• 🧪 I did some blood work to test out allergies. Now I’m waiting for the results, I wonder what the test will show. I know I have lactose intolerance, and that when I was very little, I had an allergic reaction to eggs, that eventually went away. Nowadays I feel like I start sneezing after eating, so it could be something related to my digestive system. We’ll see.
• 😷 Talking about allergies, I took the train to Montreal this week and the air quality was not great in the area because of the fires going on the west prairies. I felt my sneezing and stuffy nose symptoms getting worse throughout the day and I had to take antihistamine every 4 hours to get it to a manageable state.
• ⭐ Which leads me to Scintillation 6 in Montreal! Yes, it’s the third year I attend this event and it’s always great to listen to intriguing panels and meet some authors. It’s a very unique conference: it’s small and cozy. You can never tell if the person sitting beside you is that famous author! Everybody mingles together, it’s great! I saw Ruthanna Emrys, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton, Jon Evans and so many more. Now I have a big list of books added to my TBR.
• 🙌 Leading up to this event, I had a crazy week at work, with things I had to finalize before the trip and that had an impact on my first day of vacations. I almost couldn’t disconnect from worries on the first day, and the allergy symptoms did not help much. On the first evening of the event, I actually left a little earlier to get some rest at the hotel because I was so tired. And by the next morning I finally felt I was stepping into vacation mode.
• 🧱 I wandered through Old Montreal without a specific destination, simply letting myself get lost in the moment. I saw that the piece of the Berlin Wall is still standing in the same spot where I first saw it 11 years ago.
• 🧘‍♀️ I used my brand-new foldable yoga mat for the first time. It worked pretty well, it fits in my carry on perfectly, and I put it on the floor of the hotel room with a towel underdeath. That way I could do my morning routine without fail. It has become one of my essential travel items now.
• 📒 I met a person during the event who was taking notes in a Supernote Nomad device. He let me try it out, and I really enjoyed the writing feel and its size. I also like that the design allows you to replace the battery and expand the memory with a micro-SD card. I’ve thought about getting a Remarkable device before, but the price and the subscription model are not attractive to me. This Supernote seems like a good alternative, with an Android OS. I’ll do some digging.
• 📖 I stopped reading a book for my book club: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. I got as far as 50% but I wasn't enjoying it. I thought it would be something different, but it didn’t click for me. The overly masculine tone with crude jokes, heroism bravado and this heavy “bro” dynamic wasn’t working for me.
• I started reading Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning. It’s the opposite of the book I mentioned above: it’s dense and complex and intricately written. I feel ready for something like this now.

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Post 90/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

• 🏠 We had gutters installed in our house!
• ✅I had a moment that I was second-guessing my to-do list and then I thought about changing tools again. My idea was to move to MS To Do, but I also wanted to do a full capture minds-sweep before that. Which I did, and that was enough for me to trust my Nirvana lists again. So, the issue was not the tool itself but my (lack of) consistency in clarifying and processing what was in front of me. It was just me skipping my weekly review or letting my inbox pile up. Great reminder to reset instead of reinventing!
• 🔎 It’s been crazy at work again and in weeks like these I really don’t want to look more at computers after I get back home. My evenings are more for exercise, enjoying dinner and reading.
• ✈️ I’m excited to take some days off this month! I have two trips planned!
• 🥈 Me and my partner completed the Run for Women – 10K! It was cold (8C) and there was a slow drizzle during half of the run. We almost gave up, but we stayed and finished it! Note to self: always bring a rain jacket!
• 🙌 I really thought I woudln’t have the energy today to write this week notes post, but, hey, here it is!

