Bear is a fantastic notes app if you're on Mac and iOS. I use it for my reading notes, commonplace book and linked backup of my Day One journal. I wrote a post about Bear last year, but this video does a great job of showcasing its features if you're curious.
Technology
After poking and prodding the capabilities of Micro.blog for the past 18 months, I have decided to consolidate my online writing on Wordpress where I’ve kept a blog for more than a decade.
This wasn’t an easy decision. Micro.blog is an innovative, capable, affordable service run by a smart, conscientious entrepreneur. It balances simplicity and power like no other blogging platform.
I’m always curious about why a blogger leaves a certain platform and moves to another. In case this is helpful to others, I’m sharing why I am making this change.
Om Malik recently launched a separate “daily” blog, which looks like a subdomain off his Wordpress site. For folks who keep a Wordpress blog, have you considered this as an alternative to separate Wordpress/Micro.blog sites for short and long posts? Puzzling through a longer term solution to POSSE.
Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter
Thursday, February 27, 2025 • 14 min read
I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.
A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.
The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.
Apple is launching a new product this week — probably an iPhone SE. But what if they unveil an e-reader and a subscription reading service? Books are in the cross-hairs of the intersection between arts and technology. Amazon and e-readers are ripe for Apple-style disruption. A man can dream!
I love my Kindle Oasis, but Amazon is sure making it hard to stay loyal. Maybe Kobo will save the day and release an updated black and white e-reader to replace its discontinued Libra 2. This should be the golden age for e-reader innovation. Kobo? Apple? Sony? Anyone?
My blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate: Why Blogs Matter
Why Blogs Matter
Thursday, February 6, 2025 • 10 min read
This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.
I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.
An odd assortment, I know.
Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.
Incredible update to the Readwise app today. You can now “chat” with your highlights, which uses AI to find connections you probably overlooked or forgot from your reading. Since it only draws from the highlights you saved, the results are astonishingly personal. This is my kind of AI! 💙📚
Wrist pain prompted me to set aside my Magic keyboard and Mighty Mouse for more ergonomic options. Enter the KeyChron K15 Max Alice mechanical keyboard and a Logitech vertical mouse. I love the clicky keyboard and more comfortable layout, but sheesh, it’s hard for this old dog to learn a new trick.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024 →
For fun, I asked ChatGPT to create a cover image for an essay I wrote. The essay mentions old books and a Kindle: note the hybrid book/eReader lit by candlelight, and how the leather wing chair barricades the door. “Don’t bother me, I’m reading,” it seems to suggest. ❤️❤️❤️
David Copperfield and the Magic of Amazon WhisperSync
Saturday, May 4, 2024 • 1 min read
I’m currently reading the classic David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 📚 for the first time. I’m reading it on my Kindle with an add-on $3 splurge of the Audible audiobook. I experimented with WhisperSync many years ago when it was first released and found it buggy. For such a low fee, I thought I would give it another try. I went from reading last night on my Kindle to listening this morning in the car, to reading again in a waiting room, to listening once more as I did chores.
How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review Notes
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 • 8 min read
This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.
If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.
You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?
A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.
In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.
After three good years with Craft, I’ve moved my reading notes and PKM to Bear. I really love Bear’s simplicity and hidden power on both Mac and iOS. No futzing, just my words. Blog post: Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking.
Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking
Friday, February 23, 2024 • 16 min read
For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes. This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.
Craft and the Value of Connected Notes
I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying. Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box. In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.”
The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown. I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system.
Mac-only Apps
Saturday, February 10, 2024 • 2 min read
I’ve been evaluating Bear 2 to replace Craft for my reading notes and quasi-Zettelkasten for the past few weeks. I’ve used Craft for over three years, but that tool has morphed into a team note-taking and document-sharing platform that doesn’t mesh well with my needs anymore.
My initial impressions of Bear have been quite positive. Here is an app with a calming, minimalist design, yet in many ways, has more power and capabilities than Craft. And best of all, it intuitively works like you’d expect. Like a Mac app.
