Category Archives: Personal Life

Kludgey

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This post was written on Mastodon so it has an informal writing style with jargon and a manner for a specific audience. All the spelling and grammatical errors are intended.

I love creating my own problems and then finding a rabbit hole and chasing it until I have a geek solution that is likely foolish. If I load too many tabs on my Macbook, it gets sluggish. So, can I start xQuartz? Sure! Update however…

Okay, that done, can I SSH with the -X flag to my little Raspberry Pi? Yes! Sluggish. Wah.

How about to my “Security” laptop, running Linux? Yes. Sluggish still.

Google Search, find x2go, install it. MUCH BETTER.

So I’m using x2go, running Firefox-esr and connected to my not-work-tabs, including this one. Not seamless, but it works acceptably well enough.

Sitting here, marveling at all this exceptionally complicated computing technology before me, everything has “multiple cores” yet you really couldn’t tell. So instead of running everything from one single computer, we’ve got serious work stuff on one, then a remote desktop window to another running “fluffy stuff”, and then playing Spotify from my !@#$ iPhone. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Shitty apps, each written by devs that believe that their app is the “King Of The Realm” and you can malloc() forever without having to fret over anything at all. Leaks? Who cares! Look how pretty it is! So, multiple computers, multiple OSes, failures aren’t less, but they are spread out so they don’t block real work quite as badly.

Of course, there is also I/O Blocking to contend with. When the filesystem is doing anything, everything stops. Because I/O is super smexy.

So we contend with shitty development choices by simply throwing entire chunks of technology at the problem. Two laptops, a Raspberry Pi, an iPhone, and an iPad. Each device is good at individual things, but no, we can’t do everything on one single device. Watch that device just chug right to the fucking ground. Ah well. The modern response is “throw a hypervisor on it” and that, wow, what a great way to make an even bigger mess of things.

Bullshit hypervisors make for hilarious blown-out-afternoons. So, Windows 10 on an HP Elitebook laptop, install Hyper-V from the OS, and the Radeon display driver commits hairy suicide. Not only does the driver break, but it cannot be “upgraded” or “fixed”, the only thing you can do, is remove HyperV and… poof, uh, there was a problem? No! No problem! So, you shrug and chuckle and look at the icon for VirtualBox. Yeah, hey buddy…

There are some situations where I start thinking that I should buy a cheap $200 Chromebook just for some things. More technology. SMH. Of course.

Two days ago I remembered the glory-promise of X-Windows and SSH tunnels, with the Display being sent elsewhere. Oh my god, the promise of that… so glittering. So… disappointing.

Oh it works. But it’s like watching slugs have a romantic dinner. Maybe I should just read a book while you request that website, hmmm?

Obviously you turn to Google, the eminent sage and eternal junkie for answers. Ah yes, X-Windows over SSH is a ping/pong nightmare, half the traffic is consumed by just making sure that all the lower layers are functioning properly, constantly. Fine. But then you spot things like x2go, give that a shot, eh… it’s somewhat better.

In the end, the promise bends to tools you already have. Like TeamViewer connected to Windows 10 on a different laptop.

Heh, assuming TeamViewer stays functional that is.

Technology is bittersweet. We have such command of so many wonders. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all an immense house-of-cards. I suppose I’ve seen too much, I know too much, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” kind of running through my head. Like looking at Layer 1 connections secured by… chewed bubble gum.

And all the various cheats and hacks, because you naturally want something, but you can’t get it because the people who provide the thing, won’t provide the tools for the extra things you want. They aren’t going to write the code, their codebase is secret, you can’t submit code yourself, and so you just sit there, google searching and finding kludgy-as-fuck solutions to your headaches.

Yeah, that’s fine, be a prat. I’ve got a python script that scrapes your shit and does what I wanted to do.

Case in point, Signal. I love Signal. I will always love Signal. But I want to search on metadata within the Signal app. No. Like the soup nazi, no metadata for you! Only search on stuff in primary stream. Fuuuuuuuu.

So I have a group chat, it’s all my friends, in Signal, and we use it as a blazing-bright thread, it connects us all, geographically spread throughout the United States. It made the COVID-19 Pandemic less lonely. It was a community of dear friends and we could be together without risk.

So, I journal, have an app for that, but obviously Signal doesn’t work with the journal app, so I can’t just hoover all the Signal content into the journaling software. Sometimes I forget to review everything we said in Signal, so the date-of-chat just slides off primary display. You could scroll, but wouldn’t it be nice to search on metadata? Like take me to the first thing shared on Sep 01, 2021? That would be nifty! NO. NO SOUP FOR YOU.

