Category Archives: Lifehacking

Lifehacking

What to do with books that don’t spark joy?

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In the wake of moving on from @ValhallaVC, I brought home a bunch of books.

Which brought to the fore how many books I had in my home study.

So I pulled the trigger on Marie Kondo’s “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”.

Well, I didn’t follow her Rx 100%.  She wants you to take all the books in your house, put them in one pile, and go through them.  I wasn’t even about to pile all the books in my study into one pile.

But I _did_ do what she said next, which is pick up the books, one at a time, and ask “does this item spark joy in me”?  If not, out it goes.

Well, an astonishing 150 or so books didn’t spark any joy in me, so out they want.

Life-changing magic in my study.  Lots of empty space now on the bookshelves and lots of new books to imagine there.

But, meanwhile, what to do with the non-joy-sparking losers?

I looked on the InterTubes, and found the advice to go to Powells (the Portland, OR treasure) online and sell the books.

Cool.  All I had to was paste a list of the ISBN numbers into a text box at powells.com, and they would tell me which ones they wanted to buy (for PayPal or store credit).

So I got a nice ISBN-scanning Android app (XScanPet).  I got the paid version on Google Play for $1.49 because it had some features I liked and because, well, I wrote software for a living for 20 years and think people who pump code should get paid.

And I went through the stacks of books, batch by batch, and pasted the ISBNs into powells.com.  Powells has wanted maybe 15 of the 80 or 90 I’ve processed so far, so the hourly rate on this label is abominable, but so what, it’s the principle of the thing!  Those books were valuable once so they should be valuable now.

In any case, almost done.  Next joy target in the study is junk in my desk drawers.

Lifehacking, Making

Cheap Home Automation

My son is a new homeowner, so we naturally have a boatload of homeowner-ly things to talk about now.  One of them was home automation.

I’ve been automating lights and timers for many years now, going back to the X.10 days.  For the past ten years I’ve pretty much used Insteon equipment, form SmartHome, because it’s pretty cheap, pretty broad in terms of kinds of switches and sensors and controllers, and because, although it’s proprietary, you can get the APIs and hack at it.

So I told him about Insteon, and got as far as, “well, smart lightswitches and smart outlets in Insteon cost about $30 each…”  He said, “Whoa.  That’s not cheap.  How can I get home automation cheap?”

So we both started looking, and found a boatload of open-source work on home automation.  Most of it involves someone writing controller-side code — or even a whole controller-side platform — to command “various” peripherals.

OK, that’s great.  If you wrote your own controller and put it on an old computer — or a new cheap Pi-class computer — you could save the cost of a controller and its software.  These run about $150 for Insteon, and seem similar for other protocols.  The Zonoff hub (full disclosure: my firm Valhalla Partners is an investor in Zonoff), found in Staples Connect home automation sets, retails for maybe $50, but you get the idea.  That’s not chump change, but if you have 20 peripherals at $30 a pop, the total system cost is (20*$30)+$150= $750, so by doing your own controller you’re only saving 20%.

The main question seems to be: can you get down the price of the peripherals from $30 to something more Earth-bound?

CrummyCook, Lifehacking

Make-ahead Lunch Weeks 3, 4: Ham Bone, Greens, and Bean Soup

Well, make-ahead lunch week 3 got eaten by Snowzilla here in DC.  Couldn’t get out for ingredients.  Too much shoveling to make lunch on Sunday.  Didn’t get out to work a couple of days that week so no lunch needed.

Existing stocks of Peruvian Vegetable Soup and Burritos tided me over the days I did go to work.  All goodness

So this Sunday the snow was largely melted, the game was on again, and so I found a soup recipe that was 1) fibre-tacious, 2) within my capabilities, 3) would freeze easily.

Indirectly, an article on soups that freeze led me to this Melissa Clark recipe for Ham Bone, Greens, and Bean Soup.

A bunch of kale, a half-head of cabbage.  All good.  Used canned beans instead of dry.  Okey-dokey.

The ham bone itself was a problem.  Our Whole Foods doesn’t do deep dish butcher-y things like cut ham bones in three.  I sometimes even think they make meat without any bones, innards, or waste.  Well, not really, but they give a good simulation.

In any case, Debbie was at the Whole Foods while I was doing stuff at the hardware store, and she got a already-cooked ham hock with bone in.

