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Jonathan Reed

Contributor

Mastodon: @jonathanreed@techhub.socialEmail: jonathan@macstories.net

Jonathan is a graphic designer at DesignStudio. As well as being a long-time Apple user he is a huge film and television aficionado and is very interested in the intersection between the two mediums and technology. He lives in London with his wife and daughter and is writing his bio in the third person.

444 — November 30, 2024

Sill is Yet Another Way I’m Curating My News Intake

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Sill is Yet Another Way I’m Curating My News Intake

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I’m dealing with my tech anxiety by changing my approach to tech news. The following week, after the U.S. election, I applied that same philosophy to world news. A downside of this change is that there are a few stories that I feel have passed me by or that I haven’t discovered until days after they occurred. Now, a new service from Tyler Fisher called Sill might be able to help me keep up with the stories being discussed by people I know and trust.

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443 — November 23, 2024

A New Tool from Trakt Prompted Me to Update My Letterboxd Shortcut

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A New Tool from Trakt Prompted Me to Update My Letterboxd Shortcut

I’m sure many of you have experienced this: you spend hours sweating over a problem only for someone to come along with an easy solution that takes a fraction of the time and significantly fewer tools. Well, it happened to me this past week. If you’ll remember, a couple of issues ago, I wrote about how I’d managed to obtain my wife’s TV Time data from the company with a GDPR request and used a Python script to – one-by-one – add each entry to her Trakt account. This allowed her to sync with Sequel and continue her TV tracking with a much more pleasant app.

If only I’d waited a week. Last Friday, Trakt introduced a tool for importing all of your tracking history from a wide range of sources. IMDB, Letterboxd, JSON files, and, yes, TV Time, are all supported. So the purpose of this first part of my column this week is to say, “Don’t do what I did!” Instead, head over to the Trakt website to use their very simple tool.

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442 — November 16, 2024

Weather Up: The Interactive Weather Widget I’ve Been Looking For

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Weather Up: The Interactive Weather Widget I’ve Been Looking For

After several years of non-interactivity, widgets became interactive again last year in iOS 17. What we mostly saw emerge were widgets with buttons – either huge, chunky buttons like on the Shortcuts widget or small buttons like on the Reminders widget. Those are great and all, but some developers decided to push those boundaries.

The first and most noticeable app to do so was, unsurprisingly, Widgetsmith. Its Music Collection Flow widget allows you to browse through your music collection in much the same way you could on iTunes back in the day. Other widgets from the likes of Widgetpod also offer a great deal of utility. That said, the one that I’ve been waiting for is a fully interactive weather widget.

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441 — November 9, 2024

Going Blindly Into Python Scripts to Move TV Time Tracking to Sequel

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Going Blindly Into Python Scripts to Move TV Time Tracking to Sequel

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about technology in general, but one area where I have a real weakness is coding, scripting, and the like. I’ve played around with it before, but despite some attempts to learn languages like SwiftUI, my efforts have always petered out. That meant the challenge my wife gave me this week took me way outside my comfort zone.

My wife and I watch quite a lot of TV and movies, and we enthusiastically track everything – down to the episode. I’ve been using Sequel, the MacStories Selects Award-winning app for tracking media, for several years, while my wife has been using TV Time. I used the app before Sequel came along and found it to be decent, if not lacking many features. Recently, my wife’s become frustrated with the app’s stability and has been looking jealously at Sequel’s nice UI on my iPhone every time I open it up to log an episode.

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440 — November 2, 2024

Tech Anxiety and Dealing with the News Firehose

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Tech Anxiety and Dealing with the News Firehose

Source: Ales Nesetril | Unsplash

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s recently had the feeling that tech news is becoming more toxic – that more and more product releases have this semi-political commentary or opinion attached to them. What is a photo? Is AI making a positive difference? Should we have more choices regarding what apps we put on our devices and from where? It can become a bit much. Has the joy of tech news disappeared?

Let’s be clear: I love tech. I love reading about it, I love listening to people talk about it, and I love writing about it. I don’t think that will ever go away. But sometimes, I almost feel like I’m punishing myself getting worked up about the latest generative AI slop machine or some new hateful/just plain stupid thing that Elon Musk has said. (And now, he’s crossing over into politics, which is delightful.) These things can build up to the point that I occasionally feel like it’s hard to find the “good” tech stories.

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