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Have you ever gotten to the end of a long work day and realized you’re no closer to your goals? I have. The problem, counterintuitively, was lack of interruption. Sure, I was doing a lot of stuff. But I never paused to ask whether I was doing the right stuff. Or whether my approach was working. Or if I was spending the right amount of time on it. So I needed a reliable way to interrupt my “unproductive productivity,” and refocus on what’s important. The obvious first-thought solution was a timer. Unfortunately, if you use timers a lot, you learn to dismiss them reflexively. And it’s really easy to forget to set the next timer. A week later I’d think “Hey, that timer idea really worked, I should get back to that.” And then I didn’t. So I built a new kind of timer. It does 2 unique things: My timer asks me a question. It gradually blurs my screen if I don’t set a new timer. Every few minutes it asks me the same question: “What will you focus on?” I answer in a word or two, hit enter, and keep working. Having to name my intention keeps me fully aware of my trajectory. If I’m in danger of drifting, it’s obvious. If I’m flying on something simple and don’t need to reorient frequently, I can set the timer for a longer duration, maybe 30 minutes. But if I’m working on something more open-ended, I might tighten the leash all the way down to 3 minutes. Then I can’t get off track. Unlike a regular timer, I can’t fail to set the next one. If I don’t restart it promptly, the screen gradually becomes less readable until I do. If I wanted to avoid answering, I’d have to make a conscious decision to close the app just so I could see the screen clearly. I’d have to decide to be less productive. I never do. This small intervention has worked beautifully. Not only am I catching unproductive divergences earlier, I’m noticing fewer of them over time. It seems to be training me to do more and better thinking. It’s not a replacement for a more extensive journaling practice. I love to journal, but that only happens once per day. What about the rest of the day? There’s a lot of benefit in reflecting more often than once every 24 hours. If you’re running macOS, I recommend giving Intention a try. I use it every day, and I think it’s the superior way of working.
Have you ever gotten to the end of a long work day and realized you’re no closer to your goals? I have. The problem, counterintuitively, was lack of interruption. I never paused to ask whether I was doing the right thing. Or whether my approach was working. Or if I was spending the right amount of time on it. The obvious first-thought way to interrupt myself was a timer. But I discovered those are too easy to dismiss, and too easy to forget about. A week later I’d think, “That timer idea really worked, I should get back to that.” And then I didn’t. So I built a new kind of timer that asks me a question: “What will you focus on?” Every few minutes I answer in a word or two, restart the timer, and keep working. This keeps me fully aware of my trajectory. If I’ve drifted, it’s obvious. If I’m flying on something simple and don’t need the reminders, I can set the timer for a longer duration, maybe 30 minutes. But if I’m working on something open-ended, or my attention is wandering, I might tighten the leash all the way down to 3 minutes. Unlike a regular timer, I can’t ignore it. If I don’t answer the question, the screen gradually blurs until I do. Drifting requires making a conscious decision to close the app. I have to decide to be less productive. This tiny intervention has worked beautifully. At first, I caught myself drifting constantly. Over time, I naturally became more focused. It’s training me to stop wasting time. Setting a recurring timer every few minutes sounds like it could be too much. Instead, it’s a relief. There’s nothing worse than spending all day accomplishing nothing useful. All I have to do to prevent that is type a word or two and hit enter. Importantly, it’s not a blocker. It doesn’t try to stop me from using distracting apps or sites. I’d just disable that, anyway. Instead of trying to take control away from me, it gives me more control, because I’m more aware. Plus, this makes blockers unnecessary. I can tell you from experience: by the third time you set a 3-minute timer you’ve titled “Aimless scrolling,” you’ll feel ridiculous enough to stop. It’s also not a journal, or a log. Those are harder to keep up with, and they don’t help minute-to-minute. Journaling once per day is great, but then I’m still potentially spending a full 24 hours off course. This is every few minutes, and it only takes a couple of seconds. All I have to do is name what I want to focus on. If you’re running macOS, I recommend giving Intention a try. I use it every day, and I think it’s the superior way of working.
