If you aren’t getting anything out of a book, put it down and pick up another book. Every hour you spend inching through a boring book is an hour you could’ve spent plowing through a brilliant one.

When it comes to books, quitters finish more.

It helps if you choose the right books in the first place. Stop reading what you think you should be reading and just read what you genuinely want to read. Read what you love.

Great advice here from Austin Kleon. I have been applying it to all of my forms of media consumption: music, television, and movies. And YouTube. And long form internet reads.

I think it’s important to recognize that reading can also include these newer forms of media. You can learn just as much from a well-made YouTube essay as you can from a well-made book.

When you drag your thoughts through multiple disparate pieces of art, you end up arriving at deeper, richer conclusions.

Claire Benton, vice-president of the British Academy of Audiology, suggests that by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can "forget" to filter out the noise.

"You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it," she said.

"Those more complex, high-level listening skills in your brain only really finish developing towards your late teens. So, if you have only been wearing noise-cancelling headphones and been in this false world for your late teens then you are slightly delaying your ability to process speech and noise," Benton suggests.

I got a pair of active noise cancelling headphones for Christmas this year, and it took a few weeks of use before finding them comfortable to wear.

As opposed to my Powerbeats Pro (which offer “noise cancelling” as a result of the little plastic dinguses I shove into my ear canals), these Bose headphones actively filter out background noise.

If I have them on in my office for more than a half hour, it will hurt when I take them off. Everything sounds so loud, even the din of the white noise that gets piped into the office seems irritatingly noticeable.

Truly inspiring. Instead of fretting about all the horrible stuff going on that’s out of our control, here’s a prime example of how you can fight back and make a difference.

I had a blast making this mix CD for my wife for Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, I know, it’s 2025. But who cares? Mix CDs are way cooler than giving someone a playlist (which of course I did).

The process of acquiring a blank CD, meticulously crafting a playlist of songs that made me think of my wife, making the album art in Pixelmator, and handing it to her when I was done gave me the biggest feeling of pride I’ve felt in years.

And yeah, it was just a dumb, impractical CD filled with mushy songs.

But it was fun as hell to make, and that’s what it’s all about.¹

Here’s the track list:

1. The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
2. Seals & Croft - You're the Love
3. The Bird and the Bee - Birthday
4. Kate Nash - I Hate Seagulls
5. Bonny Light Horseman - Lover Take It Easy
6. Donna Lewis - I Love You Always Forever
7. Sonya Spence - Let Love Flow On
8. The Mountain Goats - San Bernardino
9. Lily Allen - Littlest Things
10. Paul Frees - Although I Dropped $100,000
11. Freddie Scott - (You) Got What I Need
12. Hall and Oates - You Make My Dreams
13. Belle and Sebastian - If She Wants Me
14. Exile - Kiss You All Over
15. Stars - My Favourite Book
16. RuPaul, Lawrence Cheney, Bimini Bon-Boulash, Tayce, Ellie Diamond - A Little Bit of Love

If you wait for Apple to deliver on its promises, you’re going to miss out on the most important technological shift in a generation.

The future is here today. You don’t have to wait. With Ollama, you can start building the next generation of AI-powered apps right now.

I am a huge fan of NSHipster. When I was first learning Objective-C, NSHipster provided the weird, quirky back stories about the language that truly helped me understand how to best use the language.

If you’re one of those programmers who is putting your head in the sand about this tech, I think you’re gonna regret it. Not because it’s gonna make you better at your job (though it probably will), but because it’s so much fun.

This is a great option if you’re looking for an example of how to get an LLM running entirely on your own hardware.

A virtual museum of video game levels. I spent a few minutes reliving the good ol’ GTA San Andreas days, as well as perused the Mario Kart 8 levels, and this is extremely impressive and fun.

(Thanks for the tip, Matt!)

Pass this article along to literally everybody you know who would say “I’m not a tech person.”

It walks you through how to install Signal, how to use a password manager like 1Password, how to use a VPN, and how to make yourself safer on social media.