Quicken Classic for Mac - A Long-time User Review
Friday, January 12, 2024 • 9 min read
I’ve used some version of Quicken for 35 years. That puts me in a stodgy demographic that manages money in a certain “this is how I’ve always done it” way. For the uninitiated, Quicken is a personal finance software program that helps manage your checkbook and credit cards, pay your bills, keep to a budget, and track investments. It’s available on Windows and Mac, though there are differences in capabilities between the two. There are companion apps for iPhone and iPad, but they feel like afterthoughts, lacking key functionality of the desktop software. Quicken Classic is sold as an annual subscription across three offerings: Deluxe, Premier, and the recently released Business and Personal edition.
Seven years ago, I switched from Quicken Premier for Windows to the less capable Mac version. I’ve written previous blog posts about using Quicken on the Mac: in early 2018 when I switched and follow-on updates in 2019 and 2020. In large part, I was critical of the Mac version of the software, particularly its inability to export investment data.
In the intervening four years since my last post, Quicken has improved in many ways, including the ability to export all its data, including investments, to Quicken for Windows. With this critical functionality in place, I thought it was time to provide an updated and favorable review of the Mac version of Quicken and how I rely on it to manage almost every aspect of my financial life.
The Curiosity of Micro.blog
Monday, October 16, 2023 • 4 min read
How I fell into a trance with the Indy blog service, Micro.blog, is a curious story.
I received a renewal invoice from HostGator notifying me that the cost of my bi-annual web hosting service was going up 58%. Quick math informed me that I was paying too much for a personal blog. Surely there must be a less expensive alternative? That question led me down many paths, most leading me in circles.
Moving to Wordpress.com seemed like a good idea until I realized its plug-in-enabled service made even HostGator’s renewal price seem like a steal. I considered Medium and Substack, but their continual pestering readers to subscribe to their respective services didn't mesh with my belief in the value of an open internet. Many other competing web hosting services offered attractive short-term teaser rates but would require constant leapfrogging from service to service to remain affordable.
One service — Micro.blog — caught my attention briefly. $5 a month for hosting your blog with your own domain, a federated service that automated cross-posting to all sorts of other sites, and a blogging platform that allowed you to publish both long essays and short tweet-like updates to a timeline with no ads and no algorithms. No spam, no trolls. No fake news. Just old-fashioned blogging.
A Writer’s Journal: Day One or Craft?
Saturday, February 26, 2022 • 12 min read
I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. I got started in my early twenties filling dozens of blank journal books. Ten years ago, I went digital with an app called Day One, and I have been using an iPad to journal since then. My journal holds thousands of entries — over a million words — spanning more than thirty years of private thoughts and memories.
Read Better with Craft and Readwise
Thursday, January 13, 2022 • 16 min read
Have you ever run across a book you know you’ve read but can’t recall much about it? Or, come across a passage in a book while you were reading that seemed important — something you knew you could use at some point in the future — but didn’t know where or how to save it so you could find it again?
The Craft App —A Year of Magical Linking
Wednesday, December 15, 2021 • 10 min read
It’s been a year since I adopted Craft as my primary research and note-taking app. I shared my impressions of Craft early on, but I thought I would provide an update on how I’m using the software and why, with all the other choices available in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, I’m still all-in with Craft.
Grammarly, Ulysses and Lost Links
Saturday, October 23, 2021 • 3 min read
I’m a long-time subscriber of Grammarly, the subscription-based grammar checking and proofreading service. I’m the kind of writer that needs grammar and style checking. No matter how many times I review a draft, the round trip through Grammarly finds some sort of error. It’s tough to proofread your own writing, and incorporating this final check in my process has saved me from some otherwise mortifying bloopers. The cost of a premium Grammarly subscription feels low when compared to publishing articles with these dumb writing errors.
