I was bored one evening and applied the Adbreak mod to my Kindle Oasis (10th generation). I was helped along by Dammit Jeff’s video and step-by-step instructions on the Kindle Modding wiki.

Jailbreaking devices like the Kindle are a popular pastime for folks. Getting past Amazon’s defenses allows intrepid users to customize layouts, fonts, UI, load e-books of different formats, change almost every aspect of the device’s function, etc. and add extra programs like simple games or even disabling ads.

I performed a jailbreak on my Kindle Touch back in 2012 so I could load up custom screensavers that delighted me. After a while, Amazon issued an update that broke the jailbreak and I never bothered doing it again.

Dammit Jeff pointed out some interesting apps like KindleForge and KOReader that could be installed,

KOReader was more interesting, as it promised the ability to read many more ebook formats, flow PDF text to make those files more readable, adjust the fonts and sizes of almost every aspect of the UI to your liking. and that’s great – if you want to spend a lot of time fiddling instead of reading.

Also, very few of the many apps available for download via KindleForge seemed worth spending my time on. Do I really need a Tetris clone on my Kindle? No. No, I do not.

So I backed out of the jailbreak and reset my Kindle. I felt more comfortable almost immediately.

Lord knows the Kindle is not perfect. It is a deliberately dumbed-down device with few customizations available apart from loading fonts (Hyperlegible is a good one), a so-so attitude to leading and kerning, etc. As Jason Snell often observes in his Kindle reviews, Amazon could do so much better if it cared to.

But for me, for now, my lowly Kindle Oasis (now discontinued) is fine. It’s fine. It meets my low expectations, the battery still holds a charge, and I can carry 100+ books in my hand wherever I go.

Today’s lesson: Kindles come and go. It’s the books that delight.

With the turnover of a new year, I did not want to carry the burden of imaginary work into 2024.

I looked at my Readwise Reader collection of saved web pages/PDFs/videos to process (~1,000 items). My YouTube Watch Later list totaled over 2,200 items. My default Amazon wishlist for Books has not been emptied in years.

I have always used my read-later, watch-later, and buy-later lists as “cooling off” platforms. When I returned to them later, I could assess whether an item captured in the heat of the moment retained its warmth. Most of the time, I’d think, “Why did I save this??” and thus saved myself the time and trouble of processing it.

It’s always interesting to me to scroll through the lists and see what captured my attention at specific periods of the year: plantar fasciitis remedies and exercises, note-taking, retirement planning, authors I was following, reviews of a specific book or movie I’d just read, breakfast prep videos, etc. Yes, if I had unlimited time and energy, I’d love to have read and viewed all these things.

But I don’t. No one has.

So, I decided to declare bankruptcy on all these lists and clear them out. If something really wants my attention, it’ll come back and then I’ll take action on it in the moment by reading it, viewing it, or buying it. Or capturing it in one of my cooling-off lists, which I’ll likely again have to clear out at the end of 2024.

How To - Readwise

Cleaning out the Readwise list was pretty easy; find the Bulk Actions command and Delete All.

I’ll still indiscriminately add web pages to Readwise for later reading in 2024. It’s a dumping ground for my current in-the-moment interests. If I want to keep something, Archive it.

How To - Amazon

Display the Books list, select More, then Manage List, scroll to the bottom, then Delete List. Repeat for all other specialty lists that are no longer needed.

In 2024, I’ll create specialty lists as I need them, and I’ll continue to use my new Books list as a cooling-off chamber for in-the-moment captures.

How To - Youtube

YouTube was the toughie. It’s not in Google’s best interests for users to delete all those yummy videos they’ve saved up. Fortunately, there are scripts you can enter into the browser Console to do the work for you. The scripts usually work in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

Searching YouTube for “how to delete YouTube watch later list” yields how-to videos going back years; find ones that are recent, within the last few months ideally. YouTube changes its interface frequently, which breaks these scripts.

The easiest way to clear the Watch Later list is to use the Chrome extension YT Watch Later Assist. If you have thousands of items in the list, start the deletion process and ensure the screen doesn’t go asleep.

If you have other YouTube playlists you want to clear out, check out the scripts that run in the Console. They usually enable you to change the list name from “Watch later” to the another list name.

If you have over the years subscribed to too many YouTube channels (I had over 150 in my list), use the Console to run a mass unsubscribe script. While I had trouble getting the Watch Later scripts to run, this unsubscribe script ran perfectly. It ran so quickly though that it skipped some items. Running it 3 or 4 times did the trick and I am now unsubscribed from all YouTube channels.

