It also happened to be a great week for space exploration. Our whole family spent Friday night in front of the TV, watching NASA’s dedicated feed for Artemis II’s return to Earth. I think, for my kids at least, it wasn’t as momentous as I was perhaps expecting — maybe there’s something about the fantasy worlds created or advanced technology surrounding them that takes away an allure of a trip to the Moon. Rewind to 1969-1972, and you don’t have the Internet, you don’t have AI, you don’t have cell phones. You don’t even have Star Wars! Perhaps there was an absolute bout of wonder 54 years ago that my girls just didn’t have this time around. Even for me — given all the remarkable feats of technology that hit the news every single day — it was challenging to envision the speeds, the precision, and the engineering required to bring those four brave astronauts home. There’s something about space that is so unforgiving and so vastly different from this beautiful Creation. I’m not sure a lowly accountant can fathom the challenges involved.

I’m going to steal a link from Nick Heer’s Pixel Envy to top off the Artemis II trip here on The newsprint. Most readers will have already visited the Artemis II-dedicated Flickr page. If you haven’t, there are some truly stunning photos here that no human camera has ever captured before.

My Review of the Nuphy Node 100

This review turned into a longer bit of writing, so I made it a dedicated post instead. Maybe it’ll do better for SEO as well? Who knows?

I purchased one of Nuphy’s base-line low-profile Node mechanical keyboards a few months ago and have used it on and off each week since. I figured it’d be good to get some thoughts out there — this is one of the most price-accessible mechanical keyboards you can find right now.

The Second Cup

Astropad’s Workbench for Mac

For years, the default remote desktop app for the Mac and iPad was Screens. I’ve tried Screens multiple times and can never work through all the firewall settings in place. I have a pretty simple Eero network, and everything I’ve tried with Screens has failed to get through. Perhaps there’s a new kid on the remote desktop block.

The Martyr’s Crown

Now, this is an interesting thought experiment. I like the discussion.

Notebooks Are Coming to Gemini

I was perplexed this last few weeks when I went into Gemini to add a group of documents — Excel sheets, PDFs, etc. — only to find that Gemini didn’t really have the capability to do this a few weeks ago. I immediately jumped over to Claude and came away pleased with Claude Projects. Of course, give it a week in the AI world, and Gemini now has the same features.

AI-Powered Google Finance

Another Google upgrade this week. I always get a little iffy when talking about stock research apps. I think, for most people, the only barometer you need to measure is whether you think the company will still be here in 40 years. If the answer to that is “No”, don’t invest. Use your own brain and second-order thinking to figure it out.

Quote of the Week

Concerning AI, and after my experiences with AI in accounting this week—

I should mention something before moving forward here. It’s interesting how often my definition of “accounting” or “taxation” or “financial reporting” differs from what people think I do each day. I am sure the same can be said for doctors or lawyers.

In the case of the following quote, “accounting” probably means “bookkeeping” — data entry and record keeping to ensure excise tax compliance, timely data for decision-making, or base data provided to professional firms for financial reporting. “Taxation” is an entirely different thing — I wouldn’t even consider it accounting. Sure, accountants do tax, but not all accountants do tax, just like not all doctors are surgeons. And “financial reporting” would align more with the production of year-end financial statements, reporting to management and shareholders, and reporting to lenders or other users of the financial statements.

So when you hear “accounting”, I think 9 times out of 10, you should think “bookkeeping”, which is something not many CPAs would work through these days.

""Doing it" goes first. Current models can parse accounting data and reformat it faster and more accurately than any accountant working manually. If a significant portion of your revenue comes from charging clients for data entry and coding, that model is already dying. Within 12 months, there won't be a justification for spending human hours on those tasks... What survives? Confidence. In 5 to 10 years, some clients will hire a CPA for one reason: insurance. The tax pro doesn't prepare, only reviews and grades his confidence level in case of litigation or an audit. Underwriting of returns and compliance will be a massive industry. Clients will be able to handle 90% of the prep, but will always want someone on their side to talk to the IRS in case of an audit. That's not worth nothing."

Roger Ledbetter, The Slow Death of Tax & Accounting Work

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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I’ve been allergic to low-profile keyboards in the past, for whatever reason. There aren’t as many of them on the market, and they all seem to have a compromise I’m not willing to deal with. The Nuphy Node 100, for the most part, is no different — there are compromises in this low-profile keyboard that keyboard aficionados will scoff at (me included!).

But the Node 100 has one ace up its sleeve: price. This has to be one of the best value mechanical keyboards I’ve ever used. At $100 USD, you simply cannot go wrong.

Materials, Fit, and Finish

For $100 worth of materials, you’re going to get what you pay for here. This is a fully plastic keyboard. It’s quite light to move around, and it has those cheaper ABS plastic keycaps that tend to look slightly shiny after a month or so of use. Materially, there are no miracles at work here.

I do quite like the aesthetic, though. The Node 100 comes in three different colours — Lunar White, Ink Gray, and Light Pink. Ink Gray is, indeed, gray. No matter what those images look like, it is not black, or space grey, or space black, in any way. This Ink Gray is far lighter than I was expecting, to the point that I don’t feel it would fit in an all-black setup. It looks great, but it isn’t black.

I like the bits of colour Nuphy have used to highlight special function keys. I immediately moved the green, yellow, and red keys into an orientation that works well for custom keyboard shortcuts in our tax software, and it looks flat out slick.

There are some feet on the underside that you can flip up to increase the typing angle. Again, they are plastic feet, so long-term durability may be poor, but it’s there if you’d like.

Lastly, layout: I’m a giant fan of the Node 100’s key layout. It’s a “100%” keyboard, but it has more of a 96% layout in the low-profile variety. Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down all line the right side of the Enter key, making room for a full-size zero key in the number pad. This is an ideal layout for a keyboard — you get a full zero, ensuring you don’t have to change any typing muscle memory, and you get a full-size plus key in the number pad. It is so difficult to find this layout in the keyboard world.

Overall, fit and finish is of the $100 price point. It’s not great, but it’s good considering the price. The most important physical parts of the Nude 100, more than anything, is its perfect layout for anyone needing numbers in their daily work.

