As we’re in the Christmas season, and as 2025 comes to a close, I’ve found myself thinking about all I have to be thankful for this year.

The biggest one by far is that Kami and I have had our first year of marriage.

It’s been beautiful, and we’re so thankful for it.

Today, I wanted to share a card that we had written for our placemats on our Colombian wedding. We had this translated and printed up, in front of every seat at our reception.

It’s, in a certain way, our marriage’s rallying cry.

I hope you enjoy it, and take it to heart. 💚

“Restoring together”

These words are written on our rings, in our home, on our hearts, and even on the shoes Kami is wearing today!

It’s an invitation and conviction, that we are called to orient our lives towards restoration in all we do…

That together we will see the pain and injustice in the world, and instead of ignoring or running, we will engage. That we will give our YES to being instruments of restoration. That we will strive together to catalyze creative solutions to bring hope, life, peace, and abundance to all the places where there is none. That we will always walk together towards better relationship with God, with ourselves, with humanity, and with creation.

On this beautiful and joyous day, as we celebrate our marriage and our lifelong union, we invite you to join us in our commitment to restoration!

We invite you to look at your life, and at the world around you – your relationship with yourself, with God, with your family, with your community, with your country and with creation – and to look deeply at anything and everything that is not as it should be…

And instead of running or shying away from the problems, injustices, and darkness, we invite you to join us by committing to do and be whatever is needed in order to RESTORE.

Because the restoration of all things will only be possible if we do it…

TOGETHER.

Daniel Manary recently interviewed me on his podcast, Artificial Insights.

We talked about some of the ways we at Waha have been able to deploy AI tools to save our non-profit literally years worth of work as we pursue our organizational goals.

It was a great chat!

The episode is available on YouTube and on whichever podcasting service you use!

Leave Daniel a review and let him know I sent you!

Also, be sure to hit Reply By Email and let me know what you think of the episode!

Last week, in anticipation of COP 30, my wife and I were invited to talk about climate change at our house church.

This has been a topic close to my heart for many years now, but I had never talked publicly about it before. So, I was excited to share.

I also wanted to share some of those same thoughts here. I hope you find it impactful.

If you don’t accept climate change, this post doesn’t seek to convince you otherwise, nor to start an argument about it. It just seeks to share my journey, my experience, and some convictions about it.

If you want to chat about it afterwards, feel free to Reply By Email.

I look forward to any conversations it starts!

I grew up in a culture that didn’t believe in climate change.

In fact, it actively denied it.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “Global Warming”. It was in a DVD from the church we were attending when I was 10 years old.

The DVD was a recording of a seminar taught by an American man.

In the seminar, he had several sessions where he taught flat-out that global warming was a lie.

He gave a number of statements to support that claim, ranging from saying that scientists are lying and fabricating all their data, to claiming that global warming couldn’t be true because other scientists in the past claimed the world was actually cooling, to claiming that scientists were actually trying to convince people of a narrative to make people more reliant on the government.

That was the first time (and for many years, the only time) I heard anything about global warming.

Since it was apparently something that was a “lie” that only some people in other parts of the world believed, and since no one that I knew believed it, it didn’t seem like it affected my life in any significant way as a Canadian boy from small-town Saskatchewan

So, I took the mental note that “global warming/climate change aren’t real”, and I moved on with my life.

However, about 10 years later (roughly 10 years ago), I found myself questioning that conclusion.

I started reading the work of real scientists who were publishing work about climate change.

I started meeting some of these people who actually believed that the average temperature of the planet was rising, and that that was having very tangible, significant impacts on real people around the world…

And I started seeing more and more evidence of it for myself.

So, I decided I needed to dig deep into the science. I decided to confront all the evidence on both sides, and conclude for myself whether what I grew up being taught was right or wrong.

And… long story short, I came to realize that I had been taught VERY wrong.

Earth’s climate IS changing.

It is definitively caused by the collective actions of humanity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

(Specifically, it has been caused by our emitting of roughly 1,800,000,000,000 TONNES of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during that time by the burning fossil fuels, resulting in nearly doubling what was otherwise the natural amounts of CO₂ in the atmosphere*, causing the atmosphere to retain much more heat than it did before the Industrial Revolution ago.)

* from a range of 180-280 ppm (Parts Per Million) throughout all the rest of human history (280 ppm at the start of the industrial revolution), to over 425 ppm today, increasing every year.

Climate Change is not only extremely well-established science, with tens of thousands of pieces of evidence from dozens of scientific fields…

It is also something that is already powerfully affecting millions of lives around the world, today.

It seems like every other week some all-time weather / climate record gets broken. From Canada, with an unprecedented heatwave that killed hundreds of people, or unprecedented wildfires beating the record for the amount of forest area burned by more than double… to Pakistan with unprecedented flooding displacing literally millions of people, to islands in the Pacific Ocean that have been inhabited for many generations being swallowed up by the rising oceans…

Climate change is destroying and upending lives of people all over the world, TODAY…

And will continue to do so for the rest of our lives.

And our children’s lives…
And their children’s…

The decisions that we make today, and the decisions being made in international leadership conferences like COP30, will help shape what the coming decades and centuries look like for humanity, and for every living thing on earth.

I’ve also been a passionate follower of Jesus for all my life, and so it’s important for me to align my life with His heart and His will.

And one thing is very clear: Jesus’ heart is for the hurting, the marginalized, and the broken.

All through the gospels, we see Him loving and restoring those that society (and religion) had rejected. The beggar, the uneducated, the impoverished, the hungry, the homeless…

He loved and brought restoration to each of them.

And these groups of people are the very groups that are most at risk because of the effects of climate change, both today and for the decades and centuries to come.

Those without resources are most at risk from the destabilization that comes with a more chaotic and extreme climate.

And Jesus cares about them! He cares what happens to them!

For the last 200 years, humanity has collectively been making choices that will result in a more chaotic and extreme global climate. This will have the definitive result of making it harder for the planet’s poorest and least-resourced people to survive and thrive…

And we continue to make those choices every day.

In the Bible, societal injustices that caused suffering among the “lowliest” were taken very seriously, because God loves those that our societies have rejected and ignored.

Jesus loves those who will be affected the most powerfully by climate change.

And so, He cares deeply about how we as humanity steward this moment.

Jesus cares deeply about climate change.

And we should too!

When thinking about climate change, Jesus’ heart, and our response, there is one scripture passage, and two quotes that come to mind that I wanted to share as a part of this conversation.

The first is one of my favorite passages, from Isaiah 32. I feel it demonstrates at least part of God’s heart for this situation well:

Isaiah 32:14
The fortress will be abandoned,
   the noisy city deserted;
citadel and watchtower will become a wasteland forever,
   the delight of donkeys, a pasture for flocks,

These verses, at least in part, remind me of the destruction we’re seeing, and that is coming, from climate change.

It’s very real. Cities will be destroyed and abandoned. Places that used to be lively and filled with life will be left empty and uninhabitable.

BUT… that passage continues! That destruction is a reality:

Isaiah 32:15-20
UNTIL the Spirit is poured on us from on high,
then the desert becomes a fertile field,
and the fertile field seems like a forest.

The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,
his righteousness live in the fertile field.

The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;
its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.

My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,
in secure homes,
in undisturbed places of rest.

Though hail flattens the forest
and the city is leveled completely,
how blessed you will be,
sowing your seed by every stream,
and letting your cattle and donkeys range free.

God is a God of restoration.

And He wants to partner with us to restore what humanity’s poor stewardship of Creation has destroyed.

The destruction is real, but His restoration is greater.

And His desire to partner with us to restore is greater.

Time and time again, God shows He wants to accomplish His work by partnering with people.

And, so we need to show up, obey, and put in the work to see that happen.

Which leads us to the quotes.

In my journey away from being a climate change sceptic, I have read a LOT of books on the matter.

By far, the most beautiful, powerful, and hope-giving and was The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.

There are two quotes I wanted to share from this book. First:

“Anger that sinks into despair is powerless to make a change.
Anger that evolves into conviction is unstoppable.”

The more I learn about climate change, and about the decisions that we as humanity have made over the decades to ignore the science and the warnings, and to choose profit over people, the more sad and angry I get.

But, anger on its own is useless.

It needs to turn into conviction, and that conviction can be a powerful fuel for change.

The second quote:

“For change to become transformational, our change in mindset must manifest in our actions.”

Action.

It’s really easy for me to get depressed and pessimistic over this topic. It seems like for those who understand what’s at stake, that tendency towards pessimism seems to be a regular theme.

But wallowing in sadness isn’t the solution.

Putting in the work to the solve problem and partner with God’s heart for restoration, even when it sometimes seems impossible is the solution.

I’ll end with this:

We live in a season of apocalyptic vibes.

So many things make it feel like the end of the world (as we know it) is just around the corner… real and legitimate threats of superintelligent AI, nuclear war, deteriorating democracies, pandemics, et al.

It can be hard to think more than a few years ahead, let alone about what the lives of our great-great-great grandchildren might be like.

But I submit to you that it’s highly likely that many of you will have great-great-great grandchildren, and that it’s worth thinking about the future we create for them.

Remember that you are someone’s great-great-great-grandchild, and there were pretty apocalyptic vibes 100+ years ago as well. (Remember, there were even more wars and pandemics then when compared to now…)

When pondering that (recurring) feeling of impending apocalypse, I’m often reminded of the Brazil Nut Tree.

Brazil Nut Trees feel like they take forever to come to fruition — they take a lot of work, over many, many years to mature and start bearing fruit..

However, once they are mature, a single Brazil Nut Tree can produce enough food every year that 3 people could live off nothing but one tree’s fruit.

The craziest thing?

A Brazil Nut Tree can live up to 1,000 years.

That’s over 30 generations of people fed off of the fruit of a tree that you or I could plant today.

What you and I do today can matter for the future, a lot.

We can either make choices that will help people for decades and centuries to come, or we can make choices that will make life for them harder and harder.

Jesus’ heart is for the well-being of those suffering from climate chaos today, and for those who will be dealing with its effects centuries from now.

I want my heart to be aligned with His.

How about you?

Everyone is just 2-3 decisions away from a completely transformed life.

I read this idea years ago and it’s stuck with me.

It almost feels too simple to be true; but more and more, I find myself agreeing with it.

The word decision comes from Latin roots, meaning “to cut off.”

The picture is that of severing one branch or path, so you can put all resources into another.

Like pruning a tree.

Or burning a ship.

It just takes 2 or 3 of those kinds of decisions — commitments with permanence and lock-in — to completely transform almost any situation.

Those 2 or 3 choices look different in every case, and they’re definitely manifest with varying levels of difficulty, but they’re there.

Dealing with obesity? Maybe your three decisions are to 1) intermittent fast, 2) eat according to your macros, 3) exercise/sweat for 45 minutes a day.

Struggling with finances? Maybe your three might be 1) aggressively cut unnecessary expenses, 2) build up an emergency account (or, if you have one already, pay off all debt with extreme aggression), 3) invest in acquiring skills to increase your earning capacity.

And sometimes it’s much easier than 3 decisions…

Sometimes it’s just one.

Trying to grow your “thing” (business, organization, personal brand)? Implement the rule of 100.

Overwhelmed as a leader in your organization? Buy Back Your Time by hiring an assistant.

Feeling like you don’t have enough skills to adapt to a new AI-driven economy? Decide to complete one of the many amazing and free courses available, and set yourself apart from everyone else not willing to put in that work.

Each of these are decisions in they’re most literal sense: they will require cutting off some practice, habit, or possibility and committing to another. It will take work.

It’s not a magic bullet. It’s pruning shears.

And pruning (and getting pruned) is hard.

But, transformation is on the other side.

And that is amazing, and worth it.

Dopamine is powerful.

It has been exploited in a hundred different ways to addict and enslave us…
But, it is also something that drive us to pursue what we want to pursue.

It can be abused in order to trap, or harnessed to express freedom.

The cool thing is, the choice is ours!

We can choose what we give our time to.
We can choose where we put our focus.
We can choose what we spend our time getting excited about …
What makes our brain buzz with dopamine.

And our dopamine doesn’t need to be spent consuming and consuming,
The next thing and the next thing,
Over and over again, ad mortem.

We can ACT and choose to get excited about MAKING instead.
About what the next thing is that we can CREATE.
About what the next thing our minds can conceive and our hands can weave.

It’s literally never been easier to learn a new skill,
create something new,
and get it out into the world.

THAT’S SUPER EXCITING!

If we let it, it can be something that gets the dopamine flowing.

That feels much more rewarding and meaningful than keeping on scrolling for the next thing to consume.

We were created in the image of a Creator.

So, create.

I was recently asked to teach a small session on using prompt engineering to get the most value from AI tools. These are the notes on that class. 😊

👷🏼‍♂️ What is Prompt Engineering?

By this point, most of us have used some kind of LLM chat bot, such as Deepseek, ChatGPT, or Claude, at least a few times.

(Some of us use them basically all, day every day 😅)

And most of us have also had a similar experience of sometimes getting really great output from these AI tools, and other times getting complete garbage.

There are a number of pieces that go into having LLMs generate high-quality output (including complex questions like model type, model size, temperature settings, etc.) but one of most important is definitely the quality of the prompt you give to the LLM.

Put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out.

The art of crafting the message you’re sending the AI to maximize the quality of the output is called Prompt Engineering, and it’s key to working well with these tools.

Even lower-power, cheaper AI models (including ones that can run 100% for free, offline on your laptop) can still often generate really great output IF it is given a proportionately great prompt.

So, if you want to get more from AI tools, figuring out how best to prompt them is an important place to start!

🧩 The Lego Pieces of a Great Prompt

When I’m trying to craft a high-quality prompt, there are 5 pieces that I try to include.

In some cases, any one or two of these on their own can create a useful prompt.

However, all of them together can help the AI generate output that feels almost magical.

The 5 pieces are:

1. Identity
2. Define the Task
3. Examples
4. Context
5. Confirmation Questions

1. 🧬 Identity

LLMs think differently from how humans think in many important ways.

But, there are a few notable ways that we think similarly.

One of those appears to be in how our perceived identity reflects our productive output.

If we believe we’re going to do a good job at something, we’re more likely to actually DO a good job at that task. If we are given a task that we don’t think we’re qualified for, and we let that belief steer the work we’re doing, we’re doing to do a poor job.

Football players hype themselves up before a game by telling themselves they’re amazing football players.

Good public speakers prep themselves for a speech by reminding themselves that they are good public speakers.

And, for some reason, LLMs are better at the tasks you give them if you tell them they are good at that task before they start it.

So, a good LLM prompt starts with giving the AI the identity you want it to have for what you’re asking it to do.

Here are a few examples I used this week:

For translation:

You are a world-class translator. 
You create top-quality, culturally-aware, 
nuanced, natural-sounding translations of 
video scripts from English into Hindi. 

For programming:

Act as a professional, full-stack web developer. 
You build applications using React and server-less infrastucture, 
by architecting software solutions using the current best practices, 
and then by writing high-quality, well-thought-through code.

Start by giving your AI a pep-talk, and they’ll do what you’re asking surprisingly well.

2. 🎯 Define the Task

What do you want the AI to do? What is your actual goal?

If you can explain in detail the “what” you’re asking of the LLM, it’s going to do a better job of understanding the task, and consequently, will give you better output.

If you aren’t clear, the AI will guess, and may do a good job. Or it may not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

But, to maximize quality, detailed instructions are key!

3. 📑 Examples

Another way humans and LLMs can think similarly is that we befit from Show AND Tell.

If I give you you a task, and explain the details of it to you, you might get it.

But, if I explain AND give you a few examples of what it looks like when the job is done well, you’re probably going to understand the task better, right?

Similarly, when prompting, explaining the task, and then ALSO giving a number of examples of how you want the task accomplished, will result in better output than if you do not include examples.

4. 🗺️ Context

For basically all projects and problems we find ourselves working on, there is context that plays into how we approach our work.

In programming projects, there is pre-existing code we work with.

In translation, there’s the content that you actually want to see translated.

In writing, project-specific style and key terms play into how we define high-quality output.

Providing this context to a large language model is vital to getting good output.

Now, providing too much context can also be problematic. Most of these models start to perform poorly when they’re given too much information, so you probably don’t want to give millions of words at a time to the AI, except under very specific conditions. (There are other techniques like Retrival Augmented Generation that you can use to work with massive data-sets like that instead).

However, including the specific context that is applicable for the task you’re giving the AI will result in much better quality output than if you just ask it to do a job without providing that context.

5. 🤔 Confirmation Questions

This one is gold!

It’s super simple, but in my experience, it can increase the likelihood that the LLM will succeed outputting what you want it to by maybe 2-3x.

You know how sometimes you’ll send a prompt to an LLM, and it misunderstands what you asked, and you need to ask again?

It would be nice if we could avoid that, wouldn’t it?

Well, adding just one line to the end of a prompt will decrease the likelihood of a misunderstanding like that significantly.

And this piece you can just copy and paste into any prompt.

Here it is:

Before you answer, please ask me 10 questions 
to clarify what I have asked of you.

Turns out, LLMs can be pretty good at figuring out what parts of what we’ve asked of them are ambiguous, and they can then ask us to clarify those specific ambiguities in order to clarify the task.

If you include this line at the end of your prompt, the AI will ask you 10 questions where it doesn’t fully understand what you’re asking of it.

Go through and try to give thoughtful answers to these questions, then send them.

I have found that adding this line and these steps to a prompt definitely increase the amount of time I spend on any single prompt, but I find it also increases the likelihood that the LLM will understand what I’m asking it to do even more, saving me the time of needing to try several different prompts to get the right output.

So, I’ve found it a very worthy addition!

🗨️ Couple other thoughts

This above is my general framework for approaching prompting LLMs directly, such as in a chatbot interface. Five simple pieces, but useful ones!

It is worth noting that prompting templates do look different in certain other instances, such as when prompt engineering for building AI agents (where providing objectives and tools are other vital components).

It is also worth noting that different types of models can and should be prompted different.

A high parameter reasoning model like OpenAI’s o3, or Claude’s Sonnet 3.7 thinking might not need as many examples to create high-quality work. So, you can still usually get quite high-quality output even with less prompt engineering, especially because they can spend time “reasoning” before they give you the answer. Meanwhile, a smaller, cheaper model may require more purposeful prompting, with more examples, to be able to reliably give you the output you want.

This past week I’ve been listening to Ryan North’s audiobook, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, which seeks to provide instructions for how to invent every major technology required for a thriving civilization. The idea being, if you were to travel back in time tens of thousands of years and wanted to majorly short-cut how long it took humanity to progress from our hunter-gatherer, living-in-caves days to thriving civilizations with cars and electricity and computers, you could do that.

It’s a charming book filled with a lot of nerdy fun.

One technology that North covers that blew my mind was antibiotics, and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about them since.

First off, I was shocked to learn just how recently antibiotics began to be produced and made widely available.

Alexander Fleming’s infamous moldy bread incident, which lead him to discover and isolate penicillin for the first time, happened in 1928.

Then, it wasn’t until 1940 that penicillin started being mass produced, meaning that people finally, for the first time in history, had a viable tool to fight against infection.

For the vast, VAST majority of human history, a simple cut or scrape, if it got infected, could kill you.

And there was basically nothing that could be done to combat that.

In contrast, today I take for granted the fact that, if I get an infection, I’ll probably be fine. I can go to basically any doctor, almost anywhere in the world, and I can get a drug that will cure me of almost any infection in a ridiculously short amount of time.

But that possibility has been around for less than 100 years.

Every one of my grandparents were born into a world without antibiotics.

Yet, since 1940 when antibiotics were made generally available, they have likely saved hundreds of millions of lives.

That’s crazy to me!

The thing about antibiotics that I found even more shocking, however, was how much longer we COULD have had them, had history played out just a bit different.

North explains that it was known as early as 3000 BC that some molds (but not all) could be used to help treat wounds and prevent the spread of infection.

But, the work of isolating those specific infection-fighting molds, cultivating them, and scaling that cultivation to benefit all of civilization didn’t happen for thousands of years after that was first known, even though it could have been done relatively easily in the 3000s BC with the right techniques.

(North explains step-by-step the process of isolating, refining, and scaling production of antibiotics in his book. It’s surprisingly simple, and could have been done in most ancient civilizations without much problem.)

Which means, we’ve had the puzzle pieces we needed for around 5000 years to create a drug that saves millions of lives every year… but it wasn’t until only 85 years ago that someone actually shipped that drug at scale so that people everywhere could benefit from it.

That is shocking to me… and sad.

It’s hard to imagine the number of people who died from infections between 3000 BC and today. How many sons and daughters lost before their time. How many mothers and fathers…

Maybe billions. Quite possibly, as many as tens of billions.

This convicts me of a simple fact:

Ideas on their own are useless.

Knowledge on its own is useless.

It’s what we do with those ideas and that knowledge that’s important.

Humanity wasn’t changed much by the knowledge that some molds could fight infection.

We were changed when people took that knowledge, and put in the work for it to be scaled to billions of people.

The knowledge didn’t count until they shipped it.

But when they finally did ship it, it changed the world.

I’ve continued to have people reaching out wanting to know more about the Interlinear Audio Bible tool I created last year!

So, here are 2 quick announcements and updates about that!

1. Code is now Open Source!

I’ve put a version of the tool I created on GitHub, where it can be used by anyone to create their own interlinear audio chapters, whether for scripture, or otherwise… in over 1,000 different languages!

Check it out here 👉🏻 audio-interlinearify

2. English-Hebrew Interlinear Audio TaNaKh Podcast is Launched!

I’ve partnered up with Andrew Case from Aleph with Beth (again) to make a new resource available to students of Biblical Hebrew!

We’ve been using my interlinear audio system to create an English-Hebrew Audio Bible, which Andrew has been starting to publish in Podcast form!

You can listen to the first chapters from Judges here.

We’re interested in eventually seeing it in many more language pairings (Spanish-Hebrew, Portugues-Hebrew, Chinese-Hebrew, etc.).

If you are interested in helping get those launched, let me know!

Did you know that you have access to resources that increase the more you spend them and use them?

This feels counter-intuitive.

If you spend money, you will have less money.

If you eat food, and you will have less food.

If you use an eraser, you will have less eraser.

Most things decrease when we use them or spend them.

We rarely think of the resources that you and I have that increase the more we spend and use them.

Think of exercising.

If you spend energy going for a half-hour run once a day, you will have more energy throughout your day-to-day life than if you don’t go for those runs.

Spending physical energy results in you having more physical energy.

Skills are similar.

If you use a skill (even a new one that is just starting to sprout 🌱), you will end up with more of that skill.

Use some skill to cook a meal, and you’ll gain more skill in cooking.

Use some skill to 3D print something, and you’ll end up with more skill in 3D printing.

Write, and your ability to write will increase.

The more of it you use, the more if it you will have.

When I was a kid, there was a song we would often sing in Sunday School:

🎼Love is something, if you give it away 🎶
🎶You’ll end up having more. 🎵

It’s true. The more you Love well, the more Love you will have.

We all have access to these and many more innate regenerative resources — Gifts we’ve been given that, as we use and express them, we will naturally gain more and more of.

That’s worth stewarding well!

These are things that can’t be taxed. They can’t be stolen. And we can only lose them when we don’t use them and spend them well.

When my wife and I were talking about this idea, she also pointed out that innate degenerative resources are also a very common and present reality in the human experience:

• Use violence, and it will result in more violence.
• Getting into credit card debt is likely to result in more and more debt.
• Hate will always breed more hate.

The take-away seems fairly self evident, then:

Use and spend your innate regenerative resources as much as you can!
And avoid the degenerative at all costs.

Simon Willison has a rule and belief I think I want to adopt:

“I believe that the price you have to pay for taking on a project is writing about it afterwards.”

I LOVE THIS!

Another way he puts it:

“I recommend adding ‘write about it’ to your definition of ‘done’ for anything that you build or create.”

I want to work towards adopting this practice, at least for my personal projects; perhaps for the work projects I’m involved in which I am able to publicize, as well!

A project isn’t finished until you’ve written about it.

This is one of the reasons I wrote my most recent post, making the files available for our CNC’d Emergency Dry-Composting toilets.

I haven’t done anything with that project in almost 2 years, but I’ve been meaning to write about it since way back then.

I’ve also been wanting that whole time to publish the blueprints under a Creative Commons license so others could use it too if they wanted/needed.

Part of me saw the project as “done” because I wasn’t actively distributing toilets to earthquake victims anymore. But, with “A project isn’t finished until you’ve written about it.”, I don’t actually allow myself to check that project off as “Done ✅”, until I’ve written and posted about it.

So, now, I have!

When I consider applying this rule, I can think of about a dozen other projects that I’ve done that I should consider writing about.

So, there might be more posts incoming. 🙃

Two years ago, on February 6, 2023, two massive earthquakes hit the south eastern region of Türkiye and the north western region of Syria.

These earthquakes ended up being responsible for over 60,000 deaths.

As I wrote about and gave video updates about, I and a number of friends drove to the earthquake zone, and started providing aid within about 72 hours after the quakes hit. We continued to provide aid in the region for several months after.

For the first several weeks after the quakes, many in the region didn’t have running water. This was causing outbreaks of cholera in the region, as poor disposal of human waste meant feces was getting mixed into the ground water, and eventually into drinking water.

One of our major projects during that time was to design and deploy a sanitation solution that could help alleviate this.

Specifically, we designed a toilet that was simple to produce and deploy, and needed no water to safely dispose of people’s feces and urine.

These dry-composting toilets only needed sawdust (or some other source of carbon, like newspaper, dry leaves, etc.) to be able to safely dispose of human waste.

We ended up making and deploying several hundred of these to the earthquake zone, and got our systems in place so well that we could have deployed hundreds more with just a few text messages, if we needed.

However, by the time we got to this point, more permanent sanitation solutions started to be made available in the region, so fewer and fewer people ended up needing these.

I wish we had known how to make these toilets from the first day we landed in the earthquake zone, as we would have been able to help so many more people, and prevented a lot more people from getting sick.

So, I’m writing this post so that anyone else who might be leading similar aid relief in the future has the tools to do it faster than we did!

What did we make?

Basically, we designed an Emergency “Flat Pack” Dry-Composting Toilet System, as pictured below:

A mock up of all CNC'd parts, before assembly

A mock up of the CNC'd parts assembled

A mock up of a completed toilet, with seat attached

(If you don’t know what a CNC machine is, you can watch this video for an explanation).

We went through several design iterations before settling on this design (including, at a couple points, exploring the possibility of injection molding, or just building all these toilets by hand).

In the end, this design, in partnership with a local company that had a large CNC machine, ended up being the best balance we could find of price and simplicity.

The final product was a really solid toilet design, and also something that was really easy to produce and to assemble!

All it took was a few moments of slotting wood pieces into place, screwing on a toilet seat, putting a bucket in the box, and we had a viable toilet!

Our local friends, helping with assembly of several dozen units.

We worked with Christian H. on Upwork to get the designs for these drawn up, and he did a great job of working with us in the midst of our ever-changing design constraints.

Parts list

Every toilet system that we distributed had one of each of the following:

• The CNC’d wooden parts, as shown above. (design files below)
• A standard plastic toilet seat, which screwed into the CNC’d parts with included plastic nuts.
• A 18 liter / ~5 gallon bucket (The ones we got were either 33.5 cm tall, or 27.27 cm tall; Most large-enough plastic buckets would work fine, but you’d just need to make sure that they fit inside the wooden frame, and can hold enough waste. 18 liters was perfect.)
• Roughly 50 kg of Sawdust (I talked a bit about how we got that at the end of this post. I can’t recall off hand how long this would last. I think a small family could use it for about a month, but I don’t remember specifically.)
• A plastic scoop, to be able to shovel the sawdust from its bag to the toilet bucket. (Think, like a popcorn scoop used in movie theaters.)
• The poster we designed to show proper and safe usage of the composting toilets. (Also available below. This was important! Pooping in a pile of sawdust and covering that with more sawdust is not something we’re used to. In order to slow and prevent the spread of disease both short-term and long-term, proper understanding of how to use these composting toilets was important. A nicely designed poster was the most scalable way we could think of to make that happen at the time. )
• Optional: We didn’t make a ton of these available until towards the end of our distribution campaign, but if I was doing this again, I would have sent more Standing Privacy Tents with our toilets. Not all recipients needed these, but a number did.

How did we deploy them?

Once we knew what all we needed, the challenge primarily became sourcing the various parts we needed to assemble in order to create a viable toilet experience.

Thankfully, we ended up in contact with a number of men and women from within the Turkish church who were spending their time to help earthquake victims, and happened to be fantastic at logistics. They also had connections with people and companies outside of the earthquake zone.

One of these contacts was able to get us connected with a truck driver, who we were able to commission to transport everything for us.

Another was able to help us source all the parts and pieces listed above.

All in all, the major parts of our task-list for this project consisted of:

1. Finding a company with a CNC machine, that could cut the material we needed. (We used OSB wood because it was cheapest at the time. It was less durable, but since this is was just a stopgap solution for just a few weeks/months until running water is restored, we thought it was fine.) We sent them the plans to be cut (available below), and told them how many units they wanted. They gave us a price accordingly.
2. Finding a company that could source the buckets and scoops. Most larger hardware stores could do the job; though, I think our contact was actually able to get these directly from an injection moulding company… which is pretty cool.
3. Finding a source for the sawdust (or other source of carbon) for the composting toilets. This could have been quite hard, but ended up being a fairly quick find for us. I talk a little about it here.
4. Printing the posters to use to explain safe usage of the composting toilets. (Any print shop will do.)

Once all those are in place, then they need to be packed onto a truck, and sent into wherever they’re going to be needed.

The logistics of this was not nothing.

But, once we found good sources for each piece of the puzzle, it became just as easy to deploy 20 toilets as it was to deploy 200 or more!

All you need to deploy them yourself

If you’re in a situation where you need to deploy emergency dry-composting toilets too, I’ve sought to make the process as simple as possible.

Beyond the inventory list above, here are all the things you need to be able to deploy your own emergency dry composting toilets:

Plans for the CNC Machine

Here is a zip file of the blueprints for the toilet frames.

They’re available in PDF and DXF file types.

Assuming you don’t have a background in working with CAD software, then the PDFs will probably be the easiest way for you to view the files.

However, when you find a company with a CNC machine, they’ll most likely prefer to work with the DXF files.

Posters and Audio Explanations

We created posters in 3 different languages, to teach people how to use these toilets.

First, we did it in English, because that was the easiest language for me to write and proofread the text in.

Then, because the two primary languages in the earthquake region was Turkish and Arabic, we also designed posters in Turkish and Arabic.

Here’s the English version:

Our English Training Poster

Also, because there was a high degree of illiteracy among some of the communities we were working with, we also made the explanations available in audio form on the website we set up (KompostTuvalet.org — This site needs a significant redesign. If you’re good at UI and interested in prettying this up, Let’s talk!)

Here’s the files we used for each:

• English: Poster 🖼️, Audio 🔊
• Turkish: Poster 🖼️, Audio 🔊
• Arabic: Poster 🖼️, Audio 🔊

Thanks to Puente Global for doing the design and Turkish translation.

License

All these assets are available under CC BY-NC 4.0 license. That means that you can use and modify them freely and without limitation, as long as you give credit, and as long as you don’t make money from them.

This is designed to help people, so take it and adapt it to that end! Translate them into any language that you’re working in, or make it work in your context however you need!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me!

“If you want to change the future, start living as if you’re already there.”

~ Lynn Conway (via James Clear)

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A few years ago I came across Steph Ango’s 40 Questions to ask Yourself Every Year.

Since then, I’ve made it a practice in the last week of the year to work through those questions in my Bullet Journal.

I’ve really loved the practice. I love the last few days of December every year — the closing of one chapter and the opening of a new chapter feels so hope-giving to me.

These questions have been a notable part of that transition time these last few years.

(I also follow Ryder Carroll’s advice to always start a new journal in each new year, so these questions end up being the last 2-4 pages of my journals each year. The new journal also has a powerful way of adding to the “opening a new chapter” feeling for me.)

All that being said, I’ve noticed that there are some questions on Steph’s list that I’ve not always found as useful to me (as one example, I’ve found that the questions about music, media, and fashion tend to be less useful to me).

And I’ve also noticed that sometimes I wish I could add my own questions.

So I’m going to!

Here’s MY list of 40 Questions to ask Myself Every Year, which is about 80% the same as Steph’s and 20% my own:

My 40 Questions

1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before?
2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions?
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
4. Did anyone close to you die?
5. What cities/states/countries did you visit?
6. What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year?
7. What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
9. What was your biggest failure?
10. What other hardships did you face?
11. Did you suffer illness or injury?
12. What was the best thing you bought?
13. Whose behavior merited celebration?
14. Whose behavior made you appalled?
15. Where did most of your money go?
16. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
17. What song will always remind you of this year?
18. Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer?
19. What do you wish you’d done more of? … less of?
20. How are you spending the holidays?
21. Are you carrying anger/frustration towards anyone now that you weren’t this time last year?
22. What was the best book you read?
23. What did you want and get?
24. What did you want and not get?
25. What did you do on your birthday?
26. How did you Fight for Rest this year? What did you do for vacation? … sabbath?
27. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
28. What kept you sane?
29. Re-read your /why page. What are 5 ways you fulfilled your “Why” this year?
30. Does it need to be updated at all? Anything added? … Removed?
31. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your relationship with 1) God, 2) Yourself, 3) Humanity/Others, 4) Creation? Why do you give that answer?
32. What did you do this year to leave a legacy?
33. What did you do this year that will leave the world a worse place?
34. What did you do this year that will leave the world a better place?
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you admire the most?
36. What political issue stirred you the most?
37. Who did you miss?
38. Who was the best new person you met?
39. What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?
40. What is a quote that sums up your year?

I’m a fan of the idea behind /now pages, /uses pages, and /hello pages.

The basic vision behind each of these is that there’s a place on one’s personal websites where visitors can go to see interesting, noteworthy, and useful things about the site’s owner. So, /now pages are where you can go to see what that person is currently up to. A /hello page is a quick introduction, as well as an explanation of how that person likes to communicate online. And /uses (mostly used by programmers and developers) is where to go to see what kind of technology, hardware, and software that person uses.

