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Oh, new Boards of Canada album!
Decoding
Articles about productivity and technology.
Latest posts
Bookmarked “Ferrari Luce – Ferrari.com”
I just love the design of this thing.
Making Bike into a thinking environment
I created a demo video of how I started using Bike 2.0 extensions. They are pretty cool. Essentially I want to set up a thinking space with reactive AI integration. Something like a simpler version of Obsidian, without any Electron crap. I don t plan to open-source these repos, because I don t want to support them. [ ]
Back to blogging
I m restarting the usage of this Bike outline based blogging thing. Blogging with Bike I want to have an easy way to blog.
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Honestly, the best thing about Spatialize Stereo on AirPods is that you can turn it off.
Bookmarked “Itsyhome – Control HomeKit from your menu bar”
Your entire smart home in the macOS menu bar. Cameras, lights, thermostats, locks, and more – just one click away.
Last two weeks from my Zettelkasten
I keep a Zettelkasten, a personal knowledge base where I write notes and connect them over time. I’m trying out writing about what’s happening there, we’ll see if it sticks. It started with a video I watched a video about M-shaped careers. People with too many interests (“scanners”) building deep expertise in multiple areas instead [ ]
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I can safely say that Liquid Glass is the Butterfly Keyboard of software design. The basic idea is great, but the execution sucks. I just hope it won t take years to fix it.
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I had my two previous post in the wrong format, so outgoing links didn t work. Fixed it.
Bookmarked “LinkEdit – Cocoa Productions”
Personal knowledge manager (PKM). Point to any folder and manage your Markdown and plain text notes. Create auto-updating links which can go in both directions. Pretty early, but looks promising.
Bookmarked “sozercan/kaset: 📻 The missing YouTube Music macOS app”
A native macOS YouTube Music client built with Swift and SwiftUI.
Bookmarked “aaaaalexis/obsidian-cupertino: A native look and feel Obsidian theme designed for a clean, focused, and mobile-friendly writing experience.”
Cupertino is an Obsidian theme, optimized for desktop and mobile devices. Bringing clean, focused, comfortable reading and writing experience to your vault. Looks pretty nice, but… it is still Electron under the hood.
Bookmarked “Updatest”
All your Mac updates. One beautiful interface.
Bookmarked “Owl”
Owl is a note-taking app currently under development for Apple platforms. An early version is available for Mac.
My Mind Is Not the CPU for Bureaucracy
I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions, but this year I made an exception. It’s not a goal but a boundary, and it’s that I want to stop spending thinking capacity on problems AI can handle well enough. Things like passport renewals, car maintenance, and health insurance paperwork aren’t intellectually hard problems for me. They’re [ ]
Bookmarked “Writing Workflow”
This is actually a pretty interesting way to think about which app should be used for which type of writing. Question: What am I writing? a. Longform a novel or non fiction piece of more than 2,000 words. Answer: Scrivener b. Shortform a blog post or e-mail or report or some such. Something [ ]
Blogging from Bike today
I’m writing on my blog from Bike today, which I still love. Blogging with Bike Publish daily notes to my Zettelkasten from Bike Also related but in a different way Thinking in Threads with Bike Outliner Note: sometimes I wonder why do I keep a separate Zettelkasten around, since WordPress and my blog could solve [ ]
DEVONthink and Liquid Glass testing
There is a new beta of DEVONthink in Liquid Glass. Looks pretty nice. There’s a new app icon, which is similar to DEVONthink To Go 4. Some smaller UI issues The magnification glass on the right has a small UI issue. General settings drop-downs are touching each other.