📌Around the Internet:

• I Have a YouTube Problem - This post caught my attention, because Matt mentions that he’s used to multitasking: “My workflow has always entailed doing three or four things at once. I'm often editing for work, watching a YouTube video, and reading a book all at the same time. I move my attention from one to another.” He gave up TikTok but started watching more YouTube videos and he’s worried about it.
• I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game – YouTube - I saw this on Andreas blog. Super interesting how this dead game still has a community around it. It reminded me of the old MUD’s.
• I Came. I Saw. I Regretted Everything. – Musings from a Tangled Mind – I identified myself so much with this post! If you are an introvert, you will understand.
• A Love Letter to Analog Life – Musings from a Tangled Mind – About life before the internet.
• Experimental June – Manu – Manuel is doing a minimal digital inputs month experiment. I’m interested to see how it goes. I like the idea of reading more books and meditating.
• AI is Making You Dumber. Here's Why | Nebula – It’s scary to think about a future where we are all using AI for everything!

A sunny Spring afternoon

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

This month was all about high-stakes space adventures, clever humour, some espionage, and romance. In other words, delightful escapism!

1. Full Speed to a Crash Landing (Chaotic Orbits #1) by Beth Revis, 192p: Super fun sci-fi novella. Fast-paced with heist-like intrigue, and a bit of romance. Ava is such a strong and independent female character, I enjoyed her machinations.

2. The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz, 342p: This book is extremely ambitious, with long time spans and touching a variety of topics: environmentalism, capitalism, terraforming, access to public services, personhood, gender and sexuality, identity, and corporate greed. It's super creative and has lots of sense of humour interspersed with serious issues. It's truly diverse with bots, animals and non-human species all living together in this terraformed planet (Sask-E). There are cyborg cows, moose, naked mole rats and sentient trains. I didn't like the execution too much; I couldn't connect to many of the characters. It felt like it could have been three books: there was a lot going on!

3. Defy or Defend (Delightfully Deadly #2) by Gail Carriger, 264p: A quick adventure with espionage: Dimity (spy code name Honey Bee) is assigned to fix the Nottingham vampire hive, which is descending into madness. Her bodyguard is Sir Crispin Bontwee, who always had a thing for her. It's full of Gail Carriger's classy humour involving tea, curtains, and extravagant redecoration of a crumbling vampire house.

4. How to Steal a Galaxy (Chaotic Orbits #2) by Beth Revis, 122p: I loved this continuation of “Full Speed to a Crash Landing”. Fast-paced space heist with Ada Lamarr doing her thing: misdirection and deception. She's great! All the action happens at this charity gala hosted by the Museum of Intergalactic History on Rigel-Earth. The auction items include Tutankhamun’s tomb chest, a brick from the Great Wall of China, and even the original Apollo 11 Mission Control red rotary telephone. There are twits, smart banter, and enemies-to-lovers tension. I immediately jumped to the next in the series.

5. Last Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3) by Beth Revis, 176p: This one follows directly after the events of the second book, starting inside Ada's spaceship. She has Rian White with her, and we still don't know for sure what Ada is after or what she really wants to do. I love the mystery and the twist and turns in this series. It was great to know Ada's mother and her pigeons; she is a badass! It's hard to say more without spoilers, but I really liked Ada and Rian's dynamic and how she masterly deceives everybody (including Rian).

6. Notorious Pleasures (Maiden Lane #2) by Elizabeth Hoyt, 391p: I wanted to get back to this series because I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in the 1700s and the diverse characters. Lady Hero Batten, a dutiful daughter, is engaged with a dull man, the Marquis of Mandeville. On the ball when their engagement is announced, Lady Hero finds the Marquis' brother, Lord Griffin Remmington, in a very indiscrete situation involving a married lady. Hero helps both to escape being discovered by said married lady's husband. Griffin is a notorious rake, but he has a thing for Lady Hero, and so we have the reformed rake and enemies-to-lovers trope. Lady Hero is also helping to build the new orphanage for the St. Giles children, which connects to the previous book storyline. We continue to see a glimpse of the mysterious Ghost of St. Giles. I'm still intrigued by this mystery, and I will continue this series just to find out!

