Friday Tidbits: clicky keys and reorgs
On last week’s These Traces I touched on my tendency to over-manage tasks. There’s a certain geekiness to it, but also a very real quest for a holy grail—a method that would actually work, once and for all. This led to my increasing need for simplicity.
Blocks.
So, that same evening I decided to clean-up all that I’d accumulated in Things over the years (at some point I stretched its limits by using it as a dumping ground for anything I’d come across). When I was done, and as I prepared to restructure my Areas, I realized something that made me genuinely sad: I didn’t need it anymore. Things is probably in my top five apps in terms of design, on both Mac and iOS. It’s just beautiful. But at the end of the day, it’s a text list. It’s linear. And like all task managers, it demands attention through ceaseless fiddling because those checkboxes won’t check themselves.
So where do I go? For projects, I need a much broader and messy canvas in order for my brain to function. I want visuals and links and texts and drawings all crammed together within a shared space—and this is accomplished in Craft. It’s also a place where I can dump ideas and crosslink them to specific subjects.
For recurring tasks or simple reminders: Apple’s own Reminders app has come of age (1). The upshot is that this is also fully baked into the entire system.
And for daily organization? My big epiphany is the calendar. I’ve set up recurring blocks that I can fill with specific content at the beginning of every week. There’s no checking, no fiddling, only a quiet time slot providing an overview of what I’ve chosen to accomplish. For content on which I’ve already done research in Craft, I add a deep-link to the document in the event’s notes, giving me one-click access to it when the time comes.
Simple and unobtrusive. So far, so good.
Mechanics
“My words… man! They’re banging off the walls in wild clicky thumps and twaps and bam bam bams!”… Don’t worry, it’s not an aneurism: I got myself a mechanical keyboard and this post is my official baptism. I’m mistyping here and there but given my muscles are adapting to a new layout, it ain’t too bad.
The keyboard is a Keychron K2 (V2), with metal frame and blue Gateron switches. They’re the extremely clicky ones, so I wasn’t sure it would work out. Turns out it’s fine. I almost ordered brown, but then read some people found those switches mushy. (2)
After an entire life spent using stock Mac keyboards, this is long overdue (3). In fact, I never truly adapted to the laptop-style keyboard on a desktop machine: the low-impact and silent keys are great when typing on my iPad, but I’ve always felt desk use required something more substantial. This Keychron is heavy and solid (doesn’t budge an inch on my desk), has backlighting (in multiple colours no less) and unlike many offerings out there, it’s a first-class Mac citizen as well. In fact, it comes pre-configured for Mac out of the box.
But beyond the glorious typing, there’s another feature that’s life changing for me: it connects to three devices via Bluetooth (4). So I’m currently writing on a vertical iPad Pro (yay!), with the M1 Air right next to it. I can switch from one to the other just by hitting a key combo. For someone constantly jumping between both... that’s a biggie.
Electra 120, you’ve made quite the impact.
@18
Lastly, there was a discussion in the 1EYE SOCIETY Slack channel this week about wider lenses for street photography. And it made me long for the old Fujifilm 18 mm f/2 I’d shot in Toronto, during the X-Pro3 film project. I never bought that lens, but I do own the XF 18-55 mm, so I thought what the heck. At 18 mm it’s an f/2.8 which isn’t too shabby. It’s much bigger but...that’s not a problem currently, is it?
Some pics below. Have a great weekend :)
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I experimented with GoodTask, an app that uses the Reminders data store as its foundation. Ultimately though, the UI left me cold and was still overkill. Coincidentally, a writer I follow posted about a similar move this same day (going from Things to Reminders). It cemented my decision.
I’m a complete newbie to this world. Didn’t even know about switches before looking into this. Btw: I didn’t get a hot-swappable model. I don’t need another rabbit hole to explore (!)
Apple had great mechanical keyboards back in the day though...
This was frustrating however. If you ever find yourself in the same situation, here’s how it works: the user manual only mentions fn+1 as the key combo to enter Bluetooth pairing. But it’s actually fn+1 OR fn+2 OR fn+3...each one corresponding to an individual device. They mention these as the switching combos, but NOT for pairing.
If you pair a Mac using fn+1, and then pair an iPad using fn+1...you’ve just overwritten the Mac and it won’t connect anymore. It’s obvious but it isn’t.
