Not Selling the Computer I Want
Dude.
meta
A collection of 207 posts
Introducing Birch Bark: An Email Newsletter Experiment
Sign up here! I’m not a big fan of putting substantial writing in newsletters (way to kick off a newsletter announcement, huh?), but I’ve grown quite fond of the sort of newsletter that just has some interesting links, such as the hugely popular Sidebar. I read a lot
Recent Podcast Appearances
Recent Podcast Appearances
You know this already if you follow me on Twitter, but in case you don’t I wanted to share a few podcasts I’ve had the pleasure of guesting on in the past week. A Slab of Glass Chris, Jeff, and I talked about how we use our iPads
Something I Love About Books (there isn’t a Tomometer)
Something I Love About Books (there isn’t a Tomometer)
The recent debut of Apple TV+ gave me a chance to publicly roll my eyes at Rotten Tomatoes for the way I feel it reduces all semblance thoughtful criticism into a puree of thought replaced by a singular score. While I do use the site sometimes to get a ballpark
My Shortcut for Writing Quick Link Posts in Ulysses
Download the Shortcut here. Writing link posts isn’t that hard, but it does involve a lot of manual copy and pasting to get the title, link, and quoted text into your writing app, so I made a shortcut to streamline it! Here are the basic steps: 1. Highlight the
Homework Assignment
Assignment: If you work somewhere with people on computers much of the day, tomorrow take note of how many people use more than one window on screen at a time. Note that this is a per monitor thing, so no credit if they have 1 app on each screen. If
Taking the Week Off
I'm on a business trip in Whitefish, Montana this week, so don't expect much, if anything new here until the weekend. On the one hand, I'd much rather be working a normal week and work on the site like normal, but on the other
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 in a more organized way. Movies in Letterboxd Letterboxd has been around forever, and is a popular way to track and review movies. Trackt is another option here, and if
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 the service, I finally found something it works great for and wanted to share. Context In 2016 I tracked a bunch of aspects of my life, from weight to sleep
Recession…Revitalization
2019 was the first year ever that BirchTree saw fewer visitors than the year before. Needless to say, after 8 years of uninterrupted (sometimes exponential) growth, this was a bit of a change. I could blame the decline in general blog readership everywhere. I could blame the big link bloggers
21 Books in 2019
I set out to read 20 books in 2019 and today, on the final day of the year, I have completed my 21st book. Here are 21 micro-reviews of each book, in the order I read them: It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work Probably the best book
Today’s “Podcast”: Take a Minute to Think
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
The Biggest Change to BirchTree in 5 Years
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
My 10 Favorite Movies of the Decade
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
My Favorite Video Games of the Past Decade
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.