I used ChatGPT last weekend to help us revise the menu structures on our coho’s internal web site. I wrote out a detailed prompt, and then entered every page title on its own line, about 35-45 in total. In my prompt, I told ChatGPT to merge page topics, to rephrase them so they make sense to a less-technical audience, and to provide three examples of hierarchical menu structures, with at least one restricted to two levels.

We were pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Some of the AI’s groupings didn’t make sense, but many of them did. Using ChatGPT kept us from having to spend hours and hours on this exercise. Editing the AI’s work, recognizing what was good and what needed rethinking or special considerations, was much easier than doing it all ourselves.

We’re busy with other coho duties and our $dayjobs; I’m all for using a tool that gets us to the finish line quicker with less pain.

I remember way back in the ’90s, meeting with a great nutritionist who was also a great therapist. At the time I listened to lots of Audible.com books and shows. She advised me at the time to reduce that input. “You like to mull things over,” she said. [1]

When podcasts came along, I gorged myself and have done for many years. I listened to them doing the dishes, working outside, walking, puttering around the house, etc. The margins of my day needed to be filled with something, put to use, and listening to podcasts helped me feel I was doing something productive with that otherwise unused time.

However, I have more than once over the past years heard a whisper underneath all the noise: Get rid of them. Go quiet.

This usually led to me pruning my feeds, reducing the number of podcasts in my queue, and so on. But, like stubborn belly fat, the episodes continued to accumulate over time and never went away.

But I heard that whisper more frequently of late. I decided my word of the year would be SPACE: more spaciousness in my schedule and more spaciousness in my head. So I decided to take more drastic action on my aural inputs.

In Castro, I deleted all the podcasts in my “later” queue and reduced the number of active podcasts in my current queue to about 25. I’m in no hurry to work through them.

I unsubscribed from many podcasts; I still keep a few that I really like because I do enjoy listening to something while I wash the dishes or vacuum. I select not just what I listen to, but when and where I listen. [2]

If I really want to hear something, it’s easy to find that specific episode and download it. And Castro makes it easy for me to upload audio files and listen to them easily.

I am finding myself in the quiet a little more, and I don’t miss the chatter. I have also not been plagued with the FOMO, a devil imp if ever there was one.

[1] The irony of my overconsuming junk food for the body and junk food for the mind is not lost on me.

[2] As I also do to control my eating.

Alan Jacobs writes a bit about his read-it-later strategy, one I also subscribe to. I throw things into Pocket but never read it; it simply scratches a hoarder’s itch to save something without the consequences of dealing with it. (Same with my Amazon wishlists; they’re parking places for items I hardly ever think about again.)

The best read-it-later app for me is Mailist. I have it send a daily email with a single link from my pile of read-it-later links. I like the randomness of not knowing what will arrive, and it’s always interesting to see what interested past-Mike that has no interest at all for present-Mike.

We got several compliments on the Dec 2022 newsletter I did for our Bull City Commons Cohousing community.

So I thought I’d put down here a few things that I do and a few lessons learned along the way. This post may be helpful to cohousing or other communities wanting to start their own newsletter.

I’ve been writing the Bull City Commons Cohousing newsletter since December 2019 or thereabouts when I took over from the former editor. You can see the newsletter’s evolution on our newsletter archives page.

Mailchimp

A former community member started the newsletter on Mailchimp. Because we’re always economizing, we use the free tier that has just enough functionality to get you going, but with the fancier tools (such as AI-powered scheduling of mailings) always out of reach.

Mailchimp is powerful and highly customizable, but it, like many online products and services in this age, is geared to the needs of commerce, business, online selling, and full-on marketing. As such, it’s got an arsenal of tools like audience segmentation and A/B testing that experienced marketers know how to manipulate. As a result, its interface can be forbidding and intimidating.

It’s true that BCC’s early years were dedicated to marketing and selling units. But because we were at the free tier—and because we were civilians doing this in our spare time after the rigors of the $DAYJOB—no one knew how to learn or how to leverage Mailchimp’s formidable firepower.

And while Mailchimp’s interface offers several templates and ways to get started designing a newsletter, it took several issues to learn the basics. For example, pictures spanning the whole width of the design needed to be resized on my Mac to 564px before importing into Mailchimp, or 264px if they were half-width. Mailchimp has a way to resize pictures in its own interface but I found it too arcane and frightening to use; I often found myself cropping an image instead of resizing it.

