🍪 #7 - Keeping track of movies, TV, books, ...
And a convenient iOS shortcut to get a summary from a website based on its URL & GTA VI
Hi,
and welcome again to Little Bites, my weekly bite on productivity, apps, tech, …
This week I would like to talk about keeping track of movies, TV shows, books,…, the iOS shortcut I use to get instant summaries of a URL and the GTA VI trailer.
Happy reading,
Steven
Reading time: 6 minutes to chew through.
☑️ Keeping track of movies, TV shows, books,…
🏷️ Apps
As I highlighted last week, I stopped using Day One as my journal app, as I was already capturing my knowledge in my second brain with Logseq/Obsidian.
I already kept track of the movies and TV shows I watched, but all at a simplified level. Just the name of the movie or show, linking it to the day I watched it.
In using websites as Twitter and Artifact I get a lot of recommendations which triggered me to look at a separate tool to record my viewing habits.
I never do anything in a rush, so I had a look at and tried many solutions.
The main features I was looking for were:
Minimal: not too many features or complicated design
Covers movies and TV shows
Movie and TV show rating
Short synopsis
iOS
In my search I first stumbled on Letterboxd, described as a social network for film discussion and discovery. It has a strong and very active community and it ticked many of the boxes. However, it only covers movies, so that was a no-go for me.
But if you only need an app for movies, I suggest you have a look at Letterboxd (which is also available on Android).
Up next I tried Trakt, another popular tracking option, supporting iOS and Android. While it holds both movies and TV shows I found it a bit too slow and unresponsive when using it. I’m also a sucker for clean and minimal design and while Trakt looks ok, it didn’t fully appeal to me.
Following and testing a few more, I finally stumbled on Sequel, a minimal-looking app that covered all my requirements.
It looks very nice, is lightweight and easy to use, has ratings, allows you to quickly add new things to “watched” or your “watchlist”, has collections, …
I probably forgot a lot more of its features, but besides movies and TV shows it also allows tracking of regular books, audiobooks and games.
One thing to add is that Sequel comes with a subscription, however, the features of “where to watch”, “release reminders”,… are not really what I need so I’m ok with the free version.
Have a look for yourself and let me know what you’re using.
📱 My iOS shortcut to get a summary from a website based on a URL
A few weeks ago, I shared my iOS shortcut on how you can use ChatGPT to get a summary of any webpage.
While this is a great shortcut for summaries, it does require you to have the specific page open (as the content of the page is copied and sent to ChatGPT to summarize).
I recently started reading via RSS again and thought it would be great if I could get a summary of an article without leaving my RSS reader (Reeder).
While the ChatGPT summary works great, I don’t want to open every article I want a summary on.
So I turned to Perplexity for help.
That is the advantage of the widespread of AI tools, you just need to know which one to use for your specific situation.
Below you can find the link to the shortcut, for which you also need to install the Perplexity AI app and have an account (free version).
What the shortcut will do is get the URL of the article from the share sheet and prompt Perplexity for a summary (since Perplexity can browse the web).
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/bc828064b03b41ffbeae23dfb44d8a52
One thing to note is that it will not work for all websites.
I found that I could not get a summary of articles from my news site as they are locked behind a subscription. But for those cases, you could open the article and once opened use the ChatGPT shortcut to get its summary.
Feel free to tweak the shortcut to your needs. Just make sure that it’s enabled on the share sheet and that a prompt is provided so Perplexity knows what to do with your URL.
🎮 First trailer of GTA 6
I have played countless hours on the GTA series, starting in 1999 with GTA2 and its top-down look. Over the years, the gameplay and graphics have improved significantly up until the immensely popular GTA V, which has become the 2nd most-sold game ever (after Minecraft).
But GTA V was released a decade ago, so everyone has been waiting impatiently for a successor. And patience has been rewarded, although “slightly” as the trailer for GTA VI was just officially released.
The wait for the full game is still on as it is expected to be available in 2025 only.
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