Links

I keep thinking about this 2021 blog post by Dave Rupert on a retirement seminar by his financial advisor he "inadvertantly attended" which posed three main questions:

1. Where are you going to live?
2. How are you going to change a light bulb?
3. How are you going to get your favourite ice cream?

At the end of the presentation, the speaker opened up the conversation and asked current retirees to offer advice for near-retirees. A significant part of that discussion was about forming and maintaining relationships... Men tend to build relationships around tasks and often struggle with retirement because they’ve lost their primary mode of relationship building.

The way Dave ended this post has prompted me to think about relationships too.

I feel so far away from the need to think about retirement but, nonetheless, a healthy exercise. It appears to have stuck with me if I’m still rehashing it two years later. Now I think about relationships a lot.

Jan Miksovsky writes about their home-cooked app MomBoard to display notes on an e-ink display from Jan and their siblings to their mother who suffers amnesia (but not dementia). Jan used deliberately simple HTML and CSS on an e-ink tablet's web browser for high resilience, with a simple web app to post notes and JSON storage in the cloud. Jan's post marked 2 years of successful use!

Hamilton Nolan, journalist on American labour and inequality, provides a mental model for why you should still vote for politicians who support ideas which are wrong or harmful:

With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests.

[The] true work of political action is ... to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.

I just wonder if there is a less combative term than 'enemy'? Maybe 'opponent'? And the title put me off reading this otherwise excellent article initially.

(via Ed Yong)

Justin Duke writes his experience in using Things and GTD, and his suspicion of PKM.

Some observations of Justin's task setup in Things are:

• Only 4 areas, but quite a few projects in each area (and projects taking the GTD definition)
• Prefixes project names with 'x' for blocked or delegated tasks
• Prefixes project names with '∞' for 'unfinishable' tasks

I appreciate his link to Andy Matuschak's note on writing about note-taking:

most people who write about note-taking ... aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity

This connects to Justin's side note about personal note-taking:

("What about the stuff that you don't need to share with anything else?", one might ask. I posit to you: this information probably does not need to be recorded, and you probably have better things to do with your time.)

I don't quite agree with this as I find it helpful to take notes to augment my own patchy memory, but on the other hand, I write plenty of short notes which I never look at again. However, can I predict ahead of time which notes these are?

Alex Chan wrote about creating tiny static websites for browsing files in folders with just an index.html and machine-readable metadata in metadata.js.

I create one website per collection, each with a different design, suited to the files it describes. For example, my collection of screenshots is shown as a grid of images, my bookmarks are a series of text links, and my videos are a list with a mixture of thumbnails and text.

This feels like a more approachable (to me) version of a 'home-cooked app' which was the subject of Blake Watson's 2023 talk and Maggie Appleton's 2024 talk. Both Alex and Blake did made their own bookmarking website/app.

It also feels like it would work well with a Johnny.Decimal system which emphasises files and folders.

(via Simon Willison)

I have always found typing text in the terminal perplexing ("Why can't I highlight text?", "Why can't I use my arrow keys?", etc). I knew Ctrl+C to interrupt a process and the up arrow ↑ to repeat the previous command, but that was it.

Julia Evans explains not just why it's complicated but also what shortcuts she finds useful, including Ctrl+W to delete the previous word and Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of a line.

I also enjoy Julia's writing style as she makes technical topics feel approachable and doesn't make you feel silly for not knowing things.

I liked Michelle Barker's detailed CSS implementation for "styling a (relatively) simple table"