Typing Feel

This is my first-ever set of linear switches. Nuphy has recently debuted Blush silent linear switches, in both low-profile and high-profile varieties, and they are a great option for those who work in an office environment or who work around sleeping children. They aren’t as quiet as the Durock Silent Shrimps I have in my high-profile keyboards, but these are entirely passable for quiet environments. I’d wager they are quieter than those ultra-cheap Logitech or Lenovo options you see on every cheap office desk.

I don’t mind the feel, either. I’m not sure linear is my favourite pick — when I get going, it’s easy to get hammering down and the lack of tactical bump provides no feedback on where in the downstroke you are.

The Blush switches are quite light — it does not take much to actuate a key switch on this keyboard. For quick, light typers, I imagine this would be a dream. I can get going at a brisk speed, but I’m not as light as typer as others. The result: I make many mistakes typing on the Nude 100. It’s easily my least effective keyboard in terms of accuracy.

I’m largely positive on the Node 100’s Blush switch feel. The keycaps are pretty large and flat, and the light switch makes for an effortless actuation. When it’s really time to bear down and get work done, I can fly on this thing — but I have to be willing to go back to correct my mistakes, or have AI do some extra heavy lifting on my written work.

Other Notes

For a $100 keyboard, there are a surprising number of additional features you gain here:

• The Node 100 can be used wired or wirelessly, and comes with a little USB-nubbin’ thing you can plug into your computer to bypass Bluetooth. I’ve just used Bluetooth and it has worked great.
• The keyboard has a touch-sensitive area in the top corner that you can use to increase volume, screen brightness, or any number of customizable settings. I’ve used the feature precisely once — it was a bit sensitive and I couldn’t properly dial in the volume I was looking for. I haven’t used the feature since.
• Battery life has been stellar. I haven’t charged it since I did the initial charge out of the box. I’ve used it for, let’s say, two days a week for the last few months. I’m pretty impressed with the battery life.
• The Blush switch options are pretty great and a worthwhile recommendation. If you don’t like them, you can swap them out, as the Node 100 is hot-swappable. Again, pretty impressive for a $100 keyboard.

Summary

This was a pretty simple review for a pretty simple keyboard. At this price point, you aren’t going to get every feature under the sun — a plastic chassis, cheaper keycap plastic, and an overall lighter and cheaper feel.

Where the Node 100 really shines is in its layout, standout battery life, and surprisingly good typing experience. I actually quite like the Blush Nano switches in the Node 100. Though they aren’t my favourite switch ever, these are an easy recommendation for any office environment.

I’d recommend anyone take a look at the Node 100 to get a sense of whether a low profile mechanical keyboard makes sense for your desk, especially at $100. If you have any sense of mechanical keyboards at all, I’d suggest looking at the Air V3, and specifically if you use the 75% layout. My gripe with the Air V3 is the number pad layout — a half-zero key, and a pushing of the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys to the top right rather than providing a few extra function keys that you can map to special shortcuts. If you’re like me in this regard, you may be stuck with the Node 100 regardless.

Diving into the resurrection story yields some stunning wisdom, and it’s the story that gives something new each year. Our pastor spoke at length today about “tetelestai”, the Greek word for “It is finished”. I don’t normally (ever, honestly) put in AI-generated content here at The Newsprint, but I figured I would include the following Gemini results when I asked Gemini “What does tetelestai mean?” The results:

The word tetelestai (τετέλεσται) is one of the most significant terms in the New Testament, famously known as the final cry of Jesus in the Gospel of John (19:30). While it is often translated as "It is finished," its cultural and linguistic background provides a much richer "paid in full" connotation.

Linguistic Structure — The word is the perfect indicative passive form of the Greek verb teleo (τελέω). Understanding the "Perfect Tense" is the key to its power:

• The Verb (τελέω): Means to bring to an end, to complete, to fulfill, or to pay a debt.
• The Perfect Tense: In Greek, this tense denotes an action that was completed in the past but has ongoing, permanent results in the present.
• The Nuance: It doesn't just mean "I'm finished with this task"; it means "This task is completed for all time, and the results will never change."

The Cultural "Paid in Full" Context — In the first century, tetelestai was a common word used in everyday secular life. Archaeologists have found ancient papyri, such as tax receipts and business contracts, with this word scribbled across them.

• Accounting and Commerce: When a debt was fully settled, the creditor would write tetelestai on the certificate of debt. It served as a legal receipt, proving the person no longer owed anything.
• The Servant’s Report: A servant would use the word when reporting back to a master after completing a difficult assignment. It signaled that the job was performed exactly according to instructions.
• Sacrificial Purity: Priests would use a related form of the word when inspecting a sacrificial animal. If the animal was found to be without blemish, it was declared "complete" or "fit" for the altar.

Theological Significance — By using this specific word, the biblical narrative suggests a multi-layered completion of Christ's mission:

• Legal/Debt: The "debt" of sin incurred by humanity is cancelled. The ledger is zeroed out.
• Prophetic: Every Messianic prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures was fulfilled.
• Sacrificial: The final, perfect sacrifice was offered, rendering the old system of animal sacrifice unnecessary.
• Active Completion: The "work" of salvation was finished by the creator; it was not left for humanity to complete or "earn."

Summary of the Term — If you were to see a bill today stamped with a big red "PAID," that is the modern equivalent of tetelestai. It is a word of finality and triumph, shifting the status of a person from "debtor" to "free."

"It is finished; the work is done, the debt is paid, and the victory is won."

What a remarkable set of results. It is finished! The job is done. The debt is paid. Then, now, and forevermore.

I’ll also share the very best Easter sermon I’ve ever heard: Alastair Begg’s “The Man on the Middle Cross”. Of course, the criminal on the cross next to Jesus presents so many corollaries — as in, what actually is the value of baptism if that criminal could enter heaven through his repentance in the very last moments of his life? Those issues are for another day, for another mind, for another conversation. For today, that man represents our chance at eternity. Thank goodness for that man! (Both men, of course.)

I hope you’ve had a blessed Easter weekend.

