Hung-Su's clues

videogame

2025-05-26T21:37:38.253Z

Videogames

Videogames are the reason I'm a software engineer today. My first program was a new level in the ASCII art game: ZZT.

Between videogames, TV shows, movies, music, and books, videogames are easily the most impactful pop culture medium in my life, for combining many of the best elements of all the others.

The first videogame I ever played was likely a Pac-Man clone when I was around 4 years old, on the family computer.

The game I've spent the most hours on by far is DotA 2, which I can also partially thank for my move to the USA from Australia.

I especially like videogames that tell memorable stories. For me these are Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur's Gate 3.

For games to play with friends, I generally like slower paced base building games like Factorio, Necesse, and Stardew Valley.

my favourite magazines

2025-05-04T16:22:58.244Z

My favourite magazines

I define a magazine as having multiple writers, frequent publication, and funding from ads and subscriptions.

For magazines without ads, check out Slow journalism.

For blogs with only one writer, my favourite blogs and digital gardens.

The list

The Good Trade is extremely pretty and has some notable articles, like How To Respond To Someone Who Is Grieving

Serve The Home is a magazine for self hosting. I go here for networking hardware news and reviews. There are so many ads here that I sometimes consider installing an ad-blocker, even though Ad blocking makes the free internet worse.

National Geographic is one of the most gorgeous magazines of all time. Photographers who work there shape the entire photography industry. In addition it is highly respectful of your advertising privacy, allowing you to opt out of specific advertising networks. As I start to enter my 40s, I find it is a much better source of travel inspiration than Instagram and other social networks.

The contentious

The Cut covers interesting and difficult topics in a clear writing style with wonderful typography that seem to be well researched. They write primarily for women and parents, of which I am neither, thus their lower status on this list.

Gothamist is a free magazine about New York city, with nice typography. I don't read it as I don't live in NYC.

The Strategist is a product review magazine owned by NYMag. They post with such high frequency that I have doubt at the level of quality of its recommendations. But their articles still serve as a useful starting point for new product types.

Wired magazine was once one of my most beloved tech magazines, particularly in the 90s when they were a print magazine. Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t is an article from them that I still reference often. I bought a digital subscription from them in 2022 but found myself skimming, disagreeing, and otherwise getting no value from most of their articles, so I've since cancelled my sub.

The Wirecutter is a consumer product reviews magazine acquired by The New York Times. Was once highly acclaimed but has since become slightly infamous, to the point where people who read it are judged for their lazy thinking. For alternatives, there are RTINGS.com and Consumer Reports

career

2025-09-09T23:33:38.039Z

I'm a software engineer of 14 years experience

image here

I most recently worked for CrowdStrike. There I wrote TypeScript EmberJS

image here

Before that I worked at POLITICO.

I worked at Birdsnest

board game

2025-08-05T20:32:52.388Z

Board Game

A box that contains everything needed to play a game, usually on a tabletop.

Some things that are similar but different:

Classic board games are those that are not owned by anyone. Examples include Chess, Go, and Mah-jong.
Pen and paper RPGs require pen, paper, and a rulebook only
card games by comparison use only cards, no pieces.
tabletop games such as Warhammer 40000 require players to create their own team or army of miniatures, to play a campaign or scenario on a tabletop. These games might offer a starting box that includes some miniatures, or may offer the rulebook alone for players to choose their own miniatures. These games tend to require enormous time commitments to acquire the miniatures, as well as play the games.

I take a lot of pride in How I choose board games for my friends.

Things for board games enthusiasts

Board game events

PAX West here in Washington has huge areas devoted to board games and I like to go when I can.

Zulu's Board Games holds a yearly board game marketplace that I like to attend and find cheap board games in great condition.

Gen Con is the largest board game convention in the USA, and it's held annually in Indianapolis, but I have never gone.

A dice tower is a great upgrade. A friend printed this one for me, and my gaming group enjoys it. The only downside is that it is a bit loud. It requires a 3D printer and some springs.

Collapsible dice trays are a cheap and high return on investment accessory. Ideally choose colours that your players like.

A card shuffler is a great way to shuffle cards. Some players insist on riffle shuffling, but this damages cards over time. If you value the cards in your board games and don't like card protectors, this can help.

My experience with Ubuntu in 2020

2025-09-25T16:55:20.302Z

My experience with Ubuntu in 2020

On 2020-November-10, I installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my my computer. As of 2021-January-01, I've decided to retire it, though I did enjoy the experiment.

Things I liked and will miss

Linux window management is excellent, marvelous even. By combining GNOME with PaperWM, I've no need for multiple monitors at all. MacOS and Windows application management that floats and overlaps windows by default feels prehistoric and wrong. I miss this so much that I will be looking into writing something similar for Windows.
It runs entirely off a USB drive! Windows absolutely refused to be installed on a USB drive.
No forced updates. Windows is notorious for forcing updates even during user activity. Under Linux I can rest well knowing that updates are fully under my control.
I like the lack of bloatware. I really don't appreciate the default installation of Cortana, Candy Crush and many other rubbish apps in Windows.
Far fewer notifications. Windows seems to come with a lot of nonsense notifications, such as
- use Microsoft Edge
- use Onedrive
- do a virus scan
Some of my development work is faster. Namely, builds and fetches.

Things that gave me trouble, but are not deal breakers

Audio didn't work quite right out of the box. I have a Dual Shock 4 controller with a 3.5mm headphone jack I often use, and Linux wouldn't use it at first. Once I installed PulseAudio Volume Control I was able to set output to what I wanted, but this introduced another problem of noticeable audio delay in games, which took another config tweak. Windows audio device management is much easier and had none of these issues.
Gamepad setup was fussy. I had some trouble using my Dualshock 4 in games. Some Googling and shell commands got things working, but this wasn't necessary in Windows. Many others have reported that this works out of the box for them, so I seem to be an outlier. But this was my experience nonetheless.
Installing apps. In Windows I knew the default location to be Program Files on the drive with Windows on it, C:. In MacOS, I knew this to be in Applications. For Linux, apparently, the best practice is the /opt folder
In Windows I use F13 and F14 keys for Push-To-Talk and Toggle Voice Activation. In Linux, these are registered as UNK191 and UNK192. UNK191 also seems to be called the "Tools" key.
Screenshot tools. After some fiddling I realised Ubuntu's native GNOME screenshot tool can be bound to my desired shortcut, Alt+Shift+$.
App formats, app stores and app repositories. I still do not know the difference between a snap, an app image or flat pak.

Things that forced me back to Windows

Some Windows apps and games either don't have a Linux substitute, or don't run in Linux. So far I have tried and failed to run these or find substitutes:
- AirExplorer
- Adobe suite, though people have had success running them in WinApps
- Many many games, including but not limited to
  - Destiny 2, which works with Geforce NOW but has too much latency
  - EA Games, such as Star Wars Fallen Order
  - Epic Games exclusives, such as Fortnite and the Pathless
  - Vermintide 2
  - The Witcher 3, which I can still play with Geforce NOW, with lag. See my experience with Game streaming
- Popular benchmarking software, including
  - Cinebench
  - Crystaldiskmark
  - Userbenchmark
- The NVDA screen reader, and Internet Explorer
- Virtual Reality. My headset is Windows Mixed Reality which makes things even more difficult.
- My keyboard (GK68XS) app. The keyboard still works, but programming it requires the Windows app.
Emoji picking is just crap. The GNOME emoji picker only works on GTK apps, but the apps where I want emoji are web or electron apps, such as Twitter, Slack or Discord.
Screensharing is a bit iffy. Doing so results in all my monitors shared as a single monitor. I ended up removing my extra monitors.
Cyberpunk 2077 performs noticeably worse in Linux by many accounts, including lower framerates and more frequent crashes.
Colour is very strange. Despite using the same monitor, colours look much much worse than when connected to Windows. Most notably, blues and purples.
Progressive Web Apps don't seem to work properly. I like having Youtube Music as a PWA, but under Ubuntu I must run it as a Chromium tab. Under Windows, I can open the start menu, type "yout" and open Youtube Music seamlessly.
Linux seems unable to sleep my computer - cold boots only.

Verdict

I cannot use Linux as my primary OS. But I will very happily use Linux on my home server that doesn't need games or media playback.

Some other interesting people and their Linux experiences

https://monadical.com/posts/moving-to-linux-desktop.html

Linus Tech Tips said I should build my own home theatre

2025-09-19T06:33:25.659Z

Linus Tech Tips said I should build my own home theatre

So I did. It cost more than I thought.

Movie nights at our place were frequently troublesome. Without fail people would say:

Can we turn on subtitles?
Can you make it louder? We can't understand what they're saying
It's too loud, can you turn it back down?

Movie night was never a straightforward sit down and enjoy the show experience. I would always have to fuss and tinker throughout watching. I was always on alert to manage the volume, and would never be 100% focused on the movie.

This is the sound bar I had. It cost me $110USD including sales tax, and it sucks. Even when I wasn't fussing with the volume, listening to the sound bar felt like plasticky cheap defeat. Sometimes you could hear dialog come out of the pathetic 5-inch "subwoofer" instead of the sound bar. It has 4.2 ⭐ on Amazon and in my opinion it deserves to be around 3 ⭐.

So it felt serendipitous that Linus Tech Tips released the following video: I Built an INSANE Surround Sound Setup for Under $250.

A promise of better audio for just a few hundred dollars? Or even just $40 for a noticeable improvement? I formulated a basic plan: find second hand speakers and an AV receiver nearby, for up to a few hundred dollars. Surely anything at all would be better than what I had now.

I opened up Facebook marketplace and began browsing. My brother-in-law spotted my laptop screen full of speakers, exclaiming loudly:

"Yes, PLEASE buy some new speakers."

Second hand means a chance of failure, and no returns

In Linus' video, every speaker and part he bought seems to work. For me, over the course of my three week audio journey I bought three defective items:

a subwoofer that was too quiet to practically use
a receiver that turned on but didn't make any sound
a receiver that worked great at first but failed soon after

These kinds of failures are difficult or impossible to detect when buying. After my first failed purchase, I endeavoured to ask every seller to test every item. But 2 out of 3 refused, saying that the time is not worth it for such cheap items.

Additionally, for 95% of defective items, sellers won't refund you.

Then there's the wasted time. Many many hours were wasted on:

communicating with the sellers of these devices about the initial purchase
driving to pick up stuff
diagnosing and attempting to fix these devices
attempting to negotiate refunds, and failing
looking for replacements
disposing of dead equipment - I went to a nearby electronics recycling event

3 out of 12 items I bought were failures - a 25% failure rate is shockingly high and a legitimate reason for people to not want to deal with second hand goods.

Second hand audio costs less than new, but more than you'd think

Then there's the wasted money - the above is around $100 of gear that didn't work out for me. Also, Linus did not mention was the cost of buying wire and cables. It's not much, but at these price ranges, new speaker wire is a non-trivial fraction of the budget. My spending is broken down below:

Cost	Item
$100	Onkyo 7.1 system
$11	RCA cable
$20	Yamaha receiver
$80	NHT monitor
$80	NHT subwoofer
$7.59	Right angle power cable for subwoofer
$26.51	Pure copper speaker cable (100 feet)
$50	Denon receiver
$375.10	Total

Of all this, around $126 was total waste. But even at $375.10, I'm still much happier with my final setup than an off-the-shelf soundbar - it just wasn't as cheap as I thought it would be.

Home theatres take a lot of space

Space is a huge cost I didn't think about. The speakers, receiver, and subwoofer take up quite a lot of space. I had enough room, but my wife did comment on the floor space she lost to the subwoofer, and space she lost on the entertainment unit to the receiver and speakers, so she can no longer place her pretty plants there.

I also have a huge spool of speaker wire that in all likelihood, I will never use, just taking up space in the garage.

The end result - they sound great and cost less than new

Even with all the extra challenges of buying second hand, I'm extremely pleased with the result.

The star of the show is the NHT M5 monitor, which I'm using as a centre channel speaker.

The next star is the subwoofer, a NHT Verve subwoofer with two 10 inch woofers.

Then there's the receiver, a Denon AVR-S510BT receiver.

Finally, I have two leftover mini towers from Onkyo.

All together, my setup looks like this:

I know some people question having the speakers obscured by the TV - I haven't been able to test if moving them away makes a difference. For now they still sound great.

I've worn many headphones, and been to many movie theatres, including IMAX. Even so, with this home theatre, I've had some unique audio experiences that I don't think I've had before:

In Devil May Cry, a tentacle moved across the screen, making squishy wet sounds as it moved. I could hear the sound seemingly coming from the tentacle on screen! This wouldn't be possible on headphones!
While watching Last of Us season 2, the therapist character called out from another room, asking if Pedro Pascal wanted a drink. I thought someone was in my house calling from the other room!
While watching Mr Holmes, during the night scenes I felt irritated by the sound of countryside buzzing insects. I thought they were real!

Would I do this all again? YES.

That said, I still clamour for more. The Onkyo left and right speakers sound far worse than the centre, so I'm already hungering for potential replacements...

blockquote

2025-10-10T01:36:59.377Z

Blockquote

A long phrase or quotation that is embellished or highlighted as being especially important. They can function as an opportunity to show some typographic flair.

Pretty examples

My all time favourite blockquote style is this one from Sam Who, featuring a random illustrated dog from at least three.

Smashing Magazine has an enormous embellished quotation mark, and a cute rounded geometric sans font.

Quanta Magazine has blockquotes framed with ornamental quotation marks.

Undark has blockquotes with a thick and solid left bar, a bigger font size, italics, and a different colour.

The Verge floats to the side, with lines reminiscent of a ruled school notebook.

I find the Verge's old blockquote design with all caps, pink italics to be a bit garish.

Bustle has very pretty blockquotes. Note the reduced letter-spacing (Kerning):

Polygon has a curious sidenote-like blockquote, with all caps, italics, and a vertical gradient:

Maggie Appleton has some beautiful blockquotes on her notes. Centre aligned, with small decorative bars above and below.

Wired magazine has quotes with a thick left bar, and generous white space all around.

McKinsey has quotes that break outside of the document width:

Hidden Heroes quotes also break out of width, with a bold sans caps font and a subtle purple, topped off with a little flag like a cherry-on-top.

The Cut has some very loud blockquotes, off to one side, in caps, with wider letter spacing, plenty of white space all around, and with a thick bar on top for good measure.

Farnam Street features a handsome bold geometric sans font for the blockquote itself and a smaller text size on the last line.

How to implement

I like to type a quotation dash — using the Windows Emoji keyboard, by pressing Win + ., then going to the Symbols tab.

People against Blockquotes

Practical Typography seems to dislike them. From their page on Block quotations:

The reader’s next thought is usually “Great—I can skip this.” So if you want readers to pay attention to quoted material, edit it carefully and integrate it into the text. Don’t just shovel it into a block quotation.
—Matthew Butterick

Why publish notes

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

A few moments ago, my wife asked me "Why do you want to make a blog?"^[1] and my off the cuff answer was "Because I want to". But the reality is a lot bigger than that.

First of all, there are some reasons not to, so let's get those out of the way.

Why you shouldn't publish online

Brutally unkind people. A thoughtless comment can leave permanent imprints. Most of us have found ourselves dwelling on an unkind statement for days, weeks, or months afterward. Or worse, the internet can swarm on an unsuspecting hobbyist and flood them with unkindness. For that reason there is no comments sections on this website. Some people I respect partially disagree: They dislike the bad comments, but endure them for the immensely valuable comments.^[2] So I may change my mind later.
Crime. People have been known to use information from social media and blogs in creatively malicious ways. Photos of a holiday to indicate the person's home is vacant for burglarising, a selfie that reveals a person's location are all clues that have been used. I've taken care to omit information that could identify me from these notes wherever possible.
Time. I'm not sure how many hours I've spent setting this website up, customising it, and writing posts, but it is surely a lot and not something I'd ask anyone else to do.

Why you should publish anyway

Even with those risks in place, since I started publishing I've experienced these benefits which far outweigh the costs:

I read more of my writing. I read my notes quite a lot even without publishing them. Since publishing them, I find myself reading them even more, which acts like a gentle reminder system for the things which are important to me.
It sharpens my writing. Before I put things online, I let myself write complete unintelligible crap that even I sometimes could not understand. Now, I'm forced to really edit, revise, and polish my words. This improves my communication in writing, at work, with friends and loved ones and beyond.
It sharpens thinking. You may have heard of the Feynman Learning Technique, which states that to understand something, you should be able to express it simply. Publishing notes forces me to do this.
It's fulfilling in the long term. Many activities provide only a fleeting, short term benefit. Activities like watching TV or playing a game may fulfil me only during the activity, leaving nothing to show for it. By contrast, writing is something I enjoy doing and also leaves me with a useful artifact I can reuse many times.
The internet depends on it. The following blog post expresses it better than I can:

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail. These companies are profoundly overvalued, don't care about permalinks, don't make your content portable, and have terms of service that are so complex and obtuse that there are entire websites dedicate to explaining them.

—Scott Hanselman on 2012-August-19

This is a digital garden, not a blog, but I knew what she meant 😊 ↩︎
So you're thinking about writing on the internet, scroll down to "Listening to criticism is a superpower." ↩︎

Why I treasure note taking

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Why I treasure note-taking

[!quote] Albus Dumbledore
Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it. #quote

What's the point of taking notes? Many people view the practice as a waste of time, and indeed there are some who are against writing notes.

Even so, I treasure note taking for a long and growing list of reasons.

It connects me deeply to people

Just a few moments before writing this note, I found a note that I had watched Donnie Darko with my friends, which gave me an excuse to message them and gossip.

At Christmas, I'm able to draw upon months or even years of notes I've taken about people to choose thoughtful gifts that no social media algorithm could ever choose.

These are just a few examples from thousands of times I've thought to interact with people, all because of something I had written in the past.

It blocks distractions, allowing active listening

If I attend a meeting, I will tend to zone out, even more than many people as I likely have Inattentive ADHD. Zoning out means I'm unable to effectively contribute to the meeting, or derive useful information from the meeting.

Taking notes is my impervious armour against the daydream demon. It forces me to focus, directing my extrasensory attention to one place, or what ADHD people know as hyperfocus. This often results in too many words - I'll note even minor non-words, a facial expression, a glance someone might have wanted forgotten. But it is much easier to have too many words and cut back than it is to have too little and add what's missing.

It protects me from rumination

All too often I begin a thought that turns into a doom spiral. Scribbling notes of this thought reveals to me all the merit and silliness of the thought. Then I can let the silliness go, and keep the merit if there was any.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30099387

Notes accumulate, memory fades

I often encounter information that I will perceive only once, but I must remember it a long time. The most common example is the name and number of someone I've just met. Would you really trust just your memory for something so important?

Zoom recordings are unsearchable and slow

The experience of seeing a video, hearing a voice cannot be reproduced by notes. Even so, for your future self who is in hurry for key information, rewatching a recording is excruciatingly slow.

Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

Browsing notes means our own interest instead of an algorithm
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Writing is thinking

[!quote] Leslie Lamport
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking. #quote

https://critter.blog/2023/01/04/let-me-write-i-mean-think-about-it/

Richard Feynman

Original creations are a legacy My dead dad's journal

Human memory is unreliable

Who can remember their grocery list perfectly?

Google isn't good enough

Googling every answer is slow

Google Search is getting worse, because the public internet is getting worse.

Notes compound in value

Note writing creates durable cumulative knowledge

Gains from my second brain
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30151963

Titanfall 2

2023-06-01T07:41:02.307Z

An underrated FPS.

I bought for just $3.49USD

This guy says it is the best FPS campaign he's ever played - recommends for being more adrenaline than even Doom. No filler missions to pad time

One of the characters appears to have a messed up Aussie accent. He's from New York.

The Spell Brigade

2025-09-30T20:59:37.708Z

The Spell Brigade

One of My favourite things of 2025!

In their words:

Survivors-like with ONLINE CO-OP for 1-4 players. Team up with your wizard friends to slay hordes of dark creatures. Complete team-based objectives, unlock new upgrades and create overpowered spell synergies. Friend nor foe is safe in this friendly fire bullet hell!

They have a roadmap.

Streets of Rogue

2024-07-19T00:26:00.399Z

A 2D immersive sim. I initially discovered on itch.io and played the free version, then bought later on Humble Bundle for $4.99USD.

