Signs of age, Bitcoin energy, Obsidian plugins, and more
The Weekly Review: Vol VIII Issue 4
Hello friends,
Welcome to another issue of The Weekly Review, your less-than-weekly newsletter about spirituality, personal knowledge management, and random internet miscellany. If you somehow took a wrong turn and ended up here, you can unsubscribe anytime using the link at the bottom of this message!
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This past week, we had two birthdays in our house. My wife turned 40 and our son Jack turned 13 (meaning we only have one non-teen left 😳). Both were good reminders of how life is passing by. And I’m truly starting to feel the age is little ways.
Old pains visit more frequently and overstay their welcome. I have less energy overall. And the highlight of our week is the Saturday afternoon nap.
But where I really start to feel old is around my kids. The words they use, the things they do on social media, and the things they find funny don’t make sense to me. And while there are still topics of the digital life that I can tell them about, it feels increasingly like I’m the one getting left behind.
I suppose this is inevitable, but some times it hits you harder than others. I try to hide the fear, but they smell it.
Then they tell me, “Dad, that’s suss. I smell cap.”
🤷♂️
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Items of note
The Last Word on Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption
Speaking of topics that make me feel old. Despite the title (we’re likely nowhere near the “last word” on Bitcoin), this article challenges a few of the ideas I’ve had about cryptocurrencies. I’ve long held the view that anything related to blockchain technology is negative — the environmental impact is simply too high. But I confess I barely understand how this stuff all works.
Nic Carter makes a few points that challenge the common assumptions and got me thinking about this once more:
Another common mistake energy detractors make is to naively extrapolate Bitcoin’s energy consumption to the equivalent CO2 emissions. What matters is the type of energy source being used to generate electricity, as they are not homogenous from a carbon footprint perspective. The academic efforts that get breathlessly reported in the press tend to assume either an energy mix which is invariant at the global or country level. Both Mora et al and Krause and Tolaymatgenerated flashy headlines for their calculations of Bitcoin’s footprint, but rely on naive extrapolations of energy consumption to CO2 emissions.
It’s an interesting read, but even he admits the bottom line is that this technology is energy intensive. I’m still of mostly the same mind, but am trying to keep my mind open about it. And to just understand what it’s all about.
And don’t even ask me about NFTs …
We’ve been defining product marketing wrong
As I’ve shifted my role at Wildbit over the past year, I’ve read a lot of materials on the topic of marketing. Some good, a lot not so much. This specific newsletter is of the former, and focuses on defining a product marketer.
In most of these product marketing definitions a key point is missed: product marketers should be just as versed in who the company is building for, as they are in what the company is building, if not more.
I love this approach and I’d even argue that there’s a very fine line between working in customer success and working in product marketing. Both of those roles need to put the customer front and center. And this falls in line with what we call being people-first.
This piece also includes a good table describing what an “audience-focused” product marketer does compared to a product-marketer lacking the distinction.
The Compounding Effect of Small Leaks
I enjoyed this article from Zakk Fleischmann. In it, he talks about how spending $5 for a Starbucks coffee is a “leak” and how this trickles into other areas of life.
Poker players have this concept called a leak: a blind spot that causes you to consistently make an error. As an example, a very common rookie leak is to only raise (put in more money) when you have a good hand. You can see why this would be problematic: after a few rounds, an observant opponent will be able to tell when you have a good hand and when you don’t.
There’s no question that getting an extra coffee is a small leak. But what starts as a $5 coffee on your walk to work can quickly become lunch out, with a drink or a side, and/or ordering dinner out instead of cooking what’s in your fridge. Yes, the first leak was only $3. But that leak grew throughout the day and now its $80 ($5 for coffee, $15 for lunch, $50 for dinner, plus $10 to have it delivered).
This reminds me of the idea of saying no to yourself. If you don’t practice this, it will be hard to do so in any situation (this is why fasting is an important discipline). And once you say yes to one temptation, it’s easier to give in to your desires in other areas.
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Obsidian tip of the week
If you haven’tr tried this tool yet, go grab a copy.
If you have installed it, but are still in the process of adopting it in your workflows or daily routines, here are a few recommendations I have for setting it up.
- Enable the daily note plugin. Open the Preferences using CMD+, (same as any app on macOS). Under Core plugins, there are several good default plugins. But none are more helpful to getting started using Obsidian than the daily note.
- Enable other plugins that make sense for you. I didn’t realize how many good options were available here in my first few weeks of serious usage. But now I use the following: Random note, word count, quick switcher, and tag pane to name a few.
- Review the hotkeys. aka shortcuts. Using the keyboard is one of the first things I try to learn with any app. Obsidian has a nice way of listing this out, letting you search through the list, and assign your own combinations.
- Automatically update internal links. Located under Files & Links. I can’t recall if this is enabled by default, but I want it on at all times. If I have links to an existing note and I then decide to rename that note, I don’t want to have to manually update those links.
- Enable tags in the graph view. Explicit manual linking between notes is ideal, but I also like to see common themes across files. Adding tags is how I do this and it’s nice to see those in the graph (you can enable this in the graph options in the top left)
Those few steps made the product easier to use and more useful for me.
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Quote of the week
Everyone has a set of default activities for filling the little gaps in their day, but they’re usually subconsciously chosen. You can get a lot of control over how you spend time by choosing sensible defaults. Keep a short list of good default activities to do whenever you have a few free minutes and you don’t want to decide what to do.
William Van Hecke, Cadence
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Currently
Reading: Dune. I’m only just started, and while there are a lot of vague details about the history and religion/spirituality and a lot of unfamiliar names and terms, it’s been good. I feel hooked.
Listening: Com Truise put out In Decay, Too late last year and it’s been a go-to work album for me. The album was a play off of an earlier one (In Decay), and while it’s a collection of tracks he’d recorded-but-not-released over the years, you can feel some of the same tones as the 2012 album. But overall, I think it’s one of his better collections of songs and an easy listen.
Drinking: It’s Lent, so any beer I’ve had recently is non-alcholic. Sadly, much of it has been less than good.
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Can you believe a time change is just about here already? Next time you see an email from me, we’ll have just moved the clocks forward. Until then, I’ll enjoy the naps as much as possible to make up for that hour of sleep!
