Conlin’s Cafe

There’s a new cafe/bakery in Somerville, across the street from my apartment. It’s in a storefront that’s been vacant for a few years, and had previously been used for a succession of three or four bagel shops. These were all traditional NJ bagel shops, and all of them were pretty good. Since the last one closed, there really hasn’t been a good place in Somerville to get a fresh bagel. (This may have actually helped quite a bit with my weight loss over the last few years.) Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks have bagels, of course, but they’re not really bagels, if you know what I mean.

I’ve been to the new place once, and had a sandwich and cappuccino. They were both OK, but not amazing or anything. I need to try their bagels and see if they’re any good.

There are now three places in town that could reasonably be described as “coffee shops”: Starbucks, Dragonfly, and Conlin’s (the new place). There was an interesting article in The Guardian recently about how coffee shops have become a signifier of urban change. Something does seem to be happening to Somerville, with new, expensive, apartment buildings going up, and fancier stores on Main Street. I guess I can’t complain about any change that allows me access to better coffee. But I hope my rent remains affordable.

Night Coffee

After having, I think, a bit too much coffee on Friday and not sleeping well, I stuck with decaf over the weekend and slept pretty good on Saturday night and very good last night. I woke up at around 5:30 this morning, and feel pretty good about it. Here’s a relevant Diesel Sweeties comic. (My “night coffee” on Friday was supposed to be a decaf cappuccino, but I suspect they might have screwed up and given me a regular.)

I’m feeling kind of optimistic this morning, which is really unusual for a Monday morning. Maybe it was all the fresh air and exercise I got over the weekend. I should really get more of that.

Apple Watch

So I gave in and bought an Apple Watch today. Specifically, I bought the larger Sport Watch, so it cost $350, minus the $150 gift card that I had. I took a walk to the mall today, since it was such a nice day, and talked myself into trying one on at the Apple Store. So I did that. Then, somehow, I got sucked into the Apple Store reality distortion field and actually bought one.

My first impression is that the Sport band is weird, and I’m not sure I’m going to get used to it. It’s a little hard to put on; you have to tuck one end under the other, and it’s a little tricky to get it done right. But hopefully it’ll get easier as the band gets broken in and I get used to it. There’s a good review on the Sport band at iMore. I’m also hoping I don’t turn out to be allergic to the material the band is made of. (If that’s an issue, I’ll probably find out soon, since I plan on wearing the watch for the rest of the day.)

In terms of functionality, I’m not sure what use I’ll really get out of it, other than the obvious one: telling me what time it is. I did just get a notice on it that it’s time for me to stand up and move around a bit, so maybe that’ll turn out to be a helpful feature.

thinking about Apple Watch

Trading in my old iPhone 5s got me a $150 Apple Store gift card. (And apparently Apple got $40 million in gold. Though I guess not just from my iPhone.)

The Apple Store has a limited product selection, so I’m not sure what to do with my $150. I’ve thought about applying $100 to getting AppleCare+ for my new phone. But I’m not a big fan of AppleCare; I’ve never been in a position in the past where I needed service on an Apple product, and AppleCare would have paid for it, if I had it. When stuff goes wrong, it’s usually either before the standard warranty expires, or well after the extended warranty would have expired.

I also thought maybe I could buy a year of Office 365 to extend my subscription, but they only sell the “personal” single-machine version, not the Home version that I use.

So I’m also thinking about maybe buying an Apple Watch. The watch has been out for about a year now, and there have been a few articles looking at how it’s done over that first year, including this one from the NY Times and another on Hodinkee. There was also an interesting thread on Reddit recently.

My $150 would get me halfway to the $300 price for an Apple Watch, so that makes the watch seem a bit more reasonable to me. I still like my Swatch Sistem51, but an Apple Watch might be kind of fun.

(Update: Apple probably didn’t get $40 million in gold from recycled iPhones.)

John Ashbery

I’ve been reading old issues of the New Yorker at lunch time recently. (I’m still working through the backlog of issues from the last time I had a subscription.) Earlier this week, I came across a poem by John Ashbery. I first read his poetry back when I was in college, for a class, and remember enjoying it. I don’t usually like most of the poetry in the New Yorker, but once in a while something clicks. So it got me thinking about Ashbery and maybe picking up a book of his work. I checked Amazon, and was surprised to see that the first few I looked at weren’t available for the Kindle.

I didn’t think too much about it, but I stumbled across this old article from the NY Times today, which explains a few things. It makes sense, and it’s good to know that I can pick up a number of his books in ebook format, though they’re kind of expensive. The 100-page Three Poems is $15 on Kindle, while the 1000-page hardcover Collected Poems is just under $30. So you can get the complete text of his first dozen books in a nice hardcover for $30, or an ebook of just one for $15. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I guess I shouldn’t look for sense in the pricing of poetry books and ebooks.

