I’ve added dark mode support to my custom theme, which I ported to Hugo/Micro.Blog from a previous one I made for 11ty, using Alpine Theme as a baseline.
I’ve pushed it to GitHub in case anyone is interested: crlzff/crlzff_theme: Hugo theme for Micro.Blog.
Just upgraded from my MacBook Pro, Late 2012 to the new MacBook Air M3. That Pro served me faithfully for almost 11 years without a single issue - what a beast! Made me think about Apple’s legacy of amazing products… Jobs pulling that first Air out of a manila envelope still remains one of my favorite Apple keynote moments ever.
Currently reading: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
Currently reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future delays them occasionally. But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
— Marcel Proust
The 2038 Problem - Code Reliant
“The 2038 problem" relates to an issue with how Unix-based systems store dates and timestamps.
The core of the issue is that a 32-bit variable can only store integers up to 2147483647. Once the system clock ticks past this at 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, it will integer to overflow, setting its value to −(231) , wreaking havoc from there.
Y2K all over again?
Prevalence-induced concept change
Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.
— The Comfort Crisis by Micheal Easter
Admitting What Is Obvious - Every.to
Billions of dollars in value are wasted every year by people doing the high-status thing they wish they felt compelled to do instead of the weird, low-status thing they actually want to do.
Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile? - Subconscious
Blue-green algae did not win by competing symmetrically with anaerobes. It won by not competing. Photosynthesis was an asymmetric survival strategy. Nothing else did it. The market for sunshine was wide open. The result was a rapid disruption.
There was an additional sociotechnical challenge: the web is a standards-based ecosystem. Standards emerge in retrospect, when a problem space is so well-understood that everyone can agree on how it should work.
Everything Easy is Hard Again - Frank Chimero
In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago.
From Living systems grow from simple seeds - Subconscious
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. (Gall’s Law )
Innovation is overrated - Hey.com
Innovation should almost never happen. It’s incredibly rare. It mostly happens by accident, not by intention. It’s wonderful when it does, but you merely fluctuate in and out of it, it’s not steady state.
Work is mostly mundane. It’s mostly maintenance. It’s mostly local improvement and iteration. Work is mostly… Work. Any innovation is an outlier, nearly a rounding error.
Disney’s Downfall: The Rise and Fall of an Entertainment Giant - Plain English
We often think of Disney as having a flywheel of all different components: merchandise, theme parks, TV, motion pictures. That’s true, but close to two-thirds of Disney’s cash flow last decade was coming from its theme park division. That was because, as successful as the films were, they were primarily monetizing through those parks.
Plain English by Derek Thompson is always a pleasure to listen to.
Thinking together - Subconscious
When a society hits the information scaling threshold, it stalls out. It can’t function until it invents new ways of making sense that can cope with the complexity of the information environment. And societies that don’t pull off this transition? The paper posits they collapse.
It seems related to The Rule of 3 and 10.
And the Subconscious Substack is always a great read.
We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business - eyeondesign.aiga.org
Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author of, among other things, the excellent read that is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, published in 2021. If you, like me, have read it at least twice, you might be happy to know that the author also writes a ~monthly newsletter called The Imperfectionist. It covers many of the same topics and reads equally great.
Here’s a selection of some of the recent issues that I liked the most:
[…] when you loosen up on the sense of obligation, you end up meeting most of those obligations anyway: you become better at meeting deadlines, keeping your promises, and so on.
[…] striving toward sanity means “clearing the decks” before getting down to business on a project you care about, or reading another how-to book about it, while operating from sanity means “paying yourself first”, making a start even though the decks aren’t clear – because you understand that even five minutes spent Actually Doing The Thing are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours at some point in future. (Similar advice from this article)
The final reason is that the point of reading, much of the time, isn’t to vacuum up data, but to shape your sensibility.
The lesson here isn’t that systems and techniques are worthless. For me, instead, the answer has been to keep using them, but to relate to them differently: to demote them, I suppose, from things I try to use to live life for me, to things I use to help me live my life. To treat them as the tools they are – which means I’m the one who has to decide, day after day, when it’s appropriate to use them.
