2025-07-09 04:16:00
Well, a little less than two months since Mozilla announced it was happening, Pocket, the venerable read-it-later service, has officially shut down.
I’ve been meaning for the last few days to check when Mozilla was turning out the lights; go figure, it’s today.
I’ve exported all my saves, which turned out to be a list of nearly 15,000 URLs split across two CSV files.
My real-later journey has been long and winding. I’ve traveled from Instapaper to Pocket to Readability to Instapaper to Reeder to Goodlinks to Readwise Reader to Pocket. But when I got a Kobo a few years ago, I settled on Pocket since you can read your saved items on the e-reader. Pocket has also had great integration with the Reeder app.
Although I rarely use the Pocket app or website, I’ve been very happy with its text parsing and reliability. And I’ve appreciated how democratic it is. It seems like it’s been very developer-friendly, available everywhere, and able to be integrated in other apps.
In fact, I had vague plans of trying to build my own read-later app upon Pocket’s infrastructure some day. I guess that won’t be happening now.
To maintain my current read-it-later workflow, my plan is to import my saves into Instapaper, since it has the same integration with Reeder as Pocket did.1 That aspect should be fairly seamless. But my Kobo will go back to being purely for reading books.
You had a good run, Pocket. Rest easy, my friend.
What I should do, though, is try starting over with my reading workflow and give Artemis, the calm web reader, a serious try. I like so much about what it stands for — namely, reading articles on their actual websites, and having a quieter, scaled-back reading queue.↩︎
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2025-06-02 04:16:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Nick Heer does the work in dismantling this sexist post regarding Apple’s ass handed to it by Judge Gonzalez Rogers. [🔗 pxlnv.com]
2️⃣ Whoa. Monty Python and the Holy Grail turned 50 this year! It still makes me laugh out loud every time I watch it (which you can do for free on YouTube). [🔗 kottke.org]
3️⃣ I had no idea Taylor Swift was so web-forward right from the beginning. She had her music available to download from her website back in 2002 (when she was 13) and by 2003 had a ‘Taylor Talk’ tab there — which I presume was an early blog before she had Tumblr. [🔗 webdesignmuseum.org]
4️⃣ This restaurant is mind-blowing. It looks like a drawing inside! [🔗 kottke.org]
5️⃣ The Baltimore Ravens went all out in their Severance-themed scheduled reveal video. [▶️ youtube.com]
6️⃣ BasicAppleGuy is trying a new approach to reader support in which all his wallpapers and other haberdashery remain free to everyone, but can also be purchased to easily download the files all at once. I like the idea and hope it’s successful for him! [🔗 basicappleguy.com]
7️⃣ This overlapping version of “Dear Theodosia” is beautiful. [▶️ youtube.com]
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2025-05-24 04:51:00
I’m glad that Jason Snell blogged about his skepticism toward the OpenAI and io partnership because his feelings almost exactly mirror my own. Personally, I don’t trust Sam Altman any further than I could throw him. But I do trust Jony Ive — so his high regard for Altman has to count for something.
The framing of this as “two friends coming together” makes me uncomfortable. It’s like they’re trying to say Sam + Jony is the new Steve + Jony spiritual partnership the world’s been missing without actually saying it.
And yet, I’m glad to see Jony Ive excited about building a tech product again. And it brings me joy that he’s able to continue working with his chosen family of designers. As Snell says:
Never count out Jony Ive and the talented people that surround him. They’ve gotten the band back together, thanks to an enormous investment of AI money, and we’re going to find out–eventually–what they want to put into the world.
The language they’re using certainly frames the product as The Next Big Thing. I hope it really is, because I’d hate to see this team lose credibility in the way Humane — also stacked with ex-Apple talent — did. Theirs is not the roadmap I’d want to see followed.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2025-05-12 11:05:00
A list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted when I’ve got 7 of them. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ This might be the fastest and easiest dollar I’ve ever spent. This browser extension replaces images of Trump and Musk with kittens. [🔗 apps.apple.com] (Via Lou Plummer)
2️⃣ If the words “HomeStar Runner” mean anything to you, this video is going to make you very happy. [🔗 homestarrunner.com]
3️⃣ If you’re a Harry Potter fan, this zine will probably make you sad. But it resonated with me, a superfan who has nevertheless been disgusted by JKR’s behavior toward trans folks and now feels conflicted about enjoying the series itself. [🔗 redgoldsparkspress.com]
4️⃣ A folding e-reader? Now we’re talking! [🔗 theverge.com]
5️⃣ Niléane’s roundup of playful Mac apps is so fun! [🔗 macstories.net]
6️⃣ David Sparks showed off Perplexity’s new voice assistant app. It’s pretty wild how good they made it hooking into Apple’s native frameworks and does make Siri look extra bad. [🔗 macsparky.com]
7️⃣ YEAH TOAST! My buddy reminded me of this song that has rattling around in the back of my head for half my life. Love it. [▶️ youtube.com]
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2025-05-07 00:19:00
Acapulco returns in July for a fourth and final season. I’ve enjoyed this series, and I’m glad they’re wrapping up here — it feels like a natural conclusion.