Has co-op multiplayer which I've enjoyed a lot

Return of the Obra Dinn

2025-08-14T01:58:21.896Z

A totally unique mystery videogame, which was given to me on the Steam Store.

On my first attempt, I gave up after a few scenes, thinking the game impossibly hard and could not believe anyone could beat the game without a walkthrough.

On my second attempt, I created a new Obsidian vault just for this game, and was able to complete it in full without using any cheats or walkthroughs, and felt very satisfied doing so.

If you enjoy Personal Knowledge Management and mysteries, I highly recommend this game.

Pentiment

2025-08-13T23:15:21.035Z

A videogame featuring phenomenal typography as a way of communicating character social standing. The game created original Typefaces just for the game, by studying historical texts, which you can read about in great length in the Lettermatic case study.

I personally didn't finish the game, but I finished Act 2. For engaging mystery games, I preferred Return of the Obra Dinn and Case of the golden idol.

PEAK (2025)

2025-09-15T18:16:18.823Z

A multiplayer co-op videogame that took the world by storm in 2025, about rock climbing. In August of 2025, it sold 3.7 million copies, which is more than any other Steam game that month^[1]

At the time of writing, the only game of its kind. I love playing games with my friends, and this is the first time we've been able to play something together that we enjoyed where we don't have to kill anything.

Many games of the past made losing decidedly un-fun. Modern games like PEAK make losing fun, even hilarious. If you have friends to play with, I strongly recommend you try this.

What were August's biggest new PC and console game hits?
Simon Carless ‧ 2025 September 05 ‧ The GameDiscoverCo Newsletter ↩︎

Necesse

2025-10-15T18:23:02.611Z

A 2D multiplayer sandbox game that I've spent many hours playing

I bought it for $6.69USD in 2023 on the Steam store. As of 2025 it is still considered Early Access, but will release 1.0 on 2025-October-15.

Has a dedicated server app for Windows and Linux. I played this game with friends across the US, and running the dedicated server located between us in Chicago made the game much more enjoyable for all. The official docs have a guide to running the server app on Linux, but I instead opted to run the server inside a docker container using this image.

Mother 3

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

3rd game in Mother series, following Earthbound.

Created by Shigesato Itoi

Super Eyepatch Wolf made a great video about it.

Videogame in Japanese language only, on Game Boy Advance. There is an English fan translation

Fans made a 3 minute clay-style video tribute on 2022-Feb-14

Final Fantasy 7 remake

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

2020 remake of Final Fantasy 7. Originally on Playstation 4, but I have the Intergrade version with Yuffie's InterMission quests on the Steam Store.

If you have any interest in this game, you must watch this video of Briana White, the voice actress for Aerith hearing her own voice:

Elden Ring

2025-03-22T07:32:51.813Z

Possibly my favourite videogame of 2022. Also the first Souls-like game I ever played.

Why the game is fun

It's popular. By far my favourite part of this game is being able to talk about it with friends and colleagues of whom many are playing it.

It's visually stunning. The game is so beautiful it is worthwhile to simply explore even without killing a thing. The elaborate and immense scale of the creatures and structures take much inspiration from Berserk, which in turn is a hauntingly beautiful series with a Bosch-ian art style. The game's art style is well captured in this dialog:

I remember when I was drawing the Undead Dragon, I submitted a design draft that depicted a dragon swarming with maggots and other gross things. Miyazaki handed it back to me saying "This isn't dignified. Don't rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon. Can't you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?"

—Masanori Waragai

For more, this article is quite fantastic: The Boschian Horror of ‘Elden Ring’

It has one of the best Open worlds, ever. Elden Ring presents options that give every player an entirely unique experience which gives all players something to talk about. The last few years of open world games have been full of excessive handholding and on screen guides that throttle the player's desire to explore. Elden Ring has almost no guides, relying on clever world design that both forces and encourages the player to explore. I haven't felt quite so adventurous since I played Morrowind.

Writing on games made a 10 minute video talking more: Why Exploring in Elden Ring Feels So Good

Rich lore. The visuals of the world and its people are all tied together with some incredible lore and worldbuilding, aided by George R R Martin.^[1] This Gamespot article explains it better. If you have the time, the Elden ring lore videos by Vaatividya are so amazing they were reposted on Elden Ring's official channel.

The soundtrack shapes mood perfectly

The soundtrack is not one that wows. It is one that subverts your mind, moulding it to the world of Elden Ring and that is what makes it so incredible.

The entire soundtrack can be listened to and downloaded here

Not so fun things

Despite the lore, the game's story or its characters have been entirely forgettable for me. I had extremely high expectations of the story given its involvement with George R. R. Martin, and could not tell you anything about it despite having 40 hours in the game.

The game balance is terrible. Enemy damage is too high, rune rewards often don't make sense. Videogamedunkey made a video about it.

Enemy attack animations and range can be so fast and unfair it forces one style of play: defensive counterattacks. Quik Reviews made a 16 minute video - and goes on to say Sekiro has better designed bosses. This person made a 12 minute video showing how unfair Malenia is.

I'm playing it on PC, and am aware it runs better on Playstation 5 and looks far better on a big TV. PC gamers should note the game is capped at 60FPS.

Fun things outside the game

Stuff I personally enjoyed

Videos

Carbot Animations did some hilarious spoofs.

Blaidd voice actor Scott Arthur reads thirst tweets in a 4 minute video

Co-op

Elden Ring has a built in coop mode that I do not enjoy. It requires the host and joining player to both assemble ingredients to cast a spell to join each other. This is fine, but the game also allows Enemy players to join your multiplayer session and kill you. This cannot be turned off. I wanted to enjoy Elden Ring together with a friend at the start of the game, and we were quickly slaughtered by a level 70 player. In addition, I'm told that co-op terminates when the area's boss has been defeated, requiring both players to cast the spell again.

For a much more fun experience, those playing on PC can have a more traditional co-op multiplayer mode with the Seamless coop mod. Note that it requires starting a new game. Here's a video of it working!

Stuff I haven't tried or understand

Merchandise

There are two Figuarts Minis for Elden Ring: Raging Wolf and Melina.

Vaatividya made an art book of all Souls games, including Elden Ring, called Soul Arts. Vaatividya also made a 19 minute video walkthrough of the book.

There is a beautiful Tree Sentinel sculpture, for about €1700 from Sword & Wing x Acy Studio

Glitches

Spiffing Brit found that immortality is possible by dying on purpose to the game's first boss then quitting the game. More in his 24 minute video

Game Engine

This very smart person deconstructed how Elden Ring's graphics works, and in doing so also also dove deep into DirectX12: Behind the Pretty Frames: Elden Ring

Tips for winning

Use a fun and strong build

A build being the combination of stats and equipment you've chosen for your character. I've wasted a lot of time with builds, namely from Fextralife on the Elden Ring wiki, whose builds seem famous but I did not have fun or success with. In particular, his Inquisitor build with the Ghiza's Wheel I really disliked despite it being one of his newest builds, just 9 days old at time of writing. I've since found a player named cRPG Bro who has builds I enjoy a lot more. I have a number of builds I switch between:

Greatsword and Flame of the Redmanes. Particularly amazing on horseback
2× Curved Swords. My preferred weapon most of the time for killing small and fast creatures such as dogs, but does so much damage I can even use this against some bosses.
Misericorde and Flame of the Redmanes, mostly following this cRPG Bro video
Shield and Spear, loosely following this cRPG Bro video. Based on theory that a Guard Boost of 100 means you lose no stamina when you block with a shield. It achieves this by upgrading a Greatshield, then casting Scholar's Shield with your right hand. Needs 12 intelligence to use the Scholar's Shield spell which increases Guard Boost by 20–22%.
Colossus Greatbow, for those annoying situations where I can't hit something up close. I did try Crossbows, but I dislike that they do so little damage.

Some builds I haven't tried but look promising:

cRPG Bro dual hammer Strength build https://youtu.be/65QCwG8dGVg

Vampiric mace build https://youtu.be/VZSNdbyUyHU

Do lots of Critical hits

Enemies have a Stance health bar, and all attacks do some amount of Stance or Poise damage. Do enough Poise damage and the enemy will buckle over, sometimes revealing a glowing golden body part. Move quickly to that golden body part and press R1 to critical hit. Take care to NOT run - you'll do a running attack instead.

Weapon and attack	Poise damage
Misericorde R1	4
Misericorde R2	8
Misericorde charged R2	24
Misericorde jumping R1	6
Misericorde jumping R2	16
Greatsword R1	20
Greatsword R2	20
Greatsword charged R2	48
Greatsword jumping R1	20
Greatsword jumping R2	32
Greatsword stamp upward cut	44

Source: This is how much Poise Damage EVERY SINGLE Weapon does

Learn to dodge and jump

Jumping causes the lower half of your body to become invincible for 25 out of 30 frames. Since it's just the lower half, overhead attacks still hurt you. Zullie the witch explains in this video. Equipment weight also has no effect on jumping, unlike dodging.

Learn to parry

Parrying causes a special kind of stagger which allows enemies to be Critical Hit. This stagger is separate from the Stance Break stagger, meaning you can combine both to inflict many such Critical Hits. A famous Elden Ring player, ONGBAL, demonstrates this here.

Parrying is easier with the buckler than any other shield, because it has the Buckler Parry. It has more frames and a shorter start.

Reddit: I tested parrying frame data, here's everything I know

It's also worth observing how others parry, such as this video of a player defeating a boss without ever getting hit.

I've heard there is a Golden Parry skill which makes parry even easier. Here's a video of where to find it, within the Capital outskirts.

Bosses

There's so much to talk about, I've moved it all to its own page, Elden Ring bosses.

Interview with George https://youtu.be/xHzJG1hHTdU ↩︎

Diablo 4

2025-08-21T01:40:53.858Z

Diablo 4

Diablo 4 is the third Diablo game I've played, having played 1 and Diablo 2.

I don't remember much of the story of 1 and 2, but I thoroughly enjoyed the story of Lilith and Inarius in Diablo 4's main game. I enjoyed it so much I may consider replaying it to experience it again.

Unfortunately, I enjoyed the main story so much, I played the first of Diablo 4's follow up content, Season of the Malignant, hopeful for another great story. It was so very bad that I uninstalled the game to never open again. My sentiment seems to be mirrored by almost all other players.^[1]

The music is incredible, but especially for fans of the older Diablo games. The entire sountrack is easily found on Spotify, YouTube, and also exists on vinyl. My favourite track is Legacy of the Horadrim.

If you are an extremely rare person who has somehow played Diablo 1, 2, or 3, and hasn't played Diablo 4, I strongly recommend and insist that you go play it.

Diablo 4 boss addresses disastrous Season 1 launch: "we felt like we were doing the right things"
Hirun Cryer ‧ 2023 August 23 ‧ GamesRadar ↩︎

Brotato

2024-12-28T07:21:47.076Z

[!warning]
As of 2023-May-27, Brotato does not have an official website. There is a Steam store page and blog post. This means the Google Search results for "brotato" such as brotato-game.com are all fake ad-spam.

An auto shooter on the Steam Store for $4.99USD. Is rated Overwhelmingly Positive.

Something I picked up when I noticed my friends racking up 100s of hours in it.

If you have an Android phone, you can download an APK of the game, and copy your save file from your computer to your phone to play there, but note that any Achievements you get on your phone won't appear in Steam.

Made with the Godot engine, and has a Portmaster port but does not work on my TrimUI Smart Pro.

Stupid mistakes I made

Like most games, in Brotato it's possible to make easy mistakes. There's a guide to the game on Google Docs which has been useful for me to realise mine, which include

Buying many bad items, such as Statue, White Flag, Gecko and Riposte. And many others...
Ignoring game feedback. I observed money fly into a "bag" icon during game but never bothered to inquire what that meant. (It means you'll get that money at the beginning of next round)
Not knowing how stats work, specifically Harvesting. This leads to the next stupid mistake:
Not buying the best items, like Caffeine, Bag, and Fertilizer.

Baldur's Gate 3

2025-08-21T05:25:42.674Z

Baldur's Gate 3

The game I sunk the most hours into in 2024 and 2025. I've been meaning to write my thoughts on this for a long time, but the game is so enormous, almost anything I write feels like a disservice.

Rather than a full review, I'll describe one highly memorable experience I had within the game:

I came across 3 ogres, including one who was unusually well spoken - an ogre who could give a Ted talk on the minutiae of meat flavourings: Lump the Enlightened.

The ogres greatest passion appeared to be for meat, and they considered gobbling me up. I negotiated with them to aid me in battle, and be allowed to eat those we defeated.

After a battle of defeating many spiders, the ogres expressed that this wasn't enough. The head ogre insisted on licking me to have a taste of something different, which went something like this:

I later discovered that the ogre's intelligence is not from education, but from a magical crown he swallowed, which I took from his stomach after I killed him!

The game is full of delightfully weird choices and stories that can play out like this. A great delight of playing Baldur's Gate 3 is finding your friends who played it, and discussing the wildly different choices you all surely made.

Absolum

2025-11-03T22:36:59.005Z

![[absolum banner.webm]]

Sidescrolling beat em up like Castle Crashers and Streets of Rage 2, but also a roguelite with Hades-style power-up drafting.

Developed by Guard Crush Games and Dotemu

Has absolutely gorgeous art, by Supamonks

Soundtrack is fantastic, by Gareth Coker, who also did music for Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Halo Infinite, and ARK.

Has an active subreddit

punctuation

2023-01-31T20:17:58.515Z

Punctuation

The characters between words, which convey meaning that words cannot. In English, they can include:

Quotation marks such as “”
Dashes such as —
Mathematical operators such as ×
Foot and inch marks ′

It is common to approximate punctuation with a similar character because the real character is not available on the writer's keyboard. Some approximations I see:

	Approximation	Real
Dash	-	—
trademark	(tm)	™
Copyright	(c)	©
Quotation (English)	""	“”
Foot or Prime mark	'	′
Inch mark	"	″
Multiplication	x or *	×
Division	/	÷

But such approximations of punctuation are ugly, even problematic. Consider these two examples:

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
‐ Oscar Wilde

The same example again with real punctuation:

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

Foot and prime marks can be especially problematic.

"She’s 6' 10"."
“She’s 6′ 10″.”

In particular, approximating Mathematics or Finance characters is frequently confusing. Multiplication × with the letter x is problematic because in maths x can refer to a graph axis as well as an algebraic value.

Additional reading

Typewolf has possibly the best punctuation cheatsheet available anywhere, for free.

Practical Typography also has an excellent Punctuation Guide.

If you think you're a punctuation expert, try pasting your writing into Just the punctuation, then see how it compares to other writers in this Medium post.

Between the words - posters of just the punctuation of major literary works such as Alice in Wonderland

Shady Characters by Keith Houston looks interesting, though I haven't read it yet.

Typewolf

2023-09-08T17:27:26.274Z

Typewolf

A typography website made by Jeremiah Shoaf, with many useful resources. My favourites are:

Typography cheatsheet
Sells the $400 Flawless Typography Checklist, recommended by Paul Stamatiou.

Foot and inch marks

2023-11-01T06:37:12.678Z

Foot ′ & inch ″ marks

Can also be approximated by italicising straight quotes ' and "

Practical Typography has a whole guide to Foot and inch marks

Drop cap

2025-05-12T08:53:25.452Z

Drop cap

A piece of typographic flair added to the first letter of an important paragraph, often the first paragraph of an entire piece of writing (though not always).

Pretty examples

Gwern Branwen has pretty drop caps on his website, but only on large screens.

Well and Good have a lot of padding around their drop caps

The MIT Press Reader colours their drop cap the same colour as its logo:

The Atlantic uses a separate font, Atlantic Serif for its drop cap, and yet another font in small caps for the first stretch of words, Adobe Garamond Pro.

https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/elon-musk-permanently-bans-twitter-account-pedophilia-pride-flag-youth-attracted

Working with drop caps

Drop caps for web are generally implemented with the CSS pseudoclass, ::first-letter . Any browser dev tools should work for analysing drop caps on the web. Firefox's dev tools has them under the pseudo elements section.

It should also be noted that using :first-letter is best for accessibility. Other methods using an element wrapping the first letter cause problems with screen readers.^[1]

Some browsers have introduced the initial-letter CSS property, which gives a reliable way to set the height of a drop cap. This allows large illustrated drop caps like above.

This is supported on Safari, Edge, and Chrome.^[2]

https://blog.stephaniestimac.com/posts/2023/1/css-initial-letter/

Smashing Magazine Historical Use And Current Best Practices With CSS , 2012 April 4 ↩︎
Can I use initial-letter ↩︎

Berserk

2025-04-22T18:55:21.793Z

Berserk

One of the Big Three of Seinen Manga, by Kentaro Miura.

I don't recommend this series for most people since it features multiple counts of rape, and its fictional world is so dark and overrun with evil and abuse of power that it is much less appealing in 2025 than in the more hopeful times of the 90s. If that doesn't scare you off, there is a lot to recommend about the series.

I first encountered the series in the early 2000s as a young teen, in its 1997 anime adaptation. I dismissed it at the time, thinking it was nothing special, watching Rurouni Kenshin and other shonen series instead.

As an adult in my 30s, I bought the first three Deluxe Editions, and have read the first two, each in around a day. There's so much happening in every cell, with every character, every interaction, and I seem to find more with every look. Like a lot of other "dark" media, Berserk chooses to mock predictable tropes such as the Hero's Journey by distorting and disfiguring them.

Other people's thoughts

A fan-made group called Studio Taka made absolutely outstanding motion comics of the first four chapters. They're extremely well voiced and in some ways are better to watch than the anime: Berserk the Motion Comic

Studio Taka also made some amazing lore videos, with a lovely female narrator.

Super Eyepatch Wolf made a 1 hour 51 minute video. I haven't watched the whole thing. Most notably he points out that a mostly unchanged artwork from Hieronymus Bosch is in the manga, and artist Kentaro Miura says Berserk was strongly influnced by Bosch.

UI engineering

2025-08-01T03:14:17.801Z

UI engineering

A branch of software engineering, specialising in designing and writing code that runs on the end-user's phone or device. This may include but is not limited to:

UI - buttons, tables, and many other things that a user can interact with. The most common area of UI engineering, and often involves a UI designer
animation - moving
localisation - displaying different content based on things we know about the user such as their timezone or language of choice
calling APIs
data state

This is in contrast to back-end engineering.

Common mistakes

Layout shift: Moving UI elements after displaying them. Causes great distress to users who may begin to interact with an element which then moves, causing errors and reducing user trust in the UI. Can be caused by images loading, and also UI elements changing size.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33765399

Foundational Skills

In addition to skills common to all software engineers, UI engineers should know:

HTML
JavaScript
Browser dev tools

Split between Front and Back

As of around 2015, front end engineering had grown large and complex enough to warrant splitting loosely into two sections: front of the front-end, and back of the front-end.

It is generally agreed this split exists, but it is not universally agreed what skills exist in each. Some guesses include

Front	Either way	Back
Accessibility, CSS, SVG	CORS, routing, TypeScript	CORS, UI data model
For those as the Front, UI pattern

HTTP protocol
URLs
Cookies, particularly in the context of GDPR
image file format

Advanced skills

Poirot (1989)

2026-01-10T18:16:12.484Z

Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989)

IMDB 8.6 ⭐

A whodunnit TV series that ran for 24 years!

David Suchet plays as Hercule Poirot, and is our favourite version of Poirot. Even better than Kenneth Branagh!

The Prime Video version is the worst version to watch. Subtitles omit Poirot's French dialog with lazy text (speaks French), and S2E1 is sliced up in nonsensical way.

The best version is blu-ray. It maintains the original's 4:3 aspect ratio and the subtitles include Poirot's many French exclamations. Précisément!

Devil May Cry (2025)

2025-08-28T17:37:42.981Z

Devil May Cry

An anime TV series based on the Devil May Cry games. Very strongly tailored to that audience - people who were edgy emo teens in the 2000s listening to Evanescence and Linken Park, who have grown into working class adults in 2025. The show displays some self awareness of how much we cringe at our edgy teenage years, while respecting it.

Episode 6 is magnificent and could also be watched standalone. If you start watching this series and feel yourself wanting to quit, I strongly recommend watching Episode 6 before you quit.

The series has quite magnificent audio and is thoroughly enjoyable on a rugged home theatre system.

