In the office

I guess this could be like a mini /uses or /defaults concerning software and/or hardware, if you really want to think of it that way. This is by no means an exhaustive list, only what I can think of right now, so I'll probably update it as more comes to me. It's also a bit of a misnomer to say "office," though I do have a proper office, I tend to move around the house with my laptop. Obviously there are some stationary objects that do remain in the office.

Kaleidoscope

If I have to diff something in a GUI, even two plain text files, I want to use Kaleidoscope. I first started using Kaleidoscope more than ten years ago. I got it as part of an app bundle and wow! I fell in love!

I still use an older version because since it came under new ownership the cost has skyrocketed and gone to a subscription model that I just cannot justify the cost of as an unemployed person. It's really quite a shame that they don't offer a slimmed down or "lite" version because I wonder how many other people are turned away from the cost barrier. It is an excellent app and you wouldn't be disappointed if you can afford it.

iTerm2

My preferred terminal application, used in combination with Oh My Zsh. Many people use VSCode (or other code editor) and all the panels and frames offered for All The Things in the app but it feels so busy and stresses me out. I still prefer individual apps for my development needs. For the terminal, it's still iTerm2.

Nova

Speaking of code editors, Nova was a beleaguered decision. As you may have read elsewhere on my weblog, I left web development cold turkey—yes, that is exactly like quitting smoking—and didn't write a lick of code for a couple years. During that time, Atom, my beloved text editor, was killed off by Github...ahem! Microsoft! ahem!...because of course it was. Shall I count the number of beloved apps I've used over the years that Microsoft acquired and then killed after rolling the best features into their other products? No, I shouldn't, it'll just make me madder.

Anyway, after that happened, I needed to choose a new code editor. My previous IDE was Komodo, which I used primarily for Drupal and PHP development, but I didn't want anything that heavy or resource intensive for my day-to-day editor, which I know would be mostly for writing HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I absolutely didn't want to use VSCode for hopefully obvious reasons based on the last entry and the previous sentiment. I considered Sublime Text but felt conflicted about having passed it up years ago in favor of Atom. Nova is pretty new to the scene, really just since about 2020, but is already a very polished Mac code editor and I'm really glad I landed here. Also a bonus that it is Portland-made software.

Adobe CS

Yep, I still use Adobe products. Namely: Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom. Everyone loves to hate on these tools and their bloat on both our machines and the industry. I've been using them for twenty years (including InDesign [and PageMaker before that!]), long before the recent spate of design tools came onto the scene.

I consider myself a "web designer" or "design implementer" or "design engineer" and I don't put entire UIs together in a tool that is not the final medium. I think this is a broken part of the industry. I'd rather mockup some pieces, create a mood board, edit photos, and create artifacts with these tools, than attempt to force a design onto the web from an entirely different medium. Of course I've worked with many other tools, I do take designs from other designers who are not also developers and implement them, but if I'm designing something myself I'm mostly doing it in the browser with the aid of Adobe products.

Fastmail

I've been using Fastmail for a year! I signed up just after signing up for omg.lol (coming up soon in this list!) Right now it is not my "personal" email address nor client, I still use an iCloud email address and Apple Mail for that. But it is my main "tech" email client and I use it for all my custom domain email addresses and my omg.lol address. I'm a happy customer so far.

Apple iCloud

I was originally a .mac user. Then a .me (MobileMe) user. And now an iCloud user. Yep, I use all the apps. They work seamlessly within the Apple ecosystem (in my experience, I know some people have issues with some things) and I can access all the same apps on all my devices and open all my documents and all that jazz. There's not much more to say here. Some individual apps listed below.

Dropbox

It's hard to put Dropbox in favorites because they've done so many things to piss me off over the years. But I do still use it a lot. It jives with my workflow and I don't know how to give it up. I've considered just moving a lot of the stuff to iCloud but I've also read people trying this and being disappointed for one reason or another. It's not perfect, but I don't know anything that is.

Pandora

I've been using Pandora since 2009. My favorite station is so well-curated over the years I never need to skip a song. I prefer it to both Apple Music and Spotify. It would be an easy switch to Apple Music, but Pandora support on devices and platforms is nearly ubiquitous. I don't like Spotify's politics or corporate behavior, so I don't think I could ever use it.

