Excursions

How much ever I try, I cannot be an active microblogger – I mean putting short posts. I cannot think in less than 200 characters.

When my daughter requested recently if she can have her YouTube channel, I wondered if she would manage to keep her interest. She does. She reads, writes and keeps recording. Sure, not everything comes out perfect. But she does not stop. Today, her second video is out. Yay!

Yep. I know first hand now, that’s just plain weird 🤦🏽‍♂️

Gruber says, and many have observed the same.

The iPhone 13 Mini has longer battery life than last year’s regular iPhone 12. That’s a game-changer for those who want the Mini size.

Yep, it makes the mini iPhone a lot more appealing.

I spent a wonderful evening with close friends yesterday whom I met after a long period, some after more than 10 years. It’s remarkable how time can’t slacken some threads, lost possibly in the dull grinds of the life. You pick these threads from where you left them. As you remember the memories of yesteryears, you can laugh at them — or be affected by the updates from people that are not around you at this moment.

You know your bond with a few folks is strong when they can lend the present moment innate warmth. You feel a deep kinship, regardless of how much time has passed since you last met them. Yesterday evening was one such occasion, when we tickled many old memories and made a few new ones.

I joined Literal yesterday — I am @amit there. I also have three invites to share. So, if you are tired of Goodreads or just want a new service to play with, please use the share link.

I love the 120-Hz display. Because I can then read the text while scrolling.

A comment from one of the iPhone 13 reviews. Sigh, levels we will go to justify the trivial upgrades in gadgets.

Austin Mann’s reviews of iPhone cameras are absolutely brilliant each year. And this year’s one for iPhone 13 Pro is no different. All shots are gorgeous. Even the video shot completely on iPhone is stunning. These devices are smartphones, no longer. These are “smartcameras”.

I believe I don’t know how to use a browser. There are just so many features in every browser that make no sense to me. And the list keeps getting growing. Tab pinning. Tab Groups. Tab Management. Reading Lists. Password Managers. Reading Lists. I use none.

I published the 20th issue of my newsletter yesterday. Though I am proud that I have stuck with this hobby of mine, I would also love to get some feedback, some critique. I don’t care about numbers — that’s another reason I have disabled the analytics. But I do love to hear from you.

I have got a few via emails and I have loved each one of them. It has improved each issue.

• If you like something, I would love to read. If you don’t like something, I would love to read that more.
• In case you prefer email, do subscribe. If you prefer RSS, do let me know. There’s that too.

After a two-weeks break away from all the timelines, it was good to scroll through a couple of them today.

The break also made me realise that I have made a few new friends online, especially from the wonderful community at Micro.blog. I missed the interactions with these folks. Each one of them is a brilliant creator in his or her own way. Bloggers. Photographers. Writers. They all are natural. They all inspire me.

I feel at home here, feel am part of this community. Not a feeling many platforms online can cultivate within you. It’s wonderful to be back and read through the lively discussions. The growth hasn’t dented the warmth, something that is pretty palpable here.

In reply to micro.blog/ronguest/…

Thank you, Ron. I will pass on your feedback. She doesn’t care much about anything other than creating, but still would love to hear anyway. 🙂👍🏼

Hello Friend,

After reading my fair share of self-help books recently, I have realized that they all follow a pattern. They start with a brilliant, unique idea. The first few chapters present the core in the most masterly manner and back it up with intriguing research and anecdotes. The author wants to answer one key question, why all readers should listen to what she says.

This part of the self-help books, especially those around psychology, gets a firm grasp on my interest. I usually note what amuses me about the central premise and the structure that the writer has put forth thoroughly. And then the book hits a damper.

Though the initial chapters always pique my interest, the subsequent chapters are most tiring to read through. They are generally fillers, present just to elevate the central idea into a book.

This hack of chasing fillers taints most of the self-help books published today. To avoid that, the author needs to be an absolute master at what she is talking about. She needs to know a lot more than she is willing to include in the book, a rarity among authors of self-help books. They generally start as a blog post, evolve and expand after numerous interactions with friends and readers.

Another case when an author doesn’t chase the fillers is when she doesn't hesitate to give up on the conventional measures of completion and success. The author does not consider the number of pages or the quote-worthy phrases as her target – a case in point, most self-published authors.

The first is about confidence in one's prowess. The second one is about control on one's objective. Self-confidence and self-control allow a writer to eliminate the need to artificially puff up their work with unnecessary fillers. And this has an apt parallel in our real life too. If we have control over deciding what matters, discipline to pursue it and confidence to execute it, we need not surround our lives with fillers.

Avoid fillers in what you say or do. Be clear about your core and focus only on that. What do you believe in? Everything else that you undertake or achieve is just a filler — all it does is deviate you from what you should focus your time and energy on. What do you believe in? Everything else wastes the time of yours and others, just like a book full of fillers does for its writers and its readers.

