Best sauce ever
I just found out that two full spoons of mayonnaise with a pinch Harissa make the best spicy sauce for a sandwich. And I’m so happy having dinner.
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I’ve said it many times on this blog…in essence to myself…that not doing something will not get it done.
This time I will add that the satisfaction of getting that something done is enormous. To see it in the rear view mirror as opposed to constantly looming over me.
This is the soundtrack of my life. The first part is playing right now, actually.
#thoughts
Back to estebantxo.micro.blog
Yesterday I was warned by @pratik that sometimes my site is not available at all. It used to happen with umerez.eu and I always blamed the different tweaks I made in templates and plug-ins without really knowing what I was doing. I want to keep this blog as clean and simple as possible so I went to a basic theme without custom templates. And the last step is to get rid of the custom domain too, in case it is the culprit of any issue that prevents the site from being light and simple. So I’m back to estebantxo.micro.blog.
I finished rewatching Game Of Thrones' first season. I enjoyed it and caught a lot of nuances I wasn’t aware of when I first watched it.
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But it's our fault. Our as a society. We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don't celebrate when someone says "You know what? I think I have enough".
The people I admire the most are the ones that have the courage to say I’ve had enough. #thoughts
A shortcut to rule them all
I posted a short video showcasing my All In One Shortcut menu that I place in my dock and use constantly.
It’s almost become my main interface with the iPhone. It starts with a Favorite shortcut menu when I put my most used actions (call wife, take a quick note, etc). That menu has a More… button that runs a more comprehensive menu that takes me to other choices.
I have menus for Home or Work related shortcuts, to choose from different countdown timers, to run Omnifocus actions, etc. Each of them, with the More… button, can take me to the main menu. Or I can cancel the loop. When I find the desired shortcut I just run it.
If I ever get en iPhone 15, this workflow will be placed in the hard action button. Meanwhile, it lives in the dock and gives me plenty of joy several times a day.
Saturday evening with 1984 on the Kindle and Johnny Walker Red Label on the rocks. Cheap yet rewarding versions of things essential to a happy life.
So I installed RayCast to try a DEVONthink plug-in that looked promising, and I uninstalled it after two minutes. It was quite meh. The plug-in, I mean, and how it searched and managed groups and files within DT. And overall, RayCast is not a match for the File/Folder handling of LaunchBar. Instant Sending, moving, copying, renaming, batch processing… are handled much more conveniently in LaunchBar. I did not bother to look into any other features of RayCast: I guess I’m still a die hard LaunchBar user. #geekery
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Sometimes we get overloaded. Too much to process. And we need to, well, not force quit everything but maybe sit back in the chair and stare out the window and let the little circles spin. Maybe we can close down a few windows, lighten the load a bit. But mostly, it’s just being patient. Trusting that something is going on, that some kind of work is going on. It’s under the surface. It’s maybe not work that shows up as a produced item, a tangible result, a measurable change, an output of any kind. It’s more of the maintenance work, the de-gunking, the oil change, a little cleaning up and fine-tuning. And when it’s done, you’ll feel better. Clearer. And you’ll get back to it, whatever it is that’s waiting for you. It will still be there. If it’s not, don’t worry. You’ll find something else.
I am going through Annie’s posts. I like them a lot. This one resonated with me. This is what I need to do every so often: stop. Just stop and let the world spin as much as it wants. Get a hold of my own time and rhythm. Breath, slow down my pulse and own myself. #thoughts
My daughter making croquetas
My daughter will probably kill me if she finds out that I posted this photo. But I’m proud of her so I guess she will forgive my good intentions. She is making croquetas, following a recipe she asked from her grandmother, my mother.
She first made a bechamel sauce stuffed with small bits of jamón ibérico, Spanish ham cured in salt. Then she made small balls, coating them in wheat flower, egg and bread crumbs. She made around 80 of these croquetas.
She fried a dozen of them for our dinner and saved the rest in the freezer. Croquetas make a great appetizer for any nice family meal.
I love cooking. My children have always been quite lazy to help me in the kitchen, but it looks like they are finally finding their own way to basic survival skills. So I’m happy.
