Phil Bowell

Susan Sontag’s Playground of Ideas:

Throw-out note-taking categories: Sontag’s notebooks resist categorization. They include quotations, like a commonplace book; they include confessions, like a diary; they include travel schedules; they include clippings like a scrapbook. Often, with notes, we can get caught up in labels (is this a diary or a journal?) but the truth is that once a notebook gets into an individual’s hands, those categories cease to hold as much sway.

This is where I find myself landing in my own notebooks. They are a mix of stuff, meeting notes, journal entries, book quotes, doodles, ideas for work, problems I’m working through. I used to have a journal and then a notebook, but over the last couple of years they’ve become one and the same. I think that makes the most sense and makes the notebook my most effective tool.

Fastmail and Kagi have a new deal so I’ve signed up for three months of Kagi to give it a real test and see how I like it.

Thanks to the Super Bowl I came across the Blue Square Alliance standing up to Jewish hate. I hope they begin work in the UK as well. 🟦

Got this for Christmas and slowly getting myself ready to read it, I’ve a feeling it will be a hard one to read.

Hostage by Eli Sharabi 📚

I found out there’s a whole world of jailbreaking Kindle’s and this is very intriguing.

Came across this rather wonderfully designed website called Making Software a couple of days ago. Haven’t been able to bring myself to close the tab. Exceptional.

Finished reading: Raven Black by Ann Cleeves 📚

Really enjoyed this, I’ve no doubt I shall be reading the rest of the series this year.

fifth session at the gym this morning. Wasn’t feeling great this morning, sore throat, tired, but decided not to text my PT cry off. Went anyway and feel better after it. It felt hard today, but glad I went.

Well that’s a fast way to make me not want to use your service. The only thing I can think it’s detecting is iCloud Private Relay, but yeh, not signing up.

I have set myself one goal this year: read one page of a book per day.

I love reading. It relaxes me in a way that nothing else does, and yet I don’t read as often as I would like. Reviewing Book Tracker the other day I noticed there were 3 months when I only read a book two or three times (June, September, and November), those were months which I could’ve benefited from reading more in as they were particularly busy or stressful at work. So I’m resolving to set up a simple habit to make sure when those kinds of months arrive I do not forget to do something which will help me.

One page seems a bit low, you might be asking why not say one chapter instead? I know myself. One page is doable. One page doesn’t feel hard when the whole day is jam packed. One page is also unlikely to be where I will stop. Once I’ve read one page I will want to at least finish the chapter and I will probably end up reading more. That’s not the aim though. One page per day. That’s doable. That’s enough to build a habit of picking up a book every day.