Weekly post #14

A reminder to stick to my defaults

Last week I spent of lot of time trying to break away from the eco-system lock-in.

But I before I go into that, it warrants a little explanation as to why I was trying to break away from eco-system lock-in which I was am so fond of.

I was a little frustrated that my work todo, calendar, notes reside on my work laptop and I have my personal on my iphone(personal icloud). I wanted to have my work todo on my iphone to better plan my day. And thus the quest began. As I thought about this, I also realized that the eco-system lock-in is a reason for me to somehow retire my otherwise perfectly running X1Extreme¹.

I installed Ticktick to replace reminders, I had an Upnote lifetime subscription from long time back that I planned to use as Notes alternative, google calendar app + ticktick for calendar and finally birtwarden for password management. ²

After spending couple of days with these apps my appreciation for Notes.app, Calendar.app, Reminders.app just grew multifold ³.

This was also driven by sudden interest in fold phones(Pixel Fold, Z fold,etc.) The idea of having a bigger inner screen for media consumption seemed enticing⁴. Given that I only use my ipad mini mostly for media consumption and nothing more. The thought of not having to have 1 device double as tab+phone was certainly appealing.

In the process I wasted a lot of time trying to find THE tool. Yes I talked about this very pitfall in my anti-productivity article only end up falling for it. In my defense though I was trying to avoid purchasing a macbook air/pro just to complete my Apple switch.

I also considered moving to the simplicity of using org but the lack of mobile app support made me abandon the idea.

Briefly I also toyed with Things 3 but I couldn’t quite justify the cost of getting macos+ipad because the purchase is tied to App store id.

iCloud backup fail!

In the whole process, I had made a mistake. When using ticktick integration to pull in my reminders into ticktick it had popped a dialog box asking if I wanted import and delete or just import. I clicked import and delete.

So the history of completed tasks along with attachments and the todos got deleted :’(. And the import in ticktick didn’t have attachments (which was a huge bummer) and let me very frustrated was to hy ticktick even had that option in the first place if they can’t do proper import.

Until this incident I never really thought about icloud backups. I assumed that each backup would be snapshot of the state at that point in time. I am here to tell you that isn’t the case. Learned this lesson the hard way.

Turns out that the backup, atleast for reminders is kind of like a patch. So each backup only contains the delta. Assume you created 1 task say “Dont delete this task” created more than 30 days ago ⁵ and if you add “New task” right before the backup kicks in. It only stores the backup of the delta and not the entire snapshot of the reminders data in the backup file, let us call it backup-1. Now if all the reminders got wiped out (like in my case) and then you tried to restore from backup-1 you would just end up with “New Task” and nothing else. Possibly to keep the backup size small. Since 30 days of having the entire db data might chew up alot of icloud space.

Also another weird thing is you can only restore “Calendar and Reminders” backup together⁶. So be cautious when restoring from a backup.

Thankfully I have a short list of repeating tasks that I was easily able to create on reminders but the history of completed tasks with its attachments is what I kind of wanted[^7].

Abraham Ozler - Movie

I have always been a fan of Malayam movies. Ozler is a malayam crime thriller. Jayaram was an absolute class act. The movie kept me engaged throughout and was an enjoyable watch.

Mammotty well another class act. Huge kudos to him for willing to take up this cameo.

Beaware that there is quite bit of gore. Though it was handled gracefully, do expect bloody scenes.

A simple script to convert the heic files from Gnome Connect to jpg for the TTL section

A very raw script to automate the process of converting the images for the TTL section of the weekly post.

#!/bin/bash

set -eo pipefail
i_dir=$1
delete_orig=$2

if [ ! -z $i_dir ]; then
  pushd $i_dir
fi

heif_files=$(find . -name \*.heic)

for a in $heif_files; 
do
  img_name=$(basename $a .heic)
  heif-convert $a $img_name.jpg
  if [ ! -z $delete_orig ]; then
    rm $a
  fi

done

if [ ! -z $i_dir ]; then
  popd
fi

Through the lens

Internet Heat Map

• Pixel Fold review
• Pixel Fold one month later
• Things 3 vs Ticktick
• Organize your life in Org
• Why non techie emacs
• You don’t need a terminal
• Tasks