Beyond this, dear readers, I apologize. I have half-baked thoughts on several topics, none of which are ready to go for this current Sunday. I have a few topics to tackle in the coming weeks:

• Impressions of the Nuphy Node 100.
• My first few weeks or month with Claude Pro.
• Thoughts on the upcoming Star Wars: Maul series.
• Re-reviewing the Logitech MX Master 4 (spoiler: this is a far bigger update than what I’m reading from other up-graders.)

Perhaps I’ll call this my “sabbatical week” — hat tip to my former Blanc Media colleagues. I’ll leave you with a quote from Wesley Huff, one of my favourite apologists right now:

"And not just mercy, but grace. So, mercy is not getting what you do deserve. Grace is getting what you don't deserve. So, mercy is you deserve sin in hell, but you don't get it any longer. But now, not only are you forgiven, but God then adopts you as a child. You don't deserve that. So you're not just forgiven; you are adopted into his family and given Eternal life"

Wes Huff, I Explain the Gospel to Julian Dorey

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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I’ve learned a few things while being transparent about The Sunday Edition over the last few weeks:

• This little “newsletter” or weekly post is read by more people than I thought. My analytics and direct subscriber count are low, but it’s sent out to RSS, which I have no record of. This is good and bad, in both things I know and don’t know. The fact I’ve received so many emails recently goes to show people are reading, and I’m so, so grateful for the encouragement.
• Far-off readers (readers who may not live in the same locale) seem more interested in technology writing, while local readers appear to be more interested in the financial writing. This is interesting.
• Creativity and whatever part of my brain is used during tax time must be the same muscle; I expected to have ample energy because I’d be using a different part of my brain, but this couldn’t be further from the case.

This week, some thoughts on the Studio Display XDR and some fun links I found during the week.

Two Weeks With Apple’s Studio Display XDR

Yes, an accountant who uses the Studio Display XDR. What a joke! And it probably is a joke, but I truly don’t care. This is likely a 10+ year display and I finally have the best Apple display you can buy. My opinions of it are reflective of it being the most expensive Apple display you can buy — there’s some great stuff packed into this otherwise-recycled design.

120Hz refresh rate is the feature I didn’t know I would love. I suppose I’ve experienced this sort of smooth refresh rate on the iPad Pro, iPhone Pro, and MacBook Pro, but I didn’t think I’d notice it on the large 27-inch display. Instead, to me, this is the most important new feature in the Studio Display XDR. Smooth scrolling, smooth video, smooth cursor movement — everything is buttery smooth across the entire operating system, and it’s such a joy to use.

Conversely, sometimes you’d like to show off a particular feature that makes regular passersby go “Wow!”. 120Hz is not going to bring about any “Wows!”. Non-tech folks are so used to this sort of refresh rate in their iPhones that they somewhat expect the same behaviour from a large Studio Display. It’s difficult to convince anyone that this level of smoothness is worth such an investment.

Also of note: macOS will downgrade refresh rates to the lowest common denominator if you have a second external display hooked up to your Mac. I tried to use the XDR beside a first generation Studio Display and macOS immediately downshifted the XDR’s 120Hz rate to its common 60Hz refresh rate. I wasn’t prepared to spend this kind of money only to use the display in 60Hz mode, so I moved the second Studio Display somewhere else.

I am growing annoyed of Apple’s constant need to recycle parts, designs, and manufacturing processes. Tim Cook’s logistics expertise is at the heart and soul of Apple’s extraterrestrial share price. His ability to lead manufacturing of tens of millions of devices at the highest possible quality and ship all over the world in under a week is what has led to Apple’s economies of scale. That same manufacturing prowess is on full display in something like the Studio Display XDR.

Instead of put the mini-LED and 120Hz refresh rates into a new package, Apple opted to design a Studio Display that looks effectively identical to the prior generation. (The XDR is slightly thicker than the first generation Studio Display; it’s immediately noticeable when side-by-side.) I’m sure the XDR is produced on the same manufacturing line. It appears to use the same packaging to be delivered. It uses the same potato camera and the same speakers as the lower tiered Studio Display. It uses the same smaller 27-inch display size. What an absolute shame this is only 27-inches diagonally.

Everything about the XDR’s physical production appears to be recycled and reused. And no, at this price, this is not an exciting thing to me. I want to arrive at the office, look at my display, and instantly remember that I have the newest toy.

The bright 2,000 nit mini-LED display is beautiful, especially when viewing 8K content. I immediately noticed the difference in the bright whites and the black blacks when comparing the XDR to the first generation Studio Display. The first generation Studio Display was actually poor in this regard — many light leaks and poor contrast provided distraction in certain environments (specifically, for me, when watching Star Wars shows with lots of black space content). The XDR completely fixes this shortcoming, and it’s almost as instantly noticeable as the 120Hz refresh rate.

I also don’t think I understood the impressiveness of HDR content until I viewed some on the XDR for the first time. I simply YouTubed an 8K HDR video to experience the full capabilities of the display, and I let out an audible gasp while watching.

Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and I honestly didn’t know how beautiful 8K HDR content could truly be.

I’ve run into a few software or graphical glitches, and I hope there’s a fix coming. I regularly (by regularly, I mean between 10 and 15 times a day) catch the XDR display glitching out, including a flashing pointer, duplicated pointers, invisible pointers, or skewed pointers. It seems the fix is to either scroll the mouse over to the MacBook Pro’s display, or moving the mouse from one side of the display to the other seems to do the trick.

I’d be curious if there are two channels at play here (one left and one right) and that the sheer amount of data running through the cable gets crossed up or something.

These glitches are annoying at worst. They don’t shut down or inhibit my work in any way. Though, if I were a designer and my mouse pointer was the actual piece doing all the work, I think I’d be more than mildly annoyed.

My ears aren’t trained enough to hear a difference in the XDR’s audio capabilities. I’ve always felt the Studio Display speakers were pretty good, and I most certainly cannot tell a difference between this and the first generation Studio Display. I also can’t tell a difference in microphone quality when recording Loom videos or speaking in a Google Meet meeting.

