Category: Featured
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Replicating Roam’s /tomorrow command in Obsidian
Roam Research‘s fabulous note taking app (Roam) was my daily PKM driver for a few years. Roam introduces the concept of daily notes for journaling but the real power is the way that it surfaces linked mentions. These are game changers for allowing the information captured within your system to bubble to the surface. I…
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The Importance of Reminders in my Trusted System
I have a sieve for a brain. I can forget things easily. Really easily. I blame this on my A.D.D, my general anxiety and some weapons grade hedonism in my early twenties. There is so much stuff whizzing around inside my head at all times; it is an utter mess in there. Recall is a…
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Removing Redundancy When Writing
When I started this challenge I was focused on volume. I just needed to write some stuff and publish it. Writing each day has definitely helped me to get faster and also to have more and more ideas. Each post sparks off more ideas for topics to write about. Any conversation about that topic will throw something else into…
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Comparisons Can Be Harmful
Comparisons can be harmful, whether comparing yourself to others or judging other people. That person has better stuff than me. That person has it easy. Their business is doing better than mine. They have better clients. They go to interesting places. They do interesting things. With interesting people. They cook nicer food. In a bigger…
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At Least It’s Not A Blue On Blue
Twitter told me yesterday that someone at 123-reg deleted a part of the internet. My immediate thought was: “Owch, that’s got to hurt” And then: “I’m glad I’m not that boss right now” A few minutes later, my thoughts had turned and instead I was thinking: “Well, at least it’s not a blue on blue”.…
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What Will People Think?
I got lots of interest and feedback from my morning routine post. Well, I say lots. I mean some. But, it was lots compared to the tumble-weeds that normally occur when publishing here. So, huge thanks to those of you who did get in touch; it’s always really encouraging to know that people actually read and get…
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My Morning Routine
2024 edit: my morning routine looks nothing like this any more. I do still try to meditate and journal every day, though my workflow is very minimal and relaxed these days. There are lots of articles telling you why you might want to consider having a good morning routine. They usually include words like ‘success’ or…
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Changing Your Internal Narrative
It is widely recognised that as humans we all have a sort of split personality. In our brain at its core, the limbic system, we have our lesser evolved chimp. This deals with emotions or feelings and controls things like our flight reflex which is independent from our more evolved frontal lobe area that deals with truth, facts, & logic. During our evolution this…
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Easy Ways to Add Vegetables to Your Diet (even if you don’t like veg)
I am embarrassed to say that I used to have a terrible diet. It was bad, like really bad. I’d consume high volumes of sugar, tonnes of simple carbohydrates and more trans fats that you could shake a stick at. However, arguably worse than all of this is that I ate almost zero fresh fruit &…
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Putting Some Fire in Your Belly
When I got back from my expedition to Scotland in April I was floating around for a few weeks before my feet properly touched the ground. I was so chill, ever so mellow, nothing could phase me or sour my mood of contentment and connectedness with myself and my world. It’s a phrase that possibly does get…
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Manage Your Week with Timeboxing
As we all know there is only so much time in one day. We can use various productivity methodologies to define & track what we need to get done in any given day but the fact remains there is a finite time available to get all that stuff done. One ‘trick’ we can use to cram more…
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Be Sure To Enjoy The Ride
You know that stock job interview question where you’re asked to specify a weakness and you flip it to become a strength? Well, if you’re like me then the next time you have a job interview (which for me is admittedly quite unlikely) you can tell them that you’re a long-term planner and you’re always specifying a thing, setting goals and then working towards…
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Canoeing from Loch Morar to Loch Arkaig
I recently came back from my second canoeing expedition in the highlands of Scotland. The first trip was fantastic but felt too short so we vowed to come back again but do it for longer. Fast forward a few years and with a deep yearning to reconnect with the wilderness we (me & Wes) set off from Shropshire on the Thursday morning with…
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Are you prepared for the long haul?
I had an epiphany this week. In fact it’s been a month or two of epiphanies but this one was particularly important. Embarassingly it’s one of those ‘No Shit Sherlock’ realisations, the ones we all have now and again and then wonder why it wasn’t obvious from the beginning. That epiphany was: Bootstrapping a product…
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B2C, are you sure?
For as long as I’ve been paying the rent by selling my skills in the web industry I’ve thought that I had a product in me. Back in the late 90’s I was a wannabe .com ‘founder’ working on terrible ideas initially with no clue about business or technology. As I came to grips with…
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Project Management Pain
TL;DR – I can’t find a tool that gives me high level scheduling overview AND individual finer detail on each project going through my little studio. Below I review a bunch of tools that don’t fit my needs. Do you know of something I should check out? Or do you agree there’s a need for…
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Green Woodworking with Mike Abbott
Since starting my beginner’s cabinet-making course, I’ve been intrigued by the differences between modern woodworking techniques and the more traditional methods such as Green Woodworking (like chair bodging). Why use green wood? Well, Mike Abbott, who is, as you’ll read, the guy that ended up teaching me, explains in his article in the Summer 2009…
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A Blank WordPress Theme
I’ve just uploaded a blank WordPress theme called Naked that I built to assist those (like myself in the past) who have a need to quickly roll-out a WordPress theme with a custom look and feel but may not necessarily have the time to start from scratch. It is purposely very simple and basic, but…
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A Pragmatic Look At Symfony
On Thursday, I presented to around 30 developers attending the July Bristol Skillswap at Bristol’s Watershed. It was my first-ever public speaking gig (if you ignore some sales presentations), and I’m delighted by how well it went. The talk was a ten-minute PowerPoint introduction and then 45 minutes of live coding – this was pretty…
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Sharp Zaurus, Bluetooth, GPRS and a Nokia 6310i
The document describes the steps that I took (minus all the wrong ones, and there were many) to get a successful GPRS data connection using my Sharp Zaurus PDA, a Nokia 6310i, a Socket Bluetooth card and an O2 (UK mobile phone operator) GPRS data account, I hope it helps you. I’m assuming that you…
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Get your Palm III talking to your phone by Infrared
This article was first published in mid-2000 on Bealers.com, but this is a few years before a blog existed here. [Nokia 7110, Palm III and a BTCellnet SIM with Data enabled] What I did: 1) Upgraded to OS 3.3 2) Upgraded my IrDA stuff from Palm 3) Followed these steps 4) On phone 5) On…