2025-06-30 14:20:00
For this month’s IndieWeb Carnival Nick has picked the topic of do-overs and the more I think about this topic—in the context of going back and doing something differently—the more I can’t find an instance where I’d want to give something a crack a second time. Not because my life’s perfect mind you, that’s far from it. There are many, many things I wish were different but going back and doing something again to get a different outcome doesn’t look appealing to me. Because however imperfect, however messy and unsatisfying, my life is my life.
There are two quotes that come to mind that are somewhat related to this. One is from Jobs' famous 2005 Stanford speech:
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
And the other is from Watts:
Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfil all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
Looking backwards, wishing things were different, seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Because life’s unfolding right in front of you at this very moment and opportunities to do things differently are waiting ahead.
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2025-06-29 17:30:00
It’s Sunday 29th, which means my experimental June is coming to an end. I’m aware that June ends tomorrow but I think four full weeks is a good timeframe for this type of life experiments so I’m happy to consider it done today. If you’re new to the blog and you’re wondering what the heck this experimental June is, here’s a short recap.
Back in May I decided to try mess with my life in two ways: I turned the digital consumption knob down to as close as possible to zero and I also brought back meditation into my life. The reason for this experiment is simple: I wasn’t happy with where my mind was and I felt I had to do something so the combination of detaching from digital consumption and the refocusing of my attention on creative output, meditation and book reading seemed like a reasonable choice.
I dragged Kevin into this and Luke joined as well. They had slightly different rules set for themselves so I encourage you to keep reading what they went through on their respective blogs.
To keep track of how the experiment was going we all posted weekly updates and I’m gonna leave links here for your convenience if you want to go back and read those:
Since this is week four I think it’s time to draw some conclusions. The first thing I’m gonna say is that I’m incredibly happy I decided to go through this experiment. I think messing with my life is something I should do more often because it’s incredibly easy for my brain to slip into stupid routines and then accept those new routines as the way things should be. I can give you one concrete example: for the longest time I was unable to go to sleep by myself without something playing in the background. And for my brain that was totally fine. But now, four weeks later, I’m the exact opposite. I’m now so terribly distracted by anything playing in the background while I try to sleep and I want my silence.
Over the past four weeks, I also managed to do some 4+ hours road trips without listening to anything. No podcasts, no music. And it was an enjoyable experience. If you told me that back in May I’d have thought you were insane.
My self-imposed rules were to keep the digital consumption as close as possible to zero and I did manage to get fairly close to that goal. Over the past 28 days I:
The goal was to redirect my focus towards reading books, creative output, and meditation. In terms of reading, I did finish three books in June and I’m currently reading two more. I also hit my—very low I have to admit—target goal of 12 books read in 2025. That brings me joy.
Creative output wasn’t terribly high but that’s partly because I spent a lot of time finishing client projects and after months of being swamped with stuff to do I’m now free-ish. I have one project going at the moment that is in its final stages and that’s it. That also brings me joy. Not having client projects will also bring anxiety in like a week but that is a problem for future me to deal with.
The meditation part of the experiment was a massive success. Why did I stop meditating? I’m such a fucking idiot at times. I started the month doing the daily meditation—roughly 10 minutes—once a day. A few days in I decided to start the introductory course from scratch on the Waking Up app (if you want to give it a try you can use my 30-Day Guest Pass). It’s a 28-day course and by Friday 6th I was already doing two days at once, one in the morning, one in the evening. Sunday 8th I logged 30 minutes of meditation, Monday 9th 41 minutes. The entire second week I meditated twice a day every day, spending between 21 to 26 minutes on the cushion. The third week—even though I got sick—I meditated twice on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, the other days I did one session. By the end of the week I was done with the introductory course and I was back on the daily meditations. On Sunday 22nd I changed the default length of the sessions to 15 minutes, on the 26th I pushed it up to 16 minutes. The plan is to slowly keep pushing it up until I get to 20 minutes and then stay there for a while. I’d love to get to 1 hour of daily meditation by the end of the summer and I think it’s easily doable.