I’ve been pondering for a while now the idea of drawing from these page ideas, and adding a new kind of page to my site.

Specifically, I have been thinking that there should be a page that contains in one place a somewhat codified version of an answer to the question “Why I do what I do?” (Or maybe, rather, “What do I want to be the reason I do what I do?”)

Derek Sivers mentions that one of the things he likes about having a well publicized /now page is that “It’s a nice reminder for myself, when I’m feeling unfocused. A public declaration of priorities.” He has codified his commitments and priorities in a given season. That public accountability, along with simply the act of writing down the thing he’s currently doing in a visible place, helps keep him on task.

I liked that idea of writing out exactly how we’re are trying to show up in the world in a given season. I’ll make a /now page for myself at some point. But, in the meantime, I have been thinking about the idea of doing something similar, but in a way that isn’t focused just on what I want to be doing “now”, but also how I want to be living my whole life.

What is my “Why?”

To that end, I’ve written and posted a /why page on my website, which can be found at joshmuller.ca/why. It’s an attempt at codifying a few philisophical and practical pieces of what, how, and why I want to show up in my life — of how I want to approach work, life, relationships, faith, the world, and how all those pieces fit together into what I do on a day-by-day basis. It’s also kind of a letter to myself; a reminder of things I think are important and that I want to be spending my life on; a place where I want to hold a few core ideas that I think I’d like to regularly come back to, that I want to continue to be shaped by in the coming decades of my life.

And, notably, it’s not a finished product.

I expect I’ll be updating that page lots in the future. My personal “why” has changed and updated over the years — the reasons I do what I’m doing looks different today, when compared to 1 year ago, when compared to 10 years ago. I think my “/why” page will similarly need updating as time goes on, too. I’m thinking about making a yearly rhythm of revisiting it.

And I’m excited to see how those changes progress over the years!

Do you have anything in your life similar to a /why page, where you’ve written your personal philosophy for how you want to show up in life?

If so, I’d love to hear about it! Please send me a message at the link below!

If not, or if you like this idea, why not add a /why page to your own website!

I’d love to hear about it, too.

Let me know, and I’d share it on this page!

I want to hear about how you got into “Your Thing”.

You know what I mean — the thing that you’re passionate about. Maybe the thing that you’re known for, or just the thing that you care a lot about.

It might be something that you consider to be part of your identity…

The hobby, or skill, or job, or passion, or style, or drive, or commitment, or affiliation, or whatever “thing” is you.

Music, programming, cooking, graphic design, activism, peace making, running, 3d printing, veganism, the carnivore diet, acting, fishing, marketing, drawing, fashion, circuit design, permaculture, body building…

Whatever thing is you!

I’d love to hear the story of how you became passionate about it!

You may have a few things come to mind when I ask that.

I’d love to hear about any or all of them!

Tell me your story!

You can either write me by clicking Reply by Email 📧 below, or you can send me a voice message 🎤 on Telegram, Signal, or WhatsApp.

Can’t wait to hear about your thing!

A couple posts back I shared an experiment I was doing with some machine learning models, to make a novel tool for language learning.

Specifically, I was interested in creating an Interlinear Audio Bible, where each verse in the Bible is read in two different languages — first in the listeners’ native language, then in the language they’re learning. As I explained in that post, the goal is to give language learners a useful tool for comprehensible input.

I included a sample chapter demonstrating this idea, and I had been hoping to create some more chapters soon.

Well, I’m happy to announce that I just finished creating some more chapters!

In fact… I made a FULL Audio Bible in this style!

And… In fact… The full truth is… I made TWO full audio bibles! 😆

The first (which I’ll personally be using the most to start with) is an English-Spanish interlinear audio bible, where each verse is read in English first, and then in Spanish.

The second (good for either Spanish natives learning English, or for advanced Spanish learners) is a Spanish-English interlinear audio bible, where each verse is read in Spanish first, and then English.

You can see all 66 books and 1189 chapters for both of those audio bibles at this Google Drive link.

This idea (and my implementation) is still quite new, and there are likely problems/errors within the files. I’ve listened through a few chapters and they all seemed to be great, but haven’t done SUPER in-depth quality control.

So if/when you find issues, please do let me know!

This work is a remix of the public domain Berean Bible, and the CC BY 4.0 La Biblia en Español Sencillo, by AudioBiblia.org / Irma Flores. The resulting work, therefore, is also CC BY 4.0, meaning you can share it and redistribute it freely, under the condition that you include attribution (To AudioBiblia.org / Irma Flores for the original Spanish audio, to Berean Bible for the English audio Bible, and to me — Josh Müller | joshmuller.ca — for the interlinear remix) when you do so.

If you have any questions, you can ✉️ Reply by email! through the button below.

Thanks to the Berean Bible team and Irma Flores for giving freely of their works. This tool wouldn’t be possible without their generous permissions!

And a HUGE thanks to Andrew Case, who made the compute for this project possible. It was not viable for me to run the NLP verse stamping model on several full audio bibles using just my laptop, so he generously made that compute available to see this project (and several upcoming projects😎) built out.

There are several new tools in this vein we’re hoping to launch soon, so keep an eye out for more projects like this coming down the pipe.

If you’d like to see something like this made for another language, feel free to let me know!

I’m hoping to release the source code and workflow I used to build this in the next few days, so anyone could build one themselves.

Or, if there is enough demand, I’m also willing to build another audio bible like this (assuming the source bibles are either in the public domain, or a compatible Creative Commons license, or assuming you’ve gotten permission from the original translation license owners to remix and release something like this).

Happy listening and learning!

Yes, it’s much better than the path we’re currently on.

Sustaining the current state would definitely be an improvement over reckless, endless extraction and destruction.

Parking a car is also an improvement over barreling it off of a cliff.

But that’s not the goal.
Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.

The goal isn’t just sustainability but Regeneration.

Not just, “Don’t make it worse”, but actively “Make it better”.

Exploited and extracted land left on its own can eventually, given enough time, see its ecosystems recover.

But, that same land put in the stewardship of a skilled and well-resourced permaculturist can see those ecosystems recover in a fraction of the time.

“The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.” ~ Charles C. Mann

We’re not meant to destroy.
We’re also not meant just to sustain.
We’re meant to Restore.

To learn, understand, and SEE things as they really are, from a place of utter humility. To know — intimately, empathetically, and tangibly — just how broken something is, how exploited and misused it’s been, and yet to also see with unquenchable conviction its paths back to life.

Don’t settle for the broken systems we see.
But, also, don’t settle for just not making things worse.

Regenerate.
Restore.
Renew.

Be a stubborn optimist.

It’s a good posture to take in all parts of life and society — not just creation care.

If there was a way to use dozens of enterprise-grade cloud software tools (that can each cost hundreds of dollars a month) for free (or nearly free), that would be worth exploring, right?

Well, let’s explore it!

Every couple years I come to a new appreciation for self-hosted software.

For the uninitiated, if you have a spare computer sitting around that you’re willing put to work as a server (or if you want to rent a server for like $5/month), there are literally hundreds of programs available for free that you can host on that server, providing really viable alternatives to commercial cloud tools.

The practice of hosting these services on a server you control is called self-hosting.

And I think it’s awesome!

One of the things I love is the sheer number of things you can do!

Looking for an cheaper/more-private alternative to Dropbox / Google Drive?
You can self-host Nextcloud.

Wanting a cheaper alternative to Netflix / Disney+, or an easy way to play your old DVDs on your phone?
Host your DVDs and other media (that you own) on Jellyfin.

How about a more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp? Or a version of Slack that you have full control over?
You can self-host Matrix / Element.

Looking for a social platform like Twitter, but that’s less toxic and more conducive of a good social experience?
You could self-host Mastodon.

You could even run an alternative to ChatGPT yourself, without needing OpenAI or other AI companies.

That’s awesome!!

I’ve been self-hosting a number of projects lately, and getting a TON of value from them:

• I run an instance of n8n (an open source alternative to Zapier), which I use for 1) syndicating my blog posts to Twitter, Mastodon, etc. 2) for automating recurring work-related tasks (tracking and reporting KPIs, sending reminders of expiring agreement for our 3rd-party licenses, automatically creating and sending reports of project progress, etc.), and 3) for doing “smart routing” of leads to respective team members; and lots more. The value I get from n8n is HUGE… and it’s completely free software.
• I run an instance of Miniflux as my RSS feed aggregator, which gives me full control over my news feed, pulling in posts from over 150 different sources.
• I’ve installed Ollama on my laptop, so I can use Large Language Models even if I don’t have internet access.
• I’ve recently been dabbling with Mautic, which purports to be a viable alternative to MailChimp or ActiveCampaign. Between a few potential use cases I’m exploring, there is the possibility of saving a good amount of money using Mautic instead of our current tools.
• In a way, this website/blog is my own little “self-hosted” social media.

I’ve been LOVING each of these, and getting a ton of value from them.

There is definitely a trade-off: it does take a fair amount of skill and some work to be able to roll out these tools. You have to be comfortable “getting your hands dirty” with the command-line and the networking infrastructure.

The learning curve is fairly steep. But there’s a thriving community of nerds creating tutorials and tools to make the process easier!

And the payoff can be awesome!

If you wanted to use Mailchimp to host a mailing list of 100,000 people, it’s going to cost you over $800 USD per month.

If you want to use Zapier to do 100,000 multi-step automations, it will also cost you nearly $800 USD per month.

But with Mautic and n8n, you can get the same features (and often, even better features), with no usage limit, for free.

You just need to provide the server.

So, if you were to repurpose an old $200 desktop computer to host these, it could save you potentially $1,600 USD per month for as long as you use it! 🤯

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty cool! 😎

I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently working as Localization Director for Waha, which is an app and Bible Study curriculum that we are working towards translating into hundreds of different languages. Many of the languages on our roadmap are low-resource languages, meaning that they have very few materials and tools available to help us and our partners in the translation process.

Part of my role as Localization Director involves designing workflows that make the best use of the limited time of our volunteer translators. To that end, I’ve been striving to keep up to date with advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low-resource languages, as these tools can be really helpful at easing the labor burden of localization projects, when they’re used effectively.

This week, I realized that one of those recent advancements could help me build a project that has been a nerdy dream of mine for a long time!

💡The Idea

Years ago, when I was living in Türkiye and learning the Turkish language, there were a couple practices that I found especially effective and enjoyable for improving my vocabulary and my understanding of the spoken language.

The first of these was studying live translation. There were a number of events (cultural seminars, international church services, etc.) where someone on stage would say something in in English, and that sentence would be immediately translated into Turkish. (Or, vise versa: Turkish first, and then English)

I found these to be great opportunities for language study! When I heard the English sentence, I would immediately try to translate it into Turkish in my head, before hearing it translated by a native speaker right after. This allowed me to compare how I thought it should be translated, with how someone with mastery of the language would correctly translate it. If I got it right, it was a nice hit of dopamine. If I got it wrong, it gave me a chance to see why I was wrong, and make the correction in the future. And occasionally, I would hear the English, and realize I had NO IDEA how to translate that into Turkish. In those instances, I could write down the sentence and save it for later studying.

The second practice I especially enjoyed was listening to Audio Bibles in my target language. Because I’m pretty familiar with large chunks of the scripture in English, listening the Turkish audio bible (especially after I had a basic conversational understanding), was a really good source of Comprehensible Input. I would listen in Turkish to passages that I knew fairly well, and when I didn’t understand something that was said, I could use the context I knew from English to help me “fill in the gaps”.

(I’ve actually also done this with Hebrew, and with Koine Greek as I’ve mentioned before. 🫣 )

The one downside with the audio bible technique is that, when working with a language that I’m less proficient in (like Hebrew or Greek), it can be really easy to lose track of what is being said. I find I can follow along fairly well when I’m understanding 60-70% of what’s being said… but if I don’t understand anything for a full sentence or two, it’s very easy to lose track of what’s happening in the audio, and to not be able to follow it at all going forward.

And if you’re not comprehending the input, it’s not really Comprehensible Input, is it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because of that, I had the thought a few times while listening to foreign language audio bibles that I wish I could combine both of those above experiences.

I wish I could hear the English of a verse of scripture, followed immediately by that same verse in the language I’m studying.

Basically, I was wishing there was such thing as an Interlinear Audio Bible.

If you’ve never used a normal Interlinear text before, they’re kinda awesome! They show you the same text in two different languages, aligned so you can read both sentences one after the other. In the case of interlinear bibles, there is also often extra grammatical information that is also shown (example).

My thought was that it would be awesome to have something like that in audio, too! Where I could hear a verse in English, and then hear that same verse my target language. Then, if I don’t understand a few sentences of the target language, I could still follow the narrative effectively, and pick up my understanding of the target language a few verses down the line.

However, if you’ve ever done any audio editing, you know how insanely long and time consuming of a process it would be to make something like this manually. You would need to have the text of both languages, and the audio of both languages open, and go through verse-by-verse, stitching them together in an audio editor, making a new file from scratch.

I imagine it would take me a little less than an hour to make a single chapter like this manually. The whole 1189 chapters of the Protestant canon would take MONTHS.

That time investment definitely wasn’t worth it to me.

So, I decided to leave that idea as just an idea, among a long list of other ideas. 🙃

I didn’t really end up thinking about it again for probably 5 years.

🤖 The Bots

Then, recently, while doing some workflow design research for Waha, someone showed me the open source NLP models that Meta has been publishing. Specifically, they showed me the Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project, which offers Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text functionality to over 1,100 different languages.

🤯🤯🤯

That’s a lot!

While digging into it, I discovered that their open source MMS model and code also included support for something called “Forced Alignment and Segmentation” in all those languages! Forced alignment is a functionality where, if you have the text that’s spoken for a given audio file, you can find out where in that audio each piece of the text starts and stops. In the case of an audio bible, I could find the start-stop times of all the verses in a given chapter, assuming I had the text and the audio available.

You could then use that to automatically cut out those verses from the main audio bible chapter, and save them as individual files.

This is where things start to get interesting!

If I can programmatically take a chapter of an audio bible and split it into audio files of each individual verse, I could easily reorganize those verse audio files however I wanted!

I could, say, run this process on to audio bibles from two different languages, and then organize the resulting files such that they alternate verses between languages!

Then I could then use ffmpeg to stitch those files back together into one single file!

That would automate the most time-consuming parts of the process of creating an Interlinear Audio Bible, like I’d dreamed of having years ago!

Well, I gave it a try with the Berean Audio Bible and the La Biblia en Español Sencillo.

Here’s what came out!

I’m really happy with it! Instead of taking an hour or more to make a single chapter, I was able to put it together in just a couple minutes (after I cracked the much longer and more complicated process of figuring out get the MMS model working on my laptop, of course 😅). I could now make another chapter in just a few more minutes! Or, with maybe an hour or two of additional work, I could write a script to do this automatically for all 1,189 chapters in the bible, and generate a full Interlinear Audio Bible!

I might end up doing that if I can find some free time this week.

I listened to this file on-repeat while making some Banana Bread last night, and in just the first couple plays-through I was able to internalize some Spanish vocabulary and grammar that I hadn’t yet been able to crack, even after more than a year of studying Spanish on Duolingo!

And I wasn’t even “studying”!

I just had the audio playing in the background while I was working.

I’m a fan of that!

So, I’m looking forward to making more of these!

🤔 P.S. The hardest part about this

Something that’s worth mentioning is that the hardest part of this project, ironically, wasn’t getting the AI model set up and running on my laptop!

It was, instead finding two Audio Bibles with license permissions that allowed me to manipulate and redistribute them like I’ve done above.

The VAST majority of audio bible licenses out there would not have allowed this ☝🏻, meaning I could have been subject to a DMCA takedown from their owners.

So, my thanks goes out to the people behind the Berean Bible and AudioBiblia.com for making their translations and recordings available in the public domain (Berean Bible) and Creative Commons (La Biblia en Español Sencillo).

I wish more organizations would follow their lead!

Copy.Church has some great explanations and advocacy about why this should be a much wider practice.

Additional Note, 2025-03-09: I finally released the code for this project!

You can find it on my GitHub.

If you’re techy, feel free to contribute!

A few years ago, when I wrote a post about the history of Smallpox, I… got a little obsessed.

I went DEEP down the rabbit-hole, learning everything I could about how smallpox affected people, families, and civilization. In the event that you and I had any long conversation during that time, I almost definitely spent some of that time talking your ear off about it.

(sorry, not sorry)

I thought that the story of smallpox and its eradication had to be one of the craziest stories in global medical history. As if no disease in history could have impacted the course of civilization more than smallpox.

Well… I’ve ended up going down another rabbit-hole…

And I was incorrect.

That title belongs comfortably with Tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is… insane.

Besides being the most lethal disease in history, beating out smallpox, malaria, cholera, the plague, the flu, and AIDS, it also has been responsible for a shocking number of historical and cultural phenomena.

It’s apparently the reason that cowboy hats were invented. It shaped women’s shoe fashion the early 1900s. It was apparently a big factor in deciding where the first nuclear weapons were tested.

Tuberculosis is everywhere.

And I do mean everywhere.

Over two billion people (1 out of every 4 people alive on earth today) are infected with tuberculosis right now.

And thousands of them will die from TB today.

The YouTube Channel Kurzgesagt recently put out a video about tuberculosis that I would highly recommend watching all the way through. It gives a really condensed, yet comprehensive overview of tuberculosis and how it has impacted humanity, through history up until today.

John Green sums up the insanity of tuberculosis in his YouTube short, explaining:

If you add up all the people who passed away in 2022 due to conflict, homicide, malaria, typhoid, and cholera combined, it is still fewer than the number of people who died from tuberculosis in 2022.

What makes that fact so crazy, of course, is that tuberculosis is curable!

So, in the 21st century, it’s not really accurate to say that serious illness and death from tuberculosis are caused by infection with the bacterium mycobacterium tuberculosis.

In fact, tuberculosis is caused by injustice. It is caused by inequitable access to health care.

And we know that, right? Because most of us living in rich countries never worry for a second that we will die of the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

Tuberculosis is curable.

Like smallpox, tuberculosis can be eradicated.

We should definitely do that.

Do you litter?

Probably not. Or, at least, probably not often.

Not a lot of people actively try to use the planet as their personal trash can…

Yet, often it seems like so many public spaces are a MESS.

İt’s interesting to ponder why…

İmagine for a moment that 1,000 people walk down a clean street, and just 1 out of 10 of them drop just a single piece of trash onto the street.

That becomes a very trash-filled street very quickly, due to the actions of a fairly small minority.

İt doesn’t take much to wreck the experience for everyone.

That sucks.

But now, imagine this:

What if even fewer people — just 1 out of every 20 — decided that they’d pick up and dispose of just 4 pieces of garbage as they walked down that same street?

Think that through for a second.

Run the math.

What happens to that street?

İt VERY quickly becomes trash-free again!

And, even more beautifully, the street STAYS trash free, even though the first group continues to litter!

The carelessness and wrecklessness of a small minority can ruin the experience for everyone else…

But it takes even fewer people purposefully choosing to make the world just a little bit better to not just FİX the problem, but to keep it fixed.

So, pick up some trash the next time you’re out!

And, also, this post is about WAY MORE than just trash…

There exists a well-known relationship between identity and action.

So much of how you and I navigate our lives comes back to identity.

If, in your internal world, you think of yourself as someone who is passionate about fitness, you will be more likely to get to the gym or go on that run.

If you think of yourself as an effective and persistent problem solver, you’ll eagerly jump into creating solutions for hard problems, instead of giving up when they seem too hard.

On the other hand, if you think of yourself as stupid, you’ll probably shy away from problems that look too complicated to solve.

If, when you think about yourself, you think of someone who is stressed and anxious, you’re less likely to take any action to leave the habits that are keeping you in stress and anxiety.

Identity informs and leads to action.

If you can solidly reorient your identity, your actions will follow closely behind.

It’s, of course, possible to take action that is incongruous with our understood identity. But never for long.

The personal-development implications of this are well-known.

But I’ve been finding myself further pondering the social and leadership implications.

When we talk about someone we disagree with, do we attack their actions or their identity?

Do we call people stupid, or do we say that what they’re doing is stupid?

Do we say that someone is a bad worker, or do we critique their work instead?

Our words have power, both for ourselves and for those around us. How we encourage and critique people matters.

Choosing the path of dignity will always lead to better results.

If you want less bad behaviour, critique actions.
If you want more good behavior, encourage identity.

I heard this piece of advice recently:

Never let a day pass without doing something that will serve you 10 years from now.

I LOVED it!

I want to make a habit of that.

But, it got me pondering, why stop there?

What if we never let a month pass without taking tangible action to make life better for our great grandchildren, 100 years from now?

How would your life look different if you were regularly thinking about, and working towards, making the world 100+ years in the future a better place?

Or, again, why stop there?

What if every year that passed, each one of us took purposeful and trackable action towards trying to make the world 1,000 years from now a better place?

That might sound crazy… but I don’t know if it needs to.

There are projects that were started 2,000+ years ago that are still feeding people, today!

Books written thousands of years ago still are widely read and influential to us today.

Our societies, our governments, our science and mathematics, our languages, our ecologies, and even our economies have all been shaped by hundreds and thousands of years of our ancestors’ actions.

Their legacy is our lived reality.

Just as our legacy will be our ancestors’ lived realities.

So, what if we lived like that was the case, and strived to take regular action make their world a better place?

Obviously, it’s impossible to have any level of confidence about what the world will look like in 1,000 years. Almost assuredly, everything about culture, society, language, and geopolitics will look vastly different.

But that was the case for the billions who came before us and brought us to the place we are today… and, yet, we’re still a product of their actions (both positively, and negatively).

So will be the case with our actions.

So, it’s probably worth acting accordingly.

A few years ago, I found myself in a bit of a culinary rut — whenever I would cook for myself, it was usually the same 2-3 meals.

I needed to expand my horizons a bit!

So, I gave myself a challenge of trying 20 new recipes over the course of the year. (For many people, that might be a small number. But for me, it seemed a fitting target.)

If I remember right, by the end of the year I had done about 15 new recipes. Short of my target of 20, but it was a step in the right direction! 😅

I had stored all my recipes in simple .txt or markdown files on my computer, as I was also learning git and refining my neovim skills at the same time. This made for a great setup on my computer, but not a great experience if I wanted to use those recipes on my phone.

Since then, I’ve found myself revisiting those recipes a few times!

Each time, the fact that my recipes where primarily on my laptop or on GitHub ended up adding a frustrating layer of inconvenience to the process. If I was at the store looking for ingredients, I needed to go through a long process of logging into GitHub on my phone, finding my notes repository, finding my recipes within that, and then dealing with the not-great visual experience on my phone.

I wanted something better!

Well… My website already displays posts and articles really nicely on mobile…

So, yesterday I put all those recipes I had in those notes on my website!

You can find them here.

I haven’t looked through them super closely. Some of them came from friends’/family’s recipe cards. Some from websites. Some from other sources.

Currently, this is just a copy-paste of my notes that I’d taken a few years ago, so it’s quite likely there’s some errors or other problems in there. It’s also possible (though, I’ll try to ensure that’s not the case) that these pages contain copyrighted works, as I wasn’t thinking about publishing when I originally took these notes.

I’ll try to go through in the coming days and make sure any and all applicable attribution, etc. is added, but it’s possible that something slips through the cracks.

If you see something that needs to be changed, do let me know!

I’ve also added a few stock photos from Unsplash and Pexels to a few of the recipes. Not photos I took myself, but just some nice visuals for the recipe to make the recipe pages more shareable.

If you try a recipe and like it (or hate it, or think I should put another recipe up), let me know!

I recently joined the executive leadership team at the non-profit Waha, as their Localization Director. I have committed to work with them for the next 3 years with the goal of shipping their app and curriculum in 80+ new languages during that time.

This has been a role I’ve been really loving. It has been stretching and demanding in all the ways I love. The role requires a high degree of competence in online-communication, a deep appreciation of nuances in languages and cultures, and a broad understanding of current technologies and how they can be used to help simplify the workflows of our volunteers and partners.

There are a number of projects I’ve already had the joy of spearhead in my work with Waha. One of these project pertains to translating our library of Articles. We currently have a growing number of resources in our ecosystem (in the form of articles, testimonials, tutorials, etc.) that haven’t yet been translated into languages other than English. We want the whole Waha ecosystem to be massively multilingual, and so one of my projects has been figuring out a workflow to quickly and affordably translate these articles into other languages for our users.

We requested a number of quotes from various translation companies for what getting these articles localized would cost, and they were all prohibitively expensive for our small non-profit, especially when considering the number of articles we need to translate.

So I set out to find another workflow that would give us top-quality translations for a fraction of the cost. Here’s what we came up with!

👷🏽‍♀️ What we did and how we did it:

Like so many others, I’ve been eagerly following the rapid developments in the AI world this year. Working in the localization field in the age of language-intelligent computers means there is a lot of value to be unlocked by building workflows that can implement these new tools well.

Such was the case with this project!

So, we decided to run an experiment: Could we create a workflow using AI tools, that would give us really high-quality machine-translations of our articles, that we could then contract with a fantastic human proofreader to check and fix errors, and verify quality?

Basically, could we make an awesome AI-Assisted Translation workflow?

One key problem we foresaw here was that Waha has some very specific vocabulary, terminology, and acronyms, that we use throughout the app and curriculum. We have most of those terms written in an internal Glossary, which is the first thing we translate whenever we start working on a new language. So we knew that getting these key terms translated correctly with our articles would be vital.

This kind of ruled out the most well-known translation tools like DeepL, Google Translate, etc. We needed a translation tool that we could actually give instructions to. Something that could adapt to the specific needs of our project, instead of just spitting out an attempt at a translation without understanding the context…

Yup! This would be a job for an LLM!

Because I had a developer account with OpenAI, that already had gpt-4-turbo-preview unlocked, we decided to use it to create the base translation. We figured that if we could give it a few stylistic instructions, along with our glossary file, that we could get a pretty good result. So we tried that!

Here’s the prompt we used:

Act as a professional translator, translating from English to {TARGET LANGUAGE}.

Use phrasing and terminology that makes the article sound like it was originally
written by someone from {COUNTRY/REGION WHERE TARGET LANGUAGE IS SPOKEN}.

Use natural sounding {TARGET LANGUAGE} instead of a literal English translation.
I want dynamic equivalence meaning, instead of a word-for-word translation.