🍅: 96%
IMDB: 7.4

Slow news movement

2025-05-31T16:02:55.659Z

Slow Media

Media that focuses on long termism, accuracy and relevance, at the expense of response time. May publish as often as once a week, or as slowly as once a year. Some may consider slow media to be the bridge between articles and books.

Why read slow media? Isn't being up-to-date the point?

"Traditional" media is rife with self-feeding problems. Since many people will not pay for information, it is funded by advertising and sponsorships. These advertisers do not have the viewer's interests at heart. They are incentivised to show as many ads as possible, meaning they prioritise engagement, and one of the most effective ways to engage is outrage^[1]. This feedback loop means news is saturated with outrageous news that degrades viewers mental health, advertising for products of often questionable quality, and news of such questionable accuracy as to be considered lies^[2]. Some call this postjournalism.

To counter this, slow journalism offers the following:

No Advertising networks. Slow media is funded in other ways, most commonly from its readers. That said, most slow journals still feature ad-like promotions to call for donations or to buy their merchandise.
Infrequent updates. Ideal for those experiencing Information overload.
Detail. Slow journalists are able to create longer content, with more rich media.
Accuracy. Fact-checking is a labourious and time-consuming process which appears to be skipped in fast-news. Slow-news can spend more time here.

A fact checking sheet from The Atlantic.^[3]

Examples of slow media

My personal favourites:

These magazines I either subscribe to in my RSS reader or visit every few months.

Works in Progress publishes every few months without a strict schedule. Free to read for all, but differs from the others in that it is funded by Stripe rather than by readers. Makes almost no attempt to push you to subscribe or buy anything, making reading a much more pleasant experience.
The Pudding publishes online once or twice a month with highly interactive stories. The "How Are You Doing?" experience is an excellent dive into emotional intelligence and the value of therapy. News is free to all, but paid supporters on their Patreon are given merchandise and access to a private Slack channel.
Knowable Magazine is so good it is hard to believe it's free to read. Start with one of their highly researched comics, Why do thieves keep stealing catalytic converters?. Then try one of their collections on The Working Life, such as their article on work-life balance. 100% funded by reader donations.
Greater Good Magazine has many fantastic articles on how to have better relationships and be a better person. One of my favourites is How curiosity and consent can make old lovers new again. Offers additional perks for donations of $50/year. Has no external ads, but displays many calls to donate, buy their merchandise, take surveys, and subscribe that feel very ad-like.
Noema publishes around twice a year, and offers issues in both print and digital for $20 each. They feature wonderful static and animated artwork for every article, and you might want to see their Top Art of 2022. They cover a wide variety of societal issues, though there is a clear American influence. I'm working through their articles on Banks for the people and another article about funding carbon sequestering with a Carbon Coin: Paying Ourselves to Decarbonize.
Psyche.co is an offshoot of Aeon mentioned below, focusing on the human mind. Often it's articles are highly actionable and extremely valuable reading, and I appreciate that they frequently supply a Key Points section that summarises each article. My favourite article is How to stop procrastinating. Totally free to read and funded 100% by reader donations.
LOW←TECH MAGAZINE is unique for being powered entirely by solar power. You can see the current battery level in the website's background. This blog has some excellent posts about energy and sustainable future. My favourite article is this one, Heating people not places

The New Atlantis is an academic journal with gorgeous photography, typography and publishes 4 times a year. I'm currently enjoying How to make friends

Others of note

These magazines I have chosen not to subscribe to, but I visit on occasion or recommend to people who may be more interested in their subject matter.

Aeon's writing is so good it is comparable to good books - the kind you go back to and reread when you need them. Their articles can run quite long and into difficult material, so you might want to start with something easier, like The Biography of the Pixel. I'm also pondering through Learning styles don't exist, and If not vegan then what?.
Quanta Magazine has gorgeous art, diagrams, typography, and huge amounts of research and fact checking. Being mostly science focused, I find myself unable to understand and appreciate the material here, but perhaps you will.
Undark, in their own words: "Undark is a non-profit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. It is published with generous funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, through its Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT."
Delayed Gratification publishes once a quarter in both print and digital. Digital costs £30/year, print costs £79/year for me in the US. They cover world news, often seemingly making a point to avoid US news. Additionally, they offer a promising looking online course on how to make infographics.
Atmos publishes twice a year and is available for free. Covers climate and environmental justice concerns such as the Ohio train derailment of 2023.
The Guardian has a Weekly print edition for $27.50USD/month
The Point Mag publishes an issue every four months, and offers 3 articles for free before requiring you to purchase a subscription for $3/month. I like their website's design style and love for typography, but after reading 3 articles and not really enjoying any, I'm unlikely to return.
Asterisk Mag is contributed to by Dynomight, one of My favourite blogs. They publish once a quarter, and in their words "is fiscally sponsored by the Effective Ventures Foundation, a registered charity in England and Wales".
n+1 has been around since 2004, and publishes 3 times a year. They are funded by the N+1 Foundation, and reader subscriptions which start at $4.50USD/month. I'm reading Why is everything so ugly?
Public Books Magazine has been around since 2012 and is funded by Columbia University and donations from its readers. Has wonderful Typography. They have a notable article on why US news is the way it is, Misinformation Society.

Similar, but not slow news

A consequence of my above strict definition of slow media is that many other sources don't fit. But you may still be interested in them.

Non-profit news

Is funded by donations, but may post more regularly than slow news and also supplement funding with advertising networks.

Wikipedia News portal updates extremely quickly and never has ads. It's my preferred sources for learning what's new around the world.
News Minimalist uses GPT-4 to rank news around the world every day and show only the most significant. Made by one person, with no ads as of 2023-05-01
Propublica is a mostly reader funded publication which investigates US abuse of power. Has some ads, publishes a little too often, and feels too aggravating for me to read regularly. But has some excellent articles, such as how to evaluate a non-profit.
Axios, in particular for me, Axios Seattle. I like this a lot for being so relevant to me, as well as being reader funded. Additionally, accepts reader corrections and publishes them. Has a high quality daily email newsletter, with no external ads - just ad-like self promotion of itself, such as calls to donate, download its app, or look at its job board. Its writing is generally not worth re-reading, but is good for skimming to know what's happening in my area.

Government funded news

State media is funded by taxpayers. Can have some downsides:

may lock access to geographic IP ranges.
may be propaganda machines, such as Russian news or Chinese News

That said, some excellent government funded news outlets exist:

Symmetry Magazine focuses on particle physics and is funded by the US Department of Energy.

Other's opinions of slow media

The Slow Media Manifesto is a deeper look into the philosophy of slow media and how to make it.

Our stories have been republished by publications including Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, The Daily Beast, Popular Science, Quartz, Slate, TED Ideas, Big Think, Time Magazine, and BBC Future

Wikipedia has a page on slow journalism.

Warnock's Dilemma ↩︎
Fortune 2023-02-15 - Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them ↩︎
The Atlantic 2018 January 12 - How to Fact Check The Atlantic ↩︎

Optimism is the faith

2025-08-26T02:56:50.941Z

[!quote] Helen Keller
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.

A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people

2025-05-31T22:13:00.495Z

[!quote] Arthur Schopenhauer
A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative.

Maggie Appleton

2025-06-03T14:49:28.631Z

A UI designer with one of my favourite blogs: The Garden. It's made with Astro

Did a bit for Pudding.cool

Wrote this about becoming a mother

She took Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain course , wrote notes about her experience here

https://theinformed.life/2023/07/16/episode-118-maggie-appleton/

Hieronymus Bosch

2023-02-14T20:10:05.406Z

Netherlandish artist who painted Christian horror until his death in 1516 AD.

There is an "official" website, and a project with high resolution scans, the Bosch project. But in my opinion, the best way to enjoy Bosch is through the Bosch Bot, which posts small cutouts of random parts of Bosch's paintings.

Great Art Explained did a 50 minute video

His surviving works can mostly be found in Prado Museum in Madrid.

Personally I find his work disturbing to look at, and yet I feel compelled to keep looking.

Gwern Branwen

2023-11-01T07:25:27.141Z

Gwern Branwen

One of my favourite writers, with one of my favourite blogs: Gwern.net. I find his writing impeccably interesting and reliable. I discovered him by accident in 2013, having saved his article on spaced repetition in my Pocket account.

My favourite blog posts

In a few paragraphs he details his experience and criticism of Google Fonts, all of which I agree with.

I find his colour sense and typographical taste a little ghastly, but also fascinating to read about his reasoning, which he documented very thoroughly in Design Of This Website.

My favourite post is the one about Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy. But I also enjoy his blog post about Dune: Dune notes

He experimented with an under desk treadmill for a few months and wrote a lot.

He has extensive thoughts about PKM in his listicle, Information Organizing

Other things

He also has a Github with the source code of his blog, in PHP.

He also posts over on Less Wrong as himself, and Hacker News as himself.

Dan Luu

2024-08-13T15:42:32.433Z

Dan Luu

One of my favourite writers on software engineering and other computery things. Much of his work on his blog, but his more recent work is behind his Patreon, because he wants to write full time without going to Substack. His patreon subscription cost is high at $24USD/month, so I'm yet to subscribe.

Andy Matuschak

2023-02-20T20:44:12.187Z

The creator of one of my favourite digital gardens of all time: Andy's working notes, which uses the sliding panes interface shown above. Created with Bear and a custom workflow of his creation, visible in this 2020-05-04 Note-writing livestream

My favourite things of 2024

2025-12-12T19:21:42.230Z

My favourite things of 2024

Inspired by What's in my now?, here are my favourite things of 2024! Note that these are things I discovered or bought this year. So some of these things were made in previous years (such as movies), but I discovered them this year.

Visible

These are physical items I bought or were given in 2024 that I've really enjoyed using.


Beryl AX WiFi 6 Travel Router	Viture One wearable display
Pikes trifold bike	DJI Osmo Pocket 3
Hugh Leverpresso	MINISFORUM BD790i SE Mini-ITX motherboard
Bellroy totepack	TrimUI Smart Pro

Art and media

Musicians, writers, TV shows and movies I discovered and loved in 2024


Heilung	3 Body Problem by Netflix
Fallout (2024)	House of the Dragon
Dune Part 2 (2024)	The Bear
Beverly Hills Cop (excluding the third)

Digital

The media, apps and websites I started using in 2024 and really like


Hades 2	Dave the Diver
Rocket Money	Baldur's Gate 3

For last years favourites, here are my top purchases of 2023

For my all time favourites, there are My favourite blogs, My favourite movies, my favourite magazines

My favourite movies

2024-08-25T05:02:21.394Z

My favourite movies

The movies I happily rewatch year after year. In approximate chronological order:

12 Angry Men
Robocop (1987)
Kiki's Delivery Service, particularly when I feel like I've been stuck in a rut
Mulan (1998)
Hercules (1998)
Office Space
Lilo and Stitch (2002)
Ratatouille (2007)
Moneyball
Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017)
Detective Pikachu
Mrs Harris goes to Paris (2022)
Glass Onion

I haven't watched the following movies enough times, but they may find themselves in the list above:

Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Snatch
Shrek 2
Miss Pettigrew lives for a day (2008)
Tron Legacy
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Grand Budapest Hotel
Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle
A Silent Voice
Green book (2018)

My favourite blogs

2025-08-19T21:57:40.736Z

My favourite blogs and digital gardens

My personal notes are heavily inspired by the personal notes, blogs, and digital gardens of many others.

The ones I love the most

Andy's working notes by Andy Matuschak is extremely enjoyable to read. He writes short notes that are easy to digest, presenting them with the sliding panes UI pattern for you to keep track of where you came from. He also posts long form articles on his blog.

Essays by Gwern Branwen is a marvelous and unique part of the internet. Spectacularly well researched posts, that have taught me a lot about how impactful and different a well written blog post is than an atomic note, and many other things. Almost frustratingly, Gwern is almost never wrong about anything.

The Garden by Maggie Appleton is beautiful and insightful. Maggie herself is a UI designer and illustrator whose work you have likely seen before, and thus her site features gorgeous typography and charming illustrations throughout.

Project Nayuki by Nayuki is a blog that started in 2007 and is still updated with wonderfully insightful essays, mostly about computer science. The article I re-read most often is about Tags not hierarchies, but you might want to start with why they don't like dividends.

Dynomight writes articles that are far better than most online magazines. The claims are interesting, the writing is long but not jargony, full of pictures and with almost excessive amounts of citations, which is a trauma response from some early commenters accusing them of not citing enough. No ads or sponsorships to be seen anywhere. The article I re-read the most is So you're thinking about writing on the internet.

Dan Luu's blog is a treasure trove for all nerds with an interest in computer science. He does his own research and details it all in extremely long blog posts. If you own an expensive keyboard, you should read his post about keyboard latency, and if you know what a command line is you should read about terminal latency. Personally I find myself re-reading this the most: 95% isn't that good.

Nikita Propokov is an engineer in Germany whose blog I refer to repeatedly. Namely his post about computer monitors, written in 2020 but still relevant in 2025!

Other people's notes I enjoyed browsing

Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Mental Nodes has an especially nice note about how creating makes you live longer.

Jake Lazaroff's blog is full of useful articles for UI engineers like myself. His post A Local-first case study is unsurprisingly about his adventures making a local-first web app with YJS.

Josh Comeau's blog is also full of useful posts for UI engineers, such as his interactive guide to flexbox

Wonderful things by Scott Hanselman I have read for many years. He posts less frequently these days, but his content stays relevant for a long time. There are a small amount of ads and sponsorships throughout but they are easy to ignore.

LYT kit by Nick Milodragovich is a directed set of notes to teach a person how to make a PKM system that scales well into the future. It is especially thoughtful to people with ADHD and overactive organisation habits.

Mastery Games has some incredibly thoughtful writing. They lack an RSS feed and don't seem to have written anything since 2022, but the writing is good enough to read even now. I particularly like Mastery through deliberate practice.

Petrichor by Bryan Jenks has some especially interesting notes about ADHD.

Brad Wood's Digital garden is extremely charming, with an aesthetic that reminds me of old brown paper computer manuals. Brad Woods is himself seems to be an excellent UI software engineer. Anyone with an interest in JavaScript and UI should look through his notes.

Everything I know by Nikita is enormous while remaining quite charming. Lots of emojis and links and pages. I recommend that you simply go there and explore, but if I had to pick one note it would be his note about relationships.

Julia Evan's blog about is phenomenal, particularly for computer science. You might want to look at Celebrate tiny milestones to start, and Things that used to be hard that are now easy.

Notes by Eleanor Konik is a wealth of information on World Building and PKM. It's made using Obsidian Publish.

Alexis Rondeau's digital garden is made with Obsidian Publish and is rich in notes. He has an interesting note exploring whether increased light improves mood.

Other digital gardens I'll check out later

Luke Rambling has a labyrinth of digital gardens in his digital garden

Joel Hooks' Digital garden

Chips and Cheese, a blog about semiconductor manufacturing and architecture. Their article on RDNA looks relevant to me as an owner of a 6700XT

Not blogs but worth checking out

If you hate ads and like reading long form and extremely well researched content, Slow journalism may be your jam.

If you're okay with ads, you should check out my favourite magazines.

Thor Love and Thunder

2025-08-06T03:44:59.855Z

A movie by Taika Waititi in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that you can probably skip. I'd recommend literally any other movie by Waititi, such as Jojo Rabbit.

The good

Natalie Portman as Lady Thor is absolutely stunning.

The relationship struggles between Thor and Jodie were reasonably engaging, enough for me to see some of myself in them. I can respect that a lot, and I hope to do better in my own relationship as a result. The flashbacks of their relationship may be my favourite part of the movie.

The bad

The aforementioned fights don't seem to be realistically resolved. Problem-avoidance was well portrayed, but the two seem to get back together in a way that was predictably unsatisfying.

The movie feels juvenile. It has energy much like an 80s morning cartoon. Just as I struggle to enjoy watching such cartoons today, I struggled to enjoy watching Thor Love and Thunder. Jokes are somewhat tiring and drawn out with weak payoffs. The Gods are cartoonishly evil. Dialogue and action felt cheesy. The whole movie feels mostly aimed at kids, and I'm not sure if that is done well either.

All this might be forgivable if the movie developed Thor's storyline in any meaningful way. It does not. Unlike Thor Ragnarok which made enormous changes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as adding significant beats to Thor's story, Love and Thunder leaves Thor in largely the same place he was prior to the movie, but with an added sidekick character, who for now isn't very interesting.

Jurassic World Dominion

2025-08-06T03:46:54.315Z

The movie feels mostly like a chaotic carnival ride. You can expect some laughs and involuntary screams. That can be fun!

Amongst all the chaos, I noticed one perfect moment in the movie that I just can't stop thinking about, which is promptly spoiled. Spoilers ahead!

Claire has been separated. After escaping an enormous dinosaur, she is finding her way back to safety, in the dark and alone. Out in the darkness she hears a sound, but it's not quite clear what it is. It repeats, longer and louder. It's playful, almost cute.

It's the whistle of a dilophosaurus. She knows all too well what that sound means.

The whistle repeats, but the sound overlaps the first. There's more than one.

Claire is unarmed and surrounded by three dilophosauruses. She is tired and unarmed. There is no escape. To date, every person who has heard this whistle has died. One dilophosaurus sniffs his helpless meal.

Chris Pratt appears and kills it.

And here, we have one of the core problems of the movie:

No danger

The movie is entirely unwilling to kill or even hurt any of its “good” characters. Being the last movie in the franchise, there wasn't much reason to keep anyone alive, yet they all survive, with only flesh scratches and scrapes. The dinosaurs appear so frequently and the characters always escape, giving us no reason at all to fear them. This is even more insulting because of the next point.

Stupid characters

The most realistic part of the Jurassic Park series is nobody learns a lesson ever. They just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. If anything they get stupider.

There are many other things to say about this movie, but I'll leave it there. Enjoy it once, then return to the original to see movie mastery.

Home

2025-10-15T18:21:34.494Z

G'day! I'm Hung-Su and these are my notes, in the form of a digital garden 😀 They are of varying levels of quality, but they're all 100% written by me. You might be curious about why I publish notes.

My oldest hobby is playing videogames, usually on my computer. I'm currently playing Baldur's Gate 3 , PEAK, and The Spell Brigade. My childhood playing videogames is directly responsible for my present day career in UI engineering.

I thoroughly enjoy note taking and Personal Knowledge Management, using Obsidian. I did a Twitch stream about them once! This website you're reading was made with the Digital Garden plugin by Ole Eskild.

I enjoy UI and UX design, especially typography. This website is using an Obsidian theme I designed and made myself, called Typomagical.

This site doesn’t use ads, cookies, or analytics and never will. I’m privacy first.

Blog of sorts

Date	Stuff
2025-May-4	I learned a lot about loudspeakers, AV receivers, in my journey: Linus Tech Tips said I should build my own home theatre.
2025-Mar-6	Some thoughts on Obsidian LiveSync after using it for a few months
2024-July-15	My favourite things of 2024
2023-Nov-04	I tried watching HDR content for the first time on a mini LED monitor, but gave up and returned it. I'll be waiting for a better monitor technology.
2023-Jun-24	Bought Diablo 4
2023-May-29	I've been thinking extensively about easy mistakes and their role in becoming top percentile.
2023-Apr-22	While attempting to cancel a credit card, realised that credit card churning is a bad idea.
2023-Feb-26	Discovered a helpful new term, ADHD procrastination.
2023-Feb-20	I spent around three hours replacing my old Font Awesome icon in my nav with an SVG from Noun Project.
2023-Feb-19	I'm thinking a bit about PageSpeed Insights. This website is based on Digital Garden plugin which gets a Performance score of only `48/100`, on a page with no images. By comparison, my website fared better at `69/100`, and with some quick tweaks from me got `74/100`.
2022-Aug-30	I've been thinking a lot about blockquotes, and Software Design document
2022-Jul-27	I was alarmed by a comment on Hacker News of a person who didn't see the point of linking their notes. So I started writing some reasons why You should link your notes.
2022-Jul-22	My 6700XT arrived, and I watched Thor Love and Thunder
2022-Jul-17	Time timer
2022-Jul-9	Jurassic World Dominion
2022-Jul-7	I published this website using Quartz by Jacky

Heilung

2025-12-12T22:49:30.973Z

Heilung

In 2024, by accident I found myself watching the live performance of Seidh at the 2023 Game Awards.

