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I went outside to water the backyard and by the time I came back inside travel from Europe to the US was restricted, the NBA was suspended and Tom Hanks announced that he tested positive for coronavirus 😳

A combination of being busy at work, a weekend vacation and the return of a couple of twice-weekly podcasts (The Totally Football Show & My Dad Wrote a Porno) means that September is the first month this year where I haven’t finished an audiobook.

Alongside 1364 other people from 99 different countries I became a US citizen today. It was genuinely heartwarming (particularly in contrast to the depressing news cycle) to see so many people from all over the world celebrate the milestone with their friends and family.

We’ll see if I will remain active on Twitter. I will say that my experience over the last week has ranged from good to not so fun, but unfollowing people and particularly disabling retweets has made a big difference. At this point I’m cautious, but hopeful.

The way that I will be posting to Twitter has changed. My tweets will now originate on my own site and are syndicated/cross-posted to Twitter. I am still active on Micro.blog and I hope to make my Twitter experience feel more like the community there.

18 months after unfollowing everyone and deleting all of my tweets I returned to Twitter a week ago 😬 I’ve spent the last week following people and then being aggressive about disabling retweets or just unfollowing people who for me are too frequently negative or outraged.

I’ve finally worked out why voicemail transcription has never worked on my iPhone: I had my Siri language set to English (UK). Voicemail transcription starts working when I change it to English (US). Time to Americanize after living here for twenty years I guess 😀

I installed the iOS 13 beta on my iPad to test it out, but was planning on waiting to update my iPhone. However, I edited a shortcut on my iPad and now it won’t work on my phone unless I upgrade. I might have to pull the trigger on updating there as well now 😬

Just had my first Impossible Burger at the Gott’s in SFO and I have to say that it was really good! If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have guessed that it wasn’t a “real” burger.

I’m in the middle of the Amazon rainforest with WiFi only via satellite and my phone in airplane mode…and I’m still getting spam calls! 🙄

I set up an On This Day page and a custom images archive page last night. It’s great for these to be on my own site rather than on a content silo.

It’s less than a week since I reduced my podcast consumption and I’ve already finished my first book: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. I’m excited to keep this going and I’m immediately starting another book. 📚

Last night I reduced the number of podcasts I’m subscribed to from 34 to 15. I’m hoping to replace the repetitive tech discussions with a combination of audiobooks and Pocket’s listen feature.

Pocket Casts adding support for AirPlay 2 is making me consider switching back to using it as my podcast app since I AirPlay to my HomePod all the time. It makes a huge difference not having a streaming delay.

I just packed up my iPhone X to send back to Apple having upgraded to the iPhone XS Max and it already feels small to me. It’s amazing how quickly that happens and I just get used to the larger phone.

I switched my chrispederick.com email from Google’s G Suite to FastMail and now that my personalized spam filter is active on FastMail I couldn’t be happier. Now I’m down to just one personal and one work Google account.

Bought one of the new 13″ MacBook Pros and I love it. I tried using only my Mac Mini and iPad Pro at home, but missed writing code on the couch. I’ve done more development in the past few days than I had in weeks and suspect going forward that my iPad Pro will be used much less.

I finished the new God of War game last night and it was spectacular. The story and setting were so well done that I’d love to read more about Norse mythology. Does anyone have recommendations for books (fiction or non-fiction) or graphic novels that cover the subject? 🎮📚