I’m the person my friends and family come to for computer-related help. (Maybe you, gentle reader, can relate.) This experience has taught me which computing tasks are frustrating for normal people. Normal people often struggle with converting video. They will need to watch, upload, or otherwise do stuff with a video, but the format will be weird. (Weird, broadly defined, is anything that won’t play in QuickTime or upload to Facebook.) I would love to recommend Handbrake to them, but the user interface is by and for power users. Opening it makes normal people feel unpleasant feelings. This problem is rampant in free software. The FOSS world is full of powerful tools that only have a “power user” UI. As a result, people give up. Or worse: they ask people like you and I to do it for them. I want to make the case to you that you can (and should) solve this kind of problem in a single evening. Take the example of Magicbrake, a simple front end I built. It hides the power and flexibility of Handbrake. It does only the one thing most people need Handbrake for: taking a weird video file and making it normal. (Normal, for our purposes, means a small MP4 that works just about anywhere.) There is exactly one button. This is a fast and uncomplicated thing to do. Unfortunately, the people who have the ability to solve problems like this are often disinclined to do it. “Why would you make Handbrake less powerful on purpose?” “What if someone wants a different format?” “What about [feature/edge case]?” The answer to all these questions is the same: a person who needs or wants that stuff can use Handbrake. If they don’t need everything Handbrake can do and find it bewildering, they can use this. Everyone wins. It’s a bit like obscuring the less-used functions on a TV remote with tape. The functions still exist if you need them, but you’re not required to contend with them just to turn the TV on. People benefit from stuff like this, and I challenge you to make more of it. Opportunities are everywhere. The world is full of media servers normal people can’t set up. Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks. Network monitoring tools that seem designed to ward off the uninitiated. Great stuff normal people don’t use. All because there’s only one UI, and it’s designed to do everything. 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy. That’s really all it takes.
An objective, external world is a non-falsifiable assumption. The prevailing theory is that our subjective experiences correspond to an external reality. However, they may simply be subjective through and through. That which we claim to be evidence of external reality is actually subjective experience, which may or may not have an external and objective cause. Any test devised to prove objectivity is evaluated within subjectivity and therefore does not require objectivity to explain the result. Some object to this, claiming that the consistency of experience is best explained by an external world. However, consistent experience does not require any external mechanism, let alone the specific one we have assumed. Claiming that belief in an external world is simpler is like claiming that belief in God is simpler; in truth we are inventing something vast and complex without evidence and agreeing not to question it. This is not science, it is a substitute for epistemic humility. Much as dreams appear consistent while dreaming, that which we consider waking experience may not actually be as consistent as we believe. However, questioning this is unproductive reasoning because it undermines the value of reason itself. We must assume our experiences are rational and consistent, or else give up thinking altogether. Experience is the only reality which is detectable. Whatever experience is, it is real and directly perceptible, unlike objectivity. Claims that experience is an illusion presuppose an objective world to which experience does not correspond. Pragmatic truth is supportable, correspondence is not. If an objective world can’t be proven, neither can we prove that knowledge does or does not correspond with it. That which produces a consistent effect in experience is useful in influencing experience in the desired way, therefore science is useful. Materialism is religious faith. Just as we once invented a spirit world to help explain our experiences, we invented an objective world for which there is similar quality evidence. Both are assumed to explain experience, yet neither is directly known. The assertion that matter gives rise to experience is no more compelling than the assertion that experience gives rise to matter. The assumption of an external world has zero explanatory power, as consistent experience does not require it. Materialism is superior to classical religions in that it responds to pragmatic truth, but it still accepts unsupportable metaphysical claims and regards them as unquestionable. By contrast, noting that we have experiences does not require extrapolation or invention. Modern civilization is optimizing materials, not experiences. Focus on economic metrics has allowed us to make tremendous progress in reducing starvation and otherwise improve the experience of the least fortunate. Nonetheless, the subtle error of conflating material improvement with improvement in well-being has consequences. In advanced societies, increases in abstract indicators of material wealth like GDP have been accompanied by negative changes in consciousness: stress, social disconnection, and increased suicide. The materialist assumption that improving external conditions will always trickle down to better experiences is demonstrably unreliable. Often, this assumption results in methods which improve economic indicators by reducing experiential well-being, and in these cases it is worse than nothing. In addition to misallocating its priorities, modern civilization also conditions people to feel powerless over their own well-being. As materialist structures (corporations, governments, economic systems) become more dominant, individuals are increasingly absorbed into mechanisms designed to optimize external conditions rather than subjective experience. People come to believe that their quality of life is dictated by forces beyond their control. The best way to improve experience is to optimize it directly. The only rational goal is maximizing satisfaction. Long-term positive changes in consciousness are what is best in life. If a person achieves material or hedonistic aims but is unsatisfied in the long term, they are having a negative experience and are working against themselves. Secure, nourish, nurture, and build yourself and your community. Seek what is satisfying and aesthetic—that which feels good and true and beautiful. Unlike materialist assumptions, this requires no external faith, only a direct commitment to improving the reality we actually experience.
