Keep your hope
Everything hurts right now.
You open your phone. War. Collapse. Crisis. Corruption. Some days, it feels like watching the world burn down to ash in real-time.
[…]
But powerlessness is a lie we tell ourselves.
Your circle of control exists. It’s real. Not as a motivational concept or a bullshit management framework but as the basic building block of action.
This morning I woke up and realised that my hope for the coming election in Germany is probably in vain. That it will be as devastating as it was when we came to understand that the Democrats lost in America. Maybe even more devastating. Because fascism could return to Germany after 90 years.
Posts like the one above from Joan help me. Maybe they help you to?
Heute morgen wieder die Kinder zur Schule gebracht. Dabei gesehen, dass auch Tramfahrer nur Menschen sind, manchmal zu schnell fahren und dann nicht mehr rechtzeitig bremsen können. Glücklicherweise nur Blechschaden bei dem Auto, wo die Tram hinten drauf fuhr. Dass so etwas vor der Schule meiner Kinder passiert macht mich etwas nervös.
Finished reading: Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb 📚
Cried for the last 400 pages. What a book. What an ending. Intensive feelings as these is what books can give. More so than movies. I know these characters. They are my friends.
I recently started using a Bookwyrm instance (bookrastinating.com) to manage my book reading. They support ActivityPub and offer some more functionality regarding reading goals and book reviews. Is there anything planned on integrating with Bookwyrm @manton?
I started reading this a few days ago as a loan from the lib: What A Way To Go by Bella Mackie 📚
Very fun and just my kind of humor:
I rolled my eyes, closed the window and went back to bed. As I fell asleep, I remembered to practise gratitude. I was immensely grateful that despite the gruesome way my husband died, he’d done it with his clothes on, and not, like Jane Borrall’s husband, naked but for a latex trench coat.
The ugly American.
dgardner.substack.com/p/the-ugl…
Found through @Buddenbohm@fnordon.de
(if only so many good ppl wouldn’t share on Substack 😭)
Finished reading The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson 📚 yesterday evening. Stayed up until after 11pm to finish the book. My regular bed time would have been at around 9.30pm 🫣
I liked the trilogy very much. The ending has a believable, moving conclusion. I was captivated by the series. 🫶
More on AI. And fun with Jenny Lawson.
I just read an article from Jenny Lawson about how using AI is going very strong for her: No, I do not want AI to “polish” me.
But after I added the update gmail was like, “YOU’RE STILL DOING IT WRONG, IDIOT?” and the polish thing came up again and I was like, “Are you trying to AI fix a paragraph where I say how much I don’t want AI to fix shit?” And turns out, yeah, that exactly what it meant because it gave me this
I will not (hopefully!) write that much about AI in the future but yeah. It was too good to not share with you. Also: I mentioned recently how I sometimes use AI but didn’t give an example. So here is one. I like to use LLMs to rewrite my English sentences in a more idiomatic way. I use this mostly for writing where it’s important for me the reader has little option to mis-interpret my words. Because they might be bad English.
Found via @manton: www.manton.org/2025/01/2…
It crept up on me subtly.
First, I stopped reading documentation. Why bother when AI could explain things instantly?
Then, my debugging skills took the hit. Stack traces now feel unapproachable without AI. I don’t even read error messages anymore, I just copy and paste them.
I’ve become a human clipboard, a mere intermediary between my code and an LLM.
I sincerely hope you don’t share the author’s experience.
paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-pat…
The likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, however, surely have that kind of money, yet they’re prostrating themselves before Trump. They aren’t stupid; they have to know what kind of person Trump is and understand — whether or not they admit it to themselves — the humiliating nature of their behavior. So why do they do it?
My default apps
Inspired by Matt Stein’s post on the same topic: mattstein.com/thoughts/…
📨 Mail Client: Mail.app, SpamSieve + GPG Suite
📮 Mail Server: iCloud Mail + self-hosted
📝 Notes: Obsidian
✅ To-Do: I don’t use to-do lists anymore. If I need a reminder, I use Apple reminders
📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone, Halide + Camera.app
🎨 Photo Editing: Darkroom, Pixelmator Pro
📆 Calendar: Fantastical
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud
📖 RSS: Reeder
🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
🌐 Browser: Vivaldi
💬 Chat: Apple Messages
🔖 Bookmarks: I don’t bookmark anymore
📑 Read It Later: Readwise
📜 Word Processing: nothing
📈 Spreadsheets: Apple Numbers
📊 Presentations: iA Presenter
🛒 Shopping Lists: Apple Reminders
🍴 Meal Planning: nothing
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Apple Numbers
📰 News: Blogs and newsletters
🎵 Music: Apple Music
🎤 Podcasts: Overcast
🔐 Password Management: 1Password
🧑💻 Code Editor: Neovim
✈️ VPN: Proton VPN
Bonus Items
🚀 Launcher: Alfred
🐚 Terminal: Ghostty
☂️ Backup: Used to be Arq + S3 + Cubbit. Currently re-evaluating
🚫 Ad Blocking: Relying on Vivaldi
🔎 Search Engine: Ecosia
📓 Journaling: Obsidian
🗂️ Version Control: Lazygit, Fork
🖼️ Screenshots: -
🐘 Mastodon Client: I follow Mastodon people through micro.blog
👨💻 Local Development: -
🗄️ Code Repositories: GitHub
🛌 Sleep Tracking: Apple Health
💽 Database Manager: -
📖 Reading: Tolino
✍️ Writing: Obsidian, Scrivener
🧾 Invoicing and Time Tracking: -
👨🎨 Design: -
🕹️ Games: a few but too little time
📊 Web Analytics: -
🗺️ Maps + Driving Directions: Apple Maps + CarPlay
🎬 Filmography Reference: Callsheet
Lots of things I do not (need) to use anymore since I gave up being self-employed.
