Johannes Holmberg

Let it sit for a week

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve learned this the hard way. Sometimes I just get too bothered about a specific thing. And before I know it, it just takes up all my mental capacity. I don’t have space for anything else.

So when I get too bogged down about something I have to remind myself to drop all thoughts about it for a week. I can come back later and fret as much as I want—but for now, let it be. It could be a piece of furniture that doesn’t fit. A tool that I’ve been tinkering with and can’t seem to get right. Whatever it may be, when I let seven days pass, my mind is freed up for more important things.

And the funniest of it all—most times I come back and don’t even notice the thing that bothered me a week ago. I may even have started liking it. It’s amazing how efficient this tactic is.

Let it sit for a week.

Sprucing up my bookshelf

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve had this bookshelf page on my site for a couple of years. A place to keep track of what I’m reading from year to year. Recently, I took some time to rethink and rename the “buckets” I draw from—in an attempt to be more intentional on how I read.

Business: This is for me to keep myself up-to-date on what’s required to run a business.
Communication: Writing, presenting, messaging—clear communication will just grow more essential as technology evolves.
Craft: About processes and tactics around the work—more about the how rather than the why.
Design: It’s important for me to keep a fresh design perspective. Both in how to think strategically but also in execution.
Engineering: I like to evolve my software engineering skills and therefore should read frequently from this bucket.
Fiction: I had a period where I read almost exclusively fiction. Especially sci-fi. It’s an area I will indulge if I don’t watch myself. Now I keep it to one fiction per two nonfiction’s.
German: To keep my skills relevant and accessible, I find it important to continue reading books in German on a yearly basis.
Health: Exercise, diet, and physical well-being.
Mindfulness: This area is on spirituality—on doing the inner work required. Whenever there’s too much chatter in my head I know it’s time to pick another book from this bucket.
People: Mainly biographies, but also other types of stories from people. I enjoy learning from others.
Reasoning: Mostly philosophy. These are books that shape my thinking and strategy. It’s been a very important area for me over the years.
Technology: Not so much about the actual implementation but rather the role that technology has in society. What’s the future like?
Worldview: Since I rarely read newspapers nowadays, these are the books I get my worldview from.

Splitting up my reading based on the areas that are important to me makes it easier to pick up new books. Normally I’ve just grabbed whatever looked most interesting. Now I should check which bucket needs balance. I keep matching lists on Amazon to make the whole process simpler, and one book per bucket each year sounds like a nice target.

Converting images to WebP with Hazel

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Let’s say you have a folder with a bunch of images in a png or jpg format and you want to automatically convert these files to WebP whenever there’s a new image dropped into the folder.

Here is a solution how you can do that with Hazel and a little CLI tool called cwebp.

Hazel is a great utility tool for your Mac which keep an eye out for changes in your folders. Depending on the criteria you set up for the folder you can then take actions on that.

cwebp is a command line interface that lets you convert images from png, jpg, etc. to a WebP format with a drastically reduced file size.

Set up cwebp

First we’re going to install cwebp and we’re going to do it via Homebrew:

brew install webp

If you don’t have Homebrew installed you can find instrutions how to install it here.

When you have installed cwebp you can use it in your terminal by the following command:

cwebp image.jpg -o image.webp

Now we have a simple way of converting an image directly from our terminal. This is pretty powerful but we want to make this thing automatic so let’s prepare a script that we can use in Hazel:

# Set the input and output paths
input_file="$1"
output_file="${input_file%.*}.webp"

# Convert the image to WebP format
cwebp "$input_file" -o "$output_file"

This script takes the input file that Hazel has detected and converts it to WebP.

Set up the monitoring folder with Hazel

1. If you don’t have Hazel installed go ahead and download it here. Open up Hazel and add the folder that you want to monitor. In my case it’s the img folder below.

2. Go ahead and create a new rule and name it anything you want. I call mine "Convert new images to webp".

3. Next we want to add the condition for the folder to monitor. I want any file with an extension of png, jpg, or jpeg to match.

4. Then we want to go ahead and add an action that’s going to happen when a file matches. We select "Run shell script" and we will use an embedded script. This will be the script we prepared earlier.

5. Click "Edit script" and go ahead and paste the script in the prompt.

6. Finally we want to delete the original file once the conversion is done. So we add another action that will "Move" the file to the Trash.

Now we have an automatic way of converting images to WebP as soon as they’re dropped into our folder.

Automatically quit email with Keyboard Maestro

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Here is a neat Keyboard Maestro setup that automatically closes my email client whenever it’s been deactivated for 5 minutes. It consists of three macros working in tandem.

The first macro will close the mail app after 5 minutes. It starts out disabled and will disable itself whenever the email client gets active:

The second macro will enable the first macro whenever mail is deactivated. This starts the countdown of 5 minutes:

The last macro will disable the first macro whenever mail is activated or quit:

This process helps me to avoid having the email client open in the background. Less distraction, more focus.

Download the macros here.

