I've published a weekly drawing and mini-essay for the past 281 weeks since July 9, 2019—five years, four months, and ten days (or 1960 days).
My writing themes and tone evolve, yet the gist is that I continue to practice.
This writing series, together with my journal, is where I think and develop ideas; what's yours?
Over the years, I've drawn in sketchbooks of many makes and sizes. In concept, I love the consistency of sticking to a single paper type and size. Yet exploring different brands and sketchbooks is required to find which paper and format you enjoy best.
Each sketchbook suits a different type of drawing and moment, some for travel, some for home, some for watercolor, etc., which means I have multiple unfinished sketchbooks.
To avoid checking each of my sketchbooks individually to know which is which, I recently sorted and tagged them with rounded color stickers that signal their status: red for completed, green for ongoing, and yellow for empty.
On top of the color sticker, I name sketchbooks serially, starting with the year I started, followed by the sketchbook number in that year, e.g., 2024.02 for the second sketchbook I started in 2024.
I have sketchbooks of various brands—Moleskine, Stillman & Birn, Hahnemuhle—and sizes—A3, A4, and A5—organized in a tiny shelf on wheels, which also houses my Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 printer.
Most of my sketchbook pages are scanned and stored on the cloud, and many of their drawings are edited and published, but many still need to be.
The point is to minimize the creative friction by seeing at a glance which sketchbooks I can draw in.
Major life changes shift your mindset and focus.
No matter how much you try, it's not something you can predict and accurately plan for.
It's like writing non-fiction; you can do all the research you want, but the best way to learn about it is to perform a real immersion.
To learn and figure out your opinion about things, to expose what you think about a given topic, to justify and explain your point of view, and to tell others why you think you are right.
I was thinking of relatives and friends to whom I may want to explain specific things—technical, factual, or conceptual—and how an online essay about it, a "one-pager," could be consumed individually by multiple people.
In the end, the point of any write-up is to spread an idea and have others reflect on it.
A web link becomes a shortcut to a brief explanation, as I did last week explaining how I date my sketches.1
There was a typo last week that I’ve already corrected. 10.01.18 may be interpreted as January 10, 2018, in Spain and October 1, 2018, in the US, whereas it represents January 18, 2010. The format is year.month.day. ↩
When is 10/8/12?
Is it October 8, 2021?
Is it August 10, 2012?
Or is it August 12, 2010?
I grew up in Spain and used to see and write down dates as day, month, and year—say, 15/10/24 for the fifteenth of October 2024.
In the US, the month goes first.
10/15/24 also represents October 15, 2024.
Digital systems put the year first, then format dates in human-readable forms adapted to regional patterns.
This means you'll see month/day/year in the United States region or day/month/year for Europe.1
For illustration, you can think of programming languages using the letters d for day (15), m for month, y for year, and other letters for other datetime components.
These codes allow programs to display present, past, and future dates to humans.
I caption sketches by hand and prefix the name of digital scans with yymmdd2—the year, month, and day when I draw them, which lets me browse drawings chronologically.
This often confuses people because dates appear flipped.3
10.01.18 may be interpreted as January 10, 2018, in Spain and October 1, 2018, in the US, whereas it represents January 18, 2010.
Next time you see one of my drawings, remember it's year, month, and day.
You can test this by changing your computer or phone's region. Nowadays, systems let you pick a calendar, date, and time format independently of the global setting of the machine, and you can use whatever you are more familiar with, regardless of the machine's region. ↩
Certain systems use dd and mm to display two-digit day and month explicitly. The limitation of this format is that by living at the turn of the century, files from the 1990s are sorted after files from the 2000s. That is, 920101 (Jan 1, 1992) will show up after 240101 (Jan 1, 2024). The only way to fix this would be to prepend the entire year—19900101 and 20240101—but that makes too many digits. ↩
I wrote this essay to point people here and avoid confusion. That may be you! ↩
The issue is that, by default, Laravel came with DB_HOST as 127.0.0.1 but MySQL 9 will reject that host in favor of localhost.
If everything else is configured correctly, simply set your DB_HOST to localhost, and you should be good to go.
macOS Sequoia introduces new features to help you be more productive and creative on Mac. With the latest Continuity feature, iPhone Mirroring, you can access your entire iPhone on Mac. It’s easy to tile windows to quickly create your ideal workspace, and you can even see what you’re about to share while presenting with Presenter Overlay. A big update to Safari features Distraction Control, Highlights, and a redesigned Reader, making it easy to get things done while you browse the web. macOS Sequoia also brings text effects and emoji Tapbacks to Messages, Math Notes to Calculator, the ability to plan a hike in Maps, and so much more.
iPhone Mirroring sounds extremely useful.
Hits the Upgrade Now button.
