2025-12-07 00:30:02
My simple 3-step plan to make Workout Buddy more useful.
2025-12-06 00:15:10
A new study is out looking 28 million people who did and did not get Covid vaccines. Here's the big takeaway:
Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 […] and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality […], with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause.
Looking good.
2025-12-03 23:40:36
I know some people have problems with digital IDs, but I personally think they're very convenient in theory and choose to use them eyes open to why others choose not to. My car can use my phone as a key, everywhere I shop accepts contactless payments, and the only reason I needed to carry a wallet with me day to day was my driver's license. This is why I was so excited to hear that my home state was rolling out support for digital driver's licenses in 2025. It didn't happen until November, but it did and I set it up immediately. It only took a few minutes and went smoothly, and I was ready to embrace my wallet-free life.
Well, until reality set in…
See, I did drive a few places without my wallet, and felt free! I was a bit worried that if I was stopped, the cop would not know what to do with it since it was just released. I haven't been pulled over in well over a decade, but it was still on my mind. But okay, that's fine, it'll sort itself over time.
But then I bought some Draino and needed to prove my age. I can't flash my digital ID to the cashier and they certainly don't have an NFC reader for me to tap and prove my age.
And then I went to Best Buy to pick up an online order, and they needed to see a photo ID to validate I was who I said I was. The digital ID has no photo, and again, they don't have hardware for me to tap my phone.
So here I am, a few weeks after I got the digital driver's license I wanted, and I'm still carrying my physical wallet around with me when I leave the house. Bummer.
2025-12-02 07:28:54
Below is a version of the above video, so read or watch, whatever you prefer.
I am not really one for inspirational quotes. I don't particularly like them. I don't particularly find them inspiring, but I really do like this one from Steve Jobs:
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things, that other people can use. […]And however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better because it's kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”
I just love this idea that the world is not the way it has always been, it isn't inevitable, things weren't always like this. And it wasn't "great men" who made it this way, it was just people who did something, made some decisions, tried something, and here we are. And so because they were able to change things, you can change things. That doesn't necessarily mean doing things at the scale of like the iPhone, it means even micro-scale things in your own life that you just want to make better, you can do that. And there's so many ways in the modern world to do that.
I've been talking for a lot of 2025 about coding and getting into the development world, and I know you guys do not care about that because my YouTube stats indicate nobody in my audience cares about development, so if I want a video to bomb, I'll talk about coding, but it has really let me improve parts of my life that I really wanted to improve. I wanted an easier way to make subtitles quickly and easily from my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. There wasn't a good solution out there, so I made a good solution for myself. I wanted to be able to dictate blog posts into my iPhone, there wasn't a great solution that I could find, so I made my own called Quick Notes.
There's a bunch of the different apps I've made this year, there's a bunch of personal tools I've made, and it's really helped me create a computer and computing life that just works better for me personally. I think that's really empowering. But it's also the physical world. And that brings us to the thing I wanted to talk about today, which is my new 3D printer.
I got the Bambu Lab A1 mini, which is their very entry-level 3D printer. This blog post is not sponsored. I bought it from Best Buy on a Black Friday sale. It was $199, which gets it into the impulse buy territory for this sort of thing. Like I've always been interested in 3D printers, but I was never able to justify the thousands of dollars they used to cost, even the hundreds of dollars they cost now, but at $199, yeah, I'll give it a shot.
I am really enraptured with this product right now. I may do another longer-form video on this, but I just wanted to kind of talk about it with this idea of being able to change the world around you, and I think 3D printing really lets me do that.
A couple of the things I've been able to make so far in just the week that I've had it are a little slot under my desk where I can put my laptop so it doesn't have to sit on my desk. I just reclaimed a lot of desk space. So I'm able to put that under there. That's been really nice. I had been shopping on Amazon for a while trying to find something that would do this for me and none of the solutions were good and they were expensive. And for the cost of like 50¢ of filament, I was able to create a solution that worked perfectly for me. It's so awesome.
