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Two months of Bullet Journaling

Wed, 13 May 2020 07:30:32 +0200

Exactly 2 months ago, on 13 March, I started with an experiment: I stopped adding tasks and ideas to OmniFocus and began adding them exclusively to a dotted Leuchtturm 1917 A5 notebook. I wrote about that a little bit back then but thought it would be a good idea to do regular updates (every couple of months) on whether or not I still found it useful and how my process changes over time.

What do I want to achieve here?

So, first: what was the goal? I wanted to have a single system where I could collect the following items:

Daily schedule including what you’d normally find in a calendar.
Tasks that have to be completed by a certain time.
Tasks that I plan to do today.
Overview of “projects” and their progress.
Habit tracking from things like how much water I’m drinking each day all the way to doing some exercising at least once per week. This also includes the books that I’ve read in the year so far and how many I still have to complete in order to reach my Reading-challenge goal by the end of the year.

I admit that this is quite a broad list but, so far, my journal does all these things and even more! It has even mostly replaced Apple Health for me which only receives very infrequent updates anymore. I’m even in the process of replacing my to-read list on Goodreads although I’m not yet sure if this list will actually make it into the journal. I might just add it to /reading/, instead 🙃

What’s my process?

The monthly page

Right when I start a new journal, the first thing I do is to create a monthly page that hold one line per day for important events, tasks that need to be done by then or at this particular day, and space for habit tracking. Right now I keep track of the following:

Learn some French using Babbel
Exercise
Write a blog post
Talk to parents

Future log

Next, I create a future log. Every page is split into 3 areas, one per month, with the goal of writing down events and tasks slated for the next 12 months.

Prepare for the week ahead

Every Sunday I try to sit down and prepare the daily pages for the next week. The template for such a page is pretty simple: It consists of 7 small boxes at the very top of each page that will hold the following data:

The current header-style for my daily pages.

Exact date (incl. year)
Week day
Weather of that day
Time/check for any kind of medication I might need to take
Amount of water I’m drinking (small line for a cup of tea, large line for a whole bottle (0.7l) of water)
Morning weight in kg
Number of completed pomodoros

The rest of each page is split into two columns where I do rapid logging according to the Bullet Journal method. If the monthly page indicates that I have some special events scheduled for today or some tasks that have to be done I add them right away to the respective daily page.

Day-to-day process

With pretty much the whole setup being done on the last day of each week, I can focus on the actual work once Monday starts. Here I basically just update the existing page when necessary and do rapid logging on the daily page.

The hardware

Last but not least, here’s a quick list of all the tools I use to journal:

Leuchtturm 1917 A5 dotted hard-cover journal
Lamy accent fountain pen
Uni-ball Kuru Toga 0.5 mechanical pencil
Triangle ruler (mostly because I don’t see the advantage of using a normal ruler that would take pretty much the same space in my journals back-pocket 😅)

Will I keep doing it?

That whole Bullet Journaling-thing was originally planned as an experiment. I had invested a lot of time and money into GTD and optimising my workflows around OmniFocus and I still believe that OmniFocus is the best tool for doing GTD. But keeping everything inside a journal has worked out even better than I expected. I get lots of gratification out of seeing what I’ve completed each day and being able to just flip back in the book to find out what I did on a particular day. I’m pretty sure I’ll keep using this method for the next couple of months and re-evaluate it then 😊

John Oliver on the USPS

Tue, 12 May 2020 15:00:06 +0200

Like of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL8g0W9gAQ

More on the Default Feeds Issue

Tue, 12 May 2020 10:00:00 +0200

Like of https://inessential.com/2020/05/11/more_on_the_default_feeds_issue

Geo-tracing my life

Tue, 12 May 2020 08:24:31 +0200

On Sunday I stumbled across a post by Aaron Parecki in which he describes how he’s been tracking his movement for the last couple of years. For many years I’ve been using Swarm/Foursquare to at least keep track of places I visit when I’m a tourist. Quite often, though, I wanted a way to visualise also my daily paths without having to rely on third-party services and in the process potentially expose my location to someone else.

While our use-cases for wanting this data may differ, luckily Aaron also wrote a little app for iOS that collects location data and then submits it to a server that can be defined by the user. About an hour after discovering Overland I had created a simple HTTP server in Go that writes the received coordinates into a CSV file. Another 30 minutes later I had that service deployed on one of my servers and storing the data onto an encrypted volume. I just love Digital Ocean Volumes 😍

Just in case this sounds interesting to you, check out zerok/geotrace on GitHub. Right now, geotrace only supports appending data to a CSV file but in the next couple of days I also want to add SQLite support to it!

