Use a Custom Domain Name

From a blog post by Manuel Moreale:

Please, for the love of all things web-related, if you decide to do anything online, get yourself a domain name. Don’t rely on the 3rd party domain provided by services like Blogger, Substack, Tumblr, whatever. Yes, it’s an extra cost but owning your URLs is important. If Substack dies tomorrow, all your fancy-cool-name.substack.com URLs are gone. And all the links scattered across the web that were pointing to them are now broken.

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Asus ZenBook 14: One Year Later

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post on a new laptop I had recently acquired to use for embedded development. At the time I was preparing to travel for work, and wanted a machine that would be able to handle my normal workload, even if it was a bit slower than my desktop(s). I’ve used it on and off since then, and decided to write up a quick follow-up post to detail some of my thoughts.

My Search for the Perfect Note-Taking Solution

Warning: I have no conclusions in this blog post. These are just my somewhat-rambling thoughts on a topic that I spend way too much time thinking about.

Introduction

I have a love/hate relationship with note-taking apps. I’ve been trying out different solutions for over a decade at this point, but have yet to ever feel perfectly at home with any system I’ve tried, which leaves me constantly looking for improvements instead of just settling in and using my system.

A New Linux Laptop...

I told myself this day would never come. There was no reason for me to own a Linux laptop. My M1 MacBook Pro was the perfect mobile computing option: fast, nearly-infinite battery life, and extremely capable. Linux laptops always need babied, and never seem to work when you need them to. My MacBook was always functional whenever I needed it…

…And I’m writing this post from a laptop running Linux that I’ve now owned for a little over 24 hours. Why?

Thoughts on Hugo after 21 Months

A little over 21 months ago, I finally scratched the itch that I’d had off and on for years to migrate my website to a static site generator (SSG). I wrote about migrating from Wordpress to Hugo when I made the change, and overall, I’ve been pretty happy with the results. My website and blog feel more responsive than they have in years, everything has been very reliable, and I know that all of my content is safely stored in a version control system I trust (Git), and in a format that is relatively portable (Markdown).

The Apple Store Time Machine

Michael Steeber:

The Apple Store Time Machine is a celebration of the places and products that have shaped our lives for more than twenty years. This interactive experience recreates memorable moments in Apple history with painstaking detail and historical accuracy.

I spent some time exploring the Time Machine Michael created this afternoon, and the level of detail is absolutely astonishing. I highly recommend downloading this and reliving some of Apple’s history.

iOS 14.5 with App Tracking Transparency + Apple Watch Unlock

iOS 14.5 was released yesterday (2021/04/26), bringing a whole host of changes that have been heavily covered on all of the major tech news outlets. Two of the changes, App Tracking Transparency and Apple Watch unlock for iPhone, caught my eye.

I’ve read the details on App Tracking Transparency, and I like what Apple is doing, though I’ve not actually experienced any of the changes myself yet. The TL;DR version is that companies are now blocked from tracking you across other apps by default, and you have to explicitly give them permission to do so, whereas before it was enabled by default, and you had to manually disable tracking. I don’t use many apps that this would apply to personally (from what I’ve seen at least), but I think this is a win for privacy-conscious individuals everywhere. For more details of the changes, see Why Apple’s new privacy feature is such a big deal by The Verge.