Flickr

As of 2024, I've been on Flickr for 17 years. Flickr is one of those platforms, sort of like Pandora, that just keeps trucking on doing what it has always done without seemingly falling to enshittification. It's rather remarkable that there are still products like this: they do one thing, the same thing they've always done, regardless of ownership, and they may not get better but they also don't get any worse. I like it, take my money.

omg.lol

OMG LOL!! I wrote a post about omg.lol for my one year anniversary. Amazing that I've only been using this platform of tools for sixteen months, it feels like home. Great people, fun tools, intelligent conversation, always helpful discussions. I'm looking forward to what new things we may see this year.

micro.blog

I started using micro.blog around the same time I signed up for omg.lol but my regular usage didn't take off until last summer. I appreciate all the features it has to offer and I recently signed up for the premium subscription in order to create two more blogs, which I've yet to do anything with (projects!), but I hope to resume my newsletter and source it on micro.blog.

However, some of the recent AI additions to the platform while other community requested features get delayed leave me with some consternation. I have no insight into how priorities get assigned but it does seem to track with the overall trend in tech right now and I'm not a fan of that trend.

Porkbun

I'm using Porkbun for all my custom domains and DNS. I transferred my new domain there last year, acquired a new one, and another, and another, and well, I might have a problem. But so far everything has been great!

Bunny.net (CDN)

I'm using Bunny.net for my CDN. It stores and serves all my static assets for all my properties, except most of micro.blog and anything stored on Flickr that I might display elsewhere. Fonts, CSS, Javascript, SVGs, other images, web manifests, all on Bunny.net CDN. I pay for the optimization service, so images are optimized and CSS and Javascript minimized and compressed. I may soon use Bunny.net for DNS as well, but that will be in the future a bit. I'm happy with Bunny.net's service so far.

Drafts

I use Drafts for writing. I'm using Drafts to write these words right now! I've written about my Drafts usage at least twice. I don't know that I need to say much more here now. I'm happy with Drafts and plan to continue using it for writing.

TextEdit, Notes, Reminders, Numbers, Mail, Music, Podcasts, Safari

These are some of the Apple and iCloud-syncing apps I use most regularly. I use Apple Music for my own music library not for streaming (noting Pandora above). I'm a regular podcast listener. Most of my personal accounts are in Safari. I have one million plain text files for anything and everything and they were all authored in TextEdit. I use Notes for organizing my life. And Numbers for making lists and checking them off. And Reminders to remind me. Phew!

Firefox (+ Developer Edition, Nightly)

My other main browser, in addition to Safari, though I use this for more research, browsing, reading, blogging, and tech-related stuff. My main development browser is Developer Edition and I sporadically use Nightly for new features. I barely use Chrome, unless I want to test or check something, and I don't even have Edge installed on this machine. In fact, I don't have any Microsoft software installed at all.

Elk & Ivory for Mastodon

I use both Elk Mastodon web UI and Ivory for iOS/iPadOS/MacOS for Mastodon. But honestly, I mostly use Elk. I made a custom Dracula theme for it last year and it is my favorite interface for interacting with Mastodon. I use the iOS Ivory app a fair amount when I'm out and about on my phone. But I can honestly say I don't use the MacOS or iPadOS version very much at all. Again, I prefer Elk in the browser on my Mac and I guess I just don't use my iPad for getting on Mastodon much? Anyway, I like them both for different reasons.

Epson printers & scanners

I have a wide-format Epson printer, an all-in-one Epson device, and a standalone Epson scanner. I don't use any of them as much as I used to. If I ever need to replace one of them, I'd by another Epson product. Yes, the ink stuff is bullshit, but all the manufacturers seem to be doing it, and Epson prints on Epson paper is amazing quality.

Canon cameras

I have a Canon point-and-shoot and Digital Rebel with a few lenses. I don't get out to shoot as much as I used to, but Canon has always been the quality, comfort, and feature set I have been happy with. Would I buy a new Canon camera? That I'm not sure about, there are some Fujifilm cameras I might be more interested in today, if I could afford them.

Samsung monitors

I have two Samsung monitors, a fairly boring standard sized one, and a larger widescreen one. They're both very good monitors, and other than an Apple display (which I just can't fathom spending the money on) I'd buy another Samsung monitor (or two!) in the future. They've always been flawless and well-priced.

