Arhiva completă: engleză

I was 14 or 15 when, finally, a martial arts club opened in the city I lived in. All of a sudden, we could go and become Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or Jean Claude Van Damme. Of course, it didn’t work like this, but something stayed with me since then: the belt system. A system of quick (sort of) wins that would keep you on your track of mastering martial arts.

I mean, isn’t it easier when you get a yellow belt after 6-12 months, showing your progress, rather than waiting years without any external sign of improvement?

I always thought quick wins are a cheap trick to keep you motivated. I thought you should be able to find intrinsic motivation in whatever you are doing and you shouldn’t care about anything else.

I still have the same belief: what you do should give you enough intrinsic motivation so that you can do whatever it is you’re doing even when it’s not as easy as you’d like. I changed my mind when it comes to quick wins, though.

You should make getting quick wins part of the process for your work (or any other activity). The quick wins shouldn’t be the purpose, but they DO help in tricking your brain to focus on work when you don’t feel like it.

How I do it?

During my normal work process I use some AGILE principles: I have daily and weekly targets.

What I do a little bit differently is having at least one of the weekly tasks (even daily, if possible) a fun one. Something I truly enjoy, even if it’s not the most effective use of my time.

The purpose of a quick win is not to move things forward, but to keep you moving forward.

Image from Canva

I’ve had video calls for 71 hours this year. A friend had 900+ hours.
And I’ve talked to 28 people. My friend talked to 800+.
My longest call was 1 hour (that’s actually not bad!).

And I only had family calls during the weekends. At least this is what my Google Calendar is telling me.

I used YourCalendarLife.com to put together the stats (a site my team built, that doesn’t save your personal data, does everything in browser, so your privacy is protected).

My friend that tried the site had 900+ hours of calls. 900!!!. With 800+ people!!!

Of course, my numbers above are not the full picture, since some calls (with my sister, with my mom and my father, for example), were not on the calendar. But still, that’s a lot of calls.

This year was weird for me. As I’m sure it was for everybody. One of the things that happened was that I started to use video calls a lot more than I used to. Especially in the last few months of the year, as I started to look more into starting a new business. When I started MavenHut, a lot of the people that you wanted to talk to (potential partners, investor, whatever), would want to see you in person. Not in 2020, of course.

And, if in my MavenHut years, the most common call was 45-60 minutes, my most common call in 2020 was 30 minutes. It seems that people realized that you can say in 30 minutes what you used to say in 1h.

But the biggest change was using more video calls for personal connections. Friends, family. We used to see each other so much, but all of a sudden they were too far away. I live in a different country now and travel was not really an option, as you probably now. So when I had a VIDEO call with my mom, who doesn’t care about technology, I could confidently say: something’s different in 2020.

How was my year, then? Well, I can see that I genuinely started to have a lot more calls in October of 2020. Not because I necessarily had more calls, but because I put more in my calendar. I actually expected December to have more calls the October, but I forgot how everything stops after the 20th of December. Even in a year where people are not really meeting and traveling.

Finally, I now know who I talked to the most. In group calls and 1on1, as well. A good friend is on the top, since he’s been helping me with starting the business, as well. But the most interesting for me is the people I stopped communicating with: people that kinda fell through the cracks. People I would’ve loved to keep in touch, but life happens. At least this way I will remember to tell them “Happy New Year!” :)

If you want to check out how your year looks like, go here: YourCalendarLife.com. Again, we don’t save your personal data. We don’t see your emails. You’re safe from us.

Like many of us now, I have lots of calls these days. Usually not back to back, but with 10-15 minutes in between them. And you know what happens in those 10-15 minutes? I start writing an email. Or reading something. And I forget when the next call starts. I remember 5 minutes in and I’m embarrassed.

So I asked our developer at KeepClose.ai to build an iOS shortcut for me that creates an alarm 2 minutes before each meeting I have in the Calendar. I start the app in the morning and I have alarms for the entire day. Of course, if I add another meeting during the day, I need to re-run the shortcut.

