Collin Donnell

Updating My Bluesky Handle Was Surprisingly Easy

I just updated my Bluesky handle to @collin.social. It took roughly ninety seconds to complete, and I can still use the actual domain for other things.

When I had looked at doing the same on Mastodon, it involved configuring a WebFinder route that returns JSON, and once I did, it wouldn’t actually change my handle that’s displayed on Mastodon. With Bluesky, it was just a matter of adding a TXT record to my domain and hitting verify.

I like and use Mastodon, but this is exactly the kind of user experience thing that makes it non-viable for anyone other than tech enthusiasts.

November 26, 2024

Bluesky, Mastodon
Keyboard Shortcut for Proofread on macOS

Of the Apple Intelligence writing tools that were released in beta recently, I’ve found the ones which try to rewrite your text in any way to be pretty bad, at least for me. The one feature I’ve been using many times a day, however, is “Proofread.” It’s sort of between macOS grammar/spellcheck and Grammarly. It’ll see where you missed a comma, fix capitalization, and that sort of thing without changing the tone of your text. It’s even smart enough to not mess up your formatting when writing in Markdown.

In fact, I like it so much I set up a keyboard shortcut for it. If you don’t know, you can set up keyboard shortcuts on your Macintosh for any menu item. I made mine control-command-p. If you’ve never done this before, Apple has a support page that will show you how it’s done.

November 20, 2024

Apple Intelligence, macOS
Why Can’t iOS Have Smart Folders?
On macOS, Apple has the concept of a “Smart Folder” that is found in all kinds of places. Sometimes they’re called something else, but it’s the same concept. Just off the top of my head, they exist in Mail, Contacts, Finder, Music, and Photos.

The only apps I know about that have added them for both macOS and iOS are Reminders and Notes, although I’ve found the implementation of them to be a bit weird. In both of those, you can’t add sub-conditions, so you can say all or any of a list of conditions, but you can’t say “all of these conditions and any of these conditions.” It might sound like a small thing, but it’s not.

Anyway, back to the topic. I want this, and I want Apple to add it. Part of me wonders if it’s just a matter of there not being an equivalent to NSRuleEditor in UIKit or SwiftUI, and so every app would have to implement the control on their own¹.

Apple Photos is the one where I really miss this because Photos libraries tend to be so big, and there are so many ways to slice them. For example, “I want to only see photos taken with this or that camera in the last six months.”

I know this whole thing probably sounds very specific and nerdy to anyone who doesn’t use this feature, but I do, and I think Apple should add it. It’s been fifteen years, Apple. I believe in you. You can do it.
1. Which is what Reminders and Notes did. ↩
November 19, 2024

iOS, macOS
Took Threads Off My Phone

Yesterday, I took the Threads app off my phone. I’d started to think that maybe three different apps for text-based social media (Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky) were too many, but really, it’s just that Threads kind of sucks, and I was tired of wasting my time on it.

Here’s how I’d classify the three as they stand right now:

Threads

Mostly shows me posts from people I don’t know or care about, and is full of engagement bait and MAGA trolls. It’s like Instagram Reels as text-based social media. You either like that or you don’t. I think the algorithmic timeline makes it really easy for trolls to find people to start fights with.

Mastodon

Mastodon is great for me since I only use it through Ivory, and a lot of my friends are there. The problem with Mastodon is that it has terrible discovery, and while it’s full of a bunch of my tech friends, there aren’t a lot of people on it who aren’t tech-enthusiasts. I’d like both, ideally.

Bluesky

It feels the most like Twitter minus the features I don’t care about and without the trolls. I’m sure they’ll show up — like they do everywhere — but without the algorithmic timeline Threads has, I might not be as personally exposed. A lot of people I know are moving to Bluesky, and I’m also connecting with non-tech people. Another big thing is that it doesn’t feel as cut off as Mastodon sometimes does. I never considered it a positive sign that when breaking news happens, you usually find out about it on Mastodon via people posting screenshots from Twitter.

Since it doesn’t seem like 100% of the people I care about will ever be on one or the other, I’m sticking with Mastodon and Bluesky for the foreseeable future.

November 18, 2024

Threads
Collin Dot Everything

I’m not going to say that I’m proud to have spent the amount that a .blog domain costs, but I did, and I’ve moved my primary blog to it. Everything, including the RSS feed and old post URLs should just work.

I don’t know how else to put it but that my other sites were already collin.photo (photo blog) and collin.band (music stuff), and I thought it would be funny to have all three. We’ll see how I feel when it comes time to renew the domain in a year, but for now I’m quite pleased with myself.

November 18, 2024
Where to Follow Me (Mastodon, Bluesky, etc)
Since the world of text-based social media seems to be having another shakeup, I felt like this would be a good time to let people know where to find me across all of the places. As of now, I’m using all of these, so follow me on whichever you like.
- Here, obviously (RSS, mailing list)
- Mastodon @collin@ruby.social
- Bluesky collindonnell.bsky.social
- Threads @fishermansporch
- My photo blog (RSS, mailing list)
- Instagram @fishermansporch
November 17, 2024
My Boring Coding Font Answer

Joe Steel wrote a post about how he uses different monospaced fonts for different apps. I feel boring now since I just use SF Mono for everything (the default in recent macOS).

October 24, 2024
New Photo Blog

In the last few months I’ve started getting really into film photography. If you want to check that out I started a new photo blog at collin.photo. I’m going to be posting photos as I get them developed and writing about where I was or what I was thinking.

So far I’ve mostly been taking photos around Portland, but I also plan on taking some trips and documenting those. If nothing else, photography has been a great way to get me out of my house.

October 5, 2024
Tech Unions with Ethan Marcotte on the Rooftop Ruby Podcast

Joel and I were lucky enough to be joined by Ethan Marcotte to talk about his new book, You Deserve a Tech Union. It’s a fantastic book which I read in it’s entirety before getting to interview Ethan on the show.

After the last year and the horrific treatment many full-time and contract tech workers have received, my thoughts on the idea of tech unions have really changed. I wasn’t against them before, I just didn’t know that it was a realistic thing that could happen. Ethan’s book showed me that organized labor both has a long history in tech, and that there are companies with unions right now, like Kickstarter United.

If you’re not into Ruby, I still recommend listening to this episode, since the entire discussion has nothing to do with Ruby at all, but does have to do with things all tech workers should be thinking about.

You can find the episode on our website, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else you can find podcasts.

September 12, 2023
Dash 7 Released

Dash, a documentation viewer for macOS, just released version 7. I’ve been using Dash for at least nine years, and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t. What Dash does is let you have all of your documentation offline and with full text search. If you’re familiar with the Xcode documentation window, it’s like a better version of that, which also works for man pages, languages, web frameworks, whatever.

This version switches from a once a year upgrade to a $15 a year subscription, which seems insanely cheap for the value you’re getting. If you’re not already a user, you should go try it now.

August 18, 2023