I’m not able to actually say anything, speechless.

I can’t thank anyone enough for helping out. Seriously. Thank you.

My mother has liver cancer. We have started a fundraiser to help cover some of the treatment costs. I would be grateful for any shares or donations.

Support the fundraiser here.

Sorry, not sorry—another iOS vs. Android thing. Basically, because I’ve changed my lifestyle over the past year—losing a lot of weight, gaining muscle, and going to the gym regularly—I find myself using my Apple Watch much more than I did, say, two years ago.

I’ve been testing Whoop, and it’s really nice, but the Apple Watch provides almost the same experience without requiring a subscription. That makes it hard for me to fully move away from the iPhone, because in the long run, the Apple Watch + iPhone combo ends up being more cost-effective.

This is never going to be not funny. Apple Music works great on Android but on the iPhone is just freaking slow.

Because I can, I’m sometimes moving between iPhone and Pixel. Most of the time it’s pixel but there are moments in which I find myself wanting to use iPhone (mostly because of Apple Watch and ability to be notified on my wrist when something REALLY IMPORTANT happens or because our apartment still has some automations based on Homekit).

But what pains me this time - I felt that notification wise I’m missing a lot on iOS. Action buttons in android notifications are golden. Somebody sends me a link? I can open it from notifications without even opening the communicator app. New YouTube video? I can just add it to watch later from notifications.

I find myself more and more saying yes to notifications on Android because I can control them better and I can easily get rid of them if needed (something that never works on iOS because you can click X and mass prune them but some of the notifications are above that X area and they won’t be deleted and I have no idea what the rule is).

That’s another one for you from my OS battles.

🍿 A Real Pain (2024) - ★★★★★

Get a free WHOOP 4.0 and one month free when you join with my link: https://join.whoop.com/CD90CC

I wanted to break myself a bit more from Apple ecosystem with a non-Apple fitness tracker. Can’t wait till it gets here!

Moved to iPhone yesterday but got annoyed in first 12 hours and I’m back on Pixel. Welp.

RSS bankruptcy. Not going to read 2000 articles.

It looks like after stopping podcasting I have stopped caring about technology that much. Or I needed a break from it and I’m still on it. Most of the days I don’t even use my PC after work. Love this character development!

Well, it’s been over a year since I last talked about my defaults (even though I tried to update it along the way).

A lot has changed in that year, so I’m going to go over it again. To make things easier, I’m reusing the old list with previous defaults and will let you know if and how they have changed.

📨 Mail Client: Mail.app on both iOS and macOS; for work, Mimestream (Google accounts only). Because I’ve shifted most of my day-to-day activities to a Windows machine (I managed to get a BEAST with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD for under $1,000), I now handle most of my mail in the browser—Fastmail in Vivaldi (personal) and Gmail in Chrome (work). On any of my devices (I use Android personally now, while my iPhone is mainly for work), I use the Fastmail and Gmail apps.

📮 Mail Server: Fastmail for personal use and Google for work. No changes here!

📝 Notes: Obsidian, Tot, and Day One. Day One is still here; I have a streak that’s about 300 days long now. For regular notes, I’ve settled on the free version of Standard Notes. When I moved away from the Apple-only ecosystem, I needed something that worked across all OSes, and Standard Notes does.

✅ To-Do: Akiflow and Things. Akiflow is still going strong; I even paid for five years of it since I’m not planning on dropping it anytime soon. I use it solely for my work calendar and tasks, and it’s made a huge difference for me. For personal tasks, I use Google Tasks. It just works: I add tasks with dates, and they show up when needed. I no longer need the complexity of something like Omnifocus, and it felt great to let go of that.

📷 Phone Camera: I previously used the Camera app on iPhone exclusively. Now, I take most of my photos with a Google Pixel 8a. The camera on the 8a is amazing, and I love having that 2x zoom button in the camera app.

🟦 Photo Management: Lightroom—still going strong! Lightroom is fantastic.

📆 Calendar: Previously used Calendar on iOS and Akiflow on Mac; now it’s Akiflow on PC and the Fastmail app on Android.

📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud + Backblaze B2—still my go-to. I’m not using Google Drive yet, and honestly, I don’t know if I need to archive many actual files. Most of my “files” are Google Docs, Sheets, and photos. I have some archives, but it’s only a few gigs of data. I may copy it to Google Drive for access on my Pixel, but I haven’t really needed it in the past year.

