I was tagged by Dom Corriveau to participate in this challenge, and the questions looked like a ton of fun!

Taylor Swift had 26.6 billion streams on Spotify in 2024. Twenty-six billion, with a B. That’s about 40 streams per monthly active user according to Spotify’s latest financial statements. Even if the streams were evenly divided across all of humanity, that would still equate to around 3 streams per person. Over three billion people use a meta product on a daily basis. Google handles almost 6 million searches per minute. We live in an age of planet scale. Ignoring the ethics and moral quandaries of having companies this big, I want to address how this mentality of planet scale has seeped down into us as individuals. We think we need to reach that audience to be relevant. We’re convinced that any business venture that we start has to explode to be a success. We dream of traveling to all seven continents to feel like our life’s adventure is complete. All around us we see and hear famous people every day, because, well, that’s the definition of famous. That almost certainly will not be you or me (unless Taylor you are reading this, in which case… hello I guess?). Those who we treasure most are likely only known by a handful of people, and it is this interconnected network of relationships that makes a globalized society truly beautiful.

This year was pretty big on the OS front. I switched to Linux and from iOS to GrapheneOS for the first time. For anyone thinking of taking the plunge, go for it! Habitica also got dropped in favour of Harsh. I’m looking forward to now keeping track of this app list as the years go by and seeing what changes and what stays consistent.

I stumbled upon a cool repository for cheatsheets aptly named “cheat”. It enables the user to store cheatsheets in a series of directories and then access them through cheat {cheatsheet_name}. While there are a ton of community created cheatsheets, I wanted to see if I could get the tool to work with my online notes, which are written in markdown and organized through mkdocs. I was able to get some elements to work quite well, although some functionality will take more work to development.

This blog has evolved a lot since it began. I have learned new things over that time, and used what I have learned to improve the blog along the way. One thing quickly became obvious; having a personal website means a never-ending journey of tinkering and exploring. Having a space that you can truly call your own is a rarity on the modern web. Interacting with readers has been a blast. There are so many small blogs around the web if you know where to look, and reading posts on those blogs is now one of favourite activities. Blog posts can encompass anything from brilliant solutions to specific problems, to more mundane thoughts about which video games someone played in the past week. All of it is awesome.

Publishing a blog post should be quick and easy. While in the zone and writing down an idea frantically, it can be easy to slip up and make an error. This could be an invalid link, repeating a sentence, or spelling a word incorrectly. While nobody is expecting an immense level of editorial scrutiny, most readers would prefer a blog free of those errors over one with them. Fortunately, there are some nifty tools that can help with the proofreading process so that those errors are quickly caught before hitting publish. These tools will work for any editing and publishing flow where there is access to the files from the command line.

Happiness wasn’t always discussed so fervently. Since 2000, the word “happiness” has increased in usage by about 300% according to Google’s ngram. There are books about how happiness gives you an edge professionally, how there may be an equation for happiness, or adventures in forcing happiness to happen. We are drowning in a chorus of happiness. If you’ve come here for an answer on how to be happy, I don’t have it (sorry), but I did want to reflect on one pattern that I have noticed in myself over the past decade; I get excited for something thinking that it will change my life, only to be let down when the event occurs. Formally known as hedonic adaptation, we always seem to adjust to whatever our circumstances allow. What if we kept better track of that phenomenon? Perhaps we wouldn’t get so surprised the next time something disappoints us, or learn to more accurately forecast just how happy some future event or thing may make us feel. The journal of great expectations is a technique/tool to do just that.

Last week, I received an ominous email with the subject line “Notification of Account Removal” from a company that I get podcasts from. “This is a note to alert you that your account has been removed, if you believe this action was taken in error, please contact us at this address”. My first thought was phishing, but this was also the second time I had received an email like this from this company. Something that I was doing was mistakenly triggering an automated system to flag the account (besides using an email alias, I cannot possibly think what else it would be). While I would have been okay just letting the account close, I was also curious if the support agent would have an explanation, and I was a little bit upset at the insinuation that I was doing something wrong. If I was doing something improperly, I also wanted to know so that I could correct it and stop causing them problems. After going through the process, no explanation was given, and instead of having the ability to restore the account, they just unlocked the email so that I could start fresh. In this instance, not a big deal, but if that account was actually important (on the level of an Apple ID or Google account for most people) I would have been pretty upset. It was a harsh lesson that we don’t actually control some of the biggest parts of our digital lives.

This week, The Verge launched their subscription offering. For $7 (USD) a month or $50 (USD) a year, subscribers get access to all articles, including the newsletters and less ads. The best part of this offering is more subtle; full-text RSS feeds[1]. In a feed reader, there are no ads, and you can read the articles in whichever style you like. Furthermore, all your articles come to you in one chronological feed, so there is no need to hop between all your favourite websites. Even better, with the full-text available to your RSS reader, you can easily save the article to your favourite read-it-later app. You get complete control, support the journalism you value, and move the needle away from a web focused on advertising and algorithms. This is the future we should be pushing for.

After quite a bit of hesitation, I recently picked up A World Without Email by Cal Newport at the used bookstore. Internally, I was bouncing back and forth between curiosity and an expectation that it would be like every other productivity book (i.e. leaves an empty shallow pit in your stomach after reading it). What ultimately made me decide to purchase it was this thought: “Email, and the fast-paced work environment it exists in, is always detested. Executives know this, employees know this, investors know this. So why hasn’t anything changed?”. The book was written in 2021 and now three years later we have not had a revolution against communication systems at work, if anything they have gotten worse (looking at you, Teams). I started to notice complexity everywhere, in the terminology that we have to learn to describe any new system, to the layers of people that we often have to work through to get anything done.