3/5/2024: My newsletter reading revelation
My new reading setup
Plus: MacBook Air upgrades, quicker selfies, and delightful to-do lists
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While I’m obviously a big fan of newsletters, I haven’t always been great at remembering to read them.
That’s because newsletters are inherently at odds with my efforts to keep a clean inbox. I seldom have time for them during the day and don’t want them all intermingled with more important messages, but filing those newsletters away into folders just leads to me forgetting about them entirely.
After experimenting with a few different approaches, I’ve finally found a newsletter reading setup that works. It encourages me to stay on top of all my newsletter subscriptions, but still allows for inbox tidiness.
Enter Omnivore
Omnivore is a free, open-source app for reading. After creating an account, you get a unique email address (which looks like yourname-jumble0f-l3tters-andnum8ers@inbox.omnivore.app), which you can use to receive newsletters. Your subscriptions then appear in Omnivore’s web app, iOS app, or Android app, with your progress synced across all devices.
You can also bring content into Omnivore in other ways. A free browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) lets you save individual articles from the web to read later, and you can do the same with articles on your phone by using the Share button.
Omnivore supports RSS feeds as well, letting you get a firehose of new posts from sites that support this feature. And if you have PDF files you’ve been meaning to read, Omnivore lets you import them, provided they’re less than 8 MB in size.
While I’ve known about Omnivore for some time now, I’ve avoided using it because I didn’t want to re-subscribe to all my newsletters with another email address, let alone an address tied to a specific service that’s not guaranteed to last forever. Everything changed after realizing I could just use my existing email instead, with forwarding rules to pass the newsletters over to my Omnivore address.
Forwarding newsletters to Omnivore
Since last summer, I’ve been signing up for newsletters with an email alias, then filtering the messages so that everything sent to that address goes into a “Newsletters” folder.
This was great for keeping newsletters out of my inbox, but not so great for actually reading them. I’d often neglect my Newsletters folder for days or weeks, and searching for newsletter content was difficult because the results were mashed up with all my other emails.
By automatically forwarding those newsletters to my Omnivore address, I get the best of both worlds: Everything still arrives in my “Newsletters” folder for safekeeping, but then another copy also appears in Omnivore for reading. Having the Omnivore app on my phone’s home screen serves as a reminder to read, while my email inbox stays clean. Best of all, I don’t have to re-subscribe to any newsletters with a different email address.
If I wanted, I could even use another read-it-later app instead of Omnivore, provided it offers its own address for newsletters. (In fact, I’ve been doing just that with Matter, whose presentation is a bit slicker than Omnivore but doesn’t have a publicly-available Android app at present.)
If you’ve set up an alias for newsletters (for instance, janedoe+newsletters@gmail.com), the auto-forwarding setup should work something like this:
- Find your email provider’s filtering feature. (See instructions for Gmail, Outlook, Comcast, and Proton.)
- Add your Omnivore address as a forwarding address for anything sent to your newsletter alias.
- Check the Omnivore app for a confirmation from your email provider. You’ll either need to click on a link or copy and paste it into your browser.
- Optionally set the filtering rule to move those emails out of your inbox and into a folder.
Of course, if you’ve been subscribing to newsletters with your regular email address, this method won’t work. You’ll either have to set up filters based on the sender (for instance, all mail sent from advisorator@jarednewman.com for this newsletter), or change your address with the newsletter.
Room for improvement
Admittedly, my new Omnivore setup isn’t perfect. I used to have separate folders for daily and weekly newsletters, but Omnivore just mashes them all into a single inbox.
Omnivore does have an experimental “Rules” feature, which lets you auto-label items by sender or other parameters, but the web version is clunky to work with, and the mobile version is currently iOS-only. And while Omnivore’s iOS app lets you relegate noisy news sources to a “Following” tab instead of your main inbox, that feature doesn’t yet extend to Android or the web.
Omnivore’s business model is still murky as well. The developers accept donations and have experimented with some premium feature ideas (such as “ultra realistic voices” when having articles read aloud), but haven’t started charging for anything yet.
Overall, though, I’m satisfied. By virtue of having a dedicated reading app on my home screen, I’m much more likely to read through my newsletter backlog instead of frittering away that time on social media. And that was my whole reason to sign up for more newsletters in the first place.
