Sharing the Kottke link because it's a gift link; click through for the article.

I've always thought Inside Out did a great job of characterising emotions in a way that makes sense to me all the way down. From memories, situational reaction, how emotions fight each other for control, how they're implemented in the actual story; it all just makes sense to me. Other people, too, apparently. It's cool to see it getting credit for how it personifies and can potentially help as an aid for navigating your feelings.

The second film builds on that significantly with anxiety, and the article makes an excellent point that these movies don't vilify any emotions; even "negative" ones. I think that's such a good observation and so important when processing and understanding our reactions to the world. Negative emotions are self preservation and, whilst it's important to be able to self regulate (positive emotions too!), it's also important to not block them out entirely.

Highly recommend these films; the first one made me ugly cry.

I am so glad to find this! I've always used letter opener for Rails projects, and it's pretty good, but this being platform agnostic and configured in the same way as SMTP on the client side makes it so much more portable. I am immediately adding this to all of our projects.

I've been trying to incorporate more weights into my workouts as I'm pretty much exclusively a cardio guy and, as you get older, that is a recipe for being constantly injured. I don't know much about this sort of thing, and I don't have the budget for a personal trainer, so finding this has been great. List your equipment, tell it which muscle groups you want to hit, and it'll generate a ~30 minute workout for you.

The main criticism I have is that the videos for each exercise don't work, so I have to make my workout then look up any I'm not familiar with on YouTube so I can see how you do them. You also can't log the weight that you do your reps at which makes referring to them in future kinda annoying. But to just be able to knock out a 30 minute strength workout fits well with my schedule and means I can hopefully start building up a bit of muscle and not being injured all the time!

But if you don't have a use case then having this sort of broad capability is not actually very useful

This whole article is just repeatedly hitting the nail on the head but this quote is especially accurate for me for so many things. If you don't have something specific you think any new technology or feature will solve, just move on. It's really that simple. I have become an extreme AI skeptic, not least because it has only ever done one useful thing for me, and that was completely by accident (and I'm not even sure if it was right anyway) (if you're interested, I needed monthly local median sunrise/sunset times for an entire year, and it gave me a table that didn't look ridiculous). Everything you read is about how terrible/amusingly terrible it is, and every time I use it it's just not good.

I've had this conversation with clients so many times about various things. Most specifically reporting. Clients always want to add "reporting", but when asked what are the sorts of things they want to report, they don't know. I've even trained clients on their data and installed Superset, but it doesn't get used because they don't know how to use SQL, or they realise they don't actually know what they're looking for (or they just use the 3 dashboards I made for them as an example that don't really provide any business intelligence).

In general, I find the immediate flocking to any new technology frustrating. I've always been like it with language adoption, preferring to be fashionably late to the party, and it has served me pretty well. AI seems to have been a particularly insidious one because everyone is rushing to implement it with no real idea of what they're doing or why. I'll just stay here repeatedly saying "why" like an irritating toddler until I either get a good reason, or the asker backs down.

I've used Transmit since I started using a Mac, and I love Panic as a company; they give me a good feeling. This is the first time I've seen Cabel speak and he's not what I imagined at all. I thought he was going to be a cool, smooth guy but he's a total exciteable nerd and now I love them even more.

The Playdate is such a delightful piece of hardware. If you're interester in quirky, fun games and interesting, whimsical and high-quality hardware, it's definitely worth a look. You're going to see criticism of the lack of backlit screen, and I would love to be able to see the screen better in all lighting conditions, but that doesn't detract too much from it as a device for me.

If you're interested in some more whimsy from Cabel, I emphatically recommend this too.

I love Eddy. He and NakeyJakey are the best thing to ever come out of Gus Johnson getting big (but we don't watch Gus in this house. I loved his videos but abusers gonna abuse and we don't play with that here).

Eddy is one of those YouTubers I have alerts on for (Jakey too actually) just because everything he does is in my wheelhouse. They're so sincere and their videos are so thoroughly considered. I almost don't care what they're about; I'll probably be into it.

I've been thinking a lot about technology in my life and the pull it can exert on my attention and what that's like for my emotional state, and I don't even have a very noisy phone in the grand scheme of things. I have perhaps 4 people in my life whom I regularly communicate with, and they're almost never a negative effect on my mood, but that is largely by design. I've stopped debating on social media, and I'm not one for drama in real life.

I do still find that my phone can annoy me just by existing. It's so useful for so many things, but sometimes those things get noisy and irritating! I like the idea of maining something simple so I can still get a web browser and maps, and then having my iPad to fill in gaps, but I'm pretty fortunate that it isn't something I need just to live something resembling a normal life.

Wish I'd learned about this a long time ago. Using the AWS CLI across multiple projects in development is super annoying.

I really want to have a go with one of these. I wonder how portable my ability with normal 34-key columnar stagger boards would be for it. Only one way to find out I guess! 😒

This is such a cool time capsule.

This stoked my nostalgia pretty hard. I worked in a phone shop right out of 6th form. I was terrible at it; not a closer, you see. But I have always loved gadgets, and have wanted to have something pretty much exactly like the iPhone since I was 9 years old.

As much as I love the iPhone (I know it's sad but I won't apologise), I do miss when phones were weird. I had so many cool ones:

• Nokia 3210
• Nokia 6600
• Nokia 6800
• Sony Ericsson P900
• Nokia 6310i

I had to get so many contracts to try all the phones I wanted. By the time I stopped selling phones, my credit rating was in absolute tatters.

Casey Neistat has this weird way to make anything a story. I have never been more inspired to make videos than when we were regularly watching his videos a few years back. I got burned out on him for whatever reason, but I love occasionally watching what he's doing now.

He has a particularly unique way of reviewing technology that I've always admired. So many reviewers focus on what tech does, and how that's an improvement, but Casey shows you what you can do with things by just doing it himself. When I saw this video in my list, I knew I was going to watch a video of Casey walking around New York wearing this thing and using it in ways that it's probably not currently intended (it's honestly worth it, if only to watch him trying to land a butterfly on a donut).

This is honestly the perfect complement to all the spec-heavy reviews like Marques' and Nilay's. Just a video of a master storyteller (I don't think that's an exaggeration) using a new tool to do what he does.

I feel like I would still love this guy even if I wasn't that interested in games. His presentation style makes me laugh so much, and his videos all look like they were super fun to make.

I love this sort of thing. This guy makes a different sandwich every day from (mostly) old cookery books. His videos are a couple of minutes long and he has multiple catchphrases. Top-tier routine-fodder. We watch his videos most days.