A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ Remember that wild painting in the final episode of Severance season 2? Well, now it’s an amazing real-life (and massive mural) in L.A.). [🔗 9to5mac.com]

2️⃣ This neat project by Avi Bagla keeps track of when every word in the dictionary has been used in a Bluesky post. [🔗 avibagla.com]

3️⃣ Robert Birming responded to my post about not posting with his thoughts on different motivations for blogging. [🔗 birming.com]

4️⃣ Herman’s got some really good, human tips for dealing with email. [🔗 herman.bearblog.dev]

5️⃣ McSweeney’s does it again, nailing these AI-assisted wedding vows with satire that I fear will become only too true. [🔗 mcsweeneys.net]

6️⃣ A throwback to a throwback. A couple of years ago, Parker Ortolani made a concept of modern apple.com showing off pre-iPhone products. Honestly, still looks great. I’m curious if their website will soon get a Liquid Glass makeover. [🔗 x.com]

7️⃣ Pratik gets it when it comes to taxes. [🔗 writing.desipundit.com]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

So I’m simply not going to do it, and you can’t make me. 😜

This is post #9/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust

So I just typed into ChatGPT, “I need an easy prompt for a Blaugust post.” Here’s what I got: What’s one small habit or tool that’s made your life noticeably better in the past year? Alright, I’ll take it and turn it.

Year of Small Improvements

When contemplating a Yearly Theme for 2025, I decided to follow CGP Grey’s lead from 2024 and go with the Year of Small Improvements. The idea being that instead of letting small annoyances stack up and continuously bother me, I’d make an effort to deploy small fixes and reap the stacked up benefits instead. At first, I kept a list of these small improvements, but I kind of fell of that habit. But I’ll share one of my favorites that I truly appreciate every day.

The problem: Our silverware holder slid all over the drawer.

Every time we’d open the silverware/utensils drawer, it would slide around the drawer. For someone who likes things to be in the right place, and also to not push the cooking utensils around so that they block the drawer opening correctly, this was pretty annoying.

Attempted fixes:

• One Command strip holding it in place
• Two Command strips holding it in place
• A screw installed behind the drawer to block it from scooting back

The final fix:

• A screw in the back and on the side to block it from moving out of place

It took quite a few attempts, but we got there in the end. And every time I open the drawer now, the drawer stays firmly in place and I’m a little happier. 😮‍💨

This is post #8/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust

The extreme preciousness of time is the point of this video by the To Scale: channel, but I hope you’ll spend 10 minutes of yours to watch it and marvel at the vast scale of the history of the universe, and our fleeting portion of it.

Amazing vision, effort, production, and payoff on this project.

This is post #7/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust Linked

Here I am, again, blogging past 11pm to try to keep up with my Blaugust goal. Although I am typically a night owl, this week I’ve been both night owl and early bird and it’s catching up with me.

Tomorrow, I have to wake up at 4:30am (in just five and half hours — yikes!) to be at a local trailhead ready to start hiking at 6am. It’ll be a long day of hiking and climbing up the Trap Dike — a very distinctive slot and slab that rises from the lake a the bottom of the Mt. Colden to its summit — with I think about 12 miles round-trip with several thousand feet of elevation gain, guiding clients on a rope system up through the steep and exposed terrain.

This is after a long day of personal climbing today, in which I was out from 10:30am until 9pm climbing at various crags in the area, culminating in a challenging route that I put up for ADK Climb Club.

Which was after a big day of guiding climbing yesterday from 8:30am till 4pm, and then a 5+ mile trail run up a mountain after work for ADK Run Club.

Which was after a big day on Monday of guiding climbing in the morning, and then doing personal climbing until after dark.

Which was after a day of canoeing with my wife in which we checked out a route that spits us out into the lake near our house.

And then on Friday I’ll have a big day of guiding a long hike (13 miles) up Gothics mountain with some clients that I took rock climbing on Monday.

Which will be followed by three days of canoe camping with my wife over the weekend.

Which will be followed by an afternoon of guiding rock climbing.

Which will be followed by — hopefully! — a rest day. 😮‍💨

To be clear, this is in no way a complaint. I love doing all these activities. I feel so fortunate to live and work in a place with such access to my favorite outdoor activities, and a great community of friends (and clients) to share it all with.

It’s just that I feel, sometimes, lately, a bit worn thin. I know I need to take more time to recover so that I can perform at my best. But. There’s so much that I want to do, and any day of good weather feels like a gift that I shouldn’t squander.

These lyrics from Hamilton’s “Non-Stop” come to mind:

How do you write like you’re running out of time?
Write day and night like you’re running out of time?