Need to know
New MacBooks: Apple’s refreshing the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air with faster M3 processors, Wi-Fi 6E support, a less fingerprint-prone “Midnight” color option, and—perhaps most importantly—support for up to two external monitors. Dual monitor output was previously limited to MacBooks with “Pro” M-series chips and last year’s M3 MacBook Pro (which will no longer require an open lid to drive two monitors simultaneously).
The 13-inch M2 MacBook Air will stick around, replacing the M1 version at $999, while the new 13-inch and 15-inch M3 models will replace their M2 predecessors at $1,099 and $1,299 respectively. As always, I implore you not to pay full price through Apple, as other retailers tend to run MacBook deals early and often.
A slew of new iPads are still expected soon, but weren’t part of Monday’s announcement.
Sketchy doorbell cams: An investigation by Consumer Reports found an array of laughably hackable doorbell cameras for sale on Amazon, Walmart, Temu, and several other online retailers. The security on these devices is so weak that an attacker can take over the camera just by knowing its serial number, which is obtainable through a companion app just by holding down the doorbell button for eight seconds.
The cameras are made by a company called Eken and sold under a slew of brand names, and some have even received an “Amazon’s Choice” designation, which sounds like a seal of approval even though it’s totally untrustworthy.
Walmart and Temu at least responded to Consumer Reports investigation and appear to have stopped selling the offending cameras. Amazon, meanwhile, has ignored requests for comment and continues to offer the cameras in question, so I guess it’s given up on safeguarding its own storefront even when others do most of the legwork.
Tip of the moment
Take quicker selfies: This one’s been sitting in my backlog since iOS 17 arrived last fall. Using Apple’s Shortcuts app, you can now add icons to your home screen that open specific camera modes, such as the selfie camera, video, portrait mode, and slow-mo. Setting it up is easier than you might think:
- Open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone.
- Under the main Shortcuts tab, scroll down to the “Camera” section and tap on it.
- In the “Camera Mode” panel, long-press the camera shortcut you want to add, then select “Add to Home Screen.”
- Modify the icon’s name and color, or just hit “Add.”
- Repeat the steps above for any other camera shortcuts you want to create.
What about Android? Your home screen’s camera icon already has its own shortcuts built in. Just long-press the camera icon and choose the mode you want to open. Some Android phones may offer additional options as a home screen widget. On Samsung phones, for instance, there’s a “Custom camera” widget that lets you access any camera mode, including portraits, night shots, and slow-mo.
Now try this
To-do lists made fun: Superlist is a to-do list app from the original founder of Wunderlist, an app that I loved until Microsoft acquired it, let it languish, and shut it down. The structure reminds me of Todoist, but with a more playful vibe (including the little chimes that sound when you check an item off). Superlist has a robust free tier for personal use, with the developers hoping to sell business features to companies.
Remember your memories: Yesterdays bills itself as an app for saving those little moments you otherwise might forget because you didn’t take a photo or post about it on social media. It’s super easy to capture a quick note or quote, and you can set reminders for the moments you want to recall later. It’s a reasonable $5 per year to store more than 10 memories total, but I also just like the overall concept, which has me thinking about setting up something similar in Obsidian.
Like these suggestions? Advisorator subscribers can view a full list of every useful app I’ve mentioned in the newsletter—over 300 in total—sorted by category.
Further reading
- Oh man do I need this: Google Maps may soon tell you where the building entrances are.
- New Pixel features: Better AI call screening, first-gen Watch breathing exercises, and more.
- Apple won’t kill off iOS web apps in Europe after all.
- Spotify’s new audiobook-only subscription only saves a dollar per month.
- The AI-generated food images on Doordash are truly disturbing.
- Federico Viticci replaces his entire MacBook screen with an iPad.
- Don’t worry; the underground floppy disk music scene is alive and well.
Spend wisely
Things are a bit slim on the deal front this morning, so let’s just round them up quickly:
- Grab UGreen’s magnetic iPhone battery pack for $20.
- Grab a 512 GB Samsung MicroSD card for $25.
- Amazon has the Blink Outdoor 4 camera for $65.
- Samsung’s 5 TB portable SSD falls to $250.
- Get Samsung’s Galaxy Watch5 Pro for $200.
- Refurbished Sonos speaker deals: Beam Gen 2 soundbar for $299, Arc SL soundbar for $509, One SL speaker for $119.
- Rare Apple Mac Studio desktop deal brings the price to $1,799.
Thanks for reading!
Got tech questions for me? Just reply to this email to get in touch.
Until next week,
Jared