Ebbs and Flows

I’ll be honest: I’m still not over our announcement a couple of weeks ago that Magic Rays of Light has joined MacStories. It’s so exciting and a huge honor to be part of such a great team. I’ve had to pinch myself a few times just to make sure that it’s real.

The announcement came alongside a stream of creative output on my part. I published my first articles for MacStories and MacStories Weekly. We shared a huge episode of the podcast to coincide with the announcement. And I got to share a shortcut I’ve been working on for a while that I’m really happy with. It was a productive week—in the literal sense that I produced a lot of stuff I’m proud of—and it was awesome.

Since then, things have been quieter. I’ve gone a couple of weeks without posting here, which is longer than normal. I honestly haven’t written much of anything, aside from show notes and my daily journaling. It’s like that part of my brain took a break and my usual, “I have to blog about this!” impulses haven’t been as strong.

To be fair, I have been focused on making the podcast and adjusting to new ways of doing things on the backend. And work responsibilities have taken up a good deal of my time and energy, not to mention being present with my family. It’s not like I haven’t been doing anything. I just haven’t been writing, and that’s been bugging me.

But should it? Creative energy ebbs and flows, and it shifts to different focuses at different times. Other things have to take priority due to external commitments and, you know, needing to work so I can pay my bills.

I’ve done my best to remove any and all “should”s from this place and just let it be whatever I want it to be. No pressure, just something to enjoy, share, and hope that others enjoy as well. That’s what a personal blog is for.

So I guess I’m writing all of this (1) to explain why things have been quiet here for a bit and (2) to convince myself that that’s okay. It’s alright to take some time off, purposefully or otherwise. So long as I keep to the commitments I’ve made, I can go with the flow on the rest.

I get the feeling that the flow is pushing me back in this direction and that I’ll have more to share here soon. (Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been tinkering with another shortcut.) Either way, I’m happy to be along for the ride, and I hope that you are, too.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out anytime or say hi on social media. I’m usually around, even if I’m quiet, and I’d love to hear from you.

Watch History Journal →

Alongside this week’s Magic Rays of Light—our first as part of MacStories—we debuted Watch History Journal, a shortcut I made for logging what you watch in your favorite journal app.

From my writeup in the latest edition of MacStories Weekly:

Watch History Journal uses your Trakt profile to generate images of titles you’ve watched on a given day and share them to your journaling app of choice. Run it once a day when you’re finished watching (or set it up as a personal automation that runs in the background before bed), and it will create a journal entry that includes everything you’ve watched. It integrates with Day One, Everlog, and the Journal app…

This shortcut rounds out Apple’s journaling suggestions system for me and turns my journal into a true one-stop shop for what I’m doing, experiencing, thinking, and making. I love journaling in this way.

If you’d like to try Watch History Journal for yourself, you can download it here. And for more details about how it works and how it was made, check out MacStories Weekly: Issue 401 featuring my article along with a lot of great writing from my new colleagues.

Thank you for following along with what has been just an incredible week. I’m so grateful to be where I am, and the best part is that this is only the beginning.

MacStories →

Yours truly, writing at MacStories:

Today is an exciting day for Magic Rays of Light. We couldn’t be happier that our show is joining the MacStories family of podcasts. Before the first episode of this new era releases on Wednesday, we thought we’d take a moment to introduce ourselves and the show to you.

I am thrilled to be joining the MacStories team! It’s a site and a team that I’ve revered for years, so it’s an honor to come aboard. Sigmund and I will continue producing the podcast we love to make, now under the MacStories banner.

There are a lot more details up on MacStories now, including our new release schedule and the announcement that Federico and John are making a guest appearance on the show this week. We got to join in on the latest episode of AppStories as well, which still feels unreal.

It’s a great day and the start of an exciting new phase for Magic Rays of Light. My sincere thanks to everyone who’s supported the show thus far by listening, sharing, and offering feedback. It means the world. I’m so grateful for our wonderful listeners, and I’m hoping I’ll get to meet some newcomers to the show this week.

Our next episode comes out this Wednesday, and there’s plenty more to come after that, so stay tuned! This is going to be fun.

Streamlining Workouts with Apple Fitness+ Plans and Stacks

Apple Fitness+ is one of my favorite services the company offers. The classes are top-notch, the trainers are some of the most likable people you’ll ever meet, and most importantly, it actually motivates me to stick to a workout routine.

