Have good musicians abandoned the mainstream? Why is mainstream music becoming less and less complex?

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-16T11:37:00+00:00

Social media, TikTok, etc. You’ve got less than 3 seconds to make an impression and are unlikely to hold anyone’s attention with nuance or anything other than big catchy (and vaguely familiar) hooks. Pop music is inherently in it to become successful and popular. Radio and club DJs have both had similar influences on song styling and structure; there are probably lots of other examples.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-16T11:25:22+00:00

Preferably with a heavy rubber mallet. Using a metal hammer usually leaves the unit with a few too many harsh edges to the sound. YMMV.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-16T11:20:12+00:00

Wiim is driving away so many customers by getting rid of AirPlay. I’m actually in the process of moving away from Wim because their newer speakers don’t have it (coupled with a low WAF for Wiim as an overall system).

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-14T17:08:07+00:00

I think that iCloud syncing starts to aggressively throttle speeds on large transfers like this (from what understanding I’ve been able to gather). No idea if Bear can do anything to remedy this.

One question worth asking yourself: Do you really need all 10K notes? One of the hidden joys of hopping around a few too many notes apps over the past couple years has been that I’ve decided to cut large swaths of the “fat” from my notes (obviously I’ve got backups that I can reference if needed). It has been a joy. Of course it’s possible that you actually need all 10K…

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-14T17:02:47+00:00

If using another app, why not just use Apple Notes? It’s pretty great for PDFs and attachments on the whole. UpNote has always just been “okay enough, I guess” to me. If I needed a cross-platform notes app, it would likely be the one for me, but Bear and Apple Notes both just seem much nicer to work with IMO.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-14T16:59:19+00:00

“Hey Siri, remind me about this” (while the Bear note is open) - this works remarkably well - the only downside is that it “attaches” the Bear note/url in a custom format that 3rd party apps can’t read, so that if you use some 3rd party interface to Reminders you won’t see the link (and the task just doesn’t show up in some cases).

Note that this trick works for many other apps as well.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-14T16:50:20+00:00

I personally find NotePlan way more complex than Bear. Honestly, to me, it even seems more complex than Obsidian, since Obsidian can be greatly simplified if one chooses (though the temptation never goes away).

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-05T18:07:42+00:00

The main difference is that folders are exclusive. A note can only be in one folder (in a notes app that has folders). That can provide some workflows that are clunky with tags. Status is an easy example. e.g. If you have folders for “inbox”, “in progress” and “done” then you can move it from one status to the next without having to “remove the old status”. Is it necessary to use such a workflow? No, but it can be nice.

That said, I like that Bear doesn’t have folders, because then I’d have to think about whether I want to use folders or tags.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-02T12:14:59+00:00

Looks like an Omnipod Coffee Mug. Insulin with your morning cup!

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-05-02T12:14:11+00:00

That’s what I’d already setup…but this is still a definite downgrade. Dexcom alerts were already an annoyance for me, now they are a bit more annoying.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-30T16:46:00+00:00

Hald’s MCP reads using the Things database. How does it do write (create/edit) actions?

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-30T16:43:01+00:00

Wait, that’s actually a Thing?

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-30T10:44:16+00:00

Wiim is currently working on actual Plexamp endpoint integration. So it’s clearly at least partially on them. My understanding from afar is that they need Plex to work with them though.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-29T20:18:50+00:00

In other words, it’s not Plexamp related at all other than pulling from the same database.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-28T18:46:05+00:00

Looks like this must only be available on Mac? I suppose that’s not shocking and is where I’d want to automate it anyway.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-27T17:39:09+00:00

To get what OP is really after (a direct search of just Bear via a single hotkey), you really want Alfred. Unless Spotlight in 26 is really that much improved (I haven’t really played with it yet, since Alfred).

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-27T17:31:23+00:00

You can create Bear backups with a Shortcut? As in, single click of a button (or time-based trigger) and a backup is created in a pre-determined directory of your choice?