I have noticed, however, the M4 Pro MacBook Pro suffering a bit with lags when preparing a Loom video. My little talking-head bubble in the corner (which I regularly shoot with the XDR’s built-in camera) is almost always laggy — I can see myself jumping from frame to frame in the video while recording. Now, when actually producing and sending to a client, that video is much smoother. Something seems to be going on when working live.

And lastly, my one particular wish is that there was one more USB-C port on the back of the Studio Display XDR. This is largely a nitpick, but I think it’s real. I plugged my now-old OWC Thunderbolt 4 dock into the second Thunderbolt 5 port in the back of the XDR, leaving only two USB-C ports remaining. I connect a Logitech Bolt receiver into one of those ports for my MX Master 4. It’s not often where I need more than that one USB-C port, but I know for a fact others will want more than one port available in the back of this display.

The reason this irritates me: I am willing to bet Apple is recycling a manufacturing process here, and rather than bore a new USB-C port into the back of the XDR display, they opted to keep the same number of holes in the back of the chassis and only update the internal components to add a second Thunderbolt 5 port. To me, two USB-C ports represent a “good enough” approach. At this price tag, “good enough” is far from good enough.

I can’t imagine 6 months with the Studio Display XDR will produce too many additional thoughts beyond what I’ve outlined above. I’ve contemplated bringing the XDR home for the sake of being able to watch TV shows on it and making better use of that mini-LED glory. But there’s also something about knowing there’s a $5,000 CAD display sitting in my basement used for maybe 2 hours a week. Perhaps a truly lengthy test of those capabilities would yield some new opinions.

Instead, the Studio Display XDR has provided a great experience so far, but falls short on the expectations I thought I would have had if I had ever been able to work on a Pro Display XDR. I’ve always enjoyed using a Studio Display, and that enjoyment certainly isn’t gone. It’s just that I was expecting more for this price.

I am simply an accountant, though. As I’ve been told time and again, no accountant needs this type of display just to view spreadsheets.

(Trust me though, you’d be surprised.)

Brutalist CISO Notes

I had a truly friendly reader reach out after one of my prior discussions on the futility of building a second brain. He provided a link to his self-created “Brutalist CISO Notes” guide, in which he showcases how he takes notes each day. A quote from the site:

The more elaborate the system becomes, the less it gets used. It quietly turns into a digital attic. Things go in. Very little comes back out. You end up managing the system instead of the system serving you.
What actually works at this altitude is not knowledge management. It’s operational memory.
A CISO notes system only has three real jobs. Capture fast. Preserve decisions. Drive action.
Everything else is overhead.

In some ways, this reminds me of the Bullet Journal methodology, or Patrick Rhone’s Dash/Plus system, which I still use in my notes to this day. Perhaps I can adapt the Dash/Plus system with a few pointers from this CISO Notes guide.

The Second Cup

Bleep

This is app one of two this week that reminds me of MyMind. To me, MyMind looks a bit more automated and automatic, while Bleep looks to require a bit more of your customization.

Spatial

And app two of two that reminds me of MyMind. I would suggest Spatial and Bleep are largely targeting the same audience here, though I think Spatial has a tad bit more flair to it. The onboarding experience was really, really well done.

Plain Text Accounting

I’m not sure I’m technical enough to pull this off, and the simplicity of this type of system would likely make my blood boil. Overall though, if you’re looking for something quick, easy, and painless to keep sense of your internal accounting records, and you have a bit of technical know-how in your arsenal, this could be a fun little system.

Steve Kerr’s Handwritten Letter to the Blue Jays’s John Schneider

Greatness, meet greatness. Player-first coaches like Schneider always make me a bit weary — I don’t believe you can lead a clubhouse by pleasing each player. But some guys just have “it”, and it seems Schneider just has “it”. The Jays are off to a great start this year and the clubhouse seems to have picked up right where they left off after that heartbreaking October.

Maurizio Baldassari Basket Weave Virgin Wool Cardigan

Pricey, but beautiful. I love me a good crossover between a sweater and sport jacket. This is right up my alley.

Quote of the Week

“And it’s not always about looking the best: intentionally dressing casually to a formal meeting sends a powerful message about who holds the power.”

Morgan Housel, The Art and Science of Spending Money

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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I had the chance to jump on the ice the last two weeks with a group of local men. Though the hockey is unorganized, it’s been wonderful to get out there, work in a sweat, and battle through some friendly competition. There’s something about that hockey adrenaline rush that becomes so physically satisfying for your body and soul in so many ways.

It can go too far, though.

I found myself talking to different sets of folks this week about my experience as a hockey official. Hockey was remarkable to me in my teenage years and early 20s — I had the chance to work Junior A hockey at the age of 15, I skated in the first ever Winnipeg Jets training camp, and I worked elite level games that featured current NHLers like Matt Barzal. Most importantly, I met many fantastic people, expanded my network of connections for the future, and learned how to deal with conflict in situations few people can understand.

But full transparency: That conflict gets to you after a while. I worked Junior A hockey in my hometown as a head official in my early 20s, and I had people I looked up to shouting at and berating me from the stands. I had local leaders attempt to breakdown doors and break their sticks over doorknobs. Not only that, but I had young kids booing me and calling me an idiot to my face. I was spit at more times than I can count. Let me tell you, I have some stories.

“It’s part of the game,” they say. And it is part of the game, until it’s not. I had someone recently quite literally say “Yeah, but Josh, you knew what you were getting into when you signed up to officiate.” You don’t know what you’re getting into. No young official who signs up at 12 years of age can understand the feeling of people you have respected your entire childhood booing and swearing at you.

While you’re in the role, it’s part of your identity. You put on a brave face, hit the ice, and be the best judge you can be at a breakneck speed. You smile and laugh when someone cuts you deep. You shrug off the fan insulting your spouse. You ignore the local police officer, who, after being called for a penalty on the ice, threatens to call you in after a game. You put up with it because any small crack will lead to a valley for a hockey player to gouge you. You must appear unflappable, for anything else will lead to utter chaos.

Very brief moments over the last two weeks reminded me of those brutal moments from the past. Something comes out in people on the ice. Perhaps it’s the Zamboni fumes unlocking an inner zombie in most hockey folks. Whatever happens, it’s brutally exhausting, brutally embarrassing, and absolutely worthy of following your reputation when you leave the rink. If something makes you become an animal on the ice, you need to leave the game behind.

