Here’s my second weeknotes attempt from 3rd to 9th Aug. Fairly uneventful week but I do have some stuff to write about, including some stuff I’m trying out.

Table of Contents

Changing web browsers

It was kind of an impulse move but I ended up switching to Vivaldi again from Zen (which I had been using for pretty much 1.5 years), both on desktop and mobile. I’ve used it before and thought it was fairly bloated, but I’m liking it now. I’m probably never going to use the built-in mail client or RSS feed and stuff like that, but it works fairly well. One thing I’m noticing is just how much better a lot of Google web apps run on Chromium browsers. You can kind of expect that I guess, but especially on websites like Youtube, the difference is honestly incredible. Even on an M4 MBA, Youtube on Firefox and derivatives is a bit sluggish, especially scrubbing through videos and playing/pausing. It’s definitely usable but it’s quite noticeable. Also, I’m using my Nothing Ear Opens with my laptop a lot and I noticed at least like 1 second of latency every time I played/paused a video in Zen, but that’s pretty much gone now!

I kind of have some qualms about Vivaldi being proprietary and all but from what I can tell they seem to be fairly trustworthy. I think Vivaldi being open source is a bit of a common misconception; only its UI is open source for whatever that’s worth, but the rest is closed. I did also like that during the onboarding process, telemetry was opt-in rather than opt-out like it is on most other browsers including vanilla Firefox if I’m not mistaken. But those kinds of defaults leads me to believe that less shady business is going on in Vivaldi, certainly less than vanilla Firefox or other competitors like Brave. I dunno what’s up with Brave anyway; most people say it’s okay but they seem like such a shady company from what they’ve done, even somewhat recently. When I first read about how they were taking donations in the name of a bunch of Youtubers without their consent (I think this was in 2018 though), that kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

Honestly though, I think the only reason I’ve used Firefox derivatives for so long is just because I didn’t really want to contribute to the Chromium monopoly. I’m still a bit divided on if I want to continue with Vivaldi because of this, but I’ll see how things go. Otherwise I’ll go back to my favourite Firefox derivative; Zen. I think part of my fatigue with Zen though is the situation with how they do their tabs. Vertical tabs and workspaces are great and all, but how they handle windows really annoys me. If I do a new Zen window, I just get a new window with the exact same tabs and workspaces as my original window. Maybe I’m just doing something wrong, but it does kind of irk me.

Reduction of janky animations on my Nothing 4a

Last week I did write about how there were more stutters in my Nothing 4a’s software, and I think I figured out why that happened. I believe it was something to do with the dynamic refresh rate setting, and the switch from 60 to 120 Hz or something of that nature was contributing to the stutters, especially when using gesture navigation. I’d swipe up to close an app I was using for a while and that would quite often be stuttery. But after locking the refresh rate to 120 Hz, it seems a lot better. Gesture navigation is a lot smoother, and generally there are a lot less stutters.

But that aside, I’m surprised that there are quite a few apps that perform fairly poorly anyway on this phone, probably just because they’re poorly optimised or something. One of the apps I use daily to track my expenses is called Cashew; just looking at it, it looks like a very lightweight app, but animations in the app stutter very frequently. Even the loading animation after I biometric unlock the app feels like 30 fps or something.

Nothing 4a battery life

I’m kind of conflicted on this and I’m still waiting to see how things develop, but I am a bit underwhelmed by the battery life on my 4a. OBVIOUSLY, coming from a bloody iPhone 7 with a shot battery, the difference is night and day, but it’s not as good as I was expecting. Maybe it’s just my battery anxiety from using that IP7 for almost 2 years, but I think it drains a bit too fast. I’ve checked background app usage and all and I don’t have anything unreasonable there, so I’m not sure if it’s because of something I’m doing or if that’s just how the battery is. I did see a Youtube video which mentioned a similar thing (only ONE review mentioned this!), how the battery performs similarly to a 4500 mAH cell, but yeah. I’m a bit mixed on that. But otherwise all is good! I don’t want to complain too much.