If I were going to add onto this post, I’d say you should learn how to use an ad blocker (I use Ghostery on my Mac and 1Blocker on my iPhone) and consider Backblaze if you don’t back up any of your data.

Gonna give this a try for a couple weeks. Maybe it will tide me over until Ladybird comes out.

This Wikipedia page is a firehose of fascinating, bite-sized pieces of trivia.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’m drawn to blogging because it makes me happy on several levels. I love sharing what I’ve learned. I love entertaining people and spreading joy. I love having a collection of the topics I was interested in at various points in my life. I love being able to practice honing my writing skills. And I love having a place on the internet that is completely my own.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I built my own Ruby on Rails app to handle it. I chose it because I wanted to get better at writing Rails apps.

I’ve had a personal website since 1998. It’s had many iterations and name changes and designs. I miss building websites for fun. So I’m doing it again because hey, it’s still fun as hell to do cool things with these computers of ours.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Oh yeah. At first, it was all handwritten HTML, but I’ve tried a few different content management systems like Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

My longer form pieces are often written in TextMate. I’ll launch a locally-running version of my site and test out formatting and whatnot before I copy and paste it into my production site.

My monthly observation posts are mostly a collection of my daily journalistic entries. Around the first day of the month, I’ll slowly re-read what I wrote about the previous month and edit the interesting nuggets down into something coherent.

For my link posts, I use a custom iPhone Shortcut. When I navigate to a URL in Safari that I wanna share here, my shortcut will grab whatever is in the <title>, then grab the URL sans any UTM or tracking params, then drop whatever I may have highlighted into a Markdown quote in a text field. I then type up my thoughts and hit publish.

This approach works great for me because there is almost zero friction to post. It only sucks when I accidentally close out of the text field, or when I write something substantially long¹. I also have to remember to navigate to the article to add tags. I should probably add that into the Shortcut process at some point.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I’m the most inspired to write whenever my thoughts begin to run away. Writing forces me to grab hold of a single thread of my swirling inner dialogue and crystalize it.

When I got laid off last year, I decided to force myself to journal every single night. I didn’t lay any other parameters: I didn’t give myself any word counts or topics or agendas. Simply write.

Now that I have a journaling habit, I find that I write my thoughts down often throughout the day. I’m inspired to write whenever I make myself laugh, or whenever I feel a light bulb go off in my head, or whenever I need a break from my negative self talk.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Short link posts are almost always published immediately. Longer posts will simmer for a day or two before I eventually force myself to publish. I am pretty diligent about editing things a day or two after that, as well. For this post, I’m gonna publish it as soon as I’m done here.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I don’t have a favorite. Every single post I’ve made on here makes me cringe when I read it back, even if it’s only 24 hours later.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I plan to keep writing. I should probably upgrade the Rails engine here soon.

I also have this idea of building a “garden” here. I came across the idea of a personal site being more like a garden, and I am really vibing with that sentiment. The first step for me is to build this cool 8-bit landscape entirely in vanilla CSS, HTML, and JS. From there, I’d like to have some self-composed, optimistic lo-fi playing in the background. As one sits in the scene, various phrases and quotes will fade in and out of view.²

I mentioned my journaling habit above, and I think another goal of mine for the year is to keep up the monthly observation posts. Writing down my thoughts is helpful, and getting a bit of distance from those thoughts gives me a fresh perspective of them.

Passing the torch

Despite seeing my own site show up in my feed on other people’s sites, I still feel like nobody ever reads this blog. So I’ll admit I felt incredibly dorky writing this post because it reminds me of how these sorts of things used to be hella prevalent back on the web when I was growing up.

But also: isn’t the point of doing these things to have fun and learn how other people approach a hobby that you’re interested in? These “challenges” serve as a collective bonding moment, an opportunity to collectively reflect on why we like this loose-knit community of goofy misfits who know what an RSS feed is.

So here’s how I’ll pass the torch: if you’ve seen these kinds of posts pop up in your own feeds these past couple weeks, copy this and do it yourself and shoot me a note when you’re done. I guarantee you’ll get at least one other person here who will be interested in your stories! ?‍♂️