Back From Prolonged Hiatus…

Yes, it has been a while since I last posted. To be honest, I’ve not felt a great need to write anything here. I’ve still be writing in my private journal every day, and that takes care of a lot of my need to get stuff out of my head.

There are a few things to report on in my world:

1. I gave Obsidian another try-out last month. I also bought and worked through the new Field Guide that David Sparks has produced. I now understand how Obsidian works and what it can be useful for — but for now, it’s not something that I need. While note-taking is something I’ll do more of in the future, I don’t foresee any use for back-links. I have the advantage of already using DEVONthink to help gather & manage information. If I were transitioning away from macOS, I may take up Obsidian or something similar. That something that may happen long-term, but for now I’m good.
2. I’m currently trying out Kagi Search after years of using DuckDuckGo. I like that I can still use DuckDuckGo-style Bangs for specialised searches. But would I pay monthly for a search engine? That I’m not sure about yet.
3. I got my winter flu job and Covid booster shot last month, after some uncertainty over whether I’d get the latter. I’m glad for both, but I’m not going to get complacent. The signs are that new Covid variants are here and hitting the UK hard.
4. I gave the Orion browser another go recently. It’s an odd beast — built on WebKit, but able to install and use Chrome and/or Firefox extensions. On paper, that would make it a clear winner over Safari, whose extension support is much more limited. But, while there are a lot of features of Orion that I liked, it had too many rough edges for my personal usage pattern. So I’m now back on Safari.
5. The experiment with Orion wasn’t a fruitless exercise. It made me take a long, hard look at how many extensions I had installed versus how many I was actually using. As a result, I’ve removed several extensions from my personal toolkits.

Also worth noting, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, is that I didn’t upgrade to macOS Sonoma last month. But I did move my system disk over to a new 2TB external SSD this week. The 480GB SSD I’d been using showed signs that it might be having problems. That in turn was a stop-gap replacement for my old 500GB LaCie SSD which was nearing the end of its lifespan. The new drive, made by Samsung, is only slighty larger than the SanDisk that it replaces, and much snappier! The march of progress, eh?