My wife surprised us with absolutely fantastic Spicy Tori Ramen at ima in midtown Detroit. I spent a good deal of the meal with my eyes closed, wishing the flavors would never end.

New skill unlocked

The air is crisp and the evenings are more colorful as autumn arrives. 🍂

I just spent the past three days going in and out of a series of COVID-induced fevers and during that time, my “smart” watch has felt really dumb. It’s a bundle of health sensors I keep strapped to my wrist so it should be able to do something useful when I’m unwell. Instead, it’s stuck on trainer dude-bro mode, unhelpfully reminding me about things like my stand goal while I’m shivering under blankets.
If it wasn’t for how incredibly helpful the watch is for sending and receiving messages with my wife while I have half a brain and my phone is across the room, I would have just removed it.

The most frustrating thing is that helpful data is already there but Apple just needs to add something like a mode to make use of it. A Sick Mode would be helpful in a similar way as Theater Mode but with the added smarts of Workouts. Just a few ideas that immediately came to mind:

• Actively use my sleep tracking data to cancel alarms and extend my Do Not Disturb time to give me a better chance at a full night’s rest.
• Silence notifications for apps I’ve told Sick Mode ahead of time I want to be protected from. (Looking at you, Teams.)
• Alert me to periodically take my temperature and include a simple interface to add that data for tracking.
• Help me track the medication I’m taking so I don’t take doses outside of the recommended time.
• Automatically turn on a watch face I setup ahead of time with all the helpful complications, like temperature and medication logging, that I mentioned above.

It really wouldn’t take Apple much effort to implement these ideas and I’m sure they could come up with even more helpful ones. Until then, I’m guessing that my only hope of implementing some of my ideas is with a custom Focus Mode.

A “user-centered” approach to design has been replaced by what [Jarrett Fuller] has taken to calling a “corporation-centered” approach. Rather than optimizing for the user’s experience, it optimizes for the extraction of profit. If Spotify succeeds at turning us all into passive listeners, then it doesn’t really matter which content the platform licenses. As Fuller put it, “It’s about ‘How do you get through as much music as you can so you keep paying for it?’" -Why I Finally Quit Spotify

Quitting Spotify has been a huge improvement to my music listening.