So I figured with the canned beans and the already-cooked ham there was excess cooking time in the recipe.  I went straight to the cabbage and kale after bringing the ham to a boil, and thus reduced the cooking time by 1/2 hour.

Oh, and I used chicken stock instead of water.  I prefer stock to water most of the time anyhow, and who knows what would happen with an ersatz (or at least jury-rigged) ham bone.

It was a huge amount of soup  I froze four portions and there were still 3-4 portions left for the fridge.  I had some for breakfast this morning.  Pretty tasty.

The make-ahead scheme for the year is taking shape.  Each Sunday make one new dish and have enough portions of the previous dish(es) left over to insure that there’s A/B variety each week.

This is all quite feasible in soup season, because these soups are actually pretty easy to make.  I don’t know how it’s going to go once we get to salad season, since salads seem at least much more hard to keep than freeze-able soups.

I’m improving in my ability to eyeball a recipe and see if it’ll taste good and be within my powers to prepare.  I guess it’s like sight-reading music.  If you do it enough you build up a skill for it.  Unlike sight-reading, you don’t have to do it in real time.

I’m also very marginally improving in my abilities to prep food quickly and efficiently.  I can chop a bit better, particularly since I’ve begun to sharpen my knives a bit more diligently.  If you take the time to put a decent edge on them they keep the edge better, so you get more effortless chopping and less holding-and-separating between chops.  But maybe I should take a course in food prep or something.  Couldn’t hurt.

Lifehacking

Thinking about Zeal

I read an article in WSJ this morning using Facebook data to show that gym attendance drops off 10% at the beginning of February.  “Oh, yeah”, you say to yourself, “New Years’ resolutions gone sour.”

But what’s going on here?

I’ve been coasting through January on my fitness goals — 185 lbs, 120/80 blood pressure, and 22% body fat — effortlessly (well, more or less) doing my diet stuff and my exercise stuff.

Is that “will power”?  I don’t think so.  I think it’s zeal.

I’ve been through this a lot over the years: some behavior change, either starting up a good habit or ending a bad one, is unbelievably difficult, day after day, year after year, attempt after attempt.  Until, suddenly, one day, I’m… ready.  And once I’m ready, the change is easy.

What’s changed?  Something happens.  In the case of smoking (which I quit years and years ago), it was the birth of my son.  Not my first child.  And I had struggled to quit after my first was born, without success.  But suddenly, I had reached some tipping point, and it was easy.  I did the same things I had done before — the Nicorette, the rewards, the toleration of overeating, the whole bag of tricks — but now it was effortless.  I would (probably!) have done the same thing if I were living with a smoker.  My zeal had kicked in.

A few questions:

What is zeal?  No idea.  Some kind of limbic-system switch flips to the other position.  Kind of like falling asleep.  or maybe falling in love.

Can you command it?  No idea.  Maybe.  My best guess today is you’ve got to keep trying and simply recognize when the zeal has come.  If you keep trying, your bag of tricks will be ready when the zeal is ready for you.  But maybe there are things you can do to hasten or enhance the probability of getting zeal.

Lifehacking

OK, well, New Years 2015

New Years resolutions have about the same status in the circles I move in as chiropractic: “Yeah, that stuff doesn’t work.”

But I love them.  For the same reason I like self-improvement and the 7 Habits and everything else: there’s wisdom in there.

I have an essay I’ve never finished about why intellectuals hate self-help… Some New Years I’ll finish it.

In any case, I’ve gotten pretty good mileage out of resolutions at the beginning of January and assessment at the end of December.

And so here I am in 2015, re-beginning blogging (part of a couple of resolutions) and, in January, trying to cobble together a new fitness regime.

I’m a big fan of “Younger Next Year” and what Chris Crowley, the main author, has come to call the “Younger Next Year” books.  I read the latest, “Thinner This Year”, over the holidays.  And it contained, to my surprise and pleasure, a better routine for warm-ups and strength exercises.

Chris C. has my number: his new routine is aimed at strength training done wrong.  He claims — and it makes some sense — that doing the right exercises wrong makes you worse, that form (and the mother of all form, posture) is quite important to fitness.

So I’m trying, first the warm-ups, and then the strength moves themselves, over the month of January.

I’ll keep you posted.