Simply calling Heilung a "band" would do them a disservice. They have a look, a sound, a performance, that together create an experience I have not ever had before. It fills the air, shakes the ground, and it's something I feel from head to toe, but especially in my chest with their booming drums, droning strings, and vocals. I enjoy their sound so much, that their music is permanently part of My favourite test songs for speakers and compression, and I firmly reject speakers and headphones that are not able to sufficient recreate the full range of their sound. Thankfully my home theatre as well as my 7Hertz Timeless earphones are mostly up to the task.

Some concert goers talk about Heilung's concerts being like a religious experience, without religion. I am in no position to talk about them, so I would direct you to this 2023 article who does a great job talking about them.

under desk treadmill

2023-11-01T13:12:11.014Z

Desk treadmill

Device for walking at a desk.

Mine is this one: Sperax Walking Pad

my computer

2025-05-26T21:38:40.034Z

My computer

The first computer I ever used would have been on my family's 486DX-33 beige computer, sometime around 1991. I don't have any photos of it, but it looked a lot like the photo above. It ran a mighty 33Mhz on a single thread and 8 megabytes of RAM. It was connected to a beige 14" CRT monitor capable of 320×240 pixel resolution, which is about as detailed as a typical emoji today 🖥. It ran MS-DOS as its operating system.

The computer I'm typing this on in 2022 is an ASUS 13" laptop. It runs at 3.3GHz, or 100 times the frequency of my first computer, with 16 times the maximum threads and has 16 gigabytes of RAM, or 2000 times as much. The built in flat display is 1920×1200 pixels. Out of all the computers I've owned, this is the one I use the most, in part to it's combination of tremendous computing performance in a tiny package.

My gaming computer is a small form factor PC I built myself inside a Louqe Ghost S1. The CPU is an Intel i7-7700 which I bought in November 2017 for $250 at the time. It has a SATA SSD, a Crucial MX500, which is noticeably slower than m.2 NVME SSD such as in my laptop above. To make up for all the slow parts it has a new and beastly 6700XT, which I thoroughly enjoy and I have no regrets moving away from NVIDIA graphics.

After ending My experience with Ubuntu in 2020, I've set up both my current computers with Windows 10.

Viture One

2025-10-02T01:23:49.651Z

Viture One

A wearable 1080P display with built in speakers, in the form of a large pair of eyeglasses. I used to own a laptop-sized portable monitor, but the Viture works so well, I gave the monitor away.

Unbeatable private and portable movie experience for planes

The number one use case for this thing is watching movies and TV shows on the plane. This gives me a tonne of advantages over using the plane's inbuilt entertainment systems:

Other passengers can't snoop at what I'm watching
My wife can sleep next to me and I don't have to blind her with light pollution from whatever I'm watching
The virtual display size is much larger than the tiny screen planes give us. Even in business class!

Improved comfort and posture

Using my laptop in a coffee shop or otherwise means having to sit in a certain way, and also look down at my laptop screen.

These display glasses mean I don't have to tilt my head down, nor shape my body like a prawn. I can lean back into a big soft lounge chair, laptop in lap, and be able to work perfectly. I'm typing this paragraph now from my bed, looking up at the ceiling.

Sound is convenient for some cases, but not for others

Putting these display glasses on, you get a small speaker near each of your ears, so you do not need to wear headphones. The sound quality is surprisingly good considering the circumstances, but is worse than almost any actual headphone or speaker you can get.

In some situations the little speakers can be annoying. For instance, in my quiet bedroom at home at night, my wife can hear some of what I'm listening to.

Motion sickness is a thing

When using it in its standard mode, where it displays a screen all the time, moving my head while focusing on the display can give me noticeable motion sickness. I've learned to focus on the real world when moving my head.

It works on many, but not all devices with USB-C

It plugs into many laptops, gaming handhelds, and some some Android smartphones, such as my Samsung Galaxy S22. It can work with a Nintendo Switch when using a dongle. Alas, it doesn't work with my wife's Pixel 7, or any phone that can't display video over USB-C.

It lacks HDR and is only 60Hz

This is unfortunate, as the blacks are quite excellent, and using it's clear enough for most games.

It's not so good for heavy read, writing, or coding.

I have had mixed success using this for productive activity like coding. Unfortunately, something about the mirrors/lenses of this device mean it can be difficult to display fine text clearly, particularly towards the edges. For example, in the bottom right corner of Obsidian is very small text "20 backlinks" or "525 words", which can be hard to read. Sometimes I am able to wear the device at just the right angle where I can read everything, but this is very fussy.

This thing is one of my near essentials, and I bring it with me on all flights, and most coffee-shop trips.

Unifi U7 Pro Wall

2024-12-21T17:36:08.000Z

U7 Pro Wall

My first WiFi 7 access point, from Unifi. I paid $230.53USD for it including shipping, and $33.08 for a PoE+ adapter.

I installed mine with CAT 6 cable for 2.5GBe, a PoE+ injector, and free standing behind my TV. There is an official stand, but it costs $30 which I feel is robbery. The device has a flat bottom and happily stands up by itself, if you have a flat surface. A 3D printable stand is available on printables.

I have no WiFi 7 devices, but in my own tests with a Wi-Fi 6E device, I was able to get 800mb/s transfer speeds. I've heard of people getting 900Mb/s or even 1600Mb/s.

Unifi official Tech specs

Bad things

It gets uncomfortably warm: 99°F/37°C on the back, 46°C on the front https://youtu.be/GFoEuSbMi_U?si=3dG4N0qblZiztiN5

I intend to buy another one when my Unifi AC Lite fails, but it has stubbornly refused to do so.

USB battery

2025-12-17T00:25:25.058Z

USB battery bank

As of 2025, most people have probably owned at least 5 of these things.

Most battery banks do not deliver on their promised capacity

When using or recharging your battery bank, they get hot. This heat causes them to throttle their speeds and even lose some capacity to heat. For example, the Nitecore NB10000 outputs 22.5W at first then throttles down to just 9W when it gets hot, and overall delivers 31Wh of actual charge which is around 75% efficiency. ^[1]

There exist a small number of battery banks with chemical structure and heat dissipation to maintain consistently high charging speed. One I would like to try is this one - one reviewer claims it can maintain 90W output charging speed from 100% battery all the way to 0, which seems almost impossible, but I'd like to see.

The BEST Cool Tech You've Never Tried - Extended "10,000" Battery Rant
Snazzy Labs ‧ 2025 November 28 ‧ publication name ↩︎

TrimUI Smart Pro

2025-11-16T04:07:16.814Z

TrimUI Smart Pro

A teeny tiny handheld game console for nerds, that I bought for $51.52USD including shipping in 2024.

It runs a slimmed down version of Linux, which can run many emulated console games, and a limited number of PC games through an app called Portmaster.

It's possible to install a variant of Android on this called GammaOS, but I have not tried.

It's a little smaller than Nintendo Switch and a little bigger than my Samsung Galaxy S22. Has Nintendo style button layout on right, which i'm not the biggest fan of as I happen to prefer Xbox and PlayStation style layouts.

Of all the cheap handhelds of 2024, this has the biggest and best screen: 4.96" 1280 × 720p. This is perhaps a bit of a waste since this device is intended to play classic games that have a 4:3 ratio, but I have also enjoyed playing some newer widescreen games on it such as Dust: An Elysian Tale and Balatro (2024).

The Allwinner A133P 1.8GHz CPU is a bit of a problem. This unusual ARM architecture CPU is so odd that the company Allwinner has not provided 32bit binaries for it. This means many Portmaster games do not work on it.

Has quite meagre specifications:

1GB DDR4 RAM. Together these have prevented me from running more demanding emulators and games, such as Hyper Light Drifter and a lot of Nintendo 64 games like Super Smash Bros 64.
5000mAh battery, which lasts me around 2 hours

I installed a custom layer over the base operating system, called Crossmix OS, which adds a variety of neat features:

Moonlight for streaming games from my computer, which works well on the device but I've found that the device's weak CPU and RAM seem only able to handle a bitrate of 2.5Mbps. I've observed one person say that Moonlight works better at 30FPS on the device, but I'd rather keep the high framerate.
Function switch remapping - there's a 2-mode switch on the bottom of the device, and its purpose can be defined to do all kinds of things. I set mine to put my console in Turbo mode for more CPU intensive tasks. Note that this seems to make the back of the device quite warm.
SMB hosting, so when the device connects to WiFi, I can see it as a network drive from my desktop PC. This lets me easily copy game files to it
Saving state on power off, and booting into saved state on power on

It has one major downside - this OS seems to introduce problems to Portmaster. For example, Death Road To Canada does not work on CrossmixOS, but allegedly does work on Knulli.

As of 2025, you should probably not buy this, and look at the Mangmi Air X.

Notes for me and others who own it

The r/trimui subreddit has made a useful website, TrimUI Hub.

TrimUI have announced an update to the base OS to v1.1.0, but CrossMix OS does not yet work with this, as of 2025-07-02. The next CrossMix update should somewhat improve Portmaster support.

Some other operating systems exist for the device:

Next UI. As of 2025-06-18 it lacks the ability to customise the toggle switch on the bottom of the Smart Pro, so I have not tried this OS yet.
Gamma OS: Notable because it's based on Android TV, opening up the possibility of running Android apps and games on this device.
Knulli: Notable to me because Portmaster seems to work better on it. There are some Portmaster games I'm unable to play on CrossMix OS, such as Death Road to Canada.

Time timer

2023-02-15T05:50:13.159Z

Time timer

A physical timer, which operates on a single AA battery. Twisting the center knob resizes the coloured portion, which immediately starts shrinking as time progresses. A switch on the back enables an optional buzzer when the time runs out.

I first heard about this gadget from the Youtube channel How to ADHD. It's common for those with ADHD to fidget, and also have trouble with Time management. Thus, a physical object with an easily understandable interface we can fiddle with is much more appealing than a clock app on our phone or computer. In addition, using an app consumes crucial screen space I'd rather reserve for my work.

My only minor complaint was that the first time I used it, I was not aware it was counting down. It's completely silent, and the coloured area shrinks so slowly i had to wait around a minute to be sure it was on. I've been very happy with it ever since.

It frequently goes on sale on Amazon, and I bought mine for around $19.78USD including taxes. (Goodness US sales taxes feel deceptive 😠)

Sturmey Archer SRF3

2025-10-02T00:22:44.096Z

3 speed Internal gear hub on my Pikes trifold bike.

It was introduced in 1933, nearly 100 years ago!

Features list from official website

Official website

Classic 3-speed internal gear hub with gear ratio of 177%
Gear steps of 33% and 33%
6061 Aluminium hub shell
Available with 28, 32 or 36 spoke holes
Compatible with 13 to 24 teeth sprocket
Anodised alloy finish
Weight - 970g

Gear Ratio

Overall Range - 177%
Gear 1 - 75% (Gear 2 - 25%)
Gear 2 - 100% (Direct Drive)
Gear 3 - 133% (Gear 2 + 33%)

Other people's thoughts

Huge thread about disassembly and maintenance

Samsung Buds 2

2023-07-02T04:28:27.878Z

Samsung Buds2

The first pair of True wireless earphones I've owned. I paid $64 for them second hand from Amazon shopping. At that price they're one of the best value items I bought in 2022.

[!warning]
I bought this product 3 times. 2 of those had an identical defect: right earbud would fluctuate between giving loud and crackly audio, or quiet audio. If buying this yourself, opt for a store with an excellent return policy.

Learned about them from crinacle's TWS list, where he gave them a B+, one of the highest scores. I can mostly agree with his review - they sound fantastic and I have no complaints about the audio quality.

Part of the reason I bought them was the wireless charging. My previous pair of wireless earphones charged over Micro-USB and were quite frustrating to use.

Being wireless, one drawback is that the latency is sometimes noticeable while playing videogames. A gunshot is always seen before it is heard, which is incredibly distracting. Hence I still have my wired earphones, the 7Hertz Timeless earphones.

Pikes trifold bike

2025-12-13T03:01:17.821Z

Paikesi

My first folding bike, bought new from a bike store in Makati, Philippines for a mere $503.92USD in 2024. It's a clone of a popular folding bike, the Brompton, which sells for around $1800 to $3500 new.

I bought it primarily for this "shopping cart" mode. I regularly ride mine to the nearby supermarket, with a basket mounted to the front to carry groceries. It turns heads almost every single time I go there.

It has a number of difference from Bromptons, including one advantage you can see in the above photo - the "shopping cart" mode can be done by folding just the rear wheel inward.. Bromptons require an additional fold of the front wheel, because the unfolded front wheel collides with the rear wheel.

The company is Indonesian, but their website doesn't seem to have this bike listed anymore. It appears to be a popular bike in the Philippines, where there are many reviews, and a Facebook group.

Parts and specs

Drivetrain

The chainring is 5 bolts in a 130mm bolt circle diameter, or 130BCD. Originally came with 45T chainring, which I've since swapped to 38T to make hill climbing easier, but also reduces my top speed.

Has a Sturmey Archer SRF3 internal gear hub , controlled by thumb shifter on right handle:

Gear 1 75%
Gear 2 100%
Gear 3 133%
Weight: 970g

Also has 15T and 13T sprockets attached to the gear hub, controlled by shifter on left handle.

This person put a Sturmey Archer 5 speed internal gear hub on their Pikes. Weighs 1950g, so adds 1kg of weight.

This video might be useful to me later if I want to increase gearing.

Wheels

Like Brompton, it has 16" wheels. Brompton website recommends pressure between 65 and 100 PSI, so I have mine at around 80 PSI. There is debate around what pressure is ideal, but I don't understand it all.

Unlike Brompton, I have to use bike tubes with long valves. Standard Brompton tubes have short valves that I can't get an air pump onto.

The rear wheel fork has a space for a plastic pump, but I've removed this pump because it doesn't work very well.

Removing the rear wheel is complex because of the internal gear hub. My local bike shop charges me $40USD to remove the wheel and replace the tube, not including the cost of the tube.

Upgrade culture

Bromptons and Brompton-clones have a thriving and active community of aftermarket parts.

This person heavily modified their Pikes Gen 4, with many titanium and leather parts.

I have 64mm rollerblade wheels installed on the back of mine. They were extremely affordable and easy to install.

This 2019 forum thread seems to have lots of info

NIU KQI3 Scooter

2025-03-22T07:31:18.129Z

NIU KQI3 Scooter

Possibly the best value electric Scooter around.

I discovered this scooter through Unbox Therapy and their video. A short while later I saw it on sale on Amazon for just $642USD including taxes and delivery, so I snapped it up.^[1]

Reasons I like it

Regenerative braking. Releasing the throttle triggers the regenerative brake, which has customisable strength using the app. I have mine set to Strong, and rely on it most of the time instead of using the scooter's disc brakes.
Lights everywhere - Front and rear lights, including brake lights
Huge deck. I have lots of flexibility over where to put my feet.
Excellent folding mechanism that easily changes between folded and ready. Some other scooters have quite fussy folding systems. Once folded, it can fit in a car or be carried up stairs. It fits in the boot of my Prius, provided it's quite empty.
Throttle safety - You have to kick off before the throttle will work. This might sound like a downside, but it means you can't accidentally press the throttle while standing around. This is a common problem with e-skateboard owners.
Lightweight. It weighs as much as 1.5 corgis, or 45 pounds, or 20 kilos. I can generally hold it in one hand when folded.
Maintains speed as battery drains. I've heard of other scooters becoming slower as the battery approaches zero.

Things that aren't fun

Compulsory phone app. The scooter has a software locked top speed, which you can only unlock by installing the NIU app on a phone and pairing that phone with the scooter over Bluetooth. Others have had the novel idea to use a burner phone to install the app.^[2]
Security. Being a scooter, it is lightweight and easy to steal. The shape means it is difficult to physically lock to a bike rack – clever thieves can just tilt and angle the scooter out of such a lock without cutting it. Thus, I have to be creative when in public spaces. This isn't too bad, such as when grocery shopping I can fold it and place under the shopping trolley. I can also bring it to the front foyer of a store, and use the app to "lock" it. When software locked, the scooter beeps an alarm when moved.
Can't ride in the rain. With just IP54 dirt and water resistance, the manual warns it cannot ride in more than 2cm of water.

Overall I'm super pleased with this - in terms of raw cost it's similar in cost to my 6700 XT graphics card, but arguably gives much more joy.

NIU on Amazon is back to $799USD at time of writing ↩︎
Why do you need an app to use THIS??!? - NIU KQi3 Kick Scooter ↩︎

NHT Verve subwoofer

2025-12-13T03:03:07.072Z

NHT V Woofer

A subwoofer I bought from FB Marketplace. I wasn't expecting to buy it - I was meeting the seller for the NHT M5 monitor, who offered me this while I was with him.

It has these curious specifications:

2 × 10″ aluminium cones - I have never seen a subwoofer with two big cones like this.
200-watt amplifier
16.9″ × 23.3″ × 6″ (7.8″ incl. base)
29 lb
38Hz–240Hz

I have generally been impressed by this subwoofer. Most subwoofers people show me are too loud, and sound like mud to me. This is the first subwoofer I've owned where I've sought out a variety of bass sounds to see what it could reproduce, such as:

the MANY bass sounds in Dune Part 2 (2024).
the helicopters in Michael Bay's Transformers (2007).

For those who like audiophile jargon, the following snippets from Sound & Vision might be of interest:

[!tip] NHT Verve Large System ‧ Chris Martens ‧ 2008 Nov 25 ‧ The Absolute Sound
Those familiar with the sound of typical vented woofers might find the V Woofer’s bass initially seems somewhat more lightly balanced, but the offsetting benefit is that the NHT’s bass also tends to sound tighter, punchier, and better-defined (different strokes for different folks).

[!warning] NHT Verve Large System ‧ Chris Martens ‧ 2008 Nov 25 ‧ The Absolute Sound
...when cranking up the volume, be aware that the V Woofer has less dynamic headroom...If you accidentally push the sub beyond its limits, as happened to us when playing the “Under Attack” battle scene from Master and Commander at exuberant volumes, the V Woofer may shut itself down (the woofer’s power light remains lit, but bass output just goes away). If shutdown occurs, simply toggle the power switch to reset the woofer.

[!tip] NHT Verve ‧ 2007 Jun 3 ‧ Sound & Vision
The V Woofer did a fine job filling in the missing octaves down to perhaps 35 Hz, but it didn't seem to have a great deal of oomph much lower...moving the V Woofer to the corner improved evenness noticeably and upped the perceived deep-bass impact somewhat.

NHT M5 monitor

2025-09-19T06:34:12.693Z

NHT M5 Monitor

A passive 3 way loudspeaker, which I bought for my home theater system. It's possibly the best speaker I've ever owned.

Why I went looking for it

Somewhere in my internet travels I came across the idea that the centre channel of a home audio system is the most important (aside from the subwoofer). This is because it plays almost all the most important audio - most of what happens in movies happens in the centre of the screen, and the audio is mixed to come from the centre. To do this, the centre should be effective across the 120–20000Hz range, but particularly in the 120–8000Hz range, which covers most of human speech.

Doing this well requires a variety of drivers. For example, the NHT M5 covers a wide range like so:

A 5" woofer to handle 66Hz–380Hz
A 3" driver to handle 380Hz–3000Hz
A 1" tweeter to handle 3000Hz–30000Hz

If you were to make or buy a speaker without a variety of drivers, such as only 3" drivers, it would find itself utterly unable to represent all ranges. Unfortunately, many cheap speakers, and even some expensive ones, are guilty of this.

This promotional poster triumphantly shows a speaker design with 4 drivers that are all the same size. This speaker is marketed as having Dolby Atmos for movies. Without even hearing it myself, I know it would sound awful, being utterly unable to represent low notes and high notes.

Thus I went hunting for a high quality 3 way speaker: one robust box with at least 3 different sized drivers.

How I found my ideal centre speaker

Looking for new centre speakers that are 3-way speakers was not promising. The cheapest new 3-way speaker seems to be the SVS Prime Center at $450USD. At that price I was absolutely not interested.

I understand for a good 3-way speaker, the enclosing box must be large and robust enough for at least 3 drivers, together with the cost of all the drivers and internal wiring, seems to jack the price up significantly more than simpler designs.

Thus I moved on to second hand markets.

Doing a search for "3 way speaker" on Facebook marketplace yields plenty of results, but most were far too large, like these:

These designs would surely sound excellent. 3-way designs seem common in older speakers - audio engineers of that age seemed wise. Unfortunately, I needed a much smaller design to use as a center channel.

