Morning Coffee 39: January 9th, 2023

There is no coffee today. Just protein shakes. This also isn’t in the morning. I’m writing this in the afternoon while walking a track, right before playing basketball at a local gym. Spent the morning with Rose, enjoying the neighborhood sidewalks and parks. Let’s begin.

Table of Contents

1. Year of Depth: Update
2. Health & Fitness
3. The Great Consolidation

The Box

• Watching: Chernobyl
• Reading: Work Clean
• Playing: The Last of Us
• Listening: Analog(ue)

Watching Chernobyl and playing The Last of Us Part 1 before this upcoming Sunday, when The Last of Us HBO series premieres. (The director of The Last of Us also made Chernobyl.)

My current Home Screen and my current weather app, Carrot.

Year of Depth: Update

We’re a week into the new year, and all of my goals are still going as planned. (I started them weeks prior, early in December, so the habits have already taken shape.)

Health & Fitness

Calory and Happy Scale are the apps I’m using to track my daily diet and weight. Happy Scale’s “moving average” is the game changer. Our weight fluctuates each day, but the moving average gives me the number to focus on. The average of all those fluctuations.

The Great Consolidation

Turning down the volume

Reeder

What was once Twitter, Substack, YouTube, Mastodon (and so many other places to keep up with), is now simply one app: Reeder.

Reeder is now my main app for all news and social media feeds. Because of this, the signal to noise ratio is much better. I no longer see the commotion that comes with a current event. Reeder keeps me informed without all the extra distractions.

Reeder is built on RSS, and I’ve learned that you can get an RSS feed for almost anything on the web.

Examples:

• Pasting a YouTube channel link into Reeder becomes a feed

• Adding “.rss” to the end of a Mastodon profile link becomes a feed

• In Reeder, there’s a Twitter section that connects your feed to the app

The Great Consolidation is me shrinking down the web to something much more enjoyable. The internet is a very loud place, and yet I’ve taken all that noise and consolidated it into something that’s more like a library.

This is Morning Coffee: a weekly newsletter that arrives in your inbox every Monday morning. I write about productivity, technology, and cool things I find on the internet. My wife wants this to be my only job, so pay what you want, purchase my books on Amazon, or join my Music Program.