thoughts about technology and productivity
I think instead of banning social media for kids, we should ban the use of algorithmic content feeds for kids (and mandate it be opt-out for adults.) Hear me out. First, putting age verification rules in front of social media sites means social media sites now potentially start having access to government records you’ve uploaded for verification. What could go wrong? Maybe data breaches…
inText is about one thing: keeping your notes organized so you can always get back to the one you want, quickly, from whatever direction you happen to be coming from. You tidy up a little as you go, you connect the notes that belong together, and inText turns that small effort into half a dozen fast ways back in. This guide walks through how that works. The inbox you actually want to clear Every…
If all goes according to plan, Coefficiencies should now be sporting a slightly new look, with Space Grotesk (the font I used for the site’s logo) as the default header and title font throughout. I did this because at some point I kind of unleashed Claude on my site to make it look nice, and ended up “Clauding it up” with the ubiquitous serif font with some words emphasized. When…
I just shipped a few new updates to macAppLibrary based on a couple of suggestions from the little community of users using it. (Side note - how cool is it that people are using this thing???) Here’s a rundown of the updates. User Christophe suggested a way to sync the descriptions and categories of apps to multiple apps, which is a use case I didn’t really have but is a great idea!…
Hello, and welcome to issue 9 of the Coefficiencies Newsletter! It’s been a little while, which I would love to blame on being busy with important things, but the honest answer is that I’ve been busy building an alarming number of small, slightly unhinged personal automations instead. The headliner is that I now have a personal assistant. His name is Mr Claude, he lives on a Mac mini…
Many, many years ago, in 2010, I got the idea for a board game called “Monster Tournament.” The idea was that you could pit all of these legendary creatures from different genres against each other in a tournament. Everything from ghosts, to ninjas, to pirates, to kaiju. I love board games and strategy games of all kinds, and figured I could translate that knowledge into a board game…
I’m a coffee snob. When I tell people that, they assume I fall into one of two buckets: I have a ten-thousand-dollar espresso machine at home. I’m into “third wave” pour-over coffee, have a fancy long-necked kettle, focus on single-origin beans with fruity aromas, and brew pour-over coffee like I’m a lab technician. I’m neither of those things. For the last…
I didn’t and still have not jumped on the OpenClaw bandwagon. I don’t know what it was, but the whole thing didn’t quite sit right with me. I think it was a combination of the scary stories about vulnerabilities as well as the almost religious fervour I saw certain people (mostly dudes) talk about their stack of ten Mac Minis and internal agents with a “soul.” But.…
My RSS reinvention continues. (If you missed the last installment , the short version is that I moved my feeds over to Feedbin and immediately started wondering why I’d waited so long.) This week I went back and gave a few new RSS readers a spin: Fiery Feeds and ReadKit . And one old favourite: the venerable NetNewsWire . Of the three I’m settling on ReadKit, which strikes the nicest…
I gave Readwise Reader a good run, but honestly I was never a fan of their iOS app. It was just so clunky to actually read my articles and keep track of read-later and all that. And I was really annoyed that I couldn’t add my private Club MacStories feed. So I switched over to Feedbin to manage my feeds, and I’m really happy so far. I love having a web service, because I can wire up…
Effective Date: June 14, 2026 inText is built to keep your notes yours. This policy explains how it handles your information. The short version inText does not collect, track, or sell any of your data. There are no accounts, no analytics, and no ads. Your notes are plain Markdown files that live in a folder you control. Your notes inText reads and writes plain .md files in a folder you choose. By…
inText is a native notes app for a folder of plain Markdown files. Here’s how to get going, plus answers to common questions. Contact Email me at contactme@coefficiencies.com and I’ll do my best to help. Getting started When you first open inText it sets up a vault for you on your device. To use your own folder instead — for example one in iCloud Drive so your notes sync across devices…
Just a short note to say that I just launched a little resource planning app for MacOS called, imaginatively, Resource Planner. If I had you at “Resource Planner” you can go ahead and go to the app page to get it. If you want a bit of background, read on. So basically, I built this app because I’m currently doing some resource planning at work, which means that there are a bunch…
I’m really happy to announce not one, but two new apps I’ve released this week. The first is Remaining. Remaining is an iOS app (iPhone and iPad) that helps you answer one simple question: how much do I have left to spend until I get paid, after all my bills come out of my chequing account? This is basically how I’ve been budgeting for most of my adult life, first with a series…