I switched to searching for "center speaker" for a while, and tried looking for designs that were 3 way. With patience and sheer luck, I spotted the NHT M5 unit, very nearby, for just $80USD. Not really knowing how good a deal this was, I still bought it. Also through sheer luck, the seller had his NHT Verve subwoofer for sale, which I happily bought.

Why I like the NHT M5 so much

This speaker had one vital task - play dialog in movies clearly enough to not require subtitles. In this regard, it passes with flying colours.

It's hard for me to describe why the NHT M5 sounds good. Many audio reviewers use a lot of words that also sound like meaningless gibberish to me. What I can say definitively, is that when I hear something from any speaker in my house, then the NHT M5, I always prefer the M5.

The M5 is so much better than my other speakers that it has presented me with a problem. When listening to 2.0 stereo sources such as music, audio doesn't play through the M5 speaker at all. For these situations I have to remember to use one of the the upmixing modes on my Denon AVR-S510BT receiver. I float between using DTS Neo Cinema, and DTS Neo Music, both seem to sound noticeably better to me than Dolby Pro Logic. This is a free and easy solution until I can spare the budget to buy two more three-way speakers to replace the Onkyos.

Other notes

Being released in 2002, the NHT M5 speakers are very hard to buy today. I occasionally see listings for them online, at modest prices.

The M5 is originally part of a set of 5 speakers and a subwoofer released in 2002, the NHT M5 Evolution. It was highly acclaimed at the time, as this reviewer describes after setting up all speakers:

The M5s were about as free from response blips and dips, and thus from vocal artifacts, as any speakers I’ve used in my studio. For instance, on “Sleep to Dream Her” from the Dave Matthews Band’s Everyday, D. Matt’s unmistakable adenoidal slur sounded full, yet characteristically honky — but no honkier than it should be. This and many other stereo pop vocals had the kind of rock-solid, three-dimensional center image that makes you swear the center speaker must be playing until your ear’s within a foot or two.^[1]

It can be used vertically as a satellite speaker, and can also be mounted onto a NHT B5 subwoofer, making it into a NHT T5 Tower Speaker.

As of 2023, the successor to these speakers seems to be the M7 LCR speaker. The m7 is quite expensive at $900 per speaker, and much heavier at 32 pounds!

At 21 pounds or around 10 kilograms, it's the largest single passive loudspeaker I've ever owned. It has 2 5.25" woofers, a 3" midrange and a 1" aluminium dome tweeter, and has these specs:


Magnetically Shielded	Yes
Frequency Response	66Hz – 30kHz. +/- 3dB
Crossover Frequency	380Hz, 2.4kHz
Crossover Slopes	12dB LP, 12dB HP
Sensitivity	85dB (2.83V at 1M)
Impedance	6 ohms nominal
Inputs	5-way binding posts
Recommended Amplifier Power	150 W/ch RMS.
Dimensions	7.75″W × 17.75″H × 8.5″D
Weight	21lbs each
Finish	Anthracite matte lacquer
Other	Stabilizer for TV placement included

It has acoustic suspension, but I do not know what that means.

Came with a grille which I've stored in my garage for now.

The company, Now Hear This, is in California between San Francisco and Sacramento.

Test Report NHT Evolution M5 Home Theater Speakers
Daniel Kumin ‧ 2002 September ‧ Sound & Vision ↩︎

MINISFORUM BD790i SE Mini-ITX motherboard

2025-12-13T03:39:39.498Z

MINISFORUM mini-ITX motherboard

A mini-ITX motherboard + CPU + cooler combo that is installed in my computer.

It is the most powerful CPU I've ever owned

It has the most power x86 CPU I've ever owned, the Ryzen 9 7940HX. Has sixteen Zen 4 CPU cores, 32 threads on a 5nm process. In benchmarks, it holds up very well against my other CPU, the Intel 1355U, and even against a loved and newer CPU, the Ryzen AI Max 390.

It's wonderfully convenient

This motherboard, and this category of motherboards, has totally changed how I think of PC building. It combines what is usually 3 separate components into one:

CPU
motherboard
CPU heatsink

Combining those three steps into one removes a common failure point I have in PC builds - sometimes CPU and heatsink installation can fail in subtle or not so subtle ways.

This leaves just a few steps to finish a PC build:

case - usually an easy choice, just pick one you happen to like and will fit your GPU of choice. Mine is a Louqe Ghost S1.
power supply - which is usually an easy choice, and something that may come for free with a case.
RAM - Also usually an easy choice for non-overclockers. I used the cheapest 32GB of DDR5-5600 I could find, which it seems to have correctly clocked down to 5200. It supports up to 64GB, but I have felt no need to have that much.
A CPU fan - Another easy choice , any 120mm fan. I used the NOCTUA NF-F12.
An SSD. There are many "best SSD" guides, such as this one from Tom's Hardware, that make this easy.
optionally a video card. Unfortunately a fairly difficult choice you will still have to make. You can go without, which may give the advantage of making it simpler to connect this to an external dock. But the onboard 610M is awful for any games.

I will very likely be using only this type of motherboard for my gaming PCs in future. The CPU performance is excellent and I greatly appreciated the ease of building. Minisforum have since released an X3D version that I look forward to try if this one should die on me.

Technical things of note

Mine does NOT have wi-fi or bluetooth.

The motherboard has a single 2.5Gbe port, which supports wake on LAN.

Its 2 m.2 2280 slots have built in heatsink and fan. Note these are PCIE Gen 4, not 5.

Mine has BIOS version 1.09 installed. 1.12 seems to exist but judging from this Reddit thread, there seems to be no real advantage to updating to it

Logitech G305 mouse

2023-03-03T08:34:07.755Z

My favourite computer mouse

Has these features:

Low latency
Cheap, $35USD for the black version
The right number of buttons for me
Lightweight
AA battery powered - so unlike other mice with built in batteries which will eventually die completely, this is future proof!
Modding community - mainly to make it lighter
Does not use bluetooth
USB receiver stored inside the mouse. I was infuriated by my previous mouse, a G703 whose receiver I constantly feared losing.

Lenovo Flex 7 laptop

2025-12-28T19:40:43.609Z

Lenovo Flex 7 laptop

A convertible 14" laptop that replaced my ASUS ROG Flow X13 (2021) .

What I like about it

SO CHEAP. I could have bought THREE of these for the cost of my previous laptop. I bought it for only $529.43 including tax, making it the cheapest laptop I've bought in my life. I found the deal on Reddit's Laptop Deals.

Excellent battery life. It's well known that x86 laptops have worse battery life than Apple silicon, but this laptop with its asymmetrical CPU and 59Wh battery have never actually run out of power on me. No battery anxiety!

Small size at 14". I've owned 15.6" and 16" laptops before, and they are just a little too big for many situations I'm in: small tables at coffee shops, small airplane trays, even in the car. A 14" can work in surprisingly more situations where a 16" laptop really cannot.

Low power consumption. It uses a 65W power brick, making it easier to charge than my previous laptop that wanted 100W and simpler to find USB-C docking stations for. It's a nightmare trying to find a docking station that will charge 100W while also providing sufficient IO.

Great pixel density. Text looks wonderful on the display. 188PPI is amazing pixel density at this price.

Webcam can be physically shut. For some shocking reason, many laptops do not have this, opting for only a light indicator to let you know if the webcam is on, but this too can be hacked. A physical switch is a rare example of something unhackable.

Convertible hinge and touchscreen. Like my last laptop, I constantly use it in tent mode for a clean two display setup, and the touchscreen I use constantly, most commonly so I can hand it to people in my house to choose which food items they want delivered.

Thunderbolt 4. This means I can use the best Thunderbolt 4 docks and accessories, such as an EGPU in future. This should mitigate one of its biggest downsides below.

What I don't like

Overheating. There is only one vent - at the bottom of the laptop. This easily is obstructed when using the laptop in bed. Additionally, the battery chemistry is so bad that when the laptop is plugged in and recharging, the laptop can thermal throttle while doing nothing simply because the battery gets so hot.

Performance dips. Despite excellent benchmarks of the Intel 1355U CPU, I frequently encounter moments of slowness on even mundane tasks like typing into Obsidian. This is magnified by the overheating problem.

Awful GPU. GPU is Iris XE, which is awful. Even ancient games like Starcraft 2 do not run well on it, limiting me to simple 3D or 2D games. I have seen it at over 90% utilisation when doing just desktop tasks. This is its weakest point and the one thing I want to change the most.

Only one USB-C port. Additionally, this one port is on the left side, but I want it on the right.

Ergonomics. Front edge where wrist rests is a bit sharp. Also the Up and down arrow keys are a bit small and hard to press.

Touchpad disabled when typing. This is a huge problem if I want to attempt basic gaming.

Screen is only 60Hz. Not a huge problem, but disappointing nonetheless.

Hugh Leverpresso

2024-07-18T02:59:32.156Z

Hugh Leverpresso

A manual espresso machine, using two levers to create the requisite 9 bars of pressure.

Something about the process of using this helps me wake up in the morning, and I think it's more effective than the actual caffeine from the coffee. It isn't possible to cheat: any failure in paying attention, will mean I don't get my coffee. Something about applying a great deal of physical force on an object for 30 seconds really wakes me up.

It has only a few downsides:

it can only make double shots of espresso, and I generally have single shots.
It takes more overall time than using an electric machine, but much less time than other mechanical espresso machines I've tried, such as the Flair Neo.

Other than that, this item is basically perfect, and at only around $105USD, far better value than many other espresso machines.

Everyday case

2023-02-19T18:44:28.838Z

Peak Design Everyday Case

Store page

A line of cases from Peak design, that I have installed on my Samsung Galaxy S22 so that I can use MagSafe.

Until Smartphones adopt Qi2, I'll likely continue buying these cases

Things I like

The magnet. It's positioned so that wireless charging works well - the Samsung's Qi charging coil is slightly below centre. I have tried in the past to use a circular magnetic sticker, but because Qi charging creates heat, that melts the glue of the sticker causing the phone to fall off wireless charging stands.

Things I don't

The texture. It traps visible specks of dust that can be annoying to remove.

The USB-C port opening. It is smaller than my previous case, and now my charging cable does not fit.

EdgeRouter X

2024-07-04T22:33:44.956Z

EdgeRouter X

An ethernet-only Network router from Ubiquiti.

With a 880 MHz CPU it is so slow, it can be beaten by a Raspberry Pi 4.^[1] I personally could only get around 500Mb/s download speed with this.

At $59USD + shipping, this was a total waste of money for me. I've since replaced it with a NanoPi R5S router and am able to saturate my fiber internet with that.

Official page: EdgeRouter X

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/help-selecting-a-dedicated-router-gigabit-poe-pppoe-support-sfp-nice-to-have/92940/2 ↩︎

Denon AVR-S510BT receiver

2025-09-09T19:16:28.789Z

Denon AVR-S510BT receiver

My third AV receiver, and the first that works.

I have it connected to these sources: Nvidia Shield Pro and 6700XT

And these outputs: NHT Verve subwoofer

A few key features motivated me to choose this:

Supports 4K@60Hz! On only 3 ports (3, 4, 5), but that's more than I need
Can up mix stereo to 5.1. It has two ways to do this: Dolby PL II, and DTS Neo:6.

It has one glaring disadvantage - it does NOT support HDMI CEC. Members of my household continually complain that there is no sound from the home theatre, which I inevitably find is because the receiver did not turn on when they turned on the TV.

Manual

Beryl AX WiFi 6 Travel Router

2025-12-13T02:51:43.130Z

This tiny device adds some neat possibilities to travel, and here's one example.

On a long flight across the Pacific Ocean, I was flying in a party of 5. The flight had Wi-Fi, but this required payment. We weren't about to pay $16USD × 5, so instead:

We paid once for unlimited Wi-Fi
I logged into the plane's Wi-Fi with this router
We all connected to this router for fast Wi-Fi 6 between us.

The Beryl is very low power, so I was able to power it from a plain USB port and fit it between our seats below:

Once the Beryl had internet, everyone in our party instantly had internet since they had connected to its Wi-Fi before! And so for our long flight we all had unlimited internet, fast enough to stream TV shows! 😊

AA battery

2023-02-15T07:28:29.521Z

AA battery

Perhaps the most famous standardised battery type in the world.

Rechargeable NiMH batteries

Project Farm has made multiple videos:

Which Rechargeable Battery is the Best?
- Says IKEA LADDA, Amazon Basics Silver, Duracell 2450 are good for high drain devices such as cameras with flash Timestamp 5:08
- Overall seems to recommend Harbor Freight 2200 and Amazon Basics Silver 2400
Which brand lasts the best when sitting on shelf
Which AA Rechargeable Battery is Best after 1 Year?

In my experience teaching households to use them has been troublesome. Cool Tools website suggests having many of these batteries in stock to encourage households to use them. https://kk.org/cooltools/eneloop-batteries-in-bulk/

7Hertz Timeless earphones

2025-07-29T19:28:45.652Z

7Hertz Timeless earphones

Quite possibly the best bang for buck audiophile earphones around.

I bought mine from Linsoul for $220 with a 3.5mm termination.

Are planar earphones. I don't fully understand what this means, but crinacle explains in this 19 minute video .

Uses MMCX cable, so these can be used over Bluetooth with a bluetooth MMCX cable. I used a Fiio MMCX Bluetooth cable.

crinacle did a video review of these on Youtube:

Notes that some people find it fatigueing, because it has sharp treble
Gave them an A- grade on his website, which is astonishingly high, and are the cheapest earphones at that grade. The most expensive at that grade is $3200.

Some people have felt disappointed by them:

This Redditor says they are great for well mastered music, but awful for "fun" things like EDM and heavy metal. Other redditors reply with mixed opinions

6700XT

2025-11-16T04:03:34.698Z

Radeon 6700 XT

An awesome GPU, released in 2021 from AMD on a 7nm process. I bought this to replace my ageing R9 285, a GPU released in 2014 on a 28nm process.

I paid $455.78USD for it including shipping and taxes. A little higher than I wanted, but still much better than the cryptocurrency inflated prices of a short while ago. Mine is the Powercolor Fighter version, which is a little smaller than other cards with the same chip.

This GPU is massively underrated. It experienced horrifically bad press at launch, with its competition beating it handily in real and synthetic benchmarks at the time, and to this day everyone seems to want nVidia's RTX 3000 series cards. Times have now changed, and I think more people should snap this up instead.

Shortcomings

No DLSS. AI upsampling is the amazing technique of increasing the size of an image while adding in missing detail. This is a huge talking point for videogames in 2021 and 2022, particularly as gamers (including myself) want high FPS at 4K resolution which is extremely difficult to achieve...unless you have AI upsampling through DLSS. The 6700 XT cannot do nVidia's DLSS, thus I'm limited to simpler algorithmic upsampling rather than AI upsampling.

That's all, there's no other shortcomings I've found so far. On to the fun stuff!

Why it's awesome

The 3rd most powerful GPU in the world per-watt. Drawing just 215 watts, it delivered 112FPS average across a suite of 9 games. Compare this to the much more popular RTX 3080, which requires 333 watts but only delivered 142FPS average across the same games.^[1] Is 25% more FPS worth 54% more wattage? For those of us with computer cases that are not the size of furniture, I think not!

Compact. With the RTX 3000 series of cards from nvidia, gamers across the world seem to have accepted GPUs that are longer, taller, fatter, and heavier. They've accepted larger cases, more intimidating cooling solutions and clever installation gadgets to support all the weight and torsion force. The 6700 XT in comparison is extremely svelte and requires no such trickery.

Ray tracing! This is my first GPU with ray tracing, which looks incredible in the games that have it, like CP2077 and Quake II RTX . Light bounces off of multiple surfaces in realistic ways, and casts more realistic shadows and reflections.

Quiet. At the aforementioned 215 watt power draw, the GPU often runs so cool the fans do not even spin.

If you got this far, you might be interested in the rest of my my computer, or the videogames I've been playing.

Graphics Card Power Consumption and Efficiency Tested Scroll to "Analyzing GPU Power Use and Efficiency" ↩︎

Software Design document

2025-03-22T07:30:12.181Z

Software Design document

A Software Design Document or Architecture Document is a piece of Technical writing that defines a plan for solving a problem with software. It is necessary because software is so complex and requires so many decisions and trade-offs, it cannot be inferred from reading source code.

Should be written by project lead, for projects that take 1 engineer month or more.^[1]

Note that designing a very complex system entirely upfront and expecting it to work generally guarantees failure. Instead, very complex systems that work will emerge over time from simpler systems that work.

Examples of great design documents

Beware, all these examples were written after the software was made, and architecture documents are generally written before a project starts. Real architecture documents made for planning are generally kept secret.

More at The Architecture of Open Source Applications.

https://johnjago.com/great-docs/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39819409

Components of a design document

A convenient location and format

Future maintainers will want to read it. Thus it's worth placing it somewhere they can easily read it. One recommendation is to make a file called ARCHITECTURE.md in the software repository, adjacent to its README.md. ^[2]

Dependencies

Significant files and modules should be mentioned by name, but not linked directly as such links can expire. Searching for the name encourages future maintainers to explore.

Invariants or exclusions

If you have intentionally excluded something from the design, that thing should be defined along with the reason why. Future maintainers cannot know why something doesn't exist.^[3]

Diagrams

These might be based on the C4 model: context, containers, components, code. Personally I prefer to rename context to customers. InfoQ has a guide to the C4 model.

diagram

https://www.unravelled.dev/how-architecture-diagrams-enable-better-conversations

Guides to writing architecture documents

The open source arc42 document framework is considered by many to be the best. Features many examples and is entirely free to use. InnoQ has a guide to using the framework.

Free Code Camp has a guide: How to write a good software design doc

https://www.workingsoftware.dev/software-architecture-documentation-the-ultimate-guide/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482836

Quartz by Jacky

2024-12-13T19:09:12.000Z

Quartz

A tool for publishing Obsidian to the web as a digital garden, and what I once used to publish what you are reading now.

It's built on top of Hugo which I'm told is very fast, but can be hard to use. So far I've observed builds with this tool taking around 40 seconds which is a bit slower than I'd like. My previous tool used Jekyll and took around 20 seconds.

The Official Quartz website has the instructions I followed to make this.

Why I stopped using it

Weird formatting requirements. Obsidian allows you to refer to a note without mentioning its path, such as [[software engineering]]. Quartz requires you to use Markdown links [](), with a full path and URL encoding of spaces. Attempting to use wikilinks anyway will result in broken links and backlinks. This has another consequence, Obsidian is unable to automatically update links in this format if you rename or move them.

Overall this made publishing more difficult, and maintenance of my vault difficult.

Missing features. For example, inline tags, like #claim will just appear as plain text. I requested support for these in this ticket.

Other drawbacks

Significant technical knowledge needed. I had to install Golang, Hugo, Make, add those to my environment path, just to build the website on my Windows laptop. For the tech savvy it doesn't feel like much, but this is too difficult for many people.
No RSS. Jacky has teased the idea of possibly adding it in future, on the Quartz Discord.
Poor Accessibility for screen readers. This comes in a few forms:
- The search button is not a button. This is fixed in these notes, but still a problem in the original source.
- No alt text on images. Markdown supports adding some text to an image like so: ![Some alt text](link\to\image.jpg). But either Quartz or Hugo ignores it.

Why I liked Quartz

All the words above may seem like I dislike Quartz. I enjoyed my time with Quartz, it just so happens I found something better!

Separate note titles, filenames, and link text. One of the solutions I tried previously, Foam Research, required that note titles, filenames, and link text all be the same, and in a particular format. For instance, a Quartz link can look like any text that I want even emoji, but a Foam link always looks like: hyphens-and-lower-case, including the dashes. This was maddening!
Interactive graph. Quartz has a much more friendly graph than others I've tried so far, with nice hover effects, bouncy physics, and even links between neighbours!
Dark mode. I often read my own notes at night, and appreciate being able to set the theme to dark mode.
Backlinks with context. A list of backlinks would appear at the bottom of a page. If you hovered over the backlink, you would see the sentence that refers to the current page. This is amazing! Backlinks should include context!

Alternatives I didn't like, but you might

Obsidian Publish, but people seem to have mixed things to say about it.
Jekyll. These notes you're reading used to be published this way. There are other ways to use Jekyll, but the method I linked seems to be the most comprehensive.