I made a little mount for my iPhone on my desk. I made a Steam Deck mount. I, what else did I make? I'm working on the Gridfinity solution. I have a lot of way to go here. There's a lot to print to fill up some of my junk drawers and kind of clean those up, but I'm working on that. I'm making a battery holder to hold my batteries because those are always a freaking mess. I'm working on all these little things. Building these little things that'll just make my life a little easier.
And I love that. I love that when I see an inconvenience in my home, in my physical space, if there's something I could print, just a little piece that would work to make this better, I am so here for it. I'm so excited to be able to make that sort of thing. And yeah, I'm just really excited to have this in my life. I don't know if the sale is still going on. If it is, check it out, I'll put a link to their website in the description, but yeah, I am really excited about this.
If you've used a 3D printer, would love to know in the comments what you're doing with it, or if this honeymoon phase ends. But yeah, for this price, getting into it and just kind of testing the waters, I think is really exciting.
So, yeah, that's it. Very short video today. Just wanted to kind of talk about this concept and just an excuse to talk about this because the 3D printer and the coding and stuff, this is all added up to just a year of me feeling like I'm kind of tweaking the world around me to my needs, which I think is really cool.
2025-12-01 21:30:42
Another banger from Hank Green on why Threads fucking sucks. His benign attempt to get attention from his followers for his charity-oriented store during Black Friday was served to basically none of his audience. It wasn't rage bait and it included a link off the platform: the poison combination for Threads to have any interest in showing that post to people.
Then he decided to try making snarky replies to other rage bait posts and include the link to the store in those posts. Turns out, that was a much more winning strategy for him, and he got a lot more views on those posts, which drove a lot more sales at his store. That's business in 2025, babyyyy.
If I had to sum up one of Hank's complaints, and my own personal bugaboo about X/Threads, it's that one of the main points of building up an audience online is getting the ability to do something with them. Hank Green makes things that people enjoy, they follow him, and he can let that audience know about things like sales at his store or his latest drive to bring money to good causes. This is good for users who get entertainment, it's good for the social networks who earn ad revenue on the chatter, and it's good for Hank who gets to use his influence. I think platforms like YouTube do this well (as well as Mastodon and blogs, of course), and everything from Threads to X to TikTok actively fight against this. I hate it.
Of note, he remarked that Twitter was still even worse, and made a bet how long it would take him to scroll and find some white supremacist content. It was 10 posts down with someone wondering who would have the courage to make it okay to say the n-word again.
Anyway, back in 2022 I wrote that I don't think people want another Twitter, and I don't think that was totally correct, as X and Threads have done pretty well since then, but I personally am not happy with them. Threads has the most vapid shit you've ever seen, and yes, everything I see in my feed are people talking about how terrible someone or something else is with no actual insight. X at least has some people posting interesting threads (heh) about product releases and new tech, but that's nestled in between the most racist shit you've ever seen, which the platform also rewards. Mastodon and Bluesky don't make my blood boil as much as the others, but I still wish there were more people there so I felt like I was seeing a more representative slice of the world and not a thin, specific slice.
2025-12-01 04:00:00
Mike Winters: writing for CNBC about a woman who has "mini-retired" at 37 years old:
In April 2024, Florence Poirel left her $390,000-a-year job at Google for what she calls a “mini retirement.”
I know these posts are easy rage bait, but I still find it fun to find the catch that enabled this person to have amazing financial independence. Usually it's a rich parent, but this time it's that you and your partner make a combined $1 million or so per year in salary (they don't specify her partner's salary in the article, but considering he also worked at Google and was 17 years older than her, I'm putting my money on it being at least as much as her).
So yeah, if you too can get yourself a job that pays in the top 3% of Americans (and top 1% in Switzerland, where they live) and a partner who does the same, bringing you into the top 0.4% of household incomes, then you are likely going to be in a good spot. "This one simple trick!" 🫠
I guess it is worth saying that someone who is bad with money when they make $50,000 will likely be decently bad with money if they suddenly earn $500,000, so there are some things most people can do to be smarter with money. I presume this is what this article is trying to do, but my god, they really should profile people who are remotely normal as their success stories in these things. "Here's how someone in the top 1% is able to live comfortably" just doesn't hit, you know? Wow, think you!