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Post 88/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

• ✍️ Lately, I haven’t been journaling as much. I like to write in the mornings, before I commute to work, but these days I’ve been using that time to tackle some personal tasks that I don’t have the energy for after work. It is a bit ironic, with the longer daylight hours here in the northern hemisphere, you’d think I’d have more time and energy. Instead, summer always wears me down. With daylight stretching until 9 p.m., I tend to stay up later, but my wake-up time hasn’t changed. By 6 p.m., I feel completely drained.
• ✏️ I’ve been craving for quiet time, and I wrote a reply to one of Joel’s blog post about boredom and focus.
• 📖 I finished reading “The Terraformers” by Annalee Newitz and had an interesting discussion with my book club. This book has great ideas and cool stuff, but it was bit lacking in the execution.
• 📞I called my mom on Mother's Day, and we talked about a book she’s reading: “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. I also want to read this book; it’s on my hold list at the library.
• 📺 I finished watching “The Rings of Power” Season 2. Even though the timeline is all messed up in this series (compared to the books) I enjoyed the show. I viewed as an alternate history of Middle Earth. I loved the dwarves!
• 🤑 So, I watched “The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime with a free trial, but wow, what is going on with all those ads? I got through the show, but it was painful to have to watch the number of ads interrupting it! I canceled the subscription before I got charged. Now, I need a break just to recover from the overwhelming ad overload. So frustrating!
• 🧩 We finished the Iron Maiden puzzle! It was not so difficult because it’s basically 20 mini puzzles in one, with lots of text (the name of the band and album titles) that made it easy to group the pieces together. I had fun putting it together! Now I need to frame it.
• 📕 I needed some quick win short book, so I’m reading this sci-fi novella: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth Revis. It’s fast paced with a strong female character in a crazy heist. I’m loving it.
• 🎮 I had a long weekend, so I played Stardew Valley in an afternoon. It was nice to get back to my little farm and going through winter. I’ve finally upgraded to a steel axe and now I can chop down hardwood. I’ve also built a guest house. Now I need to upgrade my pickaxe.

📽️ I watched videos and I actually put them on a list to share here:

• A 3D rendering of the Colosseum captures its architectural genius and symbolic power | Aeon Videos
• The Internet Used to Be a Place – YouTube
• Why Everybody Stopped Reading
• The American Literacy Crisis, Explained | Nebula
• Things to Know Before Reading Pride and Prejudice | How to Read Jane Austen for Beginners
• Tristan Harris: Why AI is our ultimate test and greatest invitation | TED Talk
• The Uncanny Horror of AI Hallucinations

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Post 87/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I am still thinking about focus and attention spans and boredom. I read Joel’s post: The constant need for a source of entertainment and that got me thinking even more. I loved that he starts talking about this time in his childhood with no technology around, and he wandered around the fields, playing with bottle caps and imagining they were spaceships (I also loved The Jetsons! 🙌).

He asks himself these questions:

Why would I wash the dishes without watching a video at the same time? Why would I fold my clothes without listening to a podcast too? Why would I have lunch without scrolling away on social media? Why would I go outside without carrying my phone at all times?

And then he asks:

Why would I not try, though?

To me, there are different layers to these questions:

• True multitasking (doing two cognitively demanding tasks at once) isn’t something we can actually do. We can’t read a text and listen to a podcast at the same time, these are conflicting cognitive efforts. Even when we think we are multitasking, we are not effectively processing information.
• Multitasking without cognitive conflicts: we can, however, combine two tasks that use different cognitive resources and don’t compete for the same type of attention. For example: listening to a podcast (passive audio input) while folding laundry or doing dishes.

This reminds me of the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, where he argues that the ability to focus intensely is a skill that must be trained. His advocates on training ourselves to be able to focus so we can better perform cognitively demanding tasks. But even if we start having distraction-free “focus” sessions every day to train ourselves, we will struggle if we can’t free our minds from a dependence on distractions.

