People and resources added to my reading list in 2020

Every January for the past seven years I’ve published a summary of all the worthwhile discoveries I made during the previous year, and then added to my daily reading and consumption. Over time, I’ve taken the opportunity to expand this summary and add commentary on my approach to reading, RSS feeds management, and personal trends about my consumption habits. (I hate the term consumption, and I’ve already used it three times, but it’s a convenient shortcut).

I’m a bit late this year, but January has been a truly busy month, work-wise, and I haven’t had the time to stop for a day and collect my thoughts. Here we are, finally.

Last year, I opened with this general assessment:

Since 2017, there has been a noticeable decline in what and whom I have discovered and found interesting enough to add to my RSS feeds, especially in the blog category. Concurrently, as I wrote in the past two summary articles of this kind, another depressing trend in my feeds has been the removal of people/resources failing to maintain my interest (or their quality). Between 2017 and 2019, the number of resources I removed from my feeds has been comparatively higher than what I added.

The first part of this assessment still holds true this time around. As for removing more sources than what I’ve added, fortunately this didn’t really happen in 2020. I think I’ve removed just one blog from my daily reads. All in all, as I look at my RSS feed subscriptions, I’d say 2020 was pretty stationary. That’s not bad news, but it isn’t particularly good news either.

Tech blogs

Over time, the tech blog category that has grown tiresome for me is the ‘tech news portal’. I still follow a few such sources, but I’ve been increasingly using their feeds to just skim headlines, check the occasional interesting piece, and marking dozens of articles as read at a time. I really prefer one-person outlets with tech commentary pieces, rather than a barrage of news, information, trivia.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to stay up-to-date with what happens in the tech world, but I’m not necessarily interested in every single thing happening on a daily basis.

Anyway, when it comes to tech blogs, every new addition to my reading list in 2020 comes from installing NetNewsWire 5 on the retina MacBook Pro I’ve used to test the Big Sur betas since August 2020.

NetNewsWire comes with a selection of tech-oriented feeds, and while many are the same sources I have been following for years (Brent Simmons and I have similar tastes, it seems), there were other people I didn’t know, such as:

Julia Evans — What’s not to like? From her About page:

This blog is about

being delighted about programming

showing how topics traditionally considered “hard” and “scary” are actually accessible and interesting and fun (TCP! / Kernel hacking! / Traceroute! / gzip! / databases! / SSL!)

asking questions and getting better every day.

how being clear & curious & humble is better than sounding like I know it all already

experimenting with alternative ways to teach hard concepts (zines!)

Becky Hansmeyer — I find Becky to be a constantly refreshing read. She may be a “beginning iOS developer and fan of all things Apple”, as she describes herself in her About Me page, but her critical approach, genuineness, and open-mindedness are qualities a lot of other people in this sphere should aspire to.
The Shape of Everything – Gus Mueller’s blog. Gus Mueller is the developer of Acorn, and if you’ve been a Mac user for a while, this app should definitely ring a bell. Acorn and GraphicConverter have been my favourite image editors pretty much since their first versions. Since version 5, Acorn has essentially become my main, almost only tool for editing images. Gus isn’t a frequent updater on his blog, but that’s a plus in my book, as every post is interesting and to-the-point.

YouTube channels

In 2020, with the pandemic, the lockdowns, the self-isolation, it was bound to happen. An increase of YouTube consumption on my part, I mean. Still, while I have indeed watched a lot of stuff on YouTube, I’ve tried to keep my subscriptions under control and subscribe to only those channels whose content managed to keep me constantly interested. For others, the YouTube algorithm is sufficient to provide me the occasional reminder or suggestion.

Photography/videography channels

Mark Holtze – From the channel description: Hi, my name is Mark Holtze and I’m a professional editor & videographer in both film and network television. I absolutely love the craft and want to share my experience in the industry with you all. Tutorials, Vlogs, short stories and pretty much everything in between. Mark keeps his videos short and interesting. I love his humour, I share his love of vintage manual focus lenses, and his videos are very well edited (duh) and informative.
Zenography – Thoughts and reviews of cameras and lenses both old and new. If you, like me, are starting to hate that shouting, hyperactive delivery style of many YouTube hosts, you’ll love Zenography’s quiet, low-key approach. The host is a good photographer and enthusiast, often providing very useful advice if you’re looking to make the most out of vintage film/digital cameras and lenses.
Steven Heise – In the channel description Steven writes: Hi, I’m Steve. I review camera gear. I film vlogs. I like cats. Terse, but accurate. Steven’s videos and reviews are typically short and sweet (I’d say they average six minutes in length), and I really like his relaxed style. If you’re looking for not-so-current digital cameras that are still a good bang for the buck from a photography/videography standpoint, check out his channel. I think he deserves many more subscribers and that his channel is way underrated.
Jake Felzien – Speaking of underrated channels deserving of more subscribers, Exhibit B is Jake Felzien. He has a cool, confident presence, making even ‘talking head’ videos interesting to watch. He is great at what he does and that is reflected in how well-edited and polished his videos are. I found him by chance as I was looking for videos on Micro Four Thirds cameras, and I instantly subscribed. He also routinely upload shorts that he calls “films” (in quotes), which I particularly love because of his ability to present mundane tasks and activities with an epic, cinematic style.