More in technology
The resiliency startup has slashed the amount it spends on AI; down from $4,500 per dev, per month, in August, to $1,600 now.
Nathaniel Christopher has a lovely recap of his time at WordCamp Canada. Very cool that the dashboard widget helped connect him to the local community. Hat tip: Anne.
Managing a house with five kids can be challenging so I like to share what’s working for us when I can. This post is how we currently handle screen time. Screens can be addictive, and it’s easy for anyone (both kids and adults) to fall into unhealthy patterns using them. Historically, I’ve been uncomfortable with screen time restrictions because I don’t want to restrict all the useful, creative, and productive opportunities that screens can provide. We’ve tried zero restrictions in the past (alongside Daily Demos as a creativity incentive), which worked ok, but at some point we wanted bit more structure. Here’s what that structure currently looks like. Device use categories For family members without phones, we have carved out the following categories of time: “Free Time” - Kids are free to do whatever activities they want (bounded only by what we’ve made available for them at the house). Video games, movies, board games, homework, run around outside, whatever. Often, this time trends towards consumption on devices, but it doesn’t have to. We call it “free time” instead of “screen time,” because we want to emphasize that the opportunities are wider than just screens. “Project Time” - Kids are encouraged to do projects, which are usually defined as creative activities of all kinds (with or without screens). This category can be blurry so we’ve often put together lists of approved project time activities, including things like: arts and crafts, coding (including “Scratch create”), playing musical instruments, recording videos, Minecraft (creative mode), the Powder Toy, Dojo Islands, and anything on Let’s Get Creative. Device-based consumption is not allowed. Offline activities are usually considered fine (reading a book, doing a puzzle, etc). “No devices” - No device use allowed. Addendum: Grant Proposals If a kid wants a one-time exception to one of the categories above, we tell them to “submit a grant proposal.” This means they need to get some paper, and write out what they want to do, and why they think it is justified. Example 1: “I want to play Minecraft creative after dinner because I am building a full-scale piano, I want to demo it tonight, and I only have 10 more minutes of work until it’s done.” Example 2: “I want to play Terraria during project time because I am making an tutorial on how to beat Moon Lord, and I need to collect screenshots from the game for my tutorial.” We usually approve grant proposals, as long as they aren’t incomplete. Schedule With these categories defined, we just need to decide how much time to allocate, and when to schedule it. For example, here’s our current “no devices” schedule: "No Devices" times Reason After Dinner Reduce stimulation before bed Sundays Protected for church and family Saturdays, before chores are done Incentivize quick completion of chores, so our Saturday afternoons remain available The categories + schedule constitutes our device policy, in addition to Daily Demos, which we continue to hold on the side. Summary Addictive device consumption can easily crowd out activities that are important long-term but deliver less dopamine short-term. Our device-time categories create a protected space for those activities on a consistent schedule that our kids can expect and make plans around. This is what works for us. Your milage may vary! Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.
There are few things worse than a dead AirTag when you need it. That's why we designed the The 4-Year Battery Keychain for AirTag. It replaces the low power CR2032 coin cell with an included Toshiba CR2477 battery for over 4x more capacity. And does so in a minimal form factor. Assembles in seconds. Split key ring + braided cord included. Easy to open with included tool. Perfect on a keychain. And great for backpacks or a purse. Also available on Amazon.
