I’ve had a few interests this year, finding a good water enhancer (e.g. flavor mixes without sugar) being one of the recent ones but my interest this year has stayed pretty steady in typography. Mainly printing out labels has led me down rabbit holes of font families. I’m making labels for moving and I’ve found a typeface I like. It’s San Francisco Pro Rounded or SF Pro Rounded for short. You can get it from Apple’s website on macOS. I started making labels using it, you can see an example below:

The Dymo Turbo 45 is a pretty nice label maker, it’s thermal so I don’t have to worry about ink usage. I’m not sure if label makers out there use ink for just basic printing because it seems like thermal printing would be way more economical in large scale uses. But I do love using the label maker to print out labels for everything around the house. I think this has been a worthwhile interest for the year.

I love this song by Rostam, it has a warm sound to it and it reminds me of being between two cultures perfectly.

I made a profile photo inspired by the album cover below:

I just saw the new MX Keys Mini, it’s a $100 non-mechanical keyboard but one of its primary marketing touts is that it comes with an emoji key:

I love to use custom keyboard shortcuts for basically everything and of my least favorite shortcuts is the ⌘ + ⇧ + Space to bring up the Emojis & Symbols floating menu.

So if you’d like to change your emojis menu shortcut follow the steps below:

1. Open up the Keyboard settings (in System Preferences)
2. Go to “Shortcuts”
3. For “App Shortcuts” add a new one (using the + button)
4. Set it for “All Applications” and then type in “Emoji & Symbols” and for the shortcut, set whatever you’d like it to be. 😊

If you want to check out a branch you had checked out right before switching to the current branch (usually during merges from main this will happen).

git checkout feature-branch
... do some work
git checkout main
... merge stuff
git checkout -
# ↑ this will take you back to feature-branch

You can clear the dock’s persistent items (default apps that show up on dock) by running the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array; killall Dock

You can reset the dock using:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist; killall Dock

Note: it might not be necessary to kill the dock but I needed to run that on Monterey.

I just finished reading this murder mystery for Halloween. Took me a little over a month to finish it so it was perfect timing. It didn’t have too much of a spooky vibe but the murder mystery aspect is great. I was completely confused until the epilogue.

I’m attempting to pick up my camera more often and take photos of things around me. And I realized, my two favorite subjects to shoot are my pets. I’ve always liked taking photos of them as having a gray cat is the perfect gray card to have around. Having a black dog is not the same, his photos become a bit more tough against bright backgrounds.

Here are photos from today:

Bonus

I’m working on a theme for my blog that will replace this theme because I am looking at making my blog more photo friendly.

In the past few weeks, my neck pain has been more of a mental burden than a physical one. I’m writing this as an exercise in therapy for myself and hopefully to remind myself (and anyone reading this) to sit upright, take breaks, and don’t take your body for granted.

I’ve been thinking about what has caused my neck pain. I sit at my computer for many hours a day, some days even after work, I’m sitting here gaming.

The main cause has been the passiveness about the position that I sit in. Whenever I am on the computer, it has been due to extending my arms too far out and leaning my neck over the keyboard to get closer to the monitor. So, moving the monitor and keyboard+mouse closer to me has helped a lot.

Next, my chair, Kristen helped me find an aeron chair from craigslist about 3 years ago. I’ve had it throughout the pandemic and as my neck pain was becoming more annoying, I never gave it a thought that maybe my chair was incorrectly adjusted. Turns out, it was a combination of my desk being too tall which caused me to lift up my chair even more and eventually not touch the floor with my feet. Dangling feet meant I had to rest them somewhere, what better place than on top of each other on top of the chair’s legs? Well, that meant my whole lower body was stiff and tense the whole time I sat on the computer. This led to fatigue in a short amount of time. So, lowering the chair and desk helped.

Taking account of how long have I been sitting in this position helps, I have gone a couple of hours in a row of just sitting here. Which just sounds bad writing it out. And it’s clearly true, I was fatiguing my whole body.

So, a few things to check:

• Adjust height of chair, desk, and monitor.
• Monitor should be eye level, a bit higher so you’re not looking down.
• Mouse and keyboard should be within arm’s reach comfortable, elbows bent about 90º while resting on the arm rest of the chair.
• Neck and back are straight, resting against the back of the chair.
• No headrest needed, this will signal if I’m getting tired looking to rest my head should instead mean I should take a break away from the computer.
• Feet should touch the ground comfortably.

I’ve been trying to learn some typescript and as part of building something with it, I’ve also started using next.js for easier react set up. I ran into an issue where styled-components were not loading in the browser but they were not throwing an error in my editor or the build log. So after some googling, I found a page talking about including the styled-component as a plugin into the next.config.js file. Like so:

module.exports = {
  reactStrictMode: true,
  plugins: [["styled-components", { ssr: true }]],
};

This seemed to fix the issue for me.

“Looking for bliss in a blah day” — Adam Grant