PaperWM

2025-09-25T16:54:43.315Z

Paper WM

A scrollable tiling window manager layer on top of GNOME. Every app you open takes the full height of your screen, and is placed in a single row without overlapping any other apps. If your screen runs out of room, apps go off the edge of the screen, and can still be reached by scrolling or with keyboard shortcuts.

This is my number one favourite reason to use Linux. It's so satisfying to use that I tend to avoid using tabs, and open things in new windows instead.

When I moved back to Windows 10/11, I made Winfinity to attempt to emulate its behaviour.

PaperWM is written using JavaScript. Its open source and has a GitHub.

Other people's thoughts

Julia Evans wrote a piece in 2020: "I’ve been using PaperWM for 6 months on a laptop and I really like it! I also really appreciate that even though it’s configurable (by writing a Javascript configuration file), it does the things I want out of the box without me having to research how to configure it."

In 2020-Nov, It's Foss compared it to Material Shell and Regolith.

CardboardWM and EndlessWM are similar, but both are abandoned.

PageSpeed Insights

2025-08-21T08:39:36.119Z

PageSpeed Insights

A web performance tool and metric by Google, expressed as a score out of 100. Can be measured using the Performance tab in Chrome dev tools, or by entering a URL into PageSpeed Insights report.

This page you are viewing currently has a score of 82/100 on mobile, and 99/100 on desktop, which you can confirm here.

Builder.io explained how they got 100/100 score, using Qwik and Partytown

Obsidian LiveSync

2025-08-13T02:28:22.840Z

Obsidian LiveSync

[!info] Caveat
I am a software engineer by profession, and to use LiveSync you will likely need to be in a similar trade or at least be very computer savvy. I have never used Obsidian’s official paid Sync.

LiveSync is an Obsidian plugin which I am using to synchronise my Obsidian vault between my Android phone and two Windows computers. It replaced Resilio Sync and Syncthing for me.

Resilio and Syncthing worked for years, but with significant issues:

Conflicts and conflict resolution. Syncthing had a tendency to imagine conflicts when there was no reason to think so. Something as simple as adding content to a file might cause Syncthing to complain and ask me to manually resolve a conflict, which would just be me accepting the additional content I wrote. Other times, the conflicts would be complex, and I would be forced to use a text editor to resolve conflicts like I was writing code. This costs me lots of time and takes me well out of writing flow
Resilio Sync has had somewhat the opposite problem. I could change a file in two places, and instead of telling me to merge things together, Resilio would simply overwrite the file with the oldest date with the file with the newest date, even if the old file has more content. I have lost significant content this way.

Since 2025-01 I’ve switched over to Obsidian LiveSync. It has worked almost flawlessly to keep Obsidian synced on my 3 devices.

I have not had to resolve a conflict even once. I have lost content just once - I opened my daily note on my phone when I had already created on on my desktop, before the desktop's version could be copied over.

Since moving to LiveSync, I can simply write and think about writing instead of thinking about syncing.

Obsidian LiveSync itself is free. It requires CouchDB set up somewhere such as Fly.io. Fly.io requires a credit card and may cost money. For small vaults under 1GB and small usage this should be free. Vaults that are over 1GB or sync many megabytes a day would probably incur a cost.

It was somewhat tricky to set up. I considered following the more manual instructions, but ultimately chose the quick start method in the readme using Fly.io. Again, I’m a software engineer and if this document looks scary then this is probably not the approach for you.

My vault is around 12000 files, and LiveSync’s initial setup took a long time. I foolishly did this on a laptop that kept going to sleep during the process, and in retrospect I should have started this on my desktop PC, or started with a fresh empty vault and gradually moved files into it instead.

If any of you have been frustrated trying to synchronise Obsidian between multiple devices, this may be an option for you.

Inflow

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Official Inflow website

A smartphone app and service to provide affordable Cognitive-behavioural therapy for those with ADHD.

After installing, the app has you fill out a form about your ADHD. You should ideally know in advance if your ADHD type is Inattentive, Hyperactive-impulsive, or Combined.

Costs $48/month

GNOME

2025-09-25T05:52:09.685Z

GNOME

A linux desktop environment that seems to gather strong opinions.

Comes by default on Ubuntu, and was what I used in my experiment, My experience with Ubuntu in 2020.

Some say GNOME is amazing. I use it only because it is required to use PaperWM.

Factorio devs klonan and raiguard in 2024 said its dumb:

Most desktop environments will allow windows to supply their own decorations if they wish but will provide a default implementation on the server side as an alternative. GNOME, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that all clients must provide their own decorations, and if a client does not, they will simply be missing

This prompted some responses

Digital Garden plugin

2025-10-12T18:47:59.662Z

Digital Garden by Oleeskild

Official website and Github

An Obsidian plugin that creates a website (or digital garden) from your Obsidian notes. Has many advantages:

Very few changes needed in your Obsidian files
Supports many plugins, such as Dataview and Excalidraw!
Free! (but you should really consider donating )

It has some disadvantages:

WebP images do not work.
Note titles are always from the filename. I often want to set my titles in the note, because filenames have character restrictions such as no question marks.
Tags are a bit weird. Clicking a tag takes you to the search window with the tag prepopulated. I'd prefer a tag page! Thankfully, this is very easy to do myself.
The page templates have poor web performance. Their PageSpeed Insights score is just 37/100 as a result of enormous CSS and JS files. I improved performance in the website you're looking at now, but do not expect this if you use the plugin yourself.

Software engineering details

Setting up the plugin requires a Github repository to be created in an account you control
A Github Access token will need to be stored in your vault. If you have any Cybersecurity experience you should know this token should be treated with great care.
Publishing or updating a published note causes the plugin to make a new commit in the repository.
The project uses Lucide icons, which is the same package used by Obsidian.

Qwik

2025-08-21T21:37:19.513Z

A framework designed to build websites with excellent First Input delay.

Official website
Github

Made by creator of AngularJS, Misko Hevery. Learn with Jason hosted Misko for a video to make a quick app with it.

Uses JSX for templating.

Front End Masters has a 3h48m course on it

Adoption and sentiment of Qwik is not great

In 2023, Technology Radar recommended assessing Qwik:

One of the challenges of creating a rich, interactive browser-based experience is in minimizing the time from first request to full user interactivity. When starting up, the application may need to download large amounts of JavaScript to the browser or execute a lengthy process to restore application state on the server. Qwik is a new front-end framework that serializes application state so it can be rendered on the server without rehydrating and replaying application logic. This is achieved through resumability, which involves pausing execution on the server to resume it on the client. Like other newer front-end frameworks, such as Astro or Svelte, Qwik also speeds up initial page load times by minimizing the amount of JavaScript to load. In Qwik's case, the initial application download is primarily HTML, with most JavaScript loaded dynamically on demand from a local cache, if possible.

But in 2024, State of JS shows a decline in Qwik adoption.

I likely will not be trying it out for any of my own projects.

Springboard

2023-03-03T08:34:07.811Z

Springboard

Springboard is a boot camp for UI design and UX design, that is complete shit. If you want to become a designer, study on your own - it's the same material, for free.

We wasted tens of thousands of dollars on this and all the material is just online blog posts you can freely access anyway, and those blog posts aren't even good.

They claim a job guarantee as a way of giving you some security, but it is bullshit. They'll set you up with a trap - that the guarantee only applies if you can make enough LinkedIn connections. Oddly, the guarantee makes no requests to refine any particular UI/UX skills.

If you really must study at Springboard, opt for their deferred tuition payment option, where they get nothing until you get the job. DO NOT choose the month-to-month option, which is what we chose. Note that choosing deferred tuition is a form of loan and will require them to do a credit check. We were scared of this and is part of why we chose month-to-month. Don't be scared of it - the alternative is worse.

typography

2025-10-12T07:55:19.109Z

Typography

[!QUOTE] Ellen Lupton
Typography is what language looks like.

Typography is the art of choosing typefaces and arranging type to make written language legible and beautiful.

Made up of some smaller skills, including:

Font selection, particularly how to choose readable fonts for body and titles.
Typesetting, including font size, leading, justification, and line length.
Punctuation, particularly how to avoid ugly approximations.

My favourite examples

Pentiment is a videogame featuring phenomenal typography as a way of communicating character social standing. The game created original Typefaces just for the game, by studying historical texts, which you can read about in great length in the Lettermatic case study.

Typewolf features many interesting typography examples on his website.

Envato Tuts has a free 39m video with some interesting examples like the serif and script above.

Other people's resources

If you're a complete beginner, I think doing exercises is the fastest way to learn the basics. This interactive type tutorial is the best I've found.
Matthew Butterick's Practical Typography is one of the best free online manuals on typography. I re-read it and refer to it often.
Typewolf's guides are precise and effective. If you have money, he has a $399USD Flawless Typography Checklist which I have purchased.
Donny Truong's Pro Web Type is a quick and practical guide to improving Typography for total beginners
Gwern Branwen has a very long article talking about the design of his website.
The Elements of Typographic Style. A well-known classic in the industry. If a book seems too old fashioned, someone reinterpreted it in The Elements of Typographic Style applied to the web
Legible Typography is a free ebook containing research on typography
UI Typography is a free book

Typography is improved greatly with colour selection for UI.

A core skill for UI design, and in my opinion, a crucial but underrated skill of UI engineering.

Knowing about Penmanship and calligraphy would probably help - though I wouldn't know as I'm bad at both!

scrollable tiling window manager

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Scrollable tiled panes

A UI pattern, where the user can create new Panes or Windows that take up the full height available, and display to one side. An alternative to Tabs.

Advantages

Maintained context. Often when you go from one link to another, you still need information from the original. Opening things in a new adjacent pane helps you keep context. Opening a new tab moves the original content out of sight.

Examples

On the web:

Andy Matuschak's notes

For your computer:

Obsidian features a "stack tabs" mode.
PaperWM - A window manager for Linux GNOME. My personal favourite
CardboardWM - Have to build yourself, so perhaps only software engineers and hackers should look. Made by a uni student with no time. This blog post details one person's adventures with it.
EndlessWM Another window manager for Linux, but Wayland. No updates since 2020

flick stick

2025-09-07T19:46:16.956Z

Flick stick

An alternate mode of using an analog stick on a game controller, for first person or third person 3D games. Flicking the joystick in a direction faces the character or camera in that direction. For instance, flicking upward will do nothing. Flicking left turns the character left. Flicking downward will turn the character 180 degrees.

Invented by Jibb Smart.

Should only be used on controllers with a gyroscope such as the Dualshock 4 and Joy-Con so you can combine with gyro aiming.

A valid criticism of flick stick is that it takes too much setup and is very brittle. A lot of work is required to get it working in only one game, and the same work will have to be done for the next game. Subtle changes in configuration can make flick stick less viable or non viable.

A simpler alternative to flick stick is a touch pad that only registers X-axis movement, such as this 3D printed controller.

easy mistake

2025-08-21T18:08:35.602Z

Easy mistake

[!warning] Don't call them rookie mistakes or stupid mistakes
Calling people out for "stupid mistakes" or "rookie mistakes" tends to result in people getting defensive, then concealing their mistakes instead of fixing them. Thus it is advisable to use the term Easy Mistake.

Unlike the many other kinds of mistake, a easy mistake is one that is:

Indisputably bad amongst skilled practitioners,
Invisible to the one making the mistake,
Habitual or recurring, because it is invisible,
Trivial to prevent in future, once revealed. That is, the solution doesn't require excessive talent, money, or effort to remedy.

Some examples:

In PKM, naming files "Untitled" or "New file", resulting in files getting lost. Easily solved by writing titles that summarise the content, and continuing to update the name over time if needed.
In chess, making moves that give the opponent significant advantage without gaining any advantage in return. Often easily solved with a blunder trainer.
In office work, getting distracted for hours doomscrolling instead of working. Often easily solved with body doubling or pairing.
When something breaks in a high stakes environment such as a factory or company, assigning blame or even shaming employees, resulting in things being concealed, eventually causing even greater problems. The alternative is blameless culture.
In team videogames, running into battle one player at a time, instead of as a unit
In videogames with item economies, buying items that are definitively or measurably bad, perhaps because the player "likes them" or simply has never thought to try others. An alternative is finding Item Tier Lists, or reading character build guides.
In videogames like Overwatch, standing too far from the game winning objective, instead of close enough to secure it

Easy mistakes are embarrassing

Particularly in team video games, if you are spotted repeatedly performing a mistake, you'll likely be called stupid, told to "stop being stupid" or some variant. This counterintuitively often results in you continuing to repeat the mistake, perhaps because of performance pressure from so many team members now looking at you, or to spite the person who called you stupid.

It's important in rectifying stupid mistakes that they are not personal failings, but the result of chains of events and reactions leading to an outcome. For that outcome to not occur, the chain of events and reactions must change

Some people refuse to do drills that could improve their easy mistakes because they believe the drills will make them look foolish. One coach solves this by making students foolish on purpose, citing that looking foolish in front of the team is better than looking foolish at a competition^[1]

Fixing easy mistakes improves skill dramatically

Easy mistakes are frequent amongst almost all skill practitioners, usually even up to 90th percentile. Thus, identifying and fixing stupid mistakes is among the simplest and most important methods for becoming top percentile. Some examples of rapid skill ascent from fixing easy mistakes:

In chess, using a blunder trainer can typically improve ELO by a few hundred in a few months
In Brotato, identifying my game-losing item choices took me from frustratedly losing Danger 5 to winning easily.
In DotA 2, switching from moving as an independent player to one only in formation with other players took me from 50% win rate to winning next twenty games in a row, easily.

How to identify easy mistakes

The invisible nature of easy mistakes to the one performing it makes it difficult to self identify. Two options exist for identifying easy mistakes:

The practitioner becomes an observer. Record your performance, then watch it later.
Ask someone else to observe. This should ideally be someone more skilled in the same domain, but even someone who seems to be less skilled can still make useful observations simply by being an external observer.

display font

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Display font

A typeface designed specifically for display usage at large sizes, to attract attention and create emotion.

Can be identified by the keyword Display in the name, such as Playfair Display. Occasionally may have these keywords instead: Headline, Banner, Poster, Big, Titling or Fine.

Display faces tend to have higher stroke contrast, tighter spacing and more intricate details. They are more likely to have excellent ligatures.

Using Display type in your body text is a mistake

This line you are reading is in a Body or Text typeface, designed to be used in this way.

This paragraph, is using a display typeface instead. You may notice it feels odd to read, especially as you read each line. Rather than adjusting to it, reading words likes this feels increasingly uncomfortable.

Using display type in body text causes a variety of issues:

The letter spacing or tracking, which is ideal at large sizes, is too tight for body text.
Some details like serifs are too small and are lost
Languages, weights, styles are usually fewer
Strokes can seem to disappear, making text very hard to read. Lowercase e becomes c.

digital garden

2025-08-19T21:56:22.250Z

Digital garden

A digital garden is a website, with content on multiple pages which link to each other.

Differentiators from blogs

A digital garden is very similar to a blog.

Both are available on the public internet for anyone to see
Both are written by a single person (most of the time)

But digital gardens have a few differences:

Always growing. All notes are permanently a work in progress. Blogs prefer the philosophy of keeping a post exactly the same after it is published, and if it is changed, a very prominent addendum should be added. Digital gardens don't bother with this limitation, and relish making changes at the whim of the author. A signature of digital gardens of the 90s was Under Construction GIFs.
Link first organisation. Blogs have a chronological timeline view, with recent posts at the top. A digital garden generally have no such timeline, favouring Links from one post to another as a way to get around. Some even have backlinks.
No ads or upsells. Blogs frequently have ads, or are written so the author can sell you another product. Digital gardens almost never have ads or sponsorships, and never bother with SEO.

Why the funny name?

Digital gardens were greatly motivated by the observation that simple handwritten notes tend to rot. Some time after they are written, the author may lose them entirely, or forget what the note means.

By contrast, a digital gardener prevents notes from rotting by treating their notes like a living thing.

Notes tend to begin as rough scrappy notes that need to be delicately tended to, like Seedlings. If you do not quickly refine your note into something more useful, you forget what it means and it dies, just like a seedling 🌱.
As you tend to a note by writing in it, you form threads of thought, like branches, forming a tree 🌳.
A robust tree, when re-read, can lead to you thinking of new ideas, or fruit 🍎. From these fruit you plant new seedlings, and the cycle continues.

The earliest occurrence of the term "garden" for online notes may be this 1998 essay, Hypertext Gardens.

Maggie Appleton wrote and illustrated a much better analogy of digital gardens here: Growing the Evergreens, and another essay, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.

backlink

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Backlink

A link that allows you to go visit sources that link to the file you are currently looking at. This blog has a list of Backlinks at the bottom of every page. If you are on a computer with a mouse, you can hover over the backlinks to see the context. I strongly believe that Backlinks should include context.

Called a Linked Mention by Obsidian, similar to how social media notifies an account when it is Mentioned.

Less Wrong calls them Pingbacks

Other people's opinions

By far the best article I've found about backlinks is Maggie Appleton's online essay: A Short History of Bi-Directional Links. Here's a snip:

The idea of the bi-directional link goes all the way back to 1945, when Vannevar Bush dreamed up the memex machine. Vannevar outlined this hypothetical gadget in an essay in The Atlantic called As We May Think. He wanted a system capable of “associative indexing... whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another... (so that) numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail.”

Zettelkasten.de says backlinks are bad:

Backlinks are bad linking on crack and steroids. Not only do they not provide any link context other than the title, but they are placed automatically. That means that your system (executed by software or habit) provides you with more choice and therefore more cognitive load. On top, you will check the backlinks if provided and that creates opportunity costs. Reviewing the backlinks is time you don’t spend with other cognitions. You will spend more time with wasting time.

I don't agree, but you might be interested in his article regardless.

Zeigarnik effect

2024-08-05T16:33:27.373Z

Zeigarnik effect

Phenomena where interrupted or incomplete tasks are remembered better than completed ones. Each task started creates tension.^[1] This tension can manifest as involuntary thoughts about the task.

This is a double edged sword. The involuntary thoughts can initially create a strong desire to complete the task, likely increasing productivity from the increased attention. But, if the task remains incomplete for a long time, the constant thoughts induce stress over time, which can lead to burnout and procrastination if the stress is too great. If you’ve found yourself in bed at 2 am with your brain screaming at you about that thing you didn’t do, that’s a Zeigarnik moment.

The Zeigarnik effect can subject us to the “Tyranny of the Shoulds”, in which we compare who we are (the real self) with who we feel we should be (the ideal self). If we leave tasks unfinished for too long, the resultant rumination or anxiety can impact our self-esteem.

Psychologists Oliver Weigelt and Christine Syrek discovered that leaving assignments unfinished over the weekend causes people to ruminate on the unfinished tasks, which leads to difficulty switching off from work.

All together, the Zeigarnik effect combined with long and difficult tasks forms a negative feedback loop, while combined with shorter tasks forms a positive feedback loop.

Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik reported this effect in 1927.

How to make the most of the Zeigarnik effect

Tasks should not be assigned or delegated until they:

have a defined "finished" state
that state can be achieved comfortably achieved within 3 days.

On finished and unfinished tasks.
Bluma Zeigarnik ‧ 1927 ↩︎

Tyranny of the Shoulds

2024-08-05T06:09:41.491Z

described by psychotherapist Karen Horney in which we compare who we are (the real self) with who we feel we should be (the ideal self). If we leave tasks unfinished for too long, the resultant rumination or anxiety can impact our self-esteem.

PKM

2025-04-22T05:48:59.445Z

Personal Knowledge Management

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the skill of managing one's life knowledge, secrets, and experiences so that they can be reused, relived, and built upon to create other work. A complete system of tools and techniques for managing knowledge might also be called a "second brain".

We live in an age of Knowledge work rather than physical labour. If you are reading this, you are likely paid to type things on a keyboard, make gestures with a mouse, and speak into a webcam. In this age, managing large amounts of specialised information to deliver tailored information is the key to success. In such a system, I believe the keys to long term success are:

Quick capture. Thoughts, words, ideas, come by and disappear so quickly. The ability to capture the important ones is crucial. This means easy to use tools that are reliable and readily available.
Resurfacing. "I wrote that down somewhere but I can't find it" is the hallmark of a PKM that has failed. Notes must be organised in a way that facilitates rediscovery, without being a burden to maintain. You may be interested in how My note organisation system achieves this.
Robustness. Good notes should survive the rigour of real life. A power outage, a destroyed computer, a company bankrupting. This means making backups that work.