menuDrop tl;dr I made a little Mac app to access your Raindrop bookmarks easily from your Mac’s menu bar. Below is a bit of background on how I made it and why. If you want to skip all that and download it, head over to the app page and do so! Longer Version I’ve recently started using Raindrop.io to store my bookmarks. The full background is probably worth its own post, but suffice to say a big…
Wow, it’s certainly been a while since I’ve posted on the site or sent a newsletter. I’ve been pretty busy at work lately, so I haven’t had much mental energy for writing. But mainly, I’ve been spending a lot of my time vibe coding. Since getting a Claude Code Pro subscription in November, I’ve pretty much been vibe coding non-stop. I don’t want to go over…
Effective Date: January 31, 2026 Remaining is designed with your privacy in mind. This policy explains how we handle your information. Data Collection We do not collect any data. Remaining stores all your information locally on your device. Your balance, bills, and settings never leave your phone. What We Don’t Do We don’t collect personal information We don’t track your usage We…
Remaining is fairly simply to set up, but here’s a quick primer in case you need help. Contact Email me at contactme@coefficiencies.com I’ll do my best to respond! Frequently Asked Questions How do I add a bill? Tap the Cash Flow tab Tap Add Event Enter the bill name, amount, and due date Choose if it repeats (monthly, weekly, etc.) How do I update my balance? Tap the Balance button in…
A while back I wrote about how I budget with Shortcuts on iOS . It was… fine? Reminders for bills, a Shortcut to calculate what’s left, a widget to show me the number. But it was held together with duct tape. Data Jar for storage, WidgetPack for display, a multi-step Shortcut that occasionally broke when iOS updated. It worked, but it wasn’t good . I’d always wanted to…
AnyBox MCP Server After being a ChatGPT guy since pretty much launch, thanks to Claude Code and my increasingly worrying vibe coding addiction, I’ve paid for a month of Claude Pro and tried out the desktop app. I’m not quite sold on the app, but I really find the ability to integrate with Model Context Protocol (“MCP”) servers interesting. Longplay , my favourite music app,…
The Coefficiencies Newsletter Issue 8 Hello, welcome to issue 8 of the Coefficiencies Newsletter! Last week during my semi-regular Star Trek Adventures gaming night I decided to introduce a classic trope: an encrypted log file they needed to decrypt to find a clue. I wanted it to look exactly like an LCARS-style computer console from the show, and have codewords they could enter to decrypt some or…
Hey, welcome to the Coefficiencies Newsletter Issue 7! Last week was a busy one due to shuffling two Thanksgiving dinners for Canadian Thanksgiving, so I ended up skipping the newsletter. But I’m determined to keep at this, so I’m back! This week, I randomly decided to blow up my entire knowledge system by abandoning Obsidian . I’m really conflicted about it. I loved how…
Hey, welcome to issue 6 of the Coefficiencies newsletter ! I finally took the Apple Watch Ultra 3 out for a phone-free workout, and a burst of vibe coding produced a fresh Obsidian sync and AI job runner. We capped the week by loading the bikes onto the GO Train and spending Saturday tracing Hamilton’s trails, with plenty of Old Man’s War universe lore from The Shattering Peace by John…
As I mentioned before, I’ve been experimenting with “vibe coding.” Instead of writing code myself, I’ve been using the “vibe coding” tool Codex to do a couple of things with my Obsidian vault: An agentic vault organizer that sorts any new file in my inbox into the appropriate subfolder, adding tags and wiki links to other files as needed. A weekly email…
Hey, welcome to issue 5 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! I spent the week coming down from a Vegas conference high, tightening up some of my automations, and generally trying to keep the post-conference energy focused on things that will actually ship. What I’ve Been Up To Most of the week centred on the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit , where every morning in the Fontainebleau’s Royal Ballroom…
I’ve never been good at keeping my files neatly organized. My Obsidian _Inbox/ fills up, my root directory gets cluttered, and the good intentions of “I’ll sort it later” rarely turn into action. So I finally asked: why not get a computer to do it automatically for me? That’s where Codex came in. Wait, What’s Codex? Codex is primarily designed as a coding assistant —think of it as an AI that can…
I’ve just finished Day 2 of the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit in Las Vegas. I initially wanted to attend to get some ideas to bring back to one of my teams at work to help improve their development workflow. The conference is organized by Gene Kim , author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook , so I expected lots of tips about DevOps best practices. It turns out DevOps is…
One more test to see that new posts are getting picked up by my Active Pieces workflow automatically.
