I think the correct progressive position on the Uncle Tupelo schism is pro-Wilco. Whatever, but it freed Farrar.

Lents is a funny neighborhood. I think the problems posed by the Woodstock/Foster/i205 couplet will permanently depress the Lents Town Center’s full potential. With as many apartments as have gone in you’d think it’d support a small market, but it’s a tough neighborhood to walk, split up by the couplet and the bypass. So for a lot of day-to-day stuff in our corner of it you can either head over to Woodstock, down to Johnson Creek or up to Foster.

The heart of the Woodstock neighborhood is about 40 blocks—2 miles—away. Over three seasons it’s a pretty nice walk, in the winter it’s not great. It’s okay by bike, but the main drag has really aggro drivers, and the unimproved roadways in that neighborhood mean you can’t really just assume a safe grid to evade the arterials. In the winter, the aggro drivers, dark conditions, and narrow areas where bikes and cars have to squeeze together make it pretty daunting.

Also, forget taking a car. Parking is not actually too bad—nobody seems to be policing the giant Safeway parking lot—but it’s really not a fun neighborhood to drive through. Lots of people on their horns, sorta slow going.

There is, on the other hand, the 19 bus line. The nearest stop is a five block walk, and there’s a shelter. When I need to run an errand into Woodstock I grab the Transit app and figure out when I need to go out the door. The ride itself is maybe 10 minutes. If I time my errands right I can probably hop off the bus, do what I need to do, and cross the street to catch the bus headed home with time to spare. Today I headed out the door at 3:15, ran through the UPS store to ship something, and had a ten minute wait for the return ride. I was home by a bit after 4.

Woodstock is a nice neighborhood to have this easy a connection to: There are two grocery stores, a hardware store, a bakery, a legit butcher, bars, restaurants, a newish food cart pod. With a big Banjo Brothers backpack I can haul a lot of stuff.

It’s pretty easy to knock off for the day, hop the bus to Woodstock, grab groceries for dinner, and be most of the way through prep before Al gets home.

There’s also the 14, which runs up Foster. It’s a bit longer walk to catch it, but also a quick ride to the good stuff on Foster in the 50s and 60s: Bread and Roses Market, Bar Carlo, Bruno’s, and a new kitchen consignment shop, among lots of other stuff. Also fine for walks or bike rides in nice weather. Also not somewhere I like to drive for as short a distance as it is.

And there’s the 72, which goes up and down 82nd. It’s a busy line, but the nearest stop is five or six minutes away, and it’s another quick ride down to the Johnson Creek shops, where there’s a Trader Joe’s, our pharmacy, a FedEx drop, and a few other things. Biking around there is not great. Walking is atrocious. Taking a car is frustrating. The bus is pretty nice. /r/Portland lives in superstitious dread of the 72 because there are a lot of poor people on it.

Anyhow, it took me a long time to understand the short-range benefits of the bus service. It just seemed easier to hop on a bike or plan for a leisurely walk. Now that winter is here, though, and it’s dark and wet, I really like running errands using the bus, especially into Woodstock. There’s a short, blustery walk, a wait under a shelter, then a quick ride. No worrying about getting run over or getting soaked.

The 14 & 19 will also go downtown, eventually. In terms of total trip time, they’re about as fast as the Green line (I have a longer walk to get to the stop), slower than a determined e-bike ride, and much slower than a car, but you can have that second Old Fashioned at the Tear Drop with any of the TriMet options. I tend to prefer the Max for downtown trips because it’s quieter and smoother.

Anyhow, tonight I signed up for a bunch of TriMet newsletters. I’m a fan of our transit system. It felt sort of prosocial.

“This is no time to be driven by ideological rigidity given the current economic and political climate.”

Signed,
People driven by ideological rigidity who just don’t realize it.

… meanwhile, I’ve learned that the fastest way to do intra-family cash transfers is to use my bank’s SMS service, which still works: t $n ACCT1 ACCT2. I even made a Shortcut out of it to help pick which account to which and for how much. It’s way faster than the website or the bank’s app.

I haven’t thought of OLPC in a long while. Back when it was a thing I went on a journey, from sorta maudlin and hopeful to crabby and resistant. Being reminded of it now … curdled in the same way I remember the Obama era now.

www.nber.org/papers/w3…

Well, let’s see how this Apple Music embed plugin works.

