onfocus

I’ve been meaning to post this article ever since it came out but I’m being compassionate with my past self about not doing it yet. My future self is used to disappointment so that guy should be pleasantly surprised it’s off his plate. Anyway, lots of good psychology here to help with productivity. Add reading it to your to-do list.

"I’d start with, at most, 10 news sites to subscribe to. This will give you a feel for how fast you want the feed to move. Too slow? Add more. To fast? Delete a few. I try to narrow things down even further: Instead of subscribing to the New York Times, which publishes dozens of items per day, I subscribe specifically to the Times’ tech section, which means I get a much more curated selection."

Seconded. And hey, I could have written this. This article has great advice for embracing the decentralized lifestyle. I personally use a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS with Reeder on iOS which costs about $8/month at AWS. Instead of limiting feeds, I subscribe liberally and put them in folders by subject. Then I browse by subject periodically instead of the full list of feeds and tune from there.

“This program opens a socket and pretends to be an SSH server. However, it actually just ties up SSH clients with false promises indefinitely...”

Discouraging bots is a fun hobby I approve of. I like this simple Python script that exploits an RFC loophole.

"The decentralized web is a mindset and a belief in an alternative structure that can address some of the afflictions that have risen from data pollution."

This article raises more questions than it answers but it’s a good summary of why some of us prefer decentralized web tools and recreation. Re-decentralization feels like a lost fight but I’m glad people are working on it.

This Google site is a fun tour of some of the details in Vermeer's paintings. It works well on a small phone screen too. I also use the Google Arts & Culture new tab extension that shows me a new painting when I open a blank browser tab.