If you do something once, why not do it twice?
If you skip something once, why not skip it twice?
We can use repetition in our favor.
Do more of what you want and less of what you don't.
Avoid the second mistake.
Do you want to solve ten problems at once?
Good luck.
It's better to break them down and be selective about the bits and pieces you can tackle in a given timeframe. Pick one and get started.
With a reduced scope, it's easier to focus on whatever you want to work on during your 168 hours.
Blogging every day is easy if you just do it. What's even easier is not to blog every day, to let time pass, and make a habit of not writing in public.
My journal frees me up from worrying about what I put in writing. Words flow, even when I know they aren't particularly meaningful. I want the text to flow to clarify my thoughts and generate ideas, to capture facts and memories, and to communicate and inspire—that's what matters.
I prefer it this way. Instead of overthinking what to write, I can review my writing later, analyzing and selecting the best parts.
Writing is a tool that serves many purposes. What will you use it for?
I grew up tinkering with Windows computers and learned how to type without looking at the keyboard as a kid.
I got my first Apple laptop1 in early 2011 and bought my second in 2015, this time with a US keyboard to write and code more efficiently.
As I expected, the decision to go for a US keyboard made me a happier coder as, apart from providing a smooth writing experience in English, it is optimized for programming.
For several years, I would swap between English and Spanish with a key shortcut when I needed to write in my mother tongue. The power to type in both languages with the same keyboard quickly became a nightmare: numerous characters change location and aren't physically there, which makes it hard to type in Castellano. No eñe and no tilde.
Let's look at the following text for a second.
¿Tendrías dos euros (2€) en monedas pequeñas?
«Creo que sí». Respondió ella.
¡Gracias!
How would you type this with a US keyboard?
The text uses the euro sign (€), the funny n we call eñe with its tilde, the acute accent over the vowels (áéíóú), opening question and exclamation marks (¿? and ¡!), and citation characters («») used in journalism for quotes—most of which don't show up in the US keyboard.
I recently challenged myself not to rely on the Spanish keyboard altogether.2
Were there key combinations for these Spanish characters in the US keyboard and, if so, why not use them instead of swapping my computer's language to fake I had a different keyboard in front of me?
After a Google search and a few ChatGPT 4o questions, I found out the answer was yes, assembled the following cheatsheet, and started practicing.
ñ — Option + n → n
á — Option + e → a (same for é, í, ó & ú)
¿ — Shift + Option + ?
¡ — Option + 1
€ — Shift + Option + 2
» — Shift + Option + \
« — Option + \
Now I could use the Spanish characters I needed with a US keyboard on macOS without switching languages.
To my surprise, it took me less than a month to get used to these shortcuts and get rid of something that bothered me for several years.
There isn't time to do all the things you want. That's why I try to find those moments when there's no need to do those things; no deadline, no rush, no deliverables.
Yet, there come periods when none of that's possible.
What do you do then?
You stick to the plan. You push a tiny bit to get it done.
There will come times, hopefully in the near future, when you'll be able to go back to normal.
reMarkable released the reMarkable Paper Pro, a brand-new device with an 11.8” color display. The latency is down to 12 milliseconds from 21 milliseconds in the older reMarkable 2, which only featured black, white, and grayscale colors. Storage is up to 64GB from 8 GB.
It's a bit pricier than the previous model.
If you, like me, have the reMarkable 2, I don't think it is worth an upgrade. But I'll have to get one on my hands to know for sure.
I maintain a spreadsheet with my subscriptions. That includes online services, insurance, and other recurrent payments. The list is ever-growing, and I review it every couple of months to see what I can cancel or downgrade.
These are some of the services that are doing a great job of locking me in.
Apple wants to sync my photos, videos, and backups to iCloud.
Dropbox wants my file library.
Amazon Blink and Eufy want to store my recordings remotely.
Spotify wants to rent my music library.1
Zapier wants me to continue automating workflows with their zaps.
Descript and Riverside want me to continue recording and editing videos and podcasts.
Grammarly wants to fix my grammar.
Adobe wants me to edit media.
In Kevin Kelly's words, we pay for access, not ownership. Lifetime subscriptions are rare—catch them if you can.
So, as long as I do these things and find no free or cheaper alternative, I'll have to continue subscribing.
I always find it interesting to think of the many songs or albums you could own if you bought music instead of renting it. ↩
There's no such thing as a bullet-proof system. Everything under the right (or the wrong) conditions can fail.
And those are the situations you can't plan for and need to adapt to when the time comes.
These situations are the unknown unknowns, for which you can prepare but won't be able to work on a solution til they happen.
Talking to a smart device is different than pressing a switch on the wall or dimming the lights with your phone, even when the outcome is similar.
Ok, Google. Lights on.
