Category: Uncategorized

Equipment

As a follow up to part 1 I’d like to take some time to talk about some of the devices I use to help me listen to audio books and get to sleep.

When I was single, I mostly listened to audiobooks on my phone speaker or on something like a Homepod Mini in my bedroom. However, once I was married, my wife and I wanted to listen to different books and that meant we needed headphones so we would not disturb the other person.

A surprising benefit of this was that the headphones also kind of act like ear plugs, blocking out street noise of which there is a A LOT in NYC.

Sleepytime Headphones

The best headphones for most people are the Sleeper Wireless headphones from sleeperbuds.com

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

ALL sleep headphones will take some time to get used to, but these are some of the easiest to use, lightest, most comfortable and at $30 you can’t really go wrong.

I first discovered these on https://www.adv-sound.com/ after visiting their booth at CanJam in NYC. In general they are quality headphones at very reasonable prices. They eventually spun this product line off to https://sleeperbuds.com specifically for these. They were also the very first headphones I found specifically billed as being for sleep.

Since then a number of other headphones specifically for sleep have cropped up, but are less great in sometimes small and sometimes big ways.

Gotchas

Because there ear tips aren’t swappable they may not fit very well in your ears or provide the best seal against outside noise depending on the shape of your ear

The Upgrade Pick

Anker Soundcore Sleep A20

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Significantly more expensive than sleeper buds, but cheaper than Kokoon, these earbuds are basically perfect.

Lots of fit options to swap to find both he most comfortable fit, but also the best noise isolation for your ear shape.

Battery lasts easily all night. Case and headphones appear to be able to charge at the same time. They are true wireless meaning no cables pulling on you as you turn at night. Low profile for side sleeping.

https://www.sleepphones.com/

⭐️⭐️⭐️

These originally were pretty good in terms of comfort and sound quality but after a design change made the headphones themselves out of a harder plastic, they became too uncomfortable. They also tended to slide around on my head as I tossed and turned at night.

They also don’t do a great job of blocking out street noise, so I had to pair them with some standard ear plugs for life in NYC

Kokoon Nightbuds

⭐️⭐️

Crazy Expensive at $250. I had originally backed these on Kickstarter. They were comfortable, the sound was good. Some of the buttons for adjusting volume broke after a few months of use and when I reached out to customer support they said it was out of warranty (less than a year?).

The sleep tracking never really worked for me, it would always shut off too soon and I’d have to restart my book as I was drifting off to sleep.

This was all before they were purchased by Philips so I don’t know how the product quality or customer support quality have changed since the acquisition.

Honorable Mention

Advanced Sound Group ADV. Sleeper TWS

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I wanted to love these. They are very nearly perfect except for some critical flaws.

These are the best fitting, best sounding sleeper ear buds. They are true wireless which means no cord pulling on you when you turn over. They last 5 hours which is plenty of time to fall asleep. They also feature active noise cancelation making them even better at blocking out unwanted street sounds than any other headphones I’ve tried.

When these first came out I bought a couple pair as they were only $80 (most sleep earbuds are well over $100+ and often closer to $200+). The first night they startled me awake by very loudly announcing “LOW BATTERY!”

I emailed customer support asking if there was anything they could do on the Firmware, they had a meeting and made the change, offered to re-flash my headphones for free if I just sent them in. Amazing. Every pair I ordered after that did not have the annoyingly loud low battery alert and instead would just die silently when they ran out of battery. Perfect

But all was not well, and I guess that’s why they’ve abandoned this product. The big issue is charging. The case and headphones don’t charge as one would expect, or at least if you’ve ever used AirPods you’ve come to expect that you can charge both the case AND the ear buds at the same time but that’s not the case here and it breaks my heart.

Instead it seems like you have to charge the case, and then charge the earbuds. Meaning you can’t just take them off in the morning, pop them in the case, pop the case on the charger (they offer wireless charging) and be on with your day confident that you’ll have fully charged headphones that night. Instead you’re surprised at bedtime when you take the case off the charger that your ear buds have no power at all 🙁

The best workflow I managed to come up with was:

1. Take ear buds out of charging case
2. Put charging case on charger
3. In the morning remove charging case from charger
4. Put earbuds in charging case OFF charger

I found this difficult enough to keep up with that I removed a star and can only give these 4 stars even though they are perfect in almost every other way.