I don’t understand nearly enough about poetry to tell you why John Ashbery is good, and why I like his work. But I’ve been thinking lately that poetry acts on the brain in a way that’s different from other prose, and perhaps it’s beneficial to read some, now and then.

TextExpander revisited

Since my previous post about TextExpander, they’ve revised their plans a bit. They’re going to keep the current (non-subscription) version around for a while, and they’ve changed the upgrade pricing so that, if you switch to a subscription, you get a lifetime 50% discount instead of just a one-year discount. So that’s pretty cool, but, at this point, I’ve set up all of my snippets in LaunchBar, and they’re working out OK, so I’ll probably drop TextExpander anyway.

There is an interesting blog post about TextExpander, and subscription software in general, at MacDrifter, from before the announced change. It’s got a lot of good info and links in it.

One of the reasons why I was thinking about moving away from TextExpander anyway is the way it handles “secure input” fields. Basically, whenever you’re in a secure input field, TextExpander can’t see what you’re typing, so it can’t expand anything. Which makes sense, and isn’t their fault. But they insist on popping up a notification telling you that, every time you’re in a secure input field. So that’s a bit distracting, and sometimes gets in the way of something that’s behind the notification. And there’s no option to turn off these notifications.

With LaunchBar, you’re not really doing general-purpose text expansion; you need to hit the special key combo to bring up LaunchBar any time you want to expand a snippet. So that’s a bit of a limitation, but it’s also an advantage, since that key combo works wherever you are, so there’s no issue with secure input fields. So I’m probably going to stick with LaunchBar for snippet expansion and give up on TextExpander.

Kindle Oasis

I’ve been thinking about buying a new Kindle for a while now. Since the rumors of a new Kindle surfaced, I decided to hold off and wait to see what they came out with. Well, they just came out with the Kindle Oasis, which is pretty cool, and I want one, but it costs almost $300. So I think I’m going to wait until the next time the Paperwhite goes on sale, and get one of those.

TextExpander subscriptions and related software

I just read the news about TextExpander’s new subscription model. I use TextExpander on my Mac and my iOS devices, and I think it’s good software, but I can’t really see spending $5 per month to keep using it. (Technically, $2 per month for the first year, with their upgrade pricing for current users. But only for the first year.) They have said, in a follow-up blog post, that the old version will keep working for a while longer, so I don’t need to be in a hurry to switch to something else, but I’ll need to switch to something else eventually.

I’m a little worried, as I’ve seen a number of other software vendors take tentative steps toward switching to a subscription model. In many cases, a big part of this is switching from using iCloud or Dropbox for syncing, to a proprietary sync model. That, in itself, is a little worrying too. With Dropbox or iCloud, I have local access to my data, and have it automatically backed up to a reliable cloud provider.

Day One 2 switched from using Dropbox or iCloud to using their own sync service. But they haven’t switched to subscription pricing. (The new version required a new purchase, though, on both Mac and iOS.) The nice thing about the new sync service is that they can offer stuff like IFTTT integration and (at some point) a web front-end. I’m using Day One on a semi-regular basis now, but if they switch to a subscription model, I’ll probably just switch over to using Evernote for journaling, since I’m already paying for Evernote. (Speaking of Evernote, I don’t mind paying for that. I’m getting a lot of use out of it.)

1Password has also started moving towards proprietary sync and subscription pricing, introducing a team plan last year, and a family plan this year. I’m still using the regular single-user version on iOS, Mac, and Windows, and I’m fine with that, and hoping that they don’t move to a subscription model. But, if they do, there’s a fair chance I’d pay for it, since it’s such a valuable piece of software.

Getting back to TextExpander, I’ve been looking at alternatives. On Windows, I use AutoHotKey, which is free open-source software. I’ve been using that for a long time, and I’m really happy with it, so I don’t need to make any change there.

On iOS, I do use TextExpander, but I really don’t get much value out of it. iOS doesn’t really allow an app to grab all the keyboard input on the phone, for obvious reasons, so TextExpander on iOS has to rely on two mechanisms: (1) built-in support for it in certain apps, and (2) a custom TextExpander keyboard. The app support is good, but it’s not in enough apps. (Specifically, Evernote and the Apple Mail app don’t have it.) And the custom keyboard is useful, but it’s missing a lot of capabilities of the regular system keyboard, so I don’t want to use it full time, and it’s a bit of an inconvenience to switch back and forth between keyboards. So, really, I think I can drop TextExpander on iOS and just not bother with text expansion, outside of what I can do with the built-in iOS text expansion.

On the Mac, I do get a good bit of use out of TextExpander. But there are a number of alternatives to it. In particular, I’m thinking about switching to LaunchBar snippets. I’ve already paid for LaunchBar, and I know I’m not using more than maybe 20% of its capabilities, so I’m going to look into it.

Also, this blog post from Craig Pearlman goes over some of the same ground I’ve covered here, and mentions Typinator as a possible alternative. I wasn’t familiar with Typinator, but it looks like it might be a good alternative.