Cal recommends training our brains to tolerate boredom. Habits like constantly checking our phones or jumping between tabs, condition us to avoid boredom and seek novelty. This damages our capacity for deep, focused work.

My concern when I see younger people constantly seeking distractions is that they completely lost their ability to have one moment, any moment in a quiet state without looking at a screen or having something in their ears. And I guess I wouldn’t be too surprised if all this multitasking were done exclusively in their leisure times. But seeing them doing that while they work, for 8 hours a day, that’s concerning.

Personally, I do listen to podcasts while doing dishes or cleaning the house. I even save favorite episodes to listen to at the gym, as an incentive to go. But I don’t listen to 8 hours of podcasts or watch videos on the background while I’m at work, doing cognitive efforts.

So, it’s NOT about ALWAYS doing ONE thing at a time. If we avoid pairing tasks that interfere with each other, like reading emails (language processing) with listening to a podcast (also language-heavy), we should be okay.

That said, I think Cal Newport is right: if we are constantly in this distracted fully excited state all the time, we can’t slow down anymore, even if we want to.

I think that with the amount of instant stimulation we carry in our pockets today, it’s way harder to even realize that we are in that state. Some people might not even remember (or know) what it feels like to be calm, quiet, and simply present—just observing the world or listening to their own thoughts.

And it’s a challenge for all of us; we are all being bombarded with an excess of information and entertainment. I noticed a shift in my ability to sit down and focus on reading a book a couple of years ago when I was still using the main social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). I believe that deleting all those accounts four years ago helped me get back to enjoy reading again and embracing boredom sometimes.

I have been curating my online consumption patterns for quite a while now, and this post summarizes a bit my feelings about feeling hacked by the online world.

Anyway, thanks Joel for sharing your thoughts!

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Post 86/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

• 👟 It has become warm enough to go for runs outside!

  1. Apr 25 – 4.56km (pace 7:02 min/km)

  2. May 02 – 6.6km (pace 7:04 min/km)

  3. May 04 – 7.14km (pace 6:38 min/km)

• 🚶‍♀️‍➡️ I'm also doing more walks outdoors which is great after 8 hours stuck in an office with no windows and in those tiny cubicles.

• 🏢 The renovations at the office are still ongoing, and I can't wait to have my proper office space again! I hate the tiny cubicles situation. It will probably be done in a month or so, fingers crossed.

• 🛋️ We've installed some shelves in our living room.

• 📺 I'm watching “The Rings of Power” Season 2. I only watch it to see the dwarves, they are great!

• 📅 I'm using Cal Newport's Time Block Planner again. I have stopped using it for a few weeks, trying to use Outlook instead. But I prefer doing my daily planning on paper.

• ✅ The Nirvana app had some updates recently, and the biggest one was that all the interfaces (web, iOS, Android, Windows) are exactly the same now. I liked that now there are color themes, and I switched from the dark theme to the customizable colored one (dark blue is my favorite right now).

• ✏️ I wrote some thoughts about attention and how I feel so different from younger people nowadays.

• 📖 I finished reading this amazing sci-fi novella by Beth Revis: “Full Speed to a Crash Landing”. I absolutely loved it! I already got the second one from the library.

• 📖 I started reading “The Terraformers” by Annalee Newitz for my local Bookclub and it is great!

• 🧩 I started another puzzle. This one is a collage of all Iron Maiden album covers!

