tomk

Tom Klaver

This is MY place on the web!

The 5,000 Photo Rule

How many photos do you need in your photo library?

I know I don't need to take 55,000 photos (and growing) with me for the rest of my life.

At one point that's how many photos I had in my iCloud Photo Library. My spouse and I have been sorting our library with GetSorted, and in that activity I had to think of two methods we found when uncluttering our home.

The first method is the question of "If this broke down, would I buy it again?". If not, maybe you can dispose of it.

The second method is the question of "when I die, would I be happy to lay the burden of sorting out my stuff on my loved ones?". That's also known as Swedish Death Cleaning.

I'm not saying both of these apply to sorting out your photo library. However, when you die, your photo library will continue to exist. And your loved ones will want to have access to it. And then, do you want to offer them a "Best Of" selection of your life, or a general database of any photo you've ever taken?

Another method, which is the point of this thing, is to work towards an arbitrary number. That's harder with physical objects so that didn't come to mind when we uncluttered our home.

Maybe you only want to have a maximum of 5,000 photos. Or you only want to keep 500 photos for each year of your life.

I want to stress though that you be careful throwing out pictures that elicit warm thoughts and memories. So even though you might not meet the number you set, it's likely more important you keep stuff that is important to you. Not because you can to meet an arbitrary number.

Week 12 2024 Bookmarks

👤 Life

📠 Apps

🌎 Cool sites

🗞️ Read

📼 Watched

Week 11 2024 Bookmarks

📠 Apps

🌎 Cool sites

🗞️ Read

📼 Watched

I can’t commit because there’s always a better book around

Most of my books are at a 2–4% finish rate.

I grab my Kobo to read, but instead I will explore the Kobo Books shop, download previews, and read those for a page or two. It is so hard to commit to a book when there are so many other books just two taps away.

It makes me sad because I know that books have had an impact on how I am as a parent, and I know books have changed how I look at the world (a little bit).

I’ve tried setting limits on the device, but they are too easy to revert.

There a are a few things I will do to solve the problem:

  1. Block WiFi connections on the router from my Kobo between 9 PM and 12 PM.
  2. Keep 2 or so books around on the Kobo.
  3. Move other books back to my Mac’s Calibre library so they are out of scope.

Deleted all of my history on Gmail

Just deleted 18 years worth of emails from my Gmail account. Apart from YouTube, I want them to have as little data of me as possible. I don't see why I would need so much history of me lying around.

Granted, I've used my Gmail account actively for about 6-7 years, so that's the weight of my actual history there.

I’m blogging from my Notes app

I wrote a Shortcut that lets me export a note from the Notes app to my weblog.lol blog. I’ve called it “Blogger”.

I still need a better way to use links and perhaps images, but we’ll see if I want to put in the effort to solve those. I can always just use markdown for links.

For now it works pretty well and I’m happy to have a low effort way to shoot a new post to my blog!

Screenshot of a shortcut workflow in the Shortcuts app on iPadOS.

Introduction

Hey! I'm Tom, and I was a UX designer for Soda Studio, Apple, Lightspeed, and Prss. I'm recovering from burnout and exploring what career I want to pursue. Could be tech writing, could be iOS development, could be anything outside of IT. Time will tell what makes me the happiest!

Most importantly I'm a dad and live with my autism. I love being a parent, scratching my own itches with Shortcuts and I listen to Fall Out Boy every single day. I'm stuck in 2005, music-wise.

That Night I Absolutely Killed It (The Mood)

It was 2006. I was 17, autistic, and my friends took me to a club.

People were dancing to some pretty nice songs, but that week "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers was my jam, babeh. I walked up to the DJ of the hour, I said, "man, could you play Mr. Brightside next?"

He said, "are you sure?" I said, "yeah I'm sure."

And so it went down. I heard the lead guitars and I was sure this was my time to make myself officially known as a Cool Guy.

Reception was ice cold. Dancing? Never heard of it. Even my friends looked confused. There was no other way but to endure this—really great—song with people who didn't want to hear it.

Reminders hack: Things 3-inspired tagging shortcuts (macOS)

SCR-20230221-tnf.png

During the iOS 16 betas, I switched my entire tasks system to Reminders. I had no work activities due to a burn-out, and Things 3 just seemed too overkill for what I needed at the time.

Things 3 has a great solution to add a tag: use the ctrl key with any other keyboard character, and your task will get the accompanying tag. For instance, ctrl-e will add Errands to what you've selected.

And then I noticed Reminders can do this too! But it takes more steps to set up. If you're familiar with setting keyboard shortcuts in System Settings, you'll know the drill.

Steps

  1. Go to your System Settings app, go to Keyboard, and go to Keyboard Shortcuts.
  2. Go to App Shortcuts and click to add a new shortcut.
  3. Select Reminders from the dropdown menu.
  4. Enter Edit->Tags-> and type the tag name you want to use. For instance, Edit->Tags->Errands. 1
  5. Enter your desired keyboard shortcut. I chose ctrl-e.

To try it out, go to Reminders and select a task to tag. Smash that keyboard shortcut. Enjoy your leveled-up productivity!


  1. If you're using a different system language, you need to use the localised menu items here.↩︎

It's so damn hard to get started

Before 2007, I loved to write. And I loved blogging. But then I learned that I could convey the same message, with more interactions, on Twitter.

My creativity died with a 140-character text field and instead that constant shot of dopamine got a lot more fun than getting whatever what was really on my mind, written out, out there.

I spent years searching for the right weblogging tool as the optimal excuse to not write, and instead focus on unimportant things like configuring my blog's comments sections before I had even published a post.

I know I still have things to say, but it's so damn hard to get started. So here it is, I guess? Finally?