Last night was an all-nighter squaring away new tech in my writing universe.
First the Adonit Pixel. I love it—Adonit have made many small changes from its last incarnation (the Jot Touch), all for the better. The tip is improved. The diameter is slightly smaller. It has better battery life. The function buttons haven’t changed location, but they are stiffer, making it harder to click them by accident—and if you do click them accidentally in the middle of writing or drawing, the drawing is given priority over the button command.
What doesn’t it have? Look at the photo very carefully—what’s wrong with this picture?
No pocket clip, that’s what. Not only that, but the stylus is perfectly round, so that I don’t dare lay it down on a table or desk—it will roll if the surface is even slightly off level.
I finally got disgusted at 2 am and got two pairs of pliers and a Fisher Space Pen removable pen clip. I bent the tines of the round barrel grip outwards until it freaking fit the oversized body of the Pixel. Problem solved.
Then there was the browser thing. Firefox for Mac has broken so that it can’t be used to drag webpages to Scrivener. I had replaced it with a new-ish entry into the browser sweepstakes, Vivaldi. It’s wonderful—speedy, flexible, and takes Chrome extensions as if they were made for it.
But at 3 am I found out to my sorrow that Rescuetime had not been logging my websites—it just had a great lump sum entry for Vivaldi as a “utility.”
At 3 am I was not making great decisions. I tried installing the Rescuetime Chrome extension into Vivaldi—no dice. I switched back to Firefox, but it still had its problems. I even tried switching to Safari—a mark of true desperation. Finally I tried looking at the Rescuetime help pages.
By this time it was 4 am. I had to read everything twice because I kept missing obvious stuff. I finally got it through my sleep-deprived brain that
- Rescuetime does not now nor has it ever supported Vivaldi, and probably never will.
- There is a workaround involving the very Chrome extension that I had given up on.
The workaround:
First, lie to Rescuetime the Chrome extension in Vivaldi and tell it you don’t have the Rescuetime the App installed on your system. Then, go to Rescuetime.com, drill through reports until you see Vivaldi time only, and tell Rescuetime.com (and therefore Rescuetime the App) to ignore all Vivaldi time.
Voila! The Rescuetime app records no time for Vivaldi. Meanwhile, Rescuetime the Chrome extension, thinking that there is no Rescuetime app, reports all the detailed website time. Rescuetime the App continues to report the time spent in Scrivener and in Solitaire. Problem solved.
(If you need the workaround, please go to the Rescuetime help link above for details missing in my description.)
The moral of this story: I should write down things to do like “put a pen clip onto my Adonit Pixel” and “Figure out why Rescuetime is barfing up Vivaldi website time” at 2 am and go to sleep.
But I probably won’t.
A Study In Silver 