📌 Interesting reads I’ve come across these days:

• Reading RSS content is a skilled activity – David Oliver: On how to curate our RSS feeds and how it’s completely different from mainstream social media.
• Fitting a round peg into a genre-sized hole: It mentions a space opera book that’s been on my radar for a while. The article discusses books that were marketed in ways that didn’t align with their author’s intended genres. “The Cold Between” by Elizabeth Bonesteel was pitched to romance readers despite being a space opera with romantic elements, leading to poor reception. That caused the author to stop writing the series.
• Westley Winks :: How I journal: cool and sustainable way of journaling – 5 things!
• Writing Is Redirecting Attention | Brain Baking: It’s about focus on one thing a time.
• Bullying is never okay – 82MHz: I totally agree and I wish all the best to Brandon! (I also enjoyed reading his posts). 🙌

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I currently work with four colleagues who are between 15 to 20 years younger than me. They're great people, and I get along well with all of them. But recently, I’ve started to notice a clear generation gap. When they talk about things they see online—like YouTube trends, Instagram memes, or TikTok videos—I often find myself completely lost. I don’t recognize the references, and while they laugh, I realize I’m missing the context.

It’s funny, because when I was their age, I was the tech-savvy one. I was way more into computers and the internet than most of my peers.

The other day, we were chatting at lunch, and they mentioned that they CAN’T sit through a full-length movie without also using their phones, tablets, or even playing a game at the same time. They told me they just can’t focus on a single activity. There always has to be something else happening in the background, or they get bored. That completely blew my mind.

I asked them if it’s the same when they’re working, and they said yes. They often need extra stimulation while they work—whether it’s a podcast, a video, a TV show, or a documentary playing in the background. 😱 It reminded me of something I heard on Cal Newport’s Deep Questions podcast, where he described this behavior as “stimuli stacking.” That seems to describe exactly what they’re doing.

I told them I’m the opposite. I need quiet and focus to be productive. The only thing I can handle while working is music, and even then, it has to be a playlist I know well. Familiar songs become a kind of soothing background noise. Instrumental music works too, but anything with new lyrics or surprises will throw me off, especially if I’m doing mentally demanding work. Only during repetitive or mechanical tasks can I manage listening to a podcast, and even then, it has to be one I’m used to.

So, I noticed that this need for multiple sources of stimulation seems most common among people in their 20’s. I have other team members who are in their mid 30’s, and they’re more like me. They say they struggle to concentrate if something like a YouTube video is playing in the background. And they can watch a full-length movie without distractions.

Another thing I notice is that my younger colleagues will complete a task super-fast, they just want to get it done. And then I revise their work and point out things that they’ve missed or mistakes they’ve made. To me all these little errors are because they don’t take the time to reflect on what they’re doing, they don’t slow down, they don’t plan ahead. It could be just because they are young in the field, and they are still learning. But when I think about myself early in my career, I always took the time to read everything and plan how I would approach that task. I always take my time and focus on the details to understand the best way to complete an interior partitions take-off, for example.

It seems like this shift is generational. People who grew up in the 2000s were deeply shaped by the infinite amount of content and stimulation. Our patterns of attention and focus have really changed in the past few years, and now I’m really starting to see how those changes are showing up in my everyday work life.

I wonder if that’s happening everywhere, and if people in their 40’s like me are noticing the change.

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Post 84/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

1. The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie, 432p: I didn't love the book, but it has a few interesting topics to dive into. The second-person narrative felt strange to me, but I can understand why it’s widely praised. For me, though, the story just felt kind of cold. I didn’t connect with the characters or cared much about what happened to them, probably because the story’s told from an ancient god’s perspective, so we’re just watching the characters instead of really getting into their heads. I didn’t like the ambiguity of the ending.

2. Borders of Infinity (Vorkosigan Saga (Publication Order) #5.3) by Lois McMaster Bujold, 305p: Super fun read, the book is a compilation of 3 novellas:  The Mountains of Mourning (1989), Labyrinth (1989) and The Borders of Infinity (1987). The stories are focused on Miles Vorkosigan in which he tells about his insane adventures in his first years working for the ImpSec (Imperial Security). In the first one he is sent to a remote location in Barrayar to solve a local dispute. In the second one he goes to an undercover mission to rescue an important researcher, and the last one he is undercover in a very remote and high security prison camp to rescue a military person and manages to find a way to escape in the most spectacular way. But what I most liked about these stories are the diverse characters: there is a hermaphrodite from Beta Colony and various genetically altered humans with different abilities who were “discarded” by society. I love how power dynamics are explored in these stories with Miles questioning everything.