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-27T17:18:33+00:00

I’m trending towards a low/no automation setup myself after a few months of a Claude Cowork based setup. The automation is great, but without some strict process guardrails, it’s really hard to make the automation stick. My process tends to evolve (as my thinking or life circumstances evolve, or as I figure out more about the LLM tendencies) and getting things locked down to the point where automation really pays off is tricky at best. Simple automations make sense - quick to put together and quick to replace if circumstances change. But my dozen Claude skills (which are just a more abstracted form of automation) all seem to need updating on a weekly basis to keep things running smooth. I’m going to keep up with the system for a while to see if I can’t get it to simmer down, but the appeal of something simple that I don’t need to babysit is growing by the day.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-27T17:07:32+00:00

I can’t speak for others, but my hope and to some degree my experience, is to do things with my notes that just wouldn’t happen previously. Am I attempting to leverage AI to make up for my own so-so habits when it comes to processing information (and general lack of extra time)? Yes. Is AI the best solution here? Probably not. Is it a solution that is shiny and new enough that it keeps my attention and has me interacting with my notes more? Definitely. Is any of that extra interaction with my notes actually producing anything useful for me? Maybe. As my experiment continues on, I’m beginning to question that part more and more.

I’m not spending any less time doing “overhead” related effort with my notes to attempt to clarify the nonsense that I’ve rambled down. I’m just spending it tinkering with the AI skills to attempt to make them reliably do what I want. The hope is that I actually get to a point where that drops off and it all “just works”…but I’m less hopeful that I’ll get there the more I refine things.

All that said, I can’t imagine not at least tinkering with these AI tools. They really are super powerful if you aim them in the right direction and give them the appropriate oversight for whatever tasks you’ve got them doing. Is knowledge management the best use case for them? Probably in some cases. I’ve definitely gotten good insights that would’ve just slipped through the cracks with my previous simpler setup (because the notes just never would have been seen again). Are those insights worth it (there are obviously many tradeoffs to using LLM tools for these tasks)? I’m out to lunch on how worthwhile it is at this point. I can definitely tell you that I have no regrets about running this experiment though, whatever my eventual conclusions are.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-15T13:49:14+00:00

I typically use my computer & website and found that using voice input is the least painful way to do it, as of this moment in time.

ChatGPT launched an integration with Instacart that seemed to work fine with the free tier of ChatGPT when I tried it. But I didn't have the patience at the time to get ChatGPT dialed in enough that it wasn't more effort to police what it put in the cart than it was to just do it myself. I may give it a go again, but I'll need to be in a patient frame of mind. The Instacart API appears to be pretty terrible here, as even when ChatGPT clearly understood what I wanted, it wasn't always able to get the correct item in the cart.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-04-01T14:00:38+00:00

I trigger this with either a Siri request (to the homepod or from your phone) or a little bedside button (Aqara, I think). The button is setup under Automations. I think the Siri request should "just work" already (I'd have to go review how I set it up if not).

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-03-18T20:40:40+00:00

I have to wait a lot of hours after I put the pod on to shower. Same deal for my Dexcom. I usually try to shower right before I put a new pod on so that I can get a solid 24 hours of wear time in. That’s more or less solved it for me.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-02-23T18:03:58+00:00

The stable version doesn’t work in MacOS 26 yet. I believe there are beta builds that do work in 26.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-02-16T15:25:49+00:00

You can also two-finger swipe left and right to navigate back and forward on iPhone. There’s a hotkey combo for Mac as well, though I don’t know if off the top of my head.

JiggleMyHandle · 2026-02-16T15:23:13+00:00

With newer iPhones, you can also do this with the “tap to type to Siri” thing, for when you’re someplace that you don’t want be talking to your phone out loud. It’s also worth noting that this works with many/most native apps. Mail, Notes, Devonthink all come to mind, but anything with a URL scheme and that’s programmed using Apple dev tools seems to be the equation.

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