The filler pages do not define a book, the same way the filler days do not define who we are. Our core defines us. So, ask yourself again — what is your core?

"The Radical Moral Implications of Luck in Human Life" by David Roberts →

Allowing for luck can dent our self-conception. It can diminish our sense of control. It opens up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about obligations to other, less fortunate people. Nonetheless, this is a battle that cannot be bypassed. There can be no ceasefire. Individually, coming to terms with luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening, the first step in building any coherent universalist moral perspective. Socially, acknowledging the role of luck lays a moral foundation for humane economic, housing, and carceral policy.

"Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead" by Chuck Klosterman →

Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do.

" The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t" by Steven Johnson →

It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source. Write a novel or record an album, and you can get it online and available for purchase right away, without persuading an editor or an A&R executive that your work is commercially viable. From the consumer’s perspective, blurring the boundaries has an obvious benefit: It widens the pool of potential talent. But it also has an important social merit. Widening the pool means that more people are earning income by doing what they love.

Postscript

I also write long-form essays by choice, which I publish along with the issues of this newsletter. I can email you these essays as well if you are interested. Just let me know. Or you could, of course, subscribe to the good old RSS feed.

I want to recommend below my essays and videos to you, published since I delivered the previous issue of the newsletter.

• Interesting, but I Don't Have Time for You →
• My Micro Camp talk — Be a Donkey — on YouTube →
• My daughter got her YouTube channel now →

Have any recommendations or feedback for me? I would love to hear from you. Just hit reply, or you can even email me.

Thank you for reading and sharing.

-Amit

After a year of recording and sharing videos with the closed family, my daughter requested for something I knew she would one day, her own YouTube channel. After putting all the checks in place, here’s her video for Kids published on the Web.

Gabriel wonders how all write emails, specifically two questions — where to draft and how to review.

I love writing emails, I wish I knew more folks who enjoy my enthusiasm for emails. But my process of doing so is simple. I use the email client to draft the email. If I ever want to get it reviewed from someone else, I will just mail them with the draft or temporarily share the device.

There’s another reason why I don’t use any text editors for emails. Because if I do, I will start writing in Markdown and eventually hate my email client for not growing up.

Isn’t it fascinating that there are two services so similarly named, Discourse and Discord, being used by different platforms as discussion boards for their users? I always get confused between the two. I like one, I hate the other.

Earth’s mysterious red glow, explained →

In 2009, a satellite circled Earth, scanning and sorting the wavelengths reflecting off the planet’s surface. Researchers noticed something baffling: an unexpected wavelength of unknown origin. They tried looking at Earth with only this wavelength, and saw the planet covered in a red hue of varying intensity. So, what was going on?

Cambridge scientists might have possibly detected presence of dark energy.

About a year ago, the XENON1T experiment reported an unexpected signal, or excess, over the expected background. “These sorts of excesses are often flukes, but once in a while they can also lead to fundamental discoveries,” said co-author Dr Luca Visinelli.

It’s curious to read about the scientists talking about their experiments. Their palpable excitement is always contagious.

“Erased From the Internet” - now that’s one phrase that I never thought I would hear. But I knew if I ever did hear that, one key option would be China.

It’s curious to watch Gruber on CNBC TV, something doesn’t feel right. I can’t put my finger on what, but I guess I just am not used to seeing him in such formal settings. Plus, he being referred to as “expert” and “blogger”.

If you like ebooks, great. Enjoy your dim, gray screen in peace. If you hate them, don’t worry about it. Who says everything must involve a computer?

I love physical books, but I prefer reading the ebooks. I hope the distinction is clear enough. If I could afford, I would purchase both the physical and digital version of a book. Read the digital version, carry around my library in the Kindle always. That affluent me then can gawk at the beauty of the physical book and stack it in his self-designed library.

Source: The Atlantic — “Why Are Ebooks So terrible?”

There’s so much of coverage for Colossal — a firm that plans to resurrect the Woolly mammoths. I have made an entry in the diary. We will remember this day as one when the curious scientists planted the seeds for the massacre at Jurassic Park.

Apple and other companies need to stop delivering these pre-recorded overproduced keynotes. Without live demos and hands-on reports, they are no longer mediums to introduce their gadgets. They simply are extended advertisements, or short films featuring devices in lead roles and executives in supporting roles.

I love to scroll through this 360-degree panoramas feature at National Geographic about Everest and its surrounding peaks. All the shots are breathtaking, especially the sunset view!

By the way, here’s a meta update which I forgot to put out there. I have ended the trial of the Glass app — the subscription price was hefty for my usage. I am not a photographer, you see. So, I did not fit there. At the same time, I decided to pay for Ulysses and Reeder. I love both the apps, and they reduce that slight friction from the two activities that I love doing.