I love my Chromebook a lot more than my Mac. The whole experience feels straightforward, no-nonsense and light. Starting/restarting is a breeze. With smart-lock, logging in and out is polished. There are no long update cycles; instead, it is always up-to-date. I have hardly seen the loading bar while using it. It is commendable, given that the underlying hardware is not as highly configured as my i9 MacBook Pro at work.
Sure, I do a lot more with the office Mac. But then, why would I ever need such a powerful machine for the stuff I do on my laptop? It's mostly the browser I use, so Chromebook is perfect.
Plus, this has a terminal, one thing I miss on a Windows laptop.
I wish I could convince more people to give ChromeOS a try. Especially, my parents could benefit a lot from this simple device. But, they are worried whenever I tell them to stop using their Windows laptop. They hated Linux (of course, what was I even thinking). They can't make any sense of macOS. iPad is too bare for them, and the onscreen keyboard is a pain. Chromebook is the best fit for them. If only they would listen to me.
I started reading (listening to) a novel by David Baldacci today and decided right away I didn't need to continue doing that. It started with gruesome details of a crime scene. Not the way I want to start my day. Or end my day. For that matter, I am tired of crime and mystery novels for now. This is the genre that I have been reading for the past few months. I will take a pause now.
I usually listen to my #books while on a morning walk. Crime novels are not the best companion at that time of the hour.
I returned the audiobook and purchased P. G. Wodehouse — the Blandings Castle collection. I will let Stephen Fry narrate light stories from the master of humour throughout the day. And I have got about 45 hours of that narration. Nice!
I have decided to change my routine from being an early-morning person to becoming a late-night guy. I realized that the mornings did not leave me with much time. The routine got packed recently with the added responsibility of Snoopy gobbling up the mornings. It just didn't leave me much time to read and write.
So when Snoopy recently started going to bed early, leaving me a silent hour at night, I couldn't pass on the opportunity. I sit alone with my laptop and a blinking cursor at write.as. There is hardly any noise around as my wife and daughter are in bed with their thoughts. Doing their stuff.
Mornings in my #life had stopped being calm. I was always praying that others should not wake up early. Before that, I should. Even if I did wake up, I felt sleepy. Thoughts ceased to come through. There was always something waiting to clog my mind.
“Maybe I should read the news first?” “I shouldn't make too much noise, or I will wake others”. “Let me just lie down for 15 minutes”. And on and on.
That's not how I remember a productive morning routine. It was time to change things. I have. I have no idea if this works. I hope, for the sake of my writing, that it does.
Matt Gemmell reminded me recently that it is ok to write less. However, this passage especially caught my attention.
Blogs were originally a kind of diary, and they were mostly repositories of short pieces, not huge articles. It's an absolute fallacy that longer works are better or more valuable; indeed, shorter pieces are more likely to be read and digested, which intrinsically increases their value.
As I had complained recently, I have been growing through a slump in my writing. I have started taking my blogging too seriously. “Not every thought deserves to be published”, I convinced myself. Or “this needs to be elaborated; the readers won't understand”.
This might sound rude, but since when have I started caring about my readers? I should read some of my earlier posts. They were terrible. They made no sense then and don't make any sense even now. Even to me. So why care?
Publish anything, everything. Short, long – doesn't matter. Anywhere that's convenient at the moment. Don't take Grammarly too seriously. Get back to writing more. I can work on making it better later.
I am recently pretty inspired by the concept of wiki or #digitalgarden. I have got me one. Why? Well, it goes back to my belief that blogs are boring. The list of posts displayed reverse chronologically doesn't help much. I've read many articles on how blogs and their typical homepage have made the web dull.
But it also is one more place to update. So many places that I can write, and yet I hardly write anything these days. Or is it because I have so many places to write at. Whatever the reason, the ups and downs of the inspiration for the writer in me continue.
There are so many things I do not like about Micro.blog. Yet that #platform remains the platform of choice for me. Why? Because it does everything just enough. I wish it got the writing interface right.
I wasn't aware that there's a way to create drafts with Write.as. With no option in the editor to save a post in-works as draft, I always thought it wasn't possible. I should read a bit first before deciding on what I know. In fairness, though, the workflow is different, slightly reverse from all other #platforms. You basically publish a post and expect it to be a draft as it was done anonymously.
Anyway, every time I access Write.as, everything looks too fragmented to me. I land on a page which is a blank one with a blinking cursor. Brilliant! But what next? There's nothing else if you don't know where to go. I can see my blog posts, edit them. Do you want the community? There is a different product. Pictures you say? That's another different product.
For example, I still wonder how do I add an image here? Can I? Or is the image's workflow separate? Possibly, it is part of the Rich editor available as a Pro feature?
There is something wonderful about a clean writing and reading interface. I am always a big fan of #platforms that build themselves on clean interfaces. It helps. Does it mean there is no place for flashy sites? Absolutely not.
I have come to a realization recently. Blogs have made web boring. Think about it. Every blog looks the same. All themes are more or less the same. A slight layout change here. A margin or padding there. Varied columns. But all look the same to me. You know that you are reading a blog.
Imagine if every page was custom. Well, let me help you. Check this site by Aegir. No, don't just look at the homepage. Look at every post. Each post has different design. What brilliance! I am absolutely impressed and saddened at the same time. And jealous too. I wish I could create something like this. I can't.
Well, why can't I? I mean, why can't I just create html pages? Isn't that the first line of code I wrote?
I like this place, but for reasons I am not yet sure. I think it is about the simplicity of the offerings. It is clean to use, it is clean to look at. That matters. I am an avid fan of non-complex systems. Too many bells and whistles and I am out.
I have lost interest for WordPress, it has become a behemoth. There are too many features that a blogger would need. Sure, it will get you started, but then there are so many other basic blogging engines that will do that very well. Why go for WP then? That platform is for people serious about starting their blog or website.
In a hope to be something for all, you stop being anything for anyone.
I believe WordPress is going through a similar phase.
What if I want a title-less post? Does it look OK? A big aim always for me is to not have any titles for my post. How will that look on a blog that expects a title. I have no idea — but here's to check that.
A clean interface always helps! This is as clean as it gets. However, I already have a clean interface on my machine, a native app that is absolutely clean. So, why do I need another clean interface? Possibly not.
Anyway, what intrigues me the most is how it looks on Matt's Micro posts site. It's so clean. Is it the default template? Plus, a system around #tagging as part of the post's body itself is pretty ingenious.