Tangible Life
Gradient UI Fun
Gradient UI fun in HEY! - Before & After
Sometimes an idea comes to me and I can’t stop thinking about it until I try it. I’ve been using HEY! for my email since it launched. In they HEY! app, you have a wallpaper at the bottom that covers mail you’ve already read. There are some great included options, but I have always chosen my own image file to customize my email experience slightly.
It struck me that if I edited the image in Figma and added a slight gradient at the top that using the color picker to grab the dark HEY! UI background color, it would make it look like the two panes blend together when I have the wallpaper covering read mail. I dig the effect.
I used the same process on the iOS version of the app (the UI color was slightly darker there) to get the same effect on both platforms. If anyone is interested in how this is done in Figma, reach out!
Impact
This post is my entry for November’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Alexandra.
What a great theme that can be approached from various perspectives. These are my favorite types of IndieWeb Carnival themes since they force me to lean into introspection.
A clip that I’ve seen or heard a few times in the last two weeks is Mike Tyson speaking to a young interviewer about legacy and how it is a meaningless term that (according to Mike) has surged in popularity and is now overly abundant in people talking about themselves or overly dramatizing their existence. I mostly agree with Tyson’s statement, or at least the sentiment. Our time on this Earth is something that we tend to treat with some grandiose purpose when that time has come to a logical conclusion. In reality, the grandiose part is the journey itself, the life we’re living while still alive. The destination is death, since we all reach it and there is no avoiding the arrival. We return to the dust from which we came, and those that are still on the journey continue on theirs without us. It really is as simple as that. Tyson is specifically talking about legacy vs. impact. I think that the time that we spend here can offer profound impact, and that’s why I will choose to focus on that concept.
I never knew the impact that being a parent would have on my life. It should come as no surprise that I, like most, have an appreciation for my parents that has grown exponentially since becoming a parent myself. You learn so much about life through your children, and you learn more about your parents in the process as well. I have amazing parents and am beyond lucky to still have them. They’ve shaped my life at every phase and have had such a positive impact on me. It isn’t lost on me that many people’s parents have an impact on them that isn’t positive, yet it is an impact nonetheless. I’m fortunate and grateful that my parents represent only positive impact in my life.
Interestingly, people’s passing often gets referred to with the term “impact” in the negative sense. It is normal to focus on the loss, the subtraction, the missing piece that it represents to those that are “left behind”. By thinking about the impact of my parents on my life, I hope I have the capacity to frame it with that impact as the basis of my emotions. Mourning is a process, and sadness and suffering are inevitable to the human condition; however, so much of our emotional computation is formulaic. That isn’t to make it sound cold and predictable, but math is math, and emotions have their own arithmetic.
With that goal comes framing for what I hope my own impact is, with a focus on the lives of my own children. I hope to lead a life of similar impact to my own parents. I hope that impact is felt increasingly over my lifetime, not through proximity to me, but through the proximity of life’s experiences. I hope my impact is like that of gravitational pull, vs. that of an asteroid slamming into a planet. When I return to dust, I hope my impact is felt due to the addition I was when I was here and not the inevitable subtraction the event represents in the formula that is our existence.
Year of Living Without 2024 (Update)
I pulled back up my post from January and was disappointed to say that I’ve failed them all.
I still don’t drink soda often, however, I’m far from having done without it in 2024. My nighttime wind down reading habit goes in fits and spurts. I’ll stick to it for months and then one night will use my phone to do something and that becomes the pattern for weeks until I yank myself back to reading. The shame is that I enjoy reading more and know it. While my device usage in the bathroom isn’t constant, I make excuses. I have a short break between calls for work and need to catch up on personal email, so I’ll use it. Honestly, it’s disgusting on more levels than one.
What I recognize is that while it is great to build habits that last more than a month by doing without, I’m not quite ready to say that being inspired by 30 days of something is enough to make it stick for ten times that amount of time. Beginning in November, I’ll take it back to what I know works. I’ll start with these 3 habits, but will outline 2025 with more monthly themes like I did in 2023. Writing about them also seems to help, so that will continue.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll reiterate that these are not resolutions. I don’t think those work for most people, present company included. I do think that themes and exercises form protocols and habits. That’s what I’m after and where I hope to increase stability and consistency. I don’t know what my themes for the next 12-18 months will be, but I’m beginning to think more about it and I have some ideas. Most of them center around the blending of zen and stoic philosophies. Leo Babauta wrote a great article recently on this blending.
