Hello, and welcome to issue 9 of the Coefficiencies Newsletter! It's been a little while, which I would love to blame on being busy with important things, but the honest answer is that I've been busy building an alarming number of small, slightly unhinged personal automations instead.

The headliner is that I now have a personal assistant. His name is Mr Claude, he lives on a Mac mini in my house, and I can boss him around from my phone, a dashboard, or the Drafts app. I wrote about him here, but the short version is that he reads my calendar, wrangles my to-do list, fiddles with my Home Assistant setup, and does some light drafting and proofreading of my blog posts.

Once you have a tireless robot helper, it turns out you start handing it increasingly ridiculous jobs. The one I'm most delighted by is a lawn-watering advisor. Rather than watering on a fixed schedule like a chump, it checks the actual rainfall at my exact coordinates every morning, works out whether my grass is short on water, and only nudges me (with a phone notification and a to-do) when I actually need to water. It even has a special mode for newly-seeded grass too. “Do I need to water the lawn” is one of those dumb things that always used to sit at the back of my mind mildly worried about. Now that’s one minor worry solved, approximately one million to go.

A Few Recent Posts

In case you missed them, here's some of what I've been writing about lately:

• Monster Tournament is a print-and-play card game I designed, with a little code on the side to balance the monsters. You can download it, print it, and play.
• Diminishing Returns in Coffee, in which I think too hard about coffee.
• Bouncing off Readwise Reader and The RSS reinvention continues, a two-part saga of me migrating my entire reading setup to Feedbin and then immediately building scripts to micromanage it.
• And hot off the press, a new macAppLibrary update that finally syncs your app notes across your Macs over iCloud.

Links

A Pocket eReader I Probably Don't Need

I keep being drawn to tiny gadgets that do exactly one thing, and the Xteink X3 Pocket eReader is precisely the sort of thing I'd buy at 11pm and then have to sheepishly explain later. It's a pocket-sized e-ink reader, and something about a dedicated little reading slab really gets me.

The Best Website on the Internet

I rediscovered Ian's Shoelace Site via an article about how it remains, after all these years, the definitive resource for tying your shoes. It's a wonderful relic of the old web, and a good reminder that a small site about one thing, made with love, can outlast basically everything.

A Music App That Speaks To Me

Longtime readers know I have an ongoing quest for the perfect way to browse my music. Playback is the latest contender I've fallen for, scratching the same itch as the MD Vinyl app I gushed about a few issues back.

Just A Nice Mechanical Pencil

Finally, for no productive reason at all, I present mechanical-pencil.com, a lovingly-made little site about, yes, a mechanical pencil (and other little gadgets.) Sometimes the web is just nice.

Wrap-Up

That's it for this issue. As always, I'm slightly amazed I've kept this going, and as always, I would not say no to a few more readers. If you know someone who'd enjoy a newsletter from a guy who builds robots to water his lawn, send them my way.

-Tom