Here are some of things that were with me in January. A few @adam tools and a few observations I have made recently.

Tools⌗

I realized that I like people and things that are NICE and welcoming. Places where we say “hello” to each other, where we are polite and where we are not afraid to ask for help or simply we can share what we think without being judged.

Arc browser - a browser for the modern web⌗

After a few years of browsing Internet and jumping on the Chrome boat right from the beginning, I didn’t expect that there’s going to be a browser that’s going to make me switch. But Arc browser did it. It’s fast, it’s simple, it’s beautiful and it’s NICE.

I love the sidebar and a “magic” feel of interacting with favorites and tabs. But most of all, I like how the entire thing is designed. It’s not just a browser, it’s a whole experience.

The way new releases are presented and also the way the team is communicating with the community is just amazing. Look at an example here: Arc team is presenting a release without major updates, but with a lot of small improvements. It’s just 💙.

Even though I’m usually the picky person, liking when everything is aligned, polished, pixel-perfect and beautiful — I enjoy the “chaos” of what the Arc team is sharing.

Their screens are messy, there are a lot of thinks on the desktop, record quality is not 8K, some footage is done via iPhone directly.

But it’s all NICE.

omg.lol- a social network (?)⌗

After a recommendation in YesWas Podcast, I was curious what this omg.lol thing is. I thought it was a Mastodon server, but it’s more than that. For a small yearly fee, you get a subdomain YOURNAME.omg.lol + a lot of extras including:

  • web profile / simple homepage
  • URL shortener
  • custom DNS management
  • weblog
  • statuslog
  • /now page (link to the “movement”)
  • mastodon server
  • email forwarding
  • and many more

And what’s interesting, every feature is accessible via API. When you interact with the page you see a lot of things like:

  • We hope you’re having a great day.
  • Need more help? Contact us at any time.

Colors are friendly, everything is extremely polished - links work, many feature are available, there’s a status page, news, crazy domains. And when I got to the Mastodon instance, I was warmly greeted by @adam who runs the entire gig. NICE!

BTW: there’s a possibility to use all the cool features under your own domain, so if you feel like there’s something cooler than omg.lol domain, you can do it!

Mastodon⌗

I’ve started my journey on mastodon early this year, you can see my activity by following lubieniebieski@social.lol.

If you don’t know what Mastodon is, you can take a look here:

So far, I like it and try to post something from time to time. I’m using Ivory on my iPhone and I’m still looking for a decent client for the desktop. The web version of the client is OK, but I’m missing the ability to resume the timeline when I finished last time, not to jump right away to the newest posts.

Hugo static site engine⌗

I’ve already shared my hello-world post regarding Hugo, but I forgot to mention that this entire thing is written in Go (Hu - Go… !:D) which I recently explored as my language of choice for hacking after work.

It’s fast, it’s NICE:) And you read this post — which I consider the biggest achievement of my migration from Wordpress to Hugo.