I’m using the How We Feel app to track moods and I can see how the combination of meditation and lower digital consumption has impacted my mental health. I’m logging fewer high-intensity negative emotions and overall I feel a lot better.
The other thing I paid attention to was my phone usage and screen time. In my week three update I mentioned how my mind tends to seek distractions when I feel sick which was an interesting thing to observe. Another interesting observation is that my phone usage is all over the place in terms of screen time. But this morning I realized something while looking at the information available on the screen time page: the first app used after pick up is 95% of the time a communication app, either telegram, messages, or mail. But once the phone is in my hand, the muscle memory kicks in and I start doing other things on my phone even though the reason why I picked it up in the first place was for communication. And so that tells me that the reason why screen time is high is simply because of that stupid muscle memory loop. Also means I have my target for the next life experiment, more on that later.
So, with the experiment coming to an end, there are a few changes I’m gonna implement in my life based on the findings of the past four weeks. I’ll bring reading blogs back because I miss reading what all the other wonderful people out there are publishing but I am not going to reinstall Reeder on my phone. Content consumption will only happen when I’m sitting here at my desk.
I am also not going to bring back the podcast app on my phone. I decided I’m gonna leave those mostly out of my life. That said, if there’s something I want to listen to, I can do it but only if I’m also doing something useful for myself in the meantime which means either training or doing stretching. That’s gonna be my new rule going forward when it comes to podcasts.
Youtube, who gives a shit. I should probably open that site once every 6 months and see if those 3 channels I care about have posted something and then forget about it for another 6 months.
News, I don’t want them back. I know this might be considered a privileged position—and I do have a blog post coming about that—but I honestly feel a lot better without them.
As for movies, TV series, and gaming, those were already so low that it’s not even worth paying attention to them. I watch maybe two movies a year, I don’t even remember the last TV series I watched and gaming is basically non-existent at this point in my life so I don’t think there’s anything worth changing on that front.
I’ll keep meditating two to three times a day for the foreseeable future. I’m absolutely loving the practice and I really feel stupid for having stopped at some point. What was I thinking...
With June almost over it’s time to think about what to do in July—other than celebrating my birthday—and I decided that with my next experiment, I’ll try break the muscle memory related to my phone usage. When I’m at home, my phone is not gonna leave my bedroom in July. Why my bedroom? Because that’s where I meditate so it will stay there, in the corner of the room, on the floor. I’ll only take it out of the room if I’m leaving the house. If everything goes according to plan, July’s screen time should be, on average < 1 hour a day. That’s the goal at least, we’ll see how it goes.
And that's it for the June experiment. This was a lot of fun, so glad I decided to do it. Life experiments are always incredibly interesting to me, and definitely something I should do more of moving forward.
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2025-06-28 17:40:00
It’s safe to assume that you have, at some point in your life, complained about something or someone. I certainly did, more than once. I used to complain a lot more, actually. But one day I realized that the source of all those annoyances and frustrations was not the world out there, behaving in ways that didn’t jive well with me, but was actually inside me: I was the source of all those feelings.
Pick the classic example: traffic. Traffic is annoying, isn’t it? You’re sitting there, wasting time, dealing with people doing wacky shit. And yet traffic has no intrinsic quality. Traffic is just traffic, that’s all there is to it.
But what if I told you that tomorrow you’ll get paid 10000 bucks for every minute you spend in traffic? I bet you’d have a very different experience dealing with said traffic. You’d likely not be annoyed by it—why would you, you’re getting paid handsomely to be there—and you’d probably spend most of your time thinking about what you’d do with all the money that is about to come your way.
And yet the traffic is still the same. Your time spent with it is still the same and the people doing wacky shit are still doing that. The only thing that has changed is how you perceive that experience.
This is true not just for traffic but for the vast majority of the things that are annoying and frustrating out there. Things and people are not frustrating: we are frustrated by them. The feeling and the sensations are coming from us, not from them.