The service is also constantly improving. Not only are there new classes each week, but new features get added all the time. I’m honestly surprised how much Apple have invested in Fitness+ from a technological perspective over the three years it’s been around.

Two major additions that came last year were custom plans and stacks, two of my longstanding wishes for the service and features that make my experience with it better every day.

Custom plans take the work out of choosing workouts. Instead of picking individual classes, you set a schedule of how long you want to work out and on which days of the week. Then you pick what types of workouts you want to do, and the app does the rest for you. Each day you’re scheduled to work out, Fitness+ will present you with a series of classes custom-built to fit what you want to do.

You can customize your plan further by choosing which equipment you want to use, trainers you prefer to work with, and types of music you’d like to work out to. There’s so much variety on the service that you can knock out a lot of classes without hitting repeats. And the best part is that you don’t have to scroll through a long list to find what you want; the app does it for you!

I’ve been using a custom plan to do a combination of core, yoga, and meditation daily for the past couple of months, and it’s been so helpful. The plan removes that initial step of picking a workout so I can focus on what really matters: getting my body moving. With that mental hurdle out of the way, I find it much easier to get started.

Meanwhile, stacks allow you to do several workouts back-to-back by, well, stacking them on top of each other. To start a stack, you simply long-press on a workout and choose Add to Stack. Once all your workouts are added, you can press the stack button in the top right corner and get going.

When I’m doing multiple workouts in a row, it can be distracting to have to stop, choose the next workout, and then start again. With stacks, I can easily flow from one workout to the next without interruption. I don’t even have to touch my TV remote or iPad screen. The button to start the next workout shows up on my Apple Watch, so I can move on with a quick press of the wrist.

Both of these features are great additions to the service, and I’ve been using them for a while. But it was only recently that I had the idea of combining them. I opened my workout plan for the day, and instead of tapping the Let’s Go button, I long-pressed on each workout and added it to a stack. When I finished the stack of workouts, I returned to my plan to see that each one had been marked as complete. Perfect!

Now I have the convenience of not having to choose my workout classes or manually switch between them. I can run through my entire exercise routine for the day in one go. And when I’m done, I have the satisfaction of knowing I did something good for myself that day.

For me, it’s not about closing my rings or hitting a certain spot on the burn bar. It’s just about making a positive choice and getting my body moving. That’s enough, and that’s the satisfaction Apple Fitness+ brings to me day in and day out.

If you’re a Fitness+ user, I highly recommend trying out custom plans and stacks, especially in combination with one another. They’re really great enhancements to an already top-tier service.

And if you haven’t given Fitness+ a try, maybe now could be time. Apple offer a one-month free trial, and the service is approachable in a way I’ve never experienced with anything in the fitness world before. It truly does have something to offer for everyone.

Thanks for reading, friends, and remember: Stay active, close your rings (if that’s helpful for you), see you next time!

Holiday Break Projects

I’m returning to work today after a nice little break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I always try to do a few small projects over the holiday break, and this one was no exception. Here’s how those went.

Celebrating Christmas with Family

This is less of a “project” and more the whole point of this break. But I tried to keep my goal of being present with family front-of-mind. It’s far too easy for me to become overwhelmed by everything happening over the holidays and end up missing out.

We had a wonderful time celebrating. With it being Noah’s first Christmas, it was a special one for me. Being a parent on Christmas is just the best, including the work it takes to put things together and make sure all the toys have the right batteries. I wouldn’t trade the look on my son’s face that morning for anything.

Several family get-togethers were had, including a dinner and gift exchange at our house with Katherine’s mom’s family. Hosting is not naturally in my wheelhouse, but it really was a blast having everyone over.

It was a merry Christmas for us and ours. I’ll consider this break a success based on this “project” alone.

Blogging

A break from work meant I had more creative energy to spare for my writing. When I woke up on my first day off, the ideas just started to flow. I ended up with four different articles I wanted to write and publish the week of Christmas, a pace I’d never even considered trying before.

But I went for it, and the ideas actually turned out. I published four days in a row last week:

I’ve never dedicated that much time to writing in a week. It felt amazing to just let my creativity flow. And to actually publish these ideas and get such positive feedback from people who cared enough to read them… I was blown away.

Aside from time with family, this was the best use of my break by far, and it left me itching to write again. (Spoiler alert: I got another article out before the break was over, making this my second blog post for this week.)