You can control the lights in a smart home through voice interactions, analog controls, or digital interfaces.
Each interface exposes a series of options that inform our behavior. For instance, a smartphone app lets us dim the lights, whereas certain analog switches provide binary control, on or off.
Tools change our behavior. In the long run, we'll default to the frictionless option.
Hey, Siri. Switch off the lights.
I always feel my posts and journal entries could be more polished, but done is better than the ever-elusive perfect.
It only takes me a few minutes to write a couple hundred words capturing what's on my mind—what I did, thought, felt, or details I might forget tomorrow.
Writing helps me understand my thoughts and make sense of my life, ensuring I don't lose important details.
When I revisit my journal, past worries fade, forgotten stories resurface, and I see how my opinions have evolved.
The benefits of writing daily and revisiting my archives are invaluable.
The same ink strokes can represent multiple different objects. Add a bit of watercolor, and the possibilities are reduced.
What the eye identifies as a mandarin orange, mainly because of the color, wouldn't be so obvious without the brush strokes.
Color adds an extra dimension to my drawings.
Yet the key is to get proportion and light right, which I always do with microfiber ink pens.
Only then does watercolor (or shading) add information and help the viewer understand what they are looking at.
Under pressure, getting something meaningful done is tricky unless the steps are clearly defined and we know how to follow them.
That's why we need to reserve time for our craft regularly, even if we don't know what we'll end up using it for.
Quick. Short. Immediate.
Easy. Summarized. Highlighted.
Content is digested for us on social media; then, we digest short impulses.
We only get the gist and can't draw unbiased conclusions.
The alternative?
Consume less, long-form content, and deep dive.
"No such thing as writer's block," says Seth Godin, and he couldn't be more right.
It may not be your best writing, but all you have to do is sit and write. Give it enough time, and something good will come.
I enjoyed learning about Disney's sodium vapor background removal process, which is used in movies such as Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), and Pete’s Dragon (1977).
This method works much better than green and blue chroma keys, but as the video experiment shows, it's much more challenging to achieve.
This site with Machine Learning Challenges (deep-ml.com) looks really promising to learn about foundational concepts.
"Willpower becomes a habit," says Charless Duhigg, "by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives."
Routines work the same way the tortoise beat the hare: by steadily working towards the finish line without missing a day, except there's no finish line.
I listed a few ideas I wanted to build in 2024 at the end of last year.
I built a daily word counter and started working on a new folder structure for my Dropbox files. But I haven't put time into developing the others yet.
I'd also like to develop these five half-baked ideas.
You may wonder why some sites help us save by waiting or lead us to buy without the need to.
Online stores like Amazon, Best Buy, or B&H offer so-called affiliate programs, in which websites and social media channels earn a sales commission on eligible purchases they link from their content.
Here's how it works on Amazon.
You add an affiliate tag1 to your product links, and Amazon tracks purchases made by customers from your links. This way, you may get ~1–10% commission for eligible purchases within twenty-four hours of the link click.2 In affiliate marketing jargon, visitors you send to Amazon are referrals.
And that's why many websites display the following notice.
Commissions may be earned from the links below.
Here's a sample affiliate link with my affiliate tag nonoma-20 (amazon.com/dp/8862931948/?tag=nonoma-20), which associates eligible purchases made through that link to my account. ↩
Eligible purchases include any products in the affiliates program, not only those you linked to. If you are linking to a photo camera, your commission may come from the visitor buying camera lenses or even home cleaning products. Amazon wants you to bring customers to their store. ↩
I recently bought an Atomos Ninja with the Atomos Connect module and an UltraSync Blue to pair devices via Bluetooth.
I couldn't find an updated list of compatible devices, so I started one.
Timecode Systems, the original creator of the UltraSync One and Blue, was acquired by Atomos, which makes monitor recorders such as the Atomos Ninja or Shogun. The UltraSync Blue is also compatible with all other Timecode Systems devices.
Last week, I shared a trick to save by waiting—patience pays off.
On the opposite corner are marketplaces that come up with suggestions we don't need but may find helpful. Sites that make us spend on what we don't need but want.
Amazon is the perfect example, but many other stores, such as IKEA or Zara, fall into the same category. You browse without a specific need in mind in search of potential things to buy. The best in this category are discount sites, such as Chollómetro, which lists discounts from many other sites to find bargains you often don't need.
If you'd like to buy a specific item from Amazon but are not in a hurry, you can set up a price alert and get notified when the price goes down.
Paste the product's Amazon web address at Camelcamelcamel.com1 to see its price history, choose your fair price, and create a price alert with your email.
It's an easy way to delay purchases and save when you don't mind waiting.
Other price-tracking services work with vendors other than Amazon. ↩
