🥰 I kept getting recommendations for FreshRSS, when I dropped my longtime Feedbin account. I wanted to test it, but I’m really cutting down on subscriptions very aggressively, firing up an instance with PikaPods is out at this time.

Luckily the FreshRSS site links to a few people offering accounts on established servers. Some have a small donation attached to it, or the really nice pay-what-you-can-afford option. Others are free.

Turns out most of the free ones listed are not accepting new accounts, but there is one that still does! Arguably, the best one, as it has an awesome cherry on top: it’s a French gay server, so I get a rainbow on the FreshRSS logo!

Merci, Barbapulpe, for having so many great services available 🏳️‍🌈

🎙️ Spokenly has a feature called Background Dictation, where you can start/stop dictation with a Shortcut. You can use that with the Action Button, those awkward back taps or, my favorite, with AssistiveTouch. I’m using it anyway, all day long.

One tap, recording starts. Second tap, recording ends. Voice is turned into text, and moved into the clipboard. That’s it.

I added a step to the Shortcut, the clipboard is now pasted into a new note in Drafts as well. Works great.

No need to leave the app you’re using, open Spokenly or Drafts, and dictate. It all happens, as the shortcut’s name clearly states, in the background.

If anyone else is looking for brrr + IFTTT Webhooks integration, this is how I got it to work:

Use your brrr URL, POST, application/json, empty headers, and json formatted body.

My use case has these, but there are a few more. Check them out in brrr’s docs.

{“title”: “YOUR_TITLE”, “message”: “YOUR_message”, “sound”: “PICK_ONE_FROM_LIST”, “open_url”: “YOUR_URL”}

📱 Quick one: Miniroll looks like a really nice idea. Goes without saying, I had to try it.

Next up? Trying to embed this in my omg.lol profile page.

Wonderful project by Chris Hannah!

🥇 All this talk about RSS readers in the past week got me thinking: I LOVE Feedbin, as backend, but mostly it’s UI/UX as well. I use it without a 3rd party app most of the time anyway. Great shortcut support, a lot of actions to configure, snappy, clean. I’ve gone through how many readers by now? 10? 15??

In the end, I come back to the site.

🎵 Music MiniPlayer for macOS.

Awesome, and still runs on iMax!

🌪️ I used my trial kDrive (https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/kdrive) to send the video files yesterday. Blazing fast.

1TB will set me back €19/year. Seems incredibly fair. Can’t figure out why some people pay almost that, a month, to use something like WeTransfer. 

You can always use the free SwissTransfer (https://www.swisstransfer.com/en-us), by the same crew, but you don’t end up with one backup by default. With kDrive, your files are saved until you delete them. No expiration date.

I’ve used my Koofr account in the past, with success, but uploading speed is not brilliant. I won’t stop using it for long term storage, but these euros are SO worth it, for time saved (less headaches) alone. Perfect for day to day stuff.

I might have, finally, found a way to use one of their services. Paid for a year.

🤔 I have never found a company with a tier structure as confusing as Infomaniak! There’s NO WAY anyone understands how mykSuite, kSuitePRO, kDrive Solo, kDrive Team, kDrive Pro all work. It’s impossible to figure out how to add things. A mess.

Upload speeds, from here, are brilliant though…

🎧 Glad I never gave up on my Last.fm account, even though I didn’t use it for over a decade. Still fun, now that I’m back scrobbling.… 

Yesterday, I found myself editing my first post in a while, and noticed it was not as fluid as before. I thought I might be a little rusty, but quickly came to the conclusion that Drafts was to blame. Better yet, the theme I was using, was to blame.

I have recently moved to the lighter side of iOS, ditched dark mode for a while,  and have been getting used to white. A lot of white! I needed a new theme for Drafts.

The one I was using was good for shorter sessions, but was annoying me on this longer one.

I considered finding one that was close enough to what I was aiming for, as one does, and go from there. So I did.

I started tweaking it, trying to wrangle it to look like what I wanted. It was not easy, as there are a LOT of settings, and it’s not immediately apparent what each one does exactly. I was feeling a little depleted anyway, and it was pretty late already. I went back to the directory, and looked for a way out. Not before long, I had it.

I came across Tiny Theme, of course. For Drafts, of course. Matt Langford did it again: he ported the amazing Tiny Theme (is it possible to not love this name?) blog theme to Drafts, and it needed only two tiny (ah!) tweaks: I like my URLS the same size as regular text, and I like my background not to be #FFFFFF. That was it. After that, I was done, I could go back to writing. Happy again.

Perks: I suppose you’re going to be seeing a lot more quotes on the posts, because quotes look nice when I’m editing the text with this. Sorry if some don’t make total sense.

Drafts themes, maybe I’ll leave it to the professionals…

One of the many sites I came across because I’m lucky enough to be a part of omg.lol, is Crucial Tracks.

The tin says:

A crucial track is a song that changes the direction of your life or helps you see the world in a different way. The songs that represent relationships or trigger memories. The songs that make you, you.

Crucial Tracks is a music journal with a simple idea: share the important songs in your life.

That’s just the beginning, though. A big one, yes, but Crucial Tracks is a lot more: there are member interviews ¹, Crucial Releases, where you can find an endless supply of new artists to add to your music collection. There’s even a merch shop. And Mixtapes. Mixtapes!

You get your own profile, where you share one song per day.

You can answer the day’s prompt; pick a prompt from a huge list; or just ignore the whole prompt thing, and pick a song for any reason that matters to you.
Not only that, but you can even pick from a lovely screen, where you’re shown your recently played songs (hello, Last.fm integration), and you go from there…

If you’d like to suggest a prompt to add to that list, mind you, let them know, they welcome it. Anyway, feel free to add a little text when you pick the song, if you wish, and hit the button.

As soon as that is done, your song will be shared. Shared to your own profile (like this one), and to a few other places: Mastodon, Bluesky, a dedicated playlist on your Apple Music account (here’s mine), one RSS feed (or two: your own, and the global one). 

Or… drum roll,  they are not. You can keep things private, if sharing is not in your DNA, or you’d rather not share for any reason. You decide.

Also, the whole thing is very, very nice looking, with plenty of themes to pick from, and just a pleasure to use. Lots of enjoyable, thoughtful, details were added to it: you get to see who you share similar taste with (Crucial Connections); you can visit a random member’s page, and a lot more. Their blog is a good place to keep up with all the new stuff that keeps popping up.

I spend a lot more time thinking about music, and listening to music, since Crucial Tracks is part of my life. That is a good thing, in my book. I usually tend to keep to the same songs, the same playlists ², but Crucial Tracks throws new music my way and, for that, I’m also grateful.

That has led me back to that old friend, Last.fm. Member for 20 years, and a decade since my last visit. It’s back on, tracking my plays, and letting me know a bunch of stuff. And who doesn’t love loads of data, graphs, and such? Here I am, if you still use the service.

Extra good news? A couple of days ago, @database released a JS widget that allows us to embed our last post on any website. It is very cool, make sure you check it out. I’m using it on my omg.lol profile. It’s great when members of the community build stuff based on others, and contribute. Brilliant.

Go to Crucial Tracks. Create an account. Start sharing. I’m looking forward to the songs you’ll share. We all are.

1. I’m a tad late with my own entry, sorry about that, Jason.

2. I know, Jason, I know, all this is all still in drafts, but I’ll get to the end of that interview, promise.