Exploring the universe from the inside out| The Autodidacts
I’ve often felt sheepish about my personal knowledgebase: it’s just a pile of text files. Everyone else has their own self-hosted MediaWiki or Obsidian or Digital Garden and mine is stuck in the ‘90s, using text/plain without any folder structure or tags. But it| The Autodidacts
The other day I happened across a pair of Lululemon shorts on Facebook marketplace. They were beautiful, they were my size, and they were a deal: only $35! I wanted to buy them. I left the tab open for a while, then I closed it.| The Autodidacts
When I was a boy, I had a ride-on lawnmower with no blades. I’d wanted a ride-on lawnmower for years, ever since my brothers and I found and restored-to-life a John Deere we found in the garage of a rental house in rural France. (The elderly neighbour, after observing| The Autodidacts
TL;DR I made a thing and think it’s cool. Have you ever wanted to send someone a link, not to a huge and confusingly-laid-out webpage, but to the one sentence that’s relevant to them? So have I. For technical people, this has sometimes been possible,| The Autodidacts
This is exactly how I did it, and how *you* can do it without repeating my dumb mistakes.| The Autodidacts
Days, it turns out, are rather easily made. The time required varies, but trends closer to making the bed, or making a cup of tea, than to making Ravioli. (If you are crazy good-looking and smile at people who aren’t when you pass them on the street, it| The Autodidacts
Conferences can be hit-and-miss. It’s easy to go through the motions on autopilot and find the experience lacklustre. Earlier on this summer, I attended one that started out lacklustre, but then became memorable, and I realized there’s a lot one can do to influence the outcome.| The Autodidacts
This morning I got stuck in the slow lane behind an old man when I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to a Zoom meeting at my neighbourhood coffee shop. Rather than speeding up and hurrying past him, thoughts on my meeting, I did the opposite: slowed down| The Autodidacts
If you’ve ever splattered your face, shirt, counter, and ceiling with coffee and grounds when trying to operate an Aeropress coffee maker, this is how to prevent it. Blowouts happen when it takes so much force to push the water through the coffee grounds that the seal around| The Autodidacts
No matter our position or situation, life will throw challenges our way. These can either knock us off our stride and make us sulk, or be an opportunity to grow. Depending on my attitude, the same situation can shift between the “this is a super annoying nuisance” category| The Autodidacts
Reality is detailed, and attention is finite. As I get older, I find myself noticing less. I think this is partly because adults are socialized not to stare, and to pretend like they know what’s going on. Children are not embarrassed by gawking. And they learn much faster| The Autodidacts
Keyboard people invest time upfront memorizing keybindings, in order to save time in the long run. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, it’s more like this: What if we crowdsourced the optimal set of universal default keybindings — and made them available in every app?| The Autodidacts
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter to the| The Autodidacts
maybe I should quit while I’m behindI play the violin. I started when I was about six, but didn’t get serious until I was nine, when my parents gave me a new instrument as a birthday gift that was sized for my hands, and wasn&| The Autodidacts
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is rarely discussed| The Autodidacts
