Alexander Kucera

Finally on route to my destination.

Forced layover in Munich. The signage was stupid and led me to walk along the train I was supposed to get on. By the time the signage was clear, the train I was walking alongside of the whole time closed its doors and left.

Breakfast time

Starting my trip to Regensburg. Weather is decent. Not too cold and dry.

Die Apostroph-Debatte: Anscheinend wird mal wieder die deutsche Sprache aufgeweicht. Der possessive Apostroph existiert im Deutschen eigentlich nicht…außer bei Eigennamen, wenn es um den Besitz geht. In diesem Fall ist er natürlich erlaubt. Gut gemacht, Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung—mal wieder wurde eine eindeutige und klare Regel aufgeweicht.

I am leaving for our gymnasium reunion in two days. I haven’t seen any of my old school friends in at least ten years. I’ve never been much of a social person; while I enjoy the company of friends, I’m not particularly good at keeping in touch.

So, I am essentially meeting a bunch of strangers in four days. I’m not very good at social gatherings where I don’t know anyone, so I’m unsure how I feel about the reunion. On one hand, I’m looking forward to it; on the other, I’m really dreading it.

My health situation doesn’t help to make me feel less awkward. Having a stiff neck that is locked at an angle, making my most comfortable stance one that looks at people’s crotches, is, well, suboptimal.

I am tempted to get Procreate Dreams and animate a bit again. I haven‘t animated in almost two decades. But I‘d need to replace my lost Apple Pen first and I can’t bring myself to spend another €140 on it.

My Paper cursor didn’t only do backflip while it was bored waiting for my input. When I came back from a longer break it was sitting there asleep with big 💤‘s coming from it. I love the whimsy even more because how reduced the app is.

I wrote my first long form post today with Paper. It was pure fun. What a great no nonsense writing app.

I thought I’d write down my current workflow setup since it has changed drastically since I last wrote about it. Not only am I exclusively working from home these days—due to health reasons—but I am also working in a very reduced capacity. This means I am mostly using my iPhone, iPad, and iMac for leisure.

With that being said, here is what I use on a daily basis.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Micro.blog

I said goodbye to social media a while ago. While I was quite active on Twitter and even more so on App.net and Slack, I have since dropped all of these. There really isn’t much point in spinning my wheels there.

These days, I post to my own blog, which is syndicated to the Micro.blog timeline and also cross-posted to Mastodon. I’m not active on Mastodon, but thanks to the Fediverse, any replies I receive on Mastodon should appear on my Micro.blog timeline.

Posting to my blog is done via the Micro.blog app or website, which is very frictionless for the most part.

• My Micro.blog Account
• My website
• My Fediverse ID: @alex@alexanderkucera.com

Fiery Feeds and FeedBin

For my daily news, I tend to watch the local news show Tagesthemen while eating breakfast. This keeps me up to date on both local and global news and politics.

For my tech news and other updates, I use Feedbin to curate my feeds and Fiery Feeds for reading them. Fiery Feeds has a few nice intelligent curation options, like Hot Links or Long and Short articles, that make it easy to catch up on too many RSS feeds every day. Yes, maybe I should subscribe to fewer feeds, but with Fiery Feeds, I really don’t have to.

Overcast

Every couple of years, I switch podcast apps. I used to be an avid user of Pocket Casts, and Castro was my favorite player for years. These days, I am back with Overcast. I don’t have any special feelings for it; it works well.

YouTube

Sadly, I am a sucker for YouTube videos. I do not browse the auto-suggestions much, but I have way too many subscriptions. At the moment, my „Watch Later“ queue contains 24 items, most of which are in the 20-30 minute range. However, there are a few videos that are 1.5-3 hours long that I haven’t gotten around to watching.

Discord

While I don’t engage much on Discord, I follow a few servers to get news announcements and participate in one or two in-person chats. The days when I was active daily for several hours on Slack and Discord are long gone.

Health related

MacroFactor

I recently started using MacroFactor to track my food and water intake. I have been on and off the food-tracking wagon in the past; usually, I track for a week or two before stopping again. The apps I have used in the past, like Lifesum and MyFitnessPal, are all nice and work reasonably well with tracking EU foods. However, they all miss a crucial element: they don’t adapt to one’s personal habits; they simply track food.

