I love seeing remnants of the work of Buckminster Fuller. First thing I do in a new place is check what’s cool on Atlas Obscura so this entry caught my eye when I landed in Reno.
The last Dymaxion Car prototype
Category Archives: Hacks
If you’ve only got two clamps because you live in an apartment – you can hack them into any length you need.
No Laptop
Shoutout to this cool person I met in the lounge at Heathrow.
We got talking while she was setting up. She explained – wherever she goes she has a full keyboard, 2 monitors and a powerful setup. She always left her laptop plugged in to external monitors at home and she had it plugged into external monitors at work, so why not just carry the tiniest part she needs.
I love it.
If you are looking at an apartment in a building with a gym, make sure someone uses the gym equipment while you are in the apartment. Are you ok with that noise during the hours the gym is available to use?
Finally a good recipe site
Recipes have a real problem on the internet. Everyone wants to share them, everyone wants to know them. But recipes are hard to monetize. They are not copyrightable!
A narrative, however, IS copyrightable.
And while most folks just are interested in a recipe, the surrounding text is important to food bloggers for multiple reasons:
- They need places to put advertisements which they use to fund their writing
- They think Google ranks recipes with stories higher
- They actually want to share interesting information. They are excited and want to share what they know, not just edit a recipe for you, a stranger!
It’s similar to how youtubers shoot ten minute videos where they mention the sponsor in the first 40 seconds, then talk about how they will give you some information but first… They are serfs, sharecroppers doing what the lords of the internet have dictated is needed to get a buck.
But I really just want to keep and use the recipes themselves. As damage appears, we figure ways to route around it. My new favorite example is http://cooked.wiki – it’s a way to collect recipes and edit them. I’m building a little cookbook of my fave recipes there under my cooked.wiki profile.
The killer feature of cooked is not just the user interface, it’s the recipe importer. Find any recipe you like online that you’d like to use.
For example – I made this Instant Pot Firecracker Chicken recipe. It’s great because you can prep everything ahead of time, freeze it and cook it on a night when you are busy and don’t have lots of time. It’s pretty good for that kind of freezer bag meal! Here’s a screenshot of the page, I’ll see you at the bottom of that.
So that’s a LOT. But I just go to the url bar and add http://cooked.wiki at the front of the url like so:
https://cooked.wiki/https://littlesunnykitchen.com/firecracker-chicken-recipe/
And that turns into something SUPER easy to read, super small that I can save in my personal recipe book.
It’s SO user focused. Any step you click on highlights the ingredients needed – it auto scales your portion sizes and you can create a shopping list from the recipes you are going to cook.
I can only assume that at some point this will get bought by a private equity firm and plundered. Until then, I’m using it and hoping they let me pay for the privilege.
Unlockers
My new office is the nicest place I’ve ever worked. It’s gorgeous.
As part of a more intentional office strategy, not everyone comes in at the same time. For occasional “everyone in at the same time” events we have extra overflow space.
But since all the desks are shared, there’s a clean desk policy. Anything you don’t want to take home goes in a locker. You pick an empty locker, put your stuff in, set the code and lock it. When you return, unlock it with the code. Simple!
I love lockers because I can use them as dead drops. When I had to return a kiteboarding kite or send someone a present it’s more fun to put it in a locker and message them the combination. Sneaky fun!
But I just found a terrible hack:
The lockers unlock for any code.
I discovered it accidentally when I went to open the wrong locker and put in my code. It opened and I, a fool, thought “That’s so weird that they put in the address of our last office as the code!” Then I moved on, until I did it accidentally again. Then I went hog wild and tested that ANY four number opens it.
I’ve let the admin team know but I also feel the need to go put presents in every locked locker until they get it fixed.
Avoiding Dumbscrolling
Like you, I enjoy small bursts of dopamine delivered at irregular, unpredictable intervals and I’ll do nearly anything to keep getting them.
This doesn’t often align with my long term or medium term goals.
I’m trying to be conscious of how I’m spending my time, so I noticed a while ago that I was on Youtube Shorts for… hours. Just scrolling and scrolling. Sometimes laughing. It’s not really doomscrolling, just… dumb. I’m on Youtube shorts because I’m too old for instagram or tiktok.
One of the best hacks I did around that was:
- Enable Screentime on the iPhone
- Set a limit of 1 hour for youtube
- Forget my Screentime password
So now I get interrupted when I run out of time and have to go waste my life doing something else. I’m sure I could reset my screentime password and figure out how to get more, but this is just enough to stop me and get me to switch activities.
It also gives me a feeling that I don’t want to use up all my precious delicious time up early in the day, so I don’t zone out too long anyway.
Another perspective on small software
My work writes big SAAS tools. These are tools that almost make no sense for one business to write to the highest levels of quality unless they are going to sell them.
The other end of software is the business of solving specific problems for specific people – and that’s the part that I really like. My part of the big SAAS business tends to be very focused on people trying to solve problems.
When I write about the pitfalls of the Ops Developer, the other side of that is that Ops Developers should absolutely be empowered to solve problems!
I love the perspective of this page about Home Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. All the tools and practices are fundamentally about helping people solve the problems they care about and helping them find more interesting problems to work on.
Am I doing this right?
My Dad bought some clear practice locksmith toys and sent me one. I didn’t read the instructions but I think I figured out the secret. This is good right?
Managing health overwhelm
Just finished this great episode from my favorite health nerds at Wild Health.
It’s a short, very accessible episode focused on how to do “not too much” health. It’s especially good because these are really data intensive folks that go deep on lots of different tailored practices. Here they talk about not doing all the trends, focusing on what actually helps you embody what you value in your life.