2024-10-22 09:56:36
Some people don’t know why they collect sport jersies but that’s not the case with me. I am a jersey collector for the teams I support every season or major tournament. This is the theme of my jersey collection as of 2024. I don’t know whether its going to change in future but its unlikely.
I have a distinct passion for collecting sports jersies and they remind me of watching the team and remembering a particular point of time in the past. This was born out in 2001 when I first watched Manchester United and fell in love with the team.
And yes I wear them all.
Manchester United (2001 – Current)
I have a jersey for every year I have watched Manchester United and this is the main focus of my collection. It was an expensive process to get jerseys from early 2000’s but worth it in the end. Some picture’s below :
Germany Football Team (2006- Current)
The 2006 Football world cup was the first major tournament I followed closely, I had previously seen the 2002 but was not emotionally attached the it. Since that world cup, I fell in love with the German Football team. This part of my collection has quite a few pieces missing and I am trying to find the older ones but they’re generally very expensive. Some picture’s below :
Sydney FC and Socceroos 2022 onwards
I started following these local teams since the 2022 World Cup but I am yet to collect the find them on good prices yet.
I expect to grow my collection this year and early next year to fix the missing pieces as there are quite a few gaps in my collection at this time.
2024-04-30 13:15:44
One of the lesser known features of iCloud Plus (Paid iCloud plans) is to manager email inside Apple Mail. If you pay for iCloud storage which stats at 50GB a month or 1.5 Aud a month, you get iCloud plus.
iCloud+ with custom email domain allows 5 custom domains connected per person in the family group and you can have 3 different email address per domain per person. Yes the amount of email address is quite low per domain however it’s a great solution for low email needs.
You will need to go to iCloud.com and add a custom domain in your iCloud+ features tab. You will then need to make changes at your domain provider which is simple enough. Once done, you can add the email address for those custom domains and you will receive them in Apple Mail.
So if you have low email needs, it might be worth checking out this solution instead of paying for another service.
2024-04-29 15:42:02
Today I am focussing on one of the my most used apps on Mac and recently it has also launched on iPhone. The app is Soulver. As the developers say its Notepad meets Calculator. When you open the app there is a blank sheet and you can write your queries and it has a side pane for displaying results. The developer has a getting started guide and there are many examples on the dev’s website.
I personally use the app for shopping (109 – 25%) gives me the price of discounted goods, plan my upcoming expenses on trips in foreign currency and keep a track of spending when with multiple people. The app also allows you to send the mathematical calculations to a friend which they can view or print in an each to understand function which is helpful if you’re navigating budget allocation between multiple people.
The app is a separate purchase on Mac, iPad and iPhone with prices 35, 20 and 14 USD respectively. You can purchase for the platforms you want or buy them all like I did.
2024-01-16 15:07:20
Periodically while browsing a third party app, I sometimes wonder what is my alternatives if this service goes away tomorrow. The likely event of that happening is low but it’s a great thought exercise. I have recently listed all my Default apps 2024 which has tons of default services that comes with all Apple devices. I am going to list all services that I rely on weekly and if not daily.
1. RSS and Readlater
I extensively use Readkit as my primary source of RSS reading. However I use Feedly as a backend service that plugs in Readkit. I also recently purchased Lire and NetNewsWire is great starting point. So this category is healthy and have iCloud as a sync engine if things go catastrophe.
I use Goodlinks as a read later service. There is always an option of using Safari Reader.
2. Movie and TV Show Tracking
I extensively use Letterboxd and Trakt for Movies and TV Shows respectively. While I will be extremely annoyed with losing any of the both services there are some alternatives. With Letterboxd launching support for TV Shows later in 2024, it will give us more options.
3. Sports
I watch a lot of sports mainly Football, F1 and Cricket. For Football I use Fotmob which is one of the most complete apps in the sports category. It supports Live activities, Dynamic Island and has great widgets. I use Cricinfo for Cricket which is decent app but has no ways to remove ads. I use the official F1 app for Formula One and also pay for the live data but then again there is lot to be desired in this app. This category has always been underserved for me and I will certainly have issues looking for alternatives.
4. Finances
I use Outgoings app for tracking recurring subscriptions and generally prefer this app. There are alternatives but this is the app I love. I also use Expenses app for major one time expenses coming up. I believe this category has tons of apps and everyone has options.
5. Books
I mostly consumer Books via Audible. I like Audible the service but I am too deep in the ecosystem. I have started backing up my Audible library where I have invested thousands of dollars. I also use Goodreads but I am always looking for alternatives. I also tried using Storygraph but their app is also not very good.
6. Photo Editing
I use Pixelmator Photo in conjunction with Apple Photos. I believe there are many programs including Lightroom and it’s more about losing time that you have spent learning the tools. There are lots of apps and I hope Photomator stays around a while.
To conclude there are some apps and services that are easier to replace and some harder to replace for me.
2024-01-13 07:47:28
These last few months have not been endearing for people who consume news on a daily basics. With the news breaking that Substack has a Nazi problem, and Artifact shutting down at the end of Feb. It begs the question what is the best way to consumer news.
What is even RSS by the way? RSS is subscribing to a website without actually giving them any of your information. This allows you to “Subscribe” to tons of websites in one app. This allows you to skim through all the content published over a period of time and read what you like.
I discovered RSS in the beginning of 2010 and the idea of a feed resonated with me. Twitter was thriving at that time and the idea of me reviewing all articles published in the last day. I review them on a daily basics and get tons of reading done with my morning Tea. For long term articles, I push them to Goodlinks app for reading them when I have the time.
However, the biggest challenge of reading RSS daily is that it’s boring. The practice of reading text has deteriorated over time and reading only headlines for 15 minutes is not particularly enjoyable.
The best way to get started is to use a RSS service for free is NetNewsWire. I would suggest not subscribe to popular news websites because they will publish 100+ articles a day and it takes practice to go through them. Starting out subscribe to your niche websites and build from there.
I believe over time this is one of the best ways to keep track of Blogs, Indie software websites and local news and the best part is there no algorithm to manipulate you.
Give RSS a shot.