So, no metadata searching. Fine. So, enter the raw kludgy “fuck it, this is also a solution, damn you all” solution. Can’t search on metadata, but just on raw data, so, lets add the data markers we want to the stream! At 6am, write the date into the stream, every day. Then you can use the tools in the app to search on what was shared, and since the metadata you want is “shared”, now you can search on it! Well, okay! “Sep 01, 2021” look! YAY! That’s what I wanted!

Obviously this creates a “Forking House Of Mirrors”… one bullshit kludgy solution leads to a new problem. I don’t want to wake up at 6am to put the date into Signal stream. OK. Lets automate that. Enter Signal-CLI. shakes head fine. So, lets try to connect to the service, that was a hard climb. Okay, now it’s as group, what groups are there? No groups. What? No. Send something to someone, then ask again. Okay. <<send>> how about now? OH YES, THIS GROUP!? You need a special hex code for this.

If you have this hex code, you’d think you could use that without having to ask going forward. No. New install? You can’t just simply use what you know to peek around the corner, no. You need to run around Robin Hoods Barn all over again, and now you can use it! HUZZAH. FUUUUUUUUUUU.

So, finally, we can send signal data from the CLI. Next, lets figure out the date commands picky-picky formatting rules. How to get Sep 01, 2021?

We’ve got that! YAY! Okay, so lets write a Bash script! Get the date, and at 6am write it out to the Signal group. Write script, change mode on script so it can execute, plumb the foggy memories you have of crontab, and boom. Failure.

FUUUUUUUUUUU

Ah yes, cardinal sin, I didn’t explicitly declare the specific paths to signal-cli, echo, mv, fuck, any command at all. Call the script yourself, works, cron calls? Lost. Fixup. Dive into vim. Find your cheatsheet. Gah.

Finally, good god watch it work. 6am every day, a machine you “rescued from the landfill” with some half-forgotten linux distro you can’t remember is actually working and that’s fine. Now, when it’s Sep 03, 2021, you can search on Sep 01, 2021, to get back and manually journal what you remember telling people, because there it is. Click-drag.

All because metadata isn’t searchable. I got what I wanted. Everyone can benefit from it too. But it is complete mess.

This is why entire afternoons are incinerated on the pyre of “Fuck, I wanted XYZ, but the devs don’t speak English, their angel investors aren’t interested, and nobody but me would ever want this feature… so… fuuuuuuuuuuu”

I suppose I could attempt to ask for whatever it is I think would be good, but devs live on the moon, or as much as would be useful, they do. So no. We don’t tell devs anything. We just muck about, finding fragments on GitHub, trying not to get sick that Microsoft owns them now.

So you find gists, you find forked projects, you find python code fragments. The dependencies aren’t circular-misadventures-into-the-fog, you try to remember basic linux stuff because you haven’t had to screw around with any of it for decades and crontab went off to the same Elysium Fields that Trigonometry went off to…

Google Fu. Another worrisome “house of cards” right there too, but lets not look too closely at it, lest it collapse. Or sell our identity to Belorussians.

It doesn’t take much at all. Fragile houses of cards built on other fragile houses of cards. People mobbing on top, like hapless Eloi sitting down at the picnic tables and never having a single bright shiny thought in their pretty little heads because food is always right there, on the table, same time every day. Meanwhile, underneath, the Morlocks are banging on pipes, and every once in a while grabbing an Eloi for a snack.

That’s the Internet. Humanity on top of the Internet. The rot in Layer 8.

And all you really do is shrug. You hope for a better world. Every once in a really long while you stumble blindly over something truly elegant. It’s like tripping over Rivendell and spotting an Elf walking along a curated beautiful path of perfectly carved scrollwork.

And it’s only momentary. The pile of constantly shifting wreckage we call the modern world continues to shudder and throb. It all works, and you marvel that these people manage to continue to live in all of this… wreckage.

Catching Up

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Welcome to the end of July 2021! So much has happened, and most of it has passed without a blog entry. Life is a box of chocolates and sometimes you run into a really thick caramel and have to slow down.

