Thoughts without walls
In pickleball coaching, drills are often designed not just to improve execution, but to shape decision-making and reinforce specific behaviors . One effective technique is to modify scoring by awarding additional points when a targeted action occurs. By changing incentives, coaches can influence how players approach the game and encourage skills that may not naturally appear under pressure.…
How five blog posts became fifty, and why that’s not as productive as it sounds Instead of finishing one of my draft blog posts, I’m using ChatGPT to write this one — about having too many drafts — and publish it instead. Back in the old days, I felt productive if I had five blog post drafts sitting in my folder. Five was manageable, a nice little backlog of “someday” posts. Now, with GenAI at my…
It’s with mixed emotions that I say goodbye to my old scanner. I bought it back in 2008—26 years ago—and it has served me faithfully ever since. I still remember how my video review back then gained a lot of attention. I even had comments like, "They should pay you for this review!" It was a simpler time, when video reviews were a rare gem on the internet, and now I look back and smile at how…
Today I learned how to use Raycast to quickly open a frequently used folder on my Mac. If you find yourself digging through Finder to get to the same folder over and over again, this little trick will save you clicks—and time. 🛠️ The Trick: Create a Quicklink Raycast has a feature called Quicklinks that lets you assign a custom name or shortcut to anything you can open, including folders. Here's…
I spent sometime in the Kwun Tong District while visiting Hong Kong. It is a underrated area. If you are a Hong Konger like myself, you would not mind the industrial vibe of the area. It is a relatively affordable area to be home base for visiting Hong Kong. Hotel: Nina Hotel Kowloon East Nina Hotel is a small hotel chain in Hong Kong. The Kowloon East location is on edge of the Kwun Tong…
As a pickleball player, I love DUPR: A data science based quantitative way to rate players. As a technologist of course I want to get to the raw data to run my own analysis of my pickleball community and beyond. Unfortunately they have yet to release a public API I wrote a scraper to pull the dataset I needed. Here is the source code on github . Improving developer experience for my own customers…
Besides the usual bedsheets and clothings, what are some tools that a college freshmen should bring to college? Here are some recommendations: 1) Keychain Flashlight that can double up as a safety light Everyone has a cellphone with built in light. Who needs a flashlight? You do when you need to have some ambient light AND use your cellphone at the same time. This one is very small, and has a red…
Cleaning out the basement and found my collection of old phones. I was never a Motorola Razr person since there are much cooler flip phones from Sony Ericsson. Here are some photos I took of them before donating them to STEAM event. Note that I did saved my Nokia 8000 and framed it — for me, that is the best cellphone design of all time.
As an early adopter for technology and cars, I took delivery of one of the first VW ID.4 in March last year. We have yet to do a long road trip until now. We drove from Lexington Massachusetts to Charlottesville Virginia and back for a college visit. These are the take aways: Driving speed matters to range -- we were driving average of at least 75 MPH and the range drops notably. The car seems to…
A friend asked an interesting question at year end: "What was your best purchase in 2021?". As I was thinking about this in my car, I realized had the answer with me right there. Availability bias not withstanding, these are my top three purchases: VW ID.4 - A major industry change is happening. Are you ready for it? Apple MacBook Pro 14 inch M1 Pro - Apple finally listened to their core customers…
The actual MK14 board is under all the wiring of an additional board I added later I have been interested in electronics since I was 10 years old. My father was a tinkerer and we always had hand build radios and stuff around the house since I remembered. When I was in boarding school, yes, like Hogwarts but without too much magic, I started reading about digital circuits. Then this microprocessor…
Reducing monthly unnecessary expenses is the key to financial wellness. With COVID we are not driving very much. With two fairly new cars sitting in the driveway depreciating makes no sense. Especially with a fairly new car in good condition, I want to sell it while the depreciation is slow(er). The car is a 2018 Audi Q5 with 14K miles on it. It is an easy car to sell. However I am willing to…
Paddle board, or a SUP, is the hip way to travel down waterways. You probably heard of Yoga on a paddle board as well. How about creativity on a paddle board? On a mini vacation, my two middle schoolers rented paddle boards on the Lady Bird Lake in Austin. Unlike typical adults, they were not satisfied with just standing or kneeling on the board and paddle with their paddle. I watch them paddle…
Mid January is still New Years resolutions making time. I find annual goal setting is much more effective, especially using the processes by Michael Hyatt. Irrespective on how you are planning your year, doing your job well is likely to be one of the goals. On Martin Luther King’s Day, this quote of his comes to mind: If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a…
Squarespace is great. You can choose from several very good looking templates for building your website. Most of them support large banner images that works across desktop, laptop and mobile phones. Two of the most popular templates are the Bedford template, and the Harris template. Because these templates are responsive, you need to be careful when creating any banner image, especially if there…
Recently I needed to purchase a MBTA Charlie Card, a Boston area subway stored value card. I know that it is available only at selected location. Luckily the MBTA website has a sales location look up page , or so I thought. This webpage present a select list of cities and towns, with a single action button for “Find Sale Locations”. I picked the town closest to me, click the button, and got a…
If you have a middle schooler in your family, you will know that homemade slime is sweeping the schools in the US. Even WSJ wrote an article on entrepreneurial middle schoolers building businesses to sell homemade slime to their friends. As an investor (Dad) to one such slime business CEO (11 year old daughter), I have a first hand view of how she is building her business. Not surprisingly, many…
If you are developing software for the Raspberry Pi, you will want to edit source files on a faster machine than on the Pi. I connect to my headless Raspberry Pi from my Mac and edit python files remotely using Sublime Text 3 and iTerm What you need 1. On the Pi: Install rsub sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/rsub https://raw.github.com/aurora/rmate/master/rmate chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/rsub 2. On your…
2016 is the year of the podcast. While there has always been podcasts on more specialized topics enjoyed by their fans ( penaddict , All Sorted , ATP ), 2016 sees a lot of big name media figures started to enter the industry. Just when people are declaring radio is dead, podcasts, playing on mobile phones, are growing. Nielson announced that they are going to start monitoring on-demand audio,…
The magic of the Paragon induction cooktop is that it allows precise temperature control during cooking. After I unboxed my Paragon, Cuisinart cookware set to arrived, first thing I tried is to make Hong Kong style Ginger Milk Pudding. ( 薑汁撞奶 ) because getting the milk to the right temperature is a key part of this recipe. Ingredients: for 2 half cup servings: 1 cup ( or 250ml) Milk 2 tsp sugar…