2019

I’ve updated my Now page.

Incoming mist

Uno de mis buenos #propósitos para el año 2020 es encontrar una solución satisfactoria para que puedo borrar mi cuenta de WhatsApp #DeleteFacebook

Great artists steal

BCN 🛫 – 🛬 RTM

The old internet died and we watched and did nothing… …but this old blog is still up and running smoothly.

Prettige kerstdagen | Bon nadal | Feliz navidad | Merry christmas

Why everyone’s mornings seem more productive than yours.

Solid advice from Tim Casasola: Don’t adopt frameworks. Test practices. This is not only applicable to team collaboration, but also to personal effectiveness.

In the 16 years after publishing this list of all 23 different operating systems I have used, I have only used 3 new OSes: Android iOS/iPadOS OS X/macOS

Over the years, I find IFTT easier to use, but more difficult to tweak.

This is a treasure trove of useful information: Surveillance Self-defense: Tips, tools and how-tos for safer online communications

How to obtain perspective and a sense of what is important × Michael Wade

This is an instant subscribe: The Happy Broadcast, an antidote to negative news and “the vitriolic rhetoric that pervades our media”. (via Jason Kottke)

Seth Godin asks us what if we did the work that matters?

In preparation for a post about my blog’s history, I reviewed all posts from 1997–2002. Wow, what an emotional trip through memory lane.

Really WordPress?!

Though I own no dog, I too start my days reading insightful blogs. I already followed a few of them, but (re)discovered a few gems in this list of blogs.

I should never work with a bag of snacks or candy on my table. I don’t know how, but I will finish the whole bag within an hour.

💬When you feel like you’re not productive, it’s not necessarily because you’re lazy or because you have bad habits, it’s because you’re not working on the right projects and you haven’t found the ones that are intrinsically motivating and meaningful to you. Adam Grant on the Tim Ferriss Show

Such a great read: What’s the Point of Productivity? I have only one suggestion for Scott: start using the word effectiveness for the ‘good’ kind of productivity.

11 years ago I was using Movable Type to host my sites, but playing around with other platforms to learn and enjoy. I had already installed WordPress on my own server, but wanted to check out the hosted version. It would take another 9 years before I would actually run a live site on WordPress (and it still isn’t my favorite CMS).

Would you be comfortable giving contact details of your best customer, spouse or friend to a stranger? Then why did you give Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Google access to your complete address book?

Sèquia tercera del canal d’Urgell

Why do Microsoft Office apps ask me whether I want to save my work when I close the app? Of course I want to save it! I would like for Microsoft to adapt the macOS way of saving always and everything without asking.

The main reason I don’t like #blackfriday is that I feel stupid and ripped off for having paid the full price for products and services in the last months.

Muy importante (y uno de mis puntos débiles en los hábitos saludables): La vida sentada… que, poco a poco, nos mata × @MadAbad

Blogs were and are better than “social” media sites. (Via @seligerj)

How to configure your iPhone to work for you, not against you This large article is stuffed with handy tips. Though I not always agree (I would recommend the default apps over installing Google’s alternatives) and some advice should be updated for iOS 13, there is a lot of solid advice. My recommendation: read the arguments before applying any tip.

Since reinstalling my computer last month, I only use the default web browser Safari. I already have decides that when the time comes that I need a second browser, I won’t install Chrome; Firefox looks like a far better option.

I’ve fallen off the microblogging wagon in the last week. Usually that is a bad sign and the direct result of not taking enough time for reflecting on work, life and the world…

This is a sad list. I have used so many of these services in the past.

Capitalism is an efficient system for surfacing and addressing the needs of consumers. But once it veers toward control over markets by a single entity, those benefits disappear. Seth Godin https://seths.blog/2019/11/the-google-tax/

November 9th will always be a special day. 22 years ago I started writing on my personal blog. I have not always been equally active on jeroensangers.com, but it will always be my digital home.

Once in a while, I rotate the OS language of my devices between Dutch, Spanish, Catalan and English. It is amazing how simply organising yourself in another language completely changes your perspective on the work to be done.

Since I’m reinstalling my main computer, today I did my tasks using almost exclusively my iPad and iPhone. It went way better than I expected, though there are some little things, such as text snippets, that I have to fix if I want to use my mobile devices more often for work.

Whenever I visit a website and a dialog pops up telling me that “We care about your privacy”, I always think “No, you do not. You’re just complying with the GDPR rules.”

Stukje bij beetje gaan de bedrijven de goede kant uit: Bij deze bedrijven moet je stil zijn onder werktijd: ‘Ik krijg veel meer gedaan’ × Madelon Meester Is er op jouw kantoor ook tijd en ruimte voor stilte?

Far too many people are unaware of the real consequences of giving up their privacy. As Carissa Véliz writes, privacy is not a private problem, privacy is a collective issue. Because we are intertwined in ways that make us vulnerable to each other, we are responsible for each other’s privacy. I might, for instance, be extremely careful with my phone number and physical address. But if you have me as a contact in your mobile phone and then give access to companies to that phone, my privacy will be at risk regardless of the precautions I have taken.

I lostinvested half the morning on finding good alternatives to Zencastr for recording podcast interviews locally, since Zencastr had technical issues. Fortunately, the issues have been resolved, but now I have two alternative solutions ready in case they ever have issues again: a local solution based on the Audio Hijack–BlackHole combination and Ringr.

