May 22, 2022

Weekender #69

  • Birb watch: everything changes in the birb world so quickly! It feels like the myna babies just arrived a short time ago, but they’re already foraging and learning how to survive on their own. One of the 4 babies has already departed the pack. The other 3 continued to hang out in the driveway for the occasional snack on Saturday. Today (Sunday), there are only 2 myna babies that have visited. Myna parents, Handsome and Matey have been attempting to chase them away from the area. While this is normal behavior due to parents not wanting to compete with their offspring for resources, it’s still sad that the young myna have to depart so quickly.

  • My favorite group, ATARASHII GAKKO! performed a live event at Zepp Diver City in Tokyo this week. Luckily, the event was live streamed so international fans such as myself could enjoy it as well! Audra and I have been fans since 2016, and it’s been really amazing to see how far this group has come. From performing weekly at small clubs as one of 4 or 5 other acts in front of as little as 20 people, to selling out the Zepp is an amazing accomplishment. While the group got the attention of record label 88Rising, and then garnered an international fan base, their slow but steady rise in Japan probably means a lot to them. If you’re curious, buy a streaming ticket to check out their Zepp live performance while you still can.

  • Howard Oakley has done a series of articles this week exploring hard drives and APFS. All of these posts contain a gold mine of info on the file system: APFS vs HFS+ for spinning hard drives, How hard disks get slower as they fill, and How much free space does an APFS disk need

  • Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software released the new outlining app, Bike. I really loved his previous plain text/outlining app, FoldingText and I’ve been wondering what he was working on as a replacement. While Bike isn’t a plaintext editor, it does support .txt and .opml out of the box. I’ve only used it for a short while, but I really like the simplicity of outlining in the app and the ability to hide and show various levels of the outline in order to focus.

  • As I mentioned earlier this week, Google finally released the “no-cost option” for G-Suite legacy users. After months of silence from Google, they did an about face and decided to allow G Suite legacy users to continue using their accounts with all services intact; as long as it was for personal use. Here’s the support document from Google with their explanation.

    • Google really made a mess out of this situation. The pessimistic view might be that had Google led with the “free for personal use” stance, they may never have converted users to become paid business users. Many folks have voiced that they should have led with this instead of waiting until a week before their self-imposed deadline. The amount of angst, anxiety and anger this has caused folks is really making many of them think twice about staying with Google.

    • I decided that I had enough of Google and moved my email to FastMail, and so far it’s been wonderful. I’ll probably do a write up of the experience later. For now, if you’re thinking about switching click here to start your free trial and get 10% off your first year if you sign up Using that link will give me a small kickback on my subscription as well.

  • I made it through the work week with the chill vibes of Nick Wolf’s album Catharsis. I had never heard of Wolf until Metic, another artist that I follow, mentioned his collaboration with Wolf on the track “Dreaming”. The whole album is a lo-fi trip to mellow happiness for me. Listen: Apple Music

by Scott Yoshinaga

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