I am doing my regular laundry today and I gathered together all the masks we wear around the house to go outside. This is a weird realization to come to, I have a little mess bag that I put the masks in to wash them.

A weird timeline indeed.

Kristen grew them last year and they just stayed on the plant, in the ground the whole time.

I’ve been enjoying blogging from my phone by emailing to my blog, it’s the most straight-forward way to get thoughts published. I’ve also been writing a lot more inside Day One and iA Writer on my phone (for quick thoughts that don’t need to see the daylight). Today, I saw that Ulysses updated to version 22 with new publishing features and I wanted to give it a go from my computer.

You can read more about their feature updates here: https://ulysses.app/

I’m trying to publish more often because it helps me get the thoughts out of my head and my brain feels less crowded.

I forget about this song for long periods of time since it’s not on Spotify.

There’s a lot of substance in this song and it’ll be hard for me properly cover through translations but there are a few lines I’d like to summarize.

A personal take on this song

Jugni goes to her country, where the ones before her were born and where they kicked out the British, that’s the first few lines. Then Rabbi Shergill talks about how Jugni’s everywhere. Everywhere there’s something wrong but the problems won’t go away until the day Jhelum dries up. Jugni finds her way to Punjab, where the educated are useless and the ones who had land sold it to go mop some floors far away, they find a white girl while their families watch for their returns. And in Bombay, nobody sleeps, everyone is looking for something and nobody finds anything. Jugni finds no peace. The YouTube version ends too soon and I forget what exactly happens in the song.

I hadn’t watched any trailers or read any synopsis before watching the movie so I didn’t know what to expect. I really enjoyed it.

I bought a 5 TB hard drive for my PS5 and now I’m thinking it might’ve been overkill since it only stores PS4 games.

Like most things, music listening for me in 2020 was very different than usual years. With a global pandemic surging, I was at home most of the year so I listened to pretty much the same music over and over.

Notably, the artist I listened to the most was Frank Ocean. His music sort of fit my moods throughout the year.

Here’s the full link to the listening history on Last.fm: Frank Ocean on Last.fm

And here’s the total listens for the year:

I’ve listened to him since 2011 but I mainly got obsessed in 2019 and 2020 continued that trend.

The songs I really like are below:

• Pink + White
• Ivy
• Solo (can’t begin to explain how this song was made for 2020)
• Self Control (the intro to this sounds so good)

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Moving on, I really like the song “A Town with an Ocean View” from the movie Kiki’s Delivery Service. I first heard it in 2020 when I watched the movie for the first time. It has a nice serene tone to it which was nice to hear when you’re just cooped up at home. It was my second most listened to song in 2020. The top spot goes to “A Man in the Station” by John Martyn, a song that reminds me being in train stations and bus stops with my headphones on, a very unlikely thing to happen in 2020. My music last year is a saudade for years past, in some form I suppose.

Yesterday, I ran into a very interesting issue so I created a small tool to help with this.

I was trying to link directly to a to-do list in the Things app, I use specific lists to separate things out so this would’ve been perfect. Things provides simple URI deep linking like things://show?id=[some-list-id]. This was exactly what I needed to link to a list from a web page, in this case, the page was a Notion page. Well, it turns out that most link embedding tools don’t want you to use anything except HTTP or HTTPS as the schema, e.g. Notion and Google docs. So if I took the above things://... url, Notion would just cancel the link embedding and go back to editing, Google docs actually gives you an error for this.

I thought about this for a bit and tried bit.ly’s link shortener but that also only wants http and https pages, nothing else. So, I decided to create a small tool. I had a simple rule for this tool, it had to be done quickly and did not require much upkeep/maintenance after I’m done using it this one time. This ruled out running a full-on web app because that would require at least an hour of setting things up. So I though about it and came to the conclusion that it should just be a simple webpage and I’ll use javascript’s window.location to redirect. This means, the redirects will only happen after a user loads the link into a real browser. I timeboxed myself into about 30 minutes of work. It turned out that I had a working version live within 15 minutes, but only because Cloudflare propagated the DNS right away and the github repo is pretty bare.

The tool is available at https://r.mhmd.us and there are instructions on how to use it. It works by taking the provided URL and setting that as the location, then after 5 seconds, it closes the tab itself. I had some hesitation about putting it up in case someone abuses it by linking to it and then redirecting somewhere else but the likelihood that will happen is very little because it’s not a very easily found page on the internet.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and just been bored. I’ve become very good at distracting myself at home. On workdays, it’s a mix of scheduled meetings, lunch, walking Samson, a bit of afternoon confusion, late afternoon wind downs and eventually getting to a weekday night. The weekday nights are either cooking at home or ordering from a select few restaurants.

I have some opinions, some strong and some weak opinions but lately I’ve been focusing on how these make my goal setting come into play. I believe there’s a lot of power to the systematic or automatic processes we set up like walking my dog at noon everyday, it’s great for him to get out and good for me to get away from the always connected world of work. My goals have become less clear recently. I don’t know what I want to do long term or what to work on. I’ve become sort of complacent but not sure with what.

The photo included in this post is the first photo I’ve taken in a long time, on my Canon 6D that I bought 3 years ago. The camera has been neglected, my interest in photography has waned to a point where I look at beautiful photos and can see the effort someone went through to take them but I think the first half of the 2010s jaded me in some bad way I am fighting away now. Photos went from interesting events and moments to an arduous process of copying from camera to computer to the internet. They lost their magic for me.

Days like today make me realize that I’m spending a lot of time consuming information from around me but not really producing anything valuable.