The Best of What You Have
If you’ve ever heard Rick Rubin speak, you already know that he has a way of making everything sound profound. That being said, I was listening to Rick Beato’s interview with him, and this bit jumped out at me. This clip is only 52 seconds long, and I’ll beg you to listen to the audio vs. only reading the portion quoted below.
He’s talking about instruments, but the statement is even more impactful when you apply it to people. To characteristics of people. To your own relationships.
I listened to that 52 seconds about 20 times over the span of a day. I trimmed it out so I could listen to just that snippet anytime I want. I’m writing about it here because I can’t shake this feeling I’ve had persist since I heard it on Monday morning.
Here’s the most important line. The line that we should all treat as mantra for our interactions with those that we love (and those that we don’t).
Using the things you have and making the best of what those things are, instead of trying to turn them into the thing you wish they were, is a really good way to go.
Thanks, Rick. For being you and making the best out of what you are for all of humanity’s benefit. Not just in music, but in life.
Cabel Sasser XOXO Festival 2024
This video made the rounds the last few weeks on other popular sites. I had to share it here because it is one of the few vidoes I’ve watched lately that had such an impact on me that I thought about it for days after viewing. Please, check it out. It is a gem, as is the speaker.
Power Underneath Despair
This post is my entry for September’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Matthew.
Matthew frames this month’s writing theme (which ties to September being Suicide Prevention Month) as:
In your darkest hour, what saved you? What helped you find the strength to carry on?
This has been a tough one to write about, which I don’t think is surprising. It’s difficult to write publicly about such things for most people. It exposes a side that our normal fascade is purpose built to protect. A writer is often attempting to transcribe an inner voice to written form. This month’s theme is asking that inner writer’s voice to have a conversation with its evil twin that attempted to eat it in the womb and help the poor sap at the keyboard bleed it out all over the page. Sometimes hard things are supposed to be hard.
My personal experience hasn’t been that I have a darkest time. What I’ve had I’d classify as dark times and they have been at various points throughout my life. They represent a vast spectrum of causes, but I can bucket them into two categories. What I’ve come to realize after lots of thought and introspection is that in an earlier phase of my life I was trying to convince the world of who I was. It’s unclear to me when the shift occurred, but in my current phase of life I am trying to convince myself who I am. I haven’t read anything on the topic, but I imagine I’m not unique in this regard. I also have a hunch that for many people, the order of these two phases I describe may be reversed.
What I can say after thinking about this month’s theme is that my darkest times certainly come from the phase I am in now. Anything I thought was dark or difficult when I was trying to convince the world of who I was pales in comparison to the audience of one that is myself. What got me through those dark times was just projecting confidence. Confidence I thought I had. Confidence and actions that built confidence in me within others. It worked really well, for a long time. Then I began to not care what anyone thought. Not just the facade of not caring. Legitimately not giving a shit. You’d think at that point it would just be sailing the seas of joy and prosperity.
What I’ve come to realize is that in the process of growing past caring what others think about me, it opened the door to becoming my own worst critic. Mind you, from the outside, I’m sure it just looked like I’d gained enough confidence in myself to not sweat the opinions of others. To some degree, that is correct, however, anytime life got hard (or gets hard) I find myself sinking to the depths of self-loathing in a way I don’t ever remember under the old regime. It sucks.
So what gets me through? Matthew’s theme is framed in hope, which is important. Things that have helped me so far include (in no particular order or gravity):
- Giving up social media; full delete of accounts.
- Regularly reading The Manual by Epictetus.
- The love of my children.
- The love of my wife.
- The love of my family as a whole.
- Embracing a mantra.
That mantra goes something like this:
Life is a journey. There will be hardships and dark times. Those times condition you for growth and allow you to measure the good times and feelings. Everyone else is on their own journey. Paths will run both parallel to yours and at intersections with no stop signs. Get home safely. Be intentional. The journey ends when it is over.
If you’re struggling, please seek help. Give yourself grace. Balance is an important function of the world. The dark gives the light purpose.
People & Blogs
I’ve been a subscriber and supporter of Manu’s excellent People & Blogs weekly series since issue #1. It has connected me with new blogs, amazing people and made me think about so many aspects of writing and what an opportunity it is to publish your thoughts on anything to the entire population of the Internet.
