Owen is excited to get the Nintendo Switch Ring Adventure. Staying active during COVID-19 has been difficult and this should help 🏃‍♂️🎮

My favourite part of the run along the Grand river 🏃‍♂️

Catastrophe drives evolution. But life resides in the pauses | Aeon Essays is a good overview of why the pace of evolution ebbs and flows over time

Fascinating:

They found that for individual cells, this power minimum hovers around a zeptowatt, or 10−21 watts. That is roughly the power required to lift one-thousandth of a grain of salt one nanometer once a day.

‘Zombie’ Microbes Redefine Life’s Energy Limits

I miss this view already

Lower Decks is great fun for this Star Trek fan 🖖

Never did catch those ducks

Still getting along

We’ve tired out the dog

Feels like a vacation

Poured rain all day yesterday. So we’re a day late for the Highland Yard run. We didn’t want to miss supporting this important cause!

In the lake within a few minutes of arriving

I’m ready for my vacation to start!

Even though I knew how it ends, Free Solo is still an intense movie. I appreciated how Sanni (Alex’s girlfriend) and the video crew became important parts of the story

Reading Shortcut for the iPad 👓⚙️

I haven’t yet adopted the minimalist style of my iPhone for my iPad. Rather, I’ve found that setting up “task oriented” Shortcuts on my home screen is a good alternative to arranging lots of app icons.

The one I use the most is a “Reading” Shortcut, since this is my dominant use of the iPad. Nothing particularly fancy. Just a list of potential reading sources and each one starts up a Timery timer, since I like to track how much time I’m reading.

Here’s a screenshot of the first few actions:

I like the bit of whimsy from using emoticons:

A nice feature of using a Shortcut for this is that I can add other actions, such as turning on Do Not Disturb or starting a specific playlist. I can also add and subtract reading sources over time, depending on my current habits. For example, the first one was Libby for a while, since I was reading lots of library books.

This is another example of how relatively simple Shortcuts can really help optimize how you use your iOS devices.

Reflection journal in Day One with an Agenda assist

I’ve been keeping a “director’s commentary” of my experiences in Day One since August 2, 2012 (5,882 entries and counting). I’ve found this incredibly helpful and really enjoy the “On This Day” feature that shows all of my past entries on a particular day.

For the past few months, I’ve added in a routine based on the “5 minute PM” template which prompts me to add three things that happened that day and one thing I could have done to make the day better. This is a great point of reflection and will build up a nice library of what I’ve been doing over time.

My days seem like such a whirlwind sometimes that I actually have trouble remembering what I did that day. So, my new habit is to scroll through my Today view in Agenda. This shows me all of my notes from the day’s meetings. I’ve also created a Shortcut that creates a new note in Agenda with all of my completed tasks from Reminders. This is a useful reminder of any non-meeting based things I’ve done (not everything is a meeting, yet).

I’m finding this new routine to be a very helpful part of my daily shutdown routine: I often identify the most important thing to do tomorrow by reviewing what I did today. And starting tomorrow off with my top priority already identified really helps get the day going quickly.

Skipping past the dramatic title, Our remote work future is going to suck makes important points about the risks of remote work. These are all important things to watch out for in our teams, particularly the potential for stifling of mentorship.

Some unfortunate formatting in the CBC’s otherwise well done coronavirus tracker. At first glance, that’s a really big number

A small thing, but I’m finding the automatic conference call link detection in Fantastical is saving me a great amount of effort, given my days are now filled with Teams meetings