Autumn walk through fruit trees

I had exactly the same problem happen to me. Even though I have my iPhone configured to only allow calls from my contacts, some some spam calls got through. I just needed to delete my old ‘Don’t answer’ contact, which I used in the past to silence known phone spammers.

The is so much great advice in this article. More than ‘hacks’ these are basic principles. A neuroscientist shares 5 ways to hack productivity × Aileen Kwun

I advised many coaching clients to create a repository of great questions. I always say that the quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of the questions you ask. To become more efficient, ask better questions × Thomas Oppong

I wish I could set a default skin tone for all emoji instead of having to do it one by one #firstworldproblems

💬As you start with your meditation practice, the first thing you’ll notice is that your mind is completely out of control. Sam Harris

I’ve been wanting to up my meditation practice for a while now. Today I started Sam Harris’ 50 day training course Waking Up, since I’ve heard many good things about it. The first session was—as expected—a very basic 5–minute breathing mindfulness exercise. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s session…

So true: Content ownership is not complicated × @manton

On this Micro Monday, I"d like to recommend @PatrickRhone. His posts make me either reflect or smile (and sometimes both).

This is such a great list of healthy habits by Nicholas Bate: Hunter-Gatherer 21C: The Complete Two Score and Ten

Este altavoz es mío: qué manera más poetica de hablar de POSSE.

Who else finds this Google patent super creepy?

🤔 I’m having mixed feelings on WordPress. On one side, the platform is hopelessly bloated, and on the other side, anytime I want to change something on my site I need “Yet Another Plugin”, since Wordpress doesn’t do it out of the box.

Derek Sivers discusses what it is like to live according to your values: Once you realize that one value is more important to you than another, you have to ask yourself if you’re living accordingly. What’s ultimately more important to you? Learning? Or creating? Money? Or time? Expanding? Or focusing? (… etc.) Once you know which takes top place, consider taking it to an extreme, to its logical conclusion, and optimizing your entire life around that top priority, letting go of almost everything else.

As every year, we went within a few days from sunny at 28℃ to cold and wet. Autumn has officially started in Lleida.

If I notice an error on a page on my site, is there any way to quickly open the current entry or page in WordPress?

Creo que debería existir un carné por puntos para periodistas. Para cada mentira que hay en sus artículos, el periodista pierde un punto. Para ganar puntos hay que encontrar mentiras en los artículos de otros periodistas.

Since VideoDrive doesn’t work on macOS Catalina (and I don’t see an update coming soon), I decides to give iFlicks a try for importing video files in the TV app. So far I like it very much, especially the rules engine for customising and fixing meta data errors.

En este día hace tres años tuvo una videollamada que me cambió la vida. Era la primera conversación sobre lo que ahora es KENSO. No teníamos ningún plan en concreto, no había propósito. Sólo había una conexión personal, muchas ganas de trabajar juntos y unos valores compartidos.

An interesting insight from the book This is not propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev: modern politics don’t censor anymore. The new way of censoring is by flooding the media with ‘alternative’ news, so it is difficult to know whether information is real or just part of a campaign.

What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Garrett Dimon https://garrettdimon.com/2019/quitting-analytics/ This is so true. I do have statistics, but hardly ever look at them.

Me pregunto cuánto dinero los medios de comunicación han ganado con todos los problemas en Cataluña…

After reading this article I started a deep dive into what psychologists call the ‘perceived aversiveness of the task’. You know, that little task that somehow feels very big…

Personal effectiveness basics: steps you can take to keep your concentration and accomplish everything faster. One tidbit I liked: Creating lists can be a double-edged sword,” cautions Hicks. “Lists can certainly help you keep track of and prioritize tasks, but if a lack of focus is due to feeling overwhelmed with the amount of work that needs to be accomplished, then creating a long list of tasks may make things worse Dr.

The mind is a mysterious organ. But there are some things we know about it… and then there are some myths.

Cuanto menos política, más felicidad…

I had a lot of fun trying out @NotionHQ today. In no time I whipped up a functional board to plan my personal development experiments.

💬 Visto los acontecimientos de esta semana, esta cita es más actual que nunca: La no violencia es la mayor fuerza a disposición de la humanidad. Es más poderosa que el arma de destrucción más poderosa concebida por el ingenio del hombre. Mahatma Gandhi

I am going to try out this meeting structure in our next team meeting: How to host the best meeting of the week.

Today I made a huge mistake. When reading articles on several newspapers1 on the current events in Catalonia I made the humongous error to browse through the comments left by other reader. I instantly lost all hope for humanity. Really, why do newspapers have comments at all? Don’t they feel responsable for their sites? I sometimes have the impression that I am the only person making the effort to always read articles published on both sides of the political spectrum ↩︎

The mind is powerful: If you think you don’t have time, you’re probably right. If you think you have plenty of time, you’re probably right. You might be living in a ‘time-scarcity’ mindset.

Derek dreams on… When considering effectiveness, most experts focus on attention management. However, daydreaming offers additional productivity benefits.

Monty Python And The Holy Grail is available for free on YouTube

What is a personal web site without a proper Now page?

Happy anniversary, blogging! 25 years ago, Dave Winer had the fantastic idea to start a blog. Without knowing Dave’s work or the existance of blogging, I accidentally started what I called my ‘News page’ three years later…

Since leaving Facebook and Instagram and loosing interest in Twitter, I decided that the right strategy for me is POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). So I dusted off my old Wordpress site and created an account on micro.blog and am already enjoying it!