Similar things

Digital gardening is an extension of PKM. The knowledge in a digital garden is the personal knowledge of that digital gardener. The difference between a PKM and a digital garden is that a garden is intended for others to enjoy, while some things are always kept separate: passwords, private life, intensely personal moments, secrets. These are well managed by a PKM, but do not belong in a digital garden.

Team Knowledge management in the form of wikis and company intranets have some resemblance to PKM, but have many additional challenges. They tend to be slow and lack any character, joy, or humour.

Interstitial journaling

2024-03-20T13:47:00.402Z

Interstitial journaling

A journaling style and productivity method. When you change contexts, write in your journal the current time and some sentences on what you just did and thought. Then write the Next action.

I have found it helpful for my ADHD as a way of engaging my Executive function. The act of typing is a kind of fidgeting, and writing the next action is executive function in action.

Tools for interstitial journaling

I do this with a Mechanical keyboard for improved effectiveness. My Macbook's keyboard is noticeably less satisfying for journaling.

I use Obsidian and Logseq for all my journaling, using a daily note template. Tony Stubblebine recommends that you do NOT go looking for a new "perfect" app or paper for this - use what you have.

Other's thoughts and experience on it

Seems to have been invented by Tony Stubblebine, in 2017

Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote about it. No date but probably around 2020-Apr-15

Similar alternatives

Bullet journaling involves using symbols and short entries to organize tasks, events, and thoughts.

micro journaling

Information overload

2024-08-05T16:44:39.745Z

Information overload

[!quote] Arthur Schopenhauer
A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative.

The state of having so much information available it paralyses the person. Effects include choice paralysis, outrage.

Caused and aggravated by social media.

In response:

Collect quotes that tell you not to do it
- The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.
- Knowledge isn't free. You have to pay attention Feynman
- Information is not truth
- If I were the plaything of every thought, I would be a fool, not a wise man.
Digital minimalism
Substitute your 24/7 feed for sources that publish less frequently, such as Slow journalism and books.
Personal Knowledge Management

Hero's Journey

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

An extremely common trope, featuring a Hero character who is called to adventure, is victorious, and returns home changed.

On Wikipedia

Evergreen note

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Evergreen Note

A note that is strong yet always growing. Popularised by Andy Matuschak and are well described on his blog. Name derived from trees that are green all year, similarly Evergreen Notes are always in season.

Principles of an evergreen note:

Have titles like APIs. I have Advice for writing better note titles.
They are always Atomic notes - they describe a single idea or have a single named purpose.
Concept oriented, usually.
Densely linked to and from other notes.
Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies Associative ontologies enable more growth than hierarchies
Written for the writer. Notes should disregard the public.

These principles mean Evergreen notes are a safe place to develop wild ideas

In my opinion, Evergreen Notes are one of the most important artefacts people today should learn how to write. Most people don't write much at all, or write things that are non-atomic, with awful titles, and never cover interesting concepts.

Opinions

are similar to marginalia in that they are one's own thoughts
but different in that it cannot connect with other thoughts

similar to memorisation in that they're connected to other thoughts, but different in that recorded in a form others can read

can cause idea formation!
can result from article capture

reminds me of commonplace book

Can too many links be a form of clutter?

ADHD procrastination

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

ADHD procrastination

[!info]
The following is my own experience and is not professional psychiatric advice.

ADHD procrastination is a cycle of anxious, frustrating, hugely effortful attempts and failures to begin and finish work that is important to me.^[1] By contrast, common procrastination means seeing the task, and choosing to do something else, typically enjoying whatever that alternative is.

For example, common procrastination might be me playing videogames instead of doing chores, thoroughly enjoying the videogames as I play. Not a single thought is given to the chores while I play the videogames.

By contrast, in ADHD procrastination I may possibly choose play videogames too, but will be thinking about the task while playing. Additionally, if I choose to do the task, I will sit at the computer, programs open, everything ready to work, but nothing is done. Entire days will be lost like this. As guilt grows, I will reject invitations to spend time with others, because I know I should do this task. I will even get angry at people inviting me to do fun things - an example of emotional dysregulation discussed later. I am not avoiding the task in the classic sense - I am expending immense mental effort trying to set myself up to do and succeed at the task. One may believe me to be incompetent, but in truth I have the skills needed to perform the task. I want to do the task, I understand the Importance of the task, I have the tools for the task, but cannot do it. I have executive dysfunction. This is ADHD procrastination.

For me, what makes this especially elusive to solve is that my executive function does work sometimes. This is where advice from neurotypical people does not help, as having intermittent or broken executive function as an adult is outside their experience. They gained executive function as they aged, so they see broken executive function as a symptom of a child who should grow up.

Additionally, when others ask me about my progress, I’d have to admit I didn’t get much done or worse, lie. This is ADHD masking.

Mistakes and failures trying to solve ADHD procrastination

Scrum. I have generally found scrum or stand-up meetings to be so ineffective, that they are wastes of everyone's time.

Guilt trip. It is highly unproductive for people around you, or yourself, to guilt trip you over how little you have achieved.

Known methods to solve ADHD procrastination

The most important starting point is to realise I am in ADHD procrastination and not common procrastination. Thus it is a problem of executive dysfunction rather than fear or laziness.

Next, the most consistently reliable method of creating executive function involves some kind of social accountability. Coworking or pair programming seem to be the way.

If no one is available, such as on weekends, I use an outlining app to dump as many thoughts about the task as possible. This often means some repetitive thoughts that I will write more than once. These are likely the more important tasks that I can choose to do now - my next action.

The difference between lazy procrastination and ADHD procrastination
Unknown ‧ 2019 March 25 ‧ Reddit ↩︎

credit card churning is a bad idea

2025-08-26T21:18:57.934Z

Credit card churning is a bad idea

Credit card churning is the act of signing up for a credit card for its rewards, then cancelling the card once the reward is claimed, ideally before the card's charges fees. Common in the USA, and mostly absent in Europe and Australia where credit card fees are lower.

I believe that most people with ADHD should not do this. Credit cards typically require a phone call to be cancelled. Those with ADHD have trouble making phone calls, and are highly stressed by upsells and social savvy. What will typically happen is the credit card goes un-cancelled, incurring yearly fees that outweigh the benefits.

What's more, credit card companies will often make cancelling difficult. For example, the American Express website does not list a phone number to call, instead telling you to call the number on your card. If you have lost the card, you are therefore unable to make the call!

What to do instead

I feel it is better to sign up for ONE excellent long term credit card with an excellent points program and simply collect miles over time, so that your normal behaviour collects rewards. For that you may want to look at The Points Guy.

announcing goals can over-inflate your sense of progress

2025-01-15T17:09:07.000Z

Announcing goals can over-inflate your sense of progress

Announcing goals, whether it is on social media or to your friends, is strongly correlated with failure of that goal.

This seems to be because the announcement gives an ego boost with very little effort. Whereas achieving the goal requires far more effort. In addition, Achieving goals is often unsatisfying.

Instead, to make personal growth, it's better to travel hopefully

You work 20% more than you can safely handle

2025-05-27T01:10:11.113Z

You work 20% more than you can safely handle

By reading this blog, you are almost certainly a Knowledge Worker. Not someone who does physical labour, but a person whose work requires knowledge, and generates knowledge.

Knowledge workers tend to self regulate their workload, and they often default to a simple strategy: start saying “no” when they feel stressed. The problem with this strategy, is that they don’t start pulling back until after they have too much going on: leading to the 20% overload that’s so consistently observed.

The overload manifests in many forms, including but not limited to:

Stress eating
Emotional outbursts
Feelings of doom and worthlessness

Potential remedies

Rather than the common 40 hour work week, knowledge workers should consider a 5-hour work day or Four day work week.

How to start saying no

You should link your notes

2025-08-21T08:57:05.114Z

You should link your notes

[!quote] Howard Bloom via Farnam Street
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

You probably write a lot of notes already, and already have Reasons to write notes. What might not be so obvious is why you should link your notes together. Maybe you've seen a lot of hype about Roam Research, Zettelkasten, Obsidian and don't get why. Here are the reasons I link my notes, regardless of app.

Links multiply reuse, and prevent abandonment

Even without links, I would re-read and refer to old writing. An old resume I would use as a basis for a new resume. An old report that got rave reviews I can re-purpose to make a new report. A snippet of code that I knew to work and would want to use again, but too small to warrant an entire version control system.

Without links, how many times a note got re-used tended to be limited. It's too much work to continually create new folders for notes, then crawling through those folders to look up a note to reuse it. Subconsciously I would use notes less and less, or even completely forgetting that they exist at all. I suspect the latter is extremely common, and undetected because it is extremely hard to realise that you have forgotten to remember something. This is a strong limitation of folders as an organisational structure, where files can only exist in a single folder. Such files put in deep folders became abandoned, never looked at again, with great regularity.

With links, I can access a file in a single click instead of twenty, which means I've found that I reuse my work perhaps 10-100 times as much as I did before. There is surely still some number of files being abandoned and forgotten, but they are far fewer now.

Links refine my writing

The reuse of my writing as a result of linking has meant I've been strongly encouraged to refine it in many ways. The simple act of linking by itself forces me to look at a note's title, encouraging me to carefully rewrite the title for better reuse. Reusing a note a few times encourages me to fix simple errors like spelling and poorly formed sentences. Some amount of more reuse encourages me to format lists, and add a hierarchy of headings. A great deal of re-use encourages me to find contrasting arguments, supporting links, images, diagrams, videos and more.

This increased quality of writing has directly contributed to my professional success and personal development. When you are the one person on a team who can write, you can lead. Technical writing is required for Engineering Leadership.

Links make writing fun again

Someone described my writing app of choice, Obsidian, as like playing your mind like a videogame. I have found this to be true. The activity of just creating links between documents I've written is incredibly satisfying, even without the visceral visuals and sound effects of a videogame. Creating a working link that clicks through to valuable content on the other side has no equal.

Additionally, it allows exploring my writing through a bouncy graph visualisation, which is so much more fun than plain text.

My conversations flow better

Many of us have had the feeling of thinking of the perfect punchline long after the conversation has ended. The French call this going down the stairs. I theorise that if you're too slow in conversation, you can become faster if you do reps of linking your thoughts together, in the form of linking notes together. Some argue that this is done better with spaced repetition, with flash cards prompting one reply, but I feel that is too rigid. In contrast, linking many notes to many other notes allows much more freedom, which is essential for flowing and unstructured conversation.

Links in journals give the illusion of superhuman memory

In my Journal, I would write about the daily goings on, and in each snippet I would link to things. That could be something totally mundane, like:

Mr Smith helped Mr White with the deployment of Our secret app.

I have written thousands of these little notes, as they happen. Later, when asked about what a person had done, I could use these links to remember what had happened, even better than that person could themselves. This gives the impression of truly superhuman memory, memory that can't be reproduced by a flesh brain.

There is no good reason to hate trans people

2025-05-31T05:20:17.201Z

There is no good reason to hate trans people

While there are reasons some people and organisations give for disliking or opposing trans people, none of these reasons withstand scrutiny as good reasons. They are often rooted in fear, ignorance, or rigid ideology. From a rational, ethical, and human rights perspective, there is no good reason to hate trans people. Hating someone for their identity is fundamentally incompatible with principles of compassion, equality, and justice.

If you need more than 6 levels of headings, you might want an outliner

2023-05-12T19:11:07.138Z

If you need more than 6 levels of headings, you might want an outliner

When writing documents, it can be useful to organise it into a hierachy of headings. Most document writing software allow around 4–6 levels of headings.

Some people have expressed that this does not give them enough levels of hierarchy. If that is the case, it is in my view that person requires either additional structure, or a different structure entirely. That could be the use of Outlines.

Outlines

An Outliner is a different tool from a document writer entirely. Where a document is fixed at up to 6 levels of headings, an Outliner allows unlimited levels of indentation, at the expense of formatting options and also an arguably ugly publishing format.

My outliner of choice is Logseq. Some alternatives are Roam Research and Tana.

Hoarding unread knowledge gives the illusion of knowledge

2025-05-31T04:58:24.337Z

Hoarding unread knowledge gives the illusion of knowledge

[!quote] Bhante Kassapa
One good line put to use, is better than a thousand captured lines.

People are frequently inclined to acquire more books, videos, articles and more than they can ever consume. The possession of these things gives the user the illusion of having already learned, without learning anything. This illusion can be so convincing it can fool others as well as yourself. This illusion is known also as The Collector's Fallacy.

Knowledge hoarding can take many forms

What is most insidious about knowledge hoarding is that doing it feels productive. There are many examples:

Collecting bookmarks to interesting articles and videos gives you a growing pile of the "work" you did. In some apps, that pile might be beautifully styled or even have automatic AI summaries.

Acquiring, arranging and shelving books looks beautiful and impressive. The more books, the more impressive.

Highlighting/underlining of text in books gives us a pile of supposedly curated high-density information:

Digital tools such as Evernote web clipper allow the easy, instant saving of whole articles to an archive to live forever. This alleviates our fear of a web page disappearing.

And there are many more examples of hoarding information.

The illusion of knowledge is strong, until it isn't

One may feel that having all of the above puts you at an advantage. And to a small extent, it does. But in all of the above examples, even the mildest of tests of knowledge will result in failure.
This is embarrassing for all concerned.

When someone sees your collection of books, inevitably you will be asked about them. You will be confronted with the embarrassing reality of not being able to answer.
Saving a bookmark to an interesting article often eventually leads to hearing about the article discussed by others, as people often encounter newly published articles at around the same time. But having only saved a bookmark, you'll have nothing to discuss.

There are bad and good solutions to hoarding

If you have found you are acquiring more than you can consume, one might consider which action to take next. There are some bad options.

One may be tempted to find a summary of the book written by someone else. This has the same problem of you not having read the work yourself, and the additional problem of now looking with the bias of the summariser.
One may be tempted to skim or speed read. The point of reading through your hoarded knowledge is to gain new knowledge. Inevitably, reading new knowledge will result in you encountering something you do not understand. These cannot be speed read or skimmed.
If it is an e-book, one may be tempted to skim it while highlighting important phrases. These collected highlights will become an unintelligible hoard of their own, and thus is also a bad idea.

These all fail because they do not address the underlying concern: for you to know a thing, new neurons must form in your brain that can produce knowledge. Forming these is a difficult process that requires directed effort.

[!quote] Old proverb
A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.

There are two general ways to form the knowledge producing neurons:

Engage in dialog about the material.
- You can share your thoughts on social media for your friends to engage you.
- You can find comment sections or communities around the material and engage there.
- You can make an event out of this, such as a book club.
- You can email the author. This has the great advantage of expanding your network and producing vivid memories, as authors very frequently reply.
Create your own material. The generation effect is a known phenomenon where information is better remembered when generated from your own mind, rather than only consumed from someone else.
- For simple forms of knowledge, you might want to create flash cards. This is well suited to simple information, such as translations of words.
- For everything else, you can begin by paraphrasing your understanding.
- If you do not understand the material, write down questions. If you do not understand enough to form questions, at least write down where you are getting stuck.
- When your understanding feels more formed, write your own notes and essays on the topic (particularly the Feynman Learning Technique),
- When you have any number of questions, notes or essays, if you are using a Linked note system, you should link your notes.

Other things that are like hoarded knowledge

A video game backlog is psychologically similar to hoarded knowledge, but having it generally does not give a gamer false confidence in what they know.

A doom pile is a pile of clutter, representing deferred work to get rid of it. This comes with feelings of guilt for not doing it, and anxiety at how hard it is to get rid of.

A task backlog similarly creates a "trauma-brag" amongst workers who talk about how much work they have to do. Simply having the backlog creates stress, anxiety and burnout, as a result of the Zeigarnik effect.

Information overload differs from information hoarding, in that overload can be caused by others as well as yourself. Information hoarding is purely self-inflicted.

Gaming PCs should have at least 4 CPU cores

2025-05-31T04:57:44.295Z

Gaming PCs should have at least 4 CPU cores

Testing Games tested a variety of games with CPU cores disabled in their video How Many Cores are Enough for Games? in 2021. They observed substantial FPS drop in a variety of low core scenarios.

CyberCPU tech counters in their 2023 video, showing as little as 4 cores being indistinguishable from 8 cores.

My own computer has 16 cores.

Feelings are not up for debate

2025-05-31T04:57:25.210Z

Feelings are not up for debate

When trying to vent feelings, it can be tempting for the listener to question if the feelings are even real. For example:

A: I feel ugly.
B: You're not ugly! How can you even think that?

This appears to be wholesome feedback, but in fact it denies the venter's feelings. This is never a productive line of questioning, and almost always leads to the inflammation of feelings and sometimes to fights.

Instead, one can isolate the feeling from the cause.

A: I feel ugly.
B: What's making you feel that way?
A: My hair always looks terrible. No matter what I tell the hairstylist I feel like I come out looking awful. I don't know how other people have such beautiful hair.

To identify the feeling, note that feelings can usually be summarised as a single word, but a cause requires many.

One can feel:

sad
angry
happy
ugly

One can think and speculate:

that your friend ignored you
that you weren't treated fairly
that rollercoaster was fun and we should ride it again

Understanding this separation between thoughts and feelings makes it much easier to manage both.

Every productivity system stops working eventually

2025-05-31T04:56:29.635Z

Every productivity system stops working eventually

One of the most important things to know about productivity routines and systems is that none are invincible. GTD, Pomodoro, Animedoro, Kanban, Agile, Pair Programming — all will eventually fail. This might be because external forces are too strong, or the routine isn't the right fit for the job, or many other reasons.

This means a few things:

You should have multiple routines.
Take note of when things fail, so that you know the limits of those routines.
Be prepared to switch routines as soon as they fail.
Forgive yourself when everything fails and you achieve nothing.
Cut yourself some slack, literally - leave days open and unscheduled.

First spotted this on Alexey Guzey's blog post, Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible

Emailing after an interview raises your chances

2025-05-31T04:51:29.933Z

Emailing your interviewer after an interview raises your chances

At a previous job, during the final round of candidate selection from a pool of 300 applicants, every candidate who advanced had sent follow-up emails after their interviews. In contrast, 66% of those who were eliminated in the penultimate round had not sent follow-up emails at any point.

Following up with the people you communicate with during each stage of the hiring process builds rapport. Every positive interaction you can make is an advantage you have over your competitors who did not, increasing your chances of getting to the next interview, and eventually receiving an offer.

Writing a thoughtful follow-up expressing your enthusiasm about the job, thanking the reader for their time and including anecdotes from your conversation shows strong soft skills. Because soft skills are more difficult to teach in the workplace, candidates that show respect, communication and active listening skills are highly sought-after by employers.

It will also make you a more memorable candidate as you will have had more communicative touch-points than those who did not send a follow-up.

I have some thoughts on How to write a follow up email.

DONE lists are better than TODO lists

2025-05-31T02:35:56.194Z

"Done" lists are better than "to-do" lists

Todo lists and their variants are massively popular, for a variety of reasons. But their popularity hides a number of persistent and consistent issues.

Benefits of a todo list

Humans enjoy creating lists. Humans particularly enjoy creating todo lists, because it seems to alleviate the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished tasks persist in the mind, and when completed they vanish. Consider a waiter who can remember an order, up until the order is completed and they forget it entirely to take the next order.

Shortcomings of todo lists

One startup that began as a DONE list, IDoneThis, discovered that adding a todo list resulted in users completing fewer tasks each day.^[1]

50% of tasks are done within a day of writing, 10% of tasks are done within a minute of writing them down

The long term outcome of a list that is emptied slower than it is filled, is that todo-lists become doom piles, or even "lists of shame". As the name implies, this causes anxiety, even Impostor syndrome from a growing belief that they are not productive.

The done list as an alternative

By contrast, a "done" list is a growing pile of accomplishment. It becomes a useful resource in future document writing, in performance reviews. In conjunction with another strategy such as a scratch pad or Time blocking, can avoid the drawbacks of todo lists while being just as or even more productive.

Some people still need to-do lists

Todo lists are still necessary - particularly for workers who are prone to distraction, such as remote workers, and those with ADHD.