Now, I’m saying all this but I’m also someone who enjoys ranting about all kinds of things. But I find ranting enjoyable for two reasons.
The first one is that I’m doing it in good spirit. Sometimes I like to be a bit silly and go on a tirade against webfont licenses, browser companies, AI, or any other topic that comes to mind. But I’m doing it for fun, I’m honestly not bothered all that much by those things.
And the second reason is that I find venting in an overly dramatic way—and you should see me in person yelling at my screen—to be a fun therapeutic exercise. It’s almost like a piece of acting and it’s genuinely fun, at least for me. But it doesn’t consume me. It’s not something I carry with me.
But some people out there are consumed by their constant complaining. And it’s infectious. The more you complain the more you find and see things worth complaining about. And that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for them, it’s not healthy for the people around them.
I can’t pay you for every minute you have to face something that annoys you—I’m really sorry—but that doesn’t mean you can still pretend I do and see what happens to your mind. You might be surprised.
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2025-06-27 19:00:00
This is the 96th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have David Wertheimer and his blog, Ideapad
I love to have people who started blogging in the 90s as guests because I can only assume there are probably not many of them still out there. A lot of things can change in 25+ years and maintaining a constant online presence for more than a quarter of a century is no small feat if you think about it.
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Hi! I'm David Wertheimer. I live in New York City with my wife, two teenage children and our dog. I am a fan of the New York Yankees, minor chords and chocolate mint.
Digitally, I've been online since 1987, when I got a 300/1200 baud modem, and began calling local BBSes and chat systems as a high school freshman. After college I had just started a job in book production when I got a call to work as an online editorial assistant instead. My online hobby became a career--this was October 1995; my first professional software suite included Netscape 1.1N--and I never looked back.
I first put up a personal web page in 1996. Websites then were for all manner of creative expression, from writing to visual, textural experiences. Sites like 0sil8, Superbad and the Fray were inventing new paradigms monthly. I tried this with my own site, with middling results.
By 1998, weblogs had become a thing, and inspired by a number of early bloggers (like Jason Kottke, who had begun writing alongside his 0sil8) I put up my own and called it the Idea Pad. From there, I just kept going.
Back then, I often published multiple times a day, everything from long expositions to quick-hit notes, one-liner jokes, and broad commentary on everything from industry news to my love life. I'm still a generalist in that way. My recent posts are largely personal, but I could put out a thousand words on user experience next week if the mood strikes.
My blog proudly hit 25 years last fall, and while my pace has shifted dramatically over the years, I see no end in sight.
When I have something I want to put out into the world, whether to share an idea with an audience, exercise my writing muscles, or just get something off my chest, I'll pop open a blank page and start writing.
Sometimes I bang out an essay in one shot, which is satisfying. Other times, I'll work on a draft for awhile, with unlimited rounds of revision and reconsideration. I have dozens of unpublished posts in my CMS. A little ways back, I actually spent some time revisiting and cleaning up some drafts to share belatedly. That was entertaining, although many of those drafts are unpublished for a reason.
Which brings me to a fun, shameful fact: much of the time, I write straight in WordPress. I don't even like the editor that much, I just appreciate the immediacy. Since my blog is so personal, and I'm not garnering thousands of views at any given moment, I even tweak posts on the fly right after I first hit Publish. Awful best practices! But it makes me happy.
If I'm doing serious writing and editing, put me in a setting with steady background noise and nothing else to do. But after 25 years, writing for myself is innate. When I get inspired, I'll just pop open a Notes file or an email draft and capture an idea.
At inception, I was hand-coding posts in HTML in BBEdit and uploading them with Fetch. Then I had a home-rolled PHP publishing system, built by a friend who kept the duct tape from falling off the pipes for a long while. I eventually moved to WordPress and stayed. Plenty of pages on my site are still hand-crafted from back when I knew something about front-end code.
I've been using the same web host (and its registrar) for probably 20 years now and generally leave it alone.