If someone asked me to ref a hockey game today, I wouldn’t last five minutes. The very first shout and I’d come unglued. I’d be part of viral videos showcasing a referee attempting to fight a coach or a fan. I no longer believe I’m capable of suppressing the kind of emotion I suppressed as a young man, working through the ranks as a hockey official.

Hockey is a chicken soup for the body. It provides just the right amount of competition to get your blood flowing. It provides the chance to share and converse with other men. It provides a chance to escape the stresses of a hard business day.

But it can go too far. If you’re an animal when the puck is dropped (or when the first pitch is thrown, or when the ball is tipped off), leave the game behind. Your actions follow you and will destroy relationships in the future.

Everyone has a story

Aleem Shaun:

I was recently reminded of a word that isn’t found in a standard English dictionary. The word, sonder, was coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s a French word meaning to plumb the depths, but the English version is defined as the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

I appreciate self realizations like this. It is through these realizations that humanity can build back bridges and heal.

Shaun concludes:

But I am also aware that some people have a greater responsibility and a greater need for sonder than others. People who hold decision-making power that impacts an entire community, nation or nations. People who hold ideologies that consider some people more human than others. People who hold the power of life and death and are willing to enforce it are the ones who need sonder the most.

This I disagree with.

People with power do absolutely require a greater need for sonder, but that does not preclude people with less power from needing that level of sonder. This double standard allows someone with less perceived power to be a jerk, while someone with more perceived power is to be held to an immeasurable higher standard. This is an unfair way of thinking and acting.

Worry less about the log in your brother’s eye and worry more about the log in your eye. Hold your own need for sonder to the same level as you hold your brother’s need for sonder.

Note that though I disagree with this conclusion, I still love this sort of piece from Aleem Shaun. Everyone has a story, and discovering those stories is one of the most amazing things that keeps us uniquely human.

The Second Cup

Hästens Grand Vividus Bed

My wife and I are looking at new mattresses, so I naturally typed in “Best mattress money can buy” into Google. This is what came up. I had a good chuckle.

Incase’s Compact Ergonomic Keyboard

This appears to be the Microsoft Sculpt, Version 2.0. Made by Incase. Designed by Microsoft. My world for a number pad edition. The Microsoft Surface Ergonomic Keyboard was my favourite keyboard of all-time.

A $200,000 Star Wars Lego Set

My favourite part of this is the random set of Clone Wars episodes he chose to model the set after. The Geonosis episodes with Luminara and Offee were great, albeit a little creepy.

Eugenio Suárez’s World Baseball Classic Championship Interview

Most Canadians were cheering against the United States for the wrong reasons. I was cheering against the United States because it felt like it would be so fresh to have someone other than one of the baseball giants to hoist the trophy. Venezuela did not disappoint. I will likely never forget the way the team all stood up and shouted their anthem in all its glory. I don’t think any pro sports championship has yielded that kind of joy shown by the Venezuelans this week.

Quote of the Week

“Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them. Let's try to figure out why they do what they do. That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.”

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!

It’s the time of year or where my workflows and habits are really put through the grinder. If a habit is going to last for me, it has to get through the depths of a tax-season-March. And the list of habits I’m shedding is growing by the day:

• I’ve written a Sunday Edition post for about 70 straight weeks, and I’m going to narrowly hit the deadline today.
• I’ve successfully worked out for 5 or 6 days a week for the last year and a half. That fell by the wayside this week.
• I’ve planned my task list and daily time blocks consistently for the last 4 months. Nope, that habit was crushed this week.
• I’ve read five complete books since mid-December. I didn’t pick up a book once this week.

This March-grind is a truly great testing ground for habits that actually improve my life. If they improve life, I’ll work doubly hard to make it happen. But if it’s just a habit for habit’s sake, then it’ll die. I guess there’s no sense in completing unnecessary stuff each day for the sake of “keeping my habits”.

Now, on that note, I’ve struggled to find time this week for this Sunday Edition. So below is a somewhat longer piece I published a long time ago about Registered Education Savings Plans. I continue to have conversations with friends, family, and clients about RESPs. They are out-of-this-world good investment vehicles.

How RESPs Are the Best Investment Tool When You Have Kids

A Registered Education Savings Plan is the most powerful way to save for your child’s future. Pretty definitive, but I mean it. RESPs are easy to set up and easy to contribute to, and you can receive an incredible 20% kick-in from the government (to a maximum of $500 per year) on your contributions each year.

Even if your child doesn’t head to university or college, I think saving and investing inside the RESP is still worthwhile.

Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) Tech Specs

First, a bullet list of important information for clarity’s sake:

• RESPs can be set up for your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or even family friends. Beneficiaries (the child) have to be a Canadian resident and have a Social Insurance Number.
• RESPs can be set up as Individual RESPs for a specific beneficiary, or can be set up as a Family RESP. I always recommend setting up a Family RESP, as they are in nearly every way superior to Individual RESPs.
• You can contribute to an RESP for up to 31 years, and the plan can remain open for 35 years (or longer if the beneficiary is disabled).
• The government matches 20% of the first $2,500 contributed each year to the RESP (leading to a maximum of $500 per year). This is the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG).
• There is a lifetime CESG maximum per beneficiary of $7,200 and the grant is matchable until the beneficiary is 18 years old. You’ll note quickly that a maximum grant of $500 per year will finish somewhere shortly after the child’s 14th birthday. If you don’t contribute the full amount each year from birth, you can carry forward the unused CESG limit until the child turns 18 years of age.
• The rate at which CESG is paid out on your first contributions each year is dependent on your family’s net income.

Withdrawing from the RESP falls into two different scenarios. If the funds are withdrawn for education purposes, then:

• Funds are paid out to the student with proof of enrolment. Payments are comprised of the CESG amounts and investment earnings (known as Accumulated Income), and the principal amount contributed by the plan holder.
• Earnings and CESG amounts are claimed on the beneficiary’s tax return in the year of withdrawal.
• Principal withdrawal amounts are non-taxable.

