Posts

I just had my first proper piano lesson. Although I knew it would be an odd experience, I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the mental and emotional challenge. Having spent a year learning from an app, suddenly I was exposing myself to the judgement of a human. Fortunately, I’d chosen an excellent human. Steve is a calm, kind, and encouraging teacher. Above all, he’s someone who clearly loves teaching. With students ranging from 5 to 76, there’s not much he hasn’t seen, either. He certainly didn’t balk at the prospect of a nervous almost-51-year-old. Indeed, the dinosaur analogies he uses with the youngsters were remarkably effective for me. ...

“The goose isn’t for dinner, she lives here.” Thanks to Duolingo, that’s just one of the phrases I’ve learned to say in German recently. And the goose is one of the more pedestrian examples. Rather than teaching you useful expressions, Duolingo mainly demonstrates how sentences are constructed and provides adaptable examples. Some of the more lurid sentences are cleverly designed to stick in your brain. “I wish you didn’t have a clown in your cellar” is certainly refusing to budge. ...

There’s a lot of focus on making ourselves as efficient as possible: cramming our days with conspicuous activities, multitasking, and listening to podcasts at double speed. This might make sense during the good times, but we come unstuck when everything gets a bit squirrely – during a pandemic or a recession, for instance – then we suddenly realise our regime isn’t really serving us. ...

Tucked away behind High Street Kensington is 18 Stafford Terrace, a sumptuously preserved Victorian townhouse. This was once the home of Edward Linley Sambourne, a cartoonist for the magazine Punch, and his wife Marian. Many of their possessions were sold after the death of their son in 1946, yet the house remains cluttered, even by Victorian standards. I learned from our tour guide that the Sambournes bought around 200 chairs. Even though they had two children and a small collection of servants, this is very a high bum-to-chair ratio (especially given the servants weren’t encouraged to sit down). What on earth was going on? ...

Over the last week, I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. This morning, my brain had a great idea: Why don’t I create a whole new blog about self-help books? Yes, that’s much better than just writing this one piece. Then I can find the right domain name, fanny around with WordPress, and (best of all) create a content plan in Trello. Excruciatingly, this is exactly the sort of behaviour Burkeman cautions against: ...

I’d always promised myself I would learn to play the piano before the age of 50. I managed it by a gnat’s crotchet, starting just a couple of months ahead of my big birthday. Although I tried to learn in my late twenties, I gave up in disgust upon discovering the existence of the bass clef. Of course, I’d realised hand coordination was involved … but that note is a G for my right hand, but a C for my left? And I have to read two staves simultaneously? I don’t need this nonsense. I’ll just read a book instead. ...

Although it only takes a minute to create a Jekyll site, you could easily spend a large chunk of your life installing the environment. A query on the Write the Docs forum prompted me to share an easier way. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Jekyll site in three steps, using the free Docker Community Edition and Bret Fisher’s images. Step 1: Install Docker First, you’ll need Docker installed on your local machine. Docker Community Edition is free, and straightforward to install. ...

Introduction In the olden days, it would take hours to install and configure a web server on a local machine. It was especially fiddly if you wanted to recreate a specific environment for testing purposes. Happily, Docker has made our lives much easier. In this tutorial, we’ll package a simple website and nginx server as a Docker image. Anyone with Docker Desktop installed can then run that site in seconds without having to set up anything. ...

In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how you can create a checklist in InDesign that’s both interactive and printable. I’m assuming you already know the basics of InDesign. If not, I recommend the InDesign Essentials course on Skillshare.

If you’re anything like me, you consume all sorts of content: books, blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts. It’s hard keeping track of it all. In this short demo, I’ll show you Readwise, a web-based tool for collecting, organising, and reviewing your highlights. I’m not associated in any way with Readwise, I just love it!