This experiment is all about trying to reduce my smartphone usage at home with the use of an Apple Watch. Yes, I know it sounds ironic — trying to reduce usage of one gadget, with the use of another gadget. But let me try to explain where I'm coming from.
One of the best things about working from home, is being able to eat with my kids at the dinner table. When I'm working from home though, I'm always worried about time that I spend away from my desk. What if my boss wants me to join a call? What if I was supposed to join a meeting? This is why I've resorted to carrying my phone around whenever I'm eating with my kids, or helping Coney out with Baby Caleb.
Carrying my phone around the house has renewed my itch to use it. Like when I'm at the dinner table, or by the bathroom door while potty training Davin, or when I'm carrying Baby Caleb around to give Coney a breather. It's all too easy to just pull it out and fire up the Feedly, Micro.blog or DuckDuckGo app. As you can see, it is not ideal to have my phone with me around the house. Also, how I am supposed to tell Davin to not bring his iPad to the dinner table, when I'm always bringing my phone around for lunch?
Great read on the definitions of love and mercy, and how both could affect our society.
The picture of a society without mercy reminds me of something I heard about mercy defined linguistically. The Hebrew word associates the experience with pregnancy. Mercy is like being pregnant. “Bearing with” the other in mercy requires genuine selflessness.
That's a wonderful description of mercy.
“Others are out there” means that mercy requires love as defined by Iris Murdoch. She says, “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than yourself is real.” Love initiates and invites mercy
I've come to a similar conclusion. If love is “willing the good of others” as Bishop Barron so often says, then there cannot be mercy without love. So, for our society to be merciful, we must first love each other. Only then will mercy manifest itself.
As Seneca points out, “We are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” A minute is long if you know how to use it. A week is plenty of time if you don’t waste it.
I thought this was an extremely good read. If you are a fan of Stoicism, you'll find much to like here. And even if you are not a fan, there is still so much good information here. The kind that you could use right away.
Reading this has made me interested in finding out more about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. From the quotes I've read on Seneca, he seems to be this old guy full of common-sense wisdom that he imparts in sometimes hilarious fashion. Marcus Aurelius on the other hand, was like this serious, principled and disciplined authority figure. Figures, he was only emperor of Rome at some point in time.
As one of my college professors used to say, “Giving is not giving until it hurts.” This story is a good example of that. But more than that, I think this is also an example of God knowing what we need, way before we even realize it.
Was it purely coincidence that the scarf was where it was at that exact moment in time? Hmm maybe.
But what if it wasn't? If it wasn't, then it is like the author says. It was God showing up in a scarf to comfort him and help him deal with his loss. I think this is an amazing story if that was the case.
Lastly, some sort of realization. If it was me in the author's situation, I'm not sure that I would have been generous enough to give the scarf away. But I think that's an indication of how attached I am to personal and material things in this world. Something I need to work on then.
This post is Day 43 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.
If you’re one of these people, opening a book might have become something to do when you haven’t got anything else going on, which is almost never. It’s as if you decided at some point, likely without conscious thought, that even though you love books, book reading is effectively the least important thing in your life – you’ll squeeze it in, if you can.
I have a feeling that a lot of it has to do with the smartphones in our pockets. At least, that's what I struggle with from time to time.
Reason #2: filtering out information takes effort.
Contrary to common sense, ignoring things is not a passive mental process.
Researchers have found that it takes energy to ignore irrelevant stimuli.
In other words, ignoring something still takes a toll on your mental stamina. Think of it this way, we wake up in the morning and our mental stamina bar is at 100% full. If you have to go through the day trying to ignore irrelevant stimuli, your mental stamina bar will probably be down to 50% by lunchtime. By the time you go home, it may be down to 10%. Then you end up just getting fast food because you can't think of anything else better to eat. And you crash down on your sofa to binge-watch Netflix, because your brain is too tired to do something else.
I have been slacking off on sharing bookmark posts lately. It's not that I haven't been reading new articles or posts. I'm still reading, almost everyday. I've just been so busy at work and at home that I run out of time to write bookmark posts. After reading a lengthy article for instance, it's usually time for me to get back to work or help with the kids. I've no time left to write down my reflections on the articles or posts I've read. So, going forward I might eschew that practice in favor of getting more bookmark posts out faster. The goal of my bookmark posts was always to bookmark and share what I think are good reads anyway. Writing down my thoughts on it are just a bonus.
This is a great read on the topic of parenting. Specifically, how to avoid over-parenting your child. I myself think that I could be considered a “helicopter dad,” so this read was a very good wake-up call for me.
Just figured out how to change the order of the pinned pages on this write.as powered site. The order is based off when you pin a page. The most recent pinned page shows up at the end of the list. So, then it's simply a matter of unpinning pages, then pinning them again in a certain order, right? Yes and no.
The problem is that the “Pin” functionality is only available when viewing the list of posts on your homepage. Once you unpin a page that was written say, months or even years ago, you would have to scroll back possibly through multiple pages to find the post you want to pin.
My solution to this was to first update the “Created” date metadata, setting it to “now” or today's date. Then you can unpin it and it should show up as the first post on your homepage. Now, you can easily pin it again.
If you wanted to retain the original “Created” date value, you can write it down before you start updating it. Or you can just download/export a backup of your site before attempting this.
This post is Day 37 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.
I went from an Archive Page that used an embedded Glitch app, to a static Archive Page.
Previously, I used an embedded Glitch app to dynamically create the contents for my Archive page. It worked well, but it was also slow. It was slow because every time you visit the page, the Glitch app had to wake up, then pull all my write.as posts and finally display them in a list. The slowness was a stark contrast to other pages on this site — most of which load very quickly. I also didn't like the idea of depending on a third-party service to serve up the contents of my Archive page.
So, I've been wanting to switch to a static Archive page for awhile now. My problem was that I already had over 350 posts on this site. To get me started, I needed a way to quickly generate a list of all posts on this site. For this, I created a .NET Core console app. This app would get all my posts using the write.as API. Then the app would spit out the list of all posts in HTML format. My first pass actually had it spitting out text in Markdown. But I quickly ran into issues with Markdown and <div> elements not playing well together. So, HTML it was. Anyway, once I had the output on a text file, all I had to do was copy over the HTML and paste it into my Archive page.
Update:
I added a new version, which in my opinion is much better than the first one I shared on this post. I'm keeping the first one for historical purposes, but I don't use it anymore.
Got a new PC at work some time ago. That means I lost all the EQ settings that I used with the Creative SoundBlaster E1 external amp/sound card. Thankfully I still have the EQ settings for my Audio Technica ATH-M50 headphones here. But I lost the ones for my Bose Soundsport Wired earphones. Just another reminder to save your stuff to devices/locations that you control.
Anyway, I had to start from scratch with my Bose Soundsport Wired earphones. These earphones are bright sounding earphones. They don't have that much bass to begin with. This is where an external amp/sound card with EQ settings can come in handy. Using the built-in “Rock” preset from Creative, I modified it to add more bass. The result was surprisingly good. This setting sounds even better than any of the previous EQ settings that I've made for my Bose Soundsport Wired earphones. There is now enough bass — more than enough for these earphones — but with minimal degradation to the mids and highs.