MacroFactor, on the other hand, adapts to your eating habits, providing you with tailored goals and occasionally coaching you on what you can improve or change. It simply clicks with me much more than all the other apps I have tried.

RP Hypertrophy

About a year ago, I finally accepted that I needed to build some strength to get my life back. Due to severe health-related issues, I pretty much stopped moving around 2016. I didn’t blow up, but I lost nearly all my muscle. Moving around the house became a chore at times. Combined with some serious joint inflammation, this kept me sedentary.

No more. I started slowly to build muscle again. At first, I went too quickly, which resulted in weeks of not being able to work out due to inflamed joints. However, in combination with MacroFactor, I have been able to manage my food intake in a way that reduces inflammation while providing enough protein and energy to rebuild my strength.

The RP Hypertrophy app has been my steadfast companion. There are other exercise apps out there—some cheaper, some more expensive, and some even free—but none of them resonate with me like the RP Hypertrophy app does. The way it allows me to quickly set up a training plan is unparalleled. It also helps me with my progression by analyzing my workout volume. Great! One less thing to think about.

RP Strength also has a Diet Coach app, but for me, MacroFactor works better.

Writing

Paper

I recently stumbled across Paper as a writing tool, and I really, really like it. I haven’t quite found the justification to pay for it yet. It comes with a hefty price tag in my region (the developer consciously charges more in richer regions of the world). However, I might consider it in the future, depending on whether I start writing professionally again in the coming months. For now, I’m going the cheapskate route and clicking away the nag screens that pop up now and again. Sorry, Mihhail!

Textastic

I don’t use Textastic for actual writing, but it is a great general text editor if I need to edit something from my iCloud, modify a file on my server, or whip up a quick Python script or other scripts.

AirMail

My email client of choice is AirMail. There’s not much to say about it, really. It works for me.

Apps by Readdle

I use several apps from the Ukrainian developer Readdle. They tend to deliver a polished experience, and their support is excellent.

Calendars

Their calendar solution is top-notch. It supports natural language event creation, the UI is nice, and it works better for me than the native Calendar app on iOS.

Scanner

Their document scanner works in a very no-nonsense way. It offers great support for de-skewing and straightening out your wonky document photos. It provides automatic OCR and document naming, and you can create workflows—something I haven’t taken advantage of yet, as my needs aren’t that complex.

PDF Expert

Their PDF reader works great. You can edit and annotate PDFs. Sadly, there is no OCR on iOS or iPadOS yet, but I am told it’s coming.

Strongbox

I used to be a strong 1Password supporter. I bought it way back when I got my first iPhone—an iPhone 4. Since then, I have bought several updates, and when they switched to a subscription model, I purchased the family plan for—I think—two years.

Then I read a thread on Micro.blog where someone talked about Strongbox. I checked it out, installed it, and took advantage of their very generous three-month trial. After a week or so of use, they had won me over, and I happily paid for their lifetime license after the trial period was over.

Granted, using Strongbox is a little bit more complicated and less streamlined than using 1Password, but their lifetime license costs what I used to pay for 1Password in a year. There is simply no comparison when it comes to value per euro.

AI

Perplexity

I use Perplexity for searching most of the time instead of doing a Google or DuckDuckGo search. I enjoy getting nicely written summarized results, and if I want to dig deeper, I can simply open the sources Perplexity found for a given topic. I haven’t found any instances where the AI hallucinated an answer, but there have been a few occasions where the suggested follow-up questions were just nonsense.

TypingMind

TypingMind is a great ChatGPT interface that allows me to use most ChatGPT features without shelling out over $20 a month. It connects via the ChatGPT API, which results in much more reasonable costs. I got myself a premium license and haven’t looked back since.

MidJourney

Generative Imaging. Some people loathe it; I personally love it. MidJourney is great for quickly generating dozens of variations on an idea, especially since they enabled generation via the website instead of in a Discord chat. We have used it to rapidly create initial drafts and, yes, even final designs for projects, both professional and private.

Graphics

Affinity Designer 2

Since I have mostly stepped back from work, we primarily focus on occasional graphic design for local projects, such as flyers, postcards, roll-up flags, and the like.

