My last article, published March 26, 2026, was all about WWDC. That’s fine. That’s what the newsletter has become, mostly. I find in the blog world I mostly write about tech, and I’m good at it, and it gets reads. But there’s more to me than being a tech blogger. There always has been.

I’ve self-published an obscure novel in my early thirties and then could never get myself to complete another. The novel is called Living on Empty, and I’m proud of it, even if almost nobody read it. At this point, I probably have several unfinished novels sitting in various states of decay across hard drives and cloud folders. Half-finished worlds with characters who stopped talking to me because I stopped showing up.

I am a writer. I will always be a writer. I’ve been writing since as long as I can remember. That’s not something I say to sound romantic about it. It’s just a fact about how I’m wired.

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I watched Apple’s WWDC 2026 announcement replay this morning while I waited for the usual buzzwords. Innovation. Platforms. Developers. You know the script by now.

But when they leaned into “AI adva…

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I’ve been living on iPadOS 26 since it dropped back in September, and I have thoughts. A lot of them. This is probably the most significant iPad software update w…

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the double standard in how the tech world treats vibe coding versus AI-assisted writing. One gets celebrated for democratizing softwa…

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If you’ve made it this far in the series, you’ve seen the version of my workflow that works. The Daily Log that hits three destinations with one tap. The Cloudflare Workers that let my iPad reach services it shouldn’t be able to. The morning briefing that reads my day to me through AirPods. It all sounds clean and intentional when I describe it in sequence.

This part is about the mess behind that. What broke, what I compromised on, what I built and never use, and what still isn’t solved. I think this might be the most useful part of the series because anyone building something like this will hit the same walls, and knowing where they are saves time.

The Meeting Notes Problem

Meeting notes were the workflow that humbled me. The idea was straightforward - I capture meeting notes in Notion during the meeting, and then the system syncs those notes to Apple Notes and Obsidian so I can access them from any device. Same multi-destination philosophy as everything else in this series.

I started building this in Drafts. Five actions and two Shortcuts. The logic wasn’t that different from my Daily Log or Weekly Note actions - capture content, format it, route it to multiple destinations. But meeting notes are structurally more complex than daily bullets. They have agendas, meeting notes sections, and AI-generated meeting summaries. The formatting requirements for each destination are different. And unlike my other actions where I’m the one triggering them manually, I wanted the meeting note sync to run automatically every weekday morning.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. If you want the honest breakdown of what broke, what compromises I’m still living with, and what I’d tell someone before they build a system like this, subscribe below.

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If you’ve been following this series, you know the foundation by now. Part 1 covered why I use five apps and why Drafts became the hub. Part 2 broke down the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly actions that route content to Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes with a single tap. Everything so far has been about getting text from point A to points B, C, and D.

This part is different. This is about what happens when Drafts needs to reach beyond what it can do on its own, and what happens when I wanted to bring AI into the workflow. Some of this worked beautifully. Some of it exists because I wanted to see if it was possible. All of it required building infrastructure I never expected to build as someone who doesn’t write code.

The Stoic Reflection: Structured Prompts, No AI Required

I want to start here because people assume this action is AI-powered and it isn’t. The Stoic Reflection action runs twice a day - morning at 6:15am and evening at 7:30pm - and it’s one of the simplest things in my entire workflow. It’s just a series of guided prompts.

The morning version walks me through a structured reflection. It asks about virtue focus for the day, runs me through a dichotomy of control exercise - what’s in my control today, what isn’t - and includes a CBT reframe prompt for anything I’m anxious about. I type my responses directly into Drafts, and the action formats them and saves the output to an Obsidian template.

The evening version reviews the day. What went well, what I’d do differently, and a sleep shutdown ritual that helps me stop thinking about work. Same structure - prompts, responses, save to Obsidian.

There’s no API call, no AI synthesis, no language model involved. It’s a JavaScript action that uses Drafts’ Prompt object to display questions one at a time, collects my answers, formats them with timestamps and section headers, and writes the result. The value isn’t in the technology. It’s in the consistency. Having Todoist remind me to run the action and having the prompts already structured means I actually do the reflection instead of just thinking about doing it. The barrier between “I should journal” and actually journaling is one tap and a series of questions I don’t have to come up with while I’m half asleep.

