hildebrand_rare

They changed this recently, and do allow direct in-app purchases now. In some random podcast interview with an exec at Amazon, I remember them saying that each team gets to make their own independent decision on this, and Audible as a unit decided to allow in-app purchases and pay Apple their cut.

Those upsell marketing emails without unsubscribe links because they are "account related emails" are the worst. I quickly solved the problem by marking everything from Experian as spam, but I can't think of another service where I've gone searching for an unsubscribe link and haven't found one. Their messaging at the bottom of these emails for anyone who is curious:

"This is not a marketing email — you’re receiving this message to notify you of a recent change to your account. If you’ve unsubscribed from Experian CreditWorks℠ Basic emails in the past, don’t worry — you no longer receive newsletters or special offers."

Checking my spam folder, it looks like I've already received two of them this calendar month.

I do have a deep fondness for logging / tracking information in my life, and currently use several disparate tools for the purpose and am trying to consolidate much of it.

On one hand, I have my "lazy trackers", or things that are recorded automatically. Last FM for music history, the health info that gets aggregated into the Apple Health app, etc... These are things that get collected automatically, and I have scripts to automatically back them up to CSV format every so often. The collection tools themselves tend to have all the analysis features I care for, so I haven't done anything major with the CSV backups at this time. I'm generally cool with the automated collection stuff and have no interest in changing that dynamic while those methods remain available. I outsource what I can.

And then there are the things I log manually. The catch-all here is a personal journal that I do with daily markdown files with a timestamp for each time I write something in them. Over time, I have decided to break out specific things into their own markdown files rather than the catch-all journal. These include media notes, where I now capture thoughts on books / movies / games / etc in their own markdown files; and contact notes, where I write down memorable notes on interactions with my friends / loved ones so I can be the best friend / family member I can for those people. Those are all encrypted markdown files. The one spreadsheet I manually keep tracks the hours that I spend playing individual video games over time, which I've always found interesting even though I'm not a huge gamer.

As for the things I have chosen to break out from the catch-all journal, that has come as a result of querying those things so often that I find it easier to make purpose-designated areas for them. That's worked well for me up to this point, but in the future I want to have a catch-all text input area that collates everything into a timestamped "database" and then automatically scripts out appending those things to the appropriate place. I normally wouldn't bother with so much development overhead, and I did start out light; but this is a huge passion in my life that makes it worth the effort.

My current notion is to use the Drafts app for this, since I operate within the Apple ecosystem and that is a fully scriptable cross-platform text notes app within that ecosystem. I can enter whatever input parameters in plain text as a passing note, and that output can be automatically parsed into a master JSON or SQLite file or whatever that can then be parsed to output everything to the appropriate markdown files automatically. This is something I plan to mock up a test version of soon. I want do keep the markdown files up to date like I always have, mainly so that I can reference notes via mobile, which is a major review and consumption platform for me.

I think for this app, the purpose is a convenient and secure writing space that's available across devices. I've been a Standard Notes customer for several years now, and I went with it because I was looking for a secure solution for my journaling. I wanted a secure place to write my deepest thoughts at home and on the go, and also a way to quickly and easily access, edit, and review those thoughts across all of my devices. That's a tall order.

This conflict of desires lead me to the age old trade-off of security versus convenience. If I want security / privacy, I should use only local text editing tools and keep everything on an encrypted volume, preferably on an airgapped machine. If I want pure convenience, I should use any of the million great cloud-based note and document options that are available on any device. If I want to fall anywhere between those extremes on the spectrum, I'll need to decide the most convenient option I can bear that provides the most security. And for me, I landed on Standard Notes when exploring this question for myself.

It's a lightweight and easy text editing program that is encrypted and secure anytime my writing leaves my sphere of control. It allows for search of my notes, filtering by title and date created/modified, and it has great sync between all of my devices to the point that I can pick it up any device and write a thought as it comes and not worry about sync conflicts if multiple instances of my note are open across devices. There are easy options to automate encrypted local backups and even daily cloud-based ones if you're a paying customer. I can export everything to plain text quite easily - which is my preferred format - so I'm in no way dependent on their continuing to exist.

If you want to read/write notes seamlessly across all of your devices and you also want to stay private and secure, your options grow limited right away. Standard Notes is the best compromise of these competing interests that I've found so far for my own situation. So even though I have the ability to use other tools as you've described - and many of them are better writing tools than Standard Notes - I still choose to pay SN as a customer.