In the corner of the rear Floodgap lab sits a pile of classic game consoles. It used to look like this: Sega Dreamcast all the consoles here only came with NTSC RF output and date from the pre-flat panel TV era. That includes multiple Atari consoles (including the inevitable VCS, here a Darth Vader 2600), several Pong machines — including two Commodore units — with various chipsets, an Intellivision (as the rebadged Tandyvision One, my first) and a Bally Astrocade with lots of upgrades. It seems wrong to use them with a flat panel, and CRTs lag less. Plus, games with a light gun (here the Dreamcast and one of the Pong consoles) often rely on the CRT's rapidly scanning beam to know where they're pointed. So what do you do when the CRT TV goes bad? I should note that this isn't all the old school gaming fun in the house. In the commons next to the pinball machines are an Xbox 360 Slim and a PlayStation 2, and in the home theatre connected to the 3D projector is a PlayStation 3 since it has some stereoscopic titles. These might appear in future articles. But most of the rest are here. I bought this Panasonic Omnivision PV-M2035 from a friend at church in 1999 for $100 [about $200 in 2026 dollars]. He had no use for it, and the top of the plastic shell had been heat-warped by sitting in his car too long, but it worked, still had the remote, and was a suitably cheap TV for my unsuitably cheap studio apartment. I used it for local news and Friends with a set of rabbit ears, VHS movies, and speakers for playing music by connecting a CD player to the single rear input. When I moved to a less cheap 1-bedroom, it came along, and its flat top was flat enough to become a shelf for a DVD player. I got the Dreamcast from Fry's in 2001 after Sega discontinued it and managed to share the composite input between them. That apartment was my crashpad for about a decade before moving to the current orbiting HQ, whereupon I bought a passive-3D flat panel TV and moved the Omnivision to its current location in the back of the house. It shared the RF input between the Inty, and later the Atari 2600, and later still the Astrocade and various Pongs. At any one time there were at least four consoles always connected to it via switches and switchboxes, and I wired up an accessory port for more. plastic was broken and on these TVs that's pretty much the load-bearing part. When it arrived at the mailbox and I unpacked it, I could see the lower half had sandwiched right through the VCR slot, with visible PCB fragments and broken buttons; aside from the tube itself (ironically), the thing was a total loss. The seller nevertheless made good on the refund, to their credit, and I got to schlep it to the recycler. Overall, however, it had occurred to me that there were very few TVs sufficiently contemporary with the M2035 out there, which might be a hint about their general longevity. So, if I was going to be forced to buy a different Panasonic, then it might as well be a more recent one, and it should be one of the "triple play" units (i.e., TV, VCR, DVD) so that I could at least get rid of the external DVD player. Mission: Impossible '88 and '89 DVD sets, where the "in stereo" animation was even burned into the video stream.) not recording and thus impossible to watch many DVDs, for which the Sima CopyMaster was the cheapest solution: it simply blots out that portion of the vertical blank along with the pulses, which also has the side effect of sometimes stripping closed captioning (in the vertical blank as well), though DVDs with proper subtitles are of course unaffected. Later Sima devices could regenerate portions of the vertical blank for better quality, and Macrovision actually sued them over their products in 2005, but later settled. The mixer on the right was purchased literal decades ago at Radio Shack (more specifically a "Video Enhancer Stereo Audio Mixer") that I think we used for a Halloween display exactly once and then forgot about. Here it was used first as a cutoff switch, and second as a way to match the audio volume from the DVD player with the audio volume from the Dreamcast, which was also directly connected to the second rear Y-cable. This TV is mono, so the stereo channels from the audio mixer and the DC get merged using their own Y-connectors (also Radio Shack) before going into the Y-cable to the single line audio input. The video function isn't used here at all; it was just a audio mixer on the shelf I wasn't otherwise using. The DVD player is under the mixer and the CopyMaster, a cheapie Sony special that will only eject discs if it's in the mood or summarily threatened with violence. You already met this system when we adjusted the laser pickup and refurbished its rechargeable battery. you met the Tandyvision One (otherwise identical to the Mattel Intellivision Master Component, and manufactured by them as an OEM) when we installed a composite video modification and a front power-cutoff reset. I later upgraded it with an original Mattel Intellivoice speech synthesizer (Tandy never rebadged these) and a CuttleCart. But you haven't met the Bally on the bottom, officially introduced in 1978 as a game console and simple home computer, sold under various names such as the Bally Professional Arcade seen on early units, later the Bally Computer System badging here, and now collectively referred to under its final incarnation as the Astrocade. These machines were based around a 1.789MHz Z80 (half NTSC colourburst) combined with the same graphics hardware Dave Nutting Associates used for Midway's arcade games Gorf and Wizard of Wor, among