One of my few memorable regrets was that I didn't register ideapad.com, and a couple of years after I started writing that became the name of a line of laptops. (I also regret my choice of domain name, but I'm stuck with it.)
One thing I'd definitely not do differently is maintain my archive. Linkrot is a terrible outgrowth of digital longevity. I promised myself early on that I'd try to avoid it, and now my kids can read my old posts, as can you, or my coworkers, or my friends from grade school who I name-checked that one time. You can find your way to things I made when I was 24. You can search Google for "furnident" and land on my post from 2002.
That relative permanence is meaningful to me. I'm not exactly proud of all my old work, but I am proud that each item is right where it was the day it got posted.
The hosting costs are the only real expense. The only money I've directly made off my website was when a little side project went viral and I slapped an ad banner on it.
I have indirectly monetized my blog in many ways, from networking to consulting to speaking engagements to book deals, and with the people I've met and interacted with along the way.
I spent some time reading other surveys and realized there's not much I could recommend that hasn't been mentioned by someone else. But here are half a dozen that aren't obvious picks and that make me go "ooh" when I see new posts appear in my Feedly:
Two-thirds of those links actually point to newsletters. One nice thing about reading in RSS is that I blur the lines between points of origin. They may be emailed, but they look like blogs to me.
Also, I still read most of the old-timers from my era that are still publishing, all of whom are still a delight: Kottke, Sippey, Storey, Gruber, Dash, Garrity, Webb, Knauss, the list goes on.
My favorite side project of recent vintage has been retired but is still great: I spent a decade-plus tweeting when either of my kids said something funny, poignant or memorable. They've outgrown it now (and we've largely outgrown Twitter) but their feeds are special.
The best stuff is back a couple of years, when they were younger and goofier.
Thanks again for having me!
This was the 96th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Dave. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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2025-06-25 23:05:00
A long time ago, back when I was a young developer, happily using Google Chrome as my daily driver, I spent a few hours messing around with Chrome extensions and coded myself an extremely simple extension that replaced the new tab with a minimal clock.
That extension has been sitting there since 2017, used by hundreds of people, with zero maintenance.
But Google being Google I now had to spend a moment figuring out how to update it in order to make it work with Manifest V3. The app is now in Google’s hands, I have zero clue how the process works and no idea how long is gonna take for the new version to show up on the Chrome Web Store. But I did my part. You’re welcome Rodrigo.
This post also doubles as the privacy page for the extension. The extension is literally 1 HTML file, 1 single JS function to make the clock work and a few lines of CSS to style the page. That’s it. The app collects no data, has no options, and there’s no paid version. If you have questions hit me up via email.
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2025-06-24 03:05:00
It’s late on Monday 23rd and I’m typing this weekly recap that I was supposed to write on a Sunday but it’s been a hectic day—today wasn’t much better, autostrade per l’italia loves me—and I was too tired to write it last night so I’m doing it now.
Week three has been interesting. Didn’t go as planned but it’s been a fun learning experience. I did manage to meditate all 7 days but for a few of those days I only meditated once, which is fine. Didn’t listen to podcasts, didn’t watch videos, and made some progress with my third book of the month. I did push live a new version of the blogroll, but didn’t post much on the blog. Screen time was back up again on my phone and that’s because I spent the first 4 days of the week with a terribly annoying seasonal flu. I woke up on Monday with a sore throat and by Monday night I had a headache, then a minor fever and a runny nose. By Friday I was already back on track but one thing I noticed is that when I feel sick my mind becomes VERY distracted and I suspect that’s because I can’t focus on work or on reading a book or on doing basically anything useful with my time and so I found myself staring at that stupid phone way too much.
But I’m glad it happened because it’s a learning experience and I have a plan for the next time I find myself stuck in bed because I’m sick.
Overall, I’m still very happy I’m doing this experiment and I very much look forward to writing the next follow-up at the end of the month because there are some important—for me at least—takeaways.
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