#highonfire #metalmondayonsunday

As part of my account cleanup and general retrenchment, I finally canceled my feedly subscription and moved the RSS feeds I follow into Unread, which provides its own syncing back end across Mac, iOS, and iPadOS. Great.

In the process of canceling my feedly subscription it reminded me I have over 30 feed filters enabled. Hm.

Oh, right: The Oregonian, my hometown paper. I pay for a subscription. The website itself borders on unusable, and the RSS feed is a nightmare. There’s only one. At some point they had feeds by section—there’s evidence of that in their outdated help documentation—but no more. You just get everything:

• Astrology
• All the advice columns (not sure how many, maybe four or five?)
• “Most expensive house in Lake Oswego this week”
• Online sports book promotions

… plus the actual news news, but good luck finding the kernels of corn in the pile.

And if you do manage to spot a news article you’d like to read, their paywall has the memory of a goldfish and godawful session handling: You’ll land on your story, get directed to the paywall, go through the login, then get kicked out to somewhere besides the story. It’s really, really bad.

I wrote the paper’s editor about this a while back, before she retired. As you might expect, the online publishing division doesn’t answer to the editorial division, and there was also the same “that stuff gets views” rationale I remember from my online media days, when we thought “views” was the prime metric.

Last month as I was cleaning up subscriptions Apple informed me I could get News+ added to my existing Apple bundle and end up paying less per month than without it, so I went along. The Oregonian is one of the publications in the News+ package, so I follow it (where they still dump a lot of junk, but not quite as much). And if you just add Oregon and Portland as topical areas to follow, the Oregonian gets pulled in to that. So I just dropped the RSS feed from my local folder (but still have WWeek, because they don’t show up in Apple News).

Some people are, like, “drop that centrist rag already … the Mercury and Willy Week are all you really need.”

Honestly, kindly, gently: lol.

I’ll always read their coverage—media literacy is about understanding and balancing a diversity of inputs—but they’re just not enough, and their reporting can be weirdly incurious if they can’t find a salacious or spicy angle. The Oregonian has its own biases and general slant, but it provides more coverage, and more diverse coverage. It’s essential.

Anyhow, I am guessing the Oregonian gets a lot more money from my paid, direct subscription than they do whatever revenue sharing Apple gives them for a content license, but their website is atrocious, their RSS feeds are unusable, and their editorial staff is held hostage by a web team operating on 2008 rules.

I wish they’d get nonprofit status so I could just budget them under “charity.”

I took a look at Structured when it first showed up a while back. Since it prefers to work within the Apple ecosystem I couldn’t use it for work because we’re a Google shop. Since then I’ve started using the native-ish Apple internet accounts -> Apple ecosystem integrations, which provide an indirect Google integration. For apps that support the stuff Apple ships, that works pretty well.

In the case of anything to do with a calendar, where Google Calendar is providing the back end, there’s going to be a certain amount of split living if you don’t want to just go live in Google Calendar’s web and mobile apps: Any video conferencing integrations you’ve got will require a manual tweak for events created outside Google’s web or mobile apps, and I’d argue Google’s own availability widget is better because it is more transparent.

But at the boundary of working with your calendar as opposed to working on your calendar, Apple’s stuff is fine. You can tell where stuff is scheduled, you can use the iOS and macOS widgets and alerts, you can get the benefits of Siri and Apple Intelligence integrations, etc.

Structured is a timeblocking tool. It shows you your Reminders, it shows you your calendars, and you can drag reminders into a list of your appointments for the day where they fit. It offers a few extra things, like assigning an energy level to each item so you can keep track of how sustainable your day’s plan is.

Yep, there are other ways to time block. Reminders and Calendar integrate with drag-and-drop now, so you can literally drag a Reminder out of a list and into your calendar to schedule it if you like. Structured refines the idea a little:

To start, you can configure which calendars and Reminders lists it can work with. I’ve got some “to-read,” “to check out,” etc. Reminders I don’t care to ever time block, so they stay out. I’ve got a few other things that are super granular, and generally opportunistic, so they stay out. I leave in Reminder lists for broad areas of concern: Each of the three functions I direct at work, a few lists for broad initiatives or concerns, and a couple of domestic sphere things.

In the main Structured screen, you get a day view that shows all the scheduled blocks from your calendars.