Brainstorming about macOS note-taking apps
The Archive (native) Plain-text Zettelkasten app with wiki-links, fast search, and minimal UI. File-based (markdown), local-first. The primary tool for this zettelkasten. (Workflow context) My current or previous usage of the app. Primary zettelkasten tool all permanent notes live here. Main journaling and thought capture. Search and browse the knowledge network. Private notes hidden [ ]
Thinking in Threads with Bike Outliner
I ve been looking for a tool that supports threaded thinking. Distill nails the concept: you think out loud into threads, and AI agents respond inline without breaking the flow. But it s pricey, hosted, and not native. I want local files so I can use git. So I built something similar with Bike. The Threading Idea [ ]
First Impressions of Liquid Glass in macOS Tahoe
I ve been running macOS Tahoe s new Liquid Glass design on my MacBook Air for a couple of days. Parts work, parts don t, but most people will adapt quickly enough. The smart thing Apple did was leave 3rd-party apps alone. They run with the previous design intact, giving you familiar anchors while you adapt to the [ ]
Solving Token Waste with Claude Code Personas
The new /context command in Claude Code revealed how I m wasting tokens by having all MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools loaded into one session for every conversation. When I m in the middle of development, I don t need OmniFocus task management or DEVONthink database tools. Based on subagents I had the following idea: what if I [ ]
Bookmarked “Making Software”
A reference manual for people who design and build software.
Pezeta Progress Log
Spent today designing the Rails controller layer for Pezeta. I analyzed Capito, an envelope budgeting prototype I built seven years ago. Standard approach – categories as envelopes, track balances, show what s left to spend, like YNAB. But Pezeta takes a different angle. Instead of manually managing category balances, I m building a goal-oriented system where users [ ]
Pezeta Progress Log: Day 9
I built the model layer for goal-oriented budgeting in Pezeta today. This is the implementation of the goal system I ve been designing over the past week. I ve laid the foundation for four distinct goal types: Someday Goals – For big purchases. Save until you hit your target amount, then stop allocating. Monthly Goals – For [ ]
On Deleting Second Brains
Joan Westenberg: Two nights ago, I deleted everything. Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever borrowed, broken, or bastardized. Gone. Erased in seconds. [ ]
Bookmarked “LisaGUI”
LisaGUI is a web OS inspired by the Lisa Office System, Apple’s first graphical user interface (GUI). It aims to perfectly recreate the Lisa’s iconic 1-bit UI directly in your browser. Lisa had so many great UI ideas. We still have the concept of stationary pads on macOS today.
Pezeta Progress Log: Day 5
Today I worked on planning Pezeta s goal system. I experimented with using two AI agents to collaborate on breaking down the work: Claude Opus 4 as the coordinating agent with read/write access, and ChatGPT o3 through Repo Prompt for implementation planning. The idea was to leverage each model s strengths. Claude handles the file operations and [ ]
Pezeta Progress Log: Day 4
Had a focused session today expanding the goal system design for Pezeta. Yesterday I started with the basic concept, today I dove deeper into the details. I expanded all four goal types with detailed logic and edge cases: Someday goals are your classic piggy bank. You want $3,000 for a new laptop someday. The system [ ]
Pezeta Progress Log: Day 3
Today wrapped up the core data foundation with the Budget view model and spent time planning the goal allocation rules that ll make this budgeting app different. The aggregation layer The Budget model pulls everything together. Give it a ledger and a month, and it calculates the current state of all categories, their allocated amounts, actual [ ]
Pezeta Progress Log: Day 2
Day two of building Pezeta. Yesterday was all planning and starting. Today was about getting my hands dirty with actual Rails models. Completed the three core models today: Category model (with proper enums and validations) MonthlyAllocation model (with decimal precision for money) Transaction model (income/expense tracking) Not the most exicting part for people to see [ ]
Bookmarked “I Shipped a macOS App Built Entirely by Claude Code”
I recently shipped Context, a native macOS app for debugging MCP servers. The goal was to build a useful developer tool that feels at home on the platform, powered by Apple s SwiftUI framework. I ve been building software for the Mac since 2008, but this time was different: Context was almost 100% built by Claude Code. [ ]
Starting Pezeta
Finally decided to start building Pezeta today. It s been in my mind for years since we started Agyvihar, our Hungarian podcast about personal finance and productivity. What s Pezeta? Simple: a budgeting app that tells you one number how much you can spend right now. That s it. No charts. No categories. No endless reports. [ ]
Bookmarked “macOS Tips & Tricks – saurabhs.org”
I actually learned a couple of new things about TextEdit and Terminal.
