Digging for Fire

Depending on where you’re at in life, and what kind of processes you have in place, you may dive right into the idea. Perhaps you work on it nonstop, stay up late tinkering, and overall just can’t get put it down. At some point you’ll start to add some definition and try to bring shape to the idea. Then, all too often, you abandon the thing right before shipping. — Joshua Wold , Nebulous undefined...

In the early days of the cigarette, smoking was considered a harmless or even beneficial activity. Cigarettes were considered stylish, sophisticated, and doctor-approved. By the early 20th century, smoking was so deeply embedded in modern culture that it was hard to imagine a future without it! Of course, fast-forward to now and, at least in Australia, cigarettes are heavily taxed, not permitted t...

Everyone is making it up to some extent. This is the secret I didn’t learn until years into my career. I often thought I was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on, and was in awe of the geniuses always surrounding me... ... Often people are making things up as they go along. They’re not sure, things are undefined and squishy. — Joshua Wold , Making it up Thankfully, this is a...

T uesday morning, I'm in the car with my son, and the topic of steganography comes up. Eli is an adventurous kid – he loves playing games involving treasure and discovery with his mates. No prize for guessing how fascinated he was with the concept of hiding secret messages in plain sight. He w anted to learn a few steganography techniques, of course. I told him about some of the obvious ones. Desp...

In 2020 I started writing a novel. It was an ill-fated endeavour, but I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned is that it's useful to have a separate "space" for writing. I used to cycle into my city office on Eagle St., then take my laptop and a coffee somewhere else to write. There was this one particular spot, a chair in the lobby of an office building, that had peop...

I've been having an ongoing argument with a friend about AI's role in recruiting. Whether you're a job-seeker or employer, things are getting pretty dire. If you're looking for a job, one in five advertised positions are "ghost jobs" – fake, or already filled. The number of ghost jobs are probably much higher on LinkedIn , where recruiters are priming their talent pools and employers are...

I'm building an app called Pita. It makes publishing and managing your podcasts easy (and pretty). This is the second update. The first is here . One of the problems with hosting your own podcast is that you still need the audio files to be served from somewhere. Depending on the podcast, these files can be quite large, especially after you're 50 or more episodes in. You also need to host your RSS...

On the 25th of February in 2015, I backed what would become my most beloved kickstarter project. The Pebble Time smart watch. I chose the Pebble Time Round edition, which I still believe to this day is the most beautiful smart watch that's ever been built. I was a long-time Apple Watch holdout simply because Apple didn't make it as a circle. PebbleOS is pure delight. My memories of the software ar...

Try asking DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square or Uyghur Muslims or Taiwanese Independence. I'm not using it. ChatGPT has better voice recognition and can remember things about me. I like that. Can't login with Apple over the web, just in the app. It should be banned like TikTok. Exporting Chinese propaganda to the world. Something there about some level of censorship being useful and good, but this c...

We use the word "goal" to talk about so many things. I want to get better at piano. I'm committed to doing yoga every morning for 3 months. Someday, I'd love to run a marathon. These are all "goals". Business school teaches that goals should be measurable, within a set timeframe. Sales targets and KPIs and OKRs are all goals with multiple axes: time and value. We plot our cours...

There's something special about black and white photography. We cannot help but perceive colour all around us, so the black and white image doesn't capture the world as we see it, but rather, as we remember it. It is said that we dream in black and white. I don't think that's true. Dreams, like memories, are a non-visual sensation. We might remember some colours that might have stood out, but that...

I've always been a troublemaker. It's in my blood. You see, through my father's line, I am a descendant of Cornish pirates. You may have heard of the Pirates of Penzance. The Gilbert & Sullivan opera was written about real pirates who harboured in a town named Penzance, at the southern tip of the United Kingdom. If you drive 15 minutes north from there, along the A30, you'll come to a place ca...

I recently wrote about the way AI is making it possible to build software essentially for free. That's not exactly true – at least not yet. Starting work on a new project is hard. It's the classic blank page problem. While AI doesn't yet do such a great job of programming, one thing that it's great at is giving me a starting point.

On June 28, 2005, Apple release iTunes 4.9. From the release notes: With iTunes 4.9, you can now browse and subscribe to podcasts from within the iTunes Music Store. Podcasts are frequently updated radio-style shows downloadable over the Internet. You can also transfer podcasts to iPod, for listening on the go. At launch, Apple's podcast directory was home to 3,000 shows. The BBC at the time descr...

Ben Thompson's aggregation theory posits that the internet created an entirely new disruptive business paradigm, because for the first time in history, products could be distributed with zero marginal cost. Now, large language models have triggered a second wave of disruption: while the internet eliminated distribution costs, AI is eliminating creation costs – making software essentially free at e...

A little housekeeping post, with a few updates to the website. First of all, if you're reading this in your RSS reader, THANK YOU for keeping the dream alive. You might like to click through for this post, because I've made some small changes to the website.

I was inspired by something I saw on Joshua Wold's blog a few days ago. He was reflecting on why we write . When I sit down to put words to the page I have an idea of what I want to write. But I’ve purposely chosen not to plan it out. The experience is much the same for me, except that sometimes I don't have an idea of what I want to write.

My method for practicing bass guitar is based on the Circle of Fifths, inspired by a method taught by Scott Devine . The Circle of Fifths is a music theory concept which links each of the 12 notes in a sequence. Start with a note, and increment it by 5. Play that "fifth", and then increment another five. As a bit of code, it could be expressed like this: notes = ["C", "D♭&#34...

Every so often you'll come up with an idea that you're pretty sure nobody has tried yet. 99% of the time you're wrong. But I think our invention of the turn-based podcast falls into that 1% of truly unique ideas. Joshua and I have been working asynchronously for nearly our whole careers. So when we started a podcast that required a scheduled calendar event every week, something didn't quite sit ri...

On a drive with Talia yesterday, I wanted to tell her about some of the interesting things I discovered while writing my Input 2024 post. The conversation went something like… Saadia Let me tell you about something I wrote, since I know you don't read my blog. Talia How do you know I don't read it? Saadia Because you don't use an RSS reader! Do you? Talia No, you're right, I don't. Saadia So how w...

Since 2021, I've recorded every Book, Film, and Television series I've seen each year. Usually, I'll write a round-up post at the end of the year with long lists of every title. For my 2024 roundup, I've decided to keep it a little more succinct. Those who know me know that I think a lot about Input and Output. What creative information do I take in, and what creative acts do I undertake? I believ...

Growing up, we always showered using (what my Italian mother called) a straccio. It wasn't until I was old enough to shop for myself that I encountered the plastic "shower puff", known also as a loofah 1 . That word – loofah – occupied a very singular place in my mind (synthetic shower accessory) until a few years ago, when I discovered a loofah growing in my garden. The crazy part was…...

Twenty twenty-five is such a great number. Check this out: (20 + 25)² = 2025 ! And if that doesn't convince you: (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025 . 1 Clearly we're living squarely in auspicious times. 2

In 2024, I led a series of Film & TV classes for a small group of homeschool students. The curriculum was designed to explore a variety of tasks and topics, offering the students insight into different career paths within the filmmaking industry.