Gaming-related / Let’s Play

These are the only people I follow, and they all have great, relatable personalities that make every upload a fun and entertaining experience to watch (here I’m mixing old and new discoveries, by the way):

The rest

Behind the Bar with Cara Devine – Cocktails and mixology? Why not. It’s not a hobby of mine or anything, but I like trying something out every now and then. YouTube is chock-full of channels of this type but I really like how Cara presents her videos. She’s a knowledgeable, professional bartender and achieves that sweet balance of being professional, funny, and entertaining. This way, her videos aren’t either too dry/boring, or too silly.
James Hoffmann – This is a channel for serious coffee geeks. I’m not one, but James is such a knowledgeable host and his videos are so well-made, that watching him is a pleasure and an opportunity to learn new things in an area I feel I should know more. He’s a gentleman, and while his reviews are generally opinionated, he’s never unfair. His professional approach, honesty, and code of conduct are things sorely lacking in many other pundits — especially in tech.
Julie Schiro – I discovered her by chance while searching for videos with tips on how to start a YouTube channel. When I stumbled on her video Which Mic Type is Best for Zoom, Class, Recording 2020 | Headsets, Lavaliers, & Podcasting Mics, because of her confidence and editing skills I initially thought she was a long-time YouTuber with a big following. Shortly after, I realised that that was her first video and that she had like 1,500 subscribers, and I couldn’t believe it. At the time of writing, she has only uploaded four videos but her subscribers count is at around 10,500. It’s well deserved. She makes video reviews and comparisons of tech gear that are as entertaining as they are informative, and I really like her style. Check her out.

Podcasts

I nuked them all in 2019. I explained my reasons in last year’s summary.

Still, there are two people I know via Twitter whom you should follow, as they make podcasts that are worth checking out:

Zac Cichy / @zcichy, currently producing Project Human.
Harry C. Marks / @HCMarks. He’s a writer currently producing The Shelf Life: A Podcast Sitcom. Also check out Home Work (cohosted with Dave Caolo).

Useful/fun Web tools

A new section. As the title suggests, these are websites/web applications I’ve bookmarked and use when the need arises. You have to keep in mind that single-purpose sites like these may stop working or being maintained without warning. At the time of writing, they all work.

HTML5 Halftone Maker
Time and Date – This is my go-to site whenever I need to convert timezones, or make time calculations, etc.
city roads – This is just something cool to look at. You enter a city, and the site downloads roads from OpenStreetMap and renders them with WebGL, creating beautiful monochromatic maps.
SVG Creator – Free online SVG converter (supported input formats: JPG, PNG, GIF).
UTF‑8 string length & byte counter – Sometimes you just need to know how long a text is, especially if you’re translating something and the output is constrained by a character limit.
Paste to Markdown – This is so useful. Suppose you have a block of text with a lot of URLs. You want to copy the text into your Markdown editor without losing all those URLs, and it would be so tedious to first copy the raw text, then copy/paste all the URLs afterwards in Markdown syntax. With this Web tool, you copy the rich text and you paste it in the Paste to Markdown window, and voilà, everything correctly formatted in Markdown, styles and URLs included.

My RSS management

This is the part that hasn’t never really changed these past years. Here’s a brief rundown of the apps I’m using on my devices.

On my Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra: Reeder and ReadKit.
On my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS 11 Big Sur: NetNewsWire 5.
On my PowerPC Macs: older versions of NetNewsWire.
On my iPad 8: Unread, Reeder, NetNewsWire for iOS, and ReadKit. Speaking of ReadKit, I really like the recently released version for iOS. While it shares many similarities with NetNewsWire, I find it useful especially for its Pinboard integration. Also, I know that four apps are overkill and for RSS reading one is probably enough, but I like reading stuff in different apps and I like supporting developers.
On my iPhone 8, iPhone 5, iPad 3: Unread.
On older iOS devices: Older versions of Reeder, and an older version of Byline.
On my first-generation iPad: an older version of Newsify, Slow Feeds (which is now called Web Subscriber), and the Feedly app itself.
On my ThinkPad T400 and ThinkPad X240 (with Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 10 respectively): Nextgen Reader.
On my ThinkPad X61T with Windows 7, and my ThinkPad 240X running Windows 2000: FeedDemon 4.5. Discontinued in 2013, it still works well.
On my Windows Phone 8.1/Windows 10 Mobile smartphones: Nextgen Reader and FeedLab.
On my webOS devices (Palm Prē 2, HP TouchPad): FeedSpider. A really great app.
On my Android phone (Xiaomi Mi A2): the official Feedly app. It’s good enough, but if you have a better candidate to suggest, I’m all ears.

Past articles

In reverse chronological order:

I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good tech writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email or Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Riccardo Mori

Writer & Translator