Journal

Minimal iPhone Experiment

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Apple has built-in software into their devices that allows you to track how much usage they get during a determined period of time and it is simply called ScreenTime. I noticed my screen time using the iPhone this past week was pretty high and I wondered what can I do about this. I’m addicted to my phone and you are too probably. I am going to do something I have wanted to try for a long time- put the iPhone in my desk drawer and leave it alone for a few days.

My Apple Watch has cellular capability to make/receive calls and text (just like Dick Tracy from the 1940’s!) check the mail, remind me to take my meds, take voice notes, listen to music and podcasts through my AirPods, record workouts, navigate while driving or walking, etc.

Dick Tracy circa 1946

The only thing I would miss out on is taking photos, especially since I am on a 1-photo-a-day project with a specific camera. I may have to fire that phone up only ONCE a day just for this. The rest of the time I can carry a small camera with me.

Speaking of carrying things with me, instead of the iPhone I will bring a long a notebook, pen, e-reader, camera and wallet. Now, I know what you are thinking and…you’re right. Those are more cumbersome to carry than that large iPhone. But that isn’t the only goal, to minimize my everyday carry. The idea is to start weaning myself of the device dependency, remember?

Kobo e-reader, Field Notes, Zebra F-701 pen, Apple AirPods Pro 2, Apple Wallet & Watch

I want to be present and engaged by my surroundings and people. Instead of watching a mindless show and scrolling on my phone, I can just find a better show to absorb without distraction. I’ll be able to read more books. I will do everything I should be doing when I am not otherwise having a phone in my face.

We went out for dinner tonight and it was difficult to hear her across the table because of the family of five sitting across the restaurant with their music, videos and games blaring as they ignore each other. Uh-uh, not me. No way.

This isn’t for everyone, I am doing this as an experiment if you recall. I don’t believe the general public could last one hour without their screens sucking their souls out. Nor do I make judgements. But I do recommend giving it a go, just to see if you can. Try it for an hour then increase it if you make it that far.

I hope I can make it that far.

Process

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In the early days in the life of this website, I never had a writing workflow. Each post was dumped from my brain to the keyboard with a shrug and a push of a button to send. Over time, I picked up tools such as converting all-in to the Apple ecosystem and accompanying software that manifested into a more thoughtful and organized work path.

First things first, I need ideas. These come from various input/output sources, such as reading frequently, or having multiple creative outlets. From here, ideas formulate and sometimes appear after connecting a string of previously consumed inputs/outputs to connect the dots. These go into a file on my personal database, Grey Matter. I’ll let them percolate in my brain for a bit, do some research, check sources and relax. Now I have something to write about.

These ideas generate from multiple inputs such as a book I am reading, RSS feeds from other’s personal websites, X, formerly known as Twitter, Substack, et al. Once I see an article I’d like to return to I will send it to Matter to read it later and delete the rest. Inside Matter, I will return to a saved article, highlight the interesting bits and add my notes and initial thoughts into the marginalia.

Now it is time to sit down to the MacBook Pro, open up the Ulysses writing software and draft an outline. That’s the skeleton of the article, so it’s time to flesh it out. Here’s where everything from the inputs, the outputs and my thoughts just start flowing into this massive article, not caring about grammar, spelling or formatting yet. Eventually, there are words and paragraphs that need to be paired down and culled. Inside Ulysses there are helpful tools that checks for grammatical mistakes, typos, punctuation, etc., and prompts me to make the needed changes before publishing the draft to my website.

Image 1: time to edit that down – Image 2: time to edit those mistakes

Now that the draft is in, it’s time to format and design of the article because it is a mixture of design, photography, etc. To get an over-all visual I run a new branch in Git that runs a new file with metadata such as title, author, date.

—

title: ${title}

date: “${date}”

type: ${type}

tags:

notoc: true

cover: cover.jpg

coversocial: social.jpg

path: /blog/${path}/

description: write description here

—

write content here

—

Afterward, the header image is added — always in black and white to maintain consistency and an overall clean look. Colors can be too distracting, I think.

Once the article is ready to post, I ensure whether to distribute as an article, to my newsletter subscribers and always out to RSS.

According to Ulysses, this article will take you almost two minutes to consume on your device, less if you are scanning, so you can hurry and go check your social feeds (lol.)

I was enjoying this playlist while editing this article:

Connect + Support

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When trying something new, it is okay to feel uncertain and hesitant, right? Well here I go anyway.

Connect-

My content lives here, on my one-man publishing house. Everything here is under my control and it’s then dispersed through three distribution channels.

The first, and most obvious, is the world wide web itself. My content is distributed to you via the Internet. You can ask your browser to get this page you’re reading right now and get access to my content.

The second is RSS. You can tell your RSS reader to fetch the content available on my website and you can then consume my content inside your app of choice.

The final one is email. I send my newsletter via email because some people prefer to stay up to date that way as well as reply back with further comments and discussion.

These three methods only take care of distribution and distribution of content is only part of the equation. You then have interaction. The point of putting content out there is to connect, to interact with others, to exchange ideas, and to grow. And interactions, through my website domain, happen mostly through comments on an article here or by email.

Support-

In the past twenty-two years that I have owned a website, never, not once, have I subjected anyone to spam, affiliate links or advertising. It’s repugnant and distracts from the messages I want to get across. Nothing has changed in that regard. You now have the option to support me and this website (self hosting costs aren’t cheap,) in many ways such as contributing to the conversation in the posts, adding me to your RSS feed readers and by dropping me a line into my e-mail inbox to hello@chrisdenbow.website.