Website/Social Media Research

This was the project I was most looking forward to going into the break, and it turned out to bear the fewest results. After thinking about federation, the importance of owning your content, and what I want my space online to look like, I decided to look into different options for hosting my website and social media presence.

The main contender was Micro.blog, a site I have immense respect for. (I even controbuted to Manton’s Kickstarter project to help get the site going back in the day.) I’ve noticed a few people I follow on Mastodon who use their Micro.blog sites for both longform writing and microblogging, and I liked the idea of doing both from a single site that I own.

Upon further investigation, though, I found that the social features of Micro.blog aren’t quite what I’m looking for. Although the site is part of the social web, it isn’t fully feature-compatible with Mastodon. You can’t log in to Mastodon clients with a Micro.blog account, and several key parts of Mastodon, including reposts and favorites, just don’t exist on Micro.blog.

I fully respect the approach that Manton and the team are taking, and I understand the reasoning behind their decisions. But I’m not willing to give up my favorite Mastodon app or features I’ve grown accustomed to, even in exchange for fully owning my social media posts. It’s a shame, but Micro.blog just isn’t the solution for me.

I also did research on some other blog-hosting options and ways I could run my own Mastodon instance. But after looking into all of the options, I came to a very boring conclusion: The setup I already have is the ideal one for me.

Squarespace is a great place to host my website. There are a couple of oddities on the backend that I don’t love, especially when it comes to editing my site on my iPad, but they aren’t dealbreakers by any means. And I’ve put a lot of work into making my site look exactly the way I want it, so I’m going to stick with it.

As for social media, I’m planning to stay on mastodon.social for the time being. I’ve had this hope for a while that Threads joining the social web will allow me to consolidate my social media presence into one account. The more I learn about their approach to federation, though, the more skeptical I become of my utopian fantasy. I’ll probably wait until that shakes out and reevaluate then.

All of that is a long way of saying nothing is going to change. I wouldn’t consider my time wasted, though. At least now I know for sure that I’m running my website and social media the best way for me.

Jetpack Joyride 2

My favorite game on Apple Arcade hosted a Christmas event that I couldn’t resist. I haven’t missed out on any of the game’s limited-time prizes so far, and I wasn’t going to start now. I finished the event in plenty of time and finally filled in the last few missing spots in my sticker book.

I’ve still yet to finish Boss Rush mode, though. It’s my white whale; I’ll keep chasing it.

A Little Bit of Work

It’s funny how giving your brain a break from work can help you subconsciously solve problems you’ve been stuck on for a while. We’ve been without remote access for some time now, which isn’t a huge deal because I was the only person who really used it. But I’ve been wanting to get it going again.

Tailscale has been my stopgap solution. It’s surprisingly simple and works great, but there’s a limit on how many people and devices can use a free account. I wanted something that could potentially scale if need be.

Our network runs on UniFi hardware, and I started digging into their backend to see if I could set up remote access that way. It turns out that they have a very simple VPN offering that I was able to get up and going in just a couple of minutes.

It’s such an obvious solution that one might wonder why I never tried it before. The answer is that I did, but I never had any success with it. The UI did get redesigned recently, so maybe the new look just clicked with me somehow? I’m not sure, but I’m thankful to have remote access at work again.

I wasn’t planning to work over the break, but this project was quick, easy, and enjoyable, so I’ll give myself a pass.

Christmas Cleanup

Everyone has their own answer to the question, “How long do you leave your Christmas decorations up?” My answer is, “Until right before I have to go back to work.”

I know I won’t have the time or energy to deal with it once I’m back in my regular routine, so there’s a short window of opportunity to get the house back in order. Katherine and I got all of our Christmas decorations boxed up and put away in the attic Sunday afternoon, and now our house is a bit more tidy, if a little less cheery.

We also finally put away some maternity clothes and a bunch of newborn stuff that Noah can’t wear anymore. Those piles of laundry were taking up space in my mind—and under my bed—for weeks, so it feels marvelous to finally have them sorted.

Looking back on it, I actually had a productive break. I did everything I set out to do and then some. It was rejuvenating, creatively satisfying, and fun—a beneficial time for my heart, my mind, and my body. I’m thankful for the time away and glad that I used it wisely.

Now I feel ready to dive back into work full-force and with renewed energy. But there will always be a part of my mind planing my next vacation… and all the projects I’ll try to tackle then.