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The Pen Addict Ink

07.07.2019 21:33

I’ve been using the Pen Addict ink for a while now. It looks great. Both with a finer nib and with broader one. This is something I always look for in a ink, because some inks doesn’t look that great both.

I’ve been enjoying it a lot. But it doesn’t work the best in my Pilot pens, their feeds doesn’t flow as good as my other pens. So I use my regular Iro ink in them instead. But I use it in all my other pens.

This means that Rober Oyster migth be another ink brand that works well enough for me to get some of their inks.

But I’m not a huge of the bottles, they are not as horrible as the one Noodlers use. Still not great.

If you’re looking for a great orange ink, I’d give the Pen Addict ink a shot.

Lists for everything

04.07.2019 12:31

I’m a list person. I write them for everything, and I mean everything.

If I’m going to do anything I start by writing it out as a list, and this includes watching movies, tv-shows, reading books, my instapaper queue and so on.

The reason I do this is that I’m a procrastinator, and having a list of items I do not have to think about makes everything easier for me. Also it feels great to cross out items. And it feels great to see some kind of progress.

It is a total productivity hack, but some hacks are actually good.

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04.07.2019 12:30

The iPhone 8 Plus after two years

02.07.2019 20:50

I have had the iPhone 8 Plus for close to two years now.

One of problems with the iPhone prince increase with the release of the iPhone X was that my experience with owning an iPhone is that after about a year and a half the battery go to hell and they slowly become slower and slower. This was a big problem with the iPhone 4s (my favorite form factor by the way), and also the 5s; but to a lesser extent the 6s Plus, even though the battery got pretty bad like the previous models.

The iPhone 8 Plus is not slow in any way, and the performance feels more or less like it did when I got it. That means that we are beyond the days where software was limited by hardware performance. The battery on the other hand is a lot worse than it was, but still not as bad compared with previous phones.

As iPhone slowly becomes as expensive as a MacBook I expect them to be useful for as long. And at this point it seems like we are there. I can’t see much of a reason to upgrade every year or every second year. My current phone is perfectly fine, I’ll wait until it becomes too slow to be usable or until it breaks as always._

Fuji RAW Studio

02.07.2019 13:12

If you have a Fuji camera like the X-Pro 2 or a X100, there is a interesting application for OS X and Windows called Fuji RAW Studio.

It is very interesting. What it does is to give you a way to take raw files you have on your hard drive and process them through your Fuji camera as if you did it on the camera.

The advantage to this is that you can use their awesome presets, and jpeg engine. But the limit is that you can only process the raw files using the same hardware they were shot with.

I use it when I change my mind about a preset, later on. My current process have changed from only shooting raw and using Lightroom to shooting JPEG + RAW and just importing JPEGs out of the camera into photos. And if I want to change something I re-process using RAW Studio.

Rider

01.07.2019 09:21

JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ, TeamCity and a bunch of other really awesome tools.

I do C# development at work, on average it is probably 50⁄50 C#/SQL backend work and Frontend work using React and Javascript.

I’d prefer to do all of it in Emacs, but because of how we work on the backend(a lot of different libraries, services etc) it is not really convenient to use a regular text editor.

Since he beginning of 2019, I have used Rider almost exclusively. I launch Visual Studio only when I’m just going to build and publish something without a publish profile. Other than that I use Rider for everything. It is faster, performs a lot better on all projects not matter how large or small. The plug-in system doesn’t grind the whole IDE to a halt.

Almost everything in Rider is a little bit nicer. It is stable, starts fast, shows you some kind of other “I’m working” indicator than a windows “Not responding” alert.

The reason I actually switched to Rider, except for the speed thing, is that if you take something that is a little bit of a pain, like picking the correct process to debug. This is a real bitch in Visual Studio (you always end up debugging all dotnet processes) in Rider you can pick based on the DLL.

Two things that I don’t think is better though:

  • You will end up re-configuring a lot of targets between projects. I wish some of it was a little bit easier to set up.
  • The package manager for nuget isn’t awesome. It works once you get used to it. But the one in Visual Studio is better.

As of late February and I still use it most of the time. And I’m not seeing back.

WSL

01.07.2019 09:13

WSL or Windows Subsystem for Linux is a way to run Linux under Windows with native like performance. I have used it some, and it is great, but there is no support for GUI stuff, and some stuff like fish just doesn’t work.

I think it is really cool, and it would be really awesome if Docker on Windows (the linux kind not the one that tries to make Docker images of Windows software) would use it to run Docker itself.

But I miss some real integration between the two operating systems. Like being able to install a Linux emacs inside Arch and run it like a regular Windows app and being able to interact with both stuff inside the VM and things inside windows. If not it is mostly just stuff we have seen before, in a different package.

Fiio Btr3

30.06.2019 20:25

After trying to use cabled headphones with current iPhone models, caved after trying more or less everything else and bought a bluetooth DAC: the Fiio BTR3.

The problem with using cabled headphones is that you need some kind of converter dongle or bluetooth DAC. When you use a dongle, it basically disconnects with the most movement. And that is really annoying when you like to do stuff on your phone while listening to stuff. Especially while walking around when I travel from home to work.

So I decided to get a DAC, after using both the Apple dongle and a few others including one from Belkin.

It’s great, it is like a little bit larger than a USB thumb drive. Charges over USB-C; I also think you can connect it to a computer and use it as a DAC over the USB-C.

The battery life covers a full day for me. Easy to connect and manage. It has some annoying sounds when you power it on and off. And I’d love it to not have it’s own power level. But other than that great.

No regrets about getting it.

What I like about having a separate bluetooth device is that even though it’s not a lot cheaper together, you can upgrade things as it makes sense for you. And the cabled headphone market is a lot bigger than the bluetooth one.

Buy with a use in mind

30.06.2019 20:23

I have written about this before, and I’m doing it again because I think it is important.

When you are going to buy something, have a sue for it, a reason for you owning it before you buy it.

I see a lot of cool pens each month, but I never buy any of them compared to how many I see. I get maybe one pen a year.

Like when I got the YStudio pen I got it because I thought it would be a great pocket pen. I know a lot of people just buy stuff and try to find a way it is useful when they have it. Every time I have done that it have ended up being something I have at my desk, until I put it away somewhere gathering dust until I throw it out.

But if I wait until I see “X would be really great for Y” then it usually end up being muc more producutive. Somtime I don’t continue using it after a while. But I have a thing I want to test it out for by the point it show up in mail.

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29.06.2019 17:53