Today I received the honor of being the featured person and blog. If you landed here from there, welcome. If you’ve been here before and want to know more about me and the journey of my tangible life, check it out and please consider supporting Manu’s lovely gift to the Internet.
Intentional Web Manifesto
Earlier today I linked to a post and added that I would use the phrase “intentional web” vs. “social web” or “personal web”. I can’t stop thinking about it. I feel compelled to push forward the idea that the Intentional Web is the web myself and many others want to help create and consume. So… here it goes:
Manifesto for the Intentional Web
We the humans of the Internet, promote and uphold the following ideals when it comes to the web content we want to create and consume.
- Written by humans.
- Written for humans.
- Engagement is not a measure, it is an action.
- Algorithms don’t direct our attention.
- We curate our consumption.
- Open discourse is not to be weaponized.
- Our feeds intend to feed the mind, not the machine.
- Attention is our currency; we spend wisely.
- Tools facilitate an action, not a solution.
- Intention is the seed for all we aim to grow.
If you resonate with this definition of the Intentional Web, it is yours to have and to represent. Propagate it and integrate it into your own little node of this web we hold so dear.
The social web
Manu’s recent post plus this one are a great example of working out your ideas, assumptions and realizations in public.
That is the web I’m arguing for. A web that is intentional, where what you consume is curated by you and you alone, where connections with others happen because you made the conscious effort to connect. And at this point, I don’t fucking know how to call that web. Maybe “personal web”? I guess I’ll go with that from now on.
I would suggeest/argue that the best name for it would be “intentional web”, since that (to me) is the part that is most lacking in every other form of “web” being described.
Family-style Dining
I’ve had dogs in my life since childhood. Though we have our first cat now, we consider ourselves “dog people” by natural selection. Our current canine family member is an English Mastiff named Oden. He’s almost 3 years old and weighs in at about 200 lbs. He is unlike any dog we’ve had before in so many ways, but this post will focus on one specific behavior that separates him from the rest.
Oden is a “free feeder”, meaning that we place his food in his bowl and sometimes he eats it then, but more often he gets around to eating it eventually. There are days that he will eat his two bowls at breakfast and dinner times and other days he’ll eat them back to back in the middle of the afternoon. I used to worry that it was an odd behavior because it is so different than all the dogs I’ve had before. His attitude towards food is very much like his attitude in general, which is to say he’s the most easygoing member of the house by orders of magnitude.
What I’ve realized in the past few months is that it isn’t as random a schedule as I’d thought originally. Our life as a large household with many children and many activities they’re involved in is probably the definition of chaos to outsiders. We prepare and eat dinner at varying times depending on the day of the week. At first I thought it may be coincidence, but after paying close attention and mentally logging the data (as I tend to do), I can say with certainty that the behavior is intentional.
Oden eats with us.
He knows he isn’t permitted beyond the boundaries of the kitchen cabinets and adheres to this “invisible forcefield” very consistently. When we start to prepare our meals, he pays attention to what’s going on, but almost in the background; merely an observer. Once members of the family start to sit around the kitchen counter seating and the table in our “nook” next to his custom-built-to-his-size dog crate (more on that in another post), he engages. He looks at all of us eating and then walks over to his bowl and begins to eat his food. I appreciate this act of family every single time he does it.
This may be something that is common to his breed, or to dogs more generally, but it isn’t anything we’ve experienced before. He is our first English Mastiff (and possibly our last… the drool stories are real), but if anyone has experiences like this, I’d love to hear about them.
Rituals Roundup
This is my IndieWeb Carnival “roundup” post. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, as this was my first time hosting the Carnival. I’m amazed that 25 people read my topic and felt compelled enough to write something on their blog and send me a link. What an amazing thing it is to have this opportunity and to get to direct people’s minds to write on a topic. The results are below and I strongly encourage folks to click each submission and read it in its entirety. They’re all lovely and my notes are merely my attempt to shine light on what they struck in me. Thanks to all 25 of you that took time out of your lives to write the posts and the email that shared it with me.
Andrea’s Rituali
Andrea’s ritual of a couple’s massage with Noemi whenever traveling may be one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard for how to make experiences abroad even more soothing and relaxing. Chef’s kiss for this one.
Chris’s Rituals
Chris contrasting “working life” morning rituals with those that took hold once not working was fascinating. Once I’d read the post, I wondered what my “post-work” rituals will look like. Something tells me that my coffee ritual will persist, but so many other portions that are mere routine today could elevate to ritual status once time is less dictated by the corporate overlords.