Use the following translation glossary whenever the English terms appear:

```csv
Term [en],Term [target_language]
[COMMA SEPERATED LIST OF ENGLISH TERM], [FOLLOWED BY PREFERED TARGET LANGUAGE USAGE]
``

When translating the English second person pronoun "you",
use the {TARGET LANGUAGE} singular pronoun
(such as "tu" in Spanish, or "sen" in Turkish),
instead of the plural ("ustedes" or "siz"),
unless context clearly suggests a plural should be used.



Translate the article below:

--- English Source Article ---

[ARTICLE HERE]

--- Translation of above article into {TARGET LANGUAGE} ---

We copied in the original English article (and, obviously, replaced the {PLACEHOLDERS} with the appropriate target language, etc. ) and pressed “send”, then waited for the text to generate.

For this experiment, we got our proofreader set up with ChatKit, which allowed her to use my gpt-4-turbo-preview API key in a nice user-friendly interface. We could have used a paid ChatGPT Plus account, but the GPT-4 model used in ChatGPT Plus has a limit of about 8,000 tokens (about 6,000 words), where using gpt-4-turbo-preview through the API gives us up to 128,000 tokens (over 90,000 words). While 6,000 words would have been more than enough for the experiment thus far, those extra 84,000+ words of context were about to become really useful to us.

After ChatKit / gpt-4-turbo finished rendering the translation, our proofreader checked it. When she was done, we debriefed. She said the translation was good — better than she would have expected a machine could do — but still far from perfect.

This was a good step in the right direction, but there was still a lot of room to improve.

There were a large number of tiny problems with the resulting translations, which were difficult to turn into clear instructions that we could give in the prompt. (We were looking for things like the “plural” / “singular” instruction in the prompt above, that would allow us to give clear instructions about how the articles should be translated. “This way, and not that way.” But the issues with the translation weren’t clear enough that we could describe them in a specific way like that, and there were enough small issues that it would take a long time to try to explain them all that way.)

If only there was a way to give the AI more context, so it could give even better translations. 🤔

🤖 Making the bot BETTER

We mulled over the project for a bit, and then had a realization:
We have an example of exactly how we want these articles translated, in the form of the article we just finished. And we’re about to have several more, as this translation project continues!

And, most importantly, we can easily tell the AI to make use of these examples!

So, we added a couple simple lines to the prompt before the article we wanted translated:

Here is are example English Articles,
and their ideal {TARGET LANGUAGE} translation.
Use similar style of {TARGET LANGUAGE} in your translation.

--- English Example #1 ---

[ORIGINAL ARTICLE]

--- {TARGET LANGUAGE} Translation #1 ---

[FINISHED/PROOF-READ Target Language Article]

We then put the first English article and its proof-read translation into the prompt, as well as the next article we wanted translated, then we pressed “send” to translate article number #2.

Our proofreader started working through the new article, and she was shocked.

“Wow! This is so much better than last time!” she told me.

She finished second article much quicker than the first, as there were much fewer things that she needed to correct. There were still a number of things she needed to fix, but it was much better.

So we repeated this process for the 3rd article!

We added the 1st English article, the 1st translation, the 2nd English article, and the 2nd translation to the prompt, before finally giving it the next article we wanted translated.

Then, our proofreader went to work again… and again she finished much faster than before.

We kept repeating this process for each new article: adding the completed, proof-read articles into the new prompt to get better and better base-translations for each subsequent article. And each article we did this for, our proofreader was able to beat her previous record of how fast she was able to correct the resulting machine translation, because the generated translation had fewer and fewer problems that she needed to fix.

This is where gpt-4-turbo-preview was really able to shine. With the 90,000+ word context window, we could give more than 40 completed articles of stylistic context to each prompt, which made for some extremely context-rich translations.

(Each article was ~1,000 words. We gave both the English and target language article as context. So we could have used as much as ~2,000 words / ~90,000 words ≈ 45 articles included in the prompt)

💲 Final Math

We translated about a dozen articles in this experiment. At the end, we sat down to debrief the project. Our final translation prompt was a behemoth, with 12 articles of context in it. But it worked fantastically well!

When we did the final breakdown of costs for the project, we discovered that the cost of translating / proofreading those final 3-4 articles with this new workflow (and our fine-tuned prompt with lots of context in it) was a full 10x less expensive than any of the quotes we were given from other translation organizations… and our translation cost was continuing to lower as our AI got more and more context to work with.

This was exciting to us. As a non-profit, new high-efficiency workflows like this mean that we can have a lot more impact-per-donor-dollar than we had before.

We’ve immediately started the process of integrating this workflow, and the lessons we’ve learned from designing it, into our wider localization initiative. We’re excited for how it will increase both the velocity with which we can ship our translation projects, and lower the costs of those projects. We’re hopeful that workflows and tools like this will play a significant part in helping us get our curriculum, app, and supplemental training-content into 80+ languages in the next 3 years!

If you’re interested in learning more about the work we’re involved in, or maybe even partnering with us in that work, check out the following links:

• 🌐 Waha’s Home Page
• 🈳 Waha’s Language Roadmap
• 🙌🏻 Partner Financially with Waha and me

I have been pretty outspoken on my love of RSS as a replacement for social media feeds. It’s a recurring topic on this blog. There have even been a number of people who found my post How to Subscribe to Mailchimp Newsletters With RSS through a random Google search, and later ended up reaching out to me and thanking me for writing it because they found it useful.

(If you’re one of those readers, Helloooo! 👋🏻😊)

Similar to that post, there is another popular newsletter service with a slightly hidden feature, which I wanted to write a quick post about.

A few people I’ve talked to have been surprised when I told them that you can actually follow any free Substack Newsletter through RSS.

(I assume that’s also the case for paid content, but I’m not subscribed to any paid Substack newsletters, so I’m not familiar with how that works.)

Finding a Substack RSS feed is really simple. Just like WordPress’ default RSS configuration, the feed for any free Substack newsletter can be found by adding /feed to the end of the domain, like this:

https://[USER].substack.com/feed

So, for Darryl Cooper’s history Substack, which is normally found at https://martyrmade.substack.com, his RSS feed would be found at:

https://martyrmade.substack.com/feed

This also works to find feeds for Substack newsletters that are hosted on custom domains, such as Pragmatic Engineer’s, which would be found at:

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/feed

Hope that helps you keep your inboxes clean, and your reading rich and fascinating!

P.S. The Get RSS Feed URL browser extension has also been super useful for me in this! If you run it on any Substack newsletter, it’ll give you the feed URL you need to be able to subscribe. Much easier than trying to remember the /feed rule every time you want to subscribe!

I’ve had lots of experiences over the years of looking forward to a new movie or TV show being released.

In some cases, that excitement for an upcoming release would last months or years. The year-long wait for Endgame after Infinity War came out comes to mind.

Lately, though, I find movies and TV shows to be much less the focus of my anticipation. I can’t currently think of a new movie I’m excited to see when it comes out.

However, I did realize that there are 3 books that are due to come out this next year(ish) that I’m excited to read!

So, I thought I’d share a few of them here:

1. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport: This one is due to come out soonest, so it will probably be the first one I’ll read. I’ve followed Cal since the first time I read Digital Minimalism in 2019. (I’ve re-read it probably 3-4 times thereafter.) Since then, I have come to be a big fan of his philosophy of lifestyle and productivity. Slow Productivity, as I understand it, is about how working deeply over a long period of time on a project can sometimes be much more useful and leave a better legacy than the scattered and frenetic work situations that we often find ourselves in today in modern knowledge work.

2. Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson : A few friends got me into Brandon Sanderson’s writings at the start of the pandemic, and I quickly got hooked. Wind and Truth is the fifth 1,000+ page long book in Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. It’s… a lot 😅. But I love the story! I’m working through finishing book #4 right now, so I’ll be ready for book 5 by its December 2024 release date.

3. Unnamed Tuberculosis Book by John Green : this is honestly maybe the one I’m most excited about, but it’s also the one that might not be available this year. As an author, John Green is best known for his young adult novels, but lately, he’s been getting really into the impacts of Tuberculosis on the world’s most vulnerable. I actually wrote about one of his campaigns last year. Well, apparently he’s writing a book about Tuberculosis. Best I can tell, it’s yet untitled, and has no release date… so it might be ambitious to hope that I’ll be able to read it in 2024. But, I’m still looking forward to reading it, whenever it comes out. 😊

I’m not sure what it says about me that I’m in a place of now deeply looking forward to new books coming out, in comparison to just a few years ago having kept all of that anticipation for movies and shows.

But, I think I like this new way of being. 😁

“Imagine what would happen if we had as much courage for peace as we have had for war?

What if we had as many monuments and holidays designated for the heroes of peace as we have for the heroes of war?

What if we channeled all our incredibly gifted minds to devise ways to de-escalate violence rather than crafting new drones and bombs and guns?

What if we were as willing to die for the cross as we have been willing to die for the sword?

What if…”

~ Shane Claiborn in Beating Guns

Have you ever logged onto public WiFi, but when you try to open a web page that you already had open, it just won’t load?

Sometimes this is because the WiFi is simply not working. In cases like that, it’s probably better to just pull out a book and read, instead of fighting a hopeless battle with bad WiFi. 🙃

Other times, however, the WiFi is actually indeed working, but it’s waiting for you to log in to it.

You’ve quite likely logged onto coffee shop or airport WiFi like this in the past. A page will load with branding for whatever company is hosting the WiFi network. There is usually a place where they ask you to put in your email address or phone number, and then you click something like “Get Free Wifi”. After that, you can use the internet normally.

Many devices are good at recognizing situations like this, where the internet isn’t accessible because the WiFi needs to be logged into first. In these cases, your device will usually give you a notification instructing you to log in, and directing you to the log-in page.

However, sometimes devices don’t recognize when there’s a need log in in order to get online, so they won’t give such a notification.

Or, sometimes I’ve found that I can accidentaly dismiss the notification that would otherwise redirect me to the log-in page.

In cases like this, if you try to open a web page that you’ve visited before, it will often not load, and not send you to the WiFi’s log-in page.

This is because your web browser will see that the network is trying to redirect you to a page that is on a different server from the one that originally hosted the page you were on, and it will stop that redirection to prevent a phishing attack.

If you ever end up in such a situation, there is a very easy way that you can get to the log in page.

All you need to do is open your web browser and go to the following web address.

2.2.2.2

This will trigger the network to redirect you to the proper log-in page, from which you will be able to get online. Because 2.2.2.2 is the address of a server that you’ve never been to before, your browser’s anti-phishing features won’t be activated.

You’ll then be able get to the network’s log-in page, and get online (hopefully) without a another problem! 😊

Today marks 2 years to the day since my dad passed away.

Dad was an amazing man, and the last 24 months without him have been more of a challenge than I would have ever expected.

Today I wanted to share the eulogy that mom, brother and I wrote in honor of dad after his passing.

The recording of Dad’s Memorial Service is below, and the reading of the eulogy starts at timestamp 55:50.

Eulogy for Jerry Müller

In 1982 when Jerry graduated from Bible College, the last verse from Isaiah 40 was what he had written in his yearbook. Over the course of the last 6 years, in the midst of all the health struggles and challenges he walked through, that verse and the 3 preceding it proved themselves to be true and powerful in his life: superscript 29 in markdown ²⁹

²⁸ Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth
Does not become weary or tired.
His understanding is unsearchable.
²⁹ He gives strength to the weary,
And to the one who lacks might He increases power.
³⁰ Though youths grow weary and tired,
And vigorous young men stumble badly,
³¹ Yet those who wait for the Lord
Will gain new strength;
They will mount up with wings like eagles,
They will run and not get tired,
They will walk and not become weary.
~ Isaiah 40

Jerry Müller passed away on December 19, 2021 from complications due to the myelofibrosis blood cancer, which he was diagnosed with in November 2017.

Who was Jerry?

Jerry was a man unlike any other. It’s difficult to sum him up in only a few words.

To start with, he was strong. Thinking back on his life, we don’t know if we’ve met someone stronger and more able than him. Not simply physical strength — though he was indeed incredibly strong physically — but even more so mentally and emotionally. Through the course of the years that he was fighting cancer, he dealt with excruciating pain throughout his body due to the ways the myelofibrosis cancer attacked his bones and marrow. However, in the midst of that excruciating pain, we never once heard him complain. His endurance and capacity to keep going and push through was beyond what any of us have ever seen.

Throughout his life, he taught us to endure, to push through the difficult things, and to keep going without complaining, even when it’s hard. We’ll always remember the motto he taught us and regularly reminded us: “Always do everything to the best of your ability.”

Another characteristic about dad was how exceptionally perceptive and intelligent he was. There never was a problem or a question that he couldn’t solve. His attention to detail in projects he was working on was unparalleled. And the sheer number of things he knew and remembered was sometimes dizzying. And he never stopped learning. After he passed away, we were working through some of his files in the filing cabinet. We were stunned when we found a several-centimeters-thick folder with all of his trainings, certifications, and achievements from multiple fields and disciplines. When he studied Electrical Engineering Technology at SIAST in Moose Jaw in the early 90’s, he ended up graduating with honors. But, him being as extraordinarily humble as he was, it took many years after his time in SIAST before he told even his wife that, not only did he graduate with honors, but he actually achieved the highest grades in history in some of his classes, including getting a 100% average over all of the three years of calculus courses he took for his program!

With us boys being homeschooled, Dad was more intricately involved in our education than most fathers ever get to be. Because of that, he was able to teach us from a young age to love learning. If Josh was bored during a slow sermon at church, instead of coloring pages or toys, dad gave him math problems, and taught him how to solve them… Consequently, Josh ended up being able to multiply two 4 digit numbers before he ever even entered Grade 1.

Stephen also remembers how dad would tell us stories from the Bible. Dad was a great storyteller, and the lively and compelling way he portrayed stories from scripture taught us from a young age to appreciate good communication and to love the Bible. He loved preaching and teaching, spending countless hours studying and preparing every time he would share, always wanting the things he taught to be conveyed with excellence.

He shaped our walk with Jesus from a very young age. He was the one who prayed with Stephen to accept Jesus into his heart when was a child.

Dad also taught us how to memorize. Together we memorized passages of scripture, the ten commandments, the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, and more. Many of these things we memorized together with dad we can still recite even to this day.

Dad also had a servant’s heart. He preferred to stay out of the spotlight, and instead to serve from behind the scenes whenever he could. He was generous with both his time and his money. He loved others by serving them. One of his favorite memories that he regularly enjoyed telling us stories about was his missions trip to Haiti in 1989, where he spent several weeks helping with construction of buildings for local ministries. We also remember several times when we were traveling as a family, and ended up meeting people who were going through rough times. After getting to know them a bit, dad would take some time to pray and convene with mom. In several instances, dad ended up giving several hundred dollars to these people we had just met. He knew Holy Spirit wanted to bless them through us, so Jerry was faithful, and gave.

It is important to note, too, that his generosity didn’t just show itself in a few specific instances in his life, but were foundational to who he was. It was in spiritual DNA. Years ago, Jerry was going through some events that he would have described as the hardest season in his life. Both his health and finances were more in question than they’d ever been before. We’ll never forget how he dealt with it: Instead of worrying and fretting about it, he decided to give. He and mom made several large donations to a few ministries and missions programs they knew of. He said, “It’s only with God’s help that we will get through this, so we need to put our trust in Him.” Giving to God’s work in the midst of the challenges was Dad’s way of putting that trust into action. Jerry taught us to give of ourselves, to give our time, and give financially, even when it was hard or didn’t make sense.

Another iconic characteristic about dad was how vivaciously funny he could be. Those who knew Jerry well would agree that his ability to make people laugh was uncontested. On a regular basis, we would quite literally laugh until we cried from jokes or stories he would tell. And he loved pranks. Many of his nieces and nephews remember well dad pranking them by scaring them with his gorilla mask. Other times, when one of us were particularly enthralled in some project or watching some show, he would shock us out of our unnecessary seriousness by blowing a hand-held air horn he had bought, bringing forth terrified screams and deep belly laughs from us all [BLOW AIR HORN 🎺]. Sometimes his jokes could be a bit much, but he would always tell us, “I only tease the people I love”. He taught us the importance of laughter, and how to find creative ways to bring joy.

Dad had so many passions. He loved woodworking and carpentry, having built more shelves, stands, stools, and sheds than any of us could count. He loved cooking and trying new recipes. The last few years, he had gotten especially good at making smoked foods. His homemade smoked-cheese was like nothing you’ve ever tasted. He loved outdoor activities like golfing and fishing. He loved gardening. Many around Lanigan will remember seeing him faithfully watering the lawn and tending the garden over the years. Several kids from around the community came and helped him with watering the grass over the last couple years. They grew to love dad, eventually starting to endearingly refer to him as their “Grandpa” across from the park.

Jerry also loved music. He loved both listening to music, and making it. Over the years, he had been involved in many choirs and worship teams. His powerful bass voice brought a new life and vigor to whatever songs were being sung. He spent time learning both the guitar and the banjo over the years, which ended up being foundational for Josh and Stephen’s love of playing music. And dad especially loved listening to good music. ’80s Christian rock — the likes of Larry Norman, Stryper, Petra, and more — made regular appearances in our house through the decades. His favorite by far, however, was Southern Gospel Music. The playlist you heard walking in was a selection of some of his favorite songs.

One iconic line that he especially loved was from Triumphant Quartet’s song Going There It seems especially poignant today:
This world is not my home, I′m a stranger in this life
I know I don’t belong so I have fixed my eyes On that Heavenly prize
When the race is finely run, I will rest at Jesus′ feet
When the Savior says ’Well done′, what a sound that will be
Won’t you come and go with me

Conclusion

Jerry was well loved by family, friends, and acquaintances alike.

To try to boil him down to just a few words fails our capacity.

He wasn’t just strong, brilliant, generous and funny.

He was so much more that we don’t even have space, time, or verbal capacity for.

He was committed and consistent.
He was faithful and kind.
He was joyous and funny.
He was honorable and unshaken.

He imparted so many of these characteristics to us, which we’ll carry with us for the rest of our lives.

The strongest aspects of dad’s character are the things that have shaped our lives the most.

His legacy lives on because of the deposit he left in each of us

Though we are heartbroken and miss him tremendously, we can rejoice in knowing that he is in the presence of Jesus, where there is no pain. Jerry is now walking in the fullness of eternal life. This same eternal life is promised to each of us who have placed our hope in Jesus Christ.

Sometimes it’s easy to fall prey to the dual lies that 1) we’ll have our loved ones in our life more-or-less forever, and 2) that love is something that we can give too much of or run out of.

It can be easy to withhold a kind word because we think we might not be creative enough to top it or live up to it later… or we might decide not to give that gift, thinking that maybe it would be better to wait and give it some other time…

But love is a renewable resource, and time is not.

The more you love, the more you’ll be able to love.

Time, on the other hand, WILL run out…
Usually before you’re ready,
and too often as a surprise.

You won’t always have your loved ones around.

So, don’t ration your love for them while you do.

Give the more generous gift.
Hold that hug a good while longer.
Say that kind word, then start drafting another.
Do for them that task they’ve been not wanting to do.
Turn off your phone and skip out on that event to be able to instead spend some quality time together.

Time will run out long before Love does.

So, don’t ration the latter.

I’m dabbling with an idea, and testing whether it’s a good fit for work and life.

Thus far, I’ve been liking the fruit of it.

Basically, the idea can be expressed as follows:

If I find myself doing the same (or a very similar) task 3 or more times, it’s worth starting to look closely at that task and to figure out a better system for it.

After doing a given task a few times, you start to get the hang of it. You start to understand the bounds and contours of what needs to be done. And you start to see ways that the task can be simplified.

Especially when it comes to digital tasks, after doing something a few times, it’s often worth starting to think through how to speed up and improve the process.

… or, how to automate it entirely, so you don’t actually have to do the task any more at all.

This mirrors an adage in Permaculture that roughly goes, “100 hours of building a system that gets you what you want with by working only 1 hour per week to maintain it is much better than working 10-20 hours a week to get the same result without that system.”

Or, put another way:

Systems will always out-perform grind.

And, especially in the digital world, those systems are easier than ever to build:

So many different services can now be connected with tools like n8n or Zapier that we should basically never need to copy from one service and paste into another again (or, at least, not more than thrice).

If you blog, and want to share your posts on other platforms (like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Mastodon), there’s little reason to copy and paste those links yourself, when 5 minutes of n8n configuring can do the job for you.

I had a big data-management project I was tasked with this week. It involving processing, renaming, and organizing over 3,000 different audio files. Had I done everything manually, it probably would have taken me like 50 hours of work. But, I ended up writing a couple fairly simple shell scripts to automate some parts of the project. This ended up saving me over 10,000 clicks, and dozens of hours of work!

Justin Wernick’s recent post says it aptly:

When at all possible, “Make The Computer Do It!”

It doesn’t work for everything, and there are more than a few tasks in life that can’t be automated.

But, when the same task needs to be done many times, it’s almost always worth trying to improve how that task is done.

P.S. I’m loving the tension that comes from considering the contrast between “tasks” and “habits” when it comes to this “rule”. Routine, rhythm, and habit have been life-giving to me in this season. This week, I made the same breakfast basically every day. And I’ve probably made well-over 5,000 coffees with my Porlex Mini and my Aeropress over the course of the last 10 years.

If those are “tasks”, I’m definitely breaking my own rule, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Maybe there’s a difference between good routine and habits, and what Taylor Troesh describes as “grind”?

Not sure. Like I said, it’s still an idea that I’m just dabbling with. 😁

I recently published my 100th post on this blog. An exciting milestone!

After passing the big 100, I’ve found myself pondering why I’ve been doing this.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process of blogging. But it is a time consumer. It is effort.

That effort made me spend some time thinking about the classic and vital question that should be regularly asked about any endeavor we spend time and effort on:
"Who is this for? and What is this for?"

If you do a search online for advice about blog writing, so much of what will come up is content about how to drive traffic, how to do good SEO, how to make money, get affiliate sponsorships and customers, etc.

Now, while there definitely has been professional value to building and maintaining my blog, making money is FAR from the main reason that I put the effort in to write. Writing for making money isn’t really something of much interest to me.

As I pondered why I write and who I’m writing to, 3 “people” came to mind who I think most of my posts are written towards, and who I think are especially worth creating content for.

1. Your Past Self

Some problems seem utterly unsolvable while we’re in the process of trying to solve them… But then, once we see the solution, the answer seems so clear and obvious that we can sometimes forget what it feels like to not know the answer.

There are likely a LOT of things you have learned over the years that you now take for granted. Skills you have, techniques you’ve developed, ways of interacting with the world that have made your life better; valuable paradigms for making decisions that you’ve learned and earned through study and mistakes.

These are worth sharing!

Of course you can’t actually send these lessons to your past self. But, there are countless people around the world who are navigating those same problems and questions that younger you struggled so hard to find solutions to, while current you takes those insights for granted.

It benefits everyone if we choose generosity, and share widely the things we’ve learned.

What do you wish was something you knew when you were younger? There are TONS of people needing to learn that same lesson today.

So, write down some of those lessons and how you learned them… and share them around!

Someone in the same situation as your past self will thank you!

2. Your Future Self

While many posts I’ve written were to document things I’ve learned in the past, there are a large number of posts that I’ve written because they’re things I want to remember into the future.

Whether that be a quote to help me navigate hard times, or a reminder to help me build the habits I want, or even just ways of thinking about the world and my place in it, which I want to walk in both now and into the future.

“Writing it down” can be a powerful way to help us keep those things we want to remember in our minds into the future. That effect is multiplied when we write in public, where people can find our thoughts potentially years into the future and remind you about them in conversation or random unexpected email.

What is something you would like to never forget?

Write it down, and post it!

3. Those Who Will Come After You

My family and I are approaching the 2 year anniversary of my father’s death.

In the last two years, there have been a TON of times that I wished I could have gotten my dad’s thoughts and advice about a wide range of things.

He was an extremely intelligent man, with a ton of novel solutions and insights in a wide range of areas.

He had a ton of really cool projects that he’d done, and a large number of projects that he was in the middle of when he passed.

But, he basically didn’t write any of those thoughts, insights, or projects down for others to be able to read.

Lately, I’ve found myself sad about that.

I’ve often wished I had a place I could go to read dad’s thoughts on life… a place to learn about some of his numerous projects, or to read about whatever was on his mind over his days, weeks, and years… a way to spend time thinking about some of the same things he had spent time thinking about.

Basically, I’ve found myself often wishing my dad had written something like a blog.

I’ve had Derek Sivers’ post saved in my RSS reader for months now. I’ve found myself revisiting it regularly. He talks about the passing of his wise and insightful friend, and how that friend had very few things that he had written down for others to read and remember. Derek lamented the lack of his friends writings, wishing he could read his friend’s thoughts and insights. He took those laments as an opportunity to push himself towards writing and creating more for people in the future after he’s gone.

I’ve found myself very much resonating with that post and that idea.

I wish I had a place to read my dad’s thoughts… to read the things he did and learned over his decades.

I wish I could read my dad’s blog.

What are some things that you wish you could share with those you love after you’re gone?
What are some things those you love will want to be able to read and revisit from your life after you’re gone?

Write them down.

Save them and share them in a place that can be found long into the future.

You may be surprised who all will find comfort in reading your words years or decades from now.

I’ve done my fair share of manually creating subtitles over the years. It can be quite a tedious and time-consuming process, so for a while now I’ve been on the lookout for a way to make that process faster.

Over the last few days, I’ve also continued to be playing around with Whisper, which I wrote about before. While playing, I found a workflow that I wish I had had access to years ago. It’s a process that allows for quick generation of subtitles using preexisting scripts, without setting a single timestamp manually. I’ve already got several projects I’d like to try this new workflow on, but first I just wanted to share one completed project with that workflow here!

The Song 🎶

So, a couple days ago a dear friend of mine released a new song on his YouTube channel.

I’ve been playing it on repeat since it came out.

It’s sooo good. 😭

Give it a listen! And if you like it, subscribe, like, comment, share it around, etc. 🙃 He’s got a small channel, but I think it should be bigger 😉

Anyways, late last night, after playing the song on my computer for the 200th time, I decided that I wanted to have the song on my phone too. So I used yt-dlp to download the video and audio to my computer.

Then, for the fun of it, I decided to run my Whisper script on it.

Whisper quickly zoomed through the song and created a transcript with its guesses at the lyrics. It also created a VTT subtitle file, with timestamps so that the words could be read in sync with the lyrics being sung in the song.

Now, the tiny.en model that I have configured with my main Whisper command has an implicit trade-off. It’s really fast, but it’s also less accurate because of its speed. It’s normally pretty good, but there are errors.

For example, at one point point, Aaron’s lyrics are:

Are we so different from one another?

Where Whisper outputted:

00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:26.000
 Dowing so different from what another.

Less than ideal.¹ 😬

At this point, I stopped to ponder for a moment…

“I have the timestamps for when words are said in this song, but tied to the wrong words…
I also have the right words from the description of the video, but they’re not yet linked to timestamps…
If only there was a way to take out the lyrics from the wrong subtitle file, and put in the correct lyrics in instead.

I could try to write a script for that… but the script would basically need to have a grasp of human language to be able to know how to what needs to be replaced where…

…

Wait a minute! Large Language Models are a thing!

The Prompt 🦾

So, I pulled up a chat window of vim-ai, which allows me to use OpenAI’s GPT models (like ChatGPT) from my terminal, and gave it the following prompt:

Below is lyrics to a song, and a VTT subtitle file generated
by a STT engine guessing at the words for that song.
Please output a corrected VTT, replacing any variances in words or punctuation
in the VTT file with that of the Original Lyrics instead.

# Original Lyrics

We hear their cries and screams
We walk on by offering sympathies
...
[THE REST OF THE ORIGINAL LYRICS]
Are we so different from one another?
...

# VTT Subtitle File

WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:17.000
 [MUSIC]

00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000
 We hear their cries and screams

00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:29.000
 We walk on by offering sympathies
...
[THE REST OF THE WHISPER GENERATED VTT FILE]

00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:26.000
 Dowing so different from what another.
...

I copied the original lyrics that Aaron had shared in the description, and also copied the whole VTT subtitle file that Whisper generated (VTT files are just text files with a specific syntax and a different file extension, so you can open them without problem in Notepad, TextEdit, or whatever plain-text editor your OS has.)

Then I ran the prompt, and let it chug.

And, it worked!!

A few seconds later, it finished outputting the new and corrected version of the VTT Subtitle file for the song, using the words from original lyrics instead of the misunderstood words that Whisper had generated.

...
00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:26.000
 Are we so different from one another?
...

This is very cool to me!

It means that, if you have any spoken audio (in a language that Whisper supports) and the original script for that audio, you can now generate a (basically?) perfect subtitle file for that audio from that script quite quickly, using just a couple commands! 😎

If you watch the song on YouTube now, the lyrics that show up as subtitles are the ones that were generated with the above process. 😊

Limitations, Further Ponderings, and Future Project Ideas 🤔

I used the ChatGPT4 8k token model on this experiment, which means that it would probably only work with content up to 2,000-3,000 words in length (Two copies of the target text, plus timestamps and prompts). I have a couple projects I want to try this on which will be probably more than 10,000 words each, so the currently available GPT4 model available through API won’t work on it.

My plan right now is to try Claude’s 100k Token Model on those projects. I repeated this experiment with this song on the Claude 9k token model and it worked perfectly. So, I’m hopeful about scaling it up with their larger model.

I’m also curious about the idea of using this with different languages. I have a couple Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic projects I want to try this on. Whisper is great in English, but is less accurate in less-resourced languages. I’m curious to see how various LLMs (GPT, Claude, maybe LLaMa?) perform on this task in other languages, when the source subtitle file might be even less accurate. ²

A note to my future self (and to whomever else this may concern 🙃):

When you chew on questions like “should I go to the gym?” or “should I go for a run?”, almost always there’s at least some resistance you encounter which makes answering with a “yes” challenging.

Often the inner monolog goes something like, “that’s too hard”, or “meh, it’s not worth it”.

Because of that, it has been not-uncommon for you to chose the path-of-least-resistance, and not put in the work… to not get sweaty.

This note is just a quick reminder that, in contrast to that resistance you feel about getting up and getting after it, in truth you have never gotten back from exercising and regretted having exercised.

You more or less always feel significantly better — body, soul, AND mind — for having gotten some kind of workout in.

Never, that I can remember, do you feel worse.

The resistance we feel to getting up and getting after it seems, in retrospect, to almost always be a lie.

And, I’m guessing that applies to a lot more than just getting a good workout in. 🧐

This morning, on day 8 of the 2023 Israel—Hamas War, my amazing girlfriend is mediating a dialog/debate between a Muslim and a Jew, about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Last night, she was studying in preparation for the discussion, and we ended up talking a bit about the history of the conflict. I mentioned that a few years ago I had listened to the “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” series by the MartyrMade Podcast. That series is a marvelous 23 hours of historical deep-dive on the events leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It is an INTENSE and DENSE series, with countless names, dates, quotations, and citations.

That being said, it’s also a series I would highly recommend almost anyone listening through, especially if you want to have a better foundation for understanding the ever-developing situation in that region of the world.

In our discussion, I mentioned that one of the things that shocked me when listening through that podcast was the fact that, in the late 1800s, Jews and Muslims weren’t really at conflict with each other in the ways we see today. The podcast host had talked about the fact that, in contrast to a popular Western understanding that suggests that Jews and Arabs have basically been in conflict since the time of Abraham (as Jews and Arabs are of the lineage of Abraham’s sons, Isaac and Ishmael, respectively), the truth is that, in the late 1800s, many European Jews thought that moving into the mostly Muslim occupied territory of the Levant would be far safer and much more preferable to staying in the Christian majority Europe, where pogroms were regularly resulting in countless murders of those in the Jewish community.

My girlfriend agreed that this was a fascinating fact to include, and asked me if I had any sources for it.

I gave a grimaced shrug 😬🤷🏻‍♂️ and I said, “ummm… there’s some great quotes about it somewhere in this 23 hours of podcast 😅😅😅 ”

She replied, “Well, if you can find a specific, quotable source, I would love to make use of it in our discussion tomorrow!”

Welp, gotta do what we gotta do for love. 🥰 Let’s see if we can’t find. 😁

1. Setup 🏗️

We’re gunna get pretty nerdy here. 😎 Lots of Linux commands. If you want to do this too, it’ll require at least some level comfortability with the command-line. I did this on Arch Linux, but it should work fine on any flavor of Linux, or on MacOS. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work on Windows, too, but you’d need to rewrite the ZSH code I used into PowerShell.

The tool I used to do this was OpenAI’s speech-to-text engine, Whisper. Specifically, I used the C++ rewrite called whisper.cpp, which is much faster than the original Python implementation.

This tool is awesome. It can transcribe audio from dozens of different languages, automatically timestamp and/or create subtitle files, and it can even auto-translate the transcriptions it makes into English. All free. All right on your computer (doesn’t need to go through an online server; it can be run fully offline).

Thankfully, I already had the tool setup and installed for my work, as projects that involve multilingual multimedia comes up quite regularly for me.

I won’t go through the installation instructions, as the GitHub repo explains it well enough on its own. I will just say that, for my workflow, ffmpeg also needs to be installed.

I wrote a few aliases for my command line to be able to use Whisper efficiently when I need it. One of those aliases I created specifically for the purpose of transcribing English very quickly, which is what I used for this project.

Here’s the ZSH alias in question.

whisp-tiny(){
    for file in "$@"; do # loop through all the files provided

	# Convert file to 16kbs .wav file
        ffmpeg -i "$file" -ar 16k -ac 1 -acodec pcm_s16le -f wav "${file%.*}.wav"

	# Run whisper.cpp on the new .wav file
        $HOME/.local/src/whisper.cpp/main -t 18 \
	-otxt true -ovtt true \
	-pc true -l 'auto' \
        -m $HOME/.local/src/whisper.cpp/models/ggml-tiny.en.bin -f "${file%.*}.wav"
    done
}

When run, this command will generate 3 additional files from whatever your source file was. It will take whatever media you give it (any audio or video file that ffmpeg supports), and it will create a .wav file of the audio with the codec and bitrate that Whisper requires for input. It will then run Whisper on that .wav file, and generate a couple text files — a .txt file and .vtt file. The .txt file will be just the text of the transcription. The .vtt file will be a subtitle file, which includes all the timestamp data of where different words and sentences are found. 😲

That will be useful for our project!!

2. The Search 🔍

Thankfully, I actually had those tools set up on my computer already when I started this search. So, I downloaded the podcast episodes to a directory on my computer, and ran the command whisp-tiny *.mp3 on the directory, to run Whisper on all the mp3 files. Then, I went and did something else for a few minutes, as it takes some time to chug through all that audio. ☕😊

I came back a few minutes later, and decided to start searching the resulting text, even though not all the files had been processed yet. On my computer the command above turns speech into text at a rate of roughly 30 seconds per second (or, about 1 hour of audio for every 2 minutes of processing) So, it took about 5 minutes to process the first 2-and-a-half hour long episode. It would have taken about 45 minutes to process all 23 hours of podcast, but thankfully I didn’t need to let it continue running that long.

When there finally were some files ready, I knew I wanted to search all the .vtt files that my script created, as it would have the timestamp data along with the words. I could use that to find where in the podcast the discussion about the topic was.

I remembered that one of the quotes included the name “Ishmael”. So, I used the text search tool grep to search through all the text files in the directory by running grep -R Ishmael. That outputted the following:

$ grep -R Ishmael
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt: brother Ishmael in his time
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt: descendants of Ishmael, notice that the Arabs and the
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt: like savages, our brother Ishmael
...

Bingo! The discussion was in episode 1!

I opened Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt in my text editor, and searched for “Ishmael” again, and found that that line is said at 00:29:33.040. I opened the mp3 to that timestamp, skipped back a bit, and started listening. 🎧

