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

I just installed the new version of the Classical app on iPhone which has a major version 2.0. What is new? Thousands of album booklets.

I don’t know if that’s a lot or not. I have found the booklet on all the albums I have listened to in the last few days. Indeed they are all recently released albums.

This aside, I realized that I don’t recall ever reading a booklet. In my music listening periods, I have completely skipped over the CD period. It was vinyl, cassettes, than after a long break, mp3, and now streaming.

These are the features announced for iPadOS 18 that I am interested in using¹:

• Smart Script: use handwriting and it gets slightly improved.
• New Writing Tools: write, summarize longer text
• Prioritize notifications
• Create images and Genmoji
• Live audio transcription
• Apple Notes: highlight, collapsible sections
• Rearrange apps and widgets
• Lock an app to require authentication
• Hide an app
• Control Center new widgets
• Schedule a message with Send Later
• Safari table of contents and high-level summary
• Redesigned tab bar in apps: a floating tab bar.
• Updated document browser in Pages, Numbers, Keynote
• Reminders show up in

Below, I’ll capture my notes as I get to try out these features.

I recently read an article about connecting different Emacs functions; unfortunately I can’t recall the title or url of the article.

After having the idea of that article in the back of my mind for a bit, it connected with one of the things I wanted to do with my Emacs: give myself the option¹ to save the state of Emacs upon exiting.

I knew about Saving Emacs Sessions. The only remaining thing was connecting desktop-save to killing Emacs.