Sara’s No Internet Ritual
When I first received Sara’s post, I didn’t immediately recognize that her referring to the ritual being “negative” meant a ritual of reduction or removal of something. Once I grasped that, I found this post fascinating. My wife recently discussed that we’re going to be doing “phone free weekends” from time to time with our entire family. I’m looking forward to it because I share some of Sara’s feelings from her “no internet” weekends. I hope she gets back on track with her rituals and they bring her the peace she seeks.
V.H.’s Assorted rituals
My favorite thing about V.H.’s post is the various angles of approach to the topic of rituals. That wasn’t merely my flight simulation pun, but a genuine appreciation for the underlying concept that rituals are about the process more than the output. In some cases, the only visible artifact of a ritual is the output, and therefore to another person’s eye, that’s all it represents. My kids see me drinking a cup of coffee and they say to themselves “Dad really likes drinking coffee,” but to understand the ritual is to understand the value of process.
Ken’s New family traditions
Ken took rituals in the direction of family traditions. I enjoyed the take and reading it makes me want to write about some of my family traditions growing up. I somehow differentiate rituals and traditions in my head, but I’m not sure how to articulate the difference.
Juhis’s Rituals build community camaraderie
Juhis nailed something so meta and ironic that I am a little ashamed of myself for not seeing it earlier. The IndieWeb Carnival is itself a ritual framework in many ways. I’m so glad someone pointed out what may have been so obvious to many of the other participants. I was also intrigued by the thought that “free thinkers” may push against rituals as they may feel limiting. I would define myself as such a thinker, but didn’t make that connection until Juhis highlighted it.
Manu’s Rituals
Manu was not the only person to refer to the Japanese tea ceremony this month. The mention of it has me not only wanting to learn more, but also makes my mind seek out other examples of ceremony that could serve as inspiration for how to hold a ritual in its highest regard. This could be in order to preserve it, or merely to further honor it beyond the simplistic term that it brings “joy.” I can also relate to the feeling Manu shares of feeling like life is a table ready to be flipped. Sometimes chaos leads to cleansing.
Chuck’s Rituals
Since Chuck’s ritual and mine both touch on coffee, I’ll share that I actually have a hand grinder ritual of my own. When we travel (just about anywhere), I bring my “kit”. I have a small hand grinder and an Aeropress for those brews. The feeling of the hand grinder is, I agree, meditative in its rhythmic processing of the beans.
Antonio’s Morning Coffee Ritual
Antonio’s morning ritual sounds luxurious to me. My ritual was based on making coffee but his is about experiencing coffee along with something mentally stimulating.
Bob’s Rituals
I respect both stances that Bob outlines. I think that his ritual of limiting variation in his life resonates with me as I’ve often wanted to create such boundaries for myself to simplify. I also like that he’d be open to a new ritual that looks to stretch himself, from time to time.
Jeremy’s A Dearth of Ritual
When it comes to the ritual of death, I agree that it is more for those left behind than for the person that has passed. That being said, I’d caution Jeremy to consider prescribing the rituals that are to be conducted. Not for himself, but as a final act to simplify the decisions they’re having to make in that hard moment.
Tracy’s Ritual Creation
Tracy’s submission was such a lovely way to remember someone who made an indelible mark on her life. After reading this, I feel a sense that the kids that got to be part of Coach Taylor’s rituals were overwhelmingly better for having the experience.
James’ Saturday morning reading
James hits so many great points in this post. His ritual is reading fiction, and this post highlights how he fell back in love with that act and then turned it into a ritual. I can relate as I’d loved reading as a child, but fell out of habit and last year started to read fiction at night as a way to “wind down” and it’s something I now look forward to throughout the day.
foreverlikethis’s VHS to Digital
What a trip down memory lane this post was for me. Not because my family has a vault of memories locked away in some form of media. My mom and dad never made home movies or recordings. We were a 35mm camera clan and so my memories of VHS centers around two realms. Taping of and then re-watching an uncomfortable number of times to admin the show C.H.I.P.S. is the first. The second is my 2 years of employment at Blockbuster Video during the end of the VHS era. DVDs took up only one aisle in our store, but the end came quickly after I left the gig.