Apple MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone

Some people have been publishing their computer origin stories. I should probably do that too, I took an interesting route to my current place. I am not a fangirl but I definitely am owned by the ecosystem. I made the decision and I'm stuck here. Sure I have complaints sometimes but overall I am pretty happy with these devices.

So I start searching online: “how to recover a deleted branch in git?”

A few results later, I find this gist.

Not one to copy/paste CLI commands straight off the internet (cough rm -rf / cough) I read through the script.

git reflog

Idk what that is, but yes, I should be flogging myself after what I just did.

What else is in here?

git checkout

Yeah that seems fine. What else?

git branch

Ok, that’s not dangerous.

Yeah I think I can give this a shot.

A few commands later and the work I thought was gone forever is restored to my computer. Hallelujah!

Now, one of the principle rules of the internet is: “Don’t read the comments.” But that’s where I go because this gist just saved my life.

And apparently not just mine. Other folks are saying the same thing:

• “you saved my life”
• “Thank you so much, you saved me”
• “Still saving lives in 2023”
• “Still saving lives in 2024! Thank you so much!”

And not just lives. Saving asses too:

• “This post just saved my ass! Thank you”
• “You saved my ass as well!!!”
• “Another ass saved here.”

And time:

• “Thanks for this, it just saved me one month of work.”
• “saved me, i was gonna work all weekends.”
• “Thanks a lot! You saved me a week's worth of work!”
• “you have saved me a months worth of work”

One commenter even went so far as:

• “You deserve a Noble Peace Prize”

I love it!

Seeing as it saved my butt, I also commented on the gist.

And because I commented, I’ve since been subscribed to further comments on the gist. And you know what? I kinda like it. I haven’t unsubscribed yet. It’s so fun. Every so often I get a new email notification from someone who commented on the gist, pouring out their gratitude.

Spread the love. As Jeremy says in “Our Web”:

Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.

Reply

• Email
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• Twitter

“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote. Silence is greater than music because it is its central organizing principle, the way the negative space around an object is what gives it a shape, the way you love someone for what they are not — the person who will not break a promise, the person who will not pass a collapsed bicycle without picking it up, the person who will not interrupt your reverie but will instead wait silently beside you until you open your eyes, is a particular kind of person, and it is each other’s particularity that we love. Just as a person is composed of their nos even more so than their yeses, sound becomes music through the silences between its notes — or else it would be noise.

Four days before his fortieth birthday, John Cage (September 5, 1912–August 12, 1992) instantly and permanently broadened the meaning of music by deepening our relationship to silence with the premiere of his now iconic composition 4’33”, inspired by his formative immersion in Zen Buddhism and “performed” by the virtuoso pianist David Tudor in a barn-like concert hall in Woodstock, New York — four minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure silence, suddenly rendering musical the ambient sounds of ordinary life.

Writer Nicholas Day and artist Chris Raschka bring the story of this quiet revolution to life in Nothing: John Cage and 4’33” (public library) — a spare, vibrant serenade to Cage’s masterpiece and its lasting existential echoes, challenging our most basic assumptions about what makes anything itself.

The story begins and ends with Tudor sitting at the piano that fateful summer evening in 1952, but in the smallness and stillness of that moment myriad questions about the nature of sound and the nature of attention come abloom, questions about how to listen and what to listen for, about who it is that does the listening, about the very nature of the self.

In the biographical afterword, Day writes:

What is music?
What is silence?
Can silence be music?
Can music be silence?

[…]

Are there even answers to these questions?
For Cage, the questions were always the important part, because the questions were more interesting than the answers. The questions often led to more questions, instead of answers.

Like Beatrice Harrison, Cage was taken to a concert as a small child and stood in the aisle spellbound through the entire performance. He fell in love with sound long before he took his first music lesson. In a sentiment common to everyone who puts anything of beauty and substance into the world, Cage would later reflect:

We make our lives by what we love.

Complement Nothing with Kay Larson’s exquisite meditation on John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the inner life of artists — one of the finest books I have ever read — and Cage’s symphonic love letters to the love of his life, then revisit other wonderful picture-book biographies of cultural icons: Keith Haring, Maria Mitchell, Margaret Wise Brown, Emily Dickinson, John Lewis, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, E.E. Cummings, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, Frida Kahlo, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, Wangari Maathai, and Nellie Bly.

Illustrations © Chris Raschka courtesy of Neal Porter Books/Holiday House Publishing; photographs by Maria Popova

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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