Tech Youtube ethics

I saw this video by Peter Kuchynskyi randomly titled MKBHD, or the illusion of independence  and it brings up points I wonder why I never thought of. The way he puts it is that pretty much none of the mainstream tech reviewers are truly independent, because of the way the entire review cycle works. Just the fact that all of these reviewers get devices before they launch is enough of a conflict of interest. That is enough of an incentive to make sure they have a net positive review 9 times out of 10.

Watching a lot of these reviews now, I’m really noticing this. So many of these tech reviewers bring up VERY few negative points if any about these products. And in the event they do, it’s either an incredibly minor issue or they caveat the problem with “oh but this is a pre-launch device” or “the manufacturer says they’ll push a software update”. Things like that, just to make sure they’re technically bringing up issues with the device. Sometimes it’s something really stupid, like “oh I expected this phone to be IP68 water resistant but it’s only IP64”; like that’s technically an issue but WHO CARES ABOUT THAT???

I saw this with some Nothing Phone 4b reviews. Watching MKBHD’s review on that had me think it’s an okay device, and you’re getting what you pay for. But after watching some other truly independent reviews, I found that the Nothing 4b isn’t that good value. I saw one of them on display at one of the tech stores here and I played around with it for a bit; and I mean, it’s not a terrible phone or anything (the vibration motor in that thing is atrocious) but I’m not going to call it good value or anything. There’s this one video which calls it “profit slop”  and I think that’s an apt enough term. Look, I’m a bit of a Nothing fanboy especially coming from a design background, and I really like their hardware/software and even advertising designs just because they’re really well done, but maaaan this Nothing 4b does not seem like a good product.

Journaling

This is something I started yesterday and have successfully done this morning too (wow!). I’ll try to keep up this habit now that I’ve started it, but for the longest time I felt so stuck when I heard advice on journaling. And that was a bit surprising for me since during my childhood, for a few years at least (around the time I was 8 or 9) I did do journaling! I still have the 2 journals I used back then in all their glory! They’re at home in my home country, so I don’t have them on me now, but I’d love to show those off in the future.

But getting back to the point, so far what’s working for me with journaling is a kind of stream-of-conciousness approach, where you basically just write down what you’re thinking as it comes. If you suddenly think of something else, you just pivot topic immediately and write that. Secondly, because I’m journalling in Obsidian (which I’ll get to later), I’m typing things out. What helps here is to just IGNORE to the best of your abilities any spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes. As long as the message is clear, and YOU understand it (because YOU’RE the only one reading it) all is good! Forget about the rest.

Obsidian

As I mentioned, I’m using Obsidian for journaling but I’m also just trying to integrate it more into my daily life to remember things in general. I was big on note taking apps like Notion/One Note/Evernote/Obsidian back in 2020/2021 and used the crap out of them back then to make lists and write about all sorts of stuff, but I kind of just gave up on them after 2021. I think part of my issue was that I kind of got out of the habit of using them, and then any time I tried to get back into them, I didn’t really know what to do with them. Also the fact that I was always overthinking the organisation of my files or pages. Even now I still do, but I’m approaching file organisation now with the mindset of “I’ll change it later on if I have to” and just making use of how it is right now.

That aside, I’m using the Notebook Navigator plugin to make it look a bit more like Apple notes for the lolz, and here’s what my setup looks like. The font I’m using is the Nothing NType font, which I quite like. It’s the serif font they use in the Nothing apps.

I’m hoping that writing my articles here and then sending them over to Hugo later on will help me write a lot more easily and often. We’ll see how that pans out.