Here’s the shortcut (you need to allow Untrusted Shortcuts to be installed, see here how):

Calendar Alarms Shortcut

Now, there are some things you need to know. Because of the limitations of the Shortcuts app, you need to keep these things in mind:

• if there’s already an alarm set for 2 minutes before your call (from a previous day), it will be put to on. BUT! It will not change the name of the alarm (it can’t be done through Shortcuts on iOS). We can’t delete it and replace it, as well.
• it only reads the iOS calendar, so you need to have your calendars added to that app, otherwise it won’t work
• because it reads the iOS calendar, if you add a call through another app (Google Calendar), you need to wait for the iOS Calendar app to sync, otherwise the shortcut won’t see the new meeting. There’s no Sync button on iOS Calendar, so sometimes it can take 5-10 minutes. I couldn’t find any way to change this.

P.S.: Finally, a little bit of promo for what I’m working on now: I think LinkedIn is bloated and almost unusable. So I’m working with my team on a solution that allows you to take back and easily manage your professional network. It’s called KeepClose.ai and it’s still in the early days, but if you think you might need something like this, get on our email list to be notified when we launched our alpha version.

Talking about something fishy :D

A Casino’s Database Was Hacked Through A Smart Fish Tank Thermometer:

A cybersecurity executive has revealed that hackers used an Internet of Things (IoT) connected fish tank thermostat to gain access to a casino’s high-roller database. Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan told the story to an audience in London last week.

“The attackers used that to get a foothold in the network,” she explained. “They then found the high-roller database and then pulled that back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud.” The incident raises awareness about the security of IoT objects.

I didn’t know you can actually mute all audio of your PS5 without using the TV remote, but this is quite good to know. Just long-press the transparent/orange mic button below the PS button.

Of course, just by pressing the white/orange button on the front will mute your mic and that’s really good when playing online games.

The new PlayStation 5 discoveries keep cranking up – even a week after the system’s American launch. Did you know, for example, that the DualSense’s mute button can also be used to quickly and conveniently turn off all of the system’s sound? You may want to do this if someone’s trying to speak to you, or if you need to listen out for a phone call or doorbell.

Basically, all you need to do is hold the microphone mute button located beneath the PlayStation button. If you’ve done it correctly, its orange light will pulse, and all of your game audio will be completely muted. Push it again and all of the sound will return. Cool, eh? We wonder what else there is to discover about this device?

From here: You Can Mute All PS5 Audio with the DualSense’s Microphone Button – Push Square.

I’ve been living in Portugal for the last 3 years or so. I genuinely like the country and, as a good citizen, I started to learn the language. From scratch.

While difficult, I’m lucky since Romanian, my native language, is also a Romance language and the grammar is really similar.

But the diminutives, OMG, the diminutives!!!

Portuguese people already speak really fast and it’s difficult to understand the words they speak, but they use SO MANY diminutives that I sometimes just stop making any effort to understand what they are saying.

I recently went with my car to get it serviced and, at some point, the guy asked for my “chavizinho” and I was confused as hell. “Chave” is “key”, so I thought I kinda got it, but I genuinely wasn’t sure that was what he wanted.

I’d love to have a dictionary that has both original word and the diminutive attached. You know, just to be there :)

Here’s a funny video (in Portuguese, with some English explanations) to understand how it happens.

Watch the video on Facebook

The source of the video: these guys.

P.S.: just to get an idea of how fast Portuguese people speak and how much they “eat” vowels, this is how the word “Portugal” sounds to me when they say it: “prtgal”.

image source

I woke up at 5:30am today. I usually wake up at 7:30-8, so this was weird.

Then I remember we just changed to Summer Time. While one hour shouldn’t make a difference, it kinda messed my sleep.

Apparently it’s quite common, as seen below. I genuinely wish we would make the change to just one time (Winter time, if possible) sooner rather than later.

Most noticeably, Daylight Saving can throw off sleep cycles. Your circadian rhythm is your body’s natural 24-hour cycle. A disruption in this rhythm, like Daylight Saving, is typically environmental, not genetic. Therefore, individuals can easily adjust behaviors that may cause issues, such as a poor sleep schedule. The rule of thumb is that for each hour of time change, it takes a day to adjust. So, if you get seven to eight hours of sleep and go to bed a little early the night before, you should wake feeling refreshed. However, if you already lack sleep and perhaps consume some caffeine or alcohol the night before, you might wake feeling sleep-deprived. Time to reset your internal clock!