As for actually using the collected data: Once SQLite support is in there I want to write a little exporter that creates GPX files which I can then use with OpenStreetMap et al. or just use it to attach proper coordinates to the pictures I take with my Sony camera. I probably have far too many things I want to do with that data to actually start doing any of them… 🤯

The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR)

Mon, 11 May 2020 16:45:00 +0200

Like of https://sebastiangreger.net/2018/05/indieweb-privacy-challenge-webmentions-backfeeds-gdpr/

Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp

Mon, 11 May 2020 13:41:00 +0200

Like of https://m.signalvnoise.com/employee-surveillance-software-is-not-welcome-to-integrate-with-basecamp/

The Last Emperox

Mon, 11 May 2020 08:49:33 +0200

For some reason it’s taking me longer and longer to get through even the most entertaining books right now. Anyway: The latest victim of that trend was John Scalzi’s “The Last Emperox” which I started on 20 April and took me until yesterday evening to read the last line of.

This book marks the third and last instalment in the “The Interdependency” series. Unlike in the previous books, the nobility of the Interdependency has finally accepted that the network of “Flows” that connects the planets of that union is collapsing and everyone creates plans to get themselves and their money to the last planet that can support human life on its own: End.

Again, unlike the previous book “The Last Emperox” follows mostly the stories of Riva and Cardenia as they try to keep the other noble houses under control and just survive all the schemes that are executed to put them down. Weirdly enough, I finally grew to really like Riva with all her profanities so I can recommend this book for her chapters alone 😁 Keep in mind, though, that this is the third part of a series and you definitely should have read the first two before starting with this one. That being said, you definitely should read the whole series if you enjoy space-operas with lots of humor! Just keep the profanity-buzzer ready and don’t expect high-tech sci-fi 😉

As for this being the last instalment in the series: John Scalzi leaves quite a few plot lines open for possible future books. It’s still fitting to call it a conclusion of the series but I won’t go into details in order not to spoil anything for you.

Germany's reproduction rate over 1.0 again

Sun, 10 May 2020 12:32:22 +0200

According to the Robert-Koch-Institute the reproduction rate in Germany has now moved over 1.0 again after being at only 0.83 just the day before. It sounds like more and more people start to feel like all these measures to keep the deseace in check overkill and skip their way around them or even protest against the restrictions.

At least in the area of Graz where I’m living I still see pretty much everyone adhering to the rules and recommendations handed down by the government. In open areas most people walk around without masks but once you enter an enclosed space, like a supermarket, everyone is wearing a mask now and I haven’t even seen anyone for a long time not wearing one properly. At the checkout the distancing also still works, in the hallways not so much but at least we’re all wearing masks and at least know that we are not supposed to come too close to each other.

Let’s hope that this will be enough for us to do better than Germany and best of luck to everyone there 🙂

Looking back at Deep Space Nine

Sun, 10 May 2020 10:35:58 +0200

Deep Space Nine, especially later seasons were probably the most memorable moments of Star Trek for me. That whole Dominion storyline was just amazing and gave characters like Garak finally a time to shine!

Now, 20 years after the last episode had aired, I had forgotten most of those little highlights until I heard this episode of the Alienating the Audience podcast with Andrew Heaton and Tom Merritt

For instance, I had completely forgotten about the Marquis and also about that Gul Dukat had eventually become a vessel for Pagh Wraiths. Damn, and now I want to watch the show again 😅

Journaling for personal time-traveling

Sat, 09 May 2020 11:33:40 +0200

Just stumbled upon this nice article by Jen A. Miller of the New York Times about keeping a “Coronavirus Diary” in which she talks about some of the benefits of keeping a journal not only during trying times like these but in general.

But the main point of this exercise shouldn’t necessarily be about what other people will think about our thoughts right now. “That doesn’t matter because we’re writing for ourselves to find out how we feel about things,” he said. He doesn’t even like to call them diaries — he [Herbert Braun, University of Virginia] prefers the term “jottings” instead.