COVID-19

shallow focus photography of microscope
Photo by Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels.com

In the time I’ve been away, I discovered that on Saint Patrick’s Day 2021, March 17th, that I had contracted COVID-19 when I could no longer smell or taste anything. My test came back positive, but I didn’t have a strong illness associated with it. Then my mind cast back to January 2020, and when I thought that I had Norovirus, but upon reflection I think it might have been COVID-19 as well, except in January of 2020, COVID kicked my ass. So perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t, I didn’t get tested at the time. Then we all got the happy news that we were invited to have our first vaccination series with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. Mine was on 3/30, and then subsequently again on 4/20. Now I have at least one true COVID-19 infection, and the mRNA, so that puts me in a pretty strong resistant category.

Working From Home & Working In The Office

During the entire pandemic, the state of Michigan opened and closed. We played the flirt game with spikes and surges and it was very ugly for quite a while. Restaurants closed up left and right, the only real dining game in town was those joints that decided to adopt a strong take-out offering. I bounced from Home to the Office, and in one of those bounces, I contracted COVID-19 from my workplace. Since then, I have had weight issues which naturally led to hypertensive issues as well. Since April I think, I’ve been back in the office, and back in the swing of things. I still quarantine myself, I still mask, and I still have lots of hand sanitizer. COVID-19 has changed how I behave, it created a host of new habits and since they can only help me, I have kept them going. I don’t know if I will ever let go of them.

Noom

On April 16th, 2021 I started the Noom program. I started at 331.4 pounds, and now I’m down to 291.4 pounds, on the program, with a lifetime goal of 220 pounds. The program is very good, the educational components are really quite valuable and I’m almost done with the education parts. I don’t think that I’m ready to “be free of the program” as I think what I need most is the discipline that the app offers me, the rigorous control over my food intake, and being careful so as to not over-indulge and gain back the weight I have lost so far. I definitely think that Noom is a diet that everyone could really benefit from, I don’t feel deprived or starving, and I still am losing weight.

Crochet

person holding purple and white pen
Photo by Castorly Stock on Pexels.com

Over pandemic, I picked up a new hobby. Crochet, which is a style of working with yarn to make various fabrics and items. So far I’ve made many blankets, hats, gloves, and “Cat Pads” for donation to Kalamazoo Animal Rescue. I have discovered that Bernat Blanket, which is a 100% Polyester yarn works amazingly well for animal applications. The yarn is very strong, it can stand up to sanitization methods, and it doesn’t suffer when cats dig in with their claws. I started a WordPress.com blog Bluedepth’s Crochet and there I cover all the neat things that I’m exploring with the yarn arts.

One of the obvious and unfortunate things about yarn arts, and Crochet and Knitting is the gender issues that surround them. Both are seen as “women’s work” and so, much of the education and pattern supply is led by and for women. Obviously, there are some things that are unisex, and I do wish quite often that more people would try something like crochet or knitting, they may find something they truly love and celebrate as I do when I make something beautiful and it is instantly useful.

COVID-19 and Temperature Checks

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I see a lot of companies starting to “open up” during our running COVID-19 pandemic. Right at the top, almost invariably I find the line item that, paraphrased “All employees are temperature checked before they start work.” and then it goes on and on from there.

I think it is worthwhile to start a conversation to illuminate understanding on what temperature checks really are. They are not quickie medical tests to determine if someone is infected or not with COVID-19. They are simply a very easy diagnostic tool to isolate vectors of COVID-19 transmission. Remember, that COVID-19 can infect you without your knowledge, it can replicate in your body without your knowledge, and by the time your immune system calls for a fever, to begin work on fighting the infection, COVID-19 has already been in your system and active and spreading the entire time, back to a standard period of about two weeks.

What temperature checks that fail do, is show you that you have a vector in your midst. Save your bus fare, because when someone is showing a temperature elevation they have been sick for at least a week if not two. These people should be interviewed to see where they have been so that those who have come in contact with them can be tested and quarantined.

So, while companies want to re-open because of economic pressure, which I do fully understand, a temperature check, a good thing to do mind you, is pretty much just identifying a bomb that has been slowly going off for two weeks. It is not testing, it is not contact tracing, and it is not quarantine. You haven’t found a sick person as much as you have found a Typhoid Mary or a Typhoid Marv.

We need to test everyone. We need a vaccine. We need masks, hand-washing, and social distancing. Everything else is just a carefully monogrammed pillow invitation for COVID-19 to spread and kill more people.

