Russell Finally Learns How To Wear Shoes

I guess this is the month of “Russell finally learns how to wear shoes,” because after last week’s discovery of the shoehorn, my shoe wearing has been revolutionized again, by good ol’ Ian’s Shoelace Site.

I’ve long been aware of Ian’s, because it’s often used as the poster child of the small, independent, non-commercial web that’s currently being crushed by LLMs. But I hadn’t taken the chance to actually read any of the content until this week, when I finally got frustrated that my new pair of sneakers kept coming untied.11 In fact, the pair I replaced didn’t have true laces at all; the laces were merely decorative and didn’t require tying.

The most important (literally, life-changing) page is his explanation of the (incorrect) “granny knot” that I was accidentally tying. It’s a very succinct page, but in case you really want to save yourself the click:

• Granny knots occur when both the top and bottom parts of the knot are in the same direction; if they’re tied in opposite directions, one half of the knot slipping will make the other half of the knot tighter.
• You can usually tell you have a granny knot because the laces will tend to sit crooked in a heel-to-toe orientation.22 As, in fact, my laces tended to do. Now that I’ve corrected the granny knot, they sit nicely left-to-right across my shoes.
• To fix it, you just have to swap the direction of the initial crossing — if you learned a granny knot growing up, you typically start by wrapping the right lace over the left, so just wrap the left over the right instead. It’ll feel odd the first couple times but becomes natural fast.

Then, I went on to learn the Ian Knot, the World’s Fastest Shoelace Knot™️, which is indeed incredibly fast and easy to learn, and results in a typical bunny-eared shoelace knot. Ian’s pictures are extremely clear — he has both “knots-eye-view” and top-down step-by-step instructions, which is lovely tutorial design — so I’d highly recommend it when you have five minutes to kill.

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I forgot to mention in the last issue, but a couple weeks ago I took the drive out to Stockton for the Redwood Tea Estate, a lovely little artisanal tea farm33 Yes, in Stockton, California. If that doesn’t sound conducive to tea growing, rest assured that most of my questions were along the lines of “how the heck do you grow tea here?” run by Patrick Sunbury, a former landscape architect who was forced to give up his career for health reasons and ended up turning to regenerative agriculture instead. He gives regular tours — hence my trip — as well as running a monthly tea membership44 In fact, it looks like the crop this year was small enough that he’s only selling via the membership. .

One thing he pointed out was that his kind of life is always an option — although he inherited his plot of land from family, the average San Francisco homeowner could certainly afford to buy a small farm in Stockton — but it does require a level of obsessiveness55 Indeed, while he was guiding our tour, he was also picking flowers off the tea plants as he noticed them. (Flowers are dispreferred, because we want the tea plant to put its energy into producing tea leaves. They do have a fascinating sweet-bitter taste, though.) and tenacity that most folks don’t really have. He’s been working on the farm for more than five years and is still regularly experimenting, with many of those experiments turning out to be duds. But, then, he seems quite content with the life he has. Shades of Wendell Berry66 Side note: I finally picked up a collection of Wendell Berry essays (specifically The World-Ending Fire), only to learn that he had passed away this week at the age of 92. I’ve only gotten through one essay (“A Native Hill”) but he really is just as great as everybody says he is. , perhaps.

Anyway, lovely experience, well worth the drive — the pic up top is one of the rows of tea bush. Another victory for Bay Area(ish) arts and crafts and agriculture.

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This week I built a home-cooked iOS app for a very specific issue that I have and probably nobody else has (but it is on TestFlight, if you ‘d like to try!). For a long time, I was a happy user of Raycast, but recently I decided I was unhappy77 There’s some pragmatic reasons for the unhappiness (Raycast’s performance has gotten worse over the years; they overinvest in their AI features; I was paying close to $100 a year for the subscription; I didn’t like that everything was locked up in proprietary software) but mostly it’s just because, as the hosts of Comfort Zone complained, the company itself has become “too cringe”. Like… why did they make a vibecoding app called Glaze?? with the extent of my dependence and largely replaced88 I also flirted with macOS standby Alfred, but everything about it just feels janky. The UI is ugly, I don’t like the interaction model, and though the main interface is zippy, most of the plugins are extremely slow. it with a combination of TinyStart, Espanso, and my good old standby Hammerspoon.

However! I also heavily used the Raycast iOS app, specifically for the quicklinks feature. I set my iPhone’s Action Button to open Raycast search, then I had a bunch of quicklinks set up for Google search, Wikipedia search, Google Docs I tend to revisit, etc. It worked quite nicely — often when I’m out and about, I suddenly want to look something up on Wikipedia, and this was about the fastest way to do so. It turns out there’s not really any other app on iOS that has a similar functionality.

So I built my own, with the assistance of Claude Code! In Index, you store your favorite links and text snippets (exportable and importable via a simple TOML config file), you set your Action Button to the “Search in Index” Shortcut, and bam one button press and you can look something up on Wikipedia.

I am not sure this is a problem that literally anyone else on earth has, but if it sounds of interest, feel free to reply to this email and I can add you to the TestFlight 🤷