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Mihai Parparita is asking on Mastodon: What are good examples of early Mac OS X software (10.0-10.4 era, pre-Intel switch)? Then providing the initial list. OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and other Omni Group software Transmit 2, Unison, Candy Bar, Pixadex, and other Panic software Audio Hijack and other Rogue Amoeba software NetNewsWire and MarsEdit Watson Acorn [ ]
Read “It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI”
Blogging is essential because it provides knowledge and serves as a valuable reference for us and others. On the other hand, getting recognized as a blogger these days is rarely going to work. People are increasingly consuming different types of content these days, and this is largely due to the way AI is changing the [ ]
Read “Never Look at Your Files Again: Wikilinks, Tags, and Search in iA Writer”
Lately, I started to do a bunch of (what I call) Project-based Zettelkasten™, which are just git repositories containing a bunch of Markdown files related to different projects. This post reminds me that iA Writer can grab all that stuff and make it available in one app. Previously: Using iA Writer as an end-to-end writing [ ]
Bookmarked “Zen Browser”
I’m not a big fan of Arc (it just overcomplicates the browsing session), but if you want something similar based on Firefox, then the Zen browser could be interesting.
Apple: we just don’t want ads
Steve Jobs said this in 2011: No ads. We build products that we want for ourselves, too, and we just don t want ads. Then, we have a new rumor, that Apple is thinking about showing ads in Maps. My reaction? No ads. You build products that you and I want for ourselves, too, and we [ ]
Bookmarked “Meishi: a tiny productivity system”
This is not more for me, but I love the idea of using the MagSafe Wallet this way.
Bookmarked “(mac)OStalgia”
Mac(os)talgia is exploring my 2020 work-from-home routine with an added touch of nostalgia. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. I would take this Mac OS 9 design of Slack, Zoom, and Figma immediately.
Read “Can anyone stop President Musk?”
Yet more reading about President Musk (I’m gonna steal this).
Read “The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified”
Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. Lately, I feel early Gilead vibes while reading the news.
Using tags to create threads in WordPress
Continuing 3380: Maybe I should use tags as a thread title in a way that group posts together. I’m using pretty general tags currently, which is fine, but a tag page is just another filtered wall of text. This way, each post could be part of an ongoing conversation. Here’s an example page for a [ ]
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Continuing 3378: If you visit the front page of my blog, you’ll notice that I organize posts by day, inspired by the daily notes feature from Roam Research. I typically enjoy this wall of text style more than having separate posts highlighted individually (perhaps that’s why I like threading on Mastodon). The issue is that [ ]
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I sometimes think we might need different ways to share ideas instead of long articles—it’s important to mention that I m talking about ideas, not stories. Looking at how I read, I see that I usually skim content instead of reading it all at once. Then, I go back to the interesting parts later. If you [ ]
Exploring Real-Time Voice-to-Text Transcription Options
I’ve been thinking about using voice input more in my workflow after watching Chris from DailyTekk talk about quitting typing. He made some interesting points about how speaking (120-150 words per minute) is naturally faster than typing (40-60 words per minute). What was interesting is his observation about typing disrupting the flow with constant self-editing—I’ve [ ]
Read “The Field Notes Thing”
I try to operate on the “Nothing Doesn’t Go in Here” principle. Flipping through the notebook that is on my desk right now, I see shopping lists, notes from conference calls, sermon notes, a little chart I made when working on some invoices for Relay, a doodle of the Widgetsmith icon I made for some [ ]
Read “Programmers are modern-day computers”
Programming as we know it is in a process of dying out. Most haven t come to terms with it yet. I m just saving this, so I can look back at it in 3 years and see if it s becoming true or not.
Read “Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website | TechCrunch”
Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week. Asked for [ ]