• Any Reminders tasks with a scheduled date but no time appear at the top of the day. They’re candidates for time blocking that you must have previously decided needed to happen on or by today.
• Any Reminders tasks with a scheduled date and time appear blocked into the day’s schedule.
• You can view any Reminders tasks without a date/time by opening an “Inbox” sidebar.

The Reminders from the top of the list and the Inbox area can be dragged in to the day’s schedule. That’s the core idea.

For instance, just now as I was sitting here typing, I couldn’t unsee a Slack notification from someone working over the weekend. I made a Reminder in my inbox, gave it a due date of tomorrow and kept moving. Tomorrow morning, when I triage and block my day, it’ll be in the list at the top of the day ready to be dropped in and time blocked.

For $15/year to unlock access to your calendars and Reminders instead of just using its internal appointment and calendar model, that seems fine: It’s an overlay that lets you manage your time in a certain style.

There are a few other things that are potentially handy:

First, you can add subtasks to a calendar item. They’re visible only to you and they don’t turn up in Structured’s task model. GTD people will probably grind their teeth at the idea of having another inbox, and that’s reasonable. I think these are probably useful less as a whole unit of work and more as ticklers or reminders. The immediate idea I had for them was to add them to 1:1s and other meetings where I need to check in on something. There are other ways to do that.

Second, there’s an AI assistant (using Apple Intelligence) that helps with subtasking a given item. I gave it a try on a few things where I had a loose list of next actions copied into the task note from somewhere else, and it did okay picking out the work items and making subtasks out of them with the prompt “subtask based on the notes.”

Third, there’s a “Replan” feature that lets you visit the purgatory of tasks that have passed their due date and put them back into circulation (either by turning them back into Inbox candidates or giving them a new date).

Oh, it also provides a web app with a Pro ($15/year) subscription. I am trying it out on my iPad Pro with a keyboard (more or less my laptop replacement) so I haven’t used that much.

There’s also one glaring oversight: No search. That’s on their roadmap. If you want to find things, you need to either pick through future dates or go back to Reminders and search from there. I wish it had search, and it should have search, but the app didn’t start life as a task manager, it started life as a time blocker.

Structured is interesting because it can break either way in terms of how much of your task management life it takes over:

Because it starts from its own internal task and planning model, you could use it as your sole todo app, understanding that it won’t lend a lot of support to your conception of task containers, whether those are “Areas,” “Projects,” “Lists,” or whatever. If you have a bunch of plates spinning in disparate areas, I don’t think it’d be a good desert island tool, because you’d probably end up shimming in some kind of meta layer that would end up hiding work or making it fussy to manage.

(There is, btw, a ticket in their roadmap for filtering, folders, etc., and the comments on that thread tell you all you need to know about how many ideas people have and what a recipe for UI messiness containers (projects, areas, whatever) could be. Good luck, Structured team.)

As an augment to Reminders, it sort of shrinks in ambition but gains in enabling easy timeblocking the work you’re deeply organizing elsewhere. For instance, my Reminders set up has several groups:

• Work
• Interesting Stuff
• Home

Within those groups you might see lists like:

• Enterprise Security
• Application Management
• Business Operations Support
• donation roundup
• administrivia
• shows to watch, things to read, music to try
• the packing list for some trip

The groups provide high-level segregation of the modes I operate in. The lists are either very tactical enumeration of a bunch of little things to get a household project done, or just work items that fall under a broad area of concern. Because I like my “big dumb list,” the Reminders “Scheduled” filter lets me see everything I put a date on, and the “All” filter just shows all of it by list. That more or less gives me the best of both worlds: Filtering to preserve attentional resources, and broad visibility to reassure myself nothing is hiding somewhere.

Structured just provides a sort of last mile for turning those things into action within the constraints meetings and 1:1s introduce into a given day.

Yesterday I wrote up GoodTask , which is more of a Reminders UI enhancement skin than a time blocker. It has some time blocking capabilities, but nothing quite this refined for timeblocking specifically. It’s more like a way to wedge a lot of OmniFocus’s Perspectives into the Reminders database while providing some ways to add metadata that are less fussy than Reminders itself. You could use the two together and never even look at Reminders itself if you wanted.

