tag:world.hey.com,2005:/bozhidar/feedBozhidar Batsov2022-08-31T06:47:59Ztag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/228182022-08-30T15:52:59Z2022-08-31T06:47:59ZHEY: Two Years Later<div class="trix-content">
<div>This July marked 2 years since I've started using HEY and I thought a short retrospective is now in order. <br><br>My usage of HEY has been close to none since <a href="https://metaredux.com/posts/2021/07/31/hasta-la-vista-gmail.html">I've discovered Fastmail last year</a>, so I seriously pondered if I should cancel my account - after all at $120/year HEY is not exactly cheap. By now I've emulated almost everything I liked from HEY (e.g. Paper Trail, The Feed, The Screener) in Fastmail fairly well. Killing HEY was the logical thing to do... At the end, though, I decided to give it one more year, for three reasons:<br><br>- HEY keeps getting small improvements every now and then<br>- The service's manifesto and goals still resonate strongly with me and I'm curious to see where it will go<br>- I think HEY World is pretty cool (even if I rarely use it)<br><br>On the other hand - HEY is still a no-go when it comes to using it with multiple domains, third-party clients, etc. The fundamental problems that I've outlined in the past are still here and I guess they are never going away. Fastmail certainly fits my use-cases a lot better. And yet there's something cool and special about HEY. The rebellious spirit perhaps. The email industry needs a few rebels and I remain rooting for HEY to succeed!</div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/170382021-11-18T21:54:52Z2021-11-18T21:58:40ZLiving in the present<div class="trix-content">
<div>A few years ago I came across this quote, attributed to the famous Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu:<br><br></div><blockquote>If you are depressed, you are living in the past. <br>If you are anxious, you are living in the future. <br>If you are at peace, you are living in the present. <br>– Lao Tzu</blockquote><div><br>It resonated extremely strongly with me, as I'm the type of person who's often living in the past or the future. You can only find peace in the present and we must never forget this. Living in the present, however, is a lot harder than it sounds.</div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/165212021-10-25T07:37:52Z2021-10-25T07:37:52ZDaniel Craig is my James Bond<div class="trix-content">
<div>I was never a James Bond fan. I mean I liked the idea of this cool British super spy, but I definitely didn't like the execution (the actual movies) much. Perhaps that's because I grew up during the Pierce Brosnan era. I recall I watched all of his James Bond movies on the big screen, but I hated them all. In hindsight I'm even wondering why I bothered to go and see them, as they all felt like some utterly predictable and shallow action comedy that wasn't particularly funny. <br><br>Fast-forward to 2006 and Daniel Craig's "Casino Royale". I was blown away by this movie! Okay, my expectations were low to none, but still... A down-to-earth James Bond movie with a title character that you can actually relate to. It's that movie and Daniel Craig's portrayal of Bond, that finally made a fan. His troubled past, serious businesslike demeanor, issues of trust and attachment, and subtle sense of humor made this version of 007 the most realistic to date by a large margin. Of course, that's that also factors in my subjective preference for such complex and multi-dimensional characters. There's also no denying that the supporting cast was very solid and that the creative vision was to my liking. I recall back then this reminded me somewhat of the recent "Batman Begins" movie, which took a very similar direction to revive the troubled Batman franchise. <br><br>Admittedly, not all of Craig's Bond movies were great, but obviously this is not his fault. There's only so much that an actor can do with a bad script or a bad director. But even at their worst (Quantum of Solace) the new movies were much better than any 007 movie I can remember. Admitted I don't remember very well the Sean Connery movies, and I've never watched those with Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. I'm sure many people would argue with my assessment and that's fine.<br><br>You might be wondering why I'm even writing this article. Yesterday I watched Craig's final Bond movie "No Time to Die", after re-watching the other 4 movies over the course of the past month. It was a very powerful and emotional experience for me, and I've kept thinking about the movie and Daniel's impact to the character long after the end credits. At this point, for me at least, he's the only legitimate Bond. The one true James Bond. Plain and simple. I watched the first 20 minutes of "Goldeneye" as a point of comparison and it felt like a bad joke compared to any of Craig's movies. <br><br>By the way, here's my personal ranking of all of Daniel Craig's 007 movies:<br><br>1. Casino Royale<br>2. Skyfall<br>3. No Time to Die<br>4. Spectre<br>5. Quantum of Solace<br><br>I can also recommend the short documentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15346636">"Being James Bond: The Daniel Craig Story"</a>. It made me appreciate Daniel's contribution to the evolution of James Bond even more. Now I know why "Quantum of Solace" was so bad!