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.

Below are some useful aliases that can save you time:

# push the current branch to remote(origin)
ggpush='git push origin $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)'

# move up directories, I use this with zsh, not sure if bash supports this
..='cd ..'
...='cd ../..'

# equality, open a documentation page for a tool
woman=man

I’m putting together a list of apps and tools I find useful on my mac, some of these are paid for extra features but I would encourage you to pay for productivity tools as developers who maintain these really deserve to be compensated for their hardwork.

Alfred

What it does

• Replaces Spotlight search, with faster results returned (this might have to do with its own caching)
• Allows adding “workflows” which are 1st party and 3rd party plugins that add more features to Alfred, e.g. auto-complete from your favorite search engine, video, music (including Spotify), or any other media source.

• Some features have been Sherlocked back into Spotlight like web results but Spotlight remains closed to adding new features.

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BetterTouchTool

What it does

More example shortcuts

• I have a key sequence where I type the back tick (` grave accent) key twice only in Google Docs, this sets the font to a monospace font. This acts like other tools that support markdown. The reverse is done by pressing two commas in a row.
• I have my F11 through F14 set to open specific apps on my computer.
• ⌘ + B converts a checkbox to a bullet point only in Notion.

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Notion

What it is/does

• An “all-in-one workspace”, I use Notion as a central place for notes, information, wikis, todos (even with Things 3), document storage, tabular data, shared notes.
• I’ve used notion for over 3 years now. I have hundreds of notes and dozens of workspaces.
• I have a “work” workspace that I use to contain all my day job notes.
• Multiple side projects live in their own workspaces.
• I have a “gifts” workspace where I keep track of things I want to get people, things I might want, and when I do get things from people, I keep them noted here.
• Real time collaboration is pretty amazing in Notion, real time updates and easy to find where others are in the document.

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Things 3

Why pay $50 for a to-do app?

I won’t even get into what it does or what it is before I address the price tag. Out of most of my apps and subscriptions I pay for, this was one of the hardest to purchase. Why? There are dozens of nice, pretty good, and useful to-do apps out there. From the stock Reminders.app that comes with iOS and Mac to fancier things like Todoist, Omnifocus, all the to-do apps from Microsoft, Google, etc, all these apps can get the job done. But there is something about how Things just works, knows exactly what you’ll want to do (doesn’t guess using fancy AI, just good UX). The apps are well designed and the experience of adding, finding, and finishing todos has not felt this good ever, in my opinion.

What it does well

It also has a basic repeat every so often, fixed on a schedule that I use and it works as expected. I use this for a weekly task of taking out the trash on the same day.

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1Password

What it is
Managing passwords is hard, keeping unique passwords for every single service is impossible, and we’re humans, we don’t like symbols and numbers. But it’s still important to have a safe and secure way to keep your passwords. I highly oppose using a siloed approach like Chrome/Firefox password managers or iCloud Keychain passwords since they block you from accessing your own passwords outside their ecosystem. I also don’t like to go for the cheapest option here, which is LastPass who have been hacked once (also note: their blog is not https as of this writing).

This is one of those things we have to sort of have to just live with until there’s a better option since 1Password itself does a great job of managing passwords, it’s just annoying to think about paying for essentially the “security of your internet identities”.

It does work on Mac, iOS, android, and all major browsers. There are also secure notes and one-time password features built in so that’s nice. One thing I wish it contained was the ability to use a per-domain email address, e.g. [email protected]

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Setapp subscription and apps

The easiest way to explain Setapp is that it’s like Netflix for apps. Setapp itself is an app store that handles installing, updating, and removing apps. It’s separate, well curated app store that contains about 200+ apps right now. I use it for downloading the following apps. I only have the subscription for Mac as I don’t find the list of iOS apps relevant to me. At first the $10 feels too much but very quickly it becomes apparent why it’s worth it. My only negative thoughts on Setapp are that it charges per computer which is unfair if you have a work and a personal computer, since I want access to a lot of the same apps on both.

• BetterTouchTool – mentioned above ↑
• Cleanshot X – a better screenshot tool for mac that does the basic screenshot stuff along with additional options like uploading to a cloud service (provided with the app for free), clean desktop every time you take a screenshot, and better control over what a window-only screenshot looks like.
• CleanMyMac X – this was one of the main reasons I got Setapp, it helps keep your mac running in tip top shape and can be used to easily find junk on your computer e.g. old files, large folders, unused apps etc.
• iStat Menus – A nice little menu bar utility app that shows various charts relating to your computer. I use it to replace the battery icon that comes default with mac.
• Bartender – This is one of my favorite mac tweaks, helps keep my menu bar clean!

Every once in awhile, I’ll browse through the Setapp store to see what’s new and there are always new and interesting apps being added. For some people, getting this subscription might make sense but for others, it might be best to just buy the apps separately outside the app store.

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I will continue updating this list as I find more apps to list and talk about.

I recently finished Stoner by John Williams. It’s a very linear narrative about a man lives in the first half of the 20th century. I listened to it as an audiobook so for most of the time, this book felt like a simple story and it didn’t have much behind it. But about 2/3rd of the way through the book, I started to find interesting bits about the characters, the way life was in the 1920s and 1930s. Time passed at a weird pace within the book, some years were shortly reviewed and others were important years within the book. And at the end of the book, I felt like I knew a simple man with a lot of conflicting feels left undiscovered.

I’ve been having a hard time writing lately. My blogging is pretty sparse and that’s been a pattern for years now but I’ve also stopped writing on paper, on my iPad, in random note taking apps like notion and iA Writer. The amount of writing I do now is non-existent compared to any previous year. Is it a bad juju or just 2020? I don’t really know, I think it might be a combination of both. Or possibly the result of bad sleep. This is the first year in the past few years where I’ve started to value sleep less and less, even when I realize I need it badly.

