👋 Hi everyone! I hope you’re having a great weekend. Welcome to the first installment of what will eventually become my weekly newsletter. I’m currently in the process of figuring out hosting (more on that below) but for now, every Sunday I’ll be putting up one of these blog recap posts. To see all of the past posts, I’m going to add a dedicated “Newsletter” page next week to assist with that, and permanent information about the newsletter once it’s officially live.
Currently, this will consist of a recap of all blog posts for the week, a few pieces of media that I’ve been enjoying, and a misc. section where I’ll write about random things on my mind and won’t be something I cover as a full dedicated post on the site, making them kinda of exclusive. Haha! But enough chatter: let’s do this!
Blog Recap
This week was a fun week for week for posts. I found a great video on how trustworthy your smartwatch is as a fitness tracker, spotlit a great app to help with adding reminders, and a whole lot more! You can find all of this week’s posts below!
🔗 Can You Trust Your Smartwatch?
Remind Me Faster | App Spotlight
Identify Music in Online Videos With iOS Control Center’s Music Recognition
Apple (Finally) Announces HomePod (2nd Generation)
Spring 2023 Apple TV+ Trailer Thoughts
How to Easily Create Lists on Mastodon
I’m Worried About Comixology’s Future Following Amazon’s Layoffs
Media I’ve Been Enjoying
📺 That 90’s Show
I decided to check out Netflix’s revival of the That 70’s Show universe, which follows Eric and Donna’s daughter Leia as she spends a summer with her grandparents Red & Kitty Forman. This show couldn’t have come at a better time, as I’ve found myself working my through That 70’s Show again on Peacock. I really enjoyed this show and thought that it was well done overall. I think the creators did a great job at balancing original character appearances with following the new characters in Point Place. At times, I almost felt like they could’ve used utilized returning cast more, but that’s not something I’d hold against this show. Besides, they brought back Tommy Chong as Leo, so my smile seeing him was a big as his stash.
📚 What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
This is a book I actually picked up on sale, on Kindle, back in 2020 and am just getting around to reading. So far, I’m really enjoying it as I tend to love media where people take the time to put real science and physics principles to fictional or hypothetical scenarios and this book isn’t disappointing.
💿 Led Zeppelin III by Led Zeppelin
Earlier this week I couldn’t sleep and had Led Zeppelin on the brain so I threw on their third album. I wound up listening another time or two and I still really enjoy this album. Admittedly, my favorite track is Immigrant Song, but let’s be honest: that’s a freakin’ jam!
Misc. Writings
I’m not ready to do any official blog posts on the subject, but over the course of the last week, as I’ve been working on content, I’ve also been working on shortcuts to help improve my workflow when blogging.
A few of these experiments have included:
- A shortcut to pull all of my blog posts for the last week, get the titles and URL’s, and format them as markdown links.
- A shortcut I can run to pick a blog post from a list and share it to my Mastodon profile.
- A time-tracking shortcut that makes it easy for me to start and stop time tracking when I’m working on my blog. This week I put close to 15 hours in.
In addition to that, I’ve been looking at hosting for this newsletter, and I think I may be going with MailerLite, but I’m not ready to commit until I’ve played with the tools on the site a bit more. For now I’m sticking with the blog post format every Sunday here on the site.
That wraps things up for this first beta issue of my newsletter. I hope you enjoyed it and be sure to check back next week for a weekly blog recap and writings you’ll only find here.
Dan Stransky 