Every day you fight like you’re running out of time
Like you’re running out of time
Are you running out of time?

This is post #6/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust

My wonderful wife approached me in a tizzy yesterday. She had that look in her eye that told me she had a technology rant built up and me — the tech guy — was going to hear about it.

Sure enough, she needed to inform me that she was not happy with the lineup of Kindles that Amazon sells today. She’s been a longtime user of the original Kindle Oasis. In fact, when she smashed the screen of her first one, she bought a used version of the same model to replace it instead of purchasing a new (bigger, aluminum, 2nd-gen) one. She would have been well-reasoned to do so; her Kindle is her most-used device and it’s not even close.

What does she love about that original Oasis? All the same things I did. Namely, its ultra-portable size and weight, its flip cover with extra battery built in, its physical page-turn buttons, and its waterproofing.

All those features are missing from today’s Kindle lineup. The Oasis is no more. The plain Kindle and the Paperwhite don’t have physical page-turn buttons, and are therefore non-starters. There are two Colorsoft versions — an adult and kid model — which also don’t have the buttons, and are feature inferior screens. The Scribe is too big and bulky for her read everywhere lifestyle.

She looked alternatives like the Kobo and Boox devices. The Kobo would be a pain to manage with her massive Kindle library and Kindle Unlimited subscription. The Boox Page almost ticks all the boxes for physical buttons and Kindle app…but it doesn’t have waterproofing and she’s a beachside and in-pool reader.

“When did Amazon stop caring about power readers when it came to making Kindles?” she demanded of me.

I didn’t have an answer.

In the meantime, she’s bought another used Kindle Oasis on eBay in hopes that it’ll last long enough for either Amazon to get their Kindle house back in order, or for Boox to add waterproofing to their eReaders.

My money’s on the latter happening first.

This is post #5/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays (or sometimes Mondays). Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ Getting the Pebble trademark back from Google is a spot of feel-good news regarding a tech giant that I just never expected. [🔗 theverge.com]

2️⃣ A follow up from a few weeks ago, Becca Farsace rode an eBike over 400 miles on nothing but solar power. Cool project, and I expect it’s an early preview of tech that will emerge in the next few years. She had to rig a bunch of stuff together custom, but I imagine that solar kits will become available over time for cyclists. [▶️ youtube.com]

3️⃣ Another video. This one I can’t quite describe, but it captured my attention from beginning to end. [▶️ youtube.com]

4️⃣ 24-year-old Adam Aaronson drank every one of the 102 IBA cocktails (not in one go!) and blogged about it. It’s a fun retrospective. [🔗 aaronson.org]

5️⃣ Numeric Citizen is cataloging with screenshots and screencasts the many places where Apple’s Liquid Glass design falls down. It’s a great resource to link to in your Feedback reports, and will make a good archive to see how the design progresses through the rest of the beta and beyond. [🔗 crafted.numericcitizen.me]

6️⃣ Nick Heer shares his distaste for the design goal of getting the UI out of the way for your content. [🔗 pxlnv.com]

7️⃣ For you camping/climbing gearheads, this (long) interview with the renowned alpinist Colin Haley is a must-watch. He goes deep on how he thinks about what gear to carry, and how he modified nearly all of it to meet his precise needs. [▶️ youtube.com]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

This is post #4/31 for Blaugust 2025.

7 Things Blaugust

Sorry for the clickbait title, but I haven’t read the book. The phrase just occurred to me as I was driving back from a short canoe paddle with my wife today and saw my quick-dry towel hanging on the passenger seat that carrying a towel in my car has really paid off all summer.

I’ve slowly been turning into someone who just carries a bunch of extra stuff in the car at all times. It’s frustrating when you get somewhere and need something — like a towel — and even though you have dozens of them at home, you don’t have one right now. So I stuck a little microfiber, quick-dry towel that packs down super small into its flexible zippered case into one of the seat-back pockets. And since I have a towel, I might as well throw a pair of swimsuit/running shorts in the pocket as well. Now, I can go for a swim at the drop of a hat! Which, in this decidedly hot summer, has proved entirely worthwhile.