Affinity Designer is unbeatable in terms of price and the value it offers for this purpose. Additionally, we can use it on the iPad for initial mockups and then continue working on the same file on the Mac. Brilliant!

Affinity Photo 2

It’s pixel-related brother, Affinity Photo, while not as intuitive and powerful as Photoshop, is still nevertheless our main go-to when it comes to editing images. Plus, it works well together with Designer and also offers the same iPad-to-Mac and back workflow.

QR Factory

Since we switched to a more graphic design-based workflow, we regularly need to create QR codes. While there are many online and free generators available, QR Factory offers a comprehensive suite of QR options in one package. I wouldn’t consider using any other option anymore.

Nuke

Foundry’s Nuke is my main workhorse for paid work. Although I don’t do as much as I once did, I am still very happy to pay for an Indie license when the occasional project comes in. Nuke remains the gold standard for compositing.

Modo

Similarly, when I need to do some 3D work, I use my trusty copy of Foundry’s modo. It still gets me everywhere I need to go—though these days, that isn’t very far.

Outbank

For banking in Germany, this is the way to go. Outbank has the best banking support of any app I’ve tried in the past. The developers had some negative press a couple of years ago related to pricing, subscriptions, and a completely revamped UI design, but I think they have recovered well from that.

For my money, this is the best way to keep track of your money, at least for European/German users.

Etsy and Printful

I recently discovered Printful, and it got me interested enough to open our own little Etsy store with designs from the cutting room floor. I mean, why let perfectly good doodles and scribbles go to waste?“

IT

FE File Explorer

FE File Explorer is my go-to app when the Files app on iOS won’t suffice. It is also a great FTP client and integrates nicely with our online workflow.

ShellFish

ShellFish is my preferred SSH client. I have tried a few others in the past, but ShellFish has really stuck with me. It also integrates nicely with Files.app.

Did my Paper cursor really just make a backflip while it was waiting for me to enter some text‽

It looks like people really enjoy the gnome prints in our new Etsy store.

So, I went to the dentist today to get a dental cleaning. My last dental cleaning was about six months ago, and the one before that was about three years prior. I was told last time that because the time between cleanings was so long, the cleaning took over an hour and that I should go more often.

So that’s what I did. And guess what? The cleaning still took over an hour. Not only that, but there was a 50% price increase since last time.

50%!

I wish I could increase my rates by 50%. That is ten times the current inflation rate. Ridiculous. I think I’ll take my chances and spread apart the cleanings to every other year again, because I do not see the value in getting this done every six months.

Ah, the Paper Markdown paragraph behavior is actually configurable in the Settings.

Does anyone have any experience with light therapy devices like the Lumie? I am on the fence of ordering one for this winter season.

This is a test of the Bear app for writing and note taking. So it turns out Bear does not publish to Micro.blog. Also the writing environment is not nearly as neat as Paper, even when I hide all the UI.

One advantage Bear has is that is supports images and other file formats in the notes. However, since it does not publish to Micro.blog that is of no help there as I still need to upload first and then include the link to the media file.

This is an online image test:

And Bear seems to suffer from the same thing that plagues Bear. It does not export paragraphs properly. Or at least it treats paragraphs in the app differently then on export. A Markdown paragraph is denoted by a blank line between bodies of text. Both Paper and Bear show a simple line-break as new paragraph, but on export the paragraphs get lost due to no extra line break being added. Not terribly hard to work around, but worth noting.

But then again, Bear is about a third of the yearly cost. Which makes the choice actually harder and not easier.

This is a quick test about how the Paper app works. I recently read the Paper review by Erlend on his Havn blog, which lead to me reading the terrific three part series by the Paper developer on how Paper came together. It showed a level of care and detail that I highly appreciate.

So now here I am writing this in Paper and really enjoying the experience. I will compare this to Bear in another post. Both offer the ability to publish to Micro.blog as far as I can tell.

Two paragraphs in and Paper already shines. But it does come with a hefty price tag. Considering I don‘t write professionally, it is a bit of a hard pillow to shallow. Let‘s see how it goes in Bear.

Now a quick image test: