musings

tl;dr Apple’s own Journal app is not much more than a proof of concept for the Journaling Suggestions API. Which in fact is a nice addition to all other journal apps out there. »

Ich bin kein großer Podcast-Hörer. Einigen weithin empfohlenen (gehypeden) Podcasts bin ich kürzlich wieder entfolgt, ich habe nicht die Zeit1 um - ansonsten von mir durchaus geschätzten - Unterhaltungskünstlern beim belanglosen Labern zuzuhören, oder dabei, wie sie sich mit ihrem Gegenüber über ihre eigenen Witze amüsieren. »

My family gifted me the X-Wing Fighter LEGO set from the MICROFIGHTERS series. It is one of the early sets in this series, dating from 2014, and they bought it used. »

A common complaint with Mastodon or the Fediverse in general is that the registration for new users is too complicated because they have to choose a server aka an instance. »

I recently learned about a new font called Fixel, which was developed at MacPaw in collaboration with Ukrainian type foundry AlphaBravo. The font is offered under an open license, and since I liked the fresh clean look and good readability combined with some distinctive characteristics1, I decided to fixelize this blog. »

As an afterthought to my first try at bicycle routing in Apple Maps1, of course I tried what everyone does nowadays: I asked our new intelligent overlord a trained chatbot for its advice on a nice bicycle-friendly route in my hometown of Cologne, Germany. »

Note: this post is in German, since it mostly concerns the local cycling situation in my hometown of Cologne and how it is reflected in Apple Maps Cycling. »

Some paperbacks from the Discworld series. Probably in the late 90s, when I had catched up with the then current instalment in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and was compulsively checking into the bookstore patiently waiting for the next release, was the last time my unread books pile had a height of zero. »

fi ligature (left) vs. no ligature (middle and right) Being accustomed to common ligatures in print and ebooks, I cannot unsee this. In particular cases as shown on the right — where the arc of the “f” badly clashes with the dot of the “i” and results in a very unfortunate overlap of the two letters — spring to my eye and make me wonder if there is some kind of dirt or bug on the screen. »

Modern e-reader devices come with several fonts pre-installed, some of them exclusives, e.g. Bookerly or Ember on Amazon kindle devices, Nickel and Kakugo on Kobo, while some are available in the public domain1, such as the Tolino pre-installed fonts Vollkorn or Bitter. »