Microposts

I can’t believe that I’m about to type this sentence: Now that America is threatening Canada with economic ruin and potential annexation as the 51st state, I think it is very important for Canadians to stay well informed. To that end, I recommend two great sources: Paul Wells and The Line. Both are high quality, independent journalism with important voices in the True North, Strong and Free 🇨🇦

🔗 What Aging Can Teach Us About Sustainable Success

With that in mind, here are a few lessons I’ve learned as an aging athlete who can still run pretty fast, but is having a lot of doing it.

  1. Stop short. Almost always.

There’s an old adage in running that you should have one more rep in the tank. It’s also called the no hands on your knees rule. Both get a simple point, the risk of pushing to get that final repeat is seldom worth it. The benefit is small, if it even exists.

I’m tempted to write this on my shoes. Good advice that I followed this morning: the workout called for 5–8 reps and I stopped after 5 good ones.

🖖 Outline of a short story, starring a Star Trek fan:

  1. New episode of Vulcan Hello podcast arrives
  2. Realizes there’s a new movie: Section 31!?
  3. Stops listening to avoid spoilers
  4. Starts watching Section 31
  5. 20 minutes in thinks: “uh oh, is this the only Star Trek movie I’m not going to finish?”
  6. Goes back to podcast. Is convinced to finish Section 31, eventually
  7. Has at least five other good Star Trek movies to rewatch first

📚 Although I exceeded my goal of reading 45 books in 2024 by finishing 60 books. I’m going to keep my goal for 2025 at 45, anticipating that I’ll be reading more non-fiction this year which will slow me down – for the better.

If you’re interested in owning your own web content (and you should be), the new Micro.one is a fantastic option at a super affordable $1/month. I joined Micro.blog back in 2018 and am a very happy Premium user.

The people should own the town square

Nice to see this:

we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

Mastodon continues to be our best, decentralized option and I’m glad it exists

🔗 Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together

I’m aligned with Viticci here:

I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that gets boring fast and misses the bigger picture of how these AI tools may practically help us in the workplace, healthcare, biology, and other industries.

I could use the help with reducing busywork and letting me focus on the creative part. That’s what I’m looking forward to

After using the new Reeder for a couple of months I’m going to stick with it.

I like having all of my sources (RSS, Micro.blog, Mastodon, Bluesky, and podcasts) consolidated into one feed with easy gestures to tag as “read later” or open in a native app. The recent addition of folders was helpful, as I’ve created an “Attention” folder for anything I really don’t want to miss. Everything else is part of the river of updates and I don’t worry about completion.

One issue with the consolidation is that I’m following people across multiple services and seeing duplicate posts. I’ve been standardizing to their Micro.blog timelines, when available. This fragmentation across services is a common complaint and I expect I’ll be experimenting with different solutions. Now that we can so easily cross-post, we also need to manage our conversations. Recent updates to Micro.blog have been really helpful for this.

The most productive thing I’ll do all week: Organized the giant box of cables by taking out anything we no longer need, had no idea what is was for, or already had at least three backups. The photo is of the discard pile

A tangled pile of various electronic cables and chargers is spread out on a surface.