I’ve added an ActivityPub plugin to my blog. I LOVE the idea of just using my own platform and having it published to followers wherever they are. Let’s see if I can get this to work
How to Sleep: Part 2
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
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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:
- Take ear buds out of charging case
- Put charging case on charger
- In the morning remove charging case from charger
- 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.
How to Sleep
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
Magic, but no explicit ties to video games
Deck building
Midly
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.
Map of Off Leash Dog Friendly Parks in NYC
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!
How to make Kaleidoscope your default Git Diff and Merge tool
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 mergetoolMindfulness Twitter
I’ve started a serious mindfulness practice and it’s been really great. I’ve been practicing on and off for years, but my wife has never really given it a go. She, like many, doesn’t really feel anything or understand what it is they’re supposed to feel. What does success look like?
Different analogies work better for different people. The one that has worked particularly well for me has been two parts.
- Your thoughts can come and go, and you can observe them separately from interacting with them, like sitting on a park bench watching people walk past.
- When you inevitably get lost in thought, you can bring yourself back gently to the practice like taming a wild horse. Slowly, pulling in further as the thoughts circle around you.
This didn’t work so well for my wife, but recently we’ve stumbled on a breakthrough. Your brain is like Twitter.
You can imagine your mind like the Twitter timeline. You don’t really have much control over what tweets appear, save for a little bit of signal based on who you follow initially. Your thoughts are the same, you can control your environment and what information you’re exposed to – but which thoughts show up, you have little control over.
Further, like the Twitter timeline you have a choice. You can look at each Tweet and let it scroll past or you can engage with it. When you engage with a Tweet by clicking like, retweet or commenting that signals to the Twitter algorithm (which is optimizing for engagement, not what you’d actually like to see) that it should show you more like that. Again, the analogy holds for thoughts. Thoughts appear in your head and you can look at/observe them without engaging further. Or you can engage and your mind is likely to show you more of the same.
If something is making you angry, and you think you can stay angry without your mind constantly generating reasons why you’re perfectly justified to be angry, you are mistaken. If something your timeline is making you angry… Ok, I think you get it.
I always pick on Twitter on this blog, but the same can be said for any social media with an algorithmic controlled timeline. Facebook, Instagram, etc.
I think ultimately this is exactly why these algorithms are so addictive. Because they mimic the natural thought process so incredibly well. Just like opioids are addictive because they mimic endorphins. They’re not the same, but tell that to your brain.
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.
How to break up big tech
Op-ed: Breaking up big tech
by Jim Wallace
Recently the Department of Justice announced they were going to start investigating the large tech companies for antitrust violations, potentially leading to breaking up big tech. It’s not surprising; large tech companies love to tell the story about how they are neutral platforms or common carriers and, thus, not responsible for the content others upload. This seems incredulous. How can one be a neutral platform and have a recommendation engine that chooses what subset of the data to show? These services could and should be separate: the platform that holds and distributes the data should serve 3rd parties that compete on the best way to display that data. This model mirrors how regulators decoupled power generation and transmission to protect consumers.
Almost all of the problems with social media, from the perspective of its users, come from the recommendation engines and algorithmic feeds that amp up controversy in the name of engagement. Those engines work for the advertisers — the real customers — not the users. It’s quite possible we don’t have the right technology or the right incentives to make a single technology service that works for everybody. Even if we do, it seems unlikely that a single company will get it right. In fact, as controversy after controversy makes the news, there seems to be ample evidence that none of them have gotten their algorithms right, based on the antisocial outcomes we are seeing.
In a decoupled model it wouldn’t be up to a single company to get the algorithms right. Instead data scientists at many companies could create competing algorithms, and users could then pick and choose the view they want. This model has proven effective in other markets. The Associated Press, for example, provides a stream of news stories, and news organizations then choose which ones to publish that are best for their respective audiences.
In this model a company like Facebook would be split into two companies. One company would collect and, for a reasonable fee, distribute posts in chronological order to any company. The second company could then display those posts however they feel is best for their audience.
Twitter is already closest to this model, because they license their data through the “fire hose”.
The fire hose is a service where every time someone tweets, Twitter passes the tweet along unfiltered to the company that subscribed to the service. However, the terms of service and API updates prevent companies from using the fire hose in creating competing views of Twitter content. That’s something the DOJ could make illegal, just as they did with Microsoft in the early 2000s. They forced Microsoft to make its private APIs public so that 3rd parties (like Netscape) could compete on an even playing field.
If Facebook, Instagram and YouTube were forced to offer a service like the Twitter fire hose, one can imagine a whole slew of new innovative 3rd party services such as a ”life stream” that aggregates the updates from all the people you follow across all the platforms in one place. Parents could subscribe to a kid friendly version of YouTube, as a paid subscription, that is not trying to get you to spend more time on the site by hacking your dopamine system. Such specialized service could help parents struggling to setup some screen time boundaries for their children. Companies looking for competitive differentiation could even extend the platform to include things that users want but large tech seems deaf to, such as an edit button for tweets.
This model can generate plenty of revenue for both platform and providers. ConEd and the AP both use this model. Cable companies today make money hand over fist selling access to their pipes.
This is not to say that large tech companies shouldn’t produce their own algorithms. Rather, they should not be the only companies allowed to produce them. We need competition to bring the best services to consumers.
To be sure, some may feel that social media, and the algorithms included, already work well based on some of the positive benefits we have seen. No one doubts the role it played in the Arab Spring. It is incredible when someone has a question about rockets and both Elon Musk and John Carmack respond! But neither that interaction nor the Arab Spring depended on an algorithm to facilitate them.
We don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We can keep what’s great about these platforms while tempering the parts that induce anti-social behavior, through competing algorithms and user choice.
I decided to publish this op-ed here after Jack Dorsey wrote a tweet thread about opening up the platform. I thought this would be a good time to post. Looks like @Jack has been reading my unpublished work from this summer 😉
Year of Focus
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