Writing Things Down in a Paperless World
Friday, September 24, 2021 • 5 min read
For the past ten years, I have been on a mission to eradicate paper from my work and home life. I can now access information more quickly and from anywhere, whether at sea or at the Apple Store where I need to produce the invoice for a dead MacBook Pro. And yet, one hold-out refuses to go gently into that dark night of paper annihilation: my Field Notes notebooks. These pint-sized memo books with their quirky designs and durable paper still travel with me just about everywhere. I sometimes wonder at the irony of using a $1,000 iPad Pro as a lap desk to scribble in a $4 notebook.
With everything else in my life so digitally focused, why do I still fill one of these 48-page Field Notes every three or four weeks?
Want to Keep a Journal? Go Digital
Thursday, January 21, 2021 • 6 min read
I’ve kept a personal journal for most of my adult life. These journals have helped me wrestle with every significant decision and manage through the many stresses of everyday life. Last month, I put down my millionth word in over 40 years of self-reflection.
I’ve written about the reasons to keep a journal, and by far the most frequent question I receive from readers is how to establish a regular habit of journaling. Many find it easy to start a journal but much more challenging to keep it up.
The New Craft App Does More Than Keep Notes
Thursday, January 7, 2021 • 6 min read
About a month ago, I started using a new Mac/iOS app called Craft to help me make sense of books I read and organize ideas and content for my own writing. I was intrigued by the potential of bringing all my disparate notes into one friction-free digital home, enabling new connections and insights from all these books and ideas. The inspiration for this came from reading Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes, which introduced me to Professor Luhmann’s famed Zettelkasten system.
Quicken 2020 for Mac - A Long-time User’s Review
Monday, November 9, 2020 • 11 min read
Welcome to my third annual review of the personal finance software, Quicken for Mac. I have been using Quicken to manage my finances since 1989: first on the Mac, then a long stint on the Windows version, before switching back to the new-and-improved Mac version four years ago. I wrote about the process of switching from Windows to Mac here.
As I wrote then, I had very high expectations for the Mac version under new leadership, independent of Intuit, and the financial benefit of a new subscription-based business model. In this post, I’ll share an update on how it’s gone using the latest version, Quicken 2020 for Mac.
How to Read More: Use a Kindle
Tuesday, December 10, 2019 • 7 min read
Reading books is one of life’s great rewards, but in today’s increasingly distractable environment, it can be difficult to find time for books. In this series of posts, I’ll share the tips and tricks I use to read at least 50 books a year without feeling like I’m reading that much at all.
First tip: get an Amazon Kindle e-reader. I’ve collected rare books since my late teens and treasure my personal library, but today most of my reading is done on a Kindle. Here’s why.
One Simple Tip to Improve your Day One Journal
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 • 4 min read
Want to establish a consistent journaling habit and record your most important life events? Let me give you some simple advice from a long-time journal writer: scan your previous half dozen entries before you start to write. This two-minute drill will help you fight writer’s block and improve the overall content of your journals.
Let me explain.
Going Paperless: Tools and Tips
Saturday, September 14, 2019 • 15 min read
I have kept a paperless office for nearly a decade. The technology has improved a lot since I started, making it pretty easy for anyone to reduce to eliminate paper from their daily life. In this post, I’ll share how I eliminated 95% of the paper from my home and office, and in the process, increased my productivity in a meaningful way.
Quicken 2019 for Mac Review
Sunday, January 6, 2019 • 10 min read
See my Quicken 2020 for Mac Review for the most recent review.
I have been using Quicken to manage my finances since 1989, making this my 30th anniversary with the program. Though I started on a Mac, and use a Mac today, the vast majority of my use has been on Windows. A little over two years ago, I switched to the Mac version of Quicken which I wrote about here.
As I wrote then, I had very high expectations for the Mac version under new leadership, independent of Intuit, and the financial benefit of a new subscription-based business model. In this post, I’ll share an update on how it’s gone using the latest version of Quicken, Quicken 2019 for Mac.