I’m on my way to a tech conference this week in Las Vegas. My flight was delayed by five hours (sigh), so I had a little time to kill. Luckily I had my laptop and decided to fix up my rss2social workflow on Active Pieces. I got annoyed testing the workflow because every time I ran it, it would spam my accounts with posts that had already been published. I decided to try Active Pieces’…
Welcome to the Coefficiencies newsletter issue 4! A few short links this week about new Apple stuff, another video game I’m digging, some Obsidian nerdery, and a little bit of reflection about self-care. Let’s dig in! Apple Week The new Apple stuff dropped this week: new phones (including the very sleek-looking iPhone Air ), new AirPods Pro (they look awesome), new Apple Watches , and…
When I was a kid in the 80s, I remember watching movies where people “hacked” into computers by hammering away at a terminal. The idea always fascinated me. So much that when we got a very early “pocket computer” where you could enter your calendar, contacts, and notes onto a rudimentary LCD screen, one of the first things I did was plunk it down next to our Atari ST…
Hey, welcome to issue 3 of the newsletter! I got two new subscribers this week - welcome! I’ve got a couple links and one thought to share this week. Hope you enjoy! Links An Awesome MagSafe Power Bank After experimenting with a cheap, functional, but enormous MagSafe battery pack charger from a no-name Temu brand, I picked up the Anker Nano Power Bank this week and it’s glorious.…
My wife and I were very fortunate to get tickets to see Jerrod Carmichael this week at a comedy club that is maybe a 30 minute walk from our house. It was very good and really cool to see such a big name in such a small venue. It was also the first time I went to a show where I had to put my phone into a little pouch (a “Yondr” pouch) that I carried with me but was locked up until it…
Hello, and welcome to issue 2 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! Just a couple of links today and one quick thought. Enjoy! Links Longplay I came across this article by Craig Grannell about LongPlay , the album-centric music player for iOS and macOS, and why it’s the best music app—and I couldn’t agree more. LongPlay connects to your Apple Music library and shows you all of your…
So after getting Active Pieces set up successfully, it started crashing on me. ChatGPT looked at the logs and suggested disabling “telemetry,” which seemed to be the culprit. I did that, and it ’s been running okay so far. Just in case, I created a second Active Pieces flow: a job that runs every five minutes and calls a healthchecks.io URL to report everything is fine. If healthchecks…
Want to make sure this will post to socials.
