• An old friend

    This is my toiletries bag. I bought it in late 1987 before spending a year in Denmark as as exchange student.

    Last used yesterday morning.

    We’ve done some miles, this old friend and I.

  • Changing the podcasting guard

    Every now and then I’ll come across a new podcast that I’m very much interested in listening to the back catalogue. And, as I like to download podcasts to my iPhone for listening when 3G/4G/5G may not be available, “Download all” is a nice feature to have.

    My podcast app of choice until this week has been Overcast. I’ve used it for many years. It works well and has a nice little feature of cutting out quiet moments in a podcast to speed it up a bit when listening. “Download all” is does not have.

    So, after coming across You’re Dead to Me recently, I wanted to start from the start. And that has led me to Pocket Casts. I like it. There are all the features of Overcast plus a few differences that are important.

    • I can “Download all”
    • I can push a podcast episode to the top of the queue
    • The Apple Watch app appears to work better. Overcast wouldn’t pop up on on the watch by default, whereas Pocket Casts does
    • I can group podcasts in folders (paid version)
    • I can manage podcasts from my MacBook (paid version)

    I don’t change apps lightly, especially when the predecessor has served me well in the past.

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  • Rock on!

    Lordi’s 2006 winning Eurovision song Hard Rock Hallelujah contains the lines “It’s the arockalypse, now bare your soul” and “On the day of rockening, it’s who dares, wins”.

    With lyrics like that, no wonder it won the song contest.

  • Learn through humility

    What a great quote this is. A reminder that learning is the responsibility of each of us. You will learn quickly if you ask for feedback from a position of humility for that will let you listen to the response without being harmed.

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  • Just forget it

    I’ve become conscious that “just” has crept into my email vocabulary.

    • “I’m just writing to ask…”
    • “I just need to know…”

    When used this way, it’s apologetic and has no place in making solid requests. Contrast with the significantly stronger examples below.

    • “I’m writing to ask…”
    • “I need to know…”

    If I just asked you do something for me, which form are you most likely to respond to? (Poll)

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  • Spotify to Apple Music

    In the last couple of weeks I’ve moved my music listening from Spotify to Apple Music after being a Spotify user for many years. I like Apple Music better.

    1. Apple Music allows you to upload albums that it doesn’t have. From my collection that was about 15. Once they are uploaded to my Apple Music Library, I can listen to them on any device.
    2. Apple Music is lossless. Not that I can objectively hear it. Subjectively I know it’s lossless so it sounds better 😁.
    3. Apple Music has multi-track Dolby Atmos. Listening to concerts and certain albums on my home theatre system changes things. 💡Make sure you set your home theatre to a mode that does no surround sound processing. That way, it should kick in for Dolby Atmos tracks, and play stereo tracks as they are.
    4. Dolby Atmos can be turned on/off by device. This means I’m not trying to hear a multi-track audio signal through my headphones.

    I used SongShift to transfer my Spotify playlists to Apple Music.

  • Training and education

    Yesterday I was musing on the difference between training and education, wondering why training in the workplace is usually ineffective. This is my stream of consciousness on the question.

    Many people consider training and education the same, however they have several distinct differences. Training is the process of learning something with a goal of performing a specific skill or behaviour. Education, on the other hand, is the systemic process of learning something with a goal of acquiring knowledge.

    In education, a person learns facts, concepts, and theories. In training, a person learns how to apply those facts, concepts, and theories. (Difference between Training and Eduction)

    So, most "training" in business, is not set within an environment of fact, concept, and theory so it is little wonder why training often falls short of what it aims to do.

    • What do we mean by learning?
    • What do we mean by knowledge?

    Education and training are processes of learning that result in knowledge which provides a person with the power to choose from a set of actions different from the set they had available to them prior to the learning occuring.

    Post-learning, a person will have:

    • an expanded set of distinctions available to them, enhancing how they observe
    • new practical skills

    There is no guarantee that what is learnt is a true assertion. It is all too easy to learn from the opinions of others in ways that positively and negatively modify the way we observe the world.

    Knowledge is a physical phenomenon. That’s obvious with the attainment of practical skills as these are often based in physical movement. What is not obvious, are the changes in physiology that accompany the acquisition of any knowledge. Yet, to say we acquire knowledge that suggests knowledge is independent from physiology – some kind of "add-on" – and it’s not. Rather, knowledge is nothing short of a change in our body from the moment when the knowledge is not yet part of us, to the next moment when it is.

    After I learn something, I am physically different. That happens 100’s of times a day. What a wonder that is.

  • Success – process flipped

    Yesterday’s attempt at Flipping the process worked as expected and I was easily able to bring the post written at WordPress into my digital garden using the obsidian-rss plugin by Johannes Theiner.

    I want my digital garden to hold all my blogging, journalling, household management, literature notes and more so anything that removes friction in writing whilst allowing me to keep all my words in a single platform is a blessing.

    I was expecting the plug-in to bring across the categories/tags as tags but that didn’t happen. No biggie. I can easily add tags using Obsidian after I’ve imported the post from the RSS feed. I will also need to do a bit to reconnect images to the originals as the import brings across a URL and that’s not ideal if I ever need to recreate the blog or re-use an image somewhere else.

    This is my input template:

    ---
published: {{published}}
url: {{link}}
author: {{author}}
---
#state/evergreen #output/blog {{#tags: }}
# {{title}}
{{content}}

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  • Flipping the process

    This post is a bit of a test, though I’m sure it will work fine. I aim to replace my current process of writing blog entries in Obsidian and copying them to WordPress for publication, with one of writing directly in WordPress (as I am now) and pulling the posts back into Obsidian via a RSS feed.

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  • Control

    There are a couple of situations impacting my life at the moment where I have little or no control.

    Telling myself that keeps up the illusion that I have any control at all.