If the beneficiary doesn’t attend post-secondary and the funds are withdrawn for non-education purposes, you have 4 options:

1. You can keep the RESP open for 36 years from the date of plan creation. This is a great option if the child needs a few years to decide their path for the future.
2. You can transfer the amount to a different beneficiary. This is easier if you have a Family RESP. CESG earnings and investment earnings can all be used for another beneficiary in the Family RESP plan.
3. You can transfer the amount to your RRSP (more below).
4. You can close the RESP.

Withdrawing Funds if Your Child Goes to School

This path is easy to explain, as it’s quite common for children to go to post-secondary in their years immediately following high school. If the funds are withdrawn for education purposes, the withdrawals are made of three different portions:

• The CESG: This amount is taxable upon withdrawal.
• The investment earnings: These amounts are taxable upon withdrawal.
• The principal contributions: These amounts are not taxable upon withdrawal.

(The first two make up Accumulated Income Payments and will be reported on a T4A slip on the child’s tax return.)

So, if you read between the lines, you’ll note there is a form of income-splitting here — by contributing to the plan and earning accumulated income and having those amounts taxed in the child’s hands, it’s likely the accumulated income will be taxed in a lower tax bracket (most students have low levels of income in their post-secondary years).

To ensure the investment earnings and CESG are taxed in the lowest possible tax bracket, withdraw the earnings and CESG amounts in a year when the child does not have a summer job. Do not withdraw more than the child’s non-refundable tax credits in that tax year if you want to completely shelter the income from tax. If the child has picked up a summer job, their employment earnings will eat into the Basic Personal Amount available to shelter the income from tax. In this situation, the child should withdraw from the contribution portion of the RESP (the portion that is tax-free).

But what happens if your child doesn’t go to post-secondary? Or what if you know they’ll never want to go to school.

Well, you should still invest inside that RESP.

Withdrawing Funds if Your Child Does Not Go to School

This is where things get fun, and I’ll pull some math out of my hat to prove it.

First, if you have a Family RESP, transfer any unused money to a child who is attending post-secondary school.

From here on in, my comments assume all beneficiaries of the Family RESP are not going to school.

If the child doesn’t go to post-secondary school, you have two options for the money in the RESP: You can transfer the RESP to your RRSP (to a maximum) or you can close the RESP.

Don’t close the RESP.

If you close the RESP, you’ll forfeit the CESG amounts, pay tax on the investment earnings and pay a 20% penalty on the investment earnings.

Closing the RESP is costly.

Instead, if the child(ren) is/are older than 21 years old and the RESP has been open for 10 years, you can withdraw the accumulated income from the RESP and transfer them to your RRSP. You can transfer up to $50,000 tax-free to your RRSP (assuming you have enough RRSP contribution room to do so), forfeit the CESG, and avoid the painful 20% penalty when you close the RESP.

By opening an RESP and investing in the RESP throughout your child’s life, you will receive CESG money that is subsequently invested. Then, if your child doesn’t go to school, you can keep the investment earnings on the CESG money, just not the CESG itself.

In a way, this is like investing on margin: You’re “borrowing” the CESG money and investing it for your child’s life, only to “return” the CESG money back to the government in the end.

Here’s the math, which requires a fun future value calculation:

• Contributions of $200 per month ($166.67 principal plus $33.33 CESG) for 18 years (216 months) at 5% results in a future value of $83,808. Repay the CESG of $7,200 and withdraw your initial contributions of $36,000 ($166.67 × 12 × 18) and you’re left with $40,608 of accumulated earnings.
• You can transfer up to $50,000 to your RRSP tax-free (and pay tax on it later).

Here’s the math if you don’t include the RESP in the same savings plan:

• Contributions of $166.67 per month (remember, no CESG money) for 18 years (216 months) at 5% results in a future value of $58,202. Take out your initial contributions, and you’re left with $22,202 of accumulated earnings.

That’s a really, really big difference. $18,407, in fact.

So, the lessons for today:

1. Always open a Family RESP, as you may end up with more than one child even if you don’t plan on it.
2. Contribute as much as you’re comfortable contributing to, a maximum of $2,500 per year. To receive the maximum CESG, you do not need to maximize your contribution each year — the CESG maximum will be reached after 14 years. Spread out the difference of that 4 years and provide yourself some additional cash flow in your life.
3. Withdraw from the accumulated earnings of the RESP in a year when your child does not have a summer job or has low levels of income.
4. Do not withdraw more than the Basic Personal Amount (plus tuition and the Canada Employment Amount, but that gets sticky) each year, unless the RESP has a large balance and your child does not anticipate going to college for a long time.
5. If your child does not go to school, don’t fret — the accumulated earnings can be transferred to an RRSP to a maximum of $50,000, sheltering the income from immediate tax and allowing you to control the tax as you withdraw from your RRSP down the road.

The Second Cup

A bit of a theme this week for The Second Cup. Evidently, a new computer launched, and there’s some excellent work out there discussing its implications.

“This Is Not The Computer For You”

I’m not sure that this constitutes a “review” of the MacBook Neo. But if you obsessed over anything as a child — computers, sport, books, chess — this may hit you right in the feels.

Software Bonkers

So, the future is everyone making their own apps. Yet, more than 75% of the people I meet each day struggle to set up their Outlook account.

The MacBook Neo

I love when John Gruber writes about Apple devices.

MacBook Neo Review - It Might Be TOO Cheap.

And this week’s final look at the MacBook Neo, from Dave2D. Dave’s videos are skyrocketing to the top of the list each time a new device is launched. Dave seems so approachable, relatable, and down to earth.

Highlight of the Week

“Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!

Now, I’m far from a tech pundit you might find on Mastodon. I don’t know much about OpenClaw or Claude Code or how much energy the latest AI data farm is eating up. I use Apple computers in an extra-heavily-fortified Windows market — accounting and taxation has to be the core of the Windows stronghold — and I have to come up with fun solutions to continue this workflow. That’s the extent of my knowledge and wisdom in tech punditry. Take my commentary accordingly.