Crochet Yarn Estimating

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I have been thinking about starting a new crochet project and it struck me that there were no measurements or calculators online that could give you an estimate of the amount of yarn you would need based on the measurements of the projects result, with fixed terms such as the weight of the yarn, the hook used, and which fundamental stitch was used to create the final result. The goal is to answer this question,

“If I wish to make a square of fabric that is 34 inches by 34 inches, made of half-double crochet using a 5mm hook and worsted weight yarn, how much yarn would I need to complete the project?”

So I decided to find out the answer manually. I worked several styles, including:

  • Foundation Chain
  • FSC
  • FHDC
  • FDC
  • SC
  • HDC
  • DC
  • SC Strip
  • HDC Strip
  • DC Strip

Where the strips were just a single row of that kind of stitch, and the non-strip measures were measuring the yarn after creating a complete work in the square based on the index, which for all of this was five inches. So, a SC Strip is 5 inches long, one row of SC, and SC is 5 inches wide by 5 inches high.

Here are the numbers that I measured, these are inches of yarn consumed for each category (YCR – Yarn Consumption Rate):

Stitch Five Inches LengthAverage YCR per Inch
Foundation Chain 25.54.8
FSC8016
FHDC8717.22
FDC8215.5
SC 785.531.42 (per sq inch)
HDC 80232.08 (per sq inch)
DC 79031.6 (per sq inch)
SC Strip5310.6
HDC Strip78.515.7
DC Strip10220.4

What surprised me was that Double Crochet uses less yarn, a little bit, than Half-Double Crochet does, and then just how close the three fundamental stitches are to each other when you hold width and height at a fixed value.

So my answer is, for a 34” by 34” square of fabric, Half Double Crochet with a Foundation Half Double Crochet will require:

FHDC = 34” x 17.22 = 585.48 inches of yarn

HDC = 34” x 34” = 1156 square inches x 32.08 = 37,084.48 inches of yarn

Full Project = 585.48 + 37,084.48 = 37,669.96 inches of yarn, with 36 inches per yard results in 1,046.38 yards of yarn.

So with this information, I know what my project would potentially cost me, outside of the project time itself, so if I select a superwash merino yarn, for example on yarn.com, their Valley Yarns Valley Superwash is $6.49 a ball, and a ball has 97 yards of yarn in it. That requires 10.78 balls, well, really 11 balls. That’s $71.39, with their 20% off deal, their out the door is $64.10.

The really nice part of knowing the rough yarn consumption rate for these stitches is that you don’t have to overbuy your yarn and then end up with extra of anything. There will almost always be partials but there is a big difference between having a third of a ball left versus having 3 1/3 balls left.

If you find these values to be useful, I would only ask that you leave a comment here letting me know that they helped.

Ulysses 18.7 and WordPress 5.4

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I just had a devil of a time with my Ulysses to WordPress integration. Something underhanded happened on the way to the Forum. Either it was something that WordPress tweaked in 5.4, or my host did something clever to get in the way and didn’t tell me. Someone left a very important bit out, which broke Ulysses, my editor of choice for blogging.

The solution was to be found in these two sites:

David Bosman’s Blog – Ulysses and WordPress and

Hans Bruins’s Medium Post – Ulysses and WordPress

So if you were using Ulysses all along, and it suddenly crapped out on you with WordPress, these instructions seem to do the trick, it did so for me!

YubiKey NFC 5 – Disappointing & Useless

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It doesn’t take much for a technology to excite me and then subsequently fail me. Case in point, a YubiKey 5 NFC security key. I bought it on November 6, 2019 for $51.94. I was excited to use this new bit of technology, thinking that it would at least be a valuable experience for me when it came to 2 factor authentication and honing my security skills. The NFC bits were very attractive and the website clearly displayed iPhone as compatible, so why not? Chip in all the way, it’s only $50!

What I got did not at all match my expectations. The NFC doesn’t work, or at least required at the time a different kind of iPhone than the one I had, which was an iPhone 6S Plus, so that was deceptive advertising leading me nowhere. The NFC part works nowhere, so it’s just marketing mumbo-jumbo for me. I then plugged it in to my USB port on my MacBook and was dismayed to see that it doesn’t really do what I thought it would, no way to get any of my TOTP settings onto the device, no applications to make it convenient to use on my MacBook Pro, but there was a way that I could put my GPG Key for my main account on there. So I did that. Then after doing that I realized that the private key had been moved onto the Yubikey and a stub left on my MacBook Pro, meaning any time I wanted to decrypt anything I needed the YubiKey. I didn’t have a choice when it came to having it in both places, and I accepted that because I rarely if ever use my GPG key since it’s a dead-on-arrival technology itself.