I’ve long found web-based “low code” automation tools like IFTTT , Make.com and Zapier handy for automating small web-based workflows— posting to social channels, updating records in Airtable or Notion, and the like. While I can often script these workflows in Python and run them on my Raspberry Pi with a cron job, there’s a lot of overhead: figuring out each service’s APIs and…
Welcome to the first issue of the new Coefficiencies newsletter! I thought I’d try the newsletter thing after running the blog for a while to see if I can find a new audience for my writing. While RSS is still my “ride or die,” I know a lot of folks like the simplicity of having something drop in their inbox every week. And I have say, there are a few newsletters I’ve…
On our nightly walk this evening, my wife made the interesting observation today that what we did as kids and teenagers, we’re still doing now, and it really resonated with me. She reminded me of a story I told her about this presentation I did for French class in the 7th grade where I did a live ‘commercial’ for a nose hair trimmer. I played the guy in serious need of a nose…
I recently got a few reasonably priced smart door/window sensors (from Aqara, which I highly recommend) to help me do a few fun home automations around the house based on doors or windows opening or closing. I got two and put one on the garage door and one on the shed door. I had the rough idea of using these with Home Assistant and my Sonos Era 300 speaker to rig up a basic home security system,…
So we went to Montréal for the Osheaga music festival with the kids this summer and I tried to keep the kit as light as humanly possible. No carry-on rules meant I could’ve gone wild, but honestly the less gear the better when you’re bouncing between a rental and the festival grounds on Île Notre-Dame. For the main trip I packed everything into my trusty Patagonia Black Hole Duffel 55L . That bag…
I’ve been tinkering with my website for the past two years, and every time I think I’ve found “the way,” I discover another tweak that makes life easier. This summer’s rabbit hole: simplifying how I post, draft, and publish. Why leafed folders stopped working For a while my Hugo site lived in a tidy hierarchy of folders: /content/posts/slug/index.md with assets dropped into the same folder. On…
I recently went through a bit of a ‘home server’ refresh and thought I’d document the experience here. I’m going to cover why I maintain home servers, why I did the refresh, what the migration was like, and the little tweaks I made along the way. Hopefully this is helpful to people who want to go through something similar in the future! Part 1: Why Do I Have Home Servers? All of…
I’ve been trying to weigh myself every day, one so I get a good rolling average of my weight to account for fluctuations, and two so I’m more cognizant of my weight and can hopefully shed a few pounds. I always forget, so I’ve been using the great app Due that reminds me every day at 730 and keeps nagging me every five minutes until I do it. I log my weight in Happy Scale , a fun…
This post started as a quick note in the MacStories Discord, but I’ve expanded it here because it’s something I keep coming back to. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about tech nostalgia — how we remember old tech, and how it made us feel. I graduated university in 2002, and the decade that followed felt like an explosion of possibility. The internet was growing up. Personal computing was hitting…
I’ve been going down a serious Home Assistant rabbit hole lately. After rebuilding it from the ground up post- piPocalypse , I just kept going with. I love the simplicity of the iOS Home app, went hard on automations for it, and had even set up a Homebridge server to port things over to the Home app that weren’t HomeKit certified. But I kept hitting walls with the Home app. First, the automations…
Tech nostalgia I think about this a lot wrt to tech in general. I graduated university in 2002 and i felt like the tech between then and 2012 was so exciting and i was so optimistic about it. There was this awesome search engine that came along that worked so well and seemed to prioritize its users so much. And then they came out with gmail and blew away all the other email providers. (I bought my…
Every day I am just more and more impressed by Home Assistant . My Lutron Casetta dimmer came with a little remote I never needed. Until I realized it could be programmed in HA. Now it’s our little bedside table remote to trigger a scene with a combination of Hue and Meross bulbs. It responds almost instantly when pressed. I previously used HomeKit to program Hue dimmer buttons to trigger Sonos…
For the past couple of years, I’ve been helping organize the Somewhat Reunion - a get-together for folks involved in Queen’s Drama in the early 2000s. I started off just volunteering when the organizers asked for help, and… well, I ended up getting pretty deeply involved: setting up the website, managing the budget and ticket sales, and eventually taking over as chair when the original…
I’ve been a fan of Anybox for a while now. It’s fast, polished, and works across devices. For a long time, I was using it to capture all kinds of links — emulator documentation, good long reads, software tools to try out later. But lately, I’ve found myself getting back into a strong daily note habit with Obsidian. And as that habit solidified, I started wanting something a little different from…