What I’ve been doing lately

Since March or April, I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing video games. Back in September or October, I would’ve used the word “wasted” instead of “spent” but I think some of those hours were not wasted, they were hours in which I couldn’t find the motivation to do anything else and video games are an easy resolve. So the video games eat up a lot of my spare time. Just in the past week, I’ve started to fiddle around with code for fun. I haven’t done that in a long time. It’s hard to motivate yourself when there’s so much doom and gloom around. It’s also hard to split up my days properly. After working on the computer all day, it’s almost impossible for me to want to be on the computer. I didn’t realize how valuable it was to be able to interact with colleagues at work, walk around the office, grab a cup of coffee, see unfamiliar faces, and all the odd little things that come with working around other people.

I’ve been trying to read and write but it happens in spurts, a few days of “good behavior” followed by a lot of bad days. I’m mainly writing this post as a therapeutic exercise. To be able to just spill some of my thoughts and emotions.

Music, or the background sounds that fill my time

For me, music has been downgraded from a first-class experience to a background ambience. The songs are the same, the sounds are familiar so there isn’t any newness. I find it comforting to hear the songs that I heard while walking to work, while riding the bus around SF, and the audiobooks that made walking around the house more interesting.

I don’t like the wordpress embed for spotify right now so here’s a song that sounds like what I’m feeling right now: Carol Kaye by Laura Veirs.

Spotify recently put out the Wrapped 2020 playlists, here’s mine: Your Top Songs 2020.

Retail therapy anyone?

It’s eye-opening just how much money you save when you’re not commuting, eating out for lunch, spending money on various things you see others have or mention. I have always been more frugal than “spendy” but I recently gave myself a bit of free reign on buying something nice for myself. I bought a reMarkable 2 which is quite pricey and was a bit uncomfortable for me to justify at first.

I don’t have any grand plans for it, I think it’ll fun to mess around on. I created the above illustrations with it. I wanted something that was a middle ground between an iPad and a notebook. This seems great for that.

I have bought a few small things to sort of improve / remove some minor inconveniences. One of these has been a small fan that I use to move around the air in the room from my humidifier. I got it for about $15 and I think it was a great purchase.

I have resisted purchasing things like clothes, shoes, and other things that I already have a decent amount of. I am pretty simple when it comes to clothing. If it fits and is comfortable, I am happy with it.

The pets

My pets, Samson and Heisenberg, look at me with confusion and maybe even concern (all made up I guess). They’re always around me, barking and meowing, but we don’t really understand each other besides the occasional “walk” and “outside” phrases.

I wonder what’s going through everyone else’s pets heads as well, are they happy or concerned we’re at home with them all the time? I hope happy but I wonder how things will be when we do start going back to our workplaces.

What a year, under the moonshadow

Ask anyone right now and they will say that 2020 is probably one of the worst years. I am in that boat too but I also have found out a lot about myself. I’m a pretty private person, I share some things on my blog but it’s hard for me to do it as some people do it on social media. Oftentimes, I will go days without talking to another person except Kristen (my wife). I am happy to be around people but it doesn’t bother me to not be around people either.

I’m no biologist but I know there’s a lot of chemical things happening within our bodies when we’re around people, in the sun, in new places, and experiencing new things, I think there are so many things missed because we as a society had to lockdown and stay put for some time. Hopefully, it will show us all the great things out there to appreciate in the future.

There’s a song I really like by Cat Stevens called “Moonshadow”, it’s a positive take on being alive and it has lifted me up quite a bit. Like I said earlier, the songs this year have made a resurgence from the past few years to help me feel okay and safe within these uncertain times. There’s a line in the song “Did it take long to find me? And are you going to stay the night?” It’s an obvious question, moonshadows don’t stay around forever but they do come back.

And in the world of FUD, there’s always Bobby McFerrin

I’d like to remind you if you’re tired and done with the fear, uncertainty and doubt, find a pleasant refuge, for me that’s the indiscernible music by Bobby McFerrin like “Circlesong Six”. It takes me away from the human languages we’re used to and puts me a state of mind of being completely unfamiliar and yet at the same time, gives a lot of warmth from the voices that surround me.

This is the first year, in almost a decade, that I am living in a “normal” seasonal city. Not as normal as the east coast but definitely more than San Francisco. The summer was hot and the recent few weeks have started cool down and really feel like fall. Being in a house, we’ve also decorated the outside a bit.

The other day there was a “wind event” as Kristen called it and it was actually a bit crazy to experience even being safe inside our house. The wind howled and flipped over our trash bins. The wind felt like it was close to 50 mph. According to the article linked, it was between 50-70 recorded in different areas in the Bay Area.

Halloween is going to definitely be different this year as we won’t be going anywhere and we aren’t dressing up. I hope to just watch some Halloween movies and relax at home. An odd coincidence is that this is one of few halloweens in recent years that landed on a Saturday! Think about how much cooler it would’ve been if there was no pandemic to keep people locked inside 🙁

Here’s a chill Youtube video to set the mood

I’ve recently been interested in time standards like the local time e.g. Pacific Daylight Time and general times. And I saw a comment somewhere either on reddit or hacker news about how times would work in places not on Earth, like the moon. I came across Barycentric Coordinate Time which is a time standard that is intended to be used for outerspace objects like planets, moons, their orbits, and satellites launched from earth.

Of course, it’s pretty amazing that we’ve been using a calendar system created almost 500 years ago and it still seems to hold up.

I never got used to the early versions of Twitter where people posted status updates. And then slowly, Twitter shifted to a news/social outlet and that became even stranger for me.

I’m thinking about how this blog can work as a status update place. Or do I even need to post status updates?? 🤔