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Taking the Week Off
I'm on a business trip in Whitefish, Montana this week, so don't expect much, if anything
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Tracking My Movies and Books in 2020 with Letterboxd and GoodReads
Part of my “New Year’s resolutions” (for lack of a better description) was to track what media I consumed
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How I’m Using Notion to Track my Life in 2020
I know articles and video on Notion are a dime a dozen, but after years of being totally befuddled by
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Recession…Revitalization
2019 was the first year ever that BirchTree saw fewer visitors than the year before.
Needless to say, after 8
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21 Books in 2019
I set out to read 20 books in 2019 and today, on the final day of the year, I have
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Today’s “Podcast”: Take a Minute to Think
I love podcasts and audiobooks. They help me learn about the world and be generally entertained effectively all the time. The rise of Audible has let me fill previously “empty” time with books, allowing me to get through more books than ever before.
But the downside of these is that they make it very easy
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The Biggest Change to BirchTree in 5 Years
In 2015 I moved BirchTree to WordPress. I had danced with Squarespace and some static site generators before that, but WordPress was tried and true, worked with everything, and was hard to totally screw up. It was also very expandable, so I could add functionality however I saw fit.
I was happy, for the most
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My 10 Favorite Movies of the Decade
As you get older, it’s harder for movies to have the same impact on you that they did when you were younger. That said, the past decade has had some of the best movies I have ever seen, and some of them have impacted me more than I ever thought they would. Looking at
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My Favorite Video Games of the Past Decade
1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I’ve said a lot on this game already, so seriously, watch the video series below, but I will say here that no game in my adult life has filled me with as much wonder and pure joy than this game. There were times playing this
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My 10 Favorite Albums of the Decade
It’s the end of the decade and I love lists, so today I’m starting a series of lists about my favorite things. Today we’re looking at my favorite albums of the past 10 years. What I learned more than anything with making this list is that 2010 and 2011 were more amazing
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BirchTree is 9! (belated)
I’m so bad at celebrating BirchTree’s anniversaries, so this post on a Tuesday night 12 days after the actual anniversary is gonna have to do it this year.
At this point I have written at this site for over one quarter of my life, which is nuts. This doesn’t even count the
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The Delicate Nature of Comparing Smartphone Cameras and a Dash of False Equivalence
Here’s how most smartphone camera comparisons go:
1. Frame up two phones with the same shot
2. Take photo
That’s it, no editing or tapping the screen to focus or set exposure, just point and shoot. In many ways that probably the most fair ways to do it, and it does line up
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How to Make a Quick and Dirty Dark Mode for Your Website
You can find this all over the web these days, but dark mode is important and I figured I’d share in one more place how easy it can be to get your site up and running in no time. Here’s all the code it takes to do dark mode here on BirchTree.
/* DARK
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A Downside to All These Dang Streaming Services
Apple Arcade Seems Like The Future Of Gaming, For Better Or Worse - Kotaku
Maddy: I have guilt about these kinds of services and our new subscription-flavored future. I don’t think I can do anything about it, but I don’t love it.
Kirk: Your guilt is related to what exactly?
Maddy: I feel
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My Own Claim Chowder
John Gruber’s “claim chowder” is one of my favorite running gags in the Apple blogging world, and I thought I’d take tonight, the night before we see a bunch of new iPhones and Apple Watches, to look back on some claims and positions I’ve taken over the past few years and see
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A New Look for Quick BIN Lookup
Most of you probably don’t know, but I run a small, but shockingly popular credit card BIN lookup site called Quick BIN Lookup. I launched the site in early 2016 and have made some small updates over time to make it faster and more reliable.
But the look and feel remained the same. In
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Feeling it Again (Summer Break is Over)
In the middle of June I mentioned on my podcast that I was going to take a bit of a summer break from the show, and that turned into a break from blogging here (only 9 posts in 6 weeks), as well as a break from Twitter and the relentless YouTube schedule I was keeping
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Why Breath of the Wild is Absolutely Brilliant: Part 1
https://youtu.be/WYEcRWpXFdc
I'm taking a break from the Persona series to talk about what I'm pretty confident is my favorite video game of all time. This game is just unbelievable and this series will go through some of the elements that I think come together to make this a