It’s a bit crazy right now. It’s getting warmer every day (which is great) it also feels earlier than in the recent years, even though the average temperature is 5 degrees Celsius (according to Wolfram Alpha) and today it was only mildly warmer. But who cares.

Anyway, it’s going on steadily towards Summer vacation and during the last week I already had been sending a few (more) students to their holidays. At least from their saxophone lessons. I guess both parties will enjoy an extra portion of free time.

Talking about free time… Blogging-wise I have kept up my streak and am now at 142 days, which is needless to say, an absolute record for me. To be honest, I’m getting a bit tired of it, which I guess, is normal, but also a sign of lack of planning.

Often I find myself having too much to do during the day, that I don’t find the time to write something, or if there’s time, lacking an inspiration or idea. At least on the planning part I can easily work, the idea part though is something else, but then again, that’s part of the exercise.

And since I talk about time: catching up with my podcast backlog I realized a lot people talking about time tracking, which made me wonder whether it would be worth trying that. In the past I very infrequently tried to log how much time I spent writing arrangements, but it was a rather half-assed approach and didn’t give me any other insights than that I started something and then most likely forgot to end the timer. I will have to debate with myself about that.

One thing that I could do to be more consistent, should I be doing the time-tracking thingy, is to build (or use ready-made) Siri-Shortcuts on which I rely more and more. I have now a bunch of Shortcuts that I use daily and also added a few evoked by voice commands.

The latter has gotten a lot better since the last time I used Siri, and is a huge help for me. Usually when I’m out and about, I tend to leave (aka forget) my reading-glasses at home, which makes using the phone, or a phone, independent of size rather difficult. With the new Shortcuts I get reliably what I want. Wich is neat.

And neat is also that I just a few minutes ago, I finished to build that Shortcut that I always wanted, to log the podcasts that I’m listening to. It now works via voice command (need this) and I don’t have to unlock the phone. The latter was only possible because I used the Notes.app. I would have wanted to use Drafts, which has become my go-to-editor, but for that to happen I would need to unlock the phone to finish the Shortcut. Which kind-of defeats the point.

I guess the same could be achieved also with Evernote, but I’m glad that I’m already off the app, and don’t want to go down that route again. So, for this purpose I will stick with Notes.app

Podcasts

Looking at the log, I have listened to 16 shows. I have been bingeing a bit on Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years and Ologies, here the Hagfish episode and the Cosmology episode which I currently listen stood out.

Some Stats:

According to Screentime I have used the iPad on average 4h 51m a day and the phone 1h 26m. Which kind of makes sense since I mostly work on the iPad.

Among the top apps on the phone are my RSS-Reader Iire, Safari, Overcast, What’s App and Bear, iReal Pro, Brushstroke, Safari and Drafts and Reeder.

Brushstroke I used to create the header images, such as in this post.

But now I will finally watch The Spiderverse thingy.