Posts

The things you own end up owning you.
— Tyler Durden. Fight Cub.

Moving house is weird. Moving countries even weirder. Why? I think it’s the Tyranny of Stuff. Modern life accumulates possessions at a prodigious rate despite how minimalist you’re trying to make it. We live in an age of material abundance unimaginable even 100 years ago to our ancestors.

One thing I couldn’t believe packing up SG was the sheer amount of things I’d managed to accumulate in a short two years in the new house — even after throwing away about half of everything I owned when I moved-in. It was strange, how weirdly anxious moving out felt deciding on holding and getting rid of stuff. It was trickier than (expensively) storing it. Loss aversion kicked in hard, and I found myself one night sitting going round in mental circles trying to figure out what should stay and what should go. For many things, I really didn’t care about them but was somehow worried about discarding for the fact I might need them in some unforeseen future.

I mentioned a few posts back that I’m convinced the underlying database for my life really needs to be plain text files. Simplicty works. But, it’s surprising how few tools seem to be based on this idea.

I’d ignored Obsidian after initially checking it out because it had no live preview feature and having two panes open on a laptop took up too much real estate. Them adding the single in-editor live preview feature has completely changed my experience since I’ve hit a sweet spot between writing experience, bi-directional linking, and task management along with it being simple markdown files I control. Things painful or messy in other apps work smoothly. I’m also shocked at how good thier plugin ecosystem is already, allowing me to layer on functionality I want and not have any bloat I don’t need.

The information firehose we’re blasted with daily mocks us to focus. It consumes and divides our attention and defiantly laughs at our plans.

Pre-COVID, I outlined how I changed things up to deal with the fact I was grinding rather than progressing critical information consumption.

The reset definitely helped consumption-wise, but ultimately I want to be applying knowledge I gain. In particular, I was still having issue with what I describe as the ephemera class of information, so wanted to see if it I could improve my flow, and make sure I was extracting the important (and discarding the unimportant faster) to leverage longer term gains and opportunities.

Having fewer, better things will likely make you happier. “The things you own, end up owning you.”. Only invest in things you spend a lot of time with and where money invested will make a quality of life difference.

This is my “would buy again” list of items I’d immediately replace if needed.

(nb: I’m not receiving sponsorship or affiliate revenue for any of these things, just genuinely wanted to recommend them to people who might need them.)

I’ve had a theory of happiness since my twenties.

I’ve often wished I’d listen to it more since it’s powered the really good parts and decisions in my life. And strangely, I’ve found it holds for most people, in most places, I’ve been. And I’ve been around.

I don’t talk about it much, because I’ve often thought it’s obvious, even silly. But it’s been surprisingly transformative for people I’ve told about it who nudged their lives in its direction.

I’m convinced now that the underlying database for my life needs to move longer-term to human-readable, plain-text formats. As much as practical. And files under my control. But, it’s hard being an OG when everyone is shouting cloud. How do you do it? Why would you do it?

Sounds old school, I know… but, more than a decade of hard knock lessons about applications, apps, and companies have taught me that the only thing you can rely on is plain text representations. If you want any semblance of continuity and history in your data. Doubly-so for the metadata around your data.

A forum foray into end-of-year management summaries (with ledger-cli) had a handful of people asking about my blog setup and its speed. I realized it’s changed significantly from posts three years back (and where I was using Jekyll and Gatsby), so time for an update post.

TLDR

The benefits of this setup are:

• very fast - due to static content and CDN (content delivery network)
• cheap - pennies-a-glass: it costs me ~$1 USD a month even for very large traffic amounts
• discovery - unlike other setups on managed providers like Github Pages etc, it’s SEO-friendly
• easy-to-operate - simple, easy commands to setup and execute deploys
• zero-maintenance - other than Amazon SSL cert updates (now automatic), have not touched it in nearly 3 years now

Despite the fact I was not the biggest Go fan at the time, I tried Hugo . Hugo was blazingly fast to build, has a heap of convenience features I really liked, and a nice ecosystem of plugins, along with some decent themes. Also, it compiles/comes as a single static binary to use. While Jekyll and Gatsby are both nice, both were dead slow to generate (additionally, every node update kept breaking Gatsby or its plugins when I was using it.). Hugo also takes care of your asset pipelining for you which can be a major headache with other static site generators.

TLDR

Buy it. Very few quibbles. Great linux laptop with a commitment to 100% repairable and upgradeable is impressive and future facing. I recommend the DIY version if you’re technical. You’ll love putting it together. Works great on Arch Linux 20211101 and above.

Preamble

My daily driver has been an M1 Macbook Air. It’s been a worthy successor to the 12” 2016 Macbook I adored. It’s light, powerful (the M1 chip is a wonder), quiet as it’s fanless, has a stunning display, good keyboard (despite critics), impressive battery life, quality speakers, and a solid webcam for WFH conf calls. It’s been an excellent machine to date. This is, perhaps unfairly, I high bar to meet when comparing Framework’s laptop against. Tough competition.

Going totally remote WFH over 2021 tweaked choices. I really tried to simplify tooling and focus on process though experimented (particularly between org-mode, notion, and logseq for GTD.).

Flirting with Zettelkasten did not work for me. Spent more time curating notes then action, and wanted a system which defaulted to doing (though some ZK practices made me better at absorbing material and acting on it).

For the interested, you can see the toolchain evolution through 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , and 2017 editions of these posts as well if you’re digging for some possibly better ways to do things, especially as we’re in the new year and year two of the pandemic.

Succinctly:

1. Be open.
2. Make lotsa little bets. Collect free non-lottery tickets.
3. Always take care of your downside.

Luck is an attitude, not a thing. Be open to experiences and opportunities.

We don’t pay truck to the role of luck in successful people’s lives. I get irked with business biographies as unbalanced personality cults where luck or psychopathology noticeably outruns talent.

Smart, productive, and ambitious are table stakes these days. Luck, and having help (and being raised white, male, and in the West to be clear about entitlement), often play an outsized role in many success stories we lionize as self-made.