I also subscribed to Obsidian Sync, just because I wasn’t in the mood to deal with Syncthing or other cloud syncing solutions. Obsidian only officially supports syncing with iCloud Drive and Obsidian Sync, and iCloud Drive isn’t an option now since I’m not using an iPhone. So Obsidian Sync it is! I think it’s like 4 USD per month (about 31 HKD) and you get 1 GB of storage (which seems a bit quaint) but at least it’s been jank free thus far! Also about Syncthing, it’s not that it’s bad or anything. After all, I did even write a guide on how to set up Obsidian with Syncthing over 2 years ago  (I wasn’t expecting it to be that long ago!). But there is a level of jank with Syncthing and it isn’t as fast as I would like from my experience.

Other productivity apps

In the same vain, I’m also working on sorting out my whole productivity software suite. I have Obsidian for notes and grocery lists and web clippings and book highlights and stuff, and I already had my calendar sorted out, but my biggest problem was my to-dos. I was using Apple Reminders syncing through a free Nextcloud instance (I think it’s provided by The Good Cloud) and my whole issue was just keeping that list clean and promptly adding stuff to it in the first place. I’ll put a screenshot below of my “Today” list, and I’ll redact some stuff but you should get the gist:

This whole thing just brings me back to the concept of friction. More friction means it’s harder to do stuff, and the opposite is also true. At least on my old phone, adding new reminders and checking off tasks had a whole lot of friction not just because the phone was quite sluggish, but also because I didn’t have any clear way to organise my tasks. I’m working on sorting that out; currently I’m using Todoist again (the free tier) and am organising tasks only based on day and priority for now, but so far I think it’s working out. Again, I’m approaching this with the mindset that I’ll re-organise things later on if I have to and even switch apps as needed, but I just want to get back into the habit of managing tasks properly.

Yes, Todoist. I know there are FOSS solutions like Super Productivity which I did flirt with around this time last year but again! Jank! I don’t really want to deal with it. It doesn’t mean it’s bad or anything, but I don’t have the willpower to push through it. That also kind of adds onto my friction point, and I’ll illustrate this through Obsidian Sync. If every time I want to add a note or task or whatever and I have to wait even like 2 seconds for it to sync after opening, that’s probably enough to stop me from doing the thing in the first place! With Syncthing, I’ve had issues before where it just doesn’t sync. And then if I proceed to write whatever down in Obsidian while it hasn’t sunc (past tense of sync), then it’s either not going to save or I’m going to deal with file conflicts and all that fun stuff.

Books

I’m also trying to get back into the habit of reading. I don’t really want to use Kindle because Amazon, but I ended up making an account for the Kobo app. I’ve been considering getting an e-reader for a while and probably will go through with that soon, but for now I’m just reading through the Kobo app on my phone. I find myself interested in understanding marketing right now, so I’m going through two books. One of them has a pretty cringe title: DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online by Russel Brunson. Now, I don’t have a company I’m trying to grow online but as someone new to marketing and online marketing, there are some interesting tidbits here which I’ll share in a different article when I’m done reading it. I’m about 30% through it according to Kobo. The other book is also about marketing: $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi. I haven’t gotten too far through it yet, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m open to book recommendations in general now! Fiction or non-fiction; feel free to recommend.

Expansion of the snblog empire

As I mentioned in my last weeknotes, I intend on expanding the snblog empire. I don’t have the full vision for how this will work into the future at all! But we’ll see how things pan out. As you can probably see in the sidebar now, I have links to a bunch of social media platforms. I’m trying to get back into using Mastodon properly, so feel free to follow there. Instagram/Pixelfed is where I post my photography, which is one of my casual hobbies. Facebook (ew) is there, but the only reason that’s there is because I can crosspost from Instagram, so no additional effort is needed there. I want to make Pixelfed more of a priority than Instagram, which I’m not doing right now but hopefully I’ll get there. There’s also Youtube, where I’m flirting with the idea of doing some blog posts in video format. I did that for my last article, and I quite like how easy it was to get it done, so maybe I’ll do more of that in the future. I’ll also post those videos to Instagram. I do intend to post these videos maybe on Odysee and stuff, but that’s going to require me to sink in some time to figure out how those platforms work; it’s not something that’s very high on my priority list for now.

Conclusion

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading!