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  5. Email-related incident at work proves yet again that noreply@ email addresses harm your business. Always let people reply to a human, even if the email was sent by a robot.

  6. First time flyering a protest, discovered murphy’s law of flyering: the moment you encounter a cluster of people who enthusiastically want flyers is the moment they will all stick together, and you flail idiotically trying to separate them.

  8. "…yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts ran into me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing"

    - Gerrard Winstanley, "a Watch-Word to the City of London", 1649

  10. ↪ Aaron Parecki: Zippers are kind of magic. When you have to fix one, it turns out you gain an appreciation for them not otherwise had by merely using them.

    @aaronpk true! I’ve noticed this also with other things, especially food. My (totally failed) attempts to make Skyr have made me appreciate eating it much more.

  11. ↪ LouLouK: By which I mean to say, how entrenched is thinking. Can you change that using training? Is that's what's actually needed?

    @loulouk in my experience, yes it’s possible (although I don’t know what your context is), and that regular training i.e. some feedback loop is vital. We choose the lens through which we see the world, but need to re-choose it every day if it’s not already entrenched.

  14. How to make kiwi cake:

    1. Find other fruit cake recipes
    2. Replace other fruit with kiwis
    3. PROFIT

    But in all seriousness, I just made one (based off this recipe, using three kiwis) and it was acceptable. Quite structurally insound, and not nearly as green as I had hoped, but tastes adequately like kiwis and very moist.

  20. Much as I miss building hurdy gurdies, using my current one for 1.5 years now is teaching me a huge amount about what to better next time. Dragging it around Europe in a rucksack was an excellent stress test, and the various repairs I’ve had to do (and continue to have to do) over the last few months highlights areas I need to put more thought into in the future.

    For example, the aluminium axle with setscrew arrangement is inadequate due to it coming loose over a period of 6 months, the trompette disengager I made was much too fragile, the strap knobs need to be glued into a solid, well-attached internal block making contact to two planes, ditto for the bridge-end string holders — having them pull up against binding (which the instrument would be better off without anyway) is inadequate. Additionally, an adjustable melody string bridge is a no-brainer, and building custom capos is almost certainly unnecessary and produces worse results than just using harp capos.

    Edit: having said all of that, it’s still a good-sounding, stable, very playable instrument.