After all these years of building websites and working on side projects, I realized that this is the only way for me to approach the whole donations/monetization part of what I do. $0 per month gives you access to the articles and newsletters I post. If you want to support for $5 or $10/month for all that plus extras, that’s awesome as well. I’d be grateful either way and your kindness won’t go unnoticed.

Between you and me, there is no obligation and I certainly don’t have an expectant hand out, but the options are out there now.

Follow Along

via RSS feed. I also send a weekly newsletter

RSS

Get In Touch

Have something to share? My inbox is always open.

Connect

Once A Month

That’s how little it takes to help. If you feel generous, consider supporting what I do.

Donate

Post-Process

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I just said goodbye to the $112 Adobe Lightroom annual subscription, again. Now I need to dismantle my Portfolio. I’ll let the $75 annual Flickr subscription lapse to and see which of the 47k+ images they’ll cull down to 1,000 on a free account.

This leaves me with nowhere to post my photos since I really do not want to do that on my blog. Not that it matters because no one sees them anyway.

📸
UPDATE 2024/02/27: I have decided to go with an inexpensive, self-hosting option on my server using the Piwigo template. Right now it is basic and barebones, but I will build it out over time. For now, here it is naked: http://www.photodenbow.com

Why bother with any of it?

However, I will save money and time by not futzing with any of it, regardless of how much enjoyment and utility I received from those services.

Hmm…

What Have I Done? (2)

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With Apple support, I have gained partial access to some devices except my MacBook and AirPods.

Apparently they are signed in on another, older Apple ID.

I have been attempting to add/drop devices onto old ID and try again on new ID but now the password suddenly fails on the old ID? I call BS as I wait one hour for a security reset.

Getting closer to all analog all the time.

What Have I Done?

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I have made a mess of things while trying to simplify.

I let a domain name expire that also had a custom email address attached to it and according to my domain registrar, lost both to a third party who scooped up that domain name so I no longer have access to it.

Therefore preventing me to do what I need to do with some of my Apple devices and old Apple ID.

Henceforth, this current domain, chrisdenbow.website and its associated email address, hello [at] chrisdenbow.website is here to stay forever.

If I want simplicity, then I really should take a few steps backward and just go analog everything and I am tempted to do so! (not yet.)

Connecting Ideas

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There have been some questions/discussions about my research-thinking-writing process and I thought I would address them here. First step is to gain input. I read voraciously- not just books but articles from other critical thinkers on a wide variety of subjects up and down the Dewey Decimal System. There is zero chance I can remember all of this input so I dump them into my custom built personal database that I call “Grey Matter” where I can retrieve at will.

The process is extensive but worth it. I’ll read something of interest and make notes and highlights which immediately transfers into my digital brain. Inside there I wrote code scripts to organize and catalog these ideas to be referenced for later.

Connected ideas on one subject in a customized graph view
Another view of connected ideas on a specific subject for easier reference
Highlights & notes automagically imported into my digital brain for reference

0:00

/0:33

Mesmerizing look inside my brain at how ideas are connected and grow on each other.

Personal knowledge management, or digital asset management can be daunting but if it is set up correctly to connect ideas and go down the rabbit hole of new thoughts. It is amazing to me to come across an article and then be immediately capable of connecting those thoughts expressed into my own while completely connecting them to other thoughts for an entirely new line of thought.

The Art Of Un-Noticing

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One of my favorite writers, Rob Walker, has a brilliant book on my shelves (thanks, Mom) titled “The Art Of Noticing: 131 ways to spark creativity, find inspiration and discover joy in the everyday.” He also has an excellent weekly newsletter I subscribe to in my RSS feeds.

Anyway, I’ve been doing some initial thinking of ways we can practice ignoring or not giving notice to those that would take away our time and attention in unhealthy ways. The first few culprits are adverts everywhere, social media and television.

What are some other distractions we can hide our eyes and ears from to regain that creativity, inspiration and joy?

I’ll be back with more on this after some proper thought.

Human Feeders

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I think it was Kleon who used the phrase “human bird feeders” to describe those places that attract and feed us. A Little Free Library certainly counts as a feeding place. We ventured out for some geocaching after lunch today and had a 2-for-1 special in that while we were looking for a hidden cache it was inside the LFL. Bonus: I found a title that is currently on my “to be read” list called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Now I can scratch that one off of my public library hold request list.

I can also check two more geocaches from local hiding places. Love it.

What are some other “human bird feeders” that attract us and make us pause?

Sneaky hide
Easy grab and go cache hidden under a rock

You’ve Been Served

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Now that I am back home for a bit I can finally play around and setup the Mac Mini desktop computer as a standalone file server.

“Minnie” is all setup to host and share any number of photos, music, videos and documents to any of my (and Sweet T’s) iDevices. Even better, I will have the ability to retrieve these documents from anywhere in the world as long as I have access to an internet connection.

And now for the moment of truth…will it work?
Of course it did(!), I am brilliant.
And here is the setup configuration as seen from Minnie’s screen.
Offsite backup? Yessss…

In the near future I will migrate all of my website code and documents on to Minnie and use it as a cheap, self-hosting website.

Time Machine back-ups of all of my hard disks, will be stored and easily retrieved if necessary. (Hopefully it won’t be necessary)

I will also be able to host and serve all of my own Podcast files as opposed to relying on a third-party file host that I pay for.

And then, I can run and publish other sites I need including my own RSS server.

All of this is designed for easy access, off-site backups/restoration, and file sharing with family/friends. Which reminds me, eventually I will allow access so family members can view/download our family’s images. “Hey Chris, do you have those pics from that 2012 Christmas party?” Yep, go fetch!