grep -B 1 -H "Ishmael" *.vtt

$ grep -B 1 -H "Ishmael" *.vtt

Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt-00:29:33.040 --> 00:29:34.420
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt: brother Ishmael in his time
--
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt-00:29:47.300 --> 00:29:50.200
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt: descendants of Ishmael, notice that the Arabs and the
--
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt-00:30:00.910 --> 00:30:03.580
Fear_and_Loathing_ep_1.wav.vtt: like savages, our brother Ishmael

I then listened to the quotes, and Googled a few of them, which quickly resulted in two great sources related to the topic, including this really fascinating quote from historian Larry Collins in his book O Jerusalem:

“With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East.”

3. Mission Accomplished! 🫶🏻

After I found those quotes and their sources, I sent them back to my girlfriend.

She responded, “Wow, these are great! I’m definitely going to translate one of these and use it tomorrow. How did you find them so quick?? You said there’s hours of content. It’s been like only 10 minutes!”

There are lots of big societal questions that accompany the AI revolution we’re in the middle of…

There are countless of horrors that we hear about day-after-day as we watch nation going to war against nation…

But, for today at least, being able to impress my girlfriend by using one of those AI developments,

as she and others like her take steps to work towards peace in the face of those conflicts,

feels like a good thing.

Te amo! ❤️

Triggers are not to be avoided.
Triggers are instead designed to highlight those places in our hearts
where we still are in need of growth,
and where we still need God to walk with us towards healing.

Don’t avoid triggers.
Study them. Learn from them.
Walk, grow, and heal through them.

~ Adapted from Debra Fileta

There’s an quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that goes something like:

If I had five hours to cut down a tree,
I would spend the first four hours sharpening the ax.

While it’s doubtful he actually said this, I find the implications of the quote to be useful, especially when it comes to thinking about self-development and self-care.

There are countless tasks, challenges, and obstacles we navigate in our lives that involve just learning enough to get by.

Get competent enough to survive, and then move on.

For most people, it’s not worth spending too much effort to be world-class at washing dishes, for example.

If you’re just pruning some twigs, you don’t need a super sharp ax.

But there are some obstacles in life that are worth approaching differently.

There are some skills in life that are worth learning really well.

Professionally, if you know you’re going to be spending a large chunk of your life on something (or, if something you’re doing is really high-stakes), there’s a lot of value in getting REALLY good at doing that thing. As an example, we usually require doctors to spend over a decade just studying medicine before we let them practice. We (rightfully) want their professional “axes” to be really sharp before they start to treat us.

Most of us don’t spend our professional lives treating the sick, but we all do have lives that we want to spend well.

And in pursuit of spending my life well, one area that I’ve found to be disproportionately fruitful for “ax sharpening” is in the area of interfacing with my emotions and my “inner self”.

If there’s one thing we’re guaranteed in life, it’s that we’re going to encounter events, people, and situations that will cause us unpredictable and often chaotic emotions.

Stress, anxiety, anger…
Joy, love, longing…
Overwhelm, sadness, despair…
Hope, annoyance, drive, exhaustion, excitement, lethargy…

And that was just this Monday.

Navigating our complex emotional lives in an ever-changing world, in the complex social circles we find ourselves in can be a lot sometimes…

Because of that, and because every one of us will spend the entirety of the rest of our lives with ourselves, closer than any other person could possibly be to the tumultuous deep that can be our inner-selves, I’d suggest that one of the most useful “axes” we can sharpen is the skill of navigating that tumult… of learning how to deal with, give space to, and work with our emotional selves.

Mental health seems to me to be a very important (though, easily overlooked) part of whole health. And it’s a part I’d not given much space to in my 20’s.

I’m glad finally starting to learn some of the tools to cultivate good mental health now, in my early 30’s.

A few tools that I’ve found to be effective to that end, which I’d say are great ways to “sharpen” one’s capacity to interface with their emotional selves:

• Breath-work - techniques like Edge Breathing, Box Breathing, the 4-7-8 Technique, or even just setting a timer and focusing for a few minutes on taking really slow, really deep breaths can be shockingly good at effecting a better mood… or at creating a mental space in which dealing with our otherwise-chaotic emotions can be done much more easily.
• Journalling - I’ve found that having a space to turn emotions into language, and then interact with those emotions as words on a page, instead of as nebulous and ethereal feelings has been a powerful tool for pursuing better mental health. Journalling is interesting, in that there are many different techniques one could use, with vastly differing uses and efficacies. But I think it’s rare that taking time to journal isn’t at least somewhat helpful. (Even last month, I was feeling suffocatingly overwhelmed by everything I needed to do in preparation for an international move. To combat that, I opened to a blank page in my journal and just simply starting writing out everything that was stressing me (not even a “to-do list”; just a “stressors” list). The very act of getting all those stressors on paper (even though it ended up taking 2 pages to do so) brought a lot of relief from that stress.) I’m hoping soon to share another post about a few specific techniques I like to use when I journal.
• Sabbath / Location - I’ve written before about how powerful taking time to rest or making a temporary location change like spending a few hours in nature can be. I think they’re both really effective, and really under-used…. in my life at least! Probably for many people. Using them consistently (like once a week) can be really life-giving and stability-bringing.
• Counseling / Therapy - When your car is making weird sounds, you should take it to a professional who can figure out what those sounds mean. So, when your inner-self is acting in ways you don’t fully understand, it also makes sense to see someone who specializes in helping people through situations like that.

It’s interesting to note that, while each of these tools are really effective on helping cultivate better personal mental health, none of them are “hard”.

They’re all fairly simple.¹

They largely require just showing up, and doing them consistently.

They mostly require habit building.

James Clear has entered the chat.

If it’s worth taking time to sharpen an ax to make the day’s work of chopping down a tree smoother, then it’s all the more worth taking the time to learn how to navigate the emotions that we’ll have for the rest of our lives.

It’ll help us to walk in more health, more joy, more love, and live all-around better lives.

Download Audio Blog

It’s often pointed out that, in contrast to a majority of other religions and faith systems, the emphasis of the New Testament is what God has done for Humanity, instead of what Humanity needs to do for God.

With rare exception, the idea of “striving” is basically not present in the exhortations of the Christian scriptures. Instead, the emphasis is on receiving the gift God has given, which no effort on our part could have accomplished.

But, there are a few exceptions. And, when those rare exceptions are present — where striving towards something is admonished — I think it is especially worthy of note.

One of those few instances is the counter intuitive invitation of Hebrews 4:11

Therefore, let us make every effort to enter that rest.

In the midst of a season of my life that has been my most overwhelming so far, I find this entreaty towards cessation of work (instead of towards further exertion) to be so life-giving.

And… sometimes, almost a little guilt-giving…

“Who am I to have the luxury of a break? So many people need to work much longer hours, and have much harder lives than me. What have I done that would deserve letting me stop?”

Resting sometimes almost feels wrong. Like we need to keep producing to justify our existence.

When confronting my resistance to rest, I’ve been finding myself challenged by two themes.

The first theme is the well-documented fact that good rest actually enables much greater productivity.

Early in the days of Apple Computers, as the world-changing Macintosh was being developed, many of Apple’s engineers were forced to work 90+ hour work-weeks in order to get the first Mac shipped sooner. However, those ultra-long hours actually ended up delaying the final shipping date of the Macintosh. Later studies that looked at the productivity of those overworked engineers showed that their exhaustion actually decreased their productivity significantly, to the point where the Macintosh would have shipped significantly earlier if the engineers had worked much fewer hours.

We live in an age where mental clarity and insightful creativity are much more important and valuable than the capacity exert ourselves 16-hours a day for weeks on end without a break.

Yet, one of the first things that gets lost in seasons of overwhelm and overwork is mental clarity and insightful creativity.

James Clear recently shared an insight that I think has an applicable parallel:

“You’re more likely to unlock a big leap in performance by trying differently than by trying harder. You might be able to work 10% harder, but a different approach might work 10x better. Remain focused on the core problem, but explore a new line of attack. Persistence is not just about effort, but also strategy. Don’t merely try harder, try differently.”

It reminded me of when I was doing some contracting work for an app development company last year. On one of my rest days, I was reading and journalling, when an idea popped into my head for improving the efficiency of one of the company’s workflows. I pitched the idea to the CEO and we implemented it. The result was that we ended taking a process that would normally take between 1-2 months of work to complete, and we transformed it into a process that now only takes about 2 days of work.

That transformative idea came about largely because I had decided to rest well that day I had the idea.

And this connection between rest and productivity shows up all over the place, from poor coffee farmers making better coffee when they’re allowed vacation time and sick days, all the way up to the most elite athletes.

One of the things that sticks out when you study high-functioning athletes is how aggressive they are with recovery. The hard workout is important, but recovering well and resting well between workouts is vital, and ends up being a huge emphasis for achieving highest performance.

So, it seems like resting really well (aggressively, even), balanced with working hard and passionately, can be a huge boon to creativity and productivity.

Just based on the raw economics, fighting for rest makes a ton of sense.

But… I also promised a second theme… And that’s this:

While productivity is important, life is more than our productivity.

Our social order might not show it right now, but all human lives are precious and priceless. The life of the richest billionaire is no more valuable than the life of a child dying from drought, famine, and war in Yemen.

Sure, Bezos, Zuck, and Musk are all exponentially more “productive” than that Yemeni kid.

But that child’s life is still priceless, regardless of that fact she hasn’t been been an economic and productivity powerhouse. (And, regardless of the fact the world generally doesn’t treat her life as valuable.)

Life is more than food, clothes, money, and productivity.

The idea that we’re invited into rest, regardless of what we’ve done to achieve it shows up all the way from the first page of the Bible, all the way to the last.

And, I think those thousands of years of wisdom have something to teach us today.

Oliver Burkeman, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, puts it in a way that has stuck with me:

… while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough — that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more done. … the sabbath [is described] as an invitation to spend one day per week “in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God."

One need not be a religious believer to feel some of the deep relief in that idea of being “on the receiving end” — in the possibility that today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence."

I’ve been thinking about scarcity and abundance this week, and wanted to share some of those thoughts!

To start, I’ve been slowly listening through Bible Project’s 15 hour course about Genesis 1. One thing I noticed come up a few times is the idea that, in the creation narrative on page 1 of the Bible, Elohim forms creation with a goal of setting up a place for humanity to thrive.

He couldn’t call creation "very good" until humanity was given abundant food, meaningful work, a commission to have kids and raise families, and a purpose in the form of the commission to steward the world and all its inhabitants.

Our universe was created to be one of abundance — To be a place where there’s more than enough… for you, for me, for our families, for our peoples, and for everyone.

But, humanity’s collective experience of the world has obviously been muuuch different than that (which Genesis 3 starts to give an explanation for). We see that manifest in so many ways today. As one potent example, there are still more than a billion people living off of less than $1 per day.

The first thing every introduction to economics class teaches is scarcity — that there is limited “stuff” and unlimited “want”.

There clearly isn’t “enough”… let alone abundance for all of humanity to thrive…

…

Except, that is a LIE!

We do have enough.

We actually have more than enough.

In the United States alone, more than 130 billion meals worth of perfectly good food gets thrown out as waste every year.

There are plenty of examples of families who grow over 6,000 pounds (2,700 kg) of food on every year on just ⅒ of an acre of land. And there are billions of acres of unused or underused land around the world where the same thing could be done.

We know how to grow an abundance of food in the driest deserts, or in the coldest arctic towns.

We do have abundance. Or, at least, access to it.

And yet, 25,000 people still die from hunger every single day.

That means, much like John Green points out about the 1,500,000 people who die from curable Tuberculosis every year, people in 2023 don’t die from starvation or hunger; they die from injustice.

People in 2023 don’t die from starvation or hunger; they die from injustice.

To paraphrase a Mr. Money Mustache quote I read this week, “We have created a dog-eat-dog world in the middle of a very comfortable and and productive dog food factory.”

It doesn’t need to be that way.

We can do better.

Let’s do better.

I don’t want to be a part of an “us”
that makes a “them”
of the world’s most vulnerable people.

~ John Green in Why Are Poor Countries Poor?

TL;DR: Those SMS authentication codes SUUUCK when you’re an expat who doesn’t always have access to the same phone number. TOTP is a fix to that, allowing you to access your accounts without needing to be able to receive SMS texts. The tutorial video below teaches what TOTP is, how it works, and how to use it. I use and recommend a paid Bitwarden plan for less than $1/month to manage my TOTP codes.

Ok, let’s talk again about online accounts, and convenience.

If you haven’t yet gotten set up with a password manager, then probably the most annoying/inconvenient thing you experience while trying to log into your accounts is forgetting your passwords. Even back when I basically used the exact same password for everything, there was still always inevitably some account that required a slightly different password than I normally used, meaning I’d need to remember (and, most likely end up forgetting) that new one.

Like I wrote about before, a password manager basically completely fixes that problem, while also significantly increases your online security in the process.

A major win-win.

However, once you’ve gotten your passwords under control with a password manager, the next biggest frustration you’re likely to face is issues with 2 Factor Authentication.

Even if you don’t know what 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) means, you’ve almost certainly come across it.

You know when you log into an account, and you get a text message with a code on your phone, and you need to type in that code to the login page in order to finish logging in to your account?

That’s 2FA.

There’s lots of interesting and nerdy things to be said about 2FA. But for now, I just want to focus on one thing:

Two Factor Authentication over SMS text message sucks if you travel internationally often, or regularly change your phone number…

… Or if you end up losing your phone.

If you need to log into an account, and need to receive a text message to log into that account, but you can’t actually receive a text message (whether because your carrier doesn’t have an international plan available in the country you’re in, or otherwise), you’re basically out of luck.

You will not be accessing that account today. 🫠

Thankfully, there’s a solution to this problem! It’s called TOTP (Time-based One-Time Passwords).

Ughhh.... not another acronym!!

Basically, TOTP is a way to allow you to verify your identity when logging into accounts, without getting a text message.

Instead of proving that you can receive texts at your phone number, you instead keep a special code (called a “seed”) in an app on your device (phone or computer).

That “seed” is used to generate unique, one-time 6 digit code that you end up using when you log in to your accounts.

So, as long as you have that “seed” saved on one of your devices, you’ll be able to access your account.

I won’t lie, it’s a bit convoluted system to understand at first. The learning curve is not insignificant.

BUT, if you regularly need to access accounts that require 2FA, but you also regularly don’t have access to SMS to use for 2FA, then TOTP is a fantastic solution.

So... many... acronyms.....

Account access got a lot more convenient and simple for me once I started using TOTP… especially as someone who regularly crosses international boarders, but still needs to maintain access to his accounts.

If TOTP sounds like something you’d benefit from, you should check out the tutorial that @Techlore put together about it. Their video is mostly focused on the security benefits of TOTP (which are significant). But, like having a password manager, using TOTP increases both security and convenience in huge and notable ways.

The video is pretty long, but it lays the foundation for you to be able to understand TOTP well, so you can learn the tool and get all the benefits from it.

Check it out if you think you’d benefit!

My personal recommendation is to use the TOTP features built into the paid plans in Bitwarden . I already Bitwarden to manage my passwords, so having it manage my TOTP seeds and codes is just a wonderful synergy of convenience.

If you have any questions, or need help setting something like this up, feel free to click the reply button bellow, and I’d be glad to try to help! 😎

EDIT, December 2024: If you want to use TOTP but don’t want to pay the $10/year for Bitwarden, I’ve also heard good things about Ente Auth. It’s 100% free and it’s open source. If you want TOTP for free, it’s probably a great tool to try.

I just wanted to quickly highlight a really cool thing that happened in the world this week.

Whether you know it or not, there’s a pretty decent chance you have come across something created by brothers John and Hank Green at some point.

They are insanely prolific siblings, both having written several books, running several companies, building educational content that is being used around the world, and helping build medical infrastructure in impoverished countries like Sierra Leone… among many other things.

On Tuesday, John shared a video on their shared YouTube channel, @vlogbrothers:

To sum up and over-simplify the video, John explains that the medical company Johnson & Johnson holds a patent on a life-saving drug to treat Tuberculosis. When that patent expires next week, it will open the door for generic versions of the drug to be made available in low-income countries, meaning that millions of people who couldn’t afford the drug before will be able to have access to it now.

The estimate by experts is that in the next 4 years, the availability of these low-cost generic alternatives to Johnson & Johnson’s Tuberculosis drugs in low-income countries will save 6 Million lives.

Awesome!

Except, that Johnson & Johnson decided (in a kinda complicated, round-about way) to extend their patent for another 4 years.

A decision that meant that 6,000,000 people would needlessly die from a preventable disease over those next 4 years.

Wow… blegh…

When I saw John’s video shortly after it came out Tuesday, it made me sad.

So many people around the world suffer and die every day from preventable causes. But, for a bunch of reasons, the solutions to prevent that needless suffering and death often simply don’t get implemented.

This just seemed like another scenario where millions of people were needlessly having their lives cut short because of corporate greed and the Western superiority complex…

It made me sad… and mad…

And as is the case with most of those other problems that cause suffering for people around the world every day, I realized I couldn’t anything about this one.

So I moved on with my life, and forgot about the video…

…

…

Until today, when I watched the follow-up video by John’s brother, Hank:

Turns out, I was wrong!

I indeed could have done something about it!

And thousands and thousands of people did!

After John’s video came out, people from around the world started putting significant pressure on Johnson & Johnson for their choice which was keeping valuable medical treatment from people whose lives depended on it.

And Johnson & Johnson conceded!

They didn’t relinquish their patent, but they granted a charity license to allow for the generic usage of the drug, allowing affordable generic versions of the drug to be made available in the low-income countries with the greatest needs for these drugs….

… which opens the door to potentially 6 million lives being saved from needless Tuberculosis deaths in these next 4 years.

Wow!!! 🤯 Freaking amazing!!!

And that change took place in just 4 short days!

Three lessons:

1. Helplessness in the face of the awful things in the world is a lie. A better world is possible, and we can be a part of seeing and making that happen.
2. Stunningly awesome and beautiful things can happen, even in very short amounts of time, when good people partner together to push towards seeing positive change brought about in the world.
3. Vision and great communication from passionate and influential people who truly understand the problems is vital to mobilize these kinds of changes. John has been making weekly videos for 15 years. And, as Hank explains in his followup, John has been deep-dive learning about Tuberculosis for most of the last year. His understanding of the issue, plus thousands of hours of practicing communication meant that he was able to create a video to mobilize thousands of people to see a change that may end up saving millions of lives.
   
   That’s absolutely inspiring to me.

“You don’t need to catch up. You just need to show up.”

~ Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal

The Project 📹

A couple years ago I got connected with Andrew Case, the co-creator of Aleph with Beth, a YouTube channel with the goal of making top-quality Biblical Hebrew educational resources available to everyone who wants them. They’ve created hundreds of really well produced videos — lessons, practice stories, quizzes, songs, and more. Their videos are designed so that anyone, of (nearly) any age, with any educational, cultural, or linguistic background can learn Biblican Hebrew by watching and studying their videos.

I’ve been dabbling in learning the languages of the Bible since I was a kid, and when I first came across Aleph with Beth, my first thought was, “Man! I wish this was available 20 years ago!”

Because Andrew and his wife Bethany (the “Beth” in Aleph with Beth) have the goal of making all the resources they’re creating accessible to as many people as possible, they’ve published all their videos and other supplemental educational content under a free, Creative Commons license. Specifically, that means they actively encourage people to copy, redistribute, and spread around their content. They want people to copy their work and share it around online for others to consume for free.

I like that. We need more of that kind of generosity in the world.

So, I ended up in a conversation with Andrew at one point, and he mentioned that they wanted their videos to be a resource that even people without good internet access could make use of. We also talked about how it would be nice to find a way to “future-proof” the videos, so even when YouTube ceases business (as all companies eventually do), these videos will still be available and useful to those who want them.

Why BitTorrent? 🌊

As we were talking, we realized that one technology that could potentially help us achive both of these goals quite well is BitTorrent. BitTorrent is probably most widely known for its usage as a way to illegally pirate copyrighted material, and so some people have come to think that BitTorrent itself is illegal. However, that’s untrue. The technology itself is very legal, and is used in many legitimate contexts, even though there are indeed people who use it for illicit purposes.

Practically, BitTorrent provided Aleph with Beth with two really interesting and valuable features for their use case:

First, BitTorrent allows for downloads to happen as slowly as needed. Some of the people that Andrew knew who wanted to study their material live in remote African villages with only slightly-better-than-dialup internet. YouTube just simply doesn’t work in those conditions. But, with BitTorrent, someone could leave their computer on and downloading for several days or weeks, and slowly download the videos for as long as it took. Bit-by-bit, kilobyte-by-kilobyte, these videos can be downloaded and saved to students’ computers, where they can eventually be watched, rewatched, and shared with others in the villiage via USB or Bluetooth indefinitely thereafter.

So, BitTorrent would allow people to watch Aleph with Beth videos, even with extremely poor internet (or, no internet at all).

Second, BitTorrent is an extremely resilient protocol. A LOT of really powerful companies and governments have tried to restrict people from using BitTorrent (specifically to combat piracy), yet it still continues to be widely used protocol today, over 2 decades after it was created. Someday YouTube will shut down. And, with it, the hundreds of millions of videos that have been uploaded to the company’s servers will most likely be lost. But, as long as network-connected computers continue to exist, torrents will continue to be a way that those computers can share files between them. Which, I think is pretty cool. That means that turning a YouTube channel or playlist into a torrent and hosting it online is a half-decent way to make sure people can continue to access those videos into the future… assuming the internet continues to be a thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sounds like something worth trying!

So, let’s give it a try. 🔥

What you’ll need 🤓

In order to do this, we’ll need a few things.

First, you’ll need a foundation with the Linux/MacOS command line. This tutorial will assume you know how to set up a Linux VPS, navigate directories, make new directories, and do other basic functions on the command line. I’m sure there are other ways to do this that don’t involve the command line, but that’s just not how I did it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Next, you’ll need a computer with yt-dlp and rsync installed on it. You may optionally also want a batch file re-namer. I use vimv.

Finally, you’ll need a Linux server to host the torrents. I used a very cheap Debian VPS I was already renting from BuyVM, but any VPS from a company that gives you permission to seed torrents from it should do.

If you have an old computer that you can keep always on and plugged in, you could also potentially use it as a free server, instead of renting a VPS.

Download All the Things! 😎

So, let’s get to the fun part! Let’s start by downloading all the videos that we’re going to want to eventually turn into a torrent!

First, create and navigate to a new directory/folder where we’re we’ll download the videos to.

Once there, here’s the command I run to download all the videos from a playlist:

yt-dlp -f 'bestvideo[height<=?1080][ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=m4a]' \
--add-metadata -i "https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLq1vmb-z7PpQt2PDNUr7XOzBjWAOWf0Rt" \
--output "%(playlist_index)s-%(title)s.%(ext)s"  --sleep-interval 3 --max-sleep-interval 10 \
--merge-output-format mp4  --embed-thumbnail --playlist-start 1

That command is a bit of a beast, so here’s a breakdown of how it works:

• yt-dlp: we’re using the yt-dlp program to download this playlist.
• -f 'bestvideo[height<=?1080][ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=m4a]': When YouTube stores a video, it stores it in a bunch of different file sizes and codecs. This flag loosely translates to “find the best mp4 video that has a resolution less than or equal to 1080p, and find the best m4a encoded audio file, and stitch them together”. When I created the torrent for Aleph with Beth, I used [height<=?1080] to create one torrent for 1080p videos, and then I changed the flag to [height<=?480] to do another torrent for 480p videos (better for phones/mobile devices).
• --add-metadata: This flag will grab the description information from the YouTube video and encode it into the downloaded video file.
• -i "https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLq1vmb-z7PpQt2PDNUr7XOzBjWAOWf0Rt": This is where we put the URL of the channel/playlist that we want to download. If you put a channel’s URL in here, you can download the whole channel. Andrew and Beth have taken great efforts to keep their playlists in the best order for students wanting to study through their material, so we’re just going to download their lessons playlist, instead of downloading the “channel” and needing to do a bunch more cleanup work after.
• --output "%(playlist_index)s-%(title)s.%(ext)s": Because this script will download hundreds of videos into the directory its run in, we want to make sure that the resulting videos are named in an order that we can work with. This flag does that. It currently will save all the videos in the form of [VIDEO NUMBER]-[VIDEO NAME].mp4. The first video will be labeled 001-, the second 002-, etc.
• --sleep-interval 3 --max-sleep-interval 10: This one is important. If YouTube thinks you’re a robot trying to download hundreds and hundreds of videos from their site, they will ratelimit you by giving you an 429 Error when you try to download, and eventually they’ll blacklist you. This command makes it so that your computer will pause for a random amount of time (between 1 and 10) between downloading each video. This will make it less likely that you get blocked/rate-limited.
• --merge-output-format mp4: This just means “make sure the final file is in the mp4 format”.
• --embed-thumbnail: This grabs the YouTube video thumbnail, and embeds it into the downloaded file.
• --playlist-start 1: Where in the playlist should the download start? Useful for if you need to download just a specific part of the playlist for some reason, or if you pause the download 100+ videos in and want to restart without re-downloading everything. The current 1 just means, “start at the first video”, but you can change it to wherever you want to start the download from.

We run that command, and go get a coffee. ☕

Then dinner. 🍲

Then probably go to sleep and come back tomorrow because it’ll likely take hours for all the videos to download (depending on the size of your playlist). 😴

But, when it’s done, we’ll have downloaded the entire playlist!!

[Optional] Filename Cleanup 🧹

At this point, we should have all our videos saved into a directory, numbered in the order they show up on the playlist.

However, we have a minor problem. The filenames aren’t really great for saving and sharing:

001-Hebrew - First Words - דברים ראשנים  - Free Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 1.mp4
002-Hebrew - Plural Nouns & Adjectives - Free Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 2.mp4
003-Hebrew - Review Game for Lessons 1-2 - Free Biblical Hebrew.mp4
004-Hebrew - Conjunction & Gender - Free Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 3.mp4
005-Hebrew - First vocab in action - Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 3b.mp4
006-Hebrew - Subject Pronouns - Free Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 4.mp4
007-Hebrew - Pronoun Practice - Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 4b.mp4
008-Hebrew - Review Game for Lessons 3-4 - Free Biblical Hebrew.mp4
009-Hebrew - Family Terms - Free Biblical Hebrew - Lesson 5.mp4
...

They’re usable for sure, but there’s a lot of superfluous information in the names that would be nice to cleanup. These names are great for SEO, and to help people find these lessons on YouTube or via other search engines. But, if we’ve already downloaded the “Free Biblical Hebrew Videos” torrent, we don’t need to know that each individual video is about “Free Biblical Hebrew”.

It would be nice if we could take that out.

Enter, vimv.

vimv (which you can get from GitHub) is a really powerful little utility that allows you to mass-rename all the files in a directory as if they were lines of text in a text file. Specifically, it opens the file names as lines of text in a vim instance, and allows you to use all the powerful text-editing tools in vim to quickly edit rename hundreds of files.

A detailed tutorial of vim/vimv is waaaay outside of the scope of this tutorial, but it’s easy enough to find tutorials for if you dig around.

I’m sure there’s lot of other mass-file editing utilities around for different operating systems, but I’ve not used them, so I can’t recommend any specifics.

After a few smart search/replace commands, a bit of block editing, and some tweaking of the filenames with vimv, we end up with:

001 - First Words - דברים ראשנים - Lesson 1.mp4
002 - Plural Nouns & Adjectives - Lesson 2.mp4
003 - Review Game for Lessons 1-2.mp4
004 - Conjunction & Gender - Lesson 3.mp4
005 - First vocab in action - Lesson 3b.mp4
006 - Subject Pronouns - Lesson 4.mp4
007 - Pronoun Practice - Lesson 4b.mp4
008 - Review Game for Lessons 3-4.mp4
...

Much better!

Onward!

Sync to Server ♻️, and Build the Torrent 🏗️

K, we’re on the home stretch! Next, we need to move the videos we’ve downloaded to the server that we’re going to host the torrent from.

Sync the Videos ⏯️

I used the following rsync command to sync the videos to my server:

rsync -avc --progress [LOCAL_VIDEOS_DIRECTORY] [SERVER_IP / DOMAIN_NAME]:[SERVER_DIRECTORY_TO_UPLOAD_TO]

Simple enough. You can look up an rsync tutorial if you have any issue here.

Set up transmission-cli 🔧

The tool we’ll use for seeding the torrent is called transmission-cli.

This program can be complicated and annoying to work with. It’s not super intuitive.

So, here’s how I made it work for me.

These commands were tested on Debian.

Start by installing the programs needed for us to create a torrent through transmission-cli:

sudo apt install transmission-cli transmission-daemon

I also recommend creating and using a specific directory to be storing all your torrents’ files in. I’ll use /home/user/torrents for examples here.

Before we start, we also need to start transmission-daemon. We can do that by just simply running the command transmission-daemon.

Then, we’re ready to create our torrent!

Build the Torrent File 📁

The command to create a torrent file using transmission-cli is as follows:

transmission-create -o ~/[TORRENT NAME].torrent -c "[TORRENT DESCRIPTION]" \
-t udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce \
-t udp://opentracker.i2p.rocks:6969/announce \
-t udp://www.torrent.eu.org:451/announce \
-t udp://tracker.internetwarriors.net:1337/announce \
[TORRENT_SOURCE_DIRECTORY]

This will make a torrent file of whatever SOURCE_DIRECTORY you specify. I like to simply navigate to whatever directory my torrent files are in (/home/user/torrents/My_New_Torrent/, for example), which allows me to us to . as my SOURCE_DIRECTORY.

When you run this command, it will create a .torrent file with the name you specific in your $USER directory.

Then, we can add it to transmission-daemon and start seeding it!

Add & Start the Torrent 💧

The command to add a torrent to the daemon is:

transmission-remote -n 'transmission:transmission' \
-a [LOCATION_OF_TORRENT_FILE] \
-w [ABSOLUTE_LOCATION_OF_TORRENTS_DIR]

Big thing to note: Make sure that for the TORRENTS_DIR you put the directory of all torrents, and not the directory of a specific torrent. (So, you want /home/user/torrents/, not /home/user/torrents/My_New_Torrent)

When that completes, you should get a response like:

localhost:9091/transmission/rpc/ responded: "success"

This means that the torrent has been successfully added to the daemon.

Now you can run the command below to see the current torrents in the daemon:

transmission-remote -n 'transmission:transmission' -l

It should show something like:

    ID   Done       Have  ETA           Up    Down  Ratio  Status       Name
     1   100%   160.5 MB  Done         0.0     0.0    0.0  Idle         My_Torrent
Sum:            160.5 MB               0.0     0.0

Note the Done percentage. If it says 100%, then your torrent should be good and ready to seed! If not, you might have a problem. (I had an issue when I tested these instructions; just ended up needing to kill the transmission-da daemon, and start it again. Worked instantly thereafter.)

If you want to see more information about your torrent, you can type the command:

transmission-remote -n 'transmission:transmission' -t1 -i

Where the 1 is the torrent ID given in the previous command.

This command will also display the magnet link 🧲 for your torrent, which you can use instead of the .torrent file, if you want.

Download Torrent from Another Device ⬇️

At this point, you have a functioning torrent!

Now, you can try downloading it from a different device!

To do that, you can either export the created .torrent file from your server’s user directory to whatever device you want to download the torrent too (using something like rsync), or you can copy the magnet link 🧲 mentioned above, and use it to add the torrent to whatever device you want to download to.

Two things that are worth knowing here:

1. Torrents work best when there are many devices that are all seeding (hosting) a given file. Downloading a torrent can be a slower process if there is only a single device that’s seeding that torrent. Sometimes, if a file doesn’t start downloading right away, that slowness can be due to the downloading device searching for where the seeding device is on the internet. That can take time, especially for a new torrent. Let it sit for an hour or two, and if it still doesn’t start downloading after that point, then there’s probably an issue to fix.
2. One thing that can speed up the “searching” process mentioned above is trackers (the -t udp://... flags in our transmission-create command above). A tracker is a special server that lets people wanting to download a torrent know where seeders of that torrent can be found. It is possible to have a torrent without trackers, but it will just take longer for the device downloading to be able to find where to download the files from. The trackers I included in the command were servers that were working for me when I first set up this command, but you might want to search out, more up-to-date trackers if you’re trying this in the future.

That’s it! 😅

Welp… That was a marathon! But, that’s what you need to know if you want to turn a YouTube playlist/channel into a torrent.

If you want to see the final result, you can download the most recent version of the Aleph with Beth lessons torrent from Andrew and Beth’s site here.

I love personal websites and blogs.

The idea of having a little chunk of the internet that is wholly yours, where you can post, and create, and make completely on your own terms is really cool to me. I’ve loved creating content that way the last few years.

And I’m also finding that I really like consuming content from people who create that way.

A blog on a personal website tends to feel so much more deep and well-thought-through than a Tweet, or Mastodon/microblog, or any other social media content. It feels very high signal, which I value.

And when a site/blog owner is actively involved in cool stuff, getting to read their ideas, projects, and other thoughts in a form longer than a Tweet but shorter than a book has been something I’ve really been loving!

Plus, you can subscribe via RSS, so no need to be exposed to exploitative big-tech companies to consume content from from cool people.

Beyond just the medium of blogging, the practice is something worth recommending!

Regular blogging on your personal website is a great way to practice and hone written communication skills, to get smarter, to clarify your thoughts, to get away from big tech, be generous with your ideas (which I love), and to just all around make the internet a better place.

All that to say, I’m a fan of it!

And, if you’re reading this, then I want to read your blog!

Seriously!

If you have a blog, please send it to me, and I’ll subscribe!

(That is, if I’m not already subscribed; some of you reading this have blogs I’m already subscribed to. 🙃 You should post more, btw 😉 )

If you don’t have a website/blog yet, why not start one today?

If you want help, reach out. I’d honestly love to help you get writing, and I’d love to read what you write.

I subscribe to a LOT of email newsletters. I haven’t counted specifically, but I’m guessing there are roughly 40-50 newsletters that I’m purposefully subscribed to and actually want to read (not just spammy marketing emails that I haven’t yet opted-out of, but actual, real content I’m interested to read and consume). Because I don’t consume traditional social media feeds, I’m left getting updates about stuff I care about from other sources. Email newsletters have been one of those sources.

However, I also value a clean email inbox. I extensively use email for work related communication, so my inbox is effectively a task list for me. I don’t want it cluttered with content that I want to read at some point, but don’t want to read when I’m in “work mode”.

Welp… I already have a system for owning my own feed of content updates that I can consume on my own terms and in my own timing, apart from the control of big-tech companies. So, RSS to the rescue, again!

There are two methods I use to subscribe to email newsletters through RSS.

The first (and, arguably, much simpler) is to use the service kill-the-newsletter.com. There’s a post on Per Axbom’s blog with an explanation and infographic explaining how to use the service, so I won’t re-hash it here. Basically, it gives you a unique email address that you can use to sign up for the newsletter, and a different unique URL that can be used as an RSS Feed to access the emails.

The second option (specifically for if the newsletter is distributed by Mailchimp) I haven’t actually been able to find any tutorials for, yet. So, I decided to write one. 😅 This method has the added benefit of allowing you to see some of the previously sent emails to a newsletter’s list, which can be cool and useful.

How to find a Mailchimp Newsletter’s RSS feed

As far as I can tell, every Mailchimp email list has a corresponding RSS feed associated with it. It’s not always easy to find, but it seems like it’s always there… even if you need to dig a little bit for it.

As an example, I recently wanted to subscribe to the RawTools newsletter. When I went to their newsletter subscription page, I noticed that their URL looked like this:

https://rawtools.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e

If you can find a URL from a Mailchimp email campaign in a format like this, you can usually use it to get its respective RSS feed.

There are 3 pieces we need in order to find this list’s RSS feed, and all of them we can find in this URL:

1. us11 - This appears to be the Mailchimp server location associated with the mailing list’s account
2. u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3 - I think this is a user identification code? Not sure. We need it, though!
3. id=4ff553ba3e - Again, not 100% sure what this is; possibly a list id? We need it too, regardless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Once we’ve got those pieces, we can use them to construct our RSS feed.

A Mailchimp list’s RSS feed looks like this:

https://[SERVER LOCATION CODE].campaign-archive.com/feed?u=["u" CODE]&id=["id" CODE]

The campaign-archive and /feed parts are the important parts that need to be switched out here.

So, we put all those pieces together, and end up with the following feed URL:

https://us11.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e