On the Studio Display — This is the first time in Tim Cook’s time as Apple’s CEO where I’m tired of the “supply-chain-first” innovation strategy. Even me, a business guy, can see Apple’s size getting in the way of innovation. For years, the Pro Display XDR stood alone as the dream-worthy display for anyone wanting great visuals. 32 inches. 6K resolution. A stunning design. Though the buyer market will have been small due to the price tag, I would bet my bottom dollar Apple’s market research suggested genuine appreciation for the Pro Display XDR.

So instead of innovate on that winning formula — again, 32 inches, 6K resolution, and a crazy fun design — Cook’s Apple made what appears to be the “supply-chain-first” decision in the Studio Display XDR. Rather than push boundaries and live in that price tag, Apple decided to make the business decision first and use the same Studio Display hardware they’ve been using for 5 years.

I’m not suggesting there isn’t innovation inside the Studio Display XDR. Mine will be here next week, and I’ll report back on the differences between the now-older Studio Display and the new XDR version. But I’ll be darned if I would rather not have something that at least felt new on my desk.

I’m excited to see the display, don’t get me wrong. I was just hoping for something, you know, that made more of a splash.

On the MacBook Neo — You could take my remarks about the Studio Display above and largely apply them to the MacBook Neo. Recycled parts, likely the same factories and manufacturing lines, and old technology, all wrapped up in what feels like Apple making a business decision.

For some reason, this business decision seems more justified than the Studio Display XDR. Where I feel like Apple could have stayed in that ultra-expensive display market and flexed its design and innovation muscles, Apple’s lack of presence in the cheap-notebook-market may well be the superior way to flex its muscles.

Not my words — only Apple could create the MacBook Neo. Only Apple could take all our recycled devices and throw them together to make a fun, desirable, and truly inexpensive notebook that tugs at our childhood heartstrings. I saw the Neo reveal and immediately thought of the first white plastic MacBook I ever played with, back in 2007. I saw that MacBook used in real life, and I was instantly sold. The Neo has that sort of allure to it (at least from this comfy office chair).

I hope Apple sells a gazillion of these things. It’ll ensure the next generation is hooked on Apple and macOS. It’ll ensure future business generations insist on cross-platform functionality. It’ll ensure Microsoft has to actually innovate Word and Excel to maintain their stronghold.

I was certain I was going to order a MacBook Neo for my girls to learn to compute here at home. They are 8, 6, and 3 years old, and they have no idea how to use a mouse and keyboard. The Neo was going to be their first computer. Instead, I ordered a refurbished M4 Air. For just $150 more, I gain oodles of extra computer.

But it’s the Neo that inspired that push.

So where the recycled parts and now decade-old manufacturing processes seem old hat in the Studio Display XDR, I am quite excited to see how they play out for the MacBook Neo.

Offline 23 Hours a Day

Derek Sivers is enjoying being away from an internet connection right now:

Every day or two, I bring my laptop into town to get online for an hour. The time limit keeps me super-focused. I know why I’m there. I know what I need. I download emails and upload code. I post my questions to a bunch of AIs, and save the answers to read later.

He’s right! — this is precisely how we used to do things. Do you remember when the library was the only place with a proper internet connection?

I’m working through James Clear’s Atomic Habits right now, and Clear would say making something harder for yourself to do is the inverse of one of the four laws of behavioural change. By cutting off the internet connection, Sivers has been able to find a new level of focus and attention to other areas of his daily life.

But the internet connection is not the actual issue. The dopamine hits are the issue. It’s not all that different from candy — starve a child of candy, and when they have their first opportunity at a candy, they’ll gorge themselves.

All told, cutting off your internet connection is likely an excellent way to find new amounts of focus for meaningful work. Though, I would like to address the root of the problem and keep the internet around for all the remarkable things it provides.

The Second Cup

Readest

Readest is a simple e-reader app for iPhone and iPad. But there’s a ton of rock solid features under-the-hood, one of the best of which is the ability to sync book highlights directly to Readwise. It’s like the Kindle app, but with the ability to read non-Kindle books.

Omron Platinum Blood Pressure Monitor

According to a physician friend of mine, this Omron monitor comes in as a highly recommended option for tracking blood pressure at home. I’m happy with it so far, for the most part. One reading was a bit uncomfortable, my heart rate changed slightly, and now I have A-Fib (not actually, at least I don’t think). Other than that, I appreciate the instant connectivity to the iPhone app and Apple Health.

Mere Civilian’s Travel Blogging Setup

There’s clearly a time and place for foldable devices. A travel writing setup like this is one of them.

Daring Fireball’s Discussion on the MacBook Neo

Yes! Some classic Daring Fireball writing in this one. I really look forward to Gruber’s upcoming reviews — they are far and away his best writing.

Highlight of the Week

“Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.”

— The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!

March marks the unofficial beginning of Canadian personal tax season. Six years ago(!!), I put together a list of things you should prepare to have your personal tax return completed. The list is largely still correct today, with the addition of needing to provide documentation related to any real estate purchase or sale you’ve made during the year. If you’re looking for a relatively exhaustive list of the documentation you may need to prepare, see this link here.

I’m going to continue some financial writing momentum from last week. I had a few emails flow in from readers who sent some creative encouragement my way. To them, I say, “Thank you greatly!”. I’ll respond better in the coming week, but it does not go unappreciated to have readers reach out with words of encouragement. Hopefully, this week is just a little smoother as a result.

I mentioned Toonie, a newsletter I wrote for a few months a few years back, and it’s become a nice spot to rob and repurpose some financial topics. I may repurpose some of those topics over the coming weeks — the severity of tax season scheduling puts me on my heels sometimes, so I apologize if you’ve heard these stories before.

This week’s topic: My thoughts on the phrase “good debt” and “bad debt”.

Good Debt and Bad Debt

I constantly hear the phrase, “Well, at least a mortgage is good debt.” As in, buying real estate is an indicator of good debt, while purchasing anything else with debt is bad debt. I don’t agree entirely with this sentiment, especially since it’s such a common perception to have.

In theory, the only good debt is tax-deductible debt. Which means the debt needs to be tied to the purchase of an investment that earns you income in some shape or form. The interest you pay on the liability becomes deductible for tax if it currently or will likely result in interest, rent, royalties, business, or other forms of income to be paid to you now or in the future.

