dash: “Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture”:

   The bad-faith style of engagement, the endangering of workers who have .00005% the wealth of the richest man on earth, the ignoring of obvious waste in defense spending… all of these signs show us that DOGE isn’t about what it pretends to be.

   It rings so possible that is scary, very scary. I cannot think of anything I disagree with on this article. And I really wanted to be able to say: “this is not true and it won’t happen in America”.

A friend shared his excitement, and joy, of using a new notes app. That made me very curious and intrigued.

I thought I could do a bit of preparation before adding yet another notes app.

What kind of preparation though? How about answering the question: what features am I looking for in a notes app?

Here’s the list of features I came up with:

1. Support rich formatting. (A)
   1. Support inline code and block code (A1)
   2. Support embedding images (A2)
   3. Support for attachments (A3)
2. Automatic geo-location of the notes (B)
3. Automatic timestamp management (creation date, last modification date, etc.) (C)
   1. Support ordering based on these (C1)
4. Good search
   1. Search by title, tags
   2. Search by dates
   3. Search by location
5. Offline mode
6. Available on all platforms
7. Sync (push better)
8. Support for automation (create notes)
   1. Append to existing notes
9. Retrieve notes using API or other mechanisms
10. Import notes
11. Export notes
12. Advanced editing features
    1. History
    2. Folding
    3. Outlines

This list is not ordered. There are things on this list that I consider mandatory. Take for example the presence on all platform and synchronization. Without these, I wouldn’t even consider a notes app.

Earlier this year, I have added a new type of entry to the blog: a linked article.

I use this type of entry to capture an interesting link. Sometimes the link comes with some short commentary; sometimes it can be a slightly longer.

Until now, there was no easy way to access the list of linked articles. Firstly, I have added the Linked link on the left bar. And then made the linked articles list look more like what I’d expect, meaning like a list.

A post on Michael Tsai’s blog reminded me of a great RSS reader available for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS: News Explorer.

I have used News Explorer exclusively a few years ago at a time I felt Reeder might be abandoned; I was also frustrated about reporting quite a few bugs and never hearing back.

Now, I have installed News Explorer back. Because I feel Reeder, now called Reeder Classic, might be abandoned. Reeder has not been seeing regular updates when being the only version of the app. Now, the developer introduced Reeder. and I suspect his focus will slowly be moving to the new app.

For the last couple of days I got my first sample of Apple Intelligence: the notification summaries.

The first time I noticed it, it was because the Calendar notification looked a bit different. I was in the middle of something and dismissed it.

Today I got it again. This time I paid more attention. And indeed, it was the same summary notification. It was summarizing 2 calendar notifications for events that occurred 3 days ago. It has nothing to do with the current events in the calendar. It has nothing to do with the notifications that are displayed once I click on it.

Notepad calculators. Text files that can do calculations. And conversions. Some even charts.

I don’t know how popular this cagegory of apps is. I don’t remember when I first learned about them. I used one, now and then, when I needed to save some formulas that I can reuse at a later time to recalculate things based on input.

It’s been a while since then. Today I took a look at the notepad calculators category again.

I go between using the Reminders and Due apps, on both my iPhone and MacBook. Why?

Reminders app has location-based reminders. I don’t use this very often, but I do need sometimes the “Remind me when I get home to check x”. What pushes me away from Reminders app is the lack of configurable notifications. I get one. If I missed it, as in I haven’t been next to my phone, or I want to then I don’t get another chance. I have to raise the phone and check. Which means carrying the