The other issue was with connectivity between the two ear buds. I would pretty regularly only get sound out of 1 year. You could sometimes get the other ear to work if you put it back in the charging case for a second and then put it back in your ear, but not always.

For most of my life I’ve had a problem. I have always had trouble getting to sleep, sometimes leading to being in bed, tired, but still quite awake way later than I’d like. Over the years I’ve worked hard to correct this. I’ve invested a bunch into having a healthy bedtime routine, consistent, less blue light, only use the bedroom for sleep, etc. but I am unwilling to give up on caffeine completely which is probably the culprit.

What to do instead?

Well the biggest problem for me was that my mind would be racing and looping over things again and again. If that sounds like you, then have I got the trick for you. Audio books.

You see, I had realized that falling asleep with the TV would make it so my mind doesn’t race as I pay attention, but the pressure was always there to open my eyes to see what was going on. But Audio books are perfect* at giving you something to engage with, but no need to open your eyes.

But you have to choose the right book. If a book is too compelling, you’re just as likely to stay awake all night listening. This has happened to me a couple of times. On the other hand if a book is too simple or boring then your mind will race anyway as it stops paying attention.

What’s the perfect balance? LitRPGs.

LitRPGs are books where the main character is embodied in a role playing video game (usually). The stories are fun and interesting, but the reading aloud of stat sheets is decidedly not which gives them a good balance.

Here are a few that I think are great, or at least great examples of the genre:

Classic LitRPGs

• The Completionist Chronicles Series
• Chaos Seeds Series

Magic, but no explicit ties to video games

• He Who Fights with Monsters Series
• Cradle Series

Deck building

• Jake’s Magical Market Series

A week ago I did something I’ve always wanted to do. I launched my first iOS App.

It’s a simple app that solves a niche problem I was having: I wanted to see my friends more in real life.

However, as I’ve gotten older and have more responsibilities I’m finding planning small get togethers to be more cumbersome. My hope is that if it’s easier to do, I’ll do it more often.

This app helps with that by automating a few steps that had me juggling three windows/apps to find a place to meet up.

Step 1

Enter all the locations where people will be coming from. Add as many as you like. They can be contacts in your contact list, businesses, street addresses, a neighborhood, etc.

Step 2

Press the “meet in the middle” button and get place suggestions between everyone.

That’s it

You don’t even need to login. It’s FREE. I don’t track any data. No plans to make it a business. There are a few more features coming as I get time to add them. Check it out. Could be useful to people here if you do a lot of coffees with folks in diffferent places. I wish I’d had this back when I was dating.

As I write this I’ve just added another major feature that is waiting for App Store approval. The ability to save the groups you create and easily recall them in the future. This is a big step towards making this into the recurring dinner planning app of my dreams.

All the information above was taken from https://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/dogareas and encoded to the best of my abilities. I’ve tried to encode the rules for the specific park in the description when you click on the pin but if you know more specific details let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to keep this map up to date. Enjoy!

First you need to grab the ksdiff command line tool and install it

https://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/ksdiff2

Then the following set of commands will set kaleidoscope to be your default diff/merge tool

git config --global diff.tool kaleidoscope
git config --global difftool.kaleidoscope.cmd '/usr/local/bin/ksdiff --diff "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"'
git config --global merge.tool kaleidoscope
git config --global mergetool.kaleidoscope.trustExitCode true
git config --global mergetool.kaleidoscope.cmd '/usr/local/bin/ksdiff --merge "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" --base "$BASE" --output "$MERGED"'

Then to run it

$ git difftool FILE1 FILE2
$ git mergetool

I can probably use this like Twitter and relieve myself of the last social media I am addicted to.

Honestly social media is really just centralized blogs with RSS and a share button.

I like listening to Cortex because they are thoughtful about how they do work and they always give me something to consider. They recently had a discussion about how New Years Resolutions are terrible and instead you should have themes for the year.

In the past I’ve been convinced that Goals are a really crappy way to do things. You set a goal, and are immediately in a mode of failure because you haven’t achieved it. Then you hit the goal and feel great for a little while, but a day or two later have to set another goal and be a failure again. It seems like you’re failing to meet your goals for much longer than you’re succeeding at them. While Goals may seem like a good way to ensure you have a growth mindset, in practice I think they have the opposite effect. Once you’ve reached a goal, you stop doing the thing you were doing that allowed you to achieve it (I did it! I ran a marathon, I can stop running now!)

