Digging for Fire

In 2020 I started writing a novel. It was an ill-fated endeavour, but I learned a lot along the way.

One of the things I learned is that it's useful to have a separate "space" for writing.

I used to cycle into my city office on Eagle St., then take my laptop and a coffee somewhere else to write. There was this one particular spot, a chair in the lobby of an office building, that had people bustling all around and a view of the river. I'd put in my headphones, play a very specific playlist, and write.

I've been having an ongoing argument with a friend about AI's role in recruiting. Whether you're a job-seeker or employer, things are getting pretty dire.

If you're looking for a job, one in five advertised positions are "ghost jobs" – fake, or already filled. The number of ghost jobs are probably much higher on LinkedIn, where recruiters are priming their talent pools and employers are gaming the algorithm.

If you're looking for an employee, you're already drowning in AI-generated CVs and cover letters. From the Financial Times:

Candidates are turning increasingly to generative AI – the type used in chatbot products such as ChatGPT and Gemini to produce conversational passages of text — to assist them in writing their CVs, cover letters and completing assessments.

Estimates from employers and recruiters who spoke to the Financial Times, as well as multiple published surveys, have suggested the figure is as high as 50 per cent of applicants.

A “barrage” of AI-powered applications had led to more than double the number of candidates per job while the “barrier to entry is lower”...

I'm building an app called Pita. It makes publishing and managing your podcasts easy (and pretty). This is the second update. The first is here.

One of the problems with hosting your own podcast is that you still need the audio files to be served from somewhere. Depending on the podcast, these files can be quite large, especially after you're 50 or more episodes in. You also need to host your RSS file somewhere (though this can be somewhere different). And most of the time, you'll want a simple marketing website too – maybe one that has your podcast episodes listed with an audio player.

That's a lot – and that's why all these paid SaaS options exist (Buzzsprout, Blubrry, Podbean, Libsyn, the list goes on…)1. But what if you could do it all for free?

On the 25th of February in 2015, I backed what would become my most beloved kickstarter project. The Pebble Time smart watch.

I chose the Pebble Time Round edition, which I still believe to this day is the most beautiful smart watch that's ever been built. I was a long-time Apple Watch holdout simply because Apple didn't make it as a circle.

PebbleOS is pure delight. My memories of the software are laced with nostalgia, and it's only 10 years ago! It had this quirky interface that was as fun and beautiful as it was unique. It covered all the bases for me in a Smart Watch:

We use the word "goal" to talk about so many things.

I want to get better at piano. I'm committed to doing yoga every morning for 3 months. Someday, I'd love to run a marathon. These are all "goals".

Business school teaches that goals should be measurable, within a set timeframe. Sales targets and KPIs and OKRs are all goals with multiple axes: time and value. We plot our course as we go, adjusting as necessary, until we reach our final destination (up and to the right). These types of goals are maps.

But back here in the real world, life teaches something different.

There's something special about black and white photography. We cannot help but perceive colour all around us, so the black and white image doesn't capture the world as we see it, but rather, as we remember it.

It is said that we dream in black and white. I don't think that's true. Dreams, like memories, are a non-visual sensation. We might remember some colours that might have stood out, but that's a memory of the experience of colour, not colour itself.

As Andri Cauldwell puts it:

To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.

I've always been a troublemaker. It's in my blood.

You see, through my father's line, I am a descendant of Cornish pirates.

You may have heard of the Pirates of Penzance. The Gilbert & Sullivan opera was written about real pirates who harboured in a town named Penzance, at the southern tip of the United Kingdom. If you drive 15 minutes north from there, along the A30, you'll come to a place called Carbis Bay.

That's my namesake. I'm a Carbis.

I recently wrote about the way AI is making it possible to build software essentially for free. That's not exactly true – at least not yet.

Starting work on a new project is hard. It's the classic blank page problem. While AI doesn't yet do such a great job of programming, one thing that it's great at is giving me a starting point.

On June 28, 2005, Apple release iTunes 4.9. From the release notes:

With iTunes 4.9, you can now browse and subscribe to podcasts from within the iTunes Music Store. Podcasts are frequently updated radio-style shows downloadable over the Internet. You can also transfer podcasts to iPod, for listening on the go.

At launch, Apple's podcast directory was home to 3,000 shows. The BBC at the time described podcasts like this:

Podcasts are downloadable audio shows that can be created and listened to by anyone with the right equipment.

Who could have imagined that podcasts would grow to become an entire media category, right alongside film, television, music, and books?