Window management with Moom

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Now and then I like to switch up my tools a bit. And a dependable window manager is an essential tool for any work on the Mac. For a long time I’ve been using Magnet for this purpose, and before that, back in the day I used to rely on SizeUp. All good tools. But last month I stumbled over Moom which is now my new window manager of choice.

It’s got all the standard functionality that I need. Like using keyboard shortcuts to resize and position windows on either side of the screen. And it handles dragging windows to the corners of the screen for resizing only by mouse. You can even override the macOS default behaviour when clicking the green full screen button to get this functionality there:

But the key feature that sets Moom apart is the ability to save snapshots of your window layouts. Say you’re organizing a couple of apps next to each other and resize them to fit your needs:

If you want to come back to this exact layout you can save it as a snapshot in Moom and give it a name. That will add an item in the Moom menu bar where you can choose it to get back to your saved layout.

That’s incredibly handy. But the thing that takes it even one step further is that you can use AppleScript to programmatically invoke that layout later:

tell application "Moom" to arrange windows according to snapshot "Review"

I’m using Keyboard Maestro for doing a lot of automation work. And involving Moom has made this process much simpler for me.

I used to do all the window management that I needed programmatically directly from Keyboard Maestro’s built in window actions. It works, but it’s tedious when you need to update them at a later time.

With Moom I can invoke my layout, do some minor adjustments and then save it to replace my previous snapshot, it can keep the same name which means I don’t need to update any of my other scripts. They still work.

I will write another post later on how I use Keyboard Maestro to set up custom workspaces. But a cornerstone tool in that setup is now window management with Moom.

Set up a global gitignore file

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It could be valuable to have a global gitignore file that you fall back on in case you don’t have one for every project.

1. Open your terminal and check if you have a global git config file set up by the following command:

git config --get core.excludesfile

2. Create a global gitignore file. You can name it anything. I call mine .gitignore__global.

3. Configure git by setting up the path for the global gitignore file you just created. I keep mine in a .dotfiles folder under my user. So in my case I do:

git config --global core.excludesFile '~/.dotfiles/.gitignore__global';

4. Now you can fill your new ignore file with anything you want ignored by default. Here’s how my global gitignore file looks like. It’s a good default for when I haven’t one set up for a project.

Send to Kindle on the web

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Finally there’s a simple, user-friendly way to send content to your Kindle, and it’s directly in the web browser: https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle

I used to connect my Kindle via cable to my computer and drag over the files manually. While that worked it didn't retain highlights and notes that I made from the book and it didn't sync to my other devices.

Then I used the “Send to Kindle” Mac app for a while. But that didn't support the epub format and more often than not I didn’t get covers for my books.

Let’s just say that it’s been a mess lately to get my books from elsewhere to my Kindle library.

But now I finally have my one-stop-shop for getting content onto my library: https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle

Moving word by word in iTerm

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Many times I find myself wanting to quickly jump around to different positions in a command in iTerm. In a text editor it’s simple, OPTION + arrowKey moves one word at the time, CMD + arrowKey moves to the beginning/end of a line. But in iTerm this doesn’t work by default. But I found out there’s a way around it.

This is how you make it work:

1. In iTerm press CMD + , to open the Preferences

2. Go to Profiles > Keys > Key Mappings

3. In the presets at the bottom, select Natural Text Editing

4. Done.

This makes navigating around long commands in iTerm a bit easier to deal with.

2021 reads

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried
Ultralearning by Scott H. Young
Getting Things Done by David Allen
1984 by George Orwell
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
The Social Singularity by Max Borders
Your Music and People by Derek Sivers
Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin
Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin
City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin
Nicely Said by Nicole Fenton
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
Kings of Colorado by David Hilton
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli
Difference by Bernadette Jiwa
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
The How Not to Die Cookbook by Michael Greger
Mindset by Carol Dweck
How to Cook Your Life by Kōshō Uchiyama
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
How to Live by Derek Sivers
A Guide to the Good Life by
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson
The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley
One Life by Morten Albaek
Ikigai by Hector Garcia
Design Beyond Devices by Cheryl Platz
The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
Iron Gold by Pierce Brown
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
What the most successful people do before breakfast by Laura Vanderkam
Yes to Life by Viktor E. Frankl
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Dark Age by Pierce Brown
Quiet by Susan Cain

Log a little bit every day

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

My journal helps me understand where I’ve been. It’s helpful having a way to recollect the things that set me on the path I’m currently on. I’ve found that just three lines of reflection in the bullet journal every evening helps me to reinforce where I’m going. It gives a purpose to the day when I take stock of the things that happened to me, and reflect on how I handled them.

Sometimes it’s hard to get started though. Some days I have no idea what is worth logging and I lack inspiration. What I do in these cases is that I go back and read what I logged in the last couple of days. It’s strange what this does but just by looking at what previous me has accomplished I get all excited and I’m ready to log a couple of lines.

A day in and of itself may not look like much. Especially when I am living that day right now, I can’t really put it into context. But it’s when I start stringing the days together, and seeing the longer view, that the pieces starts clicking for me. By logging just a tiny bit every day I’m documenting my own path.