Themes are better, these are a process not an outcomes. My theme for 2018 is the Year of Focus. With a theme I have a framework for making decisions that affects every choice I make. There’s no “Drink less” goal, instead I’ve cut back on alcohol consumption because hangovers are anti-focus. I’ve started trying to schedule out my days a little more so I can have long blocks of uninterrupted time to really get into flow, and I’ve tried to cut out other sources of distraction in my life.

Before I decided on the theme for 2018, in mid-late November I blocked Facebook and Twitter on all my devices. I did this after watching this video which made me realize that I would not really be missing out on much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E7hkPZ-HTk and I might get back a few things I had lost – some time, ability to focus, and happiness.

The first week felt weird, I didn’t know how to get news anymore. When I felt bored, my instinct was to type Facebook or Twitter into the URL bar (and then have it blocked by some software). It forced me to think of other things to do and other ways I could be spending my time, including ways of actually seeing my friends in real life.

It worked though, I felt better, less distracted. It was amazing to me however that 6 weeks later the muscle memory of typing Facebook into a browser had not gone away and I was still doing it even though I had not been on the service for a long time.

Within 3 days Facebook realized something was up and started sending me click-bait emails “So and so commented on something”, “Someone has posted for the first time in a long time”. After 3 weeks, they started texting me! It was like an ex who drunk dials you.

As I type this I’ve begun the process of downloading all my Facebook data (photos, posts, etc.) and after that’s complete I think I’ll be removing my account permanently next week.

If you’re thinking about doing the same, I’d say that Apple News is a great platform for getting news if you don’t want to hop from site to site.

* My archive just completed, 96Mb for all of my Facebook activity including Photos over the last 10 years

A colleague of mine today sent me this link from Hackernews that explains options ownership.  I think it’s great! More people need to understand this stuff, and I’m very happy this is out there.  It does remind me however of how complicated everything has gotten and that always makes me ask why?

My colleague had a great observation:

I used to grant people options and I thought I understood most of it, but it seems like in an effort to get billion dollar valuations later stage companies have added all sorts of complicated conditions

When I was younger (so much younger than today) – I used to think that complexity was a sign of how smart everyone was, and I had a bit of imposter syndrome thinking I was not smart enough to be in the real world because I didn’t understand all of this stuff.

Now that I am older (perhaps wiser? tbd) I now am more confident in my intelligence and what I see instead is people hiding in complexity.. specifically in levels of abstraction.  Dan Ariely did a test that I think is illustrative if not conclusive. He put 6 – $1 bills on a plate in a shared fridge in a college dorm. A week later he came back and they were all still there.  He then put 6 cokes in the fridge and a few hours later they were all gone! No one would steal money (that would be wrong!), but move the level of abstraction up 1 level (a coke = $1), and people suddenly have fewer issues taking the cokes. 

I see the same thing in finance. People trade all these derivatives, each one of which is another layer of abstraction away from money. Options are a layer of abstraction above shares (they abstract time), while shares are an abstraction over ownership, which is an abstraction over assets, which is an abstraction over money which is itself an abstraction. It’s a long way between that awesome trade you made and the person paying real money for their mortgage whom you just screwed over.  It enables them to do some shady things they would never do to a real person (they would never go into a real person’s wallet and take their money physically).  

I see the same with private companies and stock, stock options, etc.  I think people just assume they are not smart enough to understand, they just hear stories that stock is what you want, that’s how you get rich! But I agree with my colleague above, people are using levels of abstraction to confuse people so they can play games.

Once upon a time a stock would pay dividends because as a partial owner in a company you were entitled to a partial share of the profits. That dividend was that share of the profit! You could then turn around and use that dividend to buy more shares, and then the next time it was paid you’d get even more money!  This is essentially the proof Benjamin Graham used to show that stocks would outstrip bonds back in The Intelligent Investor and kicked off the era of value investing where calculating the price a company should be trading at was based on the profitability of the company and the number of shares outstanding.  Until the 1980s.. where you can blame Microsoft for coming up with the idea of “growth” companies that don’t pay dividends but instead pay back their shareholders with the growth of the value of the share price. Where it’s worth more because more people want it? <– This is some people’s definition of value, but I can’t use that to make a prediction about what the share price should be and so to me this is useless