I’m not ashamed to say I paid for Paul Jarvis’ Chimp Essentials course so I could come to grips with Mailchimp. It was very helpful in explaining to me the basics so I could grok the Mailchimp concepts of audiences, campaigns, all sorts of stuff. (Jarvis sold the course to others and it exists now on Udemy as Mailchimp For Newbies: A Complete Mailchimp Course. Still worthwhile, I think, if you want to get a fast head start.)

In retrospect, all we needed was a database where people could easily subscribe or unsubscribe, a way to schedule the publication, and a way to design and assemble a simple newsletter with words and pictures. Mailchimp was over-engineered for our simple purposes.

Were I to start a newsletter today, I’d probably go with a simpler system like Buttondown or Substack if they had a free tier of service or a low annual cost.

Wix web site

I believe the same former community member who signed us up for the Mailchimp signed us up for a Wix web site.

The original pages were functional and looked very homemade. A few years ago, a few of our design-savvy members did a total overhaul of the site and today it looks great.

As far as the interface: none of the online web-building sites are easy to use if you’re a newbie (I’ve used Squarespace also, and it has its own quirks), and Wix is no different. Adapting to any of these platforms them takes time to understand how it works. It’s like how you need to spend time playing a game to understand its physics and rules so that you can both leverage and subvert them; it takes time and a lot of playing around.

When I took over the newsletter, I knew I wanted to leverage the web site. I saw the newsletter as a light, more mobile news delivery system, while the website could hold longer articles, bigger photos, etc. My early newsletter issues included the first few paragraphs of a longer story that was continued with a “Read more on the web site” link.

With the redesign, we included a real blog. I use the blog heavily and try as often as possible to link from the newsletter to individual blog posts.

Someone in our group suggested we go to Wordpress to save $$$ but that would be a mistake in my view. When I had a WP blog on my own server, I was always having to deal with Wordpress security issues. Also, to make Wordpress useful, you need to add extensions and plugins; the more of those you add, the slower the site runs and I think loses some stability, as well.

By contrast, right out of the box, Wix includes a blog, photo galleries, ability to upload video files, and more. One of the Wix features we use extensively is its Events functionality. We can create an event, users can RSVP, they get an automated email thanking them for the reservation, and then receive another automated reminder email three days before the event.

You could maybe do all that in WordPress but it would take time to figure out, time to research if it’s even possible, time to make it work, time to maintain it, and so on. There comes a point where you have to ask yourself how much your time is worth. For that reason alone, Wix is worth about $250/yr.

Also, for whatever reason, Wix is not a hacker target the way Wordpress is. Or at least Wix does a very good job of making their site secure and handling the security so that we don’t have to worry about that.

For us, Wix has a good set of features that saves us time, so it’s worth the cost as our website is our brochure to the world and potential members.

There are other site-building tools, of course, like Weebly, but I don’t have experience with them; there are scads of systems out there.

The December 2022 Newsletter

The innovation with this edition of the newsletter is that it’s composed entirely of squibs and summaries that link out to all the stories on the blog. So all I needed to do to assemble the newsletter was link out to specific blog posts.

Previously, the blog was either not there or I was delinquent in updating it, so the newsletters always had original stories and pix, sometimes long stories, etc. I didn’t mind that too much, as I wanted the newsletter subscribers to get something a little extra that the blog readers did not get.

But that meant the newsletters sometimes were way too long and became a bit of a slog to read. Stories are OK being long on the blog, though, which means the newsletter can be more streamlined than before. Hit the Page Down key, and you see photos and short blocks of text, making the experience more visually pleasing. From a user’s perspective, they can skim through the newsletter, get a sense of the whole without needing to read too much, and it’s only 2 or 3 screens long. If they want to delve deeper on a specific story, they can choose to click the link and read about it; if they don’t, they can easily skip it.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and totally swiped this layout from one of those. The streamlined design meant I was able to compile this edition in about 90 minutes. In the old days, pre-blog, it would usually take me 6-10 hours to create the newsletter because i’d be writing stories, searching for pictures, etc. all at the same time. Writing blog posts still takes time, but it’s 1-2 hours per story spread out over a month or two, instead of all banged up together into a single weekend.

Because I’m always procrastinating, the fewer decisions I have to make, the better. For that reason, I tend to accept the Mailchimp design defaults for fonts, etc. I could specify those things if I was really anal about it, but I’m not. I simply duplicate the previous newsletter in Mailchimp, and re-use the text and image blocks for the next one.

