From the Couch of Ben Johnson

Father, Principal Engineer at Prodigy Education, serial hyperbolist.

✴ Some People Are Still Hurting

This week my mind keeps floating back to a post written by Kottke from early in the pandemic:

Some people feel helpless & anxious.

Some people are bored.

Some people are self-quarantined alone and are lonely.

Some people are realizing that After will be very different from Before.

Some people are really enjoying this extra time with their kids and will miss it when it’s over.

Some people just got off their 12th double shift in a row at the hospital and can’t hug their family.

The whole piece is worth reading. It was written in March 2020 when we were all scared and trying to surf the…

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✴ Start Small

I have a pattern I want to look out for and avoid.

When I have a habit I want to start, I bring the baggage of an expectation of what it would mean to do the final version of that habit. For instance, if I want to start running, I bring the expectation that a “proper run” is at least 30 minutes, or at least X fast, or at least 5 days per week. But, the critically important thing is just starting the habit. It’s way better to run for 3 minutes a day, slowly, twice a week than to push myself hard at the beginning, burn out, and never do it again.

I find myself doing this all the time. I can see…

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My five-year-old: “I learned from YouTube that all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are girls, and so now I don’t even have to learn that from school!” 🦖

I’m glad Twitter now seems to have a functioning product department that is willing to try new things. But, it hurts that the concequence of their long product drought was that they shuttered Vine. They didn’t just sunset a product, they sunset a community.

I managed to get my hosted micro.blog backed by a CloudFront CDN (with some hacky use of Hugo’s replace function). Next step: something to resize these enormous images.

I’m setting up a CDN and my son is asking me to buy him a T-Rex toy. It’s weirding me out that I’m doing both things at the same time from the same company.

✴ OmniFocus 4 Beta

Learn OmniFocus has a First Look at OmniFocus 4 coming on the heels of Omni announcing the beta.

TLDR: Switching to SwiftUI is allowing Omni to build new components for the iOS platforms that are much more akin to what we get on the Mac.

The iPad and iPhone versions of OmniFocus are great for quick entry or checking a list but I find they are not as easy to think in or work in as on the Mac.

The rapid editing of tasks and notes on display in OmniFocus 4 is a huge step in closing this gap. It also feels aligned with the design style of touch interfaces that have you directly manipulate your…

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✴ Smart Home Standards “Matter”

We have some details on the new smart home alliance (now called Matter).

Stacey Higginbotham:

With Matter, consumers won’t have to research if their Nest cameras will work with their Schlage locks or if their HomeKit compatible sensors will also work with Alexa, for example. Developers won’t have to keep up with multiple ecosystems and integrations. Initially, this will only work across a limited number of devices, but those devices include lighting, blinds, HVAC, TVs, access controls, safety & security products, access points, smart home controllers, and bridges.

I’m half surprised it…

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That’s an ambitious exclamation mark. It’s like they think you’ll be genuinely excited about being tracked.

For the record, I didn’t even know my grocery store app had ads.

I kind of love that Trump has a blog. I’m unlikely to spend time reading it, but I hope this encourages more people to consider creating an internet garden of their own. I’m curious how long it takes him to stretch out beyond 280 characters.

Today’s nugget of knowledge from my 5-year-old: “Holes in a car, not so bad. Holes in a boat, VERY bad.”

Tried Lightlife’s Facon. Surprisingly crispy and delicious. I kind of missed having something with crunch in a breakfast sandwich.

“They just want to build cool shit all day,” the employee said. “They don’t want to deal with people…”

Casey Newton has some killer reporting on the whole Basecamp debacle.

People just aren’t well equipped to understand the complexities of ad tracking. Especially when companies are forced to try to explain their usage in a paragraph.

I’m really sad to see Basecamp go in this direction. I admire a lot of people who work there and the work they did. But the people who are leaving are doing the right thing, as painful as it is, and I’d like to believe I’d have the courage to do the same.

I bought an AirTag to put in my backpack, but I’ve lost my backpack to put the AirTag in…

Potato, garlic, onion. Trying 62% hydration over a 8 hour room temp rise. It’s a bit harder to deal with but I like the 62% much better than the 60% for squooshy Neapolitan crust.

✴ Flushy the Toilet

We woke up yesterday to find a whole bunch of water puddled in our kitchen. There’s a toilet in my son’s room above the kitchen, but my wife and I investigated and it didn’t seem like it was leaking. Nevertheless, she called an emergency plumber to come check it out.

The plumber got here and in five minutes was like, “there’s a huge puddle of water on the floor… the toilet has been leaking for a long time.” I guess we didn’t look with our eyes. We think that maybe we had a waste basket underneath the leak for a while and so we never noticed.

The…

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Seems nuts that you can engrave a cow onto an AirTag but not a bike.

My son has become obsessed with preaching to the world the good news about the existence (or, really, non-existence) of Woolly Mammoths and Sabretooth cats. He’s 5 and doesn’t have a blog, so he’s asked me to let you know. 🦣 🐈

What was VW thinking with its “Voltswagen” prank?: Can we all just agree that corporate April Fools jokes are never a good idea?

My son is going to grow up thinking that the one inalienable rule of life is that adults are broken and do not function until they finish their coffee. ☕️

The Roccbox is hot. Might as well roast some marshmallows. 🔥

First pizzas of the spring. Amazingly I still kind of remember what I’m doing. 🍕

Ecobee is yet another company that has rebranded into an incredibly boring brand. They used to have this adorable bee icon and now it’s just a flat “e”. Not enjoying this modern trend.