Ecosystem digression

Because I try very hard to keep third-party apps out of my life, Structured and GoodTask are interesting edge cases. Because they’re inexpensive and don’t mess with the underlying data in Reminders and my calendars, I’m okay with them. They’re just augments. If they stopped working tomorrow, I’d be left with the basic tools again, and still on a footing of having my data and being able to work with it in tools that are good enough. They’re sort of like Greasemonkey scripts I can rent cheaply, just for apps.

I could choose a second order of rabbit-holing about whether or not the Apple ecosystem is forever. I’ve decided that if the Apple ecosystem ever ends up not being forever, some change in life circumstances must have made any todos I was tracking irrelevant to the current moment.

Okay. Enough. The problem I’ve been thinking about this weekend is “where to keep things to do.” I’ve made a choice (Reminders) and have a couple of tools to augment it.

I found GoodTask today. Or re-found it, anyhow, because the App Store had the little cloud/down-arrow icon that told me I’ve downloaded it before at some point. It’s pretty much a skin for Reminders, but it’s a skin that gives me stuff I’d otherwise pay a lot for OmniFocus to do that instead costs $9.99 once, and it includes some affordances that make some of Reminders' more fussy UI gaps less fussy.

It promises “From Simple Checklists to Complex Project Management,” but I don’t really want a complex project management tool and need just a bit more than “simple checklists” and just a few more smart list options than Reminders provides.

Doing an inventory today, I realized how much I’ve allowed the language of projects to slip into my mental model. I don’t have “projects,” I have areas that occasionally involve things that have a couple of other things nested in them. When something gets so complex that it’s a project, there’s a staff program manager sitting right there who can help with wrangling the work streams.

GoodTask includes a Smart List feature that works close enough to OmniFocus’s Perspectives for my purposes: It took about two minutes to make a Big Dumb List of date-sorted tasks in my Work group. If all hell broke loose and GoodTask stopped working tomorrow, it’d sort of suck but it separates its organizational metadata from Reminders' enough that the real fallout would be “well, I need to drag some of these groups I made into new Groups in Reminders.”

It also lets you tell it to leave some lists in Reminders out of its reckoning. I have a few shoebox lists that just gather recommendations, items of passing curiosity, to-read, to-watch, etc. I don’t want them in a tool I’m using to manage things I have to actually do, so GoodTask hides them for me.

This is all coming after a reorg I did with my group at work. I’ve got historical reasons to be a little averse to reorgs, but this was one of those times where I was watching managers tripping over each other to get capacity for their projects, unpleasant “everybody in the org is at the same meeting” experiences, and a realization two-and-a-half years into this place how few professional development opportunities we’d made for people. So we spent a month as a management team, talking about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, and how we could think beyond “this team is full of people who do this kind of work, and that team is full of people who do that kind of work.”

And for me, I felt mired in the day-to-day of the managers under me, trying to sort out what went where and playing a glue role all the time to hold us together at one level, with no room to figure out new levels.

Shifting from a very rigidly functional structure to a delivery-oriented structure is creating some definite short-term pain. We inventoried all the things we’re doing and decided that we could allow one particular kind of work to be much more distributed in order to concentrate management attention on other kinds. That distributed work needs some supporting rituals and routines to keep on track.

But for all the short-term tradeoff pain we’re dealing with, I came out of the planning cycle for next year with sign-off to build a new program and a new governance structure, and with a mandate to add a role that seemed out of the question a month ago. I have to refine my model of what I think work is.

Well, the Activation Lock thing resolved easily overnight and I’ve got this Mac mini M4 Pro in place now. Now I need to decide how bananas minimalist I want to get with my desk.

I changed my iCloud account address after I bought a Mac Studio. I was just now trying to deactivate and wipe the it for trade-in & the helper app won’t complete without the password for a non-existent account. Ticket in to remove the Activation Lock, but I had to jump through hoops to file it.

“The ‘Mad Men’ in 4K on HBO Max Debacle”

I thought this was gonna be, like, when “typography nerds” complain about kerning or something.

fxrant.blogspot.com/2025/12/t…

Alison just reminded me YOB is coming up!

What is YOB? YOB is love.

(And Buddhist doom metal)

www.youtube.com/watch

I just turned Center Stage on with a new machine. A coworker said it was giving her motion sickness, which was weird because I’ve been using it around her for a week. Turns out the new machine was still Sequoia. Upgraded to Tahoe and it calmed down. Less “rocking boat” effect.