Just focus on protecting four hours – and don’t worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.
Malesic writes: “I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. “‘You get over it,’ he replied.”
Happy reading!
Reading Ourselves to Death — The New Atlantis
A. G. Sertillanges wrote in The Intellectual Life: “The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production…. Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence.”
Maybe we just don’t know anymore what to do with the experience of experience — and putting it into writing, of course, only adds to the problem.
Windows of Opportunity: A Fleeting Chance at the Impossible - Forte Labs
The crucial thing to understand about Windows of Opportunity, he says, are that they end[…]
When these moments arrive, it’s not time to start researching things, or making long-term plans, or getting a degree. It’s too late for detailed analysis or asking your friends what they think. You must act.
The genius behind this concept is that for product development, you’re better off picking a cheap-o technology (‘withered’) and using it in a new way (‘lateral’) rather than going for the predictable, cutting-edge next-step.
Gunpei Yokoi believed that the rewards for using cutting-edge technology weren’t always proportional to the effort. That’s why he tried to limit himself to withered technologies.
It might be clear by now that I love Bear.app. It is, by far, the most used app on my phone.
If you, like me, are a heavy user of tags in your Bear notes, one thing you quickly start to notice is that the left bar, where each of them is listed, starts to get crowded pretty fast.
So one quick workaround I came up with is to use some kind of “namespace” to prepend to each tag that is not used daily as part of my personal knowledge management system.
I have a “first-tier” class of Second Brain-like tags, such as 01_Projects, 02_Areas, 03_Resources, 04_Archive, and a few more. But, since Bear allows tags to be nested in a hierarchical fashion, every other tag goes under the mighty . tag. So, for example, every note I have about running gets the #./running tag.
What happens then is that in the Bear UI, these nested tags are hidden under a nifty drop-down, under the unassuming . tag.
Is there a better solution to the messy-list-of-tag problem? If so, please let me know.
The cult cool of Japanese lifestyle magazines - Financial Times
Above all, Japanese magazines prove, with their collective unerring eye for style and detail, that a picture really is worth more than a thousand words. For the rest? There’s always Google Translate.
“Japanese readers love the prescriptive nature of magazines, and you’ll often see people referencing them to buy specific items in stores.” — W David Marx
My note taking system - Critter.blog
After a decade of futzing around with second brains and note taking systems for forever, I’ve settled on a dumb setup and haven’t touched it in three years.
I guess I’m not the the only one who went the “dumb way” after trying more structured systems… Ah, the power of simplicity and consistency!
The high tech behind Netflix’s old-school DVD service - The Verge
Netflix began to offer streaming as an added benefit to its DVD subscribers in 2007, and a lot of things the company had built for its DVD website came in handy to get streaming off the ground. The queue subscribers used to preorder DVDs essentially became the precursor to today’s watchlist, and the recommendation engine Netflix had built to suggest new movies and shows to subscribers was adapted for streaming as well. “There was plenty of technology shared,” recalled Johnson.
Part of why inflation sparks heated debates is because everyone spends their money differently, so there’s no single inflation rate – your inflation may be very different from someone else’s, then people get angry that others don’t see what they see. If you have a long commute, you’ll be more sensitive to changes in gas prices than someone working from home.
For the last few years, I’ve kept my life organized using the following system. It’s just a bunch of notes + ~1h per week of effort to keep everything in check. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it is simple enough that I’ve stuck to it consistently, and that’s what matters.
It’s heavily based on Getting Things Done by David Allen and the Second Brain concept by Tiago Forte, but over the years I kept tinkering with it and I think that by now I reached a point where it really suits my needs… and probably nobody else’s (as-is). But it could be a good enough starting point if you care to go down this route.
I’m using Bear as my note-taking (and much, much more) app. It’s my to-do list app, my bookmarks app, my read-it-later app, etc. I like having all my stuff under one roof and not divided into many silos. I know, there are countless better solutions for each of these tasks, but I feel very strongly about this.