I bring this up in a piece about AI and backend infrastructure because I think it’s important to acknowledge that not everything needs to be smart. Sometimes a dumb sequence of prompts that runs reliably is more valuable than a sophisticated AI integration that you have to think about.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. If you want to see how I built a cloud backend that lets an iPad reach services it shouldn’t be able to, and how AI fits into the parts of the workflow where it actually makes sense, subscribe below.

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I’m not a developer. If you read Part 1, you already know this. If you didn’t, go read it first because this is where things get technical and I need you to understand that everything I’m about to walk through was built by describing what I wanted to an AI and testing until it worked.

Part 1 covered why I use five apps, why Drafts became the hub connecting them, and what my daily flow looks like from 6:15am to the first of each month. This part digs into the engine - the Daily Log, Weekly Note, and Monthly Note actions that do the actual routing. These three actions are the backbone of the entire system, and they all share a pattern I stumbled into that made building each one easier than the last.

The Core Problem

Every one of these actions solves the same fundamental problem: I type something in Drafts on my iPad, and it needs to end up in Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes without me opening any of those apps. Each of those destinations has a different way of getting data in. Notion has a proper API. Obsidian doesn’t have an API on iPad, but a third-party app called Actions for Obsidian lets Apple Shortcuts write to your vault. Apple Notes has no API at all - the only automated path in is through Shortcuts.

So every action I built follows the same three-step structure. First, a JavaScript script runs inside Drafts that formats the content and handles the Notion API call directly. Second, that script passes formatted content to an Apple Shortcut using Drafts’ template tag system. Third, the Shortcut handles Obsidian and Apple Notes since those require the Shortcuts bridge to receive data.

That’s the architecture. JavaScript for Notion, Shortcuts for everything else, and template tags as the glue between them.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. If you’re building something similar or want to understand how the Notion API integration, the Shortcuts bridge pattern, and the reusable section picker UI actually work, subscribe to get the full breakdown.

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This was a weird week. I published three pieces that couldn’t be more different from each other, and somehow they all came back to the same frustration: the gap be…

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Safari 26.3 dropped yesterday with a new compression algorithm, some Navigation API improvements for single-page apps, and a handful of bug fixes. It’s a fine update. Perfectly competent. And it does…

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A few weeks ago I wrote an article breaking down how Exelon extracts wealth from Baltimore through BGE’s delivery fees. I pulled the numbers. Delivery rates tripled since Exelon bought BGE in 2012. P…

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I’m not a developer. I want to get that out of the way now because everything I’m about to describe sounds like something a developer built, and I don’t want anyon…

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This week I published five pieces and they split cleanly into two categories: the stuff I love doing and the stuff that keeps me up at night wondering if the stuff…

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The video opens the same way they all do. A guy in a beanie, standing in an artisanal workshop lit by that warm golden hour glow. Vintage machinery in the background.…

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I’ve been using iPadOS 26 since the first public beta it dropped this past summer 2025 and honestly, the keyboard shortcuts alone have changed how I work. If you’re using an external keyboard with yo…

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I’ve had my Steam Deck OLED since it launched back in late 2023. It’s a great device. I love it. But lately I’ve been on a mission to optimize what I already own instead of buying new things, and that meant looking at my setup with fresh eyes. My funds are limited and I must live the purchase choices I’ve already made in the past few years.

Here’s what I realized: I have an iPad Pro, a MacBook Pro I was lucky enough to buy from work for $500 when they sent me a replacement for it, and an Apple TV in the living room that can do so much more than I’ve given it credit. The Steam Deck sits in a dock on underneath my living room TV. What if I could access it from any of those devices? What if I could stream games to my iPad on the couch, or remote into Desktop Mode from my Mac to install something without walking across the room? Or from my iPad when traveling leaving all of my devices securely at home.

The Steam Deck runs Linux. Tailscale exists. This should be possible.

It is. And after a few evenings of tinkering, I now have a setup where I can access my Steam Deck from anywhere - my couch, my office, or anywhere else in the world - using three different methods depending on what I need to do. Here’s how I did it.

What You’re Actually Getting

Before diving into the setup, let me explain what this gives you. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to:

Access Desktop Mode remotely via Screens 5 using VNC. This is what I use when I need to install games, manage files, or change settings. It’s not pretty and it’s not fast, but it works.

Play games remotely with full controller support via Steam Link. Steam’s built-in solution is solid and easy to set up. If you just want to play Steam games and don’t care about squeezing out every last millisecond of latency, this is probably all you need.

Stream games with the lowest possible latency via Moonlight and Sunshine. This is the enthusiast option. More setup, better results. I use this when I actually care about performance.