All of this was an immense flash in the pan. I did learn a lot, and I guess it was worth the $50 I spent on it. Maybe I can return it to the manufacturer, as I have returned it to factory specs. If they don’t allow that, then I’ll likely put it up for sale on Facebook, Craigslist, or eBay.

What I got out of Yubico and their Yubikey is that it is like a lot of other security tools, pretty much meant for a very niche marketplace where people who would buy into these sorts of things are sold on the how, just looking for the what. I wouldn’t recommend Yubikey to anyone, it is not easy to use and completely unreliable. A little sidebar to mention here as well, if you wanted to use a YubiKey to secure your desktop or laptop computer, which you could do, they strongly recommend you buy two of them, in case you lose one or one gets stolen. The all-or-nothing deal is a huge cold shower.

Gin & Tonic

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Ever since COVID-19 started spreading around the world, there has been mutterings that an anti-malarial medication called hydroxychlorquine had some benefit to people with the virus. Perhaps it is with viral replication or viral implantation it is unclear to me, but the drug did bear a mention by scientists and doctors. I did a little reading and quine, chloroquine, and then hydroxychloroquine all seem to be fully synthetic versions of a very old drug, quinine.

This was exciting, because I knew full well that I had quinine in my house already. It’s an ingredient in Tonic Water. So when COVID-19 was spreading, people were panic buying left and right, and I was buying liter bottles of Tonic Water and a giant bottle of Gin.

I figure that I don’t want hydroxychloroquine, leave that to the FDA, the doctors, and scientists to argue over. I could very well dose myself, very low-dose, with quinine every day in a collins glass filled with ice, a splash of Gin, and top it off with Tonic Water. What is the damage? It’s a very low dose, its a delicious cocktail with only maybe an ounce of Gin per drink, and I spritz it with a little lime juice as a flavor addition when I like. Because the Tonic Water is cheap, $1.89 per liter, has the chemical that seems to work against COVID-19, maybe a regular micro-dose of quinine has some effect either in preventing COVID-19 from infecting me, killing it off when my immune system notices it, or quite possibly I haven’t been exposed to COVID-19 yet. Either way, liters of Tonic Water are very easy to find, making two or three glasses of Gin and Tonic go really well with lunch or dinner, and it can’t really hurt me. So, why not?

So I started to muse to myself on the topic of micro-doses of quinine for COVID-19. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, and there aren’t any studies. Chances are it’s all placebo, but if it isn’t? What if three doses of Tonic Water, say 100ml each, with ten of these doses in a liter bottle – what if my daily Gin & Tonic drinks are helping?

Maybe it is helping, it certainly isn’t hurting me. What if this was the answer all along and it was in your liquor cabinet this entire time?

New Editor: Ulysses

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For what seems like ages, I have been on the witless search for the best text editor for my MacBook Pro. Trying BBEdit, TextWrangler, Atom, MacVim, Pages, TextEdit… the list just goes on and on. Along with this fools errand, I’ve also been searching for the best font to use. What a pile of wet monkey spit this entire task has been.

So enter Ulysses. I was interested in this a while back, but the app wouldn’t function on my system at the time because I was living in denial about Mac OSX Mojave. I was happy with Yosemite and I was going to be damned if I was going to upset every apple cart I had and upgrade to Mojave. But then app after app started to upgrade on me, and over time it was easier to capitulate to Mojave and upgrade to it. Now that I’m using Mojave, I decided to give Ulysses another shot. So far, I don’t hate it, which is about as much as I was expecting honestly. It’ll take more time to actually see how it works as a new text editor, so right now I will just say that the jury is out.

Next to that is the font issue. There is a theme that covers editors, fonts, and even can be extended to movies, music, and comic books, and that is that there are so many options that someone who is on the outside looking in simply cannot choose one place to start. Websites are full of suggestions and sometimes those are handy, you can spot a font that you’ve seen in your application and you can try it out, while other times you get advice that Font XYZ is really quite amazing and then you discover that you have to pay for it, or the application you want to use simply won’t let you use that font. So instead of fretting over endless font choices I just threw a dart and ended up with Open Sans. Maybe it’ll work for me, maybe it will drive me bananas. Although maybe the editors will do that first.