Other alternatives

The Ivy Lee Method, a prioritised to-do list written once a day

Kanban sets limits on how many cards are allowed in a column

Interstitial journaling, very similar to a DONE list in that you simply write what you've been doing every chance you get

Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t
Clive Thompson ‧ 2021 July 27 ‧ WIRED Magazine ↩︎

Buying grey market software keys is worse than piracy

2025-05-30T22:20:16.647Z

If you buy software keys such as videogames from unofficial channels, you are likely hurting the original software developer. Most software developers will beg that you pirate their software instead. You also risk losing the software later if your key was bought with a stolen credit card, and the software developer chooses to void your key.

Developers tell people to pirate their games instead of using G2A - PC Gamer

G2A confirms it sold 198 fake Factorio keys - Ars Technica

Backlinks should include context

2025-05-31T02:02:11.303Z

Backlinks should include context

Backlinks are becoming increasingly popular in note taking applications, such as Obsidian and Notion. But sometimes these apps fail to supply context in their backlinks and thus make them worse to use.

For example, below in Notion you can see that the current page Horror Movies has 8 backlinks. But we do not know why. Does Caitlin Floyd direct horror movies? Is Justice Fears a Horror Movie critic? Who knows!

The equivalent Backlink in Obsidian includes some context, like this:

By supplying some context around the Backlink, we know why the link was made, and it becomes far more interesting and useful. This is so important to me, that it is part of why I chose Obsidian and Logseq over Notion.

Regardless, it is also helpful for the note to have a good title so that we do not have to rely entirely on the context. Titles are a promise of good content.

All failure is systems failure

2025-05-31T02:01:48.256Z

All failure is systems failure

It is common to blame mistakes on character, particularly when such mistakes are highly visible.

Saying that someone's work is stupid, or worse, finding its creator and calling them stupid.

Rather than helping, blaming and shaming tend to create additional problems. It is more useful for all involved to instead comment on the systems around the mistake neutrally, and redesign the systems to reduce or eliminate future mistakes.

Instead, these approaches have better long term results

Design thinking

This philosophy has a strong resemblance to Stoicism's belief that things simply "are".

Counterpoints

Some may argue that by not blaming the individual they are "getting away" with bad habits.

Some also point out that Atomic Habits attributes a person's habits to a person's beliefs. Thus the initial point that a mistake being part of a person's character seems to hold true.

Ad blocking makes the free internet worse

2025-05-31T01:03:34.197Z

Ad blocking makes the free internet worse

Using an ad-blocker makes your personal experience with the internet better. Many people collectively blocking ads makes the internet worse for everyone over time.

By blocking ads, those people have opted out of paying for free journalism. Only those without ad blockers pay the salaries of many editors, journalists and content creators. Such workers become incentivised to create content that appeals to this audience, who is older, less tech savvy, and more prone to fraud and misinformation. Over time this causes journalism to be less useful for all.^[1]

This additionally causes content creators to be forced to weave sponsorships into their content to avoid ad blockers. Or in the worst case, disguising ads as normal honest content.^[2]

What to do instead

For those who refuse to support advertising companies but want to support journalism:

Read Slow journalism, which is not advertiser-funded.
Read personal blogs which often have no ads. Maybe try My favourite blogs!
Set your ad-blocker to allow ads on sites you wish to support

Take the example of desktop web browsers. Let’s face it, unless you’re really slow on the uptake, you’ve outfitted your web browser with an ad blocker. Ha ha, you win! But wait—that means most web ads are only reaching those who are really slow on the uptake. So their dollars are disproportionately important in supporting the writing you’re getting ad-free. “Not my problem,” you say. Oh really? Since those people are the only ones financially supporting the writing, publishers increasingly are shaping their stories to appeal to them. Eventually, the writing you liked—well, didn’t like it enough to pay for it—will be gone. Practical Typography ↩︎
Substack Advertising Is Turning Writers Into Part-Time Sales Reps
Katie Deighton ‧ 2025 January 22 ‧ Wall Street Journal ↩︎

1. Claims I've made

2025-05-31T23:31:31.411Z

Claims I’ve made

claim: An assertion, usually of the form that some thing causes some other effect.

Claims fall short of universal truths or laws. Even so, they're still useful.

Should come with supporting as well as contrary links. Links can be notes, books, videos, or academic articles.

LIST from #claim AND #published

Tools to succeed at remote work with ADHD

2023-11-02T07:31:23.192Z

Tools to succeed at remote work with ADHD

Having ADHD exacerbates all the challenges and rewards of Remote work. There is no threat of office mates coming to your desk to politely break your flow, but also no social accountability.

It has been said that All failure is systems failure. It is helpful to adopt this mindset in treating ADHD, as those with it tend to blame themselves for all their troubles, leading to a negative feedback loop. Additionally, changing one's environment is non-invasive and highly affordable compared to medication and therapy. Here are some environmental changes that have helped me.

Control the noise with brown noise and wireless earphones

I have found that I am easily distracted by noise around me. Nearby conversations and construction when I'm in the office, or barking dogs and nearby phone calls when at home.

Attempting to fix this by listening to music results in me being significantly less productive, as I find myself distracted by Liking music tracks, fussing with playlists, skipping to next track when the current track becomes slightly too uninteresting.

Attempting again to fix this by using noise cancelling headphones causes me to be distracted by the sounds of my own body - I'm suddenly able to hear my own heartbeat, very small movements, even headphone cable noise if I'm using wired headphones.

Many with ADHD have reported being able to be more productive in the dull roar of air travel^[1], and I've also found this to be true. A researcher, Göran Söderlund, has done 15 studies of white noise on people with ADHD and has found people with ADHD perform better on memory and language tasks. Söderlund theorizes that in people with ADHD, listening to broadband noise somehow causes the brain to mimic the effects of dopamine.^[2] It is too expensive to book a plane ticket every time you need to be productive, but using a brown noise app is free. Mynoise.net is a free web app to generate noise, with a section specifically for ADHD. I've found the B-17 flying fortress preset to suit me well, with the radio voices turned off.

As for wireless earphones and headphones, I am using Samsung Buds 2 and Sony WH-1000XM3.

Slow your impulses, prioritise in writing

ADHD makes you highly impulsive. Combined with working remotely and having only instant messages for feedback, it is easy to impulsively reply to messages all day or flip through notifications and inboxes instead of your important work.

Some people appear to be able to prioritise without writing. Ignore that thought. For you seeing your tasks in writing is key.

Write your tasks down. Slooowly split them into smaller parts. Recombine them. Fidget with your tasks. The tasks are the fidget. You can break the task down a bit more. Why is that word there? This task should definitely be lower on the list.

And so in fidgeting with your task list you should end up with a sorted list of priorities for the day.

For tools, use a task app that allows drag and drop rearranging, and reserve a part of the screen where you can always see it. I personally keep my notes and tasks always open on my laptop screen, with everything else on external monitors.

If you prefer tactility or lack a monitor you can dedicate to tasks, you could even use small post it notes. I would suggest very cheap post it notes that you can dispose of and not feel bad, so that it is mentally easier for you to throw them away if you make a mistake. Just keep a bin nearby to clean them up when they accumulate. You will occasionally forget to clean up, and that's okay.

Interrupt-proof your thoughts by writing in a journal

ADHDers have many thoughts that can feel like they have nowhere to go. Additionally, they are fragile, and a slight interruption can cause your thoughts to shatter. By writing them down, they are given a chance to endure and become something more useful.

Additionally, if you use an app for your journal, the act of typing into the app can act as a kind of stimming, particularly on a Mechanical keyboard. The resulting writing can be used for reflection, documentation, task management and many other things.

Use an outliner for super-organisation

Outliners are distinct from note taking apps by treating all writing as Bullet Points that can be infinitely nested. This suits ADHDers in a number of ways:

Outlines are highly rearrangeable. Unlike conventional Documents in word processing applications like Google Docs and Evernote and Obsidian, Outliners expect you to rearrange and reorganise your writing heavily. An outliner's bullet points can be clicked and dragged and rearranged much more easily. This suits ADHDers whose thoughts are chaotic and go into many tangents.

Outlines are focusable. On writing a chaotic chain of thought, an outliner allows the user to choose any bullet point to focus on, hiding all others.

I recommend Logseq as a privacy focused and free outliner. In the past I have used Workflowy and Dynalist, but I feel Logseq is easily superior. Tana Inc is another outliner that is highly acclaimed, but not privacy focused.

Visualise your time

Those with ADHD struggle with time blindness - increased difficulty with reasoning about time. I personally have great trouble answering questions like

"What have you been doing lately?"
"What have you got on for the weekend?"

One tool to help with this is a Time timer, which is somewhat like a kitchen timer, but with the option to turn off the sound, making it more friendly for quiet offices.

In addition to a calendar, one technique to help with time blindness is Time blocking.

Washington Post 2022-11-14 For some with ADHD, the low rumble of brown noise quiets the brain ↩︎
PubMed Listen to the noise: noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD ↩︎

Programs, coaching, and therapy for ADHD

2023-12-04T08:53:07.461Z

Therapy and coaching for ADHD

With ADHD being a neurodivergence, the vast majority of gains in treating it will likely be in the form of behavioural change. Compared to Tools to succeed at remote work with ADHD, these take more time, focus, and possibly money. Therefore you may want to consider these once you've exhausted those options.

Reset your dopamine with a dopamine detox

With access to many sources of easy dopamine, such as social media and infinite scrolling feeds, one's baseline dopamine may rise, thus meaning you need more dopamine to reach the same baseline. You might experience this as enjoyable things no longer being enjoyable. A digital detox can lower this baseline, so that those activities become enjoyable again. One should expect such a detox to require at least two weeks.

Try Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy

CBT is specialised evidence-supported treatment for ADHD. It frequently prescribes specialised homework.

Inflow is a more affordable way to get Cognitive-behavioural therapy, at $48/month. They also offer an access program to give some people therapy for free. Check the Inflow page footer for details.

Join an ADHD program

HealthyGamerGG have an ADHD module for $20
https://www.healthygamer.gg//about/guide

Shimmer have coaches for $80/month
https://www.shimmer.care/
Is FSA eligible!

Advice for writing better note titles

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Advice for writing better note titles

People do not realise how important document titles are. I've said before, You should give your notes titles. There are many examples:

People who make no attempt at all to write titles, and can be found with dozens of documents all named "Untitled". This person often cannot find what they're looking for and blames their computer.
People who try very hard to name their documents but do not understand what makes a good title. For example, I found a wonderful guide explaining in depth how to add a security certificate to a Windows virtual machine if it was running on a MacOS host. It should have been named something like "How to add a security certificate to a Windows VM", but the author titled it simply "Windows VMs".

Thus, when you have a good document within a PKM system or even a team wiki, how do we write a good and useful title for it?

Qualities we want:

Searchability. A person who wants your document will employ certain search words and phrases, and those should overlap with your note's Title, rather than its contents.
Accuracy and Honesty. A title that doesn't reflect it's content is a form of dishonesty, and is why clickbait is so hated. Titles are a promise of good content.
Clarity. We should be able to parse a title easily and quickly to determine if it is the note we want. Milliseconds matter. Concise writing takes longer to write, but is worth it.

It's worth being aware that the goals and process for writing titles for Notes have very little resemblance to writing Headlines for Stories, Titles for Blog Posts, or Subject Lines for Emails. It in some ways resembles writing titles for Essays.

Guidelines (not rules)

Write in assertive positive form. “X causes Y” is usually better than “X fails to do Z”. For example:

Bad: Doom scrolling doesn't make you smarter
Good: Doom scrolling makes you stupid

In writing this way you may also learn to be more assertive and sure of yourself.

Phrase unproven notes as questions. Despite my previous advice to be assertive, if you cannot prove something beyond your own doubts, you should phrase it as a question.

Bad: Ability is inherited
Good: How much ability is heritable?

[!WARNING] Attention Windows users

If you are on Windows, you cannot have question marks in filenames. You'll have to infer that a file is a question, and perhaps rely on title: attributes if you are using Obsidian or Logseq.

Use consistent and correct spelling. I have been tempted many times to ignore spelling errors, but this will bite you in future when you attempt to use the search feature in your notes. Take the time to use a spellchecker and fix errors. For the same reason, you should use only a single region's spelling. Don't mix American and Australian English.

Link to the note. If you are writing in a linked note app such as Obsidian or Tana, you should try finding other notes that relate to this one, and link to them. By considering how another note is related to the current note, this puts you in a mindset to consider a usable title. For example,

There was an existing document, Run VM using Vagrant. But, I couldn't use this document as it was written for users running x86 Macs and I had an M1 Mac. In response, I wrote a document Run Windows VM on M1 Mac using Parallels, then added a link to my document in the original.
I had a note with reasons for using apps like Obsidian, called "Reasons to use a linked note system". This was precise, but felt weak and uninspiring to use whenever I tried to link it. Changing it to an imperative, "You should link your notes" made it much more fun to put in other documents.

Write the document. Titles tend to emerge from the document as it is written. You may realise on writing the body, you cannot deliver on the promise of your original title. Changing the title then becomes obvious. You may also realise on writing the title, that no single title can encapsulate all you have written. This is a good indicator that your note should be broken apart into atomic notes.

Consider characters you can't type. I am unable to easily type “Gonçalo” with my keyboard. So my note for such a person has an alias “Goncalo”.

Look at similar notes. One way to find them is in a Taxonomy of note types. You may notice interesting and useful conventions, such as How To guides beginning with the words “How to–”.

Search for it. Instead of opening a folder to reach your document, try using search to find it. The simple act of typing words into a search box leads you to think about what words might be suitable for your title.

Rewrite your titles. No matter how smart you think you are, your future self will come up with and encounter brilliance that present you is not capable of. For instance, I thought myself clever for coming up with this title:

Focus on the process, not on goals
But I later rewrote it to be this:
Travelling hopefully is better than arriving.
In addition, use a tool that does not punish you for changing your titles. One such tool is Confluence, which changes your URL if you update the title.

Anti guidelines make your titles worse

These are guidelines I've seen recommended by others, which I believe you should approach with great caution.

Move important words earlier. What is important in one circumstance may not be in another. Consider these two sentences:

Front end codebases should not use Typescript
Typescript should not be in front end codebases

Front end codebases is more important in the first, and Typescript is more important in the second. Sometimes it may be worth fussing over moving words earlier, but you can waste a great deal of time without making meaningful progress.

Arbitrary title length limits, such as "Keep titles under 10 words". have been a waste of time in my experience. Yes, it can be argued there is great satisfaction in reducing a title down to a catch-phrase or concept-handle like length. Where we waste time is the number - hours can be lost musing whether the number is 10 or 12, or if a very complex title can be honed down sufficiently.

Use Numbers. Some believe that numbers in titles makes them more interesting and assertive. I believe them to be clickbait-y and low class. Consider these examples:

73 thoughts I had while watching Game of Thrones
11 ways to build muscle and lose fat
Read faster in just 5 steps

They have some advantages, namely that they give you some idea of how large the note is. On the downside, they reek of lower class writing, and they are also not very Searchable. Who can remember to search for the number "73"? And every time we change the body we have to update the number!

Exaggerate and appeal to emotion. There are many words that are charged excessively with emotion, to the point of being upsetting or aggravating. Avoid these. For example:

Javascript is cancer
Boomer advice you need to unlearn

Name drop. It has become popular in PKM blogs and videos lately to hijack the fame of others by mentioning their names in titles. You should keep this to a minimum as doing this tends to stifle your own thinking.

Other people's thoughts

In putting together this note, I read many others. Here are some of the best:

Bryan Jenks - A structured approach to processing diverse inputs - Bryan Jenks and his Obsidian KMS

Andy Matuschak:

University of Minnesota - Writing an Effective Title

Harry Dry's top 18 rules for copywriting, but I particularly like this example:

Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche."

How to title your art

1. What is advice

2026-01-10T19:13:55Z

Advice

Related to a "How to", but does not prescribe precise steps for success. Instead describes clues, things to avoid.

LIST from #advice

ADHD

2024-06-04T04:07:57.299Z

ADHD

Short for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. At a glance, a person with ADHD may appear to others as childish and should just "grow up" and do their duties. The person with ADHD may try very hard to do so, but instead finds themselves unable to operate as others expect.

What is it like to have ADHD?

Having ADHD has known downsides

These downsides affect the person with ADHD as well as those around them.

prioritisation
- can manifest as important tasks being put aside for months or years
Deficient emotional self-regulation - the inability to vent or process emotions, resulting in emotional outbursts which then have to be managed.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
- can manifest as emotional outbursts when the ADHD person perceives themselves as being judged - whether or not the judgment is fair
Time blindness
Executive dysfunction, which combined with time blindness can result in ADHD procrastination
Interrupting
Not paying attention https://adapthd.com/topics/symptoms/8-behaviors-related-to-adhd-that-annoy-other-people/
Fidgeting
Talking too much
Failure to commit

ADHD has some upsides

Hyoerfocus permits the greatest levels of skill.

Diagnosing ADHD

Getting an ADHD diagnosis is required to get ADHD medication.

ADHD can be Inattentive, Hyperactive-impulsive, or Combined. This can be read up in more accurate detail on a more reliable source such as the CDC page. ADHD is a serious condition and you shouldn't rely wholly on social media sources for this.

Diagnosis should be done by a professional. But I'm not sure what kind.

That said, I realised I both had ADHD and that ADHD was causing me trouble when I learned I was experiencing .

tiktok adhd diagnosis wave https://youtu.be/2InkNZxf7D4

Treating ADHD

ADHD is permanent, and while treatment for its negative aspects can be effective, there is 100% regression rate on symptoms - they are part of your character. That said, the negative side effects of ADHD can be handled in a variety of ways.

10 second feedback

2025-05-10T19:22:14.897Z

10 second feedback

Ask if you can give some feedback
State the behaviour
State the impact
Encourage desired future behaviour (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback or “Can you change that?” for negative feedback)

For example:

Manager: Can I give you some feedback?
Direct: Sure, boss.
Manager: When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward?

This works because A warning before stress, reduces the stress

Caveats:

If you are angry, that will show, and undermine the intended effect.
Are you focused on the past instead of the future (i.e., reminding them about something they did wrong or punishing them)? If so, don’t give the feedback.
Are you able to let it go? If not, don’t give the feedback. In other words, if you can’t let it go in terms of how you feel, you should let it go by not giving negative feedback. If you feel an urge to deliver feedback, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons.
You cannot use this for negative feedback until you've had at least few months of giving positive feedback. Once you begin supplying negative feedback, you should give at least 3 times as much positive feedback. Ignoring this rule will build resentment and cause fights.
Some think step 3 State the impact may start an argument, and that it should be omitted. I think if there's a risk of an argument the entire process shouldn't go ahead.

I found this originally from this blog post, which in turn found it from The Effective Manager.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25221812

Hung-Su's clues

videogame

Videogames

my favourite magazines

My favourite magazines

The list

The contentious

career

board game

Board Game

Things for board games enthusiasts

Board game events

Upgrades and accessories I recommend

My experience with Ubuntu in 2020

My experience with Ubuntu in 2020

Things I liked and will miss

Things that gave me trouble, but are not deal breakers

Things that forced me back to Windows

Verdict

Some other interesting people and their Linux experiences

Linus Tech Tips said I should build my own home theatre

Linus Tech Tips said I should build my own home theatre

Second hand means a chance of failure, and no returns

Second hand audio costs less than new, but more than you'd think

Home theatres take a lot of space

The end result - they sound great and cost less than new

blockquote

Blockquote

Pretty examples

How to implement

People against Blockquotes

Why publish notes

Why you shouldn't publish online

Why you should publish anyway

Why I treasure note taking

Why I treasure note-taking

It connects me deeply to people

It blocks distractions, allowing active listening

It protects me from rumination

Notes accumulate, memory fades

Zoom recordings are unsearchable and slow

Writing is thinking

Google isn't good enough

Notes compound in value

Titanfall 2

The Spell Brigade

The Spell Brigade

Streets of Rogue

Return of the Obra Dinn

Pentiment

PEAK (2025)

Necesse

Mother 3

Final Fantasy 7 remake

Elden Ring

Why the game is fun

The soundtrack shapes mood perfectly

Not so fun things

Fun things outside the game

Stuff I personally enjoyed

Videos

Co-op

Stuff I haven't tried or understand

Merchandise

Glitches

Game Engine

Tips for winning

Use a fun and strong build

Do lots of Critical hits

Learn to dodge and jump

Learn to parry

Bosses

Diablo 4

Diablo 4

Brotato

Stupid mistakes I made

Baldur's Gate 3

Baldur's Gate 3

Absolum

punctuation