All of this works over Tailscale, which means no port forwarding, no dynamic DNS nonsense, and encryption by default. If you’re not already using Tailscale, you should be. It’s free for personal use and it makes remote access trivially easy.

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I’ve been watching Apple’s moves for the past year with increasing suspicion. Not the fun kind, where you wonder if they’re going to surprise you with something delightful. The kind where you start connecting dots that Apple probably doesn’t want you connecting yet.

Here’s what we know: Apple is reportedly working on a touchscreen MacBook Pro for late 2026 or early 2027. Ming-Chi Kuo and Mark Gurman have both corroborated this. Samsung has already started production on the OLED panels. The redesigned laptops will have OLED displays, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, reinforced hinges that don’t wobble when you touch the screen, and M6 chips built on TSMC’s 2nm process.

Meanwhile, iPadOS 26 just completely overhauled how iPads work. We got Mac-style traffic light buttons for windows. Actual menu bars that swipe down from the top. Exposé. Windowed apps that you can resize and stack and arrange however you want. The Files app looks more like Finder now. Apple essentially rebuilt the entire multitasking system from scratch to work like, well, macOS.

And both platforms run on Apple Silicon. The same chips. The same architecture. The same fundamental hardware.

So here’s my question: What if iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 are the same thing?

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I’ve been tweaking and refining my iPad setup for years now, and I think I’ve finally landed on a collection of apps that genuinely makes the device useful rather than just a fancy YouTube machine. Some of these are old friends. A few are recent discoveries. And a couple are apps I’ve reluctantly admitted are just better than the alternatives, even when I wish that weren’t the case.

The Apps That Made the Cut

Drafts (App Store) is where everything starts. I’ve set it up so that based on what I’m doing, it will share to Apple Notes, Obsidian, and Notion. On top of that, I can integrate Claude or ChatGPT and chat with AI directly in Drafts. I also created a draft action that asks me a series of questions, then creates a full note that gets shared directly to Apple Journal. This thing is the bee’s knees. The Drafts Directory has ready-to-use actions for just about any service you can think of, and the developer keeps adding new features like Apple Intelligence integration for on-device LLM scripting. It’s the Swiss Army knife of text that I didn’t know I needed until I couldn’t live without it.

Obsidian (App Store) pulled me back after I briefly wandered away. I left Obsidian very briefly and came crawling back. It’s still the most versatile notetaking app out there, working seamlessly across Apple, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, and iPadOS. I’ve always had issues with the mobile version, however, the team is finally taking mobile seriously with their recent stream of updates. The 1.10 release brought a completely refreshed mobile interface with faster launch times, better navigation, and new sidebar controls that actually make sense on a touchscreen. They’ve added haptics to toggles and checkboxes, double-tap to switch between reading and editing mode, and the whole thing just feels more intentional now. The plugin ecosystem remains unmatched-I’m still running way too many community plugins, but at least now I can manage them without wanting to throw my iPad across the room.

Apple Notes is where I go to share notes and plan things together with my partner. We plan trips, finances, house projects, and dinner parties all in Apple Notes. It’s restrictive, but it just works. And each year Apple tweaks it just enough to make it slightly more useful than before. There’s something to be said for an app that doesn’t require me to think about file systems or sync settings or plugin compatibility. It’s there when I need it, my partner can access everything instantly, and the collaboration features have gotten genuinely good. Sometimes the boring choice is the right choice.

Todoist (App Store) won me over despite my best efforts to resist. I hate to say it, but Todoist is just too damn versatile to not use. I love Apple Reminders. I prefer it over Todoist. However, Todoist works with everything I need it to work with, and I don’t have to jump through hoops to make it function properly. The natural language input is genuinely impressive-I can type “Submit newsletter draft every Thursday at 9am” and it just figures it out. The Zapier integrations, Todoist MCP, and it’s API let me automate the tedious stuff, and the cross-platform sync actually works without me having to babysit it. They just added a Ramble feature that lets you voice-capture tasks, though I haven’t played with it much yet.

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What January Taught Me About Patterns: AI Hypocrisy, Corporate Complicity, and Who Gets to Be Outraged

This week I published five pieces that might seem scattered o…

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Colin Kae…

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A new article meant to stir MAGA sympathies instead only reveals how stupid and ignorant Dan Bongino, the former FBI Deputy Director, truly is.

Bongino just went on Hannity to call the media “a big, f…

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