Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Groceries, Knitting, Wu-Tang

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Paused the dystopian audiobook I was listening to so I could hear the audio cues from the self-checkout at the grocery store, and it’s like the dystopian audiobook never really stopped.

▰ Looking over this year’s Big Ears lineup (March 26–29, Knoxville, TN) and pondering the deep direct and indirect links to the old Knitting Factory

▰ This week in barbershop music: two of the five adult males present wore black Wu-Tang Clan T-shirts, and they didn’t know each other (I had to ask). Also, no music was playing.

▰ And … 10 weeks until the 750th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto music community project

▰ You wanna draw? You wanna talk art supplies? You wanna learn from someone who knows what the heck they’re talking about? My old friend Brian Biggs, the talented illustrator and storyteller, has started a YouTube series about his favorite pencils, pens, paper, and on and on. Geeking out at its finest. As the kids say, “like and subscribe.”

▰ Me: Hey, I got my email inbox down substantially this week.

Bandcamp: It’s Friday!

▰ Didn’t finish reading any books this week, but did make solid progress on Cees Nooteboom’s Rituals (1980) and Helen Phillips’ Hum (2024), among others.

Current Essential Apps

A dozen or so

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve been talking about useful apps of late with friends, and I figured I’d have a page I can direct them to. These are some essential (to me) MacOS and iOS (and in some cases OS-agnostic) apps. I’m probably forgetting some, but I half think I could do 90% of my work with just these. Not included in the list are the more default options, like iOS apps Reminders (from Apple) and Gmail (from Google).

  • Bebop, instant mobile note-taking
  • TextSniper, copying text from screen images, etc.
  • Plex, home audio media server
  • Figma, graphics editor (and more?)

I pretty much live in Obsidian and Vivaldi. I do some work in Chrome, if it’s Google-specific. Bebop is on my phone to sync with my laptop, one of the few shortcuts on my lock screen. Whisper is on my phone, and since it doesn’t sync, I access via iPhone Mirroring from my laptop (also a shortcut on my lock screen). Plex is mostly a video thing these days, but I only use it for audio. ImageOptim and Permute probably have stronger competition, but they do the job for me. (This list doesn’t include music-making software, which is a distant corner of the universe.)