From here: How Daylight Saving Affects Your Life | Northwestern Medicine.

I need to stop myself from using some sites too much, so I looked for a solution that didn’t involve using another app.

Once thing to keep in mind if using the solution below: it worked initially, but when I edited the file again it didn’t work anymore. I restarted my laptop and it worked, but I’m sure there’s another way you can force hosts to reload.

1. In the command line, type in “sudo nano /etc/hosts”.
2. When asked, type your admin password.
3. In the screen that will appear, you’ll see the host database for your computer.
4. Using your down arrow, go to the bottom, right under where it says, “127.0.0.1 localhost”.
5. Type in “127.0.0.1 hit ‘tab’, then enter facebook.com”.
6. On a new line, type in “127.0.0.1” hit ‘tab’, then enter www.facebook.com”; this is for extra measure.
7. Now, hold down Control + “O”. This will save the changes to the host database.
8. Hit “Return” and then Control + “X” to exit the screen.
9. Remove the existing cache by typing in “sudo dscacheutil -flushcache” in the command line, this refreshes the existing cache on the host database.

From here: How To Block Websites on Your Mac Using Terminal – Mason Sklut.

I rarely play on PC. I have a Mac, first of all, and most of the PC games on Steam or GOG don’t work on Mac, but I also enjoy playing on PlayStation more, for various reasons.

Since hearing about Disco Elysium, I always wanted to play it. And now, that it is available for PlayStation, I’m just gonna do that. The price (in the US store) is $39.99, with a 10% discount for PS+ users.

It’s a really interesting detective story RPG and it’s worth looking at it, if you enjoy this kind of games (and, apparently, if you enjoyed Planetscape: Torment at some point in your life).

Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game developed and published by ZA/UM. The game takes place in a large city still recovering from a war decades prior to the game’s start, with players taking the role of an amnesic detective who has been charged with solving a murder mystery. During the investigation, he comes to recall events about his own past as well as current forces trying to affect the city. Inspired by Infinity Engine–era role-playing games, particularly Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium was written and designed by Karelian-Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz. It features a distinctive watercolor art style, and music by the band British Sea Power. […]

Disco Elysium is a non-traditional role-playing game featuring no combat. Instead, events are resolved through skill checks and dialog trees via a system of 24 skills that represent different aspects of the protagonist, such as his perception and pain threshold. In addition, a system called the Thought Cabinet represents his other ideologies and personality traits, with players having the ability to freely support or suppress them. The game is based on a tabletop role-playing game setting that Kurvitz had previously created, with him forming ZA/UM in 2016 to work on the game. Disco Elysium was well received by critics, with it being named as a game of the year by several publications along with numerous other awards for its narrative and art. A television series adaptation was announced in 2020.

Image from here

Andreessen-Horowitz is, without a doubt, an interesting take on the investment fund paradigm. I have a friend that really wants them to invest in his startup just because of the power network that they created around their startups and founders.

But they are, in my opinion, a really strong media and research company. I feel a lot of the value they provide is through media appearances of their GPs and not only and these reports they provide. I mean, the best book on what it means to build a startup is written by Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing about Hard Things.

The last report I’ve seen is their report on marketplaces that you can see here. If you are interested in marketplaces, as a founder or an investor, you need to read this.

The past year has been a gut-punch for many marketplace categories. Ticketing marketplaces found their businesses drastically diminished when events were cancelled around the world. As schools were shuttered and many businesses enacted work-from-home policies, childcare marketplaces scrambled to adopt new safety precautions and stay afloat. Even the #1 marketplace last year, Airbnb, grappled with shutdowns, cancellations, and refunds.

As 2020 drew to a close, however, many marketplaces proved to be extraordinarily resilient—a testament to the flexibility of the model. In a year when in-person interactions were heavily restricted and unemployment went through the roof, marketplaces allowed people to access the products and services they needed and, in many cases, monetize their own talents, services, and resources. From food and alcohol delivery to games, online education to outdoor getaways, marketplaces like Instacart, Valve, Outschool, and Hipcamp helped us weather a difficult year.

From here: The a16z Marketplace 100: 2021.