Lindsey’s Rituals
I’m so glad Lindsey participated in the Carnival for the first time during this month. The phrasing of “there are no neutral practices” really hits for me. This is a phrase I couldn’t have put my finger on when coming up with this topic nor when I wrote my own. It’s the compliment to the statement around intentionality. Seeing so many mentions of religious context and then an expanded concept of rituals from this exercise has also been a joy for me.
Martín’s Rituals
Martín touches on something I’d not thought of when mulling over rituals as a topic. I definitely thought of the corporate project management connotations of “rituals”, but never the very clear connection to the world of sport. There are so many fascinating examples of rituals that teams or individual players/athletes perform. Sometimes they are rituals of luck and other times they are simply the rituals that set forth the mentality to achieve (in this case, to win).
Soren’s Rituals
Great to see another blogger jumping into the Carnival mix during my month! Soren’s researching of those terms feels very familiar. I will admit that it wasn’t a topic that I landed on easily for my hosting duties, but posts like this one have made me so glad that it was not only well received by the community, but so many amazing posts have come from it.
Marisabel’s Rituals: then & now
Parenting is hard. Like really hard, sometimes. I love that where Marisabel has landed is such a pure distillation of why being a parent, for me, has been the single most rewarding thing I’ve done with my life. I feel like printing her ritual quotable on cards and handing them without judgement to all the parents I see at events with their kids, yet mindlessly scrolling on their phones while they are missing out on something they can never get back.
Mel’s Rituals
One of my favorite parts of the IndieWeb Carnival is that it shines light on parts of this world I knew little to nothing about. I had to do a bit of research just to be able to come back and understand Mel’s post. Finding rituals that connect to importance in your life seems like a win for all involved.
Barry’s Routine
It is ironic that Barry talked about the “typical” version of parents wishing their kids would return to school. I was just talking to someone at work and telling them that I missed my kids being home and I was dreading the return of school. That routine is much less zen for our household, but it is a necessary evil. I can’t wait for them to be back home when I come out of my office during breaks.
Dario’s Rituals
Dario speaks of rituals and ceremonies relating to Scrum project management methodology. I thought of this when I picked this theme, because I often hear the terms used in that context at my day job. I agree with the concept that these are examples of “illusions of control.”
Paolo’s Lack of Rituals
Rituals may not be for everyone and this post by Paolo distills that nicely. I would, maybe, are that Paolo has a ritual of reduction that is thinly masked as habits or previous rituals falling away. It is beautiful in a way because as we have things we do regularly that no longer fit our lives, it is like trimming away branches that no longer need to be on a tree and pruning them away leaves the tree free to grow further in another direction.
Britt’s Rituals
When reading Britt’s post, I came away realizing that our similar ritual of preparing tea or coffee is almost equivalent to a breath. I never would have seen the analogy so clearly had it not been for this lovely submission.
Rees’s Rituals
I’m so glad that Rees decided to start submitting to the Carnival this month! A word that has come up in several submissions is intension. Choosing to derive things in life that are worth designing rituals around by looking through the lens of intentionality is great.
Zinzy’s Rituals
Zinzy nails a feeling I struggle to write about. The feelings of failure from rituals you wish you could break. She also really challenged me to think about how easy it is to hold up the “golden rule” when thinking about how you treat others and how you’d encourage them to treat you, but we rarely hold ourselves accountable to the same standard in how we treat ourselves.
Carl’s Rituals
Carl’s description of savoring that first sip of coffee sounds so familiar to me. The smell and the warmth plus the taste all create a symphony of experience.
PenPals With Jarrod Blundy
Jarrod Blundy writes over at his blog HeyDingus. I got on with Jarrod from our very first interaction. The name of his blog immediately resonated with me from my many hours listening to Merlin Mann’s podcasts. Jarrod’s posts are interesting and span a wide variety of topics.
Jarrod mentioned to me that he had been running a monthly PenPals series where he and another person he’d met on the internet would email back and forth about whatever was on their mind and then he’d post the full conversation on his blog for folks to read once the month concluded. I thought it was an awesome idea and was happy to participated.
Here’s the link on Jarrod’s site to the full exchange. He formats it so nicely, I’d prefer people read it over there than embedding it here.
Jarrod, if you’re reading this post, thanks man. It was my honor to be your July PenPal.
Raindrop No More
Almost out of nowhere, I decided to delete my Raindrop.io account today. It had something like 250 bookmarks in it, but I hadn’t used the service in quite some time to save anything new. I’d moved from Pinboard to Raindrop.io years ago. Both services are great for saving bookmarks and have similar feature sets when it comes to folders, tags, etc.