Then, adding that into an RSS reader app gives us the last few campaign emails that were sent out from that list, as well as allows us to be notified of future emails without it cluttering up our email inbox:

When it comes to communication, there’s two extremes we can take:

1. We can hope that those we’re interacting with just magically are in tune with us; we can communicate as little as possible, hoping that they’ll fill in the blanks with what we meant… or…
2. We can put in the effort to be crystal clear about what we mean to say. To say things that we might think are obvious, but may indeed not be. To realize that the person we’re communicating with has lived a different life than we have, and so, brings different assumptions to the table. To think through where ambiguities about what we’re trying to communicate might pop up, and rephrase/reformulate our message until it’s as receivable as possible.

We can either under-communicate, or we can over-communicate.

Both, in extreme, can cause problems. But, under-communicating causes big problems long before over-communicating does.

So, best to lean towards over-communication.

(Even better yet is what Karl Sutt describes as empathetic, high resolution communication. Yes, extreme over-communication can cause problems; But the effort to partake in precise, well thought-through, and empathetic communication, coupled with an extra push of effort to be concise, is rarely wasted.)

A friend showed me this video yesterday. I really, really appreciated it.

Seems like a reminder that’s needed in a lot of places around the world in this season.

Something appearing impossible isn’t, on its own, a legitimate reason not to try.

When a new project, decision, or chapter-of-life comes our way, there also quite often seems to come a simple but nearly-invisible choice for us to make:

We can chose the easy path, where we proceed “the way we’ve always done it”, going forward well-founded on the ideas and knowledge that we’ve already acquired and tested over the years…

Or, we can chose the more scary path that forces us to learn new things — the path that requires we get stretched in our knowledge, skills, and understanding — the path where not growing and adapting, or not learning that new tool or process, would mean that we simply don’t succeed.

The former is much more comfortable, and I’m sure there come times when it’s the “right” path to choose.

But it does seem to me that choosing the path that requires us to expand the boundaries of our knowledge and skill (even if it’s just a bit) is almost always the better option.

Today marks two months since the February 6th earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria.

I’ve been finding it difficult to believe that.

It feels like just few days ago that I woke up to dozens of messages from people around the world checking in to see if we were safe.

It feels like just a few days ago that we filled up vehicles with as many supplies as we could fit, and drove the 12+ hour route to try to help some of those hardest hit and least helped by the quakes.

The memories from that first week after the quake will remain burned deep in our memories for many years, I’m sure.

The unparalleled destruction. The incomparable loss. The inexpressible pain in the faces of those who had experienced this worst-in-centuries event.

One conversation stuck out to me today: a few of us had tea a few weeks ago with one Syrian friend who had been involved in rescuing people from destroyed buildings during the Syrian war, and who also ended up involved in helping with rescue and relief efforts here in Turkey after the earthquake.

He said, “This earthquake was worse than war. In war, there are only so many buildings that can be destroyed at once. We could rescue people from one building, and then, when the next building got destroyed, we would rescue people from it, too. It was hell, but we could at least keep up with it to some extent. We know how to rescue people from a destroyed building. But with this earthquake, there were 160,000 buildings destroyed in mere seconds. There was no way in the world to rescue people from that many buildings. There was no way we could keep up with this.”

The earthquake and its results have been taking a majority of our attention for 2 months now. For how all-encompassing it’s been for us and for this country, it feels so weird to have not seen much or any global news about the tragedy for many weeks now. It’s understandable, of course; the news cycle always needs to find its next thing. But, it’s still amazing to me how quickly the world moved on from the deaths of 50,000+ people.

As for my friends and I, we’ve committed for the coming months – as long as our visas, strength, and funding allow – to contiue to be a part of trying to help those affected by this earthquake, and to continue to try to help come up with effective solutions to address the needs of those we come across.

There’s still a long road this region will walk to be restored… and we’re so honored we get to be a small, small part of it.

I’ve been pondering generosity a lot lately.

There’s a lot going on in the world to make one feel lack. Natural disasters, economic crisis, war, huge accidents resulting in ecological devastation, bank collapses, unemployment threats and spikes due to new unprecedented technologies…

And that was just these last 3 months.

It can be tempting to become stingy in the face of such situations. If we live in a universe of scarcity, then hoarding and stockpiling feels like the logical thing to do.

Generosity flies so much in the face of that.

It’s simultaneously a rejection of scarcity, and an invitation into a reality of abundance.

It strikes me that the kings and rulers of old apparently used to give as many gifts possible, as a way to flex their power and wealth.

The most potent way for them to be able to show their victory over scarcity was to bring those around them into a state of abundance by giving…. by being generous.

The modern reality feels really similar. The business leader who shares all his best insights for free on his blog or podcast is functioning from a place of generosity and abundance. He doesn’t need to give that stuff away for free — he could charge TONs for those insights. But, he gives.

Or professional photographer who has release all of the hundreds of thousands of photos he’s taken under Creative Commons so that his art spreads further and faster, and impacts more people. He’s able to impact more people through extreme generosity (giving it all away for free), than if he charged for everything he did.

Ironically, in both of these instances of extreme generosity, the result for the giver isn’t less, but more.

When we benefit from those podcasts or see those photos, we see just how much is being brought to the table. Trust is built. Opportunities for the giver multiply (business opportunities, networking, and otherwise). Ultimately, the result of such extreme generosity is ironically more abundance for everyone involved.

The very act of defying scarcity by walking self-sacrificially and in extreme generosity results in greater abundance for both the recipient and the giver.

The path of generosity is counter-intuitive, but it’s almost always the best path.

We all know the rules — don’t cross the line; stay in line; don’t get out of line.

Whether it came from our education, our parents, or just the factory-based industrial economies that our cultures have reformed themselves around these last 200 years, we know that to be a good worker (and, maybe, a good person?) means to respect the line.

But, the world is changing. And with it changes our relationship with “the line”.

Many of the lines we grew up with are less and less applicable every year. Just “staying in the lines” as an employee is no longer the guaranteed path to success that had been promised. And as we’ve seen this decade, sometimes the lines just so fully disappear (due to pandemic, war, natural disasters, etc.) that you couldn’t “stay in line” if you wanted to.

Luckily, there’s a group of people we can learn from who are great at working without “lines”.

Artists have, for millennia, been masters of making their own lines. Whether they were starting with a blank slate, or recreating something new on top of a faded and now-irrelevant previous work, their relationship to the line wasn’t one of “fitting in” and “finding their place”.

Instead, theirs was the job of creating the line. Of looking at the chaos and nothingness in front of them, and seeing what could be…. what should be.

And then, making it a reality.

I think we’d be wise to learn some lessons from the artists. You and I might not work with clay and paint, but it seems to me that every single role has space and need for more creative and artistic leadership.

The world needs more people who can look at the mess of a canvas in front of them, and see the beauty of what could be there… and then, to take the steps to make that vision a reality.

Forget about “staying in line”.

Draw a new line.

I’ve been continuing to put my efforts towards seeing more toilets rolled out to those effected by the February earthquakes. In that process, there has been a surprising amount of managerial work that has needed to be done.

First, beyond the obvious stuff of bringing the materials to be able to physically build these toilets into the earthquake zone (which was a project itself), we needed to create a poster with instructions on it so people could learn how to use these toilets safely and effectively.

Then, we needed those posters translated into the various languages spoken by those who would use these toilets. We also needed to create audio recordings of those instructions, as some of those whom we’re working with are illiterate and aren’t able to read the posters.

And right now, I’m working to figure out how we can roll out these toilets faster and cheaper, likely by using injection molded plastic in place of the hand-made wood frames that we had originally built, potentially lowering the cost of a toilet by half or more (meaning, every dollar can help at least twice as many people).

There are a few of these tasks that I have the skills to do personally. I wrote the original instructions for the posters in English, and my Turkish is good enough that I could have created an almost-passible translation for the Turkish version (almost 😅). But, the truth is, this project has required the co-ordination and partnership of dozens of different people to be able to make it work! And, as it scales up, it will require the partnership of even more!

Luckily, because of the massive need right now, many people are volunteering their time and labors to help with this. The Arabic translation of our poster was done by a dear Syrian friend who wanted to help. So much of the logistics, the labour to make the toilets, etc. has been done by volunteers who just want to see relief brought to the areas so extremely devastated. I also have a friend with a media/translation company who has been offering their services at a massively discounted rate for any work being done towards earthquake relief, including doing the Turkish translation of the posters.

In spite of all that, some of the skills we are needing in order to be able to roll this out are not readily available or easily accessed. As an example, do you happen to have someone in your friend-circle who just casually knows how to create industrial-grade injection molds and would be willing to volunteer that skill?

Yeah, me neither.

For me this week, that’s where Upwork has come in and been super helpful. If you haven’t heard of it, Upwork is basically a website where you can search for people all around the world with an extremely wide range of knowledge-work skill sets, and hire them for whatever work you need done.

I’ve used Upwork in the past for a number of work projects, from logo and website design, to virtual assistant research tasks, and more. It’s awesome, especially if there’s knowledge work that you need done, where either 1) you lacking the skill to make a project work well and you want to find someone affordable to do that thing, or 2) you do have the skill to do something, but your time is better put towards other things, so paying someone to do that thing makes more sense.

In this week’s case, #1 was my experience. We needed a model for an injection mold for these toilets, and I don’t know how to make one of those. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Luckily, Upwork had a number of people with that skillset who had listed themselves as available to work on the platform. A couple messages and a payment later, and I now have in-hand a model that we can take to a manufacturer here in Türkiye to start producing these toilets cheaper and at greater scale than we were able to before.

It would have taken me weeks or months to learn the skills to be able to properly create that kind of model myself, but with Upwork, I was able to to find someone who was able to create it in just a few hours, while I worked on other things at home.

It’s not quite time-travel, but it saved me so much time and work this week that I’m still going to call it a super power. 🦸🏻‍♂️

It’s easy for us to get caught up trying to constantly deal with the deluge of problems we face day-to-day, putting out each fire as it arises.

There are times where that “always on” mode of dealing with problems is indeed necessary.

But it seems to me that the problems we face day-to-day are many times the direct results of different up-stream problems that we don’t always recognize.

These are problems that cause other problems. You could call them “meta-problems”.

It can be really helpful to zoom out from our “putting out fires” mode of dealing with those problems in front of us, and instead ask the question, “What is the problem that caused this problem in the first place?”

Often, if you can find and solve the meta-problem (by putting in better systems, connecting people directly instead of being a middle-man, leading upwards, cultivating new habits and cultures to supersede those that were problem-causing, etc.), the fires that we’ve spent so much time dealing with actually can end up putting themselves out.

… or at least they can reframe themselves to be more easily managed.

After the utterly tragic earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria on February 6th of this year, my friends and I have been doing our best to help those affected.

We’re just a small group, so we can’t help at the scale that big NGOs with millions of dollars of funding can do.

But, we do speak Turkish, and we have been on the ground with people affected. So, we have been able to get to know people’s situations a little more one-on-one and personally than some big international organizations might be able to do.

Since the earthquakes, we’ve made several trips to cities and areas affected by the earthquake, bringing food, blankets, diapers, sanitary wipes, tents, and other supplies more to try to provide relief for those still living in these areas.

As time has gone on, one of the biggest needs that seems to be popping up and remaining largely unaddressed is that of toilets.

Because most people in the area rightfully don’t trust buildings and large structures anymore, and because running water in much of the region is basically non-existent (many of the cities’ main water lines having been destroyed in the quakes), much of the region has been been left without any viable options for safe human waste disposal and sewage treatment.

On account of that, a massive number of people are just using wherever they can to relieve themselves. Sometimes in fields, sometimes in back-alleys, sometimes behind trees.

Wherever they can.

A side-effect of this is that, instead of being processed by sewage treatment equipment, the feces and urine of tens of thousands of people are unavoidably being left just wherever it’s dropped. If you know much about diseases like Cholera, you know how dangerous that can be.

Indeed, doctors working in the area have issued an epidemic warning because of the lack of sanitation and sewage disposal. And cases of Cholera have been spreading through the region.

So, safe disposal of human waste is increasingly vital. And, the lack of it in the region is increasingly life-threatening.

There have been temporary toilets starting to be rolled out into the region, but most of the ones we’ve seen have required water to work. And unfortunately, as mentioned above, running water just isn’t really a thing right now. So, many of the toilets that have been deployed simply don’t work.

As we were talking to people on the ground, we were trying to figure out what could be done about this.

I remembered from the Permaculture Design Course that I took in Jordan last year, as well as from a clip from the documentary Kiss the Ground that there are strategies for safe and sanitary disposal of human waste via very simple composting toilets.

All you really need is 1) a bucket, 2) a source of carbon like sawdust, and 3) some simple training for how to deal with the waste afterwards to allow it to turn into usable compost.

A scoop and a frame for the bucket (box & toilet seat) is also useful, but you can actually make the system work without them in a pinch.

We explained the idea to a few people who have been living in the earthquake zone, and showed them sample photos of the idea to see if a composting toilet would be something that they’d use. We thought the idea might be perceived as gross, and that people wouldn’t want to use them. However, the reaction was the opposite. Almost everyone we talked to was eager to get one, and said they would definitely use them.

One day we had delivered some aid to a family that had 50+ people living in just a few relatively small tents. When we mentioned the idea of these composting toilets to them, they said, “Please, yes! If you had something like that, that would be a godsend! The 50 of us are all just going behind those trees, and it’s awful.”

The need is great.

So we bought wood, toilet seats, buckets, and scoops from a nearby city, and got to work!

For a first phase of this project, we got enough resources to create 30 composting toilets. Though, there appears to be such a demand that we are ramping up production for many more in the coming weeks.

Here’s us delivering 6 completed ones, as well as pieces for one of our local partners to assemble another 10 toilets:

When we started distributing them, they were a hit! A mother in the camp I mentioned above was tearing up as we gave them the first one. She was saying, “thank you so much, praise God, we’ve needed this so badly 🥲.”

Because the sawdust actually completely removes the smell of feces and urine from the toilet when you use them properly, some of the elderly and crippled people in camps we served actually ended up setting up their toilets right in their tents. It ended up being a much better solution for them than if they had needed to leave their tents to use a toilet somewhere else. And because there’s no smell, keeping the toilets in their tent wasn’t an issue.

We also created a simple site at KompostTuvalet.org, including an instructional poster that can be downloaded, shared, and printed, and an audio version of the instructions for anyone who is illiterate but needs to understand how to use the toilets safely. We’ll add to that site (and make it more aesthetically appealing) as time goes on. We’re planning to post instructions for how to build one of these toilets from scratch, further translations for people needing this resource in other languages, as well as other similar helpful solutions for people in these kinds of situations.

At this point, you might be wondering where we got enough sawdust to equip dozens of families (and, soon to be hundreds of families) to be able to use composting toilets.

Well, we actually ended up getting connected with a guy who had a storehouse full of sawdust that he was selling for heating and farming purposes before the earthquake. His storehouse was actually destroyed in the earthquake. He now has about 60 tons of sawdust stock underneath the rubble his storehouse. We were able to buy about 2 tons of stock off of him to set up these families with toilets, and we’re planning to continue to help buy his stock as we roll out new toilets, and as he’s able to get machines in to excavate the rubble.

We’re also in conversations with NGOs in the area who are interested in rolling these out around the whole affected region, so we’re trying to figure out how best to scale this up! We’re considering commissioning a plastic injection mold to be able to create the frames for these toilets much cheaper and faster than we’re currently able to do with wood. That would allow us to roll out potentially thousands of these toilets around the region for fairly cheap.

We’re also looking into other low-resource high-impact solutions to be able to help earthquake survivors in with sanitation, clean water, and other needs. One solution we’re exploring that has worked well in the past in other refugee and IDP camps around the world is Reed Bed Water Filtration systems, which, when they’re set up correctly, can effectively filter sewage “black water” for very cheap and efficiently, without electricity.

A friend of mine who has deployed systems like this in IDP camps in Iraq is planning to come sometime this month to help us best figure out how to deploy more of these kinds of solutions to help keep people in the earthquake zone safe and healthy.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to these last couple weeks! Thanks for reading!

When everything appears to be working well, the most important question to ask is:
“What could make this break?”

But, when everything seems to be broken, the most important question to ask is:
“What needs to happen to make this work?”

I listened to a talk today that reminded me of a valuable piece of wisdom I heard years ago, which I thought was worth pondering and sharing.

The talk told the story of Bill Atkinson, who was a designer and developer at Apple throughout the 1980’s. He was responsible for an innovation that has made its way to billions of computers around the world.

A quick summary of that story:

Bill Atkinson was working at Apple, developing the Graphical User Interface which would eventually make its way onto Apple’s Macintosh computers. One day, he ended up getting a tour of a place call Xerox PARC, which was a major center of some of the most important innovations in the early computing world. If you’ve ever used a computer mouse, a laser printer, or even just a personal computer like a laptop/desktop, Xerox PARC was largely responsible for the innovations that made that possible.

While Atkinson was at Xerox PARC, he saw something revolutionary. He saw a demo of a computer with multiple programs running together as different overlapping windows.

This was a game-changing feature. At the time, all programs were either text based, needing to be run on complicated command-line interfaces that made them inaccessible for non-technical people, or they needed to be run full-screen, one program at a time. The idea that you could have multiple programs running at once, on one screen, and that you could have those programs overlapping on the screen like pieces of paper on a desktop… well, that just didn’t exists!

But yet, here it was!

Later, back at Apple, Bill ended up being commissioned to create a similar feature for the Macintosh. He got to work, and went on a programming blitz to implement that same idea from Xerox onto Apple’s products.

There were a number of complex, unsolved problems that Bill needed to figure out to make it happen. For a feature that we take for granted today, the idea of getting windows to layer naturally is actually quite complicated. But, Bill had seen the feature on computers at Xerox, so he knew that those problems could be solved.

He had seen it. So he knew it could be done.

After a crazy blitz of legendary coding prowess, Bill Atkinson figured it out. He got working code that allowed programs to run as overlapping windows. It was such a hit feature that it quickly got copied and spread to what eventually became every desktop computer operating system in the world. MacOS, Windows, desktop Linux, and many more all ended up implementing this feature, which Bill Atkinson actually copied from Xerox.

Except, for the twist:

Xerox hadn’t actually developed a windowing system like Bill Atkinson thought he saw!

Xerox didn’t have anything like that, at all!

Bill Atkinson only thought he had seen a computer with a feature like that, but he didn’t.

The feature he had seen didn’t actually exist…

… until he created it.

While listening to this story, I couldn’t help but call to mind something a friend told me years ago. I had just explained some big ideas and dreams I wanted to pursue, but was overwhelmed by the scale and apparent impossibility of the idea.

She told me, “When it comes to things that seem big and impossible, my motto is: ‘If you can see it, it’s legal.’”

For any seemingly-impossible dream that has actually come to pass (airplanes, space-travel, instant cross-global communication, eradication of smallpox, et al.), it had to start with vision.

It had to start with someone seeing it.

Obviously, simply “seeing” it didn’t make those dream happen. Each of those took insane amounts of creatively, tenacity, problem-solving, leadership, and perseverance to bring to the world.

But, those changes couldn’t happen until someone had vision for the idea. That picture of how the world would look different afterwards opened the door to those changes being made manifest.

Seeing it made it legal.

It seems like every year we get more stressed, more scatter-brained, need more exercise and less screen-time.

At least, that seems true for myself.

So I wonder, what would it be like if there were a remedy to all that, which, in one single action could reduce your stress, clear your mind, give you some enjoyable exercise, and get you away from your screen, all while probably making you live longer and lowering your risk of chronic disease?

Man… that would be nigh-unto-magical, wouldn’t it?

If you could get access to something like that, it would almost be on-par with getting super-powers. 🦸🏻‍♂️

Well, you already know the punchline.

Turn your phone off. Put on a jacket.

Go for a walk 🚶🏻‍♂️

There was a lot to be pessimistic about regarding cars 120+ years ago. 🚗

They were expensive. They were incredibly unreliable, needing repair on a sometimes daily basis. And roads good enough to drive on were exceedingly rare.

There was little a car could offer you that a good horse couldn’t do much better. 🐎

Looking back on that time from today, the transition to primarily automobile-based transportation seems more-or-less inevitable. We can go unthinkably further and faster now using mechanical power than we ever could have with horses… and with a small fraction of the stink. 💩

The problems with early cars were overcome (mostly 🤷🏻‍♂️), and now we live in a world with exponentially greater transportation opportunities than our great-great-grandparents could have ever imagined.

Which makes me wonder, what would my “intuition” about cars have been, had I lived in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s?

Would I have seen them as expensive and over-complicated fads, with countless impassible problems, and made the prediction that they were destined to never catch on?

Or would I have recognized that this shift in transportation technology would make the lives of my great-great-grandchildren inconceivably different and more opportunity-filled than the life I’d lived, even if there were problems which might take a few decades to iron out?

It strikes me that the optimistic intuition was more accurate in this case. There were huge problems with the automobiles of a century ago; many of those hurdles would have seemed basically impossible to overcome.

But they were overcome.

I wonder what changes we’re living through that we’re wrongly pessimistic about?

It might take some decades (or 100+ years) to iron out, but maybe those hurdles can indeed be beneficially and positively overcome.

I find myself holding a couple aspirations in increasing value as the years go on:

The first of these is the minimizing of “noise” — of distraction, of clutter, and of that which fruitlessly wastes attention.

The other is the maximizing of “signal” — those rich and value-filled experiences, learning opportunities, content, and relationships.

Pursuing these seem to be more and more challenging every year, but yet also more and more rewarding.

I recently had someone show me a recipe on their phone. The recipe site was so stuffed to overflowing with advertisements that only about 5% of the screen was actually left for the recipe.

95% was noise.

Which, makes sense in a way. “As many ads as possible” is the natural end-game of the attention extracting financial models that built today’s internet.

But all that noise is exhausting. So I’ve loved trying to search for the other extreme as a technology user: How can I minimize noise and maximize signal?

Is there a way to use the internet and/or go through life with a noise-to-signal ratio leaning towards maximum signal possible?

Two actions here seem potent. One is actively blocking the noise, in the form of ad blockers, tools like SponsorBlock (which can auto-skip sponsor segments on YouTube 🤯), or just simply unplugging from the noise.

And the other is being more purposeful about choosing the signal.

It seems to me like the “signal hierarchy” of high-quality to low-quality content goes something along the line of: Books > Podcasts > Purposeful Video > the increasingly TikTokified feeds that seem to fully embody Epictetus’ “mindless pap”.

Since we get to chose what we expose ourselves to day-to-day, it seems to me that choosing the richer, “high-signal” path is much more beneficial than the alternatives.

Have you ever thought about what in your life makes you hopeful?

Or, what saps your hope?

I realized recently that my mental health often appears to be pretty tightly tied to how hopeful I feel in a given season.

That seems significant.

It means stewarding hope and stewarding hopefulness is much more important than I’ve tended to give space for.

Churchill’s words resonate.

So, it’s worth asking “what fills your hope-meter?”

I found myself spending a few hours alone in nature today — taking in the silence, enjoying creation, and journalling.

I came back feeling like a new man, with a “hope-meter” more full than I’ve experienced in weeks.

That time with nature and my journal refilled my hope “tank”.

Meaning, hopefulness isn’t static. It’s not something we’re helpless to change. We have some agency there.

There are things we do, watch, read, or listen to that will fill that tank up; and there are other things that will drain it.

What are those things for you?

Pay attention to and treasure that which cultivates hope, and be wary of that which sows hopelessness.

I’ve always tended to like math more than the average person. I was less a fan of arithmetic — the labour intensive process of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing our way to an answer to a question that a calculator could figure out instantly. More so, I’ve tended to find myself intrigued by the tools that math gives us to help us understand the world better. Sometimes that involves making use of arithmetic, but often it can simply mean applying ideas from the world of math in order to make better sense of the world, or to help us make better decisions.

Here are a few especially useful tools and intuitions from the world of math, which I found myself using at least once this past month.

1. Fermi Estimations

Fermi Estimations are a really cool way to get a surprisingly close guess to answer questions about the world, even if it seems like you currently have NO applicable information about what you’re guessing about.

Think of it as a method of systematic guestimation.

My first exposure to the idea was in Randall Munroe’s XKCD What If? post where he explains the idea and applies it to a bizzare question. It’s a fairly short post, and worth reading through!

Kyle Hill also explains the idea in his video below, where he works through some more example problems.

Using a Fermi Estimation can be a fantastic way to get a pretty decent ballpark guess for any piece of information you might be curious about, but using a fraction of the time and effort you would need to actually calculate a precise answer.

2. The Pareto Principle & Zipf’s Law

The Pareto Principle, also sometimes known as the 80/20 Rule, can be found in an insane amount of places. In the productivity sphere, it’s often expressed as the idea that “80% of the value of one’s work results from just 20% of the effort”. Which already is a really useful piece of information; but, the applications and lessons Pareto can offer go way beyond simple productivity insights.

V-Sauce has a great video that digs into some of the weirdnesses of the Pareto Principle, and specifically a different way of looking at the principle, called “Zipf’s Law”:

This rule has so many useful applications. Hank Green uses it to decide when is the best time to “ship” his creative work. You can use it to help you learn a new language faster, as Benny Lewis explains. Pareto originally had his insight while studying the productivity of his garden.

In his first book, Tim Ferriss notably suggests doing “80/20 Analyses” on any part of your life you want to see improvement on — from business, to relationships, to fitness, and beyond.

3. Bayes’ Theorem

This one is new to me this last couple years, but I’ve found it super helpful.

Basically, Bayes’ Theorem is a systematic way to update your understanding of a situation based on new information.

3Blue1Brown does a great introduction to the idea.

The area I’ve found Bayes’ Theorem most helpful has to be in the area of understanding medical tests.

Take the example of testing positive for COVID with a rapid test: If you don’t have any symptoms of COVID, and you haven’t knowingly been exposed to someone with the sickness, what do you do with that information?

There’s actually a decent math-based intuition for helping deal with that situation.

The video below, again by 3Blue1Brown, was great for giving a paradigm for how to process that information, and also better internalize the meaning and application of Bayes’ Theorem.

A couple years ago, a friend recommended to me the music of Steve Schallert. I actually included one of his songs in my first post on my website. Around that time, I probably listened to his album Songs of Sorrow / Songs of Hope on repeat like 50x in a row.

Well, yesterday one of his songs came up after a long season without any of his music, and the last section of the song was especially powerful and moving! I’ve since found myself playing it on repeat again. 😅

So, I wanted to share it!

Here’s the song, and the lyrics that hit me especially hard.

Enjoy!

He Was Numbered Among the Lawless

For the mothers and their daughters
For the sons who have lost their fathers
For the vagrants and the refugees
For the children who have become commodities
For the homeless seeking daily bread
Begging pocket change needing to be fed
For the immigrant working endless days
Exploited on a promise with no pay raise
For the prisoner locked inside his cell
Counting those days as he rots in hell
For the victims of this wretched war
And for the movement that we’ll just keep marching for

You already know how to do it.

You’ve done it plenty before: that gift, that kind word, that “going out of your way” to improve someone’s day and show them they’re loved.

Feels great to be on either the giving or recieving end of, and it makes the world just a little bit better.

So, why not purposefully do something to make someone’s day today?

I’m an ever-growing fan of the webcomic medium.

I love the diversity of styles. I love the jokes. I love reading the archives of a good webcomic and seeing the creator’s progression and improvement overtime.

Maybe most of all, I just love getting a chuckle when a comic comes up on my RSS reader, and getting to share that chuckle by passing it on to a friend.

(Dear friends, sorry about all the webcomics I send you. 😅 ~ Much love, Josh)

Here are a few webcomics I love! (Along with the RSS feeds they can be followed at.)

The Awkward Yeti: Heart and Brain

First stop is Heart and Brain.

It’s a comic about sentient body parts. Brain is over analytical. Heart is emotional. Tongue loves sweets.

Coffee makes regular appearances… as do a range of emotions and challenges that come along with being a human being, discussed in a really fun, disarming, and relatable way.

I’m a big fan. I think you’ll like them to! RSS feed available here.

Itchy Feet

Itchy Feet is a webcomic about world-traveling, language-learning, and foreign-culture-navigating beans. Or… at least… I think they’re beans?

As an language loving vagabond myself, there are a ton of Itchy Feet comics I find myself resonating with.

RSS feed is here.

xkcd

One of the grand-daddies of them all.

xkcd is a webcomic that has come out 3x weekly for almost 20 years.

In the words of its creator, it’s “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

Some of my favorite things. 😁

Lots of nerdiness. Lots of inside jokes. It’s a party. RSS, here.

Sarah’s Scribbles

If Sarah’s Scribbles had to be summed up in one word, that word would need to be “adulting”.

“Adulting” can be hard. The life of the millennial can be challenging. Sarah sums those challenges (especially, the laughablity of them) in her webcomic. Add this URL to your feed reader to follow her.

Poorly Drawn Lines

Easily the dumbest comic on my list… but also, probably the one I’ve shared the most often.

Poorly Drawn Lines is about… well…

Honestly… I have no idea…

I’ve read probably a few hundred of his comics over the years, and I genuinely don’t know how to describe them.

There’s probably indeed some fancy term like “socio-existential self-referentialism” or something that would be an apt description. I have no idea.

All I know is that, when I was trying to come up with that term☝🏻 , I almost choked on an apple while laughing at one of his comics.

Follow Reza and his Poorly Drawn RSS feed here

Strange Planet

Honestly, probably my favorite of this list.

Strange Planet is a comic about how alien it is to be human. Nathan Pyle takes those pieces of everyday life that have become so normal to us, and gives them a new and bizarre spin, reminding us how beautiful, amazing, wondrous, and strange life is.

I love Strange Planet so much it gets two comics:

The only trick with Strange Planet is than Pyle only shares his comics on Instagram… meaning that I’ve missed a majority of them since my exodus from the platform a few years ago, as Instagram doesn’t allow anyone to follow content on their site unless you’re a user.

Luckily, while writing this post, I discovered that some kind people over on Reddit have been faithfully reposting the Strange Planet comics there, and you can follow subreddits with RSS!

So, I have some catching up to do in my free time the next few days. 😁

When we see something novel that we don’t understand, we have a choice:

1. Shake our heads, note that it’s weird, brush it off as something we’ll never understand, and move on with our lives
2. OR, stop for a few minutes, take a look, and try to understand it.

Why do those people act that way?

Why was this tool designed this way?

Where did this weirdly spelled word come from? What’s its etymology? Its history?

What’s they deal with this crazy plant I found in the park on my walk today? What’s its purpose in an ecosystem?

Each of these questions have answers to them — some of them potentially really enlightening answers.

There are great things to be found on the path of Curiosity.

I’ve given myself a bit of a challenge these last few years to migrate as much of my digital life as I can towards using open-source software and services. There have been many reasons for this — increased security/privacy, better performance on my aging devices, more control of what my devices are doing, less likelihood that a program critical to my workflow ends up breaking or being discontinued, etc. (I’m still frustrated by Google killing off Inbox and Reader, which were both integral to my daily workflow at the time of their demise 🤦🏻‍♂️.)

There are still a few holdovers where non-open-source software show up in my life, but the vast majority of the apps and services I use day-to-day are either fully open source, or could quickly be replaced with a fully open-source alternatives if/when needed. (Looking at you, WhatsApp.)

Through this move towards Free and Open-Source Software, I’ve noticed a shift in how I look at the world which I don’t know would have come about without this transition.

The shift basically boils down to the answer to a question:
When you see a problem, what do you do about it?

If you see something broken, something that’s not working the way it should, or an area where you think there’s space for improvement, what do you do about it?

To illustrate a couple of the ways I’ve found myself answering this question (and how they relate to open source software, and the rest of life), I want to offer you a short “Tale of Two Bugs”. These tales are based on true stories, but names have been obscured to protect the innocent.

A Tale of Two Bugs

Our story opens with me using one of the last holdouts of closed-source software in my life: the chat app WhatsUp, owned by the Social Media empire PlaceBook. WhatsUp has an annoying bug in their online chat interface. This bug has been around for almost two years at the time I’m writing this post. It’s a bug that I estimate could be fixed by changing just a few lines of code in one single file; at MOST 2 hours of a developer’s time to write the fix, and get it tested and implemented.

However, even though this bug (in an app owned by one of the richest companies in history) has been around for years, could be fixed by a junior developer in an afternoon, and would help the experience of the app for tens of millions of people, it remains unfixed. There are tens of thousands of people who use this app who have skill-set to fix this bug if they had access to the source code. But, because the app is closed source, we’re left dealing with this bug indefinitely.

When you see a problem, what do you do about it?

In this case, I facepalm, groan in annoyance, close the WhatsUp Web interface, and write a post complaining about it on my website. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Which actually leads us to the tale of our second bug: while working on writing a post, I realized that there was a feature that I wished could have on my website. Because the program I use to build my website is 100% open source, I know there are places where people are talking about the development of the program. I dig around, and find the GitHub discussion page for the software I use for my website. And I find a conversation from several other other people who also are wishing for this feature! I look around at a couple other websites that use the feature we’re wanting, and realize it wouldn’t actually be too difficult to code that feature into my website for myself. I spend a couple hours learning to code in this specific programming language, writing some code, tweaking, playing, breaking, and fixing… before breaking again, and fixing again…

And, at the end, I have a functional version of the feature I wanted, fully implemented on my website! 😎

And I feel pumped about it!

I begin to walk away, before I remember that there are others who were also wanting that feature on their websites, too.

I upload my code to the GitHub page, hedging my submission with an explanation that, “because this is all based on code in a programming language I just learned for this project, my code is probably garbage; but it works for me, so maybe you’ll find it helpful, too?”

I press submit, close my laptop, and go for a walk.

I come back later, and already a few people have taken my code and implemented it on their websites! I’ve solved a problem for myself that almost instantly people have been able to make use of for themselves, too.

When you see a problem, what do you do about it?

In contrast to our first tale, here our answer has become “get to work and do something to fix it!”

Open Source, Responsibility, and the World

The main lesson I’ve taken away from this is a simple one:

We have a lot more agency than we think to bring about positive change in the world around us.

Yes, there are indeed things that we might not be able to do much about: there’s not much I can do to fix that annoying WhatsApp bug, just like there’s not a ton I can do to stop the Russian war.

But, there are a TON of areas around us we probably don’t recognize, where we can bring about disproportionately helpful change that can impact many people.

Using open source software has helped me change my response to the problems I see in the world around me. Right now, because almost everything I use is open source, basically any bug I come across is on software I have access to the code for. If I want, I can dig in, find the source of the problem, and assuming I have the skill-set, create a solution! (Or more likely, file a bug report to notify developers about a bug they probably didn’t know about…. Or, if it’s a feature I’m especially passionate about, I can even pay someone smarter than me to create the solution!)

My main point:
If we see a problem, there’s a pretty good chance we have resources at our disposal to be a part of creating and implementing the solution to that problem.

It’s a lesson learned in code, but one that I think very much applies to the rest of life, too.

It’s helped me move further away from responses of helplessness and complaining about the issues I encounter in life.

Instead, it’s pushed me more towards responses focused on action and solutions, ideally solved and implemented within community.

And I think that’s pretty cool!

“The most important step a man can take is not the first one, is it?