In a broader sense, though, good debt (in my opinion) is any debt that purchases an asset that yields a greater rate of return than the cost of that asset (including debt/interest costs). It doesn’t have to be just tax-deductible debt.

So, if you take your home equity line of credit (HELOC) (which carries a low interest rate like, say, 4.99%) and improve your home (which carries an average annual rate of return of 7.31%), then the home equity line of credit is good debt. The interest paid on the HELOC isn’t deductible for tax purposes if you improve your principal residence, but it still results in a greater long-term asset improvement than if the investment wasn’t incurred.

If you purchase a vehicle on debt, and that vehicle has a rate of return greater than the amounts paid out to operate the vehicle (including interest paid on the loan), then I think that debt is still “good”. It doesn’t matter how fast a vehicle depreciates. This could be the case if you use the vehicle to earn income, for instance.

There’s also the residual value of any asset you purchase with that debt, or the value of the asset once you’re done using it. In effect, if you borrow $5,000 to purchase an asset, and you can sell it for $2,000 once you’re finished with it, you only have to earn $3,000 (plus interest costs, which are very low these days) to ensure the debt is “good debt”.

Basically, if debt enables you to buy something that improves your net worth eventually, it probably meets my personal definition of “good debt”.

Let’s not kid ourselves: I do believe consumer debt is bad debt. "Consumer debt", something we'll touch on more in the future, could be considered "expenses", or the costs of running your everyday life. Paying interest on groceries or for the latest shopping spree is seldom wise (the only situation that comes to mind is if you happen to own a clothing store). "Expenses" should be paid for in cash or on a credit card and paid off in entirety each month.

There are also common scenarios which I’ve come to feel are bad debt when most people consider it good debt. A personal residence with lots of equity and a tiny mortgage is bad debt — the owner has lots of personal net worth thanks to the low mortgage, but there is a giant asset sitting there, idle, unable to build anything. You shouldn’t always have a mortgage, don’t get me wrong. But paying down your mortgage extra-fast and not reinvesting the unlocked equity generally results in less personal net worth growth in the long run.

Lastly, I believe there is “good debt”, “better debt”, and “even better debt”. Call it Debt Pro, Debt Max, and Debt Ultra (we’re on the eve of a major Apple product launch week, after all). And I'd attribute those characteristics solely based on the rate of return of the asset you purchase. Essentially, the more you earn with the asset you purchase with the debt, the better the debt. An example of each:

• Debt Pro — Purchasing a tool that enables you to casually earn income in the evenings over a few years.
• Debt Max — Purchasing a rental property using equity you own in your personal home.
• Debt Ultra — Hiring an employee, effectively billing out their time, and using the unlocked time you gain to reach new business success levels.

(These are examples I am coming up with on the spot. They won’t be perfect analogies. I’m attempting to move up the compounding and impact scale for each “type” of debt.)

Remember: Debt is a tool. It costs something, yes, but it provides access to assets faster than if you were to save to pay for them with cash.

If you can earn more than all the costs associated with the asset purchased with debt, then I think it’s good debt.

Debt makes the world go round.

The Second Cup

Scrybble

Scrybble is a monthly subscription to sync your reMarkable notes to Obsidian. It can find and extract highlights (remembering, of course, that highlights on a reMarkable are not actual annotations, which causes all sorts of hardship if you want to sync your highlights somewhere). You can also convert your reMarkable typed notes to Markdown. I still have to figure out how to move the Markdown highlights from ePubs I’ve read on the reMarkable into Readwise, but this at least seems promising.

Vernal Core3 L-Shaped Standing Desk

I discovered Vernal through a Workspaces.xyz interview in the last few weeks. This appears to be a totally price-accessible L-shaped standing desk option (which, I think, is basically a unicorn in the desk world). I’d be curious whether the Core3 is ultra-wobbly or relatively stable.

What is Trust?

Though Aly has directed his writing towards physicians, I’m finding it interesting how many nuggets can be transferred to other professions. I appreciate this close look at trust, and the subsequent brainstorming session on applying it to accountancy.

GMK MTNU Dasher Keycaps

I’m not into any Apple TV+ shows, but my understanding is this particular set of keycaps takes inspiration from an Apple TV+ show. These look excellent. Though, I’m unsure what kind of office decor would benefit from boldly blue keycaps.

Retro Future: The Mid-Century Modern Office Setup

Here’s another discovery I made thanks to Workspaces.xyz. There’s a lot to discover and enjoy on Spencer Scott Pugh’s blog.

Quote of the Week

“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

A simple quote, but when thought of in depth, is impactful in so many ways. When was the last time you thought about what it takes to produce a hot shower?

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!

A quick comment or two on Hockey Canada’s loss in the gold medal final this morning: In many ways, this was the best way to lose a game. There is no sensible person on the planet who watched the game and came away thinking the USA “crushed” Canada, or was even the better team. Every single person on social media across all platforms have agreed that Canada was “goalied” this morning — stymied by the best goaltender on the planet. Canada played a fantastic hockey game, were clearly the superior team, and did it all without their trusted leader. Funny things happen in winner-take-all games.

And let’s not skip over the class shown by the American team after their victory. They acknowledged being outplayed. They have toned down all sorts of trash talk and rhetoric. They even brought this grown man to tears with the Gaudreau tribute. Truly, this was a classy team when it counted and a worthwhile victor.

Congratulations to the Americans. You won’t have any experience defending a title — it’s far harder than winning it the first time around. Good luck in the next Games!

I’m going to try talking about work this week instead. I promised a few weeks back I’d try to produce something you could learn, something of value you could take with you during the week. Way back, I wrote a very short-lived newsletter called “Toonie” that attempted to provide this sort of value. Maybe I should revive it. It was far, far more widely read than this Sunday Edition has ever been.

Where it fell short for me was in the weekly effort it took to put together that level of value for a reader. Financial writing is difficult — there are so many “it depends” and so many variables to work through, it takes considerable effort to be concise and accurate at the same time.

You Need Less Money in Retirement