The reason I deleted the Raindrop.io account is that bookmarking as a service just no longer fits my mental model. The way I approach this now is that if it is something I want to read, I save it to Matter (my read-later app of choice). Once I read something there, I archive it. I don’t go back to those bookmarks, almost ever. What I recognized about myself is that having a huge collection of bookmarks is just giving me more to have to organize and manage. I rarely ever went back to Raindrop.io. It was like a graveyard of links I’d never do anything with, yet I’d tag them and put them into categories. Raindrop.io is a great app for those that manage their bookmarks in a robust way. It just wasn’t for me anymore.
For anything that I truly believe I’ll come back to, I save it to mymind. I use mymind for more than bookmarks. It has become my private vault of sorts, for pictures, links, color palettes, inspiration, mood boards, books, movies, and much more. I’m going to write a post about why I’ve moved in this direction, but for today, realizing I no longer needed Raindrop.io was a nice feeling since that digital clutter has now been removed.
A Short Guide to Dealing with Discouragement
I really enjoyed this piece from Leo Babauta.
…discouragement isn’t a problem.
It’s a property of learning, of growth, of trying. Just like heat is a property of the sun or fire. Discouragement is a property of caring and having hope.
I often frame a similar thought starting with discomfort. I love the perspective that discouragement and caring or hope are flip sides of the same coin.
Rituals
This post is my entry for August’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by the person typing these words.
I’m a systematic thinker. I have many processes and frameworks for how I approach life. Those frameworks have modules and the processes follow a routine. All of those repeatable action sequences accomplish tasks and make my life stable and consistent where it adds value. None of those things are rituals. I have few rituals, and I’m writing about just one of them today; coffee.
Coffee has been part of my life since I was a kid. I’d drink it in the mornings that I’d tag along with my dad to work (which was often). I’d drink it throughout college and into the workforce. Furthermore, I have always had an appreciation for coffee as a beverage that was stronger than most. This all predates the “coffee craze” once there was a Starbucks on every corner and now tons of competing coffee brands springing up to give that Seattle Siren a run for her buckets of money. Coffee did not become a ritual for me until about 15 years ago. That’s when I started to educate myself on bean quality, freshness, variety and the various methods of grinding and brewing. That’s when coffee consumption went from good to out-fucking-standing for me, and when coffee itself went from the scale of love interest to passionate soulmate.
I took a pause in writing this post at this moment to go make a cup.
As rituals go, the steps are simple for mine. They can be summarized as follows:
- Weigh coffee beans.
- Grind coffee beans.
- Pour hot water on ground coffee beans.
- Enjoy drinking delicious coffee.
I’ve detailed the tools I use for this ritual on my Uses page, but that’s not the point of this post. What makes this ritual special and worthy of ritual status isn’t how simple the process can be written. The ritual is about the feelings that the process evokes as it is executed. I use a scale to weigh the beans, but I can normally nail the 20g mark by eyeballing the beans before seeing the reading. I can see if the grind is too fine or coarse based on how the water flows through the bed to the bottom of the V60 and into the cup. For me, making a cup of coffee has evolved from a set of actions to support the enjoyment of drinking it to a ritual that brings enjoyment at every moment in the experience.
Someone pointed out to me that what makes this ritual enjoyable is the little bits of control that are represented throughout. I do tend to agree that my mind does enjoy the structure and the control, however, it isn’t the sole reason. The aroma of the coffee during each phase of production. The sounds of the grinder completing its task. The satisfying landing of the grounds in the cone filter. The beauty in the bloom of that first pour. The slow and sultry retreat of the water as it recedes to reveal the grounds once again between pours. The heat against my face as I take the first sip. It’s all of it. It brings a calm and happiness to my mind and my soul that I can’t imagine being as complete if I weren’t invested in the process. I rarely get coffee while out of the house these days because it feels like a degraded experience. It checks the box for the nostalgia of a truck stop or restaurant cup of coffee, but it lacks the richness of my ritual.
Making a cup of coffee is the ritual that grounds me (pun intended).
Macropad Project
This was a fun one. I’ve wanted to get a macropad for some time now. If you aren’t familiar with macropads, they are simply a small standalone keyboard, sometimes with a knob as an additional control type. I didn’t like most of the cheap products I saw on Amazon, but I also wasn’t looking to spend on the high end for it either. I wanted it to blend aesthetically with my mechanical keyboard and I wanted it to have customizable switches and keycaps so that I could push the style integration to its maximum. There’s also a bit of software called VIA, and compatibility with it was a must as well. This is what allows you to easily program the buttons, knobs and combination of the two however you’d like to perform keyboard shortcuts, recorded key macros, and more (hence the “marco” in macropad).
