There’s an aphorism that’s attributed to Steve Jobs that I’ve often used to spur on my own artistic endeavors:
“Real artists ship.”
Those three simple words convey a whole host of underlying meaning, and personally I find it incredibly helpful to refocus my own efforts toward the end goal: shipping my art for the world to see.
I’ve had several pet projects I’ve been working on, in some cases for multiple years, that I keep tinkering away on with no end in sight. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that – it’s good to have side projects that sharpen your craft or serve as test beds for learning – but at least one of the projects has been eating away at me, calling out for me to ship it.
So over the next little bit, I’ll put in the final touches of work needed to get it to v1.0, and ship it. Stay tuned!
A partial screenshot of <redacted> (I’ve already said too much!)
The Mac Studio I ordered the day after launch finally arrived, and it’s been so worth it. It’s been an incredibly fast and responsive desktop, and I love that there’s now an Apple desktop that makes sense if the iMac doesn’t suit your needs (like if you own a Pro Display XDR). I decided to set it up from scratch as a new machine and document all of the things I did on day one to get it configured for my daily workflows, and wanted to write it all down.
Installed Launchbar and replaced Spotlight as the default action for ⌘+Space
Installed Bartender and hid as many of the system menu bar items as possible
Changed the trackpad settings to my preferences (enabled tap-to click, enabled silent clicking, changed “Swipe Between Pages” to three fingers)
Enabled full disk access for Terminal
Enabled iCloud Syncing for iMessage
Enabled iCloud Drive for Desktop and Documents folders
Authorized the computer for iTunes Apple Music
Installed iStat Menus (woah, so many CPU cores!), and fiddled around with the menu bar items some more
Installed Xcodes, started downloading the latest version of Xcode
Installed Sleeve and set it up the way I like it (album art pinned to the bottom right corner of the desktop, floating on top of all windows when a track changes)
By this point I felt like the machine was in a pretty good spot, and I’ve definitely needed to tweak and install things since then, but now I have a playbook for the next time I need to set up a new machine from scratch.
The config I went with is the M1 Ultra (20-core CPU, 48-core GPU) with 64GB of memory and 4TB of internal SSD storage 💸 ↩︎
It’s been almost three years since I last wrote about my remote work setup, and a lot has changed in everyone’s lives since then. It was time for me to post some new photos of my home office, and write about some of the things that help me do my best work. But first, let’s talk a little bit about remote work almost two years into the pandemic.
I wanted to have fun on the internet again. Around a decade ago (wow, time flies!), I remember lots of little landing pages built just for fun. There were no monetization strategies or traffic expectations. These were websites built simply to showcase fun content, play with fun technologies, or a combination of the two.
A while ago, I got into mechanical keyboards. I was intrigued by a picture posted to Twitter by @garrettmurray. All three of the keyboards he showed were interesting, but the bottom one – the little guy – was the one that caught my eye the most. I had to have it.
