Mine In Mono

Written by Robert, a Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, software dev manager and paper airplane mechanic. This project is an effort to celebrate the earlier days of blogging.

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  • Oh HEY, Hello

    I have to admit something: After writing about quitting the email service HEY from 37Signals, I ended up going back and resubscribing (before my data was deleted). Sure, I tried other services. Proton was a total bust. I ran into bugs that rendered the platform unusable, unless I wanted to wait for hours to be able to access the emails the alerts were telling me I had in my inbox, or deal with the emails that, for some reason, couldn’t be deleted. Fastmail was better, but lacked polish. There were some unpainted spots, carpet that had a few stains, etc.

    When HEY warned me that my data would soon be deleted, I dutifully entered my credit card information and resubscribed for another year. Reading debates about the service, I often come across discussions about the unique features, such as the screener. People have come up with some clever hacks to replicate the functionality of the screener in other email tools. My needs/wants are not so simple, though.

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  • So sentiments expressing objective claims of morality or beauty are still, as in Lewis’s day, found to be offensive, but sentiments expressing identity are seen as sacred.

    Alan Noble, on C.S. Lewis and education

  • Bio Vinyl

    I noticed that The Cure was advertising their heavily praised new album Songs From A Lost World in a bio vinyl format. I was curious about what that meant. Fortunately, I had my good buddy Claude to help answer the question. He responded with this:

    Bio vinyl refers to vinyl materials manufactured using bio-based or renewable raw materials instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients. This type of vinyl is part of a broader category of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics.

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  • Vinyl Me? No Thanks.

    Just as I’m starting to get back into vinyl records, one of the format’s proponents, a popular record club called Vinyl Me, Please is shutting down.

    Since launching in 2012, Vinyl Me, Please has offered boutique, collectible record pressings to a subscriber base paying as much as $654 a year for the highest-tier membership, as The Denver Post’s John Wenzel reported last month. The article traces the period of instability back to the firing, in March 2024, of three senior staff, whom the board of directors allege had conspired to divert company funds to build a pressing plant. Cameron Schaefer, the company’s former chief executive, said he believed that he and the two others had been fired to save on severance.

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  • The Precarious Fox

    It seems that being a Firefox user means being in a constant state of trepidation about whether the app will last the year. For a long while now, it has been well known that the browser’s very survival depends on the largesse of its search partner, Google. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, is a non-profit, but it gets 85% of its funding thanks to the commercial interests of the biggest beneficiary of ad revenue on the internet.

    Once again, the threat of the infusion of cash from Google in exchange for placement as Firefox’s default search engine disappearing is imminent. The latest risk for Mozilla is thanks to the Department of Justice case against Google.

    The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals.

    The sad irony is that the pursuit of the DOJ to expand user choice in the area of search would limit user choice in the browser space. I have some sympathy for the argument against doing that. For all the bluster from the DOJ over the last few decades about bundled browsers, it’s easy enough for a consumer to switch if that is what they want to do. The choice is free for the making.

  • Hookmark + Linkding

    It’s hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of Hookmark until recently. The crowd I follow online doesn’t tend to miss Mac productivity tools, but this one seems to have escaped mass publicity within that community. The premise seems like a powerful one:

    Hookmark is the standalone contextual bookmarking app. It complements your launcher by also being the contextual launcher. Hookmark enables you to create and link robust bookmarks to files, emails, tasks and more, making it easy for you to access information without needing to search.

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