Apple bringing transcripts for podcasts is very cool. In fact the only thing stopping me from using the built in Podcasts app is the lack of a smart speed feature. I’m so used to having it that when I listen to a podcast without it it sounds really slow.
This week I’ve made a switch to Todoist, setup the calendar integration with Google and really leaned on their task durations. It’s worked really well for time blocking tasks in-between work meetings.
It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I read something in the first lines of a post and can’t read the rest of the post because I keep going back to it.
In this case it was the first 4 words. I don’t want a productivity system, I want a creativity system.
Fit for Forty
This is a post which I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind since September. This year marks the end of my 3rd decade, September will be my 40th birthday the end of what has turned out to be quite a hard decade. A look in the mirror and I can see how hard it has been.
At the start of the year I weighed myself and had a little bit of a shock. My weight hasn’t just gone up, it’s ballooned and I am the heaviest I have ever been by a large margin. What’s worse is that I look at photos of myself and am shocked at the size of my stomach and my physique. One thing is clear. It’s time to change and do something about it.
This week I’m going to begin a trifecta of things. I’m going to start tracking what I’m eating and how much. I eat a lot of fresh food, but also a lot of convenience food, so that needs to change. My initial aim with tracking what I’m eating is to make myself more aware and then to try and make some more healthier choices.
Secondly I’m going to drink more water. I have a large water bottle that can hold two litres of water. I’m going to build a routine of filling that up first thing in the morning and finishing it by the end of the day. If I want something sweeter or a soft drink I will go for sparkling water and a slice of fruit.
Thirdly, I need to start exercising. I optimistically joined a gym back in September and have been a grand total of once a month since. I’m going to cancel my membership and use the money to subscribe to Fitbod instead. Then I am going to add calendar appointments for workouts throughout the week.
I’m sharing this in an effort to try and build a commitment with myself. I plan to share my progress each month with how I’m doing on each of these three fronts. If I can establish some good habits in the next month I will start to share some of the statistics around my weight, but for now this is all I’m comfortable sharing.
I always enjoy a birthday list. This one from Jeff Sheldon has a few nice points and a few that made me chuckle.
Picked up a USB C dock that can handle all the connections I need. I love that I only have one cable to plug into my MacBook Pro now.
I want timers on my HomePod to be live activities on my iPhone. That would be a great enhancement.
My refusal to use Threads or X is making it much harder to keep up with sports (specifically F1) news. Anyone know of any good blogs I could add to my RSS?
It dawned on me this morning that we are in an election year. I’ve never been more disillusioned with UK politics than I am now. There seems to be no party that actually represents me, they all appear to be different shapes of the same blob with no real difference between them.
Trying again
One of my aims for this year is to try and develop some more healthy foundations or habits in my life. For many years now I’ve wanted to blog more regularly like I did in the very early days of discovering what the small web could be. It was a place of individuals sharing their lives and thoughts on their own websites. Comments were on, people linked to each other, and a feeling of community developed.
In the years since my blog has been through many incarnations, it’s been Wordpress powered, Jekyll powered, Micro.blog, and back to Wordpress. But one thing for certain is that posting over the last decade has dwindled to almost nothing, but with the odd renaissance here and there. The desire to blog has always been there but for one reason or another never lasted, or more accurately I was never able to form it into a habit like I used too.
Over the last year I’ve noticed a significant change in what I call the small web. I’ve found a lot more personal blogs who post regularly and, most importantly, interesting content. It’s sparked my creativity again, and so I’m taking some steps to start again.
One of the barriers that I’ve struggled with over the last years is that I’ve wanted my blog to be too complicated. I wanted to have small posts to replace twitter, links to be bookmarks, as well as a place to share my work, and write longer posts like this one. What I’ve realised is that when I enjoyed blogging in the early days (2007ish era) it was a lot simpler. To begin with I had one post type and it was a lot easier and a lot more fun. I realised that I needed to return to that level of simplicity if I was ever going to form a new habit of blogging regularly. So that’s what I’m doing.
I’ve installed a new theme that takes away the temptation to try and add new types of posts and instead places an emphasis on writing blog posts. So that’s what I intend to do with more regularity.