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51 posts tagged with "personal"

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Why I'm such a slow reader

· 6 min read

It's strange that someone who loves books as much as I do reads only 7–15 books a year. There are two reasons for that.

The first reason won't surprise you: like virtually everybody else in the world, my attention span and my ability to focus on reading have diminished in the last two decades or so, as a side-effect of constant screen exposure. I'm not too concerned about this, though, because at least I keep on reading. Not only that: about half of my reads are difficult, stuffy, old books — and often on paper, where there are few distractions available. (In contrast, many people nowadays seem to read non-fiction only, or contemporary literature only. Some of my fellow nerds read mostly — or only — technical books, articles, or blog posts. And there are even people who seem unable to read text for more than two minutes unless it's displayed on a bright, colourful piece of glass.) But even I don't seem to be able to read for hours on end like I used to in my youth. On my ~2h30′ flights to and from Frankfurt, I usually read most of the time, but not all the time. I manage to read for around one and a half hours or so, and then get distracted by my phone — like everybody around me.

New year's resolutions for 2025

· 8 min read

Inspired by my friend Fidel, I'm publicly sharing some of my resolutions for the new year.

This (turn of the) year I have not thought much about this nor made an actual list, unlike some other years. But certainly there are a few concrete goals in my head, some of which I already mentioned on my recap of 2024.

Here go some of the goals I can divulge, hoping to put some social pressure on myself.

2024 recap through some apps

· 4 min read

The year comes to an end in a few hours, and some of the digital services and apps that I use on a daily basis started nudging me as early as one month ago about my various stats and achievements throughout 2024, with the hope that I'd boost them on social media. I'm old school and prefer blogs to walled gardens, and since I have not been writing here much as of late, I thought I'd use those stats as a way to recap my year.

So here go four apps I use a lot, and my “achievements” on them during the year — in increasing order of importance to me.

Being late

· 10 min read

This epiphany popped into my mind a few days ago, and has been in my head since:

I am mostly happy with the things I've done in my life so far,
but I was late to many of those things.

Photo by https://www.geograph.org.uk/

Having kids

· 4 min read

A Midjourney-generated illustration for this post

Before the end of the day, when the kids are already asleep, my wife and I often go back to photos/audio/video of them that we ourselves have registered very recently (like, in the same day) and thus know well already. Nevertheless, we enjoy that, and sometimes giggle and point at the screen and say “awww”. It's a very warm feeling. And it's very stupid. I often marvel at that.

Weeknotes: 2022, week 40

· 2 min read

[3–9 Oct]

Some days this week Miss Entropy took her brand new scooter to school.

On Monday I went alone to that other town to visit yet another flat for sale. I quite liked it, and took lots of pictures to show later to my wife (but she went herself to see it some days later and didn't like it as much as I did).