3. The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius by Kendra Adachi, 246p: This book presents a guide to getting things done without falling into the trap of perfectionism or overwhelm. The author tries to bring a perspective more suitable to women and their struggles, since most productivity books were written by men so far. The book has a fun tone and encourages us to focus more on what matters. It's all great advice, but when she gets to the actionable steps it is basically GTD (Getting Things Done – by David Allen) with different names. So it wasn't all that revolutionary to me since I've using the GTD methodology for a while now. I was not a fan of the forced acronyms.

4. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher, 8 hours, 30 minutes (audio): The story is whimsical and fun, I was hooked on the very first scene. I enjoyed spending time with Mona and her curious magical abilities with bread and biscuits. I listened to the audio book, and I really like the narrator’s voice and style.

5. Cetaganda (Vorkosigan Saga (Publication Order) #9) by Lois McMaster Bujold, 302p: Miles Vorkosigan and his cousin Ivan Vorpatril are sent to Cetaganda on a diplomatic mission to attend the state funeral of the planet's empress. They are supposed to just show diplomatic respect and not cause any trouble, but we know in this series that trouble always finds Miles. The story is a mix of political intrigue, assassins, secret agents, attempted assassinations, and the rich world building of a society obsessed with genetic engineering. For Cetagandans, genetic improvement means social advancement and the whole power structure is built around it. Miles, with his visible physical disability, tries to prove himself even more amidst a society that believes all physical “defects” must be eradicated. It was a fascinating read and the good sense of humour with snarky remarks about ethics and justice continues in this series.

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

• 🌻 It was so nice to have a long weekend! I did a small spring cleaning in my wardrobe and donated a couple of pieces that didn’t fit me well anymore.
• 📖I finished reading two books! Another one of the Vorkosigan Saga: The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold and a non-fiction: The PLAN by Kendra Adachi.
• 🎧 I am listening to a fiction audio book! It’s something I haven’t done in years, but I saw this book available at my Public Library on Libby, and I decided to try it. It’s “A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking” by T. Kingfisher and I really like the narrator’s voice and style.
• 🧹I cleaned and put away my sturdy pair of winter boots. Now winter is officially over! 😆
• 🚗 My partner switched the cars winter tires this weekend. I was there just to give him some moral support, since he likes doing it all by himself.
• ❎ We voted for the federal election!
• 🧩 We framed the Zelda’s Breath of the Wild puzzle! It was an excuse to go have lunch at IKEA and get the frame. I forgot to take a picture.
• ☑️ I did a deep cleaning on my tasks lists and projects in Nirvana. I let go of a bunch of actions that I honestly would never get to finalizing.
• ✏️I had fun writing this blog post challenge: Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition. Thanks, Joel!
• 📺I’ve been enjoying watching videos about fashion history and Victorian clothing shenanigans. Mainly Bernadette Banner and Abby Cox videos (these are You Tube links, but I actually watch them on Nebula):

1. A Hilarious & Dramatic History of the Sewing Machine

2. The Truth About Louis XIV & His Unwashed 🍑

3. So Victorian Sewing Tech is Really Cool?

4. Making Victorian Cycling Breeches to be a Menace to Polite Society

• 🎈 I’m having a bit of a conflict on how I capture ideas for blog posts. For a while I kept a list in Standard Notes but for some reason, I stopped doing that, and then I started to add some of them to Nirvana, but it doesn’t feel right. I also realized that I jot down ideas while journaling, and these were not being capture anywhere else. I dusted off my Standard Notes list, updated it, and I will get back to using it again. There is so much there!

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Post 82/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I was tagged by Joel to answer the Technology Questions Challenge!

🙌Challenge accepted!

When did you first get interested in technology?

