April 19, 2021

One Year of Hey

It was my fault—I knew from the start that Hey wasn’t for me.

Still, I soldiered on because I was excited by the first real re-think of email since its inception; I wanted to make sure I gave it a proper try. I did my best to adapt, to use it as it’s designed to be used…but it’s been nearly a year now and I’m afraid I have to throw in the towel.

For all of its benefits—and there are several important ones—Hey turned my seamless experience with email into a slow, frustrating, opaque mess that I haven’t been able to get used to and that has negatively impacted my productivity and email efficiency for months. I won’t go into too much detail around why because I covered the majority of the reasoning in my initial pieces about it.

Instead, I want to discuss what the process of migrating away from Hey was like.

Amazon Finally Allows Book Covers to be Displayed on the Lock Screen →

After years of having this simple feature requested, Amazon has finally relented: You can now choose to show the cover of the book you’re currently reading on the lock screen of your Kindle while it’s asleep.

UAG’s iPhone 12 Pro Max Cases

Each year, I get more comfortable using my iPhone without a case.

At the same time, each new iPhone generation gets more sophisticated, more precious—and more expensive, making this feel risky despite the improved durability that invariably accompanies the new models.

For times when I want the peace of mind of a case, or when I know my phone is going to encounter more precarious situations (day hikes, travel—not now but usually), I like to have case options. Readers of the site will know I’ve come to admire Urban Armour Gear for putting out reliable, high-quality products, so it should come as no surprise that I explored their case line-up first when it came time to get some protection for my iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Blog Improvements

Now that I’ve reassured myself that Blot is definitely the best platform for my needs, I took some time this weekend to implement a laundry list of improvements, mostly behind-the-scenes stuff.

This is a bit of a geeky changelog, so feel free to ignore it unless you’re interested in some of what’s under the hood around here. If you’re reading via RSS or email, make sure you visit the website itself and hit Shift + Refresh in your browser to see what I’m talking about.