<br><br>So, here we are - right at the very end. Daniel story arc as a Bond is complete. I think it was a truly wonderful idea to create a bunch of connected movies that built on one another and tell the story of 007 from his becoming a 00 agent all the way to him leaving the service. I know that many people hated this and would prefer a bunch of standalone adventures, but certainly not me. I owe a huge "Thanks!" to Daniel Craig for re-imagining an iconic character and for making me a fan! I'm really curious what the future has in store for the franchise. One thing is certain, though - someone will have some mighty big shoes to fill! </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/164462021-10-22T06:39:41Z2021-10-27T14:44:16ZStrong HEY opinions, weakly held<div class="trix-content">
<div>A while ago I was trying to figure out if HEY had some keyboard shortcuts for its text editor (e.g. to make something bold or to start a list) and I came across two articles from the same author:<br><br></div><ul><li><a href="https://hulry.com/hey-email-review/">2 Weeks of HEY and I’m Never Going Back to Ordinary Email</a></li><li><a href="https://hulry.com/hey-email/">The Inflexibility of HEY Founders is Killing the Product</a></li></ul><div><br>They were written a year apart and amused me a lot, because of the sharply contrasting titles and perspectives shared in both of them. I'd say those are some pretty strong HEY opinions, although weakly held. If it were me, I would have probably edited the title of the original article after I decided to go back to "ordinary" email. I value consistency way too much.<br><br>I never had such strong or conflicting opinions of HEY myself - like many people I got curious about the service during the initial launch, as it was heavily hyped on social media, but I never felt it was a perfect fit for me. I liked it that someone was trying to change the status quo, but for various reasons it was immediately apparent to me I won't be making HEY my primary email providers:<br><br></div><ul><li>I couldn't find a good way to deal with huge volumes of notifications-like email. Normally I use folders/labels for those, plus some filters to avoid them landing in my inbox. With HEY the best I could do was to use their "bundled email" functionality, but this felt like a step back.</li><li>No inline responses. I know that's by design with the intention to improve the flow of the conversation, but in some contexts (e.g. programming mailing lists) it's really useful to be able to quote the part of a message your responding to. On the bright side - HEY made me appreciate the simplicity of top posting, which is pretty much what we had with real mail back in the day.</li><li>No keyboard shortcuts in the email editor. That's a big bummer for me, and I have no idea why someone would skip such a basic feature. I hate clicking on some buttons with a mouse for formatting purposes.</li><li>Emails under "Previously Seen" in the Imbox are sorted in the order in which you've read them, not the order in which you've received them. I find this a bit confusing and I would prefer a simple chronological ordering based on the receival time. </li><li>No support for custom domains. hey.com is an awesome domain, but it's just not enough for my needs.</li><li>Operating on multiple emails feels a bit awkward to me.</li><li>No built-in calendar. I'm all for focused products, but email and calendars go hand in hand pretty much everywhere. Every time someone sends me a calendar event on HEY I'm forced to use some external tool.</li><li>HEY is a proprietary product that doesn't work at all with existing email clients. I guess that unavoidable if you want to create something novel, but it's slightly disappointing regardless.</li></ul><div><br>Don't get me wrong - there's a lot to like about HEY, and I think it's probably a perfect fit for many people. I'm just not one of them. I do enjoy:<br><br></div><ul><li>Using HEY to have conversations with people. I'm always excited when I see that an actual human sent me an email. </li><li>The screener. Obviously every email provider has the functionality to block certain senders, but you're way more likely to bother to do this, if it's something that's mandatory for each sender. I know I never blocked senders this aggressively with Gmail, before being exposed to HEY. Fortunately, Fastmail makes it easy to emulate this behavior - there you can just apply a filter targeting all senders that are not in your address book.</li><li>The Feed and the Paper Trail. The Feed rekindled my interest in newsletters delivered over email and the Paper Trail made me work harder to put relevant emails (those I might want to look up later) there. Those are concepts that I also copied to my Fastmail workflow. </li><li>Being able to browse all the attachments is also kind of cool. It really helps me find some files I know I received recently. </li><li>Clips are awesome! I wonder why other services don't have something similar. </li><li>Being able to rename threads is also nice, even if I rarely had to use this functionality. I assume it will be way more valuable if I had a lot of email traffic going through my HEY account.