So we’ll see just what we have in store for Ulysses in the days and weeks to come. This editor also comes with a method that might be able to publish to my WordPress Blog, and that will be the next test, to see if it does what it promises.

Hidden Killer

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While working on Scott’s Thermal Cap, the brim, the band around the head, involved 32 discrete stitches per row. The pattern I was using demurred on chaining up the side and instead relied on the natural height of the SCTS to provide the height required as rows were added. Because the chain was omitted, every stitch requires attention, because usually when a chain appears on the side, it “uses up” whatever stitch was next in line, and so you customarily have to skip “where you should go” for the “next spot”. Without the chain on the side, progress is slower, the weave is thicker, and counting becomes rather picky. You want to make sure you have 32 in each row, lest you have decreases where there shouldn’t be any, and your hat comes out looking obviously wrong.

There are a lot of tools for maintaining counts in Crochet. Little plastic barrel counters, clickers, and a few apps for the iPhone. There was one of these apps, that among all the other features also had a verbal input mechanism. The app was updated and the verbal input mechanism was deprecated for Voice Control in iOS.

I have another app, called MultiTimer, in it are counters with audio feedback when you tap them. I had been using this app to count stitches in my work, but its a little annoying to have my hands on the work and then reach over to tap the phone. So I did a little poking around:

  1. Settings
  2. Accessibility
  3. Voice Control (turn it on, it downloads extra iOS components)
  4. ON: Show Confirmation, Show Hints, Overlay: Item Numbers. OFF the rest.
  5. Back to Settings, then to Control Center
  6. Customize Controls
  7. Add Accessibility Shortcuts
  8. Out to Home Screen

So, when I am working on a project, I plug the phone in (since Voice Control is a battery pig), start MultiTimer, switch to my Crochet panel where I have set up all my counters. Then I swipe up from the bottom, tap Accessibility Shortcuts icon, tap on Voice Control, then swipe down to hide the Control Center panel. Overlaid on top of all the screen items are little shaded numbers, so I focus in on the counter that I care about, “Stitch Count” and then I can say “Single Tap” to advance the counter, or “Tap 6” to clear the counter, or “Tap 4” to decrease the counter. That enables me to keep my hands on my work, and my eyes, and just say clearly what I want and the phone makes a little click sound when it does what I want. That way I can concentrate on the work, and then look at the display for the count. When my work session is done, I swipe up from the bottom, tap the Accessibility Shortcut icon, turn off Voice Control, and exit the MultiTimer app. Done and done. This way I can keep my mind focused on the work, I don’t lose count due to interruptions or cats, and it makes my phone do one singular task really well. After I started using this feature, I took back a little bit of the gripes I had previously issued against iOS, just a few. 🙂

We’re Always Shufflin

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Yesterday I came home and like many precursors to the weekend we talk about what sort of meal plan we would like for the coming week. Along with that, we put together the shopping list for our weekend supply chores.

Ever since Apple released iOS 13, we’ve had nothing but headaches with their Reminder app. So the two places we usually go are named lists in the Apple Reminders app. My partner rattled off that there were four items in one list, and I saw none of them. After we wasted an hour resetting and screwing around with Reminders I went to look for alternatives. I found one, an app called “Remember The Milk” and I chiuckled as I had seen it before. Apparently I had an account there a long time ago, so instead of creating a new account, I reccovered the old one. I invited my partner to the app, he installed it, and then I created two lists for our two spots we usually go to, and then I shared them both out to him. Then we sat back and chuckled because with this alternative, proper sync was happening, which was everything we wanted. So we have turned our backs on the Reminder app.

As I started to look through Remember The Milk, I noticed that it had grown up a lot in the time I had been away from it. I’ve been having a headache with the ToDo App from Microsoft, which is actually Wunderlist rebranded. I had split some of my work tasks into ToDo from Microsoft because it was free with my work email, an Office 365 account. ToDo from Microsoft was having serious problems, mostly whenever I had to check off a task, a zombie task would reappear and I’d have to check each task off twice. There were only a few tasks there, so converting them over to Remember The Milk was really easy.

Then as I was working with Remember The Milk, I thought that I might finally leave Toodledo, so I bought a yearly subscription to Remember The Milk, which gave me parity features with Toodledo, and then backed up my Toodledo account and imported the entire thing over to Remember The Milk.

So now all my tasks live in one place again, instead of Reminders, ToDo from Microsoft, and Toodledo, now it’s all Remember The Milk. We’ll see how it goes.