I, personally, keep a journal for a couple of reasons involving not only myself but also the people around me:

I love looking back at pictures from all those trips I made years ago. Just recently I skimmed through my album of a trip to San Francisco I did many years ago and relived some of the best moments of that in my head. But pictures are only part of the story as they usually won’t convey what I was feeling in that situation. A journal can help with that.
My dad always tells stories about how life was when he grew up. I really wish he’d had a journal so that I don’t have to write them down eventually 😅
A journal allows me not only to take notes but also doodle around and therefore make those memories even more … memorable!
I really like the idea of having notes, tasks, and events in a single place so that I immediately have the connection what happened when and in what context. This allows me, for instance, to keep track of when we went shopping for groceries the last time and therefore plan ahead.

If you’re keeping a journal, what are your reasons for doing it?

Keybase is now owned by Zoom

Fri, 08 May 2020 11:31:26 +0200

Yesterday, Zoom and Keybase announced that the first had acquired the latter. Let’s put it this way: I was not surprised that Keybase was acquired but I was surprised and, quite frankly, shocked that they are now part of Zoom.

Zoom currently has a big trust issue and they are just now with their 90-days-of-security plan starting to work on implementing some of the features everyone assumed they were already offering based on their marketing wording. Keybase wanted to be basically a web-of-trust implementation and Zoom is struggling with the basic concept of trust here. But before going there, let’s take a look at both announcements:

Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet.

– keybase.io

OK, so they got acquired without specific plans for their current offering. Judging from that I’d say that Keybase is now in a maintenance mode at best until Zoom decides what they want to do with it.

We are excited to integrate Keybase’s team into the Zoom family to help us build end-to-end encryption that can reach current Zoom scalability.

– zoom

This sounds even more like an acq-hire to me. This is also the only non-generic statement mentioning Keybase in their whole announcement. Note that it only mentions Keybase’s team (as do all the other statements in the Zoom announcement) and not Keybase, the product.

I simply don’t have a good feeling about this (unlike when they announced their blog chain plans) and therefore deleted my Keybase account.

P.S.: Gregory Hammond also has a nice write-up about this on his blog.

First baby steps in LaTeX-land (again)

Fri, 08 May 2020 07:44:51 +0200

I haven’t used LaTeX since I handed in my master thesis more than 10 years ago. Now that I’m attending some university classes again, though, I thought it would be fitting to also start writing homework assignments that way again. Obviously, the basics haven’t changed all that much but there are still a couple of things that I’ve learnt over the course of writing the first couple of texts again. My requirements for LaTeX also changed:

I need to write multiple small documents in parallel instead of one huge.
All documents should use a single bibliography.
All documents should have a similar style leaning on the classic article document class.

The setup

Since I hadn’t used LaTeX for many years, I didn’t have it installed on my laptop. So the first thing I did was to install MacTeX using Homebrew:

$ brew install mactex
$ export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-darwin:$PATH

There is also a non-GUI version of that formula but I went with the default one for now. VIM supports TeX documents out of the box so I didn’t have to install any additional packages for it.

For every class I’m attending (and for which I have to write essays et al.) I created a folder which contains a central bibliography file and a Makefile. More on both later.

biblatex/biber has replaced bibtex

One of the main reasons why I enjoy working with LaTeX is the way citations are handled. The system that is used for that, bibtex, is ancient but works quite well. Sadly, getting things like German umlauts working in it is a bit tedious, though. Custom styling is also not something you just do because you feel like it.

biblatex using biber as backend seems to be the new preferred approach for dealing with both. .bib files can contain UTF-8 and styling happens through normal LaTeX commands.

Bibliography as footnotes

For books and longer reports it’s definitely nice to have all your sources listed in a dedicated section, especially you usually use a source more than once. For articles, though, putting them into footnotes is often enough. Turns out, you can do that using \footcite instead of \cite 😅

Single-column IEEEtran

In general I really like the IEEEtran document class but for the classes I required something that supports generating single-column documents. Turns out that IEEEtran actually allows that using the onecolumn option 🙂

Custom documentclass

Since I have to write on different documents at the same time I also finally moved all the settings I apply for a specific class into a custom documentclass based on IEEEtran:

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesClass{classnamearticle}
\LoadClass[12pt,onecolumn,a4paper]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage[style=verbose]{biblatex}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage{titling}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\setstretch{1.3}
\setlength{\droptitle}{-6em}
\setlength{\parskip}{0.3em}
\renewcommand\maketitlehookc{\vspace{-1.5em}}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\renewcommand{\UrlFont}{\small\tt}