It’s the next one. Always the next step.”

~ Brandon Sanderson in Oathbringer

It’s interesting to frame both history and life through the contrasting lenses of solutions and implementation.

Farming was a solution to the challenges and dangers built into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The story of civilization has largely been a story of the implementation of that solution of farming.

Electricity was a solution to a wide range of problems. Most notably early on, it was a safe way to light one’s home with much lower risk of fire or explosion.
The last 100 years of unimaginable advancement following the roll-out of the light bulb and the electrification civilization has been to a large extent the story of the implementation of that solution of electricity.

Without the solution, these massive shifts would have never taken place.

These ideas changed everything.

Without new solutions to problems, we are simply forever stuck in old ways.

Personally, I love coming up with solutions. I definitely find it more fun than implementation.

But, it’s worth remembering that without the implementation, solutions are fruitless.

The problem doesn’t get solved without solutions; but the problem doesn’t get fixed without implementing those solutions.

Today we live in a world with an over-abundance of both personal and systematic solutions, to the point where it’s almost laughable.

With a few taps, you can find custom dietary and workout solutions that will bulk you up, trim you down, help treat disease, or make yourself sick (if you wanted the latter for some reason 🤷🏻‍♂️).

You can find detailed, effective instructions to start an online business, to run a custom artificial intelligence on your phone, or to learn any language you could ever want to learn.

Not to mention, there are pretty solid solutions worked out to solve some of society’s most pressing problems, from extreme poverty and starvation, to desertification, and beyond.

Right now, the real problem we face when it comes to fixing all those problems, from losing weight to ending world hunger, isn’t solutions. Many of those solutions are actually figured out pretty well already, and are very accessible to those who want them.

No, the real problem is implementation.

It’s putting in the work, to see manifest in real life those things we can currently see only in the blueprint.

William Gibson is widely quoted as saying:

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

I might offer an update to that:

“Most of the solutions we need are already here — they’re just not very widely implemented.”

I regularly find myself making personal deep dives into things that I find especially cool and exciting. Lately, I’ve found myself wanting to share more about those niche topics of my enthusiasm. So, here’s the first in a little series I’m calling “X is Cool!”

Enjoy!

If you haven’t heard of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), you should set aside half-an-hour with whichever of your devices has the biggest and highest resolution screen, and get ready to be in awe.

The James Webb Space Telescope is basically the best telescope and “camera” that humanity has yet made. It’s currently hanging out in an special orbit that keeps it about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, with the Earth always between it and the sun. It’s such a powerful telescope and camera that it makes the Hubble, which held the record of “Best Space Telescope” for over 3 decades, look like a flip-phone camera.

After several decades of dreaming, design, engineering, building, testing, delays, more testing, and more delays, it finally launched Christmas day, 2021!

It got into its orbit, and finished its set up and configuration a couple months later in February 2022.

And then, it started taking some photos.

And…

Oh…

My…

Goodness!

The photos this thing can take are AMAAAZING!!!

Take the photo of the Pillars of Creation, or the Carina Nebula, or Stephan’s Quintet.

Each of these are pretty decently cool photos at first glance… You know, they might make a good background for your laptop or phone.

But… I need you to look at those photos closer. Not just a glance, but zoom in on them.

If you’re on a device that makes it easy, download the high-res versions of each of those, and look CLOSE at them.

You see all those tiny little lights in the background? Not the big ones with six rays of light coming off of them. (Those are actually stars that are comparatively close to the JWST.) But you see the tiny ones behind them?

Those are GALAXIES.

Not just stars…

But entire freaking galaxies! Each with hundreds of billions of stars in them.

🤯 🤯 🤯

Many of these galaxies that the JWST has been able to image have never been seen by humans before.

In fact, just a few days after JWST came online, it beat the record for the furthest away thing that humanity had ever been able to picture… and then, a few days later, beat that record again… and then again!

JWST has been able to observe and image galaxies estimated to be 13.7 Billion Light Years away!

That’s distance it takes that light (which travels the fastest that the very laws of physics allow) to travel in 13,700,000,000 years.

Man… Space is BIG.

The JWST has been able to give us a bit more of a taste of how big, and beautiful, and awe-inspiring this universe is.

Yup. The James Webb Space Telescope is Cool!

If you want to see more of the photos from JWST, NASA’s sites have some great galleries of photos. Or your search engine of choice can help you find more!

Lots of YouTube Creators and other content creators online have made some great explainers talking further about JWST. If this has peaked your interest, check those out too!

How long would the devices you use day-to-day survive without internet access?

We live in an internet-saturated world, so that question might feel silly.

“My devices are basically always connected to the internet; why would I care how long they could last without it?”

But, there are a few reasons that might be worth thinking about it.

There are lots of situations where having a device and software that is still useful offline can prove to be really valuable.

Think of, say, a natural disaster or other emergency where the internet is out for a period of time… Or a situation where you’re camping/traveling away from data and want to still be creative on your devices… Or maybe you just want to get offline for a period of time for some extra mental clarity, but you still want to be able to be productive while disconnected from the internet.

It’s kinda shocking how many devices and apps these days require an internet connection on a pretty regular basis to just keep functioning. They need to verify your account, to confirm that you’re still “allowed” to use your software, or they need to just “phone home” back to the “mother ship” for one reason or another. Many of these apps or devices will just stop working in pretty key features after a period of time without internet access.

(As a specific example, if you’ve downloaded a movie to your tablet on your Netflix app, your tablet isn’t allow to be disconnected from the internet for more than a few weeks before the movie will simply be deleted from your device. 🤯 )

That silly and annoying. Personal computers were game-changing revolutions that worked really well long before the internet came along.

The idea of a similar level of basic functionality from our devices today when they don’t have internet seems like a reasonable request.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t tend to use apps like Notion for my personal notes – which, at the time I tried it, required an internet connection to be able to use. For me, basic (and often mission critical) features like notes working well with or without an internet connection is something I see as vital. Offline-first options like Neovim/VimWiki, Markor, or Obsidian seem like much better defaults, even if they might not share all the same features with their online-only alternatives.

In the best case, that added resilience is comforting to me. In the worst case, having been purposeful about setting up your tech with an “Offline-First Computing” paradigm may end up being really important, if you’re left without the internet for a long period of time…

In most cases, though, I simply find that having a device that is still useful even when the cafe’s internet is AWFUL was worth the effort of making sure my devices are set up to work really well while offline! 😄

Written for you while disconnected from the internet. 🫶🏽

I find physical examples of redemption to be really potent and impacting.

When I see or hear stories of things that brought destruction being transformed into tools to bring life, it excites me and stirs hope in me more than I can easily express. Literal examples of Isaiah’s swords beaten into ploughshares are really beautiful to me.

A want to see more of them!

It’s made me wonder, what would it look like to have a culture built on that kind of redemption and restoration?

What if we collectively got purposefully creative about redeeming things used for death and destruction, to turn them into tools of life?

There are already plenty of accounts of people doing that really well: people have turned nuclear weapons designed to kill millions of people into fuel that powered cities for decades, or turned missiles into piping for sewage-treating eco-machines, or beat guns used in mass shootings into gardening tools to help feed hungry people, or transformed large chunks of polluted and desertified land into lush productive food forrests.

These stories bring me hope. And make me think more of that kind of thing is not only possible, but worth pursuing, both in my own life and in the world.

What would it look like to have that kind of “Culture of Redemption” in more and more places?

What would it look like to to become a society that is collectively, actively transforming things that have caused suffering into things that bring life?

I don’t know, but I think it’s a dream worth pursuing!

Time for us to get creative.

I try to read at least a little bit of the Greek New Testament and/or Septuagint every day. Here are a few tools that have helped me do that in a sustainable way, while still keeping a fairly busy schedule.

Audio Recordings

One of the things that I’ve found most helpful in keeping a sustainable relationship with Biblical Greek over the years has been having audio resources to study with. I find that following along to the text being read aloud really helps me focus on what I’m reading (in any language, but especially with Koine).

Two main resources here:

First, is Ben Kantor’s work at KoineGreek.com. He has some of the best audio recordings that I’ve found of the Greek New Testament, with really purposeful emphasis and pacing in his reading. If you become one of his patrons, you can actually download the audio files for the recordings, so you can keep them offline and listen to them without the distraction of the internet.

Ben also has a YouTube Channel, where (among a ton of other great content) he has the entire Gospel of Mark done up as a video series with Koine Greek audio! I really love these videos. I actually added the subtitles for many of those videos, making it easier to follow along with the reading.

These recordings use the Restored Pronunciation. Because it’s the best guess scholars currently have to how the text actually sounded originally, the Restored Pronunciation is what I tend to prefer, compared to the Erasmian Pronunciation that’s taught in most Koine Greek classes these days.

However, there are currently only a few texts of scripture available as audio from Ben’s site. He is adding new content regularly, but his selection is still far from a full audio Bible. So, to fill in the gaps, I also have a second set of recordings of the whole Greek New Testament and Septuagint downloaded to my phone. The recording is done in a Modern Greek Pronunciation, which differs slightly from the restored pronunciation, but is close enough that it’s still pretty easy to understand and follow along for someone familiar with the Restored Pronunciation. The recordings I use are can be found on the Faith Comes By Hearing download page. Just select “Greek-Koine” for the language you want, and download the zip files for both of the “1904 audio” selections.

These two resources have meant I can have a pretty high quality audio recording to listen along with for any scripture text I want to read.

Reader’s Texts

Two great resources here:

First, I have a copy of Zondervan’s A Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible. This has the definitions of rare/low-frequency words shown in footnotes. While I might select a different printing of a Reader’s Greek NT were I to buy a new one today (specifically, one with a column format for the footnotes to make it easier to follow along), having a fully readable text after learning just a few hundred words is super cool.

Second, because the physical version of the text above can be a quite bulky to travel with, I have Matt Robertson’s GNT Reader app installed on my Android devices, as well. It provides a nice clean reading interface. And, when you inevitably don’t know a word, you can just tap on that word, and its definition will pop up. Very clean, smooth, and fast reading experience.

Update, August 11, 2023: I’ve actually largely stopped using the GNT Reader mentioned above, and instead have started using BART almost exclusively. It’s a bit less user-friendly, but much more powerful. It has both Greek and Hebrew built into it, as well as allows for split screen for multiple translations and languages. Andrew has a tutorial video here about how to use the app for reading Hebrew, but the process is similar for Greek.

Flashcard Software

When there’s a word I come across that I want to remember, I’ll throw it into some flashcard software, and try to review it around once a day (when I’m on the ball; I’m not always super disciplined in working through my flashcard backlog 😅).

My flashcard software of choice is the free and open source Anki. It uses an Spaced Repetition algorithm to make it so that the better you know a word that you’ve studied, the less often it shows you the card.

It has a bit of a learning curve, but has a ton of really powerful features.

I like to have 3 “cards” for each new word I’m trying to learn (drawing on Gabriel Wyner’s advice in his book Fluent Forever):

1. a prompt of the text of the word and audio of its pronunciation, with an image of the meaning of the word and its definition as the answer;
2. a prompt of just the image of the word, with the text, audio, and definition as the answer;
3. a prompt of just the audio pronunciation of the word, with the text, image, and definition of the word as the answer

I find this stack to be pretty effective at helping me internalize a word and its meaning fairly quickly. The process of recording the pronunciation of a new word, and copying/pasting it and its definition to a new Anki card is also fairly quick when you get used to it. Finding an image can take a bit more time, but I find adding a visual element to the words I’m learning to be disproportionately effective in helping me remember it, so I try to add that especially on words that I’m having more trouble learning (though, I might not have an image for every word).

For Beginners

I first started studying Biblical Greek about 10 years ago. I had some formal classes in it in university, but have learned on my own since then. The resources above are the tools I personally use today, but they might not be as useful to someone starting from scratch.

If I was to start from scratch today, here are a couple tools I’d look at using:

The free course Alpha With Angela does a really great job of introducing students to Koine Greek. Angela uses the Erasmian Pronunciation, which I mentioned above I’m not a huge fan of. However, the words and the grammar she teaches are super helpful for new students.

If you’re willing to pay a bit for a course, Ben Kantor also has a Living Koiné Greek Introduction course sold through the Biblical Language Center.

Either of these can be a good step to get you rolling. After that, I would focus on just listening and reading a lot using the resources above. Getting lots of comprehensible input can be surprisingly effective at helping you acquire a language effectively.

We’ve all got things we’ve been putting off dealing with.

Even as I say that, you probably have a bit of anxiety well up thinking about (or trying to not think about) one of those things.

So, let’s do this together:

Think of one thing you’ve been putting off.

Now, before you sleep tonight, Take One Step towards making it happen.

Think of the one “next action”, no matter how small, that you can take to move forward. Then, make that one small step happen before you sleep tonight.

As Sanderson puts it, “The most important step a man can take is not the first one, is it?
It’s the NEXT one. Always the next step.”

Take one step.

I find myself interacting online with people from a lot of different timezones. Here’s a screenshot from an actual page on my phone’s launcher.

Each of these clocks has been needed at some point fairly recently, usually because I’m scheduling a call with someone in a corresponding timezone. ¹

Now, timezones can be notoriously complicated and frustrating to deal with.

Because of the above-average amount of interactions between timezones I’ve navigated lately, I wanted to share some of the tips, tricks, and tools I’ve come away with (besides just having a full page of your phone’s launcher dedicated to clocks 😂), in case those tips and tricks might be useful to you too!

1. Timezone Codes are Broken; Use UTC/GMT Offsets Instead

This summer I had a call with someone in North America. They told me they were in the EST timezone.

“Eastern Standard Time”.

Cool! Quick lookup tells me that EST is 8 hours behind where I am.

We set the hours for our call. I confirm that my calendar appointment is scheduled to be 8 hours ahead of my client’s scheduled local time.

Then, 50 minutes before I had scheduled our call I get a text:
“Are you going to be able to join this call?”

Turns out, he was ready for me an hour before I had planned to be on the call.

Somehow, even after I had triple-checked, we still ended up miscommunication the time.

How?

Daylight-saving time, of course.

Turns out, EST was his timezone normally, but with daylight-saving time, his region actually converts to EDT, which is 7 hours behind me, not 8.

Unfortunately, he only knew his timezone as “EST”, because that’s what everyone locally refers to it as.

Egh…

Solution?

Use GMT/UTC offsets instead!

The acronyms GMT (“Greenwich Mean Time”) and UTC (“Coordinated Universal Time” … wait, what?) are names used for the global standard time that all other timezones are based off of. Specifically, it’s the time in London, UK, excluding effects of daylight-saving time.

Every other timezone in the world is defined as how it is offset from GMT/UTC.

Note: The acronym “GMT” is primarily used in parts of the English speaking world, while “UTC” is used by the rest of the world; I’ll just refer to “UTC” from now on, but you can switch out “UTC” with “GMT” in any example below and it will work fine.

So, for the example above, instead of saying he was in EST, requiring me to lookup how far EST is from my timezone (and still get it wrong), my client could have said that he was UTC-4, meaning his timezone is “Coordinated Universal Time, minus 4 hours”. I know that my timezone is UTC+3, or “Coordinated Universal Time, plus 3 hours”, so I could have instantly known that we had a 7 hours time difference.

It even works with weird timezones. Newfoundland famously is half an hour off of the standard timezone convention. But, that’s simply expressed as UTC−3:30. If I’m at UTC+3, then I can still just see at a glance that I’m 6 hours and 30 minutes off of Newfoundland.

UTC offsets are a helpful tool, worth knowing and making use of if you’re doing a lot of real-time international interactions! ²

2. Use Scheduling Software, Like Cal.com

This tip has actually proven much more useful to me this year in dealing with timezone complexities than using UTC offsets, largely because it doesn’t require a whole cultural shift to make it happen.

Basically, when possible, I try to avoid “working out a time” with someone I’m planning an online meeting with.

Instead, I share with them a schedule link integrated with with my personal calendar through a service like Cal.com. ³

Specifically, I usually share this link:

https://joshmuller.ca/cal

With it, those I’m wanting to meet with can see at a glance when I am and am not available to for a call, automatically corrected for their timezone! Then they can just select a time that works for them, and we’re good to go!

That whole story I described in the section above could have been completely prevented had I just sent my client my Cal.com link. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet set up my account at that point.

Lesson learned!

I’ve since saved a TON of time, and a lot of messaging, by setting up and using Cal.com. ⁴

The other nice thing is that the confirmation email that Cal.com sends out has an “Add to Calendar” button, which can be used to automatically add the event to whatever digital calender system the person you’re meeting with is using, making further scheduling issues even less likely.

3. If Scheduling Across Multiple Timezones at Once, Use a World Clock Converter

There are times when neither of the two tools above suffice. A specific example that comes to mind is if you need to plan a call where people will join from across numerous timezones.

A tool I used for that is TimeAndDate.com’s Worldclock Converter.

With it, you can add the timezones of all of your attendants, and see at a glance the time of day for a given scheduled event across all those timezones. It also shows you times that are convenient or inconvenient for your attendees, based on the time of day and the local standard work schedule.

You can then share with your attendants a link to the timezone table you create so they can see and confirm the scheduled time for themselves. You could even turn that link into a fancy redirect, if you wanted to share a nice clean link with your attendees, like example.com/meeting-time.⁴

That’s what I’ve got!

How about you? Do you have any tools that you have used to help you deal with the complexities of timezones?

I’d love to hear about them!

A couple years ago I scoured the internet for something I thought would be easy to find, and which I’m confident exists somewhere, but which I couldn’t turn up in my searching.

So, I made it myself…

I was looking for a printable sheet that had every chapter of the Bible listed as checkboxes, so that I could mark anytime I had read a chapter, and keep track of which chapters I had read.

Because I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I ended up brushing up on my LaTeX skills and throwing together something that would work for me.

Here’s what I came up with:

It’s not beautiful, but it gets the job done. You can Download the PDF if you want to print it off.

Further explanation (as well as the original LaTeX code, in case you want to modify it) can be found on my GitHub.

(Note: If you are someone who is just starting to read the Bible, endeavouring to read the whole thing from the outset might be a bit overwhelming. If that’s your situation, a tool like Waha may be better suited to help you start your journey than this checklist. You can come back to a tool like this after working through a few sets on Waha. 😊 )

TL;DR:   RSS is the best way to follow content online. My feed is here. Try something like Feedly if you’re new to RSS, though the options for how RSS can make your relationship with online media more healthy and meaningful are countless.

It’s been over 2 years since I deleted of all my social media accounts, and with them, all the attention sucking newsfeeds and updates that came with them.

And boy, what a 2 years it’s been!

In this post, I wanted to take some time to write an explanation/tutorial on what I think has been potentially the most useful technology for helping me thrive online without social media these last couple years.

It’s an old technology that pretty effectively solves a significant modern problem. It also has counter-intuitively helped me to be better and more deeply informed on issues I care about (and, honestly, better entertained) after having rid my life of the constant deluge and noise on social media, than before when I did have them.

Unbelievable? Maybe. But I think it might just be true.

That technology is RSS.

What is RSS? – Your Feed: Your Rules

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a silly acronym and name for a really cool technology.

RSS is basically a way to take ANY blog, website, or updating online content, and follow it all in a feed that you have 100% control of.

It’s a protocol for following the stuff you care about online, instead of a platform like most feeds today.

One of my favorite explanations I’ve heard of how RSS works comes from Seth Godin. He explains that, in essence, every creator or news source you might want to follow has something called an RSS Feed, which can be thought of like a specific frequency on a radio.

With radio, you can listen to any radio station you want by tuning your radio to the correct frequency.

In the same way, with RSS, you can follow anything you want on the internet by “tuning” your RSS app into the RSS Feed you want to follow.

When you do that, every new piece of content from that creator, news source, or online channel – from wherever place on the internet that creator is posting – will show up in your feed!

It’s awesome!

An RSS Feed itself is just a page of code, meant for computers to read — not people. It will be effectively unintelligible if you open it and try to read it yourself (you can try, with my website’s feed if you want ).

Just like you and I can’t see radio frequencies, RSS feeds themselves aren’t useful for people to look at. But, just like a radio turns unintelligible radio frequencies into music, your RSS app can turn any RSS feed that you want to follow into a news feed allowing you to follow all the stuff you care about.

In short, RSS gives you an online news feed that you own and control, and where you can set your own rules.

It’s quite cool, and has a lot of valuable uses.

Why should I use RSS?

Here are a few really cool benefits to RSS over modern social media feeds:

1. All your content in ONE PLACE

If you want to check Twitter, you do that on the Twitter app/website.

If you want to watch a new video from someone you’re subscribed to on YouTube, you do it in the YouTube app/website.

… or, at least, you used to!

RSS makes it so you can see all your subscriptions and things you care about in one place.

One app to rule them all!

(...and in the darkness bind them)

After several years now of RSS being the primary method I use to find newly posted content online, the idea of needing to check 6-8 different apps to see all the new things I care about feels primitive.

When you can see all the news, blogs, Twitter content, Reddit content, YouTube videos, web-comics, and newsletters you love at a glance with the tap of a single button, the idea of using a different app for each of those things begins to seem a little silly. 🤷🏻‍♂️

2. RSS keeps your email inbox clean

This one is simple: I think email should be used for communications, not content. Having newsletters or updates in my email inbox makes my inbox cluttered and distracts me from communicating with people. So, I pretty mercilessly unsubscribe to newsletters that get sent to my email. Instead, I use Kill The Newsletter to turn those email newsletters into RSS feeds, which I then follow in my RSS app.

My email inbox stays clean, but I still get to follow and read all the email newsletters I care about: Win-win.

3. RSS doesn’t “want” anything from you

As mentioned above, RSS is a news feed protocol, not a platform.

It’s a several-decades-old standard that you can teach any computer to use.

This is really useful, because it means that RSS is not owned by anyone.

There’s nothing it is intrinsically “pushing” you towards.

It doesn’t “want” anything from you.

Unlike news feeds created by big tech companies (companies which often make their money by showing you ads, and thus are incentivised to keep you scrolling their feeds as long as possible) with RSS there is no “goal” for your interaction. It’s a way for a website to tell your device that there is new content from sources you care about.

And that’s it.

No more multibillion dollar companies steering the content you’re shown to on your feed.

4. RSS gives you full control of your feed, showing you everything you’re subscribed to, indiscriminately

I remember when Facebook first started organizing content with the purpose of grabbing the maximum amount of attention possible, instead of organizing its content chronologically.

If you don’t remember those days, that old style of social media might feel a little foreign. We’re used to being shown the thing that the algorithm thinks we’re most likely to engage in; not the most recent thing.

Back in the day though, it was different.

Before social media companies had the primary goal of monetizing attention, most platforms would show your friends’ posts ordered from most recent to oldest. You’d open the app, and if someone posted a photo 5 seconds ago, you would see that at the top of your screen. That would be followed by the status update your other friend had posted 45 seconds ago, etc. It was simple, but great. It made it so that you could actually see all the things your friends were sharing. You didn’t miss something posted by someone you cared about because it wasn’t “engaging enough” by the algorithm’s standards.

Obviously, that’s no longer the case with most feeds today. Instead, most feeds today have some kind of mechanism that hides some content we’re subscribed to, and shows us other content we maybe didn’t chose to see.

That’s weird to me. If I click a button with the implication of “let me know when this person shares something new”, the fact I might not end up getting shown something new they put out seems kinda crazy.

RSS solves that problem.

It won’t push you to consume content you don’t want to consume, or hide from you content you do want to consume.

If you subscribe to something that’s available through RSS, it will end up in your feed. Period.

5. It has an End

I was recently listening to the Your Undivided Attention podcast. One of the hosts, Aza Raskin, is the original creator of the “infinite scroll” scroll feature now standard in basically all feed-based apps. Infinite scroll is that feature where, if you scroll to the “bottom” of your feed, more content will just automatically be loaded onto the page. It makes it so that you can scroll for hours upon hours, and more content will constantly be fed onto to your screen, ad infinitum.

It was fascinating to hear Raskin discuss this feature he created. It’s now a mainstay feature of every social media app on the market, largely because the “scroll-vortex” we so easily slip into when we use apps with infinite scroll is insanely profitable for companies with an attention extraction business model.

Raskin now recognizes that this feature he created has actually been a major negative for the world.

Hearing the creator of infinite scroll observe that he thinks the world is actually worse-off because of his invention being included in apps on billions of people’s devices today makes me think I probably don’t want it in my life either.

Luckily, RSS does not have infinite scroll.

RSS shows you the things your subscribed to, and when you’ve read those things, the feed stops.

As an example, if you look at my RSS app right now, you’ll see that it says, “There are no unread articles”.

I’ve read my news, blogs, comics, and the rest of stuff that showed up on my feed today… and now, I can go about the rest of my day! If there’s a particularly long or interesting article that pops up, I can save it to read later. But even then, when I come back, there will just be those saved posts waiting for me to read. When I’ve read all the stuff I’m subscribed to, I’m done.

No vortex of infinite scrolling for hours.

That’s replaced with just reading or watching the stuff I care about, then moving on with my life.

6. It won’t actively push you towards vile content and fake news

You remember I mentioned maybe “saving the world” in the title? This is that part.

It’s little secret that most feeds today expose us to content that makes us angry, fearful, stressed, threatened, and ultimately more hooked. This results on average in people around the world trending towards more distrust and division. (Go watch The Social Dilemma or listen to the aforementioned Your Undivided Attention podcast if you want further exploration on all of that.)

Basically, newsfeeds that are monetized by algorithmically maximizing users’ time-on-screen are naturally going to make us gravitate towards content that makes us the most emotionally charged – often, enraging, saddening, and divisive content.

That’s disconcerting. One might wonder how long a society can be saturated in that kind of media environment before something breaks. 😬

Such a problem is massive in both its implications and societal scope, so I obviously don’t expect that a tech protocol built 30 years ago could actually be the full and complete solution to it…

That being said, if you allow me a moment of reductivism in regards to this issue, it does seem like a keystone element of this problem comes back to the fact a majority of people are getting their news from sources that are incentivized to squeeze every second out of their attention by enraging them and confirming their biases, instead of striving to accurately inform them on the matters they care about. It stands to reason, then, that an effective way to counteract that problem would be for people to cease their exposure to that media that is demonstrably incentivized to mislead and outrage, and instead get their media from sources that focus on unbiased reporting of facts.

Now, RSS is not THE solution to that. Again, it’s just a news-delivery protocol.

BUT, RSS can be an effective tool to enable people to receive news with a focus on fact-based and minimal-bias reporting.

My personal technique for that has been to find a good Media Bias Assessment organization – something like Ad Fontes or AllSides – and use their work to find 2 or 3 news sources that have high accuracy and low bias in their reporting. Then, I subscribe to those sources’ daily or weekly news roundups on my RSS app… and basically I don’t worry about any other news beyond that.

(Edit - May 19, 2023: since writing this I’ve also come across Ground News, which can be added to the list of useful Media Bias Assessment organizations and news-sources.)

In doing that, it brings my relationship with the news back to an experience much more comparable to reading a newspaper: I open it up, see the headlines of those things that have come to pass since the last edition, I read the articles that are noteworthy, and then I close it and move on with my life. It leaves me informed enough on the issues of the day that I can talk about them knowledgeably, while keeping away from the crazy and misleading ideas that propaganda-focused organizations put out.

It’s a simple solution… But it’s also been a profound way to get away from my personal exposure to fake news.

Now, just imagine for a second if everyone did that.

It could be a grassroots solution to the fake news epidemic.

We can quite easily and effectively disengage ourselves from fake news, if we want.

And RSS can be a tool to help make that possible.

So, how do I get started? — Where to find RSS Feeds

Alright, the fun part! How do we start using RSS?

Like we talked about near the start, you need to find the “feed” of the content you want to follow – that “frequency” to tune your “digital radio” to, so you can get new content.

That feed will look like a standard web address/URL. Here’s what mine looks like:

https://joshmuller.ca/feed

If you copy that URL and paste it into your RSS reader app, you’ll be able to see all the content I’ve shared in the past, as well as all the future posts I share.

There are lots of websites and blogs that make their RSS feeds readily visible. Often, that will include some kind of icon with the RSS logo, which looks like this:

However, it’s become common lately to not advertise RSS feeds, because many people don’t know how to make use of them.

If you’re wanting to follow a creator whose RSS feed you can’t readily find, here are a few options:

• Try using the RSS Finder Plugin. Simply click the plugin when you’re on a page you want to follow. If there’s an RSS feed available, it should show it to you. This works for tons of services like blogs, YouTube, Medium, and more.
• If that plugin doesn’t work, there’s likely a service that can turn what you’re wanting to follow into an RSS feed:
  • For Twitter, there’s Nitter (if you want to follow @username, use the feed https://nitter.net/username/rss ).
  • RSSBridge can also be used to turn a wide range of services into usable RSS feeds
  • Check if what you’re wanting to follow is on this list. It may have the syntax you need to find your feed.
• Reach out and ask them. I’ve contacted several creators about their RSS support since moving all my feeds to RSS. Some of them ended up setting up new feeds so their content could be followed via RSS. Others provided other solutions (like newsletters, below) as effective alternatives.
• If you can’t find an RSS feed or a way create an RSS feed, more and more creators have email newsletters. As mentioned above, Kill the Newsletter is a great tool to turn email newsletters into RSS feeds.

If none of these options work, let me know and I’ll see if we can’t figure out a way for you to follow the thing you want to follow! 😁

Cool, cool, cool… now, what exactly do I do with this RSS Feed?

The simple answer to that is, “add it to your RSS reader app!”

Which raises a more complex question:
What RSS reader app should I use?

And answering that question is arguably the worst (and, kinda best) part about RSS.

The answer is, “it depends”.

It depends on what you want to do, and how you want to follow the content you care about.

You’re in full control, so you have to decide how you want to get your feeds.

This kinda sucks, in that you need to make a choice about how you want to consume your online content, when you are probably used to just consuming however has been the most convenient.

But while needing to make a choice is inconvenient, it’s also awesome for the same reason, because it’s you deciding what your relationship with digital content is going to be, instead of the owners of whatever social media company you’re using.

Because of how powerful RSS is, you can get quite creative with how your content gets to you. There are people who have used RSS feeds to give them their updates by:

• connecting to a paper printer, so they could read a physical copy of news content with their coffee in the morning,
• displaying on on digital signs or TVs
• playing their feeds with a smart speaker,
• feeding their news into their alarm clock.

The options are limited only by your imagination, and what you can make work for you practically.

Personally, I use two RSS apps, each for a unique purpose:

1. One app is specifically for reading content. This includes global news, blogs, comics, and newsletters. I have this synced to my ebook reader and my phone. Having it on a device with an e-ink display, and having those feeds saved offline, gives be the very enjoyable experience of being able to read this content peacefully, say, over a coffee at café. Because my e-ink device is only for reading, I can use it either to read books like normal, or, now, to read the news and long-form articles I find interesting.
2. The other app I use is for content which I know I will want to consume on my laptop. This is usually video content like YouTube subscriptions (which I prefer not to watch on mobile), or productivity focused updates (such as important software updates for servers I’m managing).

This is the setup I’ve found works well for me in this current season. However, as my needs change, it’s likely my setup will also change and adapt.

As such, it is difficult to give specific recommendation to you for which app to use for RSS, as that it is likely to change with your needs, too.

That being said, here are a few ideas for you to try out:

Apple

I’m not an Apple user, but my Apple-using techie friend Nathan recommends NetNewsWire for following RSS content. It’s a free and open source RSS reader for MacOS, iPhone, and iPad.

If I were an Apple user, it’s probably what I would use.

Android

The RSS app I use right now is actually one I can’t recommend for the average person, as it would be pretty convoluted for most people to set up. (It’s my personal Nextcloud server with Nextcloud News installed; I use an app that’s no longer supported to read that news; because of its lack of support, I will probably need to change the app I use soon).

On account of that, the recommendations below aren’t actually ones I use day-to-day. But I have given them a preliminary test, and they seem to work well!

Assuming you don’t need to sync your RSS feeds from your Android device to a different device, I would probably recommend Aggregator.

Another option, if you’re using Brave Browser like I recommend elsewhere, is to use its built-in RSS reader. If you want a way to start following RSS feeds without setting up a dedicated app, this might be a decent option for you. Here’s a quick tutorial of how use it.

If you need to sync between devices, you will unfortunately probably either need to be ok with some limitations to the number of feeds you can follow, be ok seeing some ads on your app, or be ok paying a subscription fee of some kind. (Or, self-host an RSS service like I do)

Feedly is probably the best option here. It has a free version of the app that is limited to only 100 feeds, but that’s pretty decent for most people to get start.

Desktop

Here is where you find an abundance of options.

Here are a few notable ones:

• Personally, I use newsboat. It’s highly customizable and scriptable, which allows me to do a ton of cool stuff with it, like playing YouTube videos on my laptop without opening YouTube, or saving the text of an article directly to a file in my notes with a single keystroke. It’s super cool. But it’s also a command-line program, which can be intimidating for newcomers.
• If you’d like your email and news in one program, the Thunderbird email program has a fairly rich-featured RSS reader built into it.
• The note-taking app Obsidian has an RSS reader plugin that also looks cool.
• If you prefer a dedicated app, I’ve played with both RSSOwl and Fluent Reader, and they both seem like solid options.

You can also always use the aforementioned Feedly on desktop, or NetNewsWire if you’re on MacOS.

All that to say, you have a TON of options.

There’s bound to be at least one that works well for how you would like to use it!

That’s Awesome! Now what?

Now, go out and follow some RSS feeds!

I would estimate that using RSS instead of scrolling social media feeds has saved me hundreds of hours over the last two years, freeing me up to spend that time on the stuff I care about, while also still equipping me to learn from and consume the content I love and care about.

My hope is that you benefit as much as I have from those saved hours, and that more meaningful relationship with your feed!

If you have any feedback, questions, or ideas related to this, I’d love to hear them!

Thanks for reading!

The most useful cooking advice I’ve ever heard:

If you can tell there’s just “something missing” in what you’re cooking,
simply add an acid.   ¹

A good squeeze of lemon juice on something bland can bring it to life in surprisingly magical way.

It can take a meal from “meh, passable” to “daaang! not bad!”   in mere seconds.

I’ve tried it with a range of acids: lemon juice, lime juice, apple cider vinegar.

It’s worked every time!

(I once tried it with a smoothie: I had a bunch of seeds and non-citrus fruits I’d blended together hoping for a refreshing drink. But when I took a sip, the result was just… meh. I ended up adding a few millilitres of the only acid I had on-hand: apple cider vinegar. Honestly, wasn’t expecting a good result (have you tasted apple cider vinegar??). Aaaaand….It brought the smoothie to life! It made it shockingly good! Where I barely wanted to drink the smoothie originally, I ended up wanting more of the ACV smoothie after it was gone! 🤯 )

“Add an Acid”

Three little words were an absolute game changer for my cooking.

I can’t help but think there are probably tips like that in other fields that are similarly simple and easy, but insanely disproportionately transformative.

Those “small keys” that open “big doors”.

A few potential ones that come to mind: Grease the Groove for strength training; don’t use attention extraction services for a healthy relationship with tech; use box breathing to ameliorate symptoms of stress and anxiety; focusing on small, consistent habits for significant life transformations over time.

I want to keep my eyes open to find more.

Do any come to mind for you?
I’d love to hear them!

In the deep-diving of the esoteric world of technology as I do, I often come across tools which the vast majority of people will never need or make use of. I tend to note those tools and log them away for personal use, as it is not uncommon for weird situations to pop up where I need some ultra-niche tool I’ve stumbled across in the past.

Other times, some of those tools I encounter could make a lot of people’s lives much easier and more convenient.

For anyone who uses a laptop or desktop computer, I think Package Managers might be one of those tools.

What is a Package Manager?