others. Unfortunately, much of its theoretical graphics power went unrealized because it only has half the video memory of the arcade units (i.e., 4K) — and that's all the memory it has, so it has to interleave bits in the video memory to store BASIC programs, meaning only game ROMs can take full advantage. Still, that was enough to be solid competition for the likes of the Atari VCS and Fairchild Channel F, and it holds its own well against the slightly later Intellivision. does have is a doozy: the cooling vents are on the underside. These machines are very prone to overheating and can be easily damaged by it, which is why I use two foam struts to keep it off the carpet. The yellow label is for Astrovision, a separate enterprise that had been attempting to develop their own console. The (then) Bally Professional Arcade was selling poorly, though part of this was due to a tardy launch and Bally's weak retail presence, and Bally decided to sell off the consumer products division in 1979. Astrovision, unable to get their unit to market quickly, bought it in 1981 along with a limited license to the Bally name and reintroduced it at Winter CES 1982. Astrovision units are otherwise the same except for the badging and are the most common Astrocades today, though the company became another victim of the 1983 video game crash and went bankrupt shortly afterwards. Simultaneously, an Astrocade derivative merged with Bally's unfinished ZGRASS-100 expansion chassis was reworked into the Datamax UV-1 graphics generator, sold in small numbers until around 1982. the wall warts and power strips, and do a little spot vacuuming with the Roomba. out in spring. Gremlin's Blockade; and a simple calculator and screen paint toy ("Scribbling"). The display is a bit noisier than the Inty/Tandyvision, probably because of the difference in shielding, but still quite good. Videostak Video Game Center, which allegedly could accomodate a VCS, Intellivision or ColecoVision. The front decal is somewhat worn and the woodgrain veneer doesn't match the Vader VCS nearly as well, but it's still a fun-looking setup. Intellivision System Changer which has Atari 2600 hardware in an expansion box for the Intellivision II (useable on the original Inty with modification). It might be fun to explore the reputed irregularities between what is believed to be a VTI clone TIA in the System Changer and the slightly earlier Coleco Expansion Module 1 (and the related Coleco Gemini), and see how they differ in practice. Now for the Pong machines. These attach to the "accessory port" on the input switcher. The current Pong menagerie are mostly MOS 7600-based, MOS' own Pong-on-a-chip: two from Commodore themselves but PAL only using the MOS 7601 (the TV Game 2000K and TV Game 3000H), plus two MOS 7600 (NTSC) systems, a Coleco Telstar Gemini, not to be confused with the Coleco Gemini or Coleco Telstar, and an Allied Leisure Name of the Game II, possibly the earliest use of the chip in NTSC regions. We'll play the Name of the Game II and Telstar Gemini below. These will be consoles for another day, but I also have a boxed Atari Video Pinball, an "honorary" Pong machine though it plays several other games, and a boxed Atari Ultra Pong Doubles, which we had before we got the Tandyvision, but I don't ever recall it working fully and it later failed to power up and got thrown away, so this is a replacement. My least favourite of the Pongs here (I really only picked it up because it was cheap) is a 1977 Magnavox Odyssey 3000. The 3000 is basically an upmarket Odyssey 2000 with proper handheld controllers, but otherwise the same me-too AY-3-8500 Pong-on-a-chip generating the same black-and-white display. Allied Leisure Name of the Game II is a two-player Pong based on the MOS 7600-001. This chip notionally contains three field games (a tennis game, a "goal" game usually billed as either soccer or hockey, and a racquetball game) and a skeet shooter, but the racquetball game can be put into a single player mode by setting it to "four" players and the NotG2's switch triggers this mode in place of the skeet shooter. It was noisy on the other TV and it's noisy here, possibly because it has its own internal RF switchbox, but it plays fine. Coleco Telstar Gemini, an MOS 7600-004 system. This has two "pinball" variants (with flippers and moveable Pong paddles, so it's still a Pong of sorts) and two shooting gallery variants involving shooting a deformed bear sprite. The light gun connector is the same as the Coleco Telstar, so I borrowed the gun from that. sing along with The Offspring. But the output looks crisp through the rear jacks, the sound is proper stereo, and we now have front inputs I can use for something else without rigging a whole bunch of Y-adapters again. Plus, if the Telstar Gemini's gun works, it's all but guaranteed the Dreamcast's does. am likely to play some Video Pinball, and in its box that's easy to move, so that can go on top of the 2600 and the NotG and Telstar Gemini can sit next to it. The old TV is out in the garage and as I have time I'll extract its circuit boards and go over them more thoroughly, since I had a lot of good times with that television and it would be nice to fix. If I do, I'll write it up here, since it's an actual old VCR. Meanwhile, I have some possible projects in mind for the Tandyvision and Astrocade, and maybe some mods to go in the VCS, and you can read about those in future articles too. In the end, with the new TV all set up, the 1980s can live again in my rear office. Or, as my wife likes to point out, they never actually died there either.