Makefile per class

Makefiles are for me the central interface I expect when entering a folder that contains files that need to be processed. Since .tex files fall in this category, I created a Makefile for each class. There’s actually nothing fancy in there but it just builds all the tex documents in the current directory including bibliography:

docs := $(shell find . -name '*.tex')
bases := $(shell echo $(docs) | sed s/.tex//g)
pdfs := $(shell echo $(docs) | sed s/.tex/.pdf/g)

all: $(pdfs)

%.pdf: %.tex classname.bib classnamearticle.cls
	latex $(subst .tex,,$<)
	biber $(subst .tex,,$<)
	latex $(subst .tex,,$<)
	pdflatex $<

clean:
	rm -f $(pdfs) *.aux *.dvi *.bbl *.blg *.bcf *.log *.run.xml

.PHONY: clean
.PHONY: all

That’s it for now but every time I work with LaTeX I learn something new 😄

Don't apologize, analyze

Thu, 07 May 2020 08:31:02 +0200

Quite some time ago, Dan Slimmon had a great post titled “Stop apologizing for bugs” in which he described the possible side-effects of developers apologizing bugs they’ve produced to other team members. While it might seem appropriate at first, keep those points in mind:

It reinforces the idea that any one person or piece of code can be blamed for a given failure. Short of malice, this is never the case.

It gives the impression that, when you wrote the code, you should have written it better. This is a counterfactual that rarely holds up to examination.

It positions shame as the correct emotion to feel about bugs in your code: if you were a better engineer – a better teammate – the bug wouldn’t exist.

If you’re a more senior engineer on your team, the effects of these anti-patterns are magnified: people see you apologizing for bugs, so they think that they should be striving to write bug-free code. They may feel ashamed if their code has bugs.

I completely agree with every single item in that list but double so with the last. Whenever a coworker found a bug in code that I had written (even if it’s not critical), it felt ashamed to the point that I got angry with myself. In the past this has sometimes caused me to panic and therefore not rationally prioritise and resolve the issue but to resolve the issue no matter what, ignoring any kind of priority. In recent years this has become better but the temptation to simply panic is still there.

Trying to get past this behaviour, the following has worked well for me so far: Whenever a bug shows its head, I write down details about it (ideally on paper), forcing me to analyze what is going on and getting past the first instinctive temptations. A big part of that analysis is to find out how the issue can be reproduced and not what is causing it. The first is fact-based while the latter is speculative.

This is important as it helps me to force my brain down a certain path instead of giving it free reign. It’s immensely important for me to avoid panic-mode (which I still fall into from time to time) and analysis instead of speculation helps. Additionally, writing stuff down on paper has a calming effect on me, which is always a bonus.

Want to buy me a hot chocolate?

Wed, 06 May 2020 08:18:12 +0200

And today to something completely different: With more and more people using services like Patreon and Ko-Fi to earn a bit of extra money I also wanted to see how that works. For this reason and just in case anybody wants to buy me a hot beverage I’ve set up a ko-fi.com account last week 🙂 But this is just an experiment!

Why Ko-fi? Mostly because it’s extremely simple and the name itself already somehow implies that it’s just there to show gratitude instead of someone having to make a living with those donations. At this point, all money that’s coming in through this channel will be used for server bills and … buying milk for the whole apartment (used for coffee, hot chocolate, and morning cereals) 🥳So no, I don’t depend on any money coming in but I’d definitely put it to good use 😁

Webmentiond now supports comments

Tue, 05 May 2020 11:21:17 +0200

After writing about comments yesterday I’ve now implemented experimental support for comment-type mentions in webmentiond. Using Will Norris’s microformats parser for Go, the current implementation will look for an h-entry at the source-URL of the mention and use its p-name for the title, e-content for the content of the mention, and u-author for its author. All these properties will be stored inside the webmentions table of the database. If the entry has a u-is-reply-to link, then the whole mention will receive the type comment.

At this point, the content is truncated after 500 characters (or actually after 497 in order to always have a maximum of 500 characters) before being stored inside the database.