In short, a package manager is a program that aims to make installing, updating, and removing programs on your computer stupidly fast and easy – doing in a single line of text what sometimes can take an hour or more of work (if you’re installing a large number of programs).

It’s a one-stop-shop for all of your software needs. All of the programs you need and want, in one place that’s fast to work with, and massively simplifies the process of managing the programs that run on your computer.

Some computer operating systems like Linux basically only use package managers for their software installation. A couple of these package managers include pacman or apt.

For most other operating systems, a Package Manager is an extra piece of software that you install on your computer.

For Windows users, there’s Chocolatey, or more recently Winget.
And for MacOS there’s homebrew.

Why are Package Managers awesome?

Here’s a few reasons I now use a package manager on every new device I set up, for both myself and for others.

It Makes Installing New Software So Fast and Easy

Like, sooo fast.

I’m in a statistics class this semester in my online university. We’re studying the R programming language as a tool to learn the principles of statistics without getting lost in the arithmetic. A good chunk of the homework for our entire first week of class is working through the process of making sure everyone in the class is set up correctly to use the R software on their computer for the rest of the class.

Because it’s a bit of an older and more arcane piece of software, it can indeed be a bit troublesome to try to find the right version of it for your computer. On account of that, there are several pages of instructions that we need to navigate our way through before we can find the download link, which we need so we can download the installer, after which we can run the installer, and finally get the program running on our computer.

Here’s a screen capture of me doing that same thing in seconds using the pacman package manager on my computer:

(The installation happens in the first 7 seconds… the rest is just me having some fun)

Stupidly quick! And granted, pacman’s syntax isn’t the easiest (what’s up with the -S?), but many package managers are much easier to work with.

For example, I wrote recently about why I recommend people use Brave in place of Chrome.

If you have Chocolatey installed on your computer, this is all you need to type to get up and running with Brave:

choco install brave

So quick.

No More Endless Searching for Programs… And Finding Viruses

By default, if you have a new program you want to install on Windows, the normal workflow is:

1. Type name of program into Google,
2. Click link that looks at least semi-reputable,
3. Decide whether the page that opens actually feels reputable enough,
4. If site doesn’t feel safe enough, repeat step #2 with a different link; otherwise:
5. Press “Download Program”,
6. Cross fingers and hope you didn’t just download a virus 🤞🏽🤞🏽

That seems… suboptimal.

With package managers, that whole process non-existent.

The programs on package managers have been vetted. Many of them are open source programs that you can open up the code and verify for yourself.

You just type the name of the program in an “install” command, press “Enter” and you’re done.

It’s nearly impossible to download a virus if you’re using a package manager.

Update EVERYTHING, instantly!

☝🏽 Honestly, this is probably my favorite part!

I have well over 100 programs installed on my computer, and I like to know my programs are running the latest updates/security patches. If I needed to make sure every program was up-to-date and secure on a regular basis, it would be nearly a full time job!

Package Managers make it so you can update every program on your computer in a single command.

With pacman on my computer, I can run the command pacman -Syu, and it will instantly go through, and check every single program on my computer and see if there are any feature or security updates are available, then go through and install them automatically. (Again, it is indeed an arcane syntax. Why -Syu? But man… those 11 keystrokes save me a TON of time in keeping my software running safe and fast!)

Luckily, many package managers are more simple to use than pacman.

Here’s the command to get Chocolatey to upgrade all the programs it can in one line:

choco upgrade all

Winget is similar:

winget upgrade --all

Homebrew takes a couple commands (brew update, followed by brew upgrade), but is still insanely quick to 1) check for updates on all the programs, 2) download updates for any out-of-date programs, and 3) install them.

Set Up New Computers Super Quick

This is the other reason I love Package Managers.

I help a lot of people get their new computers up and running (or, more often, reviving old computers that need a new breath of life). The process of going through to find, download, install, and configure all the programs that someone needs to get their computer fully up and running can be a huge time suck.

With Package Managers, that need not be the case.

When I’m setting up a new computer, I can install one program (specifically, a package manager like Chocolatey on Windows), and run one command like:

choco install brave thunderbird vlc libreoffice-still kdenlive audacity gimp krita inkscape blender obs-studio vscode

And when that command is done running, the computer will be fully set up with all the software one needs to do pretty solid multimedia creation, live-streaming, and software development work, on top of all the basic stuff everyone expects like web browsing, email, word processing, etc.

Depending on internet connection, doing all that setup manually could take the better part of several hours. This is all done in one single command, which takes just seconds to type or copy/paste.

And, for those intimidated by the idea of typing commands into a terminal window, tools like Chris Titus’s Windows Utility (explainer video at the bottom of his article) also make it possible to use a package manager (Winget) to install dozens of programs with a few clicks instead of a few keystrokes.

A pretty cool tools and time-savers if you ask me!!

Lots of issues in the world today seem to come back to the “race to the bottom”.

Creating the lowest prices and most convenience for consumers… Even if that comes at the cost of the lives of children.

Taking as much attention as possible… Even if that results in nations destablizing, and teen suicide rates skyrocketing.

Getting as deeply as possible ingrained into people’s habits and brain stems, becoming as addictive as the technology and the law allows, extracting every gram of monetization we can, no matter the cost or the side effects…
Because “if we don’t do it, someone else will”.

If we don’t win the “race to the bottom”, someone else will.

It’s been said that, “every system built on extraction will eventually crumble”.

Sometimes, looking at how we as humanity are stewarding this world, I wonder if someone took that line as a challenge instead of a warning.

So, it’s worth asking how can we do the opposite?

How can we model and partake in supply chains that make the world better for kids instead of worse?

How can we use technology in a way that makes our lives, the lives of our communities, and the world a better place?

How can we regenerate instead of extract?

How can we “Race to the Top”?

Whatever the answer, I think our role in it starts with you and me modeling it and living it out.

So, let’s do it. Let’s do what we can to Race to the Top instead of the bottom.

by Josh Müller

Of the dozens of movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, my personal favorite has to be Black Panther.

There is so much I love about it: I love that it was a movie that many people didn’t expect much of, and yet it became one of the top grossing movies of all time; I love the themes of healing and redeeming generational injustices; and I love the message that we need to chose to do the right thing, even when our traditions and cultures might sway us otherwise.

As we’re getting near the release of the Black Panther sequel, I found myself revisiting the movie, and thinking about some lessons I took away from our first cinematic visit to Wakanda.

After all, as a friend once pointed out to me:

Black Panther is a movie that tells the story of a Kingdom hidden in plain sight, gifted with an unimaginable and effectively limitless source of power, which enabled them to build a thriving nation, to heal fatal wounds, and to have wisdom and insight for world‑changing innovations that brought about well-being beyond what rest of the world had even imagined. This Kingdom is ruled by a Warrior King, who dies but comes back to life to save his people. The main message of the movie is that this Kingdom has remained too hidden from the rest of the world for millennia, but now is its time to come out of hiding, and use the Gift they’ve been given to help make the world a better place.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like that story has a LOT of parallels with Church.

So, I think maybe there are a few lessons in here for you and me as followers of Jesus.

Here are a few specific ones that I notice.

1. What you carry is more powerful than you know

The first lesson and reminder that I came away with from watching Black Panther is the fact that, as a follower of Jesus, what you’ve been given is deeper and more powerful than you or anyone else has any idea of.

In the movie, Klaue tells agent Ross that the Wakandans have a mountain full of Vibranium that “they’ve been mining for thousands of years, and they still haven’t scratched the surface!”

Wakanda’s Vibranium – their source of power, technology, innovation, etc. – was a massive mountain, deeper and more plentiful with world‑changing treasure than anyone else in the world had any idea of. That nearly limitless source of Vibranium was how they were able to create technologies centuries beyond what the rest of the world had. It’s how they were able to heal fatal wounds. It’s how they were able to create a just and stable society while the rest of the world around them was subject to injustice and instability.

That idea of having a Gift of significant power meant to help make the world a better place sounds familiar:

Paul tells us that “the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in us.”

If you’re anything like me, you’ve heard that verse enough that it’s lost some of its potency. So, I invite you to take a minute to chew on its implications.

If you’re a follower of Jesus, you carry the Spirit and Presence of the One Whose very word ignited the nuclear fusion of a trillion-trillion stars, bringing innumerable, unimaginably-large galaxies into a cosmic orbital dance spreading out on an infinite stage, further than our best technology can see in any direction.

I mean… Have you seen the photos from the James Webb Space Telescope?!?

For 13,500,000,000 light-years (🤯🤯🤯🤯) in every direction from us, there is so much beauty, wonder, and awe that we could spend a thousand lifetimes exploring it and not even begin to scratch the surface!

Scripture teaches us that God created all of that with His Word.

What’s even more insane to me is that Scripture also teaches that the same One who created all that with His Word lives in you and me, and He uses that same voice to speak to us, so that we would hear Him and follow Him.

The God of the Bible is so much insanely more powerful than our minds could comprehend that, no matter how great we imagine Him, we will always, definitionally, be underestimating Him.

And Scripture teaches that He wants to set up camp inside you and me.

The God who ignited the galaxies with a sentence wants to live in us.

Much like the Wakandans, you haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the transformational power living inside of you.

2. We need to stop hiding the Gift we’ve been given

I’m not the most well-versed in literary techniques and symbolism, but sometimes an artistic device is just so clear that it’s hard to ignore.

I feel like that’s the case with the last lines of the opening scene of the movie Black Panther:

Child: And we still hide, Baba?

Father: Yes…

Child: …Why?

For me, a major part of the message of the movie seems to be summed up in those few lines.

The kingdom of Wakanda was given a stunning power and blessing, capable of making the impossible possible. In the story, this kingdom has been holding that power to themselves for thousands of years.

But, why?

There are myriad of reasons that emerge throughout the movie: tradition, fear, and greed to name a few.

But, as the story progresses, we see T’Challa grapple with that same question posed in the opening lines of the movie: “Why?”

Surely we can be doing more.

Surely we could and should take this Gift we’ve been given to make the world a better place.

Surely the reasonable thing is to stop keeping what we’ve been given secret, and to help those suffering out of their pain; especially when we have such powerful resources at our disposal to make it happen.

T’Challa’s struggle over this question culminates in my favorite line in the entire MCU:

“All of you were wrong to turn your backs on the rest of the world. We let the fear of our discovery keep us from doing what was right! No more! I can not stay here with you… I must right these wrongs.”

The choices of the past might have made sense in order to get us to where we are now. But the season is changing. Some of the ways we used to do things don’t make sense anymore.

Where that’s true, it’s worth asking why would we keep doing them the way we used to?

Why would we let fear of change, or fear of anything, keep us from doing what’s right?

… or keep us from doing what we’re created for?

I can’t help but to hear the Apostle Paul’s words echoing T’Challa’s here: "I’m not ashamed of the Gospel, because it’s the power of God to save."

Like we talked about above, if you’re a follower of Jesus and you’ve been filled with His Spirit, Scripture teaches us that you’ve been filled with His power. It really seems from my years of following Jesus and studying scripture that a big part of what we’re meant to do with this Power is to partner with God in seeing the transformational work of His Kingdom move “on earth as it is in heaven” — to see injustices made right; to see people, families, communities, and creation healed and restored, and brought back into right relationship with God; to comfort the mourning; to free the oppressed; to bring life to dead places.

That’s the Power sitting inside of you.

That’s what we’ve been hiding inside of us.

The Power to partner in God’s work of seeing earth transformed to look like heaven.

That’s not something to be kept to ourselves. It’s not meant to be stuck inside us or our church buildings. It’s meant to flow out of us, and to be a power that will transform the world.

I also find myself loving the last scene in Black Panther. In it, T’Challa promises the United Nations that Wakanda will stop hiding and hoarding the blessing that they had been keeping secret for thousands of years, and instead would help “find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”

Do you remember the response of the United Nations representative?

“With all due respect… what can a nation of farmers have to offer the rest of the world?”

In response, T’Challa and his crew simply grin.

I can’t help but think that there is some major sense in which you and I can (and should) be walking in that same grin of confidence in our day-to-day lives.

Jesus tells us that we “are not of this world,” but that we are instead from a Kingdom with a mission of “Life, and abundance of life.”

We don’t play by the same rules that this world does.
We are ambassadors from a Kingdom of Abundance, bearing witness in a Universe of Scarcity.

You are called to bring Light to the world around you, and you’ve been given everything you need to do that.

Remember, the God who created the Universe lives inside of you.

That’s not something that’s meant to be left inside. It’s meant to be a blessing to the world around you.

Don’t be afraid to show that Light.

Be unreasonably generous, compassionate, and loving.

That’s the Kingdom we’re from, and the lifestyle we’re meant to walk in.

So, let it shine! Don’t hide it from the world.

3. The Gospel is more than a Frisbee

Wait….. wut? 🤔

Yeah, I know. Hang in there, this will make sense in a second!

When I first started thinking about vibranium and the Kingdom of God, a quote from an earlier MCU movie came to mind.

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, there’s a moment when Ultron is working to make his new vibranium “body” which later becomes Vision, and he drops a potent line:

“[Vibranium is the] most versatile substance on the planet, and they used it to make a frisbee. Typical… they scratch the surface, and never think to look within.”

The “frisbee” he’s referring to is of course Captain America’s iconic shield — a chunk of vibranium molded into a circular form that Steve Rogers threw at enemies and would hide behind to avoid gunfire.

It’s so fascinating for me to think about vibranium as a metaphor for the Kingdom of God in this context.

How often do we as Christians approach the Bible with the main goal of trying to find verses which we can use effectively in an argument?

There are a lot of apologetics and evangelism training programs around that teach you how to “debate” well about faith — how to basically “argue someone into heaven”. You learn how to use scripture as a “shield” against people’s arguments. You learn how to throw Bible verses in conversations to “beat” others’ ideas.

It’s the most powerful thing in the universe, and we’ve made a frisbee out of it.

One of my favorite musicians, Aaron Steinley has a line in his song Up in Arms that feels applicable:

“Open up my heart and let me comprehend, Lest I be to blame of using this Book as a weapon for my own gain.”

And of course, none of this is to say that Scripture doesn’t have a defensive or offensive effect — the Psalms talk about God’s name being our “strong fortress” protecting us, and Paul describes the Word of God as the “sword of the Spirit.”

But what I am saying is that the Gospel we’ve been entrusted with and the Kingdom we’re a part of isn’t meant for us to hit over others’ heads.

It’s not “a weapon for our own gain”.

What we’ve been given in Jesus, as God said to Abraham, is meant to be “a blessing for all nations.”

I’ve found it extremely rare that arguing with someone who believes differently than me in order to get them to start “believing the right thing” about God turns out to be effective. My attempts to “defend God,” more or less always fall on their face.

Which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense.

That would be like trying to defend a Lion locked in a cage. That would be silly.

The best way to defend a Lion in a cage isn’t to try to mount an effective defence in the name of the Lion.

The best way is to let the Lion out of the cage.

Similarly, the best way I’ve found to see people encounter Jesus isn’t to argue with them. It’s not to use the Word of God — the most powerful and versatile thing in the universe — as a weapon or a frisbee. Instead, the most effective thing I’ve found is to simply introduce them to Him. To share how He’s transformed my life, and invite Him to do the same in their lives. To ask Holy Spirit to touch their hearts, to move in their lives and the lives of their families.

And then, to see what He wants to do.

Don’t try to defend the Lion.

Just let Him out of the cage.

Let’s act on it!

What are some ways you’ve been underestimating what God wants to do in your life and the lives of those around you?

Are there any ways you’ve been hiding what God has given you instead of using it to bless those around you?

Are there any ways you’ve been using the Gospel as a “weapon for your gain”, to win arguments or benefit yourself, instead of bringing it as truly Good News to bring life, hope, and reality-transforming truth for the people in your life?

Whenever I have an encounter with God’s Word, I try to commit to at least one thing I can do to obey or to apply that Truth to my life. I also try to think of at least one person I can share the Truth I’ve learned with.

With that in mind, is there anything you can apply to your life from what we talked about above?

Is there anyone you can share with this week who you think would be encouraged by what we’ve been talking about?

I’d love to hear what you come up with!

Today I watched a video from Derek Muller (great name 😎👍🏽) called The Most Important Algorithm Of All Time.

The video discusses a game-changing piece of mathematical and scientific wisdom that, had it been known to the scientific community in 1958, could have prevented the nuclear proliferation of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and would have likely ended the Cold War 30 years early! ¹

It’s a great video! I love and recommend Derek’s content!

One piece of shocking insight stuck out to me:

This algorithm (the “Fast Fourier Transform”) was first discovered in 1805 by mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. However, Gauss didn’t think it was really useful or important, so he didn’t publish it. He just kept it in one of his notebooks, in a language and notation that made it inaccessible to the world.

It wasn’t until well after Gauss’ algorithm could have changed the course of history that we realized he had discovered such an important piece of wisdom. Unfortunately, Gauss dropped the ball in sharing that valuable insight with the world, largely because he didn’t actually see his discovery as valuable.

The Cold War lasted over three decades longer than it should have because Gauss underestimated the usefulness of one of his discoveries and decided not to share it.

Seth Godin talks a lot about the importance of the idea of Showing Your Work. This story underscores that truth all the more to me.

You might not have an insight that could prevent a war or nuclear proliferation. But, you probably do have some wisdom or insight that could change someone’s life.

It’s worth sharing that wisdom!

Throw it on a blog, in a video, or in a book so others can find it and benefit from it!

Showing our work (even work we don’t think is valuable), and making that work accessible to the world, could have prevented a nuclear arms race and significantly lowered the threat of humans ending all life on our planet.

That seems to me like a good enough reason for us to share the things we’re learning in an accessible way for those who want to benefit from those insights.

I recently stumbled upon Johnny Harris’ video from a few years ago titled “What I learned by befriending Iranians on Facebook”.

In it, he talks about how, in an effort to better understand the situation in Iran in 2015, he reached out to a couple dozen Iranians online to hear their stories. This act of befriending, talking with, and hearing stories of Iranians — a group that Harris admitted he had viewed through the West’s media lens as militant and hateful to a large extent — ended up humanizing the Iranian people in a way Harris wasn’t expecting.

I’ve been pondering and loving this idea.

If you think about it enough, there’s almost definitely a group of people you’ve viewed as your “enemy” or demonized in some way. You probably have a “them” whose ideology you see as at least somewhat threatening.

But… how often do we hold that view about “them” without actually knowing someone who is “one of them”?

When you think of your “them”, can you think of any true friends you have who hold that ideology?

Have you truly heard your “them” out, and tried to understand why they believe what they do?

Have you had a meal or a coffee with them?

Have you hurt with them over what they’re hurting about?

Maybe you are indeed right, and they are indeed wrong to believe what they do (but, let that keep you humble, because you’re wrong too); but, it’s worth hearing them out on equal playing field… as a friend.

It’s easier than ever to make friends with your enemies, if you’re willing to try.

Every subculture you might think of has a forum, a subreddit, a Facebook group, a Discord, or some online meeting place that you can find, where you can meet people and get to know them.

Examples like Deeyah Khan — a Norwegian lady with Pakistani ancestry, who has made documentaries where she meets, befriends, and has conversations with Neo-Nazis and Jihadists, both groups that collectively hate her and what she represents — or Dylan Marron — host of Conversations with People Who Hate Me, where Marron meets, befriends, and interviews “People Who Hate Him” in order to work better towards peace — are inspiring to me.

I’m sure there are thousands of people and communities out there who have much less publicized attempts at befriending and making peace with the “Them"s in their lives and societies. But the efforts of Khan and Marron are especially noteworthy and beautiful to me.

In so many ways, the internet has become a hate machine, full of propaganda steering us away from peace and well-being.

But, that doesn’t need to be the case.

Like Khan and Marron, we can also make use of the tools at our disposal to better work towards a world where our empathy can collectively overcome our anger. We can, as author John Green puts it in his book “The Anthropocene Reviewed”, be part of an
“us that doesn’t require a them.”

In technology, a protocol is a standard and agreed upon language that allows different systems to communicate with each other. It’s the idea underneath every layer of technology that is allowing you to be reading this right now.

The web is based on protocols. It’s a paradigm that focuses on freedom, on accessibility, and on interoperability.

Protocols grant the ability for anyone to access, use, and build on top of the work of those who came before them. Especially when it comes to the internet, protocols allow anyone to build their own website, or their own app, or chat/email/social-media server. The protocols of the internet make it so anyone trying to do those things is working on a pretty level playing field. We’re all dealing with the same networks, the same rules, and the same bits and bytes. We all start with the same digital Lego blocks to build what we want to build.

It doesn’t matter what browser you use, what device you use, or what what program you use to access a protocol. If you’re using something compatible with the protocol, you’re in. No one is going to stop you from using a protocol, and what you do with those protocols is limited only by your skill and imagination.

Protocols are awesome!

Platforms are different.

Where Protocol means “freedom”, Platform mean “lock-in”.

Most big tech sites are based on the idea of platforms.

Platforms are designed to focus on themselves, at the expense of people who are not a part of the platform. They’re not designed for freedom, or accessibility, or interoperability. They’re designed primary to benefit and profit themselves.

For a concrete example of this, chew on this question: why can’t iMessage or FaceTime be used to send messages or make video calls to Instagram Messenger?

They both do basically the exact same thing, and they’re owned by two of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

The technology already exists, and it would take less than a week of Apple’s and Meta’s engineers time working on the problem to make a pretty solid experience for BILLIONS of people.

So, why not?

Why aren’t chat systems on different social media platforms compatible with each other?

It would add a HUGE level of convenience and freedom for us as users if we only needed to check one chat app to see who’s messaged us across all our online identities, instead of the current reality we inhabit where we need to open and scroll through a bunch of different apps to see where we’re being contacted. (See XKCD 1810 and 1254 for applicable humor; I don’t even use social media, and I have 8 different chat apps on my phone to contact specific people that I otherwise can’t communicate with. That’s silly. And that’s by design. Because that’s platforms.)

Protocols are better for you and me. And better for startups looking to build something new alongside those who have built before them.

Platforms are better almost exclusively for mega-corporations.

And they know this.

Facebook Messenger actually started as a protocol! Not a platform. It was part of what’s called the Jabber network, a chat protocol still in use today (called XMPP today), which allows you to have chats with people from a bunch of different services. (Think like email. If you have a Gmail address, you can still email someone who has a Hotmail address. You use different services, but you can still send each other messages. That’s because email is a protocol. Jabber is a chat protocol that works the same way. So back in the day, you were able to have conversations between, say joshmuller@facebook.com and tonystark@jabbers.one, and it all worked great!)

Protocols allowed Facebook Messenger to quickly grow into a instant messaging power-house, largely because they were harnessing technology and a network that was already pre-built for them.

It was great!

But, as soon as they had a critical mass, Facebook realized they could make more money by locking people in to only using Facebook Messenger, instead of continuing to allow it to be a system compatible with other chat on networks.

It’s much easier to monetize someone when they feel obligated and locked in to using your product.

So, Facebook Messenger changed from being freedom-respecting protocol-based service to being a locked-down platform that they alone control and monetize.

Not cool.

I think it’s worth thinking through how we can make our tech usage more “protocol-based” instead of “platform-based”.

Just a couple thoughts:

1. Stop creating content that gets shared exclusively to platforms. Make what you create at least somehow “protocol-accessible” for those wanting freedom from exploitative platforms. One solution to that might be the POSSE method — “Post On your own Site, and Syndicate Everywhere” — where content gets shared first to your website (a protocol-based tech), but then shared onto platforms like social media for others to discover and read.
2. When possible, lean towards protocol-based solutions for new tech problems you experience, and try to nudge people away from platforms when possible. Encourage usage of protocol-based products like Element (or Jabber) instead of WhatsApp. Of Jitsi instead of Zoom. Of RSS instead of Attention-Extraction based Social Media news feeds. Or, you could use a “Social Media Protocol”, like the Fediverse, where you can replace Twitter with the protocol-based Mastodon, or Instagram with PixelFed, or Facebook with Friendica. There are ways to replace just about any platform we use with protocol-based solutions if we want.

It’s something I think many of us realize at a conceptual level, but I wonder how often we make decisions or align our lifestyles accordingly.

In reality, it’s wisdom that goes back millennia – “It’s more blessed to give than receive.”

Making something, building something, creating something is naturally a better use of our time than consuming.

We were arguably Created to create.

But thinking of our lives, both digital and physical, how much of our time is spent living this out?

Assessing our time hour-for-hour, how much time do we spend in creative “outflow”, compared to “inflow”-consuming of what others have made?

How much time do we spend watching YouTube and browsing our feeds?
How does that compare to how much time we spend creating things worth filling others’ feeds with?

I’ve aimed to tend in a direction towards more hours in creativity the last while, but I still feel the ratio of consume to create isn’t yet where I want it.

Not that consumption is wrong — it’s indeed a natural part of life, too.

But, I do think we’re created for more.

I was working on a project last week, and found myself racing back to my desk after a bathroom break, because I was so deep in creative flow I couldn’t wait to see what came out next.

It was an anticipatory experience on par with (and surpassing) the “need to know what happens next” in any book or movie I’ve watched in years. The difference was that I wanted to see what I would create next, instead simply passively absorbing what others have made.

It was a euphoric experience, and I think it was an experience worth making happen more.

So, I’m going to try to spend more time in “making” mode these next few weeks, pushing my “create-consume ratio” further towards creativity.
Wanna join me?

“Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weaknesses.

Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes.

Your life is too short and you have important things to do.

Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind.

If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.

It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity.

But there’s no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.”

~ Epictetus in The Art of Living (First Century A.D.)

Click Here to jump straight to my recommendation.

There’s a decent chance you’re reading this post on one of three web browsers: if you’re an Apple user, you’re probably on Safari; if you’re on your Windows PC, you might be using Edge; but, most likely, you’re on Chrome.

If that’s true, I think you should switch to something else. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Monopolistic Practices Make the World and the Internet a Worse Place

You might like the game Monopoly, but it’s worth noting that monopolies in the real world aren’t great.

As Seth Godin puts it “[A] monopoly is a critical failure of capitalism. When monopoly occurs, when the customer no longer has a choice, prices go up, innovation goes down and mostly, consumers have no voice.”

Web browers right now are effectively a monopoly (well, technically an oligopoly, but the same issues apply). Chrome, Safari, and Edge make up about 90% of the browser market share. When basically everyone is using the same three browers, it easily results in lost freedom to use your device the way you want. One company makes a change to their software, and because so many people are locked into using it, hundreds of millions of people lose access to important plugins they use every day.

Software monopolies are bad for technology and for the internet.

2. Tracking is Sketchy

Chrome owned by a $1.5 trillion company that makes the vast majority of its money by collecting as much information about you as possible and monetizing that information through advertisements.

Edge’s owner, Microsoft, is increasingly the same way, constantly looking for more ways to take the information they’ve gleaned from spying on you, to get more targeted ads in front of your face.

Apple and Safari should have gotten a pass on this one, except that just these last few months Apple has started getting into the ad game, too! Likely meaning they also will be harnessing information about what you’re doing on their devices and software, and using it to show you ads, too.

Tracking like that is creepy. If there’s an easy way to ameliorate that, I think it’s worth trying.

3. Non-User-Respecting Software is Lame

All three of those browsers are closed source, meaning that if you want to make a change to the way the apps works, you’re actually simply not allowed to. You’re required to use these apps the specific way that Google, Apple, or Microsoft have programmed them to work. Even though you’ve paid a lot of money for your device, when you use their software, you’re required to use that software the way they want. It’s like you don’t own your device at all.

It seems almost maybe reasonable, because it’s what we’ve gotten used to…

But, there is another way.

What do I Recommend Instead?

In short, I recommend Brave.

That might change in the future, but at the moment Brave is the main web browser that I can recommend as a generally great option for everyone of all technical skill-levels, on any device.

It solves all the complaints I mentioned above:

• It’s not developed by a tech giant, so no monopolistic shenanigans
• It blocks ads and trackers by default protecting you from the sketchy spying so common by internet companies today.
• And it’s Free/Libre Open Source Software, meaning you can have complete control over it. (If you want to go in and change the internal code to make it do something novel, or if you want to make sure that the software is not doing anything malicious or unethical on your device, you’re allowed to do that. And many people do. The fact you’re not allowed to do that with Chrome, Safari, or Edge should probably be a little worrisome😅)

Brave also just seems to all around work better than any other browser I’ve used. The fact that it blocks trackers, ads, and other garbage by default, means that your devices doesn’t actually load the code for all that. The result is a significantly faster experience than with other browsers. If you use it on your phone, it also means you use less cellular data, because those ads and trackers simply don’t load.

I like Brave. If you haven’t used it, it’s worth trying it out. It takes only a few clicks and a couple minutes to download and install.

These past two weeks I had the supreme honor of taking the Permaculture Design Course on the Greening The Desert project in the Dead Sea valley, Jordan, where they have succeeded in turning a plot of completely dead desert land into a thriving food-generating ecosystem. It was incredibly cool. I had such an great experience meeting amazing people, and learning amazing things about caring for creation.

I will surely write more about it in the future.

On the last day after class, we had a talent show, where we shared with the class things that we were passionate about. I had compiled a list of verses from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Bible relating to what we were learning about, and shared it with the class. Below is a recording of the reading, as well as a copy of the text I read. Sorry that the audio isn’t great. Might rerecord it later.

There were a few passages I trimmed, and a few phrases I “modernized” or modified to apply a bit more to what were studying.

I also footnoted the original sources of the passages, which you can find at the end of each passage.

I hope you enjoy!

Video Recording

Scripture Compilation

The fortress has been left abandoned.
The noisy city was deserted;
The citadel and the watchtower were turned into a wasteland,
the delight of donkeys, overgrazed by flocks,

until God’s Spirit is poured out from on high,
and the desert becomes a fertile field,
and the fertile field seems like a forest.
The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,
his righteousness live in the fertile field.
The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;
its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.
People will live in peaceful dwelling places,
in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest.
How blessed you will be,
sowing your seed by every stream,
and letting your cattle and donkeys range free. ¹

Right now, the poor and needy search for water,
And there is none;
their tongues are parched with thirst.

But I the Lord will answer them, and I will not forsake them.
I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs.
I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia,
the myrtle and the olive.
I will set junipers in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
so that people may see and know,
may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
and that God, your God, has created it. ²

In those days many peoples will
come to the House of the Lord and say,
“Come, let us go to the Lord,
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”

He will judge between many peoples
and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.

They will beat their weapons into gardening tools:
their swords into plowshares,
their spears into pruning hooks.
They’ll beat their guns into shovels,
and repurpose their missiles as irrigation piping.

Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
Everyone will sit under their own vine
and under their own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid. ³

“‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
On the day I cleanse you from all your sins,
I will resettle your towns, and the ruins will be rebuilt.
The desolate land will be fruitful instead of lying
desolate in the sight of all who pass through it.
They will say, “This land that was laid waste has
become like the garden of Eden;
the cities that were lying in ruins, desolate and destroyed,
are now fortified and inhabited.”
Then the nations will know that
I the Lord rebuild what was destroyed
and replant what was desolate.
I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it.’ ⁴

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or drink;
or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?
Look at the birds of the air;
they do not sow or reap or store away in barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not much more valuable than they?
Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
“And why do you worry about clothes?
See how the flowers of the field grow.
They do not labor or spin.
Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor
was dressed like one of these.
If that is how God clothes the grass of the field,
which is here today and tomorrow is turned into mulch,
will he not much more clothe you?
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’
or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
For your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
But seek first God’s Kingdom and His Righteousness,
and He will make sure you’re taken care of,
and He will work out the details.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow,
for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Each day has enough trouble of its own. ⁵

Then I was shown the river of the water of life,
as clear as crystal, flowing from
the throne of God down the middle of the city.
On each side of the river stood the tree of Life,
bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.
And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
No longer will there be any curse.
The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city,
and His servants will serve Him.
They will see His face,
and they will be with Him,
and reign with Him for ever and ever. ⁶

Frodo: I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf:
So do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil…
And that is an encouraging thought.

Human civilization has existed for thousands of years — eons of empires rising and falling; of knowledge being created and lost; and of stories being lived, told, written, and retold.

There is a LOT that came before us…

And there will be a LOT that comes after us.

You and I only get a small handful of decades to exist and be a part of it. But the bigger story continues on.

I think it’d be beneficial if we spent more time thinking from that perspective.

What if we made more decisions based on how it would impact our great, great grandchildren? What if we took a break from thinking so singularly about the short-term — this week, this month, this year — and instead spent some time thinking about what we’re building that will last for a century, or beyond?

A Brazil Nut tree can live over 1,000 years, and produce enough calories every year to feed 3 people. That’s potentially 30+ generations being fed by one person simply choosing to plant a tree.

I think we’d do a lot of good for ourselves, our lineage, and our “neighbors” if we were to spend a little less time thinking about today, and instead spend a little more time thinking in centuries.

It’s been a few years since I watched this clip of former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya sharing his concerns about attention extraction services and the dopamine industrial complex.

This video was influencial in my descision to stop using those platforms in 2020. I just rewatched this video a few minutes ago, and Palihapitiya’s thoughts are just as potent and applicable today as they were when he first shared them. Maybe even more.

It’s worth giving a listen.

There are a lot of reasons single-use plastic waste is problematic.

However, completely stopping using single-use plastic can be pretty difficult…

Improvement, however, is comparatively pretty easy!

Take a minute to think through the single-use plastic you’ve thrown away this week.

Are there any patterns?
Anything you threw out several times throughout the week?
Utensils, coffee cups, water bottles, plastic bags, meat packaging?

Note one or two instances that stuck out.
There is likely a simple habit change that you can make which will make it so you won’t need to use that type of single-use plastic again.

• Carry bamboo or metal utensils with you
• Use a reusable coffee cup
• Bring cloth bags
• Take a sealable glass container to the butcher

Ultimately, it’s probably best to work towards no single-use plastic.
But don’t let perfection be the enemy to improvement.

Take one step in the right direction. Make it a habit.

Once that habit change is solid, repeat.

The blank page is scary.

It’s unclear what “should” go on it.

“What should I write about?”
“What should I draw?”
“What should I make?”

Not to mention, there’s the terrifying element of we don’t want to mess this up!

If we leave the page blank, it stays clean. We can have the satisfaction of not having made any mistakes. We know we can walk away without having failed. Leaving the page blank is comforting.

Except that then, the work never gets done.

Then, the world doesn’t get to be impacted by what you’ve made.
Then, we miss out on experiencing the work that only you can bring.

What’s really worth remembering is that every day we get is a blank page.

Every day is a canvas of 1440 minutes that we get to fill with whatever we want.
Every day is a blank slate, until we fill it up and it passes.
Then, another day, another blank page.