Some other things that I just always carry in my car now:

• An Apple Watch charger (you’d be surprised how much it can charge up in a 20-minute car ride)
• A beefy battery that doubles as a car jumper
• A sleeping mask for nights spent sleeping in back of my Subaru
• A rain tarp (more for professional purposes since I kept forgetting to pack it on rainy days and it’s a figurative life-saver for clients when rock climbing on dreary days, can can be a literal life-saver on hiking trips in the backcountry)
• Canoe straps and other lengths of tie-down rope
• An ultralight headlamp (another item that often gets forgotten, and I’ve lent it to plenty of friends)
• A small pillow and puffy blanket (the pillow gets used most often on flights, but it’s nice for long car rides too; the blanket is equally perfect for laying out on the ground for a picnic or napping in the car)
• A portable hangboard (it doesn’t get a lot of use, but can be strung up to keep working on finger strength no matter where I am)
• Extra sunglasses
• A multitool

This is post #3/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust Gear

I went outside with my MacBook today to answer some emails and work on upcoming trip logistics for my guiding service. My wife is sitting next to me, reading her book. She commented about how our backyard is full of such good sounds. So, here’s a non-exhaustive list of everything I can hear right now.

• The soft chirp of a bird high up in a nearby tree.
• The tap tap tap of a tiny bird as it tests the bark of a tree for tasty insect treats.
• The whine of a distant boat cruising the lake — or is it a leaf blower?
• The rub and scrape of paws on wood and my dog gets more comfortable in his position in the sun.
• The whoosh of a healthy breeze through the tops of the trees, although I can hardly feel it.
• The creeeeeeeak of those same trees and the bend to the wind’s will.
• Occasionally, the angry chatter of the local squirrel population chastises us and our dog for being in their space.
• And, briefly, the “And Iiiiiii will allllwaaays looooooove youuuuuuuuu” croning of Whitney Houston as someone far away blasted it for all to hear.

This is post #2/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust

Well, that really snuck up on me. Here I was, power-puttering™ around on the computer: today is the first of August. Not only does that mark the beginning of the end of summer, but it also marks the first day of the month-long blogging challenge/community event/all-around-fun-times that is Blaugust. From the ‘Blaugust 2025 is Coming’ post by Nerd Girl, who is de-facto hosting this year:

Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. Above all the goal of Blaugust has always been to prove to folks that they can in fact sit down every day and create something fresh and then share it with the world. Posting regularly builds a community and in this era of AI-slop content, our voices are needed even more than we ever have been at any point in the past. Our hope is to create a nurturing environment where Veteran bloggers can help those just getting started and the cross-pollination of ideas can create something truly spectacular. Your blog gives you a permanent foothold on the Internet that you own and have complete control of, and that is a really good feeling in the midst of shifting trends.

I managed to post 31 times during August last year, and it really stretched those muscles. Summer has traditionally been when I take an unintentional break from blogging and being very online, which was again the case this year. I just get so busy doing outside stuff that my computer time goes way down. But I dipped my toe back into the blogging waters the other day and had a great time. I figured Blaugust would be a good thing to take a crack at again.

By the way, if you, like me, think it’ll be nigh impossible to write and publish a post on every literal day in August, don’t worry — you can double up:

Blaugust at its heart has always been about celebrating the creation of content on a regular schedule. The original challenge was to post 31 times during the month of August which is 31 days long. This can be posting every day or doubling up on some days to make the schedule a bit easier.

As you can probably tell, I didn’t put much any thought into what this piece would be. I just realized it was August 1st, opened iA Writer, and started typing. I guess that’s really all it takes. But, off the top of my head, here a few things that perhaps I’ll write about this month:

• My recent trip to climb Gannett Peak, Wyoming’s tallest mountain
• My thoughts on Liquid Glass, Apple’s new design language/material that will soon debut in their ’26 series of Operating System updates
• How iPadOS 26’s new windowing system is great in theory, but has really hampered my usage of my iPad mini (my only iPad now) with the removal of Slide Over
• Finally completing the Adirondack 46ers challenge, and perhaps some sort of ranking of each of the mountains
• A roundup of some handy little gadgets I’ve picked up over the past few months
• Trip reports from my various outdoor pursuits
• How the Camera Control button on my iPhone 16 has drastically improved my work as a mountain guide — but has also ballooned the storage space I use on my phone and has me needing up upgrade pronto

There’s seven ideas at least. Enough to get me through the first week. And if I run out of ideas, the Blaugust community has a calendar of weekly prompts to rekindle the flame — though I tend not to go by those weekly themes.

Anyway, I encourage you — yes, you! — dear reader, to join in the fun of Blaugust. There are many free blogging sites out there if you need one, but my personal recommendation is to try Micro.blog. You can get a site (that will remain on the internet even if you stop paying) for just $1 with their Micro.one plan. It’s a great service at a great deal.

See you again tomorrow, and happy Blaugust!

This is post #1/31 for Blaugust 2025.

Blaugust