In Bear, you can organize your notes with tags, which you can also nest, so they can assume a hierarchical structure. It’s been a while since I used any other note-taking tool, but I guess that many of the “famous” ones can replicate this quite easily (i.e. Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian, Roam Research, LogSeq, …).
So, the way I structure my endless list of notes, my main tags, looks something like this:
For the sake of this post, I’m going to focus on how I manage my day-to-day and process new inputs and information. So I’ll zero in on the content of the #0_Dashboard tag (folder?) and a few other notes I use as checklists for periodical reviews that live inside #3_Resources.
The #0_Dashboard tag is really the heart of the whole system. It’s home to only 7 notes:
Every goal/to-do item that’s longer than 1 single action, is exploded into a project. Every current, ongoing project gets assigned the #1_Projects and is listed in the DASHBOARD note. Every other non-current project gets the #3_Resources/projects_standby tag and is listed accordingly in the NEXT or SOMEDAY note.
Resurfacing it’s the most important part of the process, as every PKM guru out there will remind you, but it took years for me to really let the concept sink in. And I’m now glad it did.
In a sea of loosely linked notes it’s easy for something to slip under the rug, so we need a simple but consistent review workflow. I have four levels of review, on different timeframes: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly. Let’s dive in:
Every Saturday morning (but of course you can choose the day and time that suit you best) I pull out my Weekly Review note (that sits for the rest of the week inside the #3_Resources tag/folder) and go through the following routine.
First, I review my calendar for the next 2 weeks and take note of things I’ll need to act upon. I use my calendar as a reminder for timely stuff (appointments, deadlines, and so on). Everything else that has not a fixed date gets transferred into my DASHBOARD and tackled, hopefully, during the coming week.
PS. If you have been reading some articles on personal knowledge management, you’ll know by now that there are many currents of thought around the role of the calendar in managing your to-do list. This is way outside the scope of this article and I’m not going to deal with that here.
Then, in pure GTD fashion, I empty all my inboxes (email, messages, etc.). I try to abstain from going into the content of every single communication. Instead, I try to file each one under one of my lists depending on the timeframe I’ll need to get back to them. The purpose of a review is not to do the stuff we accumulated during the week but to clear our minds and set a clean slate for the next week.
After I’ve checked my calendar and emptied my inboxes, it’s time to review my lists. So, on a weekly basis, I review the following:
I do my best to keep the whole process under an hour long.
Next up is the Monthly Review! I do this on the first Sunday of every month. I pull up the related note and work my way through the checklist.
Long story short, it largely consists of updating all my devices and backing up all my data to external hard drives, so I’m not going into the details of that since is a bit out of scope for this article (but maybe the topic of a future one).
The only notes I’m going to review at this stage are related to some ongoing projects of mine. Of course, they change month by month, but this is a good hook to remember to keep an eye on them.
I do a quarterly review every three months (😂), usually on the last weekend of March, June, September and December. I like to keep it in sync with the changing seasons. Now is the moment to review, among other stuff, 2 peculiar notes of my system:
Lastly, I‘ll take some time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to review the years that’s coming to a close and plan out a little bit for the year ahead. Among the notes that get reviewed:
This is my system for staying organized and on top of things. Of course, as previously said, it’s not perfect, for the very fact that perfection rarely applies to this kind of thing. This is the system that suits me best and I can keep up with. No reason to have a system in place that’s never gets used because too complicated or daunting.
If you like to start something similar for yourself, this might serve as a blueprint. Start as small as you can. Then you should really make the system your own, move stuff here and there, add the things that you care about, and remove the ones you don’t.
One last word of advice: review is the name of the game, everything falls apart pretty soon if you don’t keep up. BUT beware of becoming enslaved by them, spending hours and hours reviewing your notes. It will give you the impression of moving along, of doing something, while that is just another form of procrastination. Try to keep each review under the 60-minute mark.
Happy tinkering.
Enough scrolling. You'll find older posts in the archive.