And anyway, Mailchimp designs are supposedly built to look good on laptop, tablet, and phone, so the less I specify about the design the better it probably looks. (Wix layouts also support multiple devices.)

One of Mailchimp’s integrations I take advantage of is publishing the newsletter to BCC’s Facebook page on publication. I don’t know if Buttondown or Substack do that, but it’s handy when trying to propagate the newsletter to larger audiences.

A Final Caveat

I would add that, if you do set up a newsletter/web site for your community, be prepared to be The One who will always be responsible for it. I happen to be technically savvy, which is handy, but I’m also now the unelected historian/reporter for our community. It’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to hand off the newsletter and blog duties to anyone else.

When I’m actively working heads-down on a project, such as writing a newsletter or doing some tech workon the laptop, I set my timecube for 60 minutes. It reminds me to get up, walk around, and maybe get some fresh ideas on whatever problem I’m trying to solve.

When I’m not actively working on anything and am just cherry-picking tasks or winging it, I set the timecube for 60 minutes to remind me to get up, walk around, and not get lost in my head and in the internet.

Background

Our community held an appreciation evening for our architects and Durham Central Park Cohousing, whose members mentored us through the journey.

During the planning, someone suggested having a slideshow play in kiosk mode on the TV in the multipurpose room while the party went on in the adjacent Common Dining Room.

And of course, all heads turned to me since I’m the de facto publicity guy who drafts the BCC blog and the (now quarterly) newsletter.

My Approach

When given this task about a month and a half before, I of course procrastinated. Well, not all the time; I was quite busy at the $DAYJOB and with other BCC and personal assignments that creating this show was not priority. I also trusted my inner guidance to let me know what to do and when I needed to do it.

But one still needs to make decisions early on, don’t one? They help to give one a place to start and to set up some useful constraints. Starting with the end in mind, I decided on the following:

• Keep the show to about 20-30 minutes.
• No music or other soundtrack, because there would be so much talking and other music playing in the other room.
• The show would be a blend of still photos and drone footage taken of the construction in progress.
• It seemed to me the simplest way to compile the photos would be to put them in chronological order; therefore, every photo needed to be accompanied by the month and year the picture was taken. I thought people looking at the pictures would want to know when they were taken.
• The show (either a movie or a PowerPoint slideshow or some other mechanism) had to play on my MacBook connected via HDMI to the TV.
• The show would be broken into three main pieces: pre-construction, construction, and then move-in on up to the present day. Even during construction we were having events—such as the beam-signing—so I thought those pictures could be interleaved with the constructions at the appropriate moments in the timeline.

What I Actually Created

An iMovie video slideshow that lasted almost 40 minutes. All photos were watermarked with the image’s creation month and year. The video got good reviews from the folks who saw it, and it brought back some good memories. But it was way too long.

Processing the Images

Did I say I started too late? I started too late.

We had two large stores of image files on our shared Google Drive: one set devoted to construction, one to community events. Fortunately, they were arranged in folders—and sometimes sub-sub-folders—by date. Google Drive is too slow to click and move through, so I tried downloading the folders via my browser, but there were inevitable hiccups with some corrupted files, internet burps, and whatnot.

• At that point, I searched out and found Cyberduck, which offered a fast and simple way to download those folders to my MacBook.

Now I had lots of folders and subfolders of images. I did not want to have to traverse all those folders; instead, I wanted a single folder with all the pre-construction images, a single folder with all the construction images, and a single folder with all the post-construction images.

• I searched around and—I still can’t believe this—found exactly what I needed: a MacWorld article from 2011  defining an Automator workflow that moved files out of subfolders to a parent folder, and then deleted the empty subfolders.
• I selectively used that Automator workflow to pull all those nested files up into a single directory for each category of images I had defined.

Now to process those images: sort them by name? By creation date? How to ensure I’m seeing all the files in the right order?

• I prefer sorting by name; it just makes things easier all around, especially if I was going to do more post-processing of the files later. Or inserting other images I might find later so they fitted into their chronologically right place.
• Much searching and trying out of programs led me to PhotoMill, which performed brilliantly.
  • The key first step after ingesting the photos, was to select them all and then select File > File Attributes > Set Creation/Modification Date from Capture Date… This added the necessary metadata to the images for the next step.
  • I created a preset workflow within PhotoMill that changed all the formats—a mix of JPG, PNG, and HEIC—to JPG, renamed all the files to start with each image’s creation date and time in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM, followed by the original filename, and then added the creation Month and Year in a 50% opaque white font in the lower right corner of each image, as shown here.

