Posts

I want a local-first calendar

I’m at the peak of my degoogling, slowly migrating of Gmail. I still use Google calendar, but hopefully, there’s an alternative. My personal calendar is much less collaborative than my work calendar. I don’t share it with friends, and I don’t use it to organise meetings. That makes it a perfect candidate for a local-first app. Storing my calendar on my devices and synchronising it through services like Dropbox or git.

Why is email so hard? Unsatisfactory migration from Gmail to Zoho

I’ve just tried to get off Gmail. After a long twelve years, I decided it’s time to do what I preach and remove one more dependency on Google. I’ve already done that with YouTube, TL;DR: Zoho Mail as an email provider, Thunderbird and K-9 as clients. But it is a pain. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic I was sick of sharing my data with Google. I was sick of having a username that I made up in my late teens (still better than the previous two: little.

The things that make me happy

In the last post, I got excited about getting a pot for my birthday. I got positive feedback (thanks Ben) and thought that I might list nine items that I often use and that make my life better. 100% Cotton sweatpants Being in comfortable clothes is underestimated. Since I moved out to go to uni, I wore jeans or chinos at all times. I thought that sweatpants are only for rappers, hardcore slavs and gym junkies.

I got a pot for my last birthday!

Socks, underwear and now a cooking pot! Why are these the best presents? The answer is: I use these things every day, and so even a small improvement in quality makes a difference in the quality of my life. Credit: Tescoma official site This is a rare Tuesday edition of my Sunday article. :) I’ve got plenty of pots and pans, but most of them are low-end level Ikea cookware.

How long will your data last before it gets lost or destroyed

My generation is the last that doesn’t have their whole life electronically documented. When I started going to school, only two of my classmates had a computer. My digital life started roughly at age fifteen. So half of my life is digitally documented. But the question is for how long? I recently found out my docx password-locked diary. I was able to guess the password (the one password I always used before using a password manager1).

Compounding skills improve your life exponentially

We have an intuition about the benefit we get from learning a skill. Learning how to remember information better is more beneficial than learning how to recognise trees using leaves. What is the cause of the greater benefit? And what are some examples of more and less beneficial skills? Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic I determine the utility of a skill as a sum of how much fun it is, how valuable it is to other people and how large is the context in which I can apply the skill.

How to describe a software issue

This article will help you become that one person who gets their technical problems solved first. Keep following these three guidelines, and you will greatly reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic Imagine that you found an issue in your favourite software, here are the steps that you can take to report the issue to a software maintainer. They don’t take much effort, but they’ll make a world of difference for the person trying to understand your report.

Facebook won't let you talk about this blog

I’ve heard about social networks censoring content, but I always thought it only affects hate speech or promoting violence. I never expected that my opinions could end up in the same bucket as stirring violence. And I’m perplexed by the way Facebook decides what you can and can’t talk about with your friends. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic A few weeks back, I was messaging with my ex-colleague and a good friend.

Simpleton: privacy-aware web analytics made with Nginx and GoAccess

Hacker News is crowded with articles about blog owners making their custom web analytics1. I thought it looked like a fun weekend project. Let me show you Simpleton Analytics. TL;DR visit the project repository, and you can have your analytics set up in a few minutes. My requirements were clear. Privacy, price, time. I want to know the bare minimum about my visitors, no cookies, no session tracking, no sharing with 3rd parties.

Start working less to produce more, strange approach to prioritisation

I’m going to talk about preventing burn out and getting a better sense of control at your job. I’ll explain why I think we feel overwhelmed at work. Lastly, I suggest setting a hard limit on reactive work, solution based on my own experience. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic First, let’s have a look at what it looks like when you are overwhelmed from work. We’ll start by dividing work into two categories: Work that someone defined for you and work that you defined for yourself1.