Findings and thingies

It’s not just Disney. Just shopping at a store is now pricier without an app, a loyalty card, coupons, or a digital wallet that traces your consumption patterns and habits.

I found this article via this Toot. Especially the quoted part (above) resonated with me as I see this as an emerging pattern in Germany throughout the last years. Almost every grovery store now has their own loyalty card which is the only way to get access to certain discounts. In the end it's all about luring customers in to give their data away with the promise of more convenience (or savings) for them.

Not everything has to be convenient nowadays. Or as Oliver Burkeman has phrased it in Four Thousand Weeks:

Resisting all this as individual, or as a family, takes fortitude, because the smoother life gets, the more perverse you'll seem if you insist on maintaining the rough edges by choosing the inconvenient way of doing things. Get rid of your smartphone, quit using Google, or choose snail mail over WhatsApp, and people are increasingly likely to question your sanity. Still, it can be done.

We have to replace the hyperactive hive-mind work flow with explicit alternatives for the assignment and organization of work, and individuals can’t do that on their own. But one of the questions here is how did productivity become personal in the first place? It’s an unusual notion in the history of large-scale economic organization — this idea that we leave it up to the individual to figure out how to organize their work.

Excellent interview with Cal Newport on productivity issues in modern work environments.

Even though I normally don't praise newsletters and stuff I need to make an exception for this motivating piece by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It's origin is from this week's edition of the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter by Tim Ferriss.

I've always struggled with impulse control, and tried researching and coming up with questions to ask myself before making purchases. However, they usually don't work, because the questions are usually too broad, and don't address the specific purchases I'm contemplating.

TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over. Amazon is the only retailer that does this. Other retailers, I make somewhere around 65%-70% no matter the retail price. Everything follows from that math, but if you want the details read on.

😮

If you are using Firefox and are annoyed by PDFs being downloaded automatically then you need to adjust browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to true. Just enter about:config in the address bar and toggle the setting.

found via A comment by shscs911

Nur für den Fall, dass jemand es noch nicht woanders gesehen hat. 🙂

MacOS shows the App Switcher by default only on the display where the Dock was last displayed. If you're using a multi monitor setup this is, at least for me, a little bit annoying. I couldn't find any setting in the UI for changing this behaviour. Thankfully it can be done using the CLI.

To display the App switcher on all monitors you need to run the following commands.

$ defaults write com.apple.Dock appswitcher-all-displays -bool true
$ killall Dock

Changing it back to the default behaviour can be achieved using the following commands.

$ defaults write com.apple.Dock appswitcher-all-displays -bool false
$ killall Dock

found via Show macOS app switcher across all monitors

from around 03:48 in the video:

[...] It's a cool case study because two reasons. 1. it highlights something I say often on the show which is when it comes to organizing work especially in teams start with the process first. What makes the most sense for us to organize our work and then 2. figure out what tools you need to implemented that. [...]

The above quote from the video is basically exact the same thing with which I try to convince people who start solving a problem by focussing on a tool instead of the process. It's always about the process and the people, not about the tooling. The latter can be solved once the processes are defined.

As of yesterday this little blog does support webmentions.

Basically you do have a small form just at the end of every article/note which you can use to send a webmention. Of course it is also possible to send it without the form. Just send it to /api/webmention.