Why I don’t write dev posts – Manu
🚀 Why I don’t write dev posts – Manu
The reason why I don’t write about dev stuff it’s because, like many others, I suffer from impostor syndrome. I’ve been working on the web for more than 12 years. I’m still convinced I don’t know shit. I scroll through minimal.gallery or OPL, see the work of all those great designers and developers, and reinforce this idea that there are, in fact, countless people out there who are better than me.
And that’s pretty much why I only write shitty and infrequent legal posts at umerez.eu.
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Linear Algebra
I think I am starting to enjoy maths (maybe).
Toward the end of high school, my maths classes were anxiety-inducing. Our teacher liked to ask people at random in the class what they thought was the answer to questions. At this time, I was not comfortable speaking out in front of the whole class. I always worried about whether my answer would be right, knowing there were people around me who would definitely know the answer. I was good at maths in the academic sense, but I, like many, encountered math as a subject strictly to learn rather than to be appreciated.
Yesterday and today, I started the 3Blue1Brown course on linear algebra, a topic in math that is the foundation of modern deep learning. I encounter terms like "matrix multiplication" and "vector" on an almost daily basis, but my understanding is grounded in their application or what they represent, not how they work. I want to change that and learn a bit more about the how behind linear algebra. What are the foundational operations? How do they work? How can I build a mental model to understand them?
James is doing a Seven Days Of New Things challenge and I’m enjoying the series a lot. #thoughts
Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?
🚀 Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?:
Micro.blog is the only Fediverse-compatible platform I know of which truly does away with likes, boosts, follower counts, and hashtags. I wish all social networks removed these pointless stats by default. Maybe offer an option to see them privately but I certainly don’t find the stats to be doing any good publicly. Micro.blog has but a single social component, a Mentions feed. It doesn’t care for any popularity contests, even if you go looking for it. This has made the local community warmer, better welcoming, and more human than other digital places I’ve been to.
And that’s exactly why I’m so happy in Micro.blog.
Restart
I know, I know, modern computers don’t need rebooting and yours has been running without a hitch for months on end. But mine just said enough is enough, and started sabotaging my every key press and trackpad drag. So I had to teach it how dumb it actually is. I offered it a reboot, promptly said yes and now it’s serving at my pleasure again. #thoughts
Simona Halep is back!
“This ordeal has been a testament to resilience,” Halep wrote on Instagram. “The triumph of truth is a bittersweet vindication that, albeit delayed, is immensely gratifying.”
I’m so happy to know that she is back at last. Go Simona!
DuckDuckGo, Walkmans and Elon Musk
Three random thoughts this Monday evening.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my searches for the last couple of weeks. Both on the Mac and on iOS/iPadOS, I set it as my default search engine, and it’s been working really well, giving me very accurate results and helping me find relevant things when I was looking for something specific, and interesting stuff when my searches were more general.
Two weeks ago I also logged off my Google account, so I’d like to think that Google is not harvesting as much data from me as it did before, for years. The thing is that I’m still logged in YouTube, so I guess I’m giving Google more information that I’d what to think.
One of the thing that YouTube fed me today is that, apparently, Walkmans might be back. I’m a sucker for useless and/or sentimental gadgets, so I’ll probably end up buying more than one. I do have a cassette collection stored away somewhere…
Another thing that I corroborated today is that I don’t stand this guy. I mean the African one. Everything he says comes off to me as bullshit. I could not watch more than five minutes, and I made myself stay longer than I wanted because I think that we need to expose ourselves to uncomfortable views. Still, nothing but bullshit. Why on Earth are we so prone to give so much voice to guys that have proven to be liars.
UPDATE: These to comments by @pratik and @clorgie are much more accurate in their depiction of the guy:
I watched the entire Don Lemon’s interview of Elon Musk. Such an inarticulate and incomprehensible, the supposedly smart, man! Is this what we are considering a genius these days? Either he’s afraid to (he claimss he is not) admit or doesn’t understand the basic concept of implications.
@pratik I watched some this morning. Musk is a dull man masquerading as a much smarter one caught in his own web of lies. Sad.
I finally caught myself reaching for my glasses to pluck the small hairs between my eyebrows. Right after trimming the long hairs from the same eyebrows. I’m turning into a visually impaired Ebenezer Scrooge. #thoughts