THIS. IS. SO. GOOD!
How I created a “On this day” feature in Obsidian for my journaling
I journal almost daily writing my thoughts into Obsidian. They appear as entries in my Daily post. Previously, I journaled in DayOne. There I wrote using Markdown format for a few years. When I switched to Obsidian I was able to export everything from DayOne in Markdown format. When I imported they entries into Obsidian, I got this file/folder structure.
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8969/2025/492db98be7.png"height="400" alt="">
In the image you can see that I have a top-level folder called “DayOne” with subfolders for each notebook (or whatever it was called in DayOne). In “Tagebuch” (That’s journal in German) I have all my daily journal entries reaching back until 2012. DayOne had this awesome feature called “On This Day” where you were presented with all your entries from the current day from previous years.
I built that for myself in Obsidian and now I’ll share how I did it.
First, create the note that you want the contents to show up in. I called it “On this day”. You will need the Dataview plugin. In your note create a dataview snippet like this. I’ll explain what it does in a second:
dataviewjs
const date = dv.date('today')
const todayDay = date.day
const todayMonth = date.month
dv.list(
dv.pages('"DayOne"').where(p =>
p.dates && p.dates.length > 0 &&
p.dates[0].month === todayMonth && p.dates[0].day === todayDay
).distinct().forEach(page => {
dv.paragraph("![["+page.file.path+"]]")
})
)
dv.list(
dv.pages('"1 Projekte/0 log/daily"').where(p => {
const fileDate = dv.date(p.file.name);
if (fileDate) {
fileDate.month === todayMonth && fileDate.day === todayDay
} else { return false }
}).distinct().forEach(page => {
dv.paragraph("![["+page.file.path+"]]")
})
)
What I am doing here is getting today’s day and month. I don’t care for the year since I want to have entries for all previous years. Then I use the Dataview feature of creating a list from the pages inside a folder: dv.list(dv.pages('"DayOne"') The double quotes inside single quotes is a Dataview thing. It’s documented and simply has to be like that.
Then I filter the list of all the pages in the DayOne folder by day and month:
.where(p => p.dates && p.dates.length > 0 && p.dates[0].month === todayMonth && p.dates[0].day === todayDay). This works because my frontmatter in Obsidian has a dates entry that is of the type date. It’s not only text but Obsidian knows this is a date and can separate it into day and month components. The frontmatter was setup by DayOne and part of the export of the entries.
For my own journal entries created in Obsidian I don’t always have that date in the frontmatter. But I have the date as part of the filename. That’s what I deal with in the second part of that Dataview query. I parse the filename and create a date from it so I can again compare the day and month: const fileDate = dv.date(p.file.name)
What’s remaining for both list of pages is to create paragraphs that get embedded into the current note/page so I can see the contents of the entries:
.distinct().forEach(page => { dv.paragraph("![["+page.file.path+"]]") })
The syntax ![["+page.file.path+"]] is typical Obsidian for embedding a note that you know the name of.
Everytime I open the On This Day note in Obsidian the whole Dataview query is run and the contents updates.
It also shows images:
Just looked at the cookie banner for The Verge (@manton shared a post from them and I wanted to take a look at it).
This is ridiculous. Functional cookies are usable for 810 partners? They transmit 2.6MB of JS for that article. It’s only text with 4 images.
Eine typische Siri Situation 🤦
Leonie verlässt das Bad, geht in ihr Zimmer und sagt in ihr Zimmer hinein: „Hey Siri, weiter!“ Daraufhin antwortet Siri im Bad: „Wiedergabe hier fortsetzen oder in Leos Zimmer?“ Ich antworte, im Bad stehend: „In Leos Zimmer“ Darauf Siri: „Ich kann den Lautsprecher nicht finden.“ 🤦
Currently reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson 📚 That’s the third part of the Mistborn trilogy and I am already in chapter 4 or so?
Finished reading: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens 📚 Finished a few days ago. Took from it what I needed and skipped the rest. Thank you for library books. 🫶😎
Finished reading: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson 📚
Just wonderful and captivating. Had to buy the last book in the series right away.
🥳🫶
Maybe on a day like this it is a good idea to look to the Stoics. Gain trust in yourself and the good people around you. Do what’s right. Don’t despair.
Here’s the whole text of this excerpt from the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holliday.
DON’T BE DISTRACTED BY DARKNESS
There’s no question that depressing things happen in this world. They always have and always will. People lie, cheat, steal. Envy, avarice, selfishness-it’s all out there. And it’s hard to miss. I’s easy to despair about this. What do we do? Must it be this way? What’s the point of being good when everyone else is so bad? This is the wrong way to think about it. It’s not up to us to change this unchangeable part of the human species, but instead to think about how to adapt to it, how to integrate it into our understanding of the world and not let it make us miserable. That’s a big part of why the Stoics talk about ignoring what other people do-their lying, cheating and stealing— and focusing on what we do. On making sure that we hold ourselves to a higher standard and put our energy towards evaluating ourselves according to those standards rather than projecting it onto others. Marcus’s best advice on this is worth remembering today: instead of talking about other peoples selfishness and stupidity, our job is “to run straight for the finish line, unswerving.”
To not be distracted by the darkness of others, to head towards the light. To be good without hesitation, even when other people are not. That’s our job. Today and for our whole lives.