And we only get a surprisingly limited number of those “blank pages” to work with.

So, let’s learn to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. Let’s learn to love that blank page, and make the most of every one we get.

Vincent van Gogh put it well:

“Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas.
But the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of ‘you can’t’ once and for all.”

When was the last time you wrote a letter?

Not an email; not a text message.

A letter.

When was the last time you wrote an address onto an envelope, and sent it to someone through the mail?

It’s probably been a while.

Heck, there’s a decent chance you don’t even know the mailing addresses for some of the people you might want to send a letter to. You might not even have paper and envelopes on hand to write and send a letter.

Why not change that today?

Technology is amazing. I love that I can instantly talk to anyone in the world in high quality video whenever I want. I love that I can send someone a message that they’ll get on the other side of the planet mere milliseconds after I sent it.

That is so cool.

But there’s something about the physical — there’s something about the tangibility of that which was hand-written with love, which you can hold in your hand, and keep as a reminder.

It’s a meaning-multiplier.

So, why not write someone you care about a letter today?

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.” ~ Morgan Spurlock

“Leadership is simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy.”
~ (paraphrased) Jocko Willink

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Free/Libre Open Source Software. With rare exception, all the software I run on my computer is Open Source (Brave, Bitwarden, to name a couple highly valuable and accessible favorites). Similarly, when I help friends and loved ones setup a new digital device, I always try to encourage them towards the free/libre and open source version of a given product, instead of the closed source versions they are normally used to.

One of these products that comes up often is the Office Suite. Many people use Microsoft Office, and pay monthly to get access to it. For a lot of those people, it’s the only office software they’ve ever known. They’ve never considered switching to something else.

When I offer alternatives like LibreOffice (or one of the other great open source office alternatives), they’re usually intrigued by the freedom and the better price tag, but when they first download it, they’re put off by the interface.

It’s not that the interface is an abomination or super difficult to navigate, per say. It is, however, an interface laid out much more like decades old versions of Microsoft Word than like the interfaces many people are comfortable with today.

Luckily, there’s a super quick and easy way to make the LibreOffice layout look a bit more more modern and accessible, more like current versions of Word.

Simply go to the top menu and click these options:

View -> User Interface -> Tabbed

Then, click either Apply to All if you want to make all of LibreOffice have this more updated interface, or just click Apply to Writer (or whichever other office app you’re in) if you just want to apply the change to that one app and not the whole office suite.

And that should do it!

Now your LibreOffice now has a layout more like the modern “tabbed”/“ribbon” style of office software that most people today are used to.

It’s an extremely quick and easy tweak.

I didn’t know about it until this week, so I’m sharing it here in case you find it valuable, too!

P.S. There are lots more customizations you can do if you want to further tweak the way that LibreOffice looks and functions. Those will just take a bit longer than 5 seconds. :)

Sometimes a reboot is the best option.

Sometimes things just get too much to keep up with, and the best option is knocking it down and trying again.

Could have been an issue with taking on too much. Could have been lack of good systems for managing the challenges that would arise. Could have been something completely unforeseeable and beyond our control.

But regardless, there comes a time where resetting is all-around a better option than trying to push forward on something that’s not working.

I experienced a microcosm of that this week. For a couple years now, I’d been using a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system like Obsidian (with GTD) for managing my tasks, projects, goals, and life. It was awesome and I loved it. But, a series of crazy months, coupled with not keeping up with my system during the craziness, as well as several new commitments that I couldn’t figure out how to integrate into my system without refactoring the whole thing, left me in a lurch. I could spend a bunch of time and energy that I didn’t have to clean up my system… or I could declare “Personal Knowledge Management bankruptcy,” and reboot.

After trying and failing at the former, I decided on the latter.

I bought a blank notebook, worked through the Bullet Journal tutorial again, and switched back to paper for life management, after several years of having been almost exclusively digital.

The change has been helpful and welcome!

I’ll probably reincorperate a digital PKM in the future again, learning lessons from this experience. But, in the meantime, the limitations of a paper-first system have been helpful to keep me cognizant of my limits.

All that to say, if you have forward momentum doing what you’re doing, keep doing it!

But if you’re stuck and what you’re doing isn’t working, sometimes it’s worth seeing if you can’t reboot.

Works well for both computers and people.

Most people are familiar with the quote commonly attributed to Einstein:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”

The implication often being that it doesn’t make sense pursuing a positive outcome using tools and techniques that we know from experience tend to leave us with negative results.

The inverse of that idea seems less frequently discussed, but may be even more important: if something you do is giving you positive result, don’t stop!

Do it more!

Sometimes the solution is figuring out a better way to do something; many times that is indeed needed, especially if we’re starting from scratch, or if the way we had been doing things has proven to be corrupt or inviable.

In most other situations, though, we already know what works… or we at least have a pretty good idea.

The solution, then, ends up simply being unreasonable persistence in that which does work.

It would be insanity to do otherwise.

… Or, at least silly and less than our best.

Counterintuitive, but game-changing.

For whatever reason, the cards often fall in such a way that the deficiencies or excesses presented in one problem end up fitting like a perfect puzzle piece into corresponding respective excesses or deficiencies of a different problem.

That’s a central concept within regenerative agriculture paradigms like permaculture: one system’s detrimental and potentially damaging surplus output can be another system’s much needed, life-giving input.

This is connects potently with the idea of an abundance mentality.

If we know where to look or how to orient ourselves (our lifestyles, communities, supply-chains, et al.), we can start to see the greater truth:

There’s always more than enough.

My phone’s camera isn’t great at capturing the full beauty of the skies at night. But, they say “The best camera is the one that you have with you.”

Here’s a photo of the Aurora Borealis — the Northern Lights — I took this week while traveling the highways of Saskatchewan, Canada!

Sometimes it’s easy to lull ourselves into that comfortable mindset that our day-to-day decisions only impact us — that it doesn’t really matter what we do, because the effects of our choices start and end with us.

I think, with rare exception, that’s actually pretty far from the case.

Many of choices we make day-to-day have very real impact on others.

For examples, in no particular order:

• Choosing to like and share a piece of spurious content (unverified news claims, convincing misinformation, etc.) might end up steering dozens or hundreds of people’s worldviews further from Truth when your recommendation shows up in their feed.
• Choosing to bring cloth bags to the grocery store instead of using single-use plastic can play a part of preventing microplastics buildup in others’ bodies, potentially preventing future disease.
• Choosing to stay up late instead of getting proper rest may result in you being exhausted and missing the opportunity to speak a word of encouragement that might otherwise change somebody’s day/life.
• Choosing to ride a bike instead of drive your car can help slow damage to our atmosphere, which can help ameliorate a potential future refugee crisis.
• Choosing to put in the difficult emotional and administrative work of abstaining from culturally accepted but toxic “normals” (Social Media? Gossip? Whichever other socially accepted but harmful addiction of many you want to name), can unlock the capacity in those around you to step into the same freedom when they hear your story.

In economics, these otherwise unmeasured second-order side effects are called “externalities”. They’re very real effects, but hard to measure because they’re not immediately visible to us when we look at the direct impacts of an action.

They’re there, though; and they’re worth us thinking about once in a while.

So, the next time you ponder a choice you need to make (or, a habit you take for granted) take a minute to ask these questions:

1. What are the ways this choice will impact my neighbors?
2. How can I make this choice in a way to best love my neighbor — whether my neighbor be geographic, digital, temporal, political, ethnic, or otherwise?
3. What is one thing I can do different today that can result in positive externalities, that will indirectly bless my neighbor (even if they never know about it)?

The idea of us working together towards a society where we consistently consider the needs of others before our own excites me and gives me hope.

I think a big part of that simply means choosing to do the hard work of loving our neighbors through aligning the externalities of our actions such that they result in their good.

How can you do that, today?

You’re creative.

Whether you feel that’s true or not, you have a creative gift that is uniquely you.

So, here is a challenge for you:

Go, create something, today.

Bake something, write something, draw something, design something, build something, record something… and put it out there!

There are people who love what you do and want more of what you’ve created in their lives.

There are people whose day would be better for them reading, listening to, watching, tasting, using, or simply having something that you created with them in mind.

Your creativity is a blessing.

You should do more of it.

I’m not a big fan of WhatsApp. While it does indeed work well as a messaging app, it also feeds into Facebook/Meta’s technological hegemony, isn’t open source, tracks who you message and what you do on your phone, and does some other creepy stuff that I’m not a fan of. But, WhatsApp is also currently the most popular messaging platform in the world, ¹ and a majority of people I contact regularly are only reachable through there. As such, even though I’ve purged the vast majority of Attention Extraction services from my life, I still have kept WhatsApp around (though, I prefer and recommend Signal or Matrix/Element).

Now, there is an issue I’ve come across while using WhatsApp: WhatsApp (as of the time of this writing) only lets you start new conversations with your contacts from within the app. It doesn’t let you start a conversation with someone whose phone number you have, but who isn’t a contact, unlike many other messaging services/platforms let you do (SMS, Signal, etc.). I imagine this is for some specific purpose such as spam reduction. However, it can be slightly frustrating, as there are a decent number of times I’ve found where I want to message someone on WhatsApp, but where adding them as a contact is superfluous (someone that I might just message once, for example… a business, or a delivery guy, etc.).

For situations like that, here is a workaround I’ve found useful:

How to Message Someone on WhatsApp Without Saving Them as a Contact:

Assuming you have the phone number of the person/business you want to contact on WhatsApp, all you need to do is open your web browser on your phone (probably Safari if you’re on an iPhone, and probably Chrome or your vendor specific “Internet” app if you’re using Android (though, I recommend installing Brave for Android or iOS, as it’s more privacy respecting than those other defaults).

Then, from your browser, you’ll type in this web address:

wa.me/13065551234

Here, simply replace 13065551234 with the phone number for whomever you’re trying to contact. You’ll also need to include the country code of the phone number you’re trying to contact. So, sending a message to someone in Türkiye, with country code 90 might look like https://wa.me/905675551234. (Also, here the https:// is added in, but if you’re typing the address into most web browsers, you shouldn’t need to add that part.)

And that’s it! Go to that web address (with the right phone number in it), and you’ll see a button that says, “Continue to Chat”. If you press it, WhatsApp should open, and if your contact has a WhatsApp account, a chat with them will start.

In case you didn’t catch it, there’s a helpful mnemonic built into the URL to make it easier to remember this trick when you need it: just remember the wa in wa.me is for WhatsApp. So, it’s just wa for WhatsApp, then .me/PHONE-NUMBER.

That’s all!

Quick and simple trick, but can be really helpful for keeping your contacts list just a bit cleaner, especially if you use WhatsApp as often as I do.

Update Jul 11, 2023: Signal actually has a feature like this too. It’s less useful for the “Message Without Saving as Contact” feature, as Signal actually does allow you to contact someone without having them saved as a contact. However, both the wa.me feature highlighted above and the following Signal link can be really useful if you’re wanting to create a link that someone can use to contact you on either platform (say, in an email signature, or as a link on a web page, or otherwise).

The syntax to create a phone number link for Signal is:

https://signal.me/#p/+[PHONE_NUMBER]

When I was a kid, I hated history class. To me, it was nothing more than a list of names, dates, and facts about wars and dead people that I was required to memorize. I never saw how it actually applied to my life. But in last few years, I’ve started to LOVE history — largely because I’ve come across amazing stories and nuggets of history that I think are really worth talking about, but which we largely don’t. Some of these stories I’ve found to be especially hopefilled. Since I don’t think these stories get told enough, I wanted to retell some of my favorites. Below is one of them.

Hope you enjoy!

Download Audio Article

We need to talk about Smallpox. If you’re reading this there’s a decent chance you don’t really know much about it. I didn’t before this past year. I had just kinda assumed it was basically chicken pox, but a bit worse. However, if you had been alive a few centuries ago, you almost definitely knew about Smallpox. You likely would have had a different name for it. But, you definitely would have either heard stories about it, or you would have lived through it.

And you would have, understandably, been horrified of it.

3,000 years of death

Scientists aren’t confident about where or how the Smallpox virus first came to exist. What we do know, however, is that it’s been with humanity for a long time, and it’s killed a LOT of us over the millennia.

The oldest evidence that we have of Smallpox is the mummified remains of an Egyptian Pharaoh who seems to have died from the disease about 3,000 years ago. ¹

So, from then on, for a decent chunk of human history, through the rise and fall of several of history’s most powerful empires, Smallpox has been infecting people and making them sick… and killing them…

And what is especially scary to me about Smallpox is just how many people it has killed over the millennia. It can be easy to become complacent when we think about the infectious diseases we face today. Even as we are navigating our way out of a pandemic that has killed millions of people, the percentage of people who died from a COVID-19 infection has actually been comparatively low by historic standards.

Not so with Smallpox.

With Smallpox, the number that tends to be thrown around is about 30%, ² or around 1 in every 3.

One out of every three people who caught the disease died from it.

One out of every three.

Take a moment to imagine what it would be like if one out of every three people you know who caught COVID had died from it.

Just try to let that idea settle in…

That was a reality for a significant chunk of human history. There was an extremely infectious disease getting passed around across much of human civilization, which would kill nearly a third of everyone who got infected with it (and would leave many of the others who got it with significant permanent damage).

For much of the virus’ history, the only inhabited regions of the world that didn’t have Smallpox was the Americas and Australia. However, when Smallpox finally did get brought over from Europe to those regions (to the Americas in the late 1400s and early 1500s, and to Australia in the late 1700s and early 1800s), it resulted tens of millions of deaths among the indigenous peoples there. ³

Beyond that, it’s estimated that in just the 1900s alone, between 300 million and 500 million people died from Smallpox around the world.⁴ That’s as much as half a billion, or as much as 13 entire Canadas worth of people who died from the disease!

I realize that’s an inconceivably large number of people to die from something. But, just, try to let the weight of that number settle in.

The word “awful” doesn’t even begin to describe the levels of pain, suffering, and loss that this disease has brought about throughout human history.

If you need a further visual, feel free to take a look at the Wikipedia article for Smallpox, to see some photos of the effects it had on people over the years. But come right back, the story is about to get interesting.

Now, you might be wondering, “If this disease has been so prominent throughout history, why don’t I know anyone who’s gotten it? Why do I know so little about it, if it indeed kills so many people?”

That is a fantastic question.

And to answer it, we need to meet a doctor, some farm-girls, and a cow that changed everything.

Enter: the Bovine

In the late 1700’s, there was a British Doctor named Edward Jenner.

Jenner was a doctor who dealt with and treated Smallpox victims, so he was keenly aware of the damage and loss of life the disease brought about. So he was looking for a way to fight back against it.

At the time, the most common preventative measure for Smallpox was a process called variolation. The original technique for variolation involved collecting infected Smallpox scabs from patients, drying those scabs, crushing them into a powder, and using a long straw to blow the dried scab powder into the nose and sinuses of the person recieving variolation.

😳

Apparently, history is nothing if not full of terrifying and gross medical treatments.

Here’s the thing, though: around this time in history, variolation (by blowing dried, powdered smallpox scabs into one’s sinuses) was actually the basically best chance you had at preventing Smallpox.⁵ It did indeed provide half decent protection against the disease. Those who had received the procedure did indeed survive exposure to Smallpox much more regularly than those who didn’t.

But, it was far from enough.

Millions of people were still dying from this disease.

It’s in that context, and in the context of significant outbreaks of Smallpox across Europe and Britain, that our friend Dr. Jenner was working, and researching… and hoping.

Around this time, some other doctors that Dr. Jenner was connected with started noticing something interesting: when a wave of Smallpox would come through an area, there was fairly consistently a group of people that would not die, and many times not even get sick from Smallpox. Sometimes, some of them would get slightly sick. But, consistently, they didn’t die from a disease that was killing large swaths of people around them.

Who was this group?

To the confusion of the medical and scientific communities at the time, it was farm girls!

Specifically, it was the milkmaids who worked with dairy cows.

Which… is a little weird…

Why would milking a cow make you immune to a disease that was killing a third of your town?

The milk wasn’t doing it. Others were drinking milk from these cows and dying.
It wasn’t like beef was the answer. Others were eating cow meat and still dying.

Sooo…. whyyyyy? 🤔

Well, it turns out, many cows in Britain at the time were dealing with a disease caused by a virus that was related to Smallpox, called Cowpox. See, Cowpox is a disease that, while it does infect humans, isn’t lethal to humans. If you were to get infected with Cowpox, in the vast majority of cases, you would simply get a fever, and in some cases, some lesions similar to chickenpox for a few days. Then, after that, you’d recover without issue.

There was effectively no risk of death or permanent damage, which stood in sharp contrast with Smallpox.

And it turned out, these girls who didn’t get sick after being exposed to Smallpox had consistently previously been infected with Cowpox.

This was game changing.

Dr. Jenner theorized that the milkmaids’ specific contact with the pus of Cowpox infected cows had been what gave them immunity to Smallpox.

So, in 1796, Dr. Jenner put that theory to the test. He took a bit of pus from a cow named Blossom, which was infected with Cowpox, and injected it in the arm of a young boy named James Phipps. Little James got a light fever for a few days, then was fine.

Later, when the boy was exposed to Smallpox, he didn’t get sick.

With that success, Dr. Jenner tested his theory again with several more people, by putting Cowpox pus into their arms. Again, when each of those people were later exposed to Smallpox (which, remember, should have otherwise killed nearly 1 out of every 3 of them), they were fine.

Dr. Jenner had just started a process that would change history.

He decided to name this new procedure after the animal that made it possible.

The Latin word for “cow” is “vacca”, from which Dr. Jenner came up with the name for this new process of conferring immunity:

“Vaccination”

Eradicate good times, come-on!

While there were some who resisted, and even mocked the idea of getting immunity to a disease through putting cow pus into one’s body, the evidence was undeniable: without vaccination, Smallpox was still killing about 20-30% of everyone who got infected with it, but with vaccination, that percentage plummeted precipitously.

Dr. Jenner’s vaccination process went mainstream. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands and beyond started receiving this new vaccination procedure. And as vaccinations increased, Smallpox cases and deaths decreased proportionately.

The process wasn’t completely perfect. A small number of people would still get sick and die from Smallpox after vaccination. ⁶ And in very rare cases, some people even got very sick and died from the vaccine itself. ⁷ But still, the result was that exponentially fewer people were getting sick and dying after vaccination, where those who were not yet vaccinated were still dying at a rate of about 1 in 3 from Smallpox.

As time went on, an even more effective and safer vaccine was developed that didn’t require cow pus.

Then, in 1959, the World Health Organization made a goal: they knew that you could stop Smallpox from spreading in a place through vaccination. Large chunks of the Western world were already largely free from Smallpox due to vaccination campaigns in those regions. So, if that was true, then in theory, you should also be able to scale that up.

So, the question was asked, Could you stop Smallpox entirely by vaccinating people in the remaining regions of the world still fighting Smallpox?

Could we entirely eradicate Smallpox?

All the evidence seemed like it was more than possible. And not just possible, but very worth it. The sheer number of lives that had been saved by vaccination was hard to ignore. And the amount of suffering that could stopped by eradicating Smallpox entirely would be almost unimaginable.

So, the World Health Organization made the commitment to do everything within their power to eradicate Smallpox… then they started putting in the work to make it happen.

For two decades, a massive global campaign was rolled out to provide vaccinations to the remaining regions of the world that were still dealing with Smallpox. Hundreds of millions of doses of Smallpox vaccines were produced, distributed, and administered to some of the poorest and most inaccessible regions in the world. This was possibly the largest coordinated public health campaign in history.

Then, in 1977, something amazing happened.

Someone caught Smallpox for the last time.

A Somalian hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin (who hadn’t been vaccinated against Smallpox)⁸ caught the disease. Thankfully, he made a full recovery. And because the vast majority of the men and women around him had been vaccinated, none of them caught Smallpox from Ali.

Then, after that, no one caught Smallpox ever again.

Three years after Ali recovered, in 1980, the World Health Organization called it:

Smallpox had been totally eradicated.

Baring a bio-weapon attack, or a lab leak from a lab holding one of the world’s few remaining samples of Smallpox, no one would ever catch Smallpox again.

Since then, over 4 decades have passed, and that’s still holding true — no one has caught Smallpox since.

That’s right. This is a true story from history that actually ends with "… and they all lived happily ever after."

Or, at least, "… and they all lived Smallpox-free ever after," which, all things considered, is fairly close.

“Smallpox was…”

The first two words of the Wikipedia article for Smallpox make me regularly ponder:

Smallpox was…

It’s been thousands of years that humanity and society has been dealing with and succumbing to this devastating disease. Through all that time, how many people wished that this disease would stop? How many people hoped beyond hope that their village or their family wouldn’t have to deal with the tornado of death that tore through communities during Smallpox outbreaks?

And how many times did people think, “This is just the way things are, and this is the way they will always be”?

Here’s the thing: We now know that last sentiment is a lie.

The way things are doesn’t have to be the way things will be.

Only a few short decades ago, people were dying by the hundreds of millions from a millennia old disease that we could barely imagine a world without…

And yet, today, that disease is completely gone.

It makes me wonder, what other travesties and sources of human suffering do we take for granted because we’ve never known a time in history without them?

History shows us that there are terrible things in the world that we can get used to as just “normal parts of life”, but which can be eliminated. Things which our children and grandchildren may not even know a name for, because they never experienced the suffering that those before them dealt with for thousands and thousands of years.

The story of Smallpox reminds me to hold on to hope, even for the things that many people think are impossible.

It reminds me that there are big, bad things in this world that we take for granted.

But that no matter how big or how bad those things might be, a world without that suffering is possible. And, I think, a world like that is worth pursuing.

Smallpox was…

In the eyes of history, Smallpox is counted as a “was”.

What other things have we gotten used to, that deserve to be a “was” of history, too?

Lately, every time someone shows me a YouTube video on their computer or phone, I find myself freaking out just a little. The ads, the list of recommended videos, the endless comments… there’s just so much going on on the screen, and I find myself easily distracted and maybe a bit overwhelmed.

In contrast, if you watch a YouTube video on my laptop, you’ll find it to be a much different experience. What you will see is the video and its description, and basically nothing else. If you want to see the comments or the recommended videos, you can scroll to see a “Show More” button. But, other than that, you just get the video you came to see.

I have really been appreciating this setup for a couple years now. I have written before about how I think we should avoid using news feeds from Attention Extraction dependent business models. This setup has allowed me to watch YouTube videos without exposing myself to the more addictive elements of YouTube’s attention extracting practices, which I’ve found to be really valuable. Some of the content on YouTube is amazing, but getting sucked into a YouTube binge-watch-vortex has wasted too many hours of my life. In combatting that, this new set up has helped me immensely.

The tool that has allowed me to achieve this on my computer has been the Web Browser Plugin Improve YouTube! (Available here if you’re using a Chromium-based browser (Brave, Chrome, etc.), or here if you’re using Firefox).

Below I share the settings that I use on Improve YouTube! and why I’ve selected them.

My Settings:

After you’ve installed the plugin, you should be able to find it along with all your other plugins. Usually that’s on the top right of your browser screen. When you click on the Improve YouTube! icon, you should see 9 options come up: General, Appearance, Themes, Player, Playlist, Channel, Shortcuts, Blacklist, and Analyzer. Each of these have a long list of settings within that can change the way you use YouTube. Below are the settings in each category that I’ve found most fruitful.

General:

Under General, the main thing I change is the YouTube Home Page setting, which I set to Watch Later. This makes it so when I open YouTube, I’m not instantly exposed to all the videos YouTube’s algorithm thinks will suck me in. Instead, I see my “Watch Later” list. So, if I’ve saved any videos I want to watch, I’ll be reminded of them. Otherwise, I’ll see a blank screen.

Usually, if I’m opening YouTube, it’s because I want to watch something specific. This helps me actually do that, instead of getting distracted by the Home Page recommendations.

Appearance:

The appearance section has several subsections, based on the elements of the video watching page. Here’s my settings for those subsections:

Header:

My main setting here is switching Position to Hover. This makes it so the search bar, logo, and everything in the header is invisible unless you “hover” over the area it would normally be. I like this because it keeps the viewing area clean. No buttons and such to clutter the video I want to watch.

I also set the Improve Logo setting to on, just because I think it looks good. 😅

Player:

Here, I set two settings. First I set the Player size setting to Fit To Window. This makes it so whatever video I’m watching will fill up the window. I also set the Forced Theater Mode to on. As far as I can tell, if the Player size is set, this is redundant, but I have it set anyway as I prefer my video taking up as much of the screen as it can.

Sidebar:

This is one of the most important settings for me. Under Related Videos I chose Collapsed.

This does one big thing for me: It hides the Recommended Videos by default, but lets me open them if I want to see them.

Sometimes the recommended videos can be helpful, but most of the time, I’ve found them distracting. This setting allows me to see them when I want, and hide them the rest of the time.

Comments:

Similar to above, under the Comments setting here, I chose collapsed. Rarely does the comment section provide any net positive to my life, so I want it hidden by default. Sometimes I’m curious what people have to say, though, so the option of leaving it available for when I chose to see it is nice.

Themes:

Here, I simply use the Black theme. It’s clean. It’s a good night-mode theme. It’s how I’m now used to seeing YouTube.

Player:

Finally, the last major setting I change is Ads. Here, I simply chose the Block All setting. There are other settings there, for if you want to be able to make sure the creators you’re subscribed to have ads shown on their videos. Personally, though, I opt to simply Block All.

Conclusion

I used to find YouTube super addicting. Now (on my laptop, at least) I feel that I have a really healthy relationship with it. If, like me, you want to come to a healthier place with web services you use like YouTube, and if you don’t have any tools in place to help you do that, I recommend giving Improve YouTube! a spin! I’ve found it to be really helpful, maybe you will to.

Lately I feel like I’ve come to a place with internet and tech usage that I’m really liking, where I’ve been able to derive great value from what the internet has to offer, while being better at protecting myself from some of its more poisonous elements.

Here are a few tools/tips that I’ve found helpful for coming to that place, which I think anyone who uses the internet could benefit from:

1. Stop using Algorithmically Generated Recommendation feeds; use RSS instead

This technique has been the most helpful for enabling me to stay up-to-date on things I care about, while keeping my distance from the manipulative tendencies of attention extraction companies.

When I say algorithmically generated recommendation, I mean any situation where the next thing you see is generated by what a computer model of you thinks you’ll like. Prime examples include YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and most other social media companies. The idea of algorithmically generated recommendations, and why they’re concerning for individuals and for society, gets expounded on in The Social Dilemma, which I recommend if you haven’t yet seen.

My solution to this is RSS, which is a way to get updates on just about anything you want on the internet without a company filtering what you see. It allows you to follow anything you’d want — from video channels, to blog feeds, to world news — in a way that you can fully control.

I wrote a tutorial on how to use RSS to follow low-bias highly-reliable news, which you can read here.

I personally use Nextcloud News and OCReader for any RSS feeds I want to read on my e-book reader (blogs, news, web comics, etc), and newsboat for everything else (YouTube Channels, Instagram Posts, etc.), though they have fairly high leaning curves, so other solutions are probably better for most people.

Regardless, I think almost everyone would benefit from taking control of your newsfeed by switching to RSS.

2. Get a Password Manager

I detailed this in a recent post, so I won’t rehash it all here. But in short, using a password manager (like Bitwarden) to create and manage unique and strong passwords for all your accounts is one of the best ways to increase security of your accounts while also multiplying your online convenience.

3. Silo Your Devices for Different Tasks

This one is kinda fun, and something I’m still learning how to optimize.

I don’t know about you, but brain seems to work better when it can focus on one thing and not get constantly distracted. Unfortunately, many devices today are optimized for distraction. Smartphones and tablets, left un-customized, will give us notifications and updates at all hours of the day. Increasingly, laptops seem to be starting to have similar notification/distraction features. Our brains don’t tend to thrive being constantly exposed to that draw to distraction.

One way I’ve been remedying that is by using different devices for different things.

Take my e-book reader, for example. I use an Android enabled e-ink tablet, which I’ve set up with my e-books and my RSS reader… and nothing else. When I’m using that device, it’s for reading. Not for messaging, not for social media… just reading. It’s a powerful device, that could have messaging and videos on it. But I use it just for reading. It makes it so I can benefit from the amazing amount of books and reading material available on the internet, without all the trappings of a smartphone. As such, when possible, I’ve been trying to cultivate the practice of leaving my smartphone off, outside my room when I sleep, while keeping my e-book reader in my room for reading material. I haven’t kept to that practice perfectly, but when I do, I love it. (Another more basic example of this is using an actual dedicated Alarm Clock, instead of your smartphone. It allows you to sleep without you looking at your phone as the first and last thing you do every day.)

Similarly, the device I’m currently writing this article on is a netbook from 2011 that I paid $38 for second-hand. It’s not powerful enough to do web browsing, video watching, or much of anything. But it can run my word processor, which makes it perfect for note taking or blog writing.

Is there any thing you want to accomplish that would benefit from having a dedicated device? For a lot of functions, a dedicated device can be gotten for fairly cheap second-hand. For other tasks, the investment in a good device can be more than worth it (my e-book reader wasn’t cheap, but it’s more than worth it to me).

4. Get Your Own Website

This one I have found so valuable without social media accounts, and I think it’s something that most people should have.

It’s never been easier to have your own little personal plot of the internet. Getting your own personal domain name costs less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, and you can host a website with it for free or cheap.

Having your own website — a little chunk of the internet that you own — has a ton of benefits over keeping your online life on services like social media: it allows you more creative flexibility, you’re not subject to the content requirements of a given platform, you can create content and benefit people without feeding into broken attention extraction systems.

Maybe best of all, it can be an amazing learning opportunity and discipline catalyst. Seth Godin, an author and leader who has written almost 20 books, has said that he thinks “Everyone should have a blog… and you should blog every day.” ¹ I’m not personally at that place of saying everyone should do it every day, but I do indeed find that having a personal writing rhythm has helped me immensely in my communicating, leading, and thinking.

Bonus: Where at all possible, chose FLOSS

FLOSS is an acronym that stands for “Free/Libre, Open Source Software”. It means software that you own and control, which you can modify and verify. There are open source, privacy and security respecting alternatives like this for almost every digital thing you could want to do. You can use Brave instead of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or Safari; Onlyoffice, LibreOffice, or Nextcloud instead of Microsoft Office or Google Docs/Drive; Signal or Element instead of Facebook/Instagram Messenger or WhatsApp; and GIMP, Audacity, and Kdenlive as alternatives to Photoshop, Garage Band, and Movie Maker respectively.

Choosing to use FLOSS software over their alternatives is a fairly easy way to use technology in a healthier, more ethical, and more secure way.

TL;DR: You need a password manager to use the internet safely and efficiently today. I use and recommend Bitwarden.

In 2020 there were nearly 8 Billion online accounts compromised by hackers.¹ Statistically speaking, at least one of your accounts was probably in that list.

Several of mine were.

When a hacker compromises an online account, many times the email addresses and passwords of those accounts are among the compromised content. Because many people re-use the same email address and password in many places, when a hacker gets a hold of a user’s username and password, it is super easy for them to take that username and password and start trying that combination on other online accounts… Like your email, your work accounts, your bank, or other valuable or sensitive accounts.

That’s not good. We want to avoid that.

Luckily, there is a tool that can be used to significantly increase both the security and convenience of your online life for free (or very cheap).

Many times, security and convenience are mutually exclusive — you need to chose one or the other. But that’s not the case with this tool. By using this tool, you will drastically increase the security of your online accounts, while also saving tons of time and headache.

I’m talking, of course, about Password Managers.

If you haven’t ever used a password manager, I’m going to quickly explain what they are and why you need them. Then I’ll recommend a password manager to you, and point you to resources for how to set it up.

What is a Password Manager? Why do I need one?

The average person has around 130 online accounts², and so, we have an average of 130 places where we need a password.

When it comes to keeping secure with dozens, or hundreds of accounts, there are three guidelines we want to keep in mind. Your passwords for each of these 130 accounts:

1. Should be complex and difficult to guess.
2. Should be unique. You should never use the same password twice.
3. Needs to be usable. The most secure password in the world is useless if we can’t remember it when we need it, or if it takes 5 minutes to type it every time we need to use it.

Doing all 3 of these without a tool to help is almost impossible.Many of us suck at all three rules. Everyone sucks at at least one of them. (For example, years ago I had a very complex and long password, but I reused that password on most of my accounts, and it was long enough that it neigh unto unusable.)

Simply put, the reason you need a password manager is that a Password Manager solves all three of these problems.

Any good password manager will help you create and securely manage passwords that are: 1) so complex that they’re effectively un-guessable, even by the worlds fastest supercomputers, 2) utterly unique, and 3) managed so conveniently that you’ll never need to even think about your password, let alone try to remember it.

For many people, trying to remember their passwords for their accounts is one of the more frustrating things about using technology.

With a password manager, you don’t need to have that frustration.

All you need is to create and memorize one good Master-password, and your password manager will securely encrypt and store all your other passwords. It then, also, makes it easy to use the right password on the right accounts.

Save time, and be more secure?

Sign me up!

Which password manager should you use?

There are hundreds of password manager solutions out there. YouTubers and Podcasters alike get sponsorships from all kinds of password managers. Not to mention, if your computer came with an anti-virus/security program of some kind (Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky etc.), it is likely that it shipped with some version of a password manager, too.

However, because your password manager is the key to your digital (and in some cases, physical) life, you don’t want to settle for just any password manager.

We want a password manager that:

1. You can be confident is actually doing what it promises (creating secure, unique passwords and storing them so only you can access them).
2. You can be confident you’ll still be able to use/access even if the company that created it ceases to exists.
3. You can be confident won’t leak your passwords (either purposefully or accidentally).

Because of that, any password manager that isn’t open source is out of the question for us.³ Unfortunately, that rules out the vast majority of password managers on the market.⁴

There are a few great options left though.

Notable open-source password managers include KeePass and Nextcloud Passwords. However, both of those have idiosyncrasies that make them probably not the best option for most people.

At the time of this writing, the open-source password manager that I personally use and recommend for most people is Bitwarden. (If you want to be REALLY paranoid, KeePass is a more wholistically secure option. It is just more inconvenient to set up and sync between devices. If you want to dig into KeePass, Techlore has a great tutorial on that here.)

Using Bitwarden

Bitwarden is a solid password manager for everyone. It’s easy enough that a grandma could use it, but secure and well-built enough that power-users can be confident with it.

Bitwarden has free and paid versions. The free version has all the benefits we’ve talked about above, so it’s enough for most people. However, I personally use the paid version because it’s stupidly cheap ($11 USD/year at the time of this writing) and there are some awesome additional features, such as TOTP for 2-Factor Authentication⁵, and a tool to check to see if any of your passwords have compromised in past data leaks.

Bitwarden works with all major operating systems (Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS), as well as browser plugins for most desktop web browers.

For those who want to, there are also methods that allow you to self-host BitWarden on your own server, so you can be in complete control of your data.

Bitwarden has lots of great tutorials on its site for new users, so I won’t rehash the whole process here. The three most important things to know for using it day-to-day is (1) How to Create an account, (2) how to use the Browser Extension for your computer, and (3) how to use it on your mobile devices. Each of those links has both text and video tutorials.

Conclusion

All that to say, if you don’t yet use a password manager, set one up today!

It’s free! And it will make your experience with technology orders of magnitude easier and more secure than it is today.