Gleb Reys

Unix admin. Apple user. Photography enthusiast.

Digital Reading

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It is with a touch of sadness that I have to recognize how one of my oldest habits is completing a digital transformation.

Reading Books with Kindle

I’ve been a fan of Amazon Kindle since the day I got my 4th Gen device. I have been an owner of another electronic ink device for 3 years prior to that. And still, somehow, I always chose to read the paper edition of a book if I had it.

But as I’m reading increasingly more of non-fiction (mostly technical books on systems administration, cloud technologies and DevOps), Kindle (and Safari on iPad) have won me over due to the purchased books becoming instantly available. In many cases, I would have finished the book by the time my paper book would be delivered from Amazon UK. And this one time, I ordered a paper book but then ended up buying a Kindle version cause I needed answers quickly and couldn’t wait any longer for it to be dispatched.

Shift Towards Kindle Books

I still read a lot of regular books, especially the ones I don’t see myself even re-reading again – it’s still convenient enough to read them once and then to pass them onto the next reader.

But lately I started noticing the shift towards Kindle books – not only because it’s quicker and more convenient to buy them but also because I love highlighting text for note taking so much.

In recent years years I had re-purchased some books in Kindle format as part of tidying up my home office – I would sell or gift the paper book but keep its electronic format. Sometimes I would even re-read parts of a book just to make bookmarks and highlighting notes in the Kindle app.

I would also re-purchase a few books that I expect myself re-reading, again for the benefit of taking notes.

But what happened today really surprised me: I decided to buy a Kindle edition of the book while I’m still reading a paper copy. It’s a loan from the library and I quite like the book, so what I realized was that I was completely unprepared for taking paper notes while reading a paper book. I’ve come to expect these notes to be available in electronic form almost instantly, and making notes on paper now to convert later just seems like a completely unnatural way for working through a book.

Don’t think the switch to digital reading is complete just yet, but paper books are slowly taking an unexpected role: I use them for discovering new interesting topics and thoughts, but more often than not I switch to the digital version as soon as I can (which, starting today, may well be before I finish the first reading).

 

I’m on Pinboard, At Last

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TL;DR: my online bookmarks are now on Pinboard.

I don’t remember why I stopped using del.icio.us in late 2009, but something must have happened and resulted in my bookmarking habits completely disappearing for a few years.

I’d say the most likely reason is that I had a few jobs which didn’t approve of using social websites or prohibited additional software (like browser plugins) from being installed. It was so painful to bookmark something that I stopped using del.icio.us and simply used local browser bookmarks. It took just a few months to completely break the habit of bookmarking interesting stuff into del.icio.us.

Recently, I’ve been a user of the Fetching service. It’s a great MacOS software that takes note of every website you’re visiting so that you can review it later. Text part of pages is indexed so you can search it locally or even have Fetching results show up in your Google searches. But looking back at a year plus of being a user, I noticed that mostly I used Fetching it as a bookmarking tool with tags.

This brings us to just a few weeks back, when I decided to give Pinboard a try. I heard about it a few times but wasn’t sure if it would work. And just like with any habit recently, this time I decided to give it a proper try: migrate my del.icio.us bookmarks, move bookmarks from Fetching, try bookmarking from my iPhone.

I’m quite happy with the results so far:

  • 800+ bookmarks from del.icio.us – migrated within 30min
  • 175 bookmarks from Fetching – took about 2h
  • found out that Pinboard is supported in my RSS readers (ReadKit on MacOS and Reeder 3 on iOS)
  • got Safari and Chrome extensions working so that I can bookmark using a keyboard shortcut
  • found iOS app that allows to integrate Pinboard bookmarking into Safari for iOS

It’s only been a few weeks but I think the bookmarking habit is coming back to me. There’s certainly an added comfort in knowing that I may be organising my online bookmarks for the last time.

Migrated to Authy

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Authy Logo

Just completed setting Authy up on my iPhone and Macbook. In case you didn’t know, here are some of the advantages Authy has over Google Authenticator:

  • encrypted cloud backup – means you can easily restore your 2FA codes onto a new iPhone
  • multi-device setup – in case you want to have more than one device generating 2FA codes
  • laptop app  – for those times when you’re coding at your laptop but just too lazy to walk over to another room just to get 2FA login on iPhone
  • customisable icons for each 2FA token – quite a few are picked up automatically, the rest you can select from a list or just pick a generic icon of a specific colour

Overall, Authy seems to be a great app, awesome design too!

Hello again

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my online interests: blogging, Unix (with still a little bit of Solaris), virtualisation (slowly being replaced by my interest in cloud infrastructure). All of those interests stemmed from my professional growth, yet personal development and many small hobbies didn’t really have an outlet to be captured and shared.

Somehow each of my specialised blogs had too much pressure to stick to a certain topic. Enough of a pressure to prevent me from writing down some really useful things which were not relevant enough to be published on one of those blogs.

This stops today. I’m finally launching a blog with no specific topic and think it will be a lot of fun.