Trying, my underrated favorite, is renewed for a fifth season! Maybe we already knew this and I forgot, but I can’t wait. S4 felt a bit off, so I hope they’ve got their mojo back.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2025-04-23 00:38:00
You’d have no way of knowing, but I swapped the entire infrastructure that HeyDingus runs on from Dropbox to iCloud today. It took all of two minutes and a few mouse clicks.
How? Through the magic of file syncing and my hosting service, Blot.
Since the beginning, Blot’s whole advantage was to turn a folder on your computer into a site on the World Wide Web. Originally, Dropbox was the only syncing service that Blot worked with, but over time, David (Blot’s developer) added Git and Google Drive as well. I tried Google Drive at one point but switched back to Dropbox after hitting some weird bugs (that I think are ironed out now). I’ve never tried Git syncing, but if you’re already comfortable with Git, I expect it’d be a really handy way to get syncing and version control for everything on your site.
All the while, the five-ish years that I’ve been writing HeyDingus, iCloud syncing has been on the roadmap but never seemed to be getting much of David’s attention. I wanted it badly, mostly for app compatibility but also because I have a distaste for Dropbox’s device limits and other restrictions. Well, he must have been working hard on it behind the scenes because a month or so ago David announced that iCloud syncing was ready to try!
Having learned my lesson when Google Drive syncing was fresh out of the oven, I convinced myself to hold off and wait for others to root out the bugs. I kept an eye on Blot’s question forum (handily available via RSS), and when I didn’t see any issues arise, I figured I could give it a shot. And then, when I set up my new M4 MacBook Air and didn’t want to install Dropbox and do the device authorization dance, I knew the time had come.
So today, I logged into my Blot dashboard (which I hardly ever have to visit since everything just syncs via my local computer) and headed to the folder sync section. I selected “iCloud”, followed the insanely easy directions1 to set it up, and voilá my site was rebuilt from the files in iCloud.
It even managed to maintain the Created on and Modified on dates for all my files!
There’s narry a hiccup so far,2 and although there’s still a chance iCloud will behave poorly, everyone’s experience in the forums seems to have been very smooth and positive so far. And while you, dear reader, probably won’t notice a thing, I’m anticipating a nice improvement in my workflows for writing and publishing here.
You see, not every writing app has direct integration with Dropbox. And while you’d think that Dropbox would be highly motivated to implement the right APIs so that they would work just like iCloud as a file provider in the file system, there seems to be some disconnect there, and apps such as iA Writer couldn’t use Dropbox as a reliable location to read and write files. As a result, I’ve had to use 1Writer (which does have direct Dropbox integration) on my iPhone and iPad to edit posts on the go. 1Writer is a fine app, but hasn’t seen much development in recent years and has never clicked as well with me as iA Writer.
The only adjustments I’ll need to make will be to rejigger a few of my Shortcuts and Drafts automations to write to iCloud rather than Dropbox. But I expect those workflows to be simpler and reliable as well, since I should be able to write directly to the file system, instead of round-tripping via an internet connection and the Dropbox API before syncing back to my device. Working with the first-party file syncing feature rather than the bolted-on third-party one should be a breath of fresh air.
I tip my hat to David for working through all the challenges of building on top of iCloud as a web service, and for making it so easy to swap syncing services. I’m looking forward to getting even more value from my iCloud subscription and uninstalling Dropbox from my devices.
Here are the steps:
[email protected].Except I started writing this very post in the top-level folder instead of my drafts folder by mistake — sorry if you saw the work-in-progress or 404 error when I took it down to finish writing.↩︎
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.