I’d been looking for some time, and one night was wandering around a combination of subreddits and Google when my search strings brought back the Momokai website. Specifically, a product page for the Aurora macropad from Momokai. I’d never heard of Momokai, but damned if they didn’t make a reasonably priced product that checked every one of my boxes and then some. This thing looked to have build quality way above what I’d been seeing in the same budget. It was an all aluminum design, and I could see from the images online that it disassembled very easily for customization. It only came in anodized black aluminum, but I’ve painted metal parts for other projects, and I knew I could make this thing look perfect for my desk setup.
I ordered it, and then got to work. I did several coats of paint on the parts to carefully bring it from stock black to a matte white that looks perfect next to the keyboard. Using left over keycaps from my mechanical keyboard set makes it look like it belongs right next to it. Here are a few images of the product as it is out of the box, and then my customized beauty:
Aurora macropad as Momokai designed it.
![Aurora macropad [LDLW Edition] - View 1](https://cdn.blot.im/blog_60118cb29b7a4a229ffbfd98b46953e8/_image_cache/c18581ba-e8dd-4caa-b2e0-7befd5646962.jpg)
Aurora macropad [LDLW Edition] - View 1
![Aurora macropad [LDLW Edition] - View 2](https://cdn.blot.im/blog_60118cb29b7a4a229ffbfd98b46953e8/_image_cache/1a5d1e91-2b65-4794-91ca-d2fda78aa981.jpg)
Aurora macropad [LDLW Edition] - View 2
I’ve only just started to program the keys with shortcuts and macros. I want to do this slowly so that I build the muscle memory and make it a true productivity gain vs. just a fun little geek project. My first macro is a simple, but often used one. When I press #1, the macro executes keyboard shortcuts with millisecond pauses where needed to achieve the following workflow:
- Bring Microsoft Teams to front most focus.
- Toggle to the Chats pane of Teams.
- Start a new chat.
- Put the keyboard cursor focus in the Contact box for the chat.
That’s it. Once these steps happen in a matter of a second or two, no matter where I was on my computer, I’m now typing the name of the person I need to chat with and either starting a new chat or bringing up the existing chat thread. I use this many times a day in my work. It saves me both keystrokes and from getting distracted along the way. Sometimes my Cmd+Tab to Teams would land me in another channel or conversation that would take my focus away from chatting with the contact I need to talk to now for the task at hand.
Fido & redirect.pizza
I enjoy finding a tool that solves a very specific problem well. I had that experience twice this week and I wanted to share them since the problems they solve are common to those in the indie web community.
Fido
Fido is a tool developed by Meadowing. It finds broken links on your site. It couldn’t be more simple. You plug in your URL and it scans the whole thing and then comes back with an index of the links that don’t work. When I ran Fido for my site, it found 3 links that were mistyped. Those are now fixed and it was such a simple task thanks to Fido. I found it after seeing another blog that used Meadowing’s lovely Guestbooks solution.
redirect.pizza
Fun name; great tool. redirect.pizza solves a very niche problem when dealing with sites. Most domain name services (like Hover or Porkbun) offer a redirect function. The issue I was running into was that I’d merged two of my old blogs into this one. Hover’s redirects for the two old domains worked, but not for https routes. With most modern browsers defaulting to https (for good reason), this meant that when someone just typed techandcoffee.com into a Safari address bar, it would render a 404 page error. My wife was the one that brought this up to me (thank you). While I knew the technical reason for the negative experience, I hadn’t put the time into finding the right solution.
Rather than having to setup landing pages to point people to Tangible Life, or configuring SSL certs redirects (which wasn’t an option since the old sites are no longer sites, and just domains I still have registered), redirect.pizza’s free tier offers 5 domain forwards that include handling of https routing. It was 5 minutes of configuration between redirects.pizza and Hover and all versions of my previous two sites route here. It even supports forwarding to the same path endpoint (which I didn’t need) and has a toggle for tracking hits or letting it be a completely private implementation (which I opted for the latter).
When I find these little gems, I’m going to collect them into small posts like this one. Simple tools for common problems. Great stuff.