Recent content on Tadas Paplauskas
My book choices over the past few years felt a bit stale, and I wanted to mix things up, so this year I’ve made an effort to read more Lithuanian authors. Sveiko proto motinystė by Austėja Landsbergienė Being a short book that covers a wide topic, it offers mostly generic advice and personal observations for modern, middle-class parents. If you’ve read any decent parenting book before,…
When people mention that they have read my blog (which happened like three times), they usually recall the posts about living without a car . Since apparently that is the most memorable thing I’ve done in recent years, I decided to write an update. After exactly three years of living without a car - two of which with a child - we finally bought one. The reason? The child seat. It seems like…
This was the first motorcycle I bought with my heart and not my head. It’s wildly impractical. You cannot take much for trips, since the only practical luggage options are a tank bag and a backpack. The Husqvarna Vitpilen 701 had the most powerful single-cylinder engine ever installed in a mass-production motorcycle, until the Ducati Hypermotard 698 Mono was released last year. It surpassed…
For the 7 years in a row now, I aim to read roughly 1 book per month . While I don’t take this goal too seriously, and the last time I hit it was 2020, it still provides some motivation. This year, I rediscovered audiobooks - the list would be much shorter without them. I still do not enjoy audiobooks as much as my Kindle or paper books - it’s too easy to get distracted and kinda ruins…
I have no idea what I’m talking about here, and you should not trust me. A decade ago, I predicted bitcoin would fail . You could argue it kind of did: its promise to disrupt legacy currencies and banking clearly wasn’t fulfilled for the same reasons I outlined in that post. It’s not widely used as a currency or a medium of exchange by real people - it’s just a speculative…
Photo by Nikita Pishchugin on Unsplash Warning: major spoilers ahead. Before I dig in, I still very much enjoyed the movie . The cinematography, set and costume design, and actor performances were terrific. It was just the right combination of weird, funny, and macabre. In one word—refreshing. Now, onto the problematic part. In essence, this is a coming-of-age story, except the main character,…
The fact that Brief History of Intelligence is written not by a researcher or academic but a CEO of an AI startup , might give you a pause - it certainly did it for me. He may have hired a great ghostwriter, his editor did a lot of the heavy lifting, or it’s all just raw talent, but you could never tell it’s a hobby project - the book is well-written, engaging, and informative. The…
Here’s a random shower thought: where did all the productivity gurus go? If you were online around the 2010s, you probably remember the names Tim Ferris (4-Hour Work Week), David Allen (GTD—Getting Things Done), Leo Babauta (Zen Habits), Lifehack.org, or dozens of others. They had countless productivity hacks to help you do more in less time. I know because I followed all of them. Once the…
I knew I wanted to ride a motorcycle in Tenerife as soon as we bought the plane tickets. I’ve been riding for 5 years, but never abroad or in the mountains. I wanted something light and nippy, as on most roads in Tenerife, you can only go up to 60-80 kph anyway. I didn’t have strong preferences for a bike, so I went with what the nearby rental store had available that day—a CFMoto…
I sold my car two years ago with no plans to replace it. I already explained why here and updated you on the first year here . Back by popular demand, here’s our 2nd year! Jk, one friend asked how it’s going, so why not rerun the numbers? The numbers This is what we, a family of three, spent on transportation in our 2nd year living without a car. Drumroll: Bolt car-sharing,…