I’ve been using Pop sockets for years upon years.

I think it started with the iPhone 8 Plus, because it was way more slippery than the 6 Plus I replaced. Over the years I’ve used multiple versions of it, not the original that you just glued on, but I started with the ones where you could twist off the pop socket itself only leaving a mount, making them more charging pad compatible. For a while I used the thing you attached on the sides that slide up and down, and these days I mostly use the first version of the MagSafe ones.

I think the MagSafe versions is the perfect version of the product, because of how easy it is to take them on and off depending on if you need it or not.

For those who are not aware. Pop sockets is this plastic and rubber knob you attach on the back of your phone that you can pull out or push in. You pull it out to use it and push it back in when you put your phone it your pocket etc. When pulled out you can use it to mount it to a bunch of pop socket compatible accessories (like their car mount, I’ll get to that in a separate post), to to use it as a kickstand (not a great one though) or to give your phone something to grip on to.

The latter is my primary use for them. It makes it a lot easier to hold a large phone, because you can kind of just let it sit between your fingers and you don’t have to strain your hand by gripping as much. When I use them I barely grip my phone at all, I just let it sit there.

I also fight a lot with mine. I think they even made a fidget toy version of it at some point.

Of all the apps I subscribe to there isn’t anything like Wallaroo.

It is an app for iPhone, iPad and macOS made by The Icon Factory that has loads of great wallpapers. Some of them are free, some require a subscription. There are a few different levels of them, one through the App Store, plus a few different levels on Patreon.

I love this app. It doesn’t have an useful or productive function. But it is so much fun.

One thing to note though, is that I had to go in and modify the Shortcut they install to set the wallpapers to let me pick what Wallpaper set they’re adding wallpapers to. Seems like it might be defaulting to the currently active one at install time.

What I love about it, outside of being really fun, is that all the wallpapers work well as wallpapers. Some better for home screens others work better for lock screens. But all of them are great for at least one of them.

The App Library on iOS is great, but at this point I’d love to have the opportunity to organize things myself instead of being tied to the weird ass App Store meta-data categories.

And for fucks sake: the recently added one should be sorted with the most recently added ones first.

With the upcoming feature of macOS being able to display widgets from your iPhone, there are a few kind of related features I’d love to see.

• Being able to display widget from any of your devices on any of them. Like there are apps that for dumb reasons can only be installed on my iPhone, but I would love to display its widgets on my iPad.
• Being to start a shortcut on one device but executing it on another.
• And related: set that a shortcut always should ask or run on a particular device

I love them.

I bought the Apple one May (’22) last year, and a in late April this year (’23) I ordered a third party one from Belkin, called BoostCharge.

These products are probably hard to get for people who either have a more put together life than I have, or don’t have small children and can just put their phone on a charger and charge it.

If you suddenly realize that you need more battery than your phone has or will be able to charge before you leave or have to go to bed. Or you have a three year old that don’t think your phone belong on the charging stand but closer to you. Or are going somewhere and would like to be able to charge it if you need to. They are awesome.

I’ve used the Apple one a lot over the year I have had it, and the Belkin one I have used a few times since I got it. The big difference between the two is that the Apple one is smaller and has a smaller capacity 1469 mAh (I think, it isn’t disclosed anywhere official), while the Belkin one has capacity of 5000 mAh.

The Apple one charges with lightning and the Belkin one with USB C. Plus that the Apple one doesn’t really have much more to it, there is an indicator that indicates battery levels but only when you attach / detach or plug / unplug a cable. While the Belkin one has a button that I had to click to make it charge the first time. But not since. That you also use to see what the battery level is on four different lights.

It also has a kickstand. It kind of works in portrait orientation, and fairly well in landscape.

I have one of the giant 13 inch iPads, for the most part I love the thing. Most of the time I either use it with that stupid expensive turns it into an laptop case Apple makes or I use a it in a thin cover with the pencil.

When I use the latter, I mostly use the tiny keyboard, and either click or swipe depending on what language I’m writing in. Being left handed, it would have been great if there was an option where I had the option to invert at least the stock sidebars. Instead of having to do all kinds of finding the spot where the keyboard kind of is close to where I want it to be, while also seeing the menu etc.

How is it that Shortcuts have gone on for so long without any real way of sharing things between different Shortcuts?

Okay, fine, you can run separate Shortcuts, and that is kind of the same. But not really.

So, if you want to send data into another Shortcut you can either use the input system, something I never get to work like I want to. Or use the clipboard. And if you want it to return data you have to put it back to the clipboard.

At this point I have a stupid amount of shortcuts that aren’t designed to run by themselves, that just support various other shortcuts. And I wish all of them could just be replaced by a function or similar.

Both to clean up my library and have a better way of managing them. But also to avoid the whole putting input data on the pasteboard, then reading it out, parsing it, doing some shit and putting it back on, for so to do the reverse on the other side.

It’s fucking stupid.

After being annoyed by the Apple Folio thingy for my 12.9” iPad Pro. The main things were that it looks boring as fuck, plus that the pencil fall off all the time. I started looking for a replacement and found this thing by Native Union.

It had a cooler yellow color than the terrible black or kind of black colors Apple has. Plus this rubber band thingy to wrap around where the pencil sits.

I love this thing. The folio itself has a cool texture, the color is better, or it is great, but not my favorite kind of yellow and the way it secures the Apple Pencil turned it into a non problem within minutes of getting it.

Just a list of some apps and devices that have been very useful to me as I’m well on the way to have lost 40KG and hopefully 45 and 50 since May of 2020.

• Happy Scale. I love this weight tracker. It let you define goals and milestones, have various average calculation algorithms to pick between. And it always keeps the lowest weigh-in of the day. It is a very useful tool to stay motivated a be reminded that loosing weight over the long term is a lot of ups and downs.
• FoodNoms the only good calorie tracker I have used. It is just a paid app that let you add the food you eat. No upsells on training or diet programs. For the most part it is based on you adding things manually, but it also have some integration with databases. Requires some work in the start, but after a while it gets easier. I currently don’t track calories, but in the start and at various points during my weight loss journey it have been immensely useful and a large part of why I have been able to stay with it.
• Apple Watch. For me it is very useful to get data on how fit I am, how much I move and all of that. Especially after I got more into Gentler Streak. Most fitness trackers that sync to your smart phone platform of choice can probably to most of the same.
• Gentler Streak. I find this app very interesting, and some very useful metrics on how tried I seem to be. My only complaint about it is that when I started using it I started to hit the “start workout” button on watch more diligently than in the past, and it considered it an increase in activity, even though I was the same amount of active as before and was bothering me about it. I use the metrics it give me on heart readings in a very human understandable way to guide how many times a week I go to the gym.
• Any scale that syncs to the cloud: I use this from Withings. It is okay. Not a huge fan of their app, and I’d love for it to be able to sync things to Apple’s Health app without having to launch the app and letting it sync things. Other than that I don’t have any big complaints about it. Most of the time I just step on it for a big. And later sync the weight into where I want it.