2017s
Humbling game of Blokus! 😬
Time for family New Year’s Eve. Game of Clue is first up! 🎲
It was Mrs. Peacock in the Hall with a Wrench! 🔧
Leveling up my coffee fussiness with this new coffee distribution tool. ☕️
Got a set of the Bodum demitasse for Christmas. Lighter than my typical Illy demitasse but I like that you can see the espresso. ☕️
Tyler and I played Super Mario Odyssey through a few levels today and had a blast. The game is filled with little hidden gems. And playing as other characters with the hat is amazing. 👍🏻💯
First time playing Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and liked it a lot. Limiting to only have 3 players, but fun routes and tunnels add challenges. Pairs well with snow and hot cocoa. 😊
Watched Hacksaw Ridge tonight. Very well done. Battle scenes were a bit much. Tammy and I have now watched all the 2017 Best Picture nominees.
Static site generators are great in so many ways, but the friction in publishing with them is horrible.
What apps make you better?
I’ve been very intentional about which applications I put on my iPhone and even where I put them. I don’t put any social media applications on my phone, and don’t put news applications on it either. I specifically seek out applications that have addictive patterns baked into them and remove them as well.
A while back I started keeping an entire page of applications that are all there to help me achieve my goals and improve as a person. Novel idea huh? This is what that screen looks like today.
YouAte
Keeping a food journal is a great way to eat better and YouAte does it all with photos. I had used Rise for a while which you typically use with a coach. YouAte can be used with friends for support or you can use it solo.
Day One
Journaling is a great way to reflect on things. This is by far my farvorite journaling application. It supports multiple journals and also has strong encryption.
stickK
When my book club read Nudge it referenced the work and theory behind commitments that has now been built into an offering called stickK. I haven’t used this for a commitment yet but I like the mechanics and think it’s a solid approach.
Happy Scale
This is a great application for logging and analysing your weight data. It applies smoothing to all of your data which I think is a far superior way to look at weight data.
Headspace
Meditation app with a tremendous amount of options.
Streaks
Streaks is a habit tracker. I consider habit trackers to be very different from task management. Habit trackers tend to focus on streaks, and Streak does just that. I’ve also used Productive in the past and like it a lot. The built-in HealthKit hooks in Streak are a nice benefit to me.
Zones
Zones is a fabulous app for tracking the intensity of your workouts and letting you know what heart rate zone you were in for how long. If you have an Apple Watch and collect this data Zones can even tell you info on historical workouts.
SleepTown
Fun app that helps you keep consistent sleep patterns. This app helps me make sure I’m not staring at my phone too late.
Forest
Fun app for forcing yourself to not use your phone during the day. Great for keeping yourself from habitually checking your device.
Health Mate & Omron Wellness
Both of these are here because they support devices I have. The Health Mate app connects my Withings Scale to HealthKit so data flows automatically. The Omron Wellness app connects my blood pressure monitor to HealthKit as well. I like having as much automation as possible from measurements to storage.
What is yours?
What apps are on your mobile device to encourage good things? I’d highly recommend putting them in one place and making it a regular stop on your phone.
I want to be an energy efficient household but this monthly report from XcelEnergy does nothing to help me. Just makes me feel bad. Showing min/max/avg by day and hour would at least give some data to work with.
… NAS issue resolved? After extended SMART test said all was fine I did another rebuild of the Volume and after 14 hours it succeeded. 🤷♂️
Watched The Circle. Thought provoking ideas and concepts. Okay movie.
I got an Anki Cozmo robot for Christmas and we’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Little thing has a lot of character.
We are going to bring in the new year… frozen!
Tyler and I did this LEGO Technic RC Tracked Racer. Very fun! One of the most impressive LEGO kits we’ve done.
… back to NAS issue. I ran the extended SMART test on every drive in my Synology and no errors. Attempting to repair the RAID volume again. 🤞🏻
Playing Prime Climb with the family. Interesting game. Sort of like Sorry. Lots of math!
Playing Maze Racers with the kids. Fun game.
Christmas Eve dinner on Big Green Egg. 🔥❄️
Nice gentle snow for Christmas Eve this afternoon. 🌨
