I refuse to apologize
Hello! This is the space where I traditionally apologize for not writing a newsletter lately. I could hypothetically mention that travelled recently, and that after that trip I was trying to catch up on paid work, but you know what? I don't work for you. You're not my boss. So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to write this newsletter when I feel like it and if you'd like to read it you can. I encourage you to live the same way as me, or to not live the same way as me. You are your own person, I think, so do whatever works for you. Anyway, here's some stuff I've been working on.
Apple Shortcuts is pretty cool actually
I've written a lot about Apple Shortcuts in the past month. This is a very easy tool to overlook, which I mentioned in my intro to the application for The Wall Street Journal (paywalled, sorry about that). It's one of the better features of the iPhone, though, and at this point would be the hardest thing to leave behind if I switched to Android.
Basically you can build multi-step automations and trigger them whenever you want. On the phone it gets better: you can make automations that trigger automatically when you, for example, arrive at a particular place. I mention this in the Journal piece, but I use this to automatically turn off my "feed that cat" alarm when I'm away from the house. It works great.
I've been digging into the application more lately and writing about it. I automated my journal setup (WIRED), pulling in things like my location, the current weather, and even a quote to use as a jumping off point for my daily entries. I found an app that adds around 150 actions (Lifehacker). And I found an app that adds automations to the Mac version of Shortcuts (Lifehacker), which is honestly something Apple should have done in the first place.
It's fun diving into a single topic like this and writing multiple articles about it. I also kind of like that the articles are split between different publications. The Wall Street Journal article is very different than the WIRED or Lifehacker pieces, and that's because those publications serve very different kinds of readers. It's fun to talk about the same thing to different audiences.
A few other things I wrote
The podcast landscape is a mess. Good. (Lifehacker) You can use whatever app you want to listen to podcasts. I wish the rest of the internet worked that way.
How to install Windows 11 without all the junk (Lifehacker) No Edge, no Co-Pilot, and no need to create a Microsoft account. It's beautiful.
Mira would like to remind you to get off the computer
