🖖 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

☕️ Consistently tasty coffee

I’ve been a happy AeroPress user for many years now. A few weeks ago, I was gifted the Flow Control Filter Cap. The cap acts as a pressure activated valve that prevents any drip through the filter, until you press on the plunger. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much of a difference it has made to the consistency of my coffee

Before trying the flow control cap, I would not have said the AeroPress was unduly inconsistent. So, this isn’t a complaint about the original design. Rather, I now have fewer errant grounds making it through to the mug, can hold the brewing longer for a more robust flavour, and am less likely to make a mess while brewing. I can also reliably generate a nice foam at the end of the brewing.

The only small downside is that it is more challenging to get the used filter and grounds out of this cap. The filter tends to stick to this cap much more than to the original.

To complete my transition to coffee influencer, here’s an unnecessary, slow-motion video of making coffee 😀

🏊‍♂️ The Mystery of the Shrinking Pool

There’s an odd glitch with my Apple Watch: anytime I finish a swim interval, it claims there are still two meters left. Then after about five seconds, it realizes I’ve stopped, decides I’ve finished a lap after all, and moves to the next interval.

An Apple Watch Ultra display shows exercise metrics, including duration, distance left, interval pace and time, heart rate, and current time and temperature.

It isn’t the pool, I’ve tried several different ones. Even stranger, it isn’t accumulating by lap. If I finish a 25m sprint: two meters short. A 500m interval: also two meters short. So, it isn’t caused by misestimating the length of the pool.

Anyway, not a big problem. The only real impact is that my intervals are always slower on the watch than in the actual pool, since several seconds get added to each one. This makes it look like I’m much faster on longer intervals, since the delay has a bigger impact on short swims.

📚 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

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ Finding the return to fitness sweet spot with RTT

Thanks to a pre-Christmas flu and general busyness over the holidays, my triathlon training took a dive.

This past week, I’ve really tried to get back into it. As a result, my watch and phone have been pointing out that my training load has spiked and are suggesting caution.

At the same time, my readiness to train has been correspondingly increasing. I’ve been using this increase, plus generally feeling good, to keep the training intensity at the right level without overdoing it.

Auto-generated description: Two smartphone screens display fitness tracking data, including training load, heart rate variability, and sleep analysis.

Seems to be working so far. Now that I feel like I’ve regained momentum, I’ll ease off on the training progression to stabilize on a more modest increase over weeks. I don’t need to relearn the lessons of overtraining and injury!

Göran Winblad has a good video on how to use RTT and HRV as one indicator in training. Worth investigating for your training too.

🎧 Reducing “abundance blindness” by deleting my Apple Music library

I lamented recently what a mess my Apple Music library had become. I was tempted to delete the whole thing and start again, only to end up doing nothing. What’s the big deal? It’s just a collection of songs. I search through them, find something I like, and hit play.

Then Jason Burk said in Episode 128 of Hemispheric Views:

I just, I find that I have this, like, abundance blindness where I have an infinite number of songs. So, it kind of wraps back around on itself to be like, who cares about any of it? It’s just way too much.

And the urge to clean everything up came back. So, I did it: deleted every album and playlist! It feels nice to start all over, add back in the essential albums, and appreciate the scarcity of good music again. I’m continuing to use the great Albums app to keep the focus on actual albums, which are the proper way to appreciate music.

Of course, I can’t quite delete everything 😀.

Screenshot of the Apple Music app with only the Songs of Innocence U2 album in the library

🎶 Top albums of 2024

According to my listening history, my top three albums of 2024 were:

I’m a bit surprised that Nonkeen snuck in there at #3. It is rather different from the other two.