These new fields are also exposed in the relevant HTTP-API endpoints for each mention. You can see an example for this by looking at the response body of this request:

[
  {
    "id":"bq7jiguu9c2cnem5k8eg",
    "source":"https://jlelse.blog/micro/2020/04/2020-04-09-eccgd/",
    "target":"",
    "created_at":"2020-04-09T15:03:31Z",
    "status":"approved",
    "title":"jlelse's Blog",
    "content":"Some people don’t wear their mask over mouth and nose.That’s something I don’t understand at all. If some people wear masks, why don’t they wear them right? I see that sometimes when I go for a walk alone. People pass by me who have a mask over their mouth, but their nose is not covered.In order to generally avoid the narrowness in the supermarket more, I now only go shopping once a week at most and drive to a supermarket that is much bigger and where one can keep more distance than in the supermarket around the corner. Another advantage: The offer is also much better and there are still more of the things I want to buy. (But they didn’t have toilet paper either.)",
    "author_name":"Jan-Lukas Else",
    "type":"comment"
  }
]

To use this new implementation, simply pull zerok/webmentiond:latest and restart your server 🙂

I’ve also updated the rendering of mentions on my blog, which makes the mention listed above to appear like this:

Rendering of the comment on zerokspot.com with special indicator that it is indeed a comment

Spotify, Sonos, Streams, ... and guests

Tue, 05 May 2020 07:58:08 +0200

Recently I ran into a weird issue with my Sonos and Spotify setup. For some reason, playback on my phone stopped repeatedly. After a couple of tries I could narrow it down to be related to the way Sonos and Spotify talk to each other.

How to reproduce:

Start a specific song through the Sonos app.
Go to Spotify and start a different song.
After a couple of second the playback through Sonos will stop.

This is a quite annoying as I sometimes start the Chillout Lounge in the living room for guests while I have to do something else in another room and still want to listen to some music. I was really surprised when my partner came over and asked me if I had stopped the music. She had also tried to start it again using the hardware button on the Sonos and the playback through Spotify on my phone stopped at about the same time. With the issue’s cause being narrowed down I simply opened some on-device MP3s for those couple of minutes I need to be away from the living room.

The next day I started looking through some of the discussions on the Sonos discussion boards but couldn’t find anything particularly useful. The whole setup with what counts as single stream and what doesn’t seems to be rather fuzzy (no idea how that’s supposed to be work, but anyway). Coincidentally, I had stumbled upon Tom MacWright’s post about music hoarding. I also tend to buy at least my favourite songs as MP3s (or in another format) for situations where they either disappear from Spotify or that service is simply not available for some reason or another. I’ve now also added “Having guests” to the lists of reasons to have an offline-archive of music 😂

Comments using Webmentions (some planning)

Mon, 04 May 2020 10:21:48 +0200

With my current webmention implementation being rather stable now I think I’ll set a new goal for the project: I want it to also support comments as defined on the IndieWeb wiki. With this extension to the protocol the target of a mention checks the content of the source for additional information about the content in order to display it like a classic “comment” at the target URL.

This has implications for the receiver and the sender of a mention.

The sender/source

The actual webmention itself looks exactly the same but the document that is available at the source has to have some specific characteristics in order to be recognised as comment. A slightly slimmed down version of these requirements for a source document includes these:

It has to have a h-entry.
Ideally, that h-entry should hold an in-reply-to URL so that the target knows if it was just mentioned or if the source is meant as a comment to the target.
It should contain either an e-content or p-summary element that is “not too long” and that should then be displayed by the target.

These are all things I will have to include in my Hugo setup. At this point, I think, I’m going to just add another parameter to posts that are meant as comments which points to the page I want to comment and render that link according to the comment-rules described above. If time permits, I want to get this done over the course of the next couple of days.

The receiver/target

Since I also want to render comments on zerokspot.com, I will have to extend the content parser inside webmentiond and add more microformat2 support. Or (more likely) I will finally give willnorris/microformats a try 😅 In any case, the Mention struct will probably gain a couple of new fields:

Content
AuthorName
AuthorURL
AuthorImage
Type

In the case of a comment, the Type will probably simply be comment to distinguish it from a “normal” mention.

I have no idea yet when I will get around implementing this. I hope, though, it won’t take me too long to get this into webmentiond. I really want it now that I’ve seen comments in the wild 😅

Virtual beer festival

Mon, 04 May 2020 08:33:47 +0200

Saturday night was slightly different from our usual program. While we normally watch some how/movie followed by the Zeit im Bild 2 news program before going to bed, we dialled into a Zoom call around 10pm to listen to some brewers from Oregon talking about their latest creations and how they are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis.