I’ve always been draw to machines that could do things: TV’s, radios, rotary telephones, cassette players (note: I was born in 1979). These devices fascinated me, and I constantly annoyed my parents by asking how they worked. I even managed to destroy the only tube TV in our house while conducting an “experiment”: I partially unplugged it and touched both prongs of the plug with a piece of metal (I think it was a spoon) while the TV was still connected to power. BOOM—fried TV! My parents were not happy, especially since we were growing up during a time of crazy hyperinflation in Brazil, and electronics were not easy to replace.

But I truly fell in love with technology when my dad—who was a mathematician, civil engineer, and university professor—got access to computers at the university. One day, he brought home a small personal computer: the TK-85 (a Brazilian clone of the ZX81). I was hooked immediately. I must have been around 7-8 years old.

The TK-85 ran a BASIC operating system. It had a small keyboard, a joystick, no mouse, a TV output and it could be hooked up to a cassette player to load up programs. It didn’t have internal memory in the way we think of it now—every time we wanted to use a program, we had to load it into the RAM, which could take 30 minutes or more depending on the file size. The cassette player made these weird, alien-like noises while loading.

That’s how I got started with computers. I learned BASIC and DOS, and I still remember the thrill of moving from a text-only interface to using Windows for the first time—with a mouse and multiple windows! 😱 The mouse was mind-blowing to me.

The rest is history. My dad kept upgrading our home computer, and as soon as I could save up enough money, I bought my own PC.

What’s Your Favorite Piece Of Technology All-Time?

This question always makes me think of the fundamental technologies that enabled the modern world: sanitation, steam engines, photography, electricity, the telegraph, the transistor, telephones, and more. Maybe I’m going too far back—but without electricity, we wouldn’t have any of it. So, I’ll say electricity!

If I had to name a favorite object, it would be the personal computer (with a good keyboard!). A close second would be the digital wristwatch.

What’s Your Favorite Piece Of Technology Right Now?

I love e-readers! I think they are such a neat piece of technology! I got my first Kindle in 2012 and used it for nine years before switching to a Kobo Libra H2O in 2021 (a few years after I moved to Canada) which I still use daily. E-readers gave me access to books that weren’t published in Brazil or were too expensive to import. I truly believe they help democratize access to knowledge, which makes it all the more frustrating to see what Amazon is doing with the Kindle ecosystem right now. Still, there are great alternatives out there, and I’m hopeful that independent e-readers will continue to innovate.

Name One New Cool Piece Of Technology We’ll Have In 25 Years!

I can’t predict the future, but I hope we move toward more sustainable production and use of technology. I’d love to see a future where planned obsolescence is a thing of the past and devices are modular, upgradeable, and repairable, so we stop generating the massive amounts of e-waste we see today.

So, it would be cool to have modular technologies. Also, solar or renewable powered devices and wearables. It would be amazing to have fully biodegradable electronics.

I also hope we create digital environments that aren’t driven solely by corporate interests: places where ecosystems can communicate with one another, protect privacy, encourage diversity and equitable access to knowledge (not just feed us junk and ads).

Final thoughts

This was fun! Thanks @Joel for tagging me!

It was nice to go down memory lane and reflect on how technology shaped who I am and how it could shape our future. I feel incredibly grateful to have had access to a computer at such a young age. Back then, computers weren’t ubiquitous in Brazil. It took years for personal computers to become truly popular and affordable. My dad was fortunate to be part of a small group of people who worked with computers early on, and that gave me a rare opportunity.

I’m hopeful that we’ll wake up from the hot mess we’re in today and shift toward a future where technology is more sustainable, open, accessible, and focused on helping humanity rather than exploiting it.

I will nominate:

• Steve – An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Marisabel – Konfetti Explorations
• Alexandra – The Wry Writer
• Steve – Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition | An Almost Anonymous Blog

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Update

Here are the responses:

• Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Blog Question Challenge: Technology Edition – The Wry Writer

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Post 81/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #challenge #tech #noisymusings

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.