With a folder of images renamed, sorted, and formatted the way I wanted, all that was left was to … sift.

Because I did not have a detailed outline in mind, and because I wanted to let the materials lead me to where they wanted to go, I felt the only thing to do was to sift through all those images to make a first cut.

So for about an hour or so every day, I sorted through about 3,800 image files. Most were quickly consigned to the Trash.

I totaled the numbers of files I had. If each image lasted 4 seconds on screen, then 4 times the number of files and divided by 60 would tell me how many minutes the show would last. That first cut got me to about 60 minutes, so I knew I had lots more cutting to do.

Creating the Video Slideshow

As I sifted through the files again, I hit on the idea of calling the video “Timelines.” I decided to keep the construction images and event images separate, but staying with the pre-construction and post-construction eras. So there would be smaller timelines playing within the larger timeline narrative. I also decided to stop the show after our celebratory gala in May, after the move-ins had finished and we were ready to enjoy our accomplishment.

During that second round of culling, I created new subfolders for the images and began investigating how to present them. After looking at PowerPoint and other kiosk/slideshow programs, the simplest and most powerful tool to use was iMovie.

I consulted a MacMost video course on iMovie I’d bought a while back to educate myself for another project. Gary very helpfully had several videos dealing with my specific use case, and he refreshed my memory on applying transitions, titles, and other niceties. Using iMovie also let me easily drop in some MP4 and MOV drone videos captured during some of our events and during construction.

We were now at, oh, a day before the event? I reported that I’d have a really good first draft, and figured I’d have most of Saturday to get it mostly good.

Renaming the files as I had done meant that, as I dropped in batches of files, they sorted into the sequence I wanted. Adding the drone videos was also dead easy. And iMovie let me know how long the video was, so I could do more drastic cutting as needed. I had iMovie render low quality videos I used to review what would be the final product.

The MacBook Pro’s M1 processor made very short work of the video creation; on my old iMac, it would have taken maybe 90 minutes. I was so happy I got the Pro.

The video wound up at about 40 minutes, still about 20 minutes too long. I did some cutting and moving chunks around, but did not have a better creative idea to support such a drastic cut. Had I arrived at this point a week earlier, a better idea would have appeared.

What I Would Have Done Differently

• I could have eschewed watermarking all the photos in favor of using titles or other iMovie captioning. But then, I’d have still had to reference each image’s creation date to get that info correct. So, six of one…
• I would have foregone sifting through 3,800 images. My process, for better or worse, is to sort through everything. I did find a few great shots that way, but that effort was over the top. As Liz noted, whenever people were not in the pictures, the air went out of the show.
• In the next draft of this video, I will trim the 15-20 minutes of boring construction photos. Since I named the video “Timelines”, I will instead create more mini-narratives showing the progress, say, of the hallways and the lobby from studs to sheet rock to paint. Those will tell more meaningful stories within the larger construction narrative, and the impact will be greater to see 2 years’ progress on a defined space within the span of a few photos.

Resources

• MacMost iMovie course
• Automator workflow of the month: Move files from subfolders | Macworld

I had a long and happy partnership with Launchbar on my iMac. But when I started using my MacBook Pro more intensively recently, and found that Spotlight wasn’t doing everything I wanted, I found that Launchbar has been languishing with hardly any updates, to the consternation of its fans who love its look and operation.

So I turned to Alfred and am really enjoying it. The community and forum are active (unlike Launchbar’s), there are many great tutorials and Youtube videos on setting it up and using its workflows, and I am very much enjoying playing with it. Which is the main thing.

In searching the web for tips and clues on how others organize their digital files, I ran across this video from Caitlin’s Corner: DIGITAL DECLUTTER | organizing my files, email & hard drives - YouTube.

For whatever reason, watching her dig through her piles of old digital files lit a fire under me to do the same. Her method is a bit Marie Kando: open every file, even if only briefly, consider it, then keep or delete.

I think what inspired me (beyond simple procrastination on my latest project) was her commitment to the job. Her video time-jumps from the morning, when she starts, to late at night when she finally stops looking through at least one of her hard drives. I could see myself doing the same thing. The idea of letting go of this digital baggage, and finally making the decisions I have been putting off, also inspired me.

I started last night with my Google Drive files, of which I did not have many. I’m now viewing GDrive as a temporary holding area for files in progress or for collaboration. I decided that my MacBook Pro and Dropbox would be the FInal Source of Truth for all my files. So the GDrive files I kept are now sitting in my Downloads folder, which I will get to cleaning out … soon.