📖 RSS: FreshRSS with Reeder. Since I moved to Android, I now use Read You with FreshRSS. It works well, and I don’t miss Reeder!

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Same as before. I use whatever is default on Android.

🌐 Browser: Arc Browser on Mac and Arc Search on iOS. Arc has gone downhill in recent months, and their Windows app never took off. I dropped Arc entirely and switched to Vivaldi. It works as well as Chrome without actually being Chrome. I don’t care as much about browsers anymore, so Vivaldi it is.

💬 Chat: Telegram, Signal, and WhatsApp—still the same, though I’d rank them differently now: Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram.

🔖 Bookmarks: Browser.

📑 Read It Later: Good Links. I’ve stopped using “read it later” tools. If I need to save something for later, I send it to myself via Signal or email. But honestly, I only did that a few times over the entire year. Another thing I let go of!

🤖 Mastodon: Previously used Ivory and IceCubes. Now, it’s mostly in the browser, and if I’m on my phone, I use Moshidon.

📖 Blog: micro.blog and Day One.

⌨️ Launcher: Raycast. I don’t use macOS that much anymore, but when I’m on my MacBook (like right now), I still use Raycast.

📜 Word Processing: Obsidian. I can’t even remember what I meant by “Word Processing” originally, but I mostly use Google Docs now.

📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets.

📊 Presentations: Google Slides.

🛒 Shopping Lists: Previously used Reminders; now I use Google Tasks.

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: YNAB.

📰 News: RSS.

🎵 Music: Spotify.

🎤 Podcasts: Pocket Casts.

🎮 Gaming: PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, and Anbernic RG35XX.

🔐 Password Management: 1Password.

👨🏻‍💻 Terminal: Previously used WebSSH; now I use whatever Windows provides—usually PowerShell or something similar.

Perhaps we should stop thinking of the USA as a country to look up to.

Americans, what the hell

ChatGPT search is crazy

iPhone wants me to use MacOS and be enclosed in Apple ecosystem, but Android let’s me do my shit anywhere - and I didn’t know that I value this but I do.

Chill out please

Apple Music working better on Android wasn’t on my bingo card but yet here we are

5 icons in a row are better than 4 icons in a row. I don’t make the rules but I do.

To use an iphone is to use a phone in slow motion. This is how it feels like

Android apps are good enough that I don’t miss any particular app. Even if the iOS app was better, the Android version of it (either because there’s the same app for Android or there’s a different app that does the same thing) is most of the time good enough to not care because it does the job done.

And this is when I found out that Reeder can be replaced.

And today on Android I’ve installed Sum Up and now all of my chat messages get summarised. This is happening on a $300 device, for free. I have an assistant that allows me to ask even the trickiest questions and I can do stuff like circle to search.

Two weeks with my Pixel. That was quick! Still is my main phone.

Since I have moved onto the Pixel I find myself using Gemini a lot. I do it a couple times a day and my questions are mostly about small things. Yesterday I asked what the hell is baba ganoush, today I have asked what does “habibi” actually mean. We were picking new heaters and I wasn’t actually sure how do we calculate the wattage and it just answered me. MOST of the times I did fact-check and it was actually right!

This is a big change to my daily workflow. Because whenever something comes to my mind - I can (and I am!) ask about it and learn something new.

There are moments in which I’m missing my iPhone, sure. I do have these thoughts daily, but my sim card remains in the Pixel for about week and a half. Whenever I think about the iPhone, I remind myself that this tool has better assistant, better screen, does the same job and have OUT OF THIS WORLD notification system. And - that was new to me, seriously - these are to me worth more than iOS ecosystem? And the funny part of that is because I’ve moved from Apple to more open Google (evil, but a bit more open) - I can still access my photos and messages on my Mac. Because they are available in the web.

Crazy experience. I know we said these things about Apple, but they just figured some nice things out. You’re getting to bed and plugging up your phone? It’s getting darker and black & white, so you go to sleep instead of scrolling. Someone’s calling you and you can’t answer now? Flip your phone screen down and it will be silenced because obviously.

So, if anyone asks - I do like Pixel 8a.