</li></ul><div><br>For me, however, the coolest feature of HEY was introduced after its launch and it's HEY World. I totally love the simplicity of making blogging as simple as writing one email. If only the text editor was a bit better or supported Markdown... One can always dream! </div><div><br>Anyways, going back to the beginning - I was never in love with HEY, and admitted I never used it that much. <br>I never had any strong options of HEY either, and I've seen plenty of those online. Still, I appreciate every effort to modernize/revitalize email, and I'm curious how HEY will evolve over time. That's why I keep paying for it, even if I'm using Fastmail pretty much 99% of the time. Actually, HEY started my journey to find a good privacy-focused Gmail alternative, so for that alone I'd always be grateful to them.<br><br>HEY is a bit expensive, at 100$/year (actually it's 120$/year for me with the VAT included), especially given what the competition is charging (many services start at around 50$/year) and offering (most competitors I checked had way more features). Basecamp will do well to reconsider their pricing structure down the road. At the very least custom domains should be made part of the standard HEY subscription. <br><br>That's all from me for now. <a href="https://batsov.com/articles/2021/08/06/getting-in-touch/">Email forever</a>!<br><br><strong>P.S.</strong> I'd be curious to learn what's your own take on HEY and whether you're still using the service. </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/164272021-10-21T07:41:46Z2021-10-21T21:28:47ZThe land of the free and the dumb<div class="trix-content">
<div>They say that ignorance is bliss and they are totally right. I've always known that our society in Bulgaria is messed up on numerous levels, but it was fairly easy to ignore the majority of the problems as they weren't exactly in my face. I guess you could say I was living in a bubble, that shielded me from most of our grim reality. Then COVID-19 came and it changed it all... <br><br>It turns out I'm living in a country where almost everyone's a "medical expert" (of the anti-vaxxer variety), and where every attempt to introduce measures against the spread of COVID-19 is interpreted by the majority of the population (the anti-vaxxers), as curbing their freedom. As a result we now can claim the following glorious "achievements":</div><div><br></div><ul><li><a href="https://vaccinetracker.ecdc.europa.eu/public/extensions/COVID-19/vaccine-tracker.html#uptake-tab">lowest rate of vaccination in the European Union</a> (only 25%)</li><li>highest rate of mortality in the EU</li><li>highest rate of idiots on social media in the world, spreading false information about vaccines and their safety</li></ul><div><br>While, COVID-19 has somewhat subsided in most of Europe, Bulgaria is now dealing with <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/bulgaria/">a massive 3rd wave</a>.<br>After our government totally failed on the vaccination front (knowing their constituents, no one wanted to press the matter before the upcoming elections), they were finally forced to adopt more "drastic" measures - meaning requiring a "green certificate" (proof of vaccination or a recent COVID-19 test) to visit restaurants, bars, cinemas, etc. And then all hell broke lose... Turns out that almost everyone in our country is a total idiot! Even Gregory House would be shocked the intellectual prowess displayed by some people here:<br><br></div><ul><li>Vaccines will cause any number of deadly deceases, infertility, and maybe even make you a slave of Bill Gates. Some people claim that the RNA vaccines will change their DNA and they'd rather preserve the purity of their body... Apparently, those were the worst vaccines that were ever invented. As I said - it seems everyone here's a medical expert.</li><li>Lots of people claim they already had COVID-19, but they can't prove it. They also claim their natural immunity negates the need for a vaccine, but they can't prove this either.</li><li>The typical Bulgarian is convinced they are smarter than the people from all the developed countries, where mass vaccination programs were successfully carried out. They believe other countries made a grave mistake, but because Bulgarians are smarter, we will thrive. No comment here.</li><li>Some anti-vaxxers started to compare their present situation to the Holocaust in WW II. They went as far as using the star of David as their avatar on social media as a sign of protest. For me, that's just insane!</li><li>Most politicians rallied against the new rules (even if they have been successfully applied in most of </li><li>Europe for a while). Must be a good for their election campaigns.</li><li>Business owners said they didn't fire their vaccinated staff, because they were respecting everyone's freedom. Batshit crazy!</li><li>The anti-vaxxers claim that they don't understand how being against the vaccines is bad for the society. Go figure!</li></ul><div><br>It pains me to see that even that even intelligent people, who I've known for a very long time, are behaving in a very irrational way these days. I spend way too much time on social media and I often can't believe what I'm reading there. It's often so absurd, that I'm wondering if this some form of extreme sarcasm or something. Sadly, however, that's not sarcasm - people genuinely believe all their bullshit. As do the majority of people around them.<br><br>Probably I shouldn't have been too surprised, though. Our people are infamous for being selfish, short-sighted, and having no respect for rules whatsoever. Here's one classic example for you - smoking indoors was formally forbidden in Bulgaria over a decade ago, but the vast majority of restaurants, bars, and clubs still allow it. Why so? Well, no one bothered to enforce the rules and restricting the "freedom" of customers to do what they want would be bad for business (according to the businesses). Fuck this shit! I guess I thought with COVID-19 people would be a bit more reasonable, as their lives were at stake, but it turned out this was nothing but wishful thinking. <br><br>Anyways, for me one thing is quite clear - it's impossible to ignore the level of stupidity in Bulgarian society at this point. Sadly, COVID-19 made this painstaking clear. If we manage to survive this crisis I'll seriously start contemplating relocating somewhere else. The dumb and the free can have our country all to themselves. </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/164152021-10-20T18:25:27Z2021-10-21T19:23:39ZThe MacBook Returns<div class="trix-content">
<div>New is always better my ass, especially when it comes to Apple's computers from recent years! Still, from time to time new is actually better... like this week. I guess by now everyone has heard about the new MacBook Pros that undo a lot of the controversial changes of the previous MBP generation (2016-2020). In no particular order:<br><br></div><ul><li>MagSafe charging is back. You can still charge via a USB-C port as well. Win-win.</li><li>HDMI is back. I hated the USB-C to HDMI dongles so much, as half the time they didn't work with certain beamers.</li><li>SD card reader is back. I rarely used it, but I appreciate its presence. Fewer dongles is always better!</li><li>The dreaded Touch Bar is gone. I think it was the primary reason why I never bought a MBP from the previous generation. That and the crappy keyboard they finally replaced last year.</li></ul><div><br>Feels like 2015, doesn't it? But wait, there's more!<br><br></div><ul><li>Fast-charging over MagSafe. Not a must have for me, but much appreciated regardless.</li><li>Slimmer bezels. Way way overdue, given how the competition has been moving in recent years.</li><li>Much better webcam. It was about damn time!</li><li>Much better displays - slightly bigger, higher res, ProMotion (up to 120Hz). Not that big of a deal for me, but I'll take it gladly.</li><li>The notch. Oh, well - if this was a perfect laptop our lives would be pretty boring, right? We need/love to rant about something!</li></ul><div><br>I have to admit those are some mighty sweet machines, and that's even without factoring the performance and power efficiency of M1 Pro/Max. Those are actually the first MBPs that I have been genuinely excited about since the first MBP Retina was released way back in 2012. But you know what's the most important thing for me in this story? Apple actually listened to user feedback for once! This rarely (never?) happened in the Steve Jobs era (although, to Steve's credit - I doubt he would have ever shipped something like the previous gen MBPs). Seems we're dealing a very different Apple today, and it seems that all of us, who use their products, have some agency. That makes me feel good.<br><br>While, I'm enjoying a lot my time with Windows 10 and my custom built AMD-powered desktop PC, I'll definitely order one of the new Macs (likely the 14 inch model with a mid-range M1 Pro) when they become available here in Bulgaria. Why so? Well, it definitely seems like the most polished laptop around, and the one that provides the best balance of power and battery life. If Intel or AMD manage to create something truly competitive to M1, I'd be happy to stay in their camp. It's good to have options, but right now I think we have now. The MacBook has returned! </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/160282021-10-04T13:03:40Z2021-10-06T17:29:54ZWriting on an iPad<div class="trix-content">
<div>One of the allures of HEY World for me is the promise of easy blogging on the road - e.g. on a iPad or an iPhone. This wasn’t a big concern in the past year due to the pandemic, but now that I’m traveling a bit again it’s certainly a relevant topic for me. <br><br>Of course, using a laptop is the obvious solution for any work one has to do while traveling, but given how powerful modern phones and tablets are, I’m starting to wonder if we’ve really reached the point where one can be productive on a mobile device. After all we’ve got the same M1 chip in both the latest Macs and the iPad Pro. <br><br>I’m far from the thought that I can do any serious programming on a mobile device, but my day job hasn’t involved any programming for quite a while now and I’m certain I can edit documents, chat, write emails and join meetings from an iPad. It’s not without problems, though - multi-tasking on an iPad still sucks, even on iOS 15, and there’s the writing experience itself...<br><br>I can’t imagine one can do much writing with the on-screen keyboard, but younger people will probably shock me. Those who know me are familiar with my passion for mechanical keyboards and my profound dislike for most laptop keyboards. And now those seem really great compared to the hardware that I’m currently using… <br><br>I’m writing this article on an old iPad Pro (9.7 inch, first gen, 2016) and I’m using Apple’s official keyboard cover with it. It’s better than no physical keyboard, but it’s pretty bad overall - mostly because the keyboard is tiny and the keys are tiny as well. Still, it gets the job done. Perhaps the situation will be somewhat better with the newer 11 inch iPads, as they are bound to have bigger keyboards. I’m sure the 13 inch models will have a decent keyboard, but they are so big that I can’t imagine using them comfortably in tablet mode, and so heavy that a MacBook Air will probably be lighter than the combination of an iPad and an external keyboard. Not to mention it will have much less battery life.<br><br>At any rate - I’ll keep trying to do more work on my iPad for the next couple of weeks before deciding if I wish to push this idea any further. It’s good to have options and we sure live in a time of countless options. </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/159432021-09-30T08:31:13Z2021-10-21T21:05:58ZThe story of a nickname<div class="trix-content">
<div>I envy everyone who picked up their nickname when they were 12 and just stuck with it. For me the journey to discovering my One True Nickname was long and somewhat messy, as at some point I was using several nicknames simultaneously. If it weren't for password managers like LastPass I would have probably struggled to remember which nickname did I use for some services.<br><br>I think I got my first computer in 1998, when I was 14 years old. Back then one needed a nickname for only 2 things - IRC and gaming. I don't remember my IRC nickname to be honest, but I assume it was something like "bozhidar84", as this was the trend back then. I do remember my gaming handle quite well, though - it was "Lord_Bad". Remember the arcade games where you had to use your initials for the leaderboard? Well, my initials are BIB, but I never liked how this looked, so I always used the initials BAD instead. It felt badass! When I finally had a computer at home, one of the first games that I played was "Age of Empires" and I thought it'd be cool if I had a nickname that was fitting of the game - both noble (Lord) and fearsome (Bad). Eventually I adopted this nickname outside of gaming as well and I was mostly "Lord_Bad"/"lordbad" online until my early twenties.<br><br>I had gotten to the point I had to find myself a job and I felt it'd be silly to have an email like <a href="mailto:lordbad@developer.bg">lordbad@developer.bg</a> on my resume. It was time to grow up and adopt a new "more professional" online identity. I knew that the prevailing fashion of the day were handles like "jsmith", which meant "bbatsov" in my case. However, for some reason I never liked addressing people by their last name, and I didn't like being addressed by my last name either. I still hate this to this day. That's why for a while, when signing up for something, I was trying the following nicknames in this order:<br><br></div><ul><li><strong>bozhidar</strong> (my name is pretty rare, even in Bulgaria, plus there are several ways to spell it in English; this meant there was a good chance I'd land "bozhidar" with some services)</li><li><strong>bozhidarb</strong></li><li><strong>bbatsov</strong></li><li><strong>bozhidar.batsov</strong> (I rarely got to this one, as it's quite long and "bbatsov" was usually available)</li></ul><div><br>Over the course of the years I realized this nickname selection process was a big mistake, as people were often struggling to figure out who I was on certain services. They'd expect me to be "bbatsov", but I'd "bozhidarb" or "bozhidar" there. Messy. That's why I eventually came to accept that "bbatsov" is the one true nickname for me - there are plenty of Bozhidars out there, but it seems I'm one of only a handful of Bozhidar Batsovs (I think there's only one, besides me). As an added benefit - this nickname is the easiest to type, and probably the easiest to read, as that "zh" in Bozhidar confuses a lot of people.<br><br>While writing this post I realized there's one more feature of "bbatsov" - it could stand for Bozhidar Batsov or Bug Batsov. Many of my friends call me Bug, and I'm 100% certain that if you're not familiar with Slavic languages it's much easier for you to pronounce Bug than Bozhidar.<br><br>Funny enough, my handle on HEY World is "bozhidar", but I guess that's fine as for an email <a href="mailto:bozhidar@hey.com">bozhidar@hey.com</a> looks a bit nicer than <a href="mailto:bbatsov@hey.com">bbatsov@hey.com</a>, at least to me. On a similar note - I still regret rage-quitting Reddit with my original "bbatsov" handle, which forced me to become "bozhidarb" when I decided to make a comeback there. <br><br>Of course, I do have some secret nicknames that I use in various anonymous contexts, and I have a ton of legacy/failed gaming nicknames - e.g. at some point I was obsessed with "The Lord of the Rings" and I'd often style myself as "elendil". I also had a few nicknames inspired by WarCraft and StarCraft - I'm reasonably sure that my first email address was <a href="mailto:alexei.stukov@yahoo.com">alexei.stukov@yahoo.com</a> (followed by <a href="mailto:lordbad@usa.net">lordbad@usa.net</a>). I love a couple of my secret nicknames and their stories, but for obvious reasons I can't discuss them here. <br><br>So, that's the story of my nickname. It's a bit boring, just like the nickname itself (if only I were as cool as "Neo", "ZeroCool" and "Morheus"...), but it's my story. Frankly, I don't even know I why I decided to write it. Perhaps it's because I came to value a lot consistency and simplicity in every aspect of life. Perhaps it's because I've always been fascinated by the power of names. I'm sure there's some reason, even if I'm not sure what this reason is. </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/158932021-09-28T08:29:37Z2021-09-28T08:29:37ZLack of inspiration<div class="trix-content">
<div>Lately I've faced an interesting challenge - there's a long list of topics on which I want to write, but I couldn't actually start writing on any of them. I've been pondering privately whether I'm dealing with lack of inspiration or with a severe case of procrastination. Or perhaps some combination of both?<br><br>Truth be told I've struggled to focus on anything "productive" for the past couple of months, so I'm leaning towards "lack of inspiration". Experience has taught me that when you're really inspired to write, the writing happens almost by itself - you start without any preparation and planning, you write a novel-sized article in an hour, the first draft is pretty much the final version and the process is very rewarding for you. When you're not inspired the whole process is just mentally draining. And, of course, that's not something specific to writing.<br><br>On the bright side - when I lack inspiration to work on the things that I consider meaningful, I do get to do plenty of fun and somewhat useful things. Here are a couple of examples:<br><br>- suddenly I decided I need to change LastPass, the password manager I've used without serious issues for over a decade. Playing with 1Password and Bitwarden was a lot of fun. <br>- similarly I decided I need to stop using Google Chrome and played with a ton of browsers (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc), before settling on good old Firefox. I should have done this a long time ago!<br>- I've started to re-watch Daniel Craig's James Bond movies. Up next - "Skyfall". <br>- I've started to study a bit of Spanish again. <br>- I finally cleaned up my RSS subscriptions in Feedly. Pro-tip - delete any feed that generates more than 5-10 articles a month.<br>- I've started playing StarCraft II online (ranked, 1 vs 1). It's really depressing how bad I am!<br><br>And what about my missing inspiration? Frankly, I don't care much about it, as I'm reasonably sure I'll rediscover it when the time is right. For the time being I'm fine with simply enjoying the last few weeks of my sabbatical in the least productive ways possible. </div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/148702021-08-16T06:30:08Z2021-08-18T05:18:35ZHey, again!<div class="trix-content">
<div>I've been meaning to try out <a href="https://www.hey.com/world/">HEY World</a> for a while now and the time has finally come. While I already have <a href="https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/12/12/making-sense-of-all-my-blogs.html">more blogs</a> than I can possibly tend to, I do agree with <a href="https://world.hey.com/jason/hey-world-b02a6f2e">Jason Fried's premise</a> that (personal) blogging is way more complicated than it needs to be. There's some beauty in the simplicity of HEY World that I find quite appealing.<br><br>Don't get me wrong - I still love Jekyll, and writing articles using Emacs and Markdown, but this publishing toolchain is <a href="https://emacsredux.com/blog/2018/11/06/back-in-black/">not without its problems</a>. Plus, I think it'd be cool to be able to write a short article or two straight from my phone, without having to jump through any hoops. <br><br>I'm not quite sure how will I use HEY World going forward, as between <a href="https://batsov.com">(think)</a>, <a href="https://metaredux.com">Meta Redux</a> and <a href="https://emacsredux.com">Emacs Redux</a> I have plenty of avenues for my tech articles. Plus, from what I gathered, HEY World is not a very good fit for<br>articles with code listings in them. I've been thinking that I can use it either for non-technical articles or as a replacement for short tech articles that end up as 5-10 tweets. Or some combination of both. Or something completely different. Time will tell.<br><br>The first step has been made, though, and that's what matters the most. It's onwards and upwards from here!</div>
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Bozhidar Batsovbozhidar@hey.com