Two days before that I had stumbled across a post by one of my favourite breweries in Portland about the “Stay home, drink beer” festival organised by the Oregon Brewers Guild. Looking through the schedule I found a couple of things that sounded interesting, 1pm PST (10pm CEST) was ok, and for only $5 I didn’t really mind if I only saw about a quarter of the talks before going to bed after a long day 🙂

The whole event was organised on Eventbrite with a page on Facebook for discussions and other tracks. The main track was a Zoom webinar moderated by Chrstina LeRue and Tony Roberts from the Guild. Since I don’t have a Facebook account anymore and don’t want to reopen that specific Pandora’s box I just joined the main Zoom call and used AirPlay to put it onto our living room TV after grabbing a bottle of my favourite beer that is also available here: Hoegaarden Blanche 😁 Sorry, there’s simply no way to get an Oregon-brewed beverage 😔

Due to the late hour we only listened to the first three talks but really enjoyed them! At first, John Harris of Ecliptic Brewing told some stories from his long career and also presented some of his new and old favorites. I immediately went to Ecliptic’s website to check their food and beer menu just to add it to my list for the next time I’m in that area.

After about half an hour, a panel discussion started with Nick Arzner, Dan Malech, and Ben Parsons talking about what their respective companies had to do to stay operational and distribute their beer. Turns out that with restaurants and bar being closed, draft is mostly dead and the first thing they had to figure out was to get rid of their already filled kegs. Some even went out and drove from street to street for people to get some beer using their growlers etc. I’m actually really surprised that something like that hasn’t happened in Austria, too.

The last call we sat in on before calling it a night was with Josh Pfriem and Gavin Lord of Pfriem giving a tour through their new barrel-aging facility which they use to produce, for instance, a Belgian dark aged in cognac barrels or an apricot or nectarine ale. These two immediately made it onto my must-try list!

After that I immediately went to bed so I cannot write anything about the rest of the program. That being said, the part of the festival that we were awake was great! Big thanks to the organisers and stay safe!

Supporting magazines and newspapers

Sun, 03 May 2020 10:55:57 +0200

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that I more and more enjoy reading long-form articles again compared to “just the news”. There is just something really special about an article about a single topic that looks at it at great detail and also shows it from multiple angles.

At the same time, I never wanted to get a newspaper subscription for two reasons: At least in Austria they are extremely expensive. A subscription of Der Standard is normally € 49.90 per month. It’s pretty much the same for Die Presse et al. The second reason is that I know that I would never get around reading everything. I’ve had a Wired subscription for many, many years now and back when I still received their print magazine, most issues ended up in my basement still covered in the shrink-wrap.

Even with the move to e-paper or dedicated applications (in the case of Wired) I still only get around to read a tiny fraction of what’s offered. Luckily, most magazines and newspapers now offer special online-only subscriptions where you simply get around the paywall for their website or just get the good feeling of supporting a medium that you really enjoy reading. This also allows me to read content from various sources. As of last month I subscribe to the following publications to get my fix of long-form journalism:

Wired Magazine
Der Standard (Austrian newspaper) to keep up to date with what’s going on in Austria
Ars Technica for their day-to-day coverage of tech and science
New York Times for their coverage of COVID-19 in the USA and also for their cooking and life-style section 😄

All of these are quite high quality and I simply want to help keeping them operational. Especially with the transition from print to digital pretty much every “classic” newspapers has struggled but some recognised the change early on. Der Standard and the New York Times are probably among the latter and having a subscription is simply a good way for me to say “Thank you” 🙂

At this point I’m pretty sure that I will also eventually subscribe to the German Die Zeit but for now I have enough to read every day! Do you also enjoy reading long-form? Do you also have some subscriptions?

WriteTheDocs 2020 events going online

Sat, 02 May 2020 10:14:11 +0200

Not surprisingly, the organizers of the WriteTheDocs conference series announced two days ago that they would move at least the Portland and the Prague events scheduled for this year to become online-only events. It’s not yet clear how that will actually all work but for those who’ve already purchased tickets there are options to either convert them to online tickets or getting a refund. Given the quality of the previous events I’m quite confident that it will be worth just converting your ticket 🙂

I guess they will also eventually re-open the ticket sale for the Portland event once they have a clear plan what that event will look like. So far, at least, it’s scheduled for some time in August with the Prague one following some time this fall. I was already really looking forward to another great week in Prague in September but I can definitely understand why this online-move was made. This, though, has the advantage that I can at least try to attend but events again without having to finance a trip to the US AND the Czech Republic 😅