If I had the patience to do this I probably would, but I “sacrificed” a Magic Keyboard using industrial strength hook-n-loop tape on the underside of my desk. I’d pay for a standalone device, though.

www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025…

This is/was my favorite todo app, meaning it most closely mapped to my brain and had as much stuff in it as I wanted and no more:

puddingtime.org/denote-ta…

Using it on iPad would entail hosting it where I could get at it from a mosh or ssh client.

Sounds unwell.

Snap. I got my way on a couple of things and suddenly have a backlog of stuff I deferred while I sat around waiting to see if I’d win + new things. Apple Reminders is not going to cut it. Took a look & the OmniFocus sub I canceled runs out tomorrow. Gotta dig out my Things/OF bake-off notes.

I wonder at what point all the costs of commodified housing – administrative overhead, ​NGO inefficiency, cost of mental health and addiction services, damage to the tax base, ​or cost of shelters – make our conviction that the market is the answer sorta fall apart.

Al & I took the Green line downtown for breakfast at Grits n' Gravy, then we walked up to Slabtown then down through the Alphabet District. I took the OM-3 with the 17mm/f1.8 II. Weird that after nine years of shooting with X100s/Fujifilm, the OM feels closer to natural after just a few months.

I’m enjoying Pluribus. I didn’t see the tagline until yesterday:

“the story of the most miserable person on Earth who must save the world from happiness.”

… which would have affected my read a little. I haven’t been clear for the first six episodes that the world needs to be saved. 📺

“The bad news: You’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: There’s no ground.”
— Chögyam Trungpa

I’m going to keep this first part short:

I got my first account on a Unix machine some time around 1991 or 1992. Up until that year I’d almost solely used 8-bit computers at home, but had some experience using a DEC PDP-11 in college to work on the school newspaper.

“Unix” became my home environment – the place I wanted to be regardless of what I had to use. I was a little late to Linux, finally getting it installed on a machine in ‘95 or ‘96. I lucked into a freelance gig where I could write about Linux. I co-authored a book about Linux. I got some gigs helping complete books about Linux during the heyday of tech books, when Borders or Barnes and Noble had large tech sections. There are a lot of people in the world who read my chapters on how to use the command line in Linux. If they didn’t read about it in the original edition of a doorstop-sized “Unleashed” book I contributed to, which I think was about Red Hat, then they read the mildly revised editions for other distros.

I completely subscribed to “The Elements of Style: UNIX as Literature":

“UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance.

“Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.

“At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.”

Like a lot of people, I ended up migrating to Macs once OS X came out, but I did so because there was Unix in there somewhere.

But today I don’t live in a work world where it’s a meaningful skill set. I spend a lot of time making decks and working on documents. I use a lot of browser-based SaaS for work. There’s pretty much nothing to script at work, and when I do spot things where I could, the right play is invariably to drop a few suggestions about how to best write that script to the person I’m paying to do that.

I’ve worked on a few personal projects over the past few years that were meant to help me keep my hand in: TUI apps, a CLI interface to the SmugMug and flickr APIs, etc.

But I have also had to admit those projects haven’t been particularly sticky, even though I spent a lot of time making sure they mapped to my sense of How Things Should Be, because a command line/shell orientation makes less and less sense to me. There’s friction getting things in and out of a shell environment when so much of the work you have to do doesn’t live in there. And once you start cobbling together tools that might let you live in both worlds, you’re in a UI wild west, with myriad configuration conventions and differing ideas about ergonomics.

It has not been easy on the ego to slowly transition out of that Unix orientation. I have the career I have because of that first account on an Ultrix box and years spent in and out of the Unix and Linux orbit as a writer, sysadmin, web developer, consultant, and manager. It has been almost as much a cultural identity as a skill set, and possibly more.

But it also feels increasingly awkward and shoehorned into my day-to-day life, and clinging to it bothers me because I’m at a stage of life where I want to be less set in my ways, not more. I think about how to maintain my fundamental plasticity as a matter of aging gracefully, remaining a learner, and embracing the ways the culture around me is changing in ways I’m not always chill with, but need to accept.

As hard as it is to set aside or let go of something that was such a big part of my life, though, it’s also nice to lose that sense of obligation to a past self who’s indifferent to my present self.