For the first time in our lives, we ordered a tumble dryer. We tried to get by without one for as long as possible, but with now 4 people in the family (on of which an infant that will pee, poop and puke wherever, whenever) and no dedicated space to hang our clothes to dry other then our living room, there was no longer a practical way around it. Pretty excited for this jump in household technology and (what I assume to be a) steep increase in live quality, tbh.

One week with E. We’re now a family of four and it has been one week already. It’s hard to say how I perceived it in terms of length. It feels like it’s been months already and like it only was a day, at the same time.

For years now — I even want to say for a decade — I’ve joked that my read-later list should be called my read-never list. It’s not even a joke, but an evergreen truth: who reads the articles they save for later? How many of these articles do they even start to read? For both, I’m thinking of a single digit percentage. As far as I’m concerned and if I’m guessing the average of the past ten years or so, I must have started to read 10 to 20% of all my saved articles, and finished reading maybe 20 to 40% of them: that’s what? 2-8% of the total?

I‘m in the same boat. I‘ve been using Instapaper for the past 10 years or so. I save a lot to it, but I only read a small percentage of what I save.

However, I‘m fine with that. I don‘ t have the ambition to have „Instapaper Zero“. At the time of writing this, I have 273 unread items lying around. I‘ll probably never read most of them. But that‘s fine. I open up Instapaper when I want to read something, knowing that I have 273 items stored away that I will most likely find interesting.

This hasn‘t always been the case, but since accepting that I will not read a lot of the things I save for later, using Instapaper has been a lot more fun and felt less like work or something I have to do. Theres a few rules I have for saving, though:

• Only save things I have read a paragraph or two of and would have continued if I had the time. No saving based on interesting headlines.
• No news. By the time I get to read them, they‘re old and not of interest anyways.

I didn't mean to. I had it in the back of my head for a few months now that I had to do them, but I did not plan on doing them today. I just wanted to check out taxfix and how it feels. Entered some data, then some more, then I was done. Great product design on their part, I guess.

This is like a surprise gift I gave to myself, because now I don't have to worry about it anymore. What a great day.

Interested to see how far off their calculations are from the actual return. Reviews online seem to be 50/50 on either "I got exactly what they calculated" and "They said I'd get 1k back but I had to pay 800 instead".

It took me almost exactly three years of the pandemic to get Covid for the first time. We were very cautious during the pandemic and I'm happy we were and I got infected that late. My symptoms were similar to a (very nasty) cold and I'm not sure it would have been that mild with earlier mutations and fewer vaccinations.

I got it on a business trip to Portugal, where a lot of people from different countries were together for a prolonged period of time. I knew it was risky from the beginning and it happened. Can't hide forever, I guess.

After three years of Covid, there really is not much news to me having it. I basically just wanted to jot this down for my future self as a note.

Since I'm back home, I'm isolating away in my daughters room to not get the family sick. I spend a lot of time on the computer and my wife places food at the door. Basically feel as if I'm 14 again.

My symptoms are gone for a few days now, but my tests just don't seem to get negative. It's day 12 now since I noticed first symptoms. Hope to get out of here soon. Also, my daughter want's her room back.

Update (16th April): I finally tested negative on the evening of the 11th. I experience some fatigue currently, am tired a lot quicker than usual. Focussing is a little harder than usual.

I’ve added a bookmarks section to this site. This happened for two reasons:

1. I wanted to have a bookmarks section for some time now
2. I wanted to see if I could build something CMS-Like myself that would make it easier for publishing content on this site.

Number 1 is rather self-explanatory, so I’ll focus on 2 here. I’ve tried out TinaCMS for these notes in order to make it easier to publish them, from any device. And it surely was a good step in the right direction (it’s a lot better than editing markdown files on my MacBook).
But while it was an improvement, it also did not feel like the optimal solution. Writing on my phone is not really possible and I have to wait for a deploy to make sure everything worked fine.

Quick sidebar: You might think that publishing on a phone is stupid and nobody wants to do it. I thought so too. But after building a blog based on Notion, it was just so nice and easy to write and publish that I found myself jotting down quick thoughts even from my phone. I want this kind of frictionless process for everything on my site.

So I used the new bookmarks section to try and build a small CMS into my site that I have a lot of control over. It’s build in Next (like the rest of this site) and uses Planetscale & Prisma for all things data and Clerk for user authentication. This is also a stack I wanted to try for some time, so that was even better. Te setup is not perfect currently and I’ll have to do some more tweaking, but it will be enough to get a feel for it.

So I now have three different way of managing content on this site. My OCD is screaming at me, but I’ll endure it in the name of science. Or something.

Needed to hear this. Key takeaways:

• Keep things as simple as possible
• Focus your time and energy on learning to program instead of configuring tools
• "You're not Primeagen. I'm not either. We have shit to do"

I feel like working on configuring my setup is giving me the illusion of doing something productive, but in the long term, the benefits it gives me in contrast to working on a hard problem are simply not there.

Timo:

Maybe we sometimes try too hard to offer some kind of education or to present ourselves as experts? At least I sometimes feel that way. But I don't think that's necessary.

I feel the same. I guess in the past years, personal blogging did kind of die and all blogs that were left were the big, professional ones. And now I have the association of "blogging" and "professional" engraved in my brain and it's really hard to make it go away.

I try to write more casual stuff on my site, but in order to feel good about it, I had to create this extra section so I don't "spoil" my other content. Which is weird, since most of the content over there isn't exactly sophisticated. Whatever, if this is the way I'm able to wrote more informal stuff on here, so be it.

After moving away from Jekyll and Netlify for hosting, that also meant moving away from NetlifyCMS. I could have implemented NetlifyCMS even while hosting this site with Vercel, but it felt weird and I never really was happy with NetlifyCMS.
It worked and was easy to setup, but it felt a little fiddly around the edges. I now added TinaCMS, first only for these notes to try it out. Really interested to see how good it works on mobile devices. For now, let's just hope this note gets through without any trouble.

Seneca, in Letter LVI:

I cannot for the life of me see that quite is as neccessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be.

In this letter, Seneca talks a lot about focus and disctractions and how it is not external influences that cause disctractions but internal ones. He goes on to state that even a perfecly still room is no guarantee for focus unless focus is created internally:

For what is the the good of having silence throughout the neighbourhood if one's emtions are in turmoil?

and

There is no such thing as 'peacful stillness' except where reason has lulled it [the world] to rest

While I think that a quite envorinment helps with focusing compared to a noisy one, I also think it's wrong to make the environment responsible for the quality of work we do (or if we do any work at all).
I see this happen to me a lot. Instead of just doing what needs to be done, I find excuses why I cannot do the work. "My collegues are distracting me" or "My child is playing a little too noisy in the background", where this is no reason to not try to do my best work.

It is harder to do the work in a loud environment, but it still is possible. But the brain loves to avoid doing hard things. It will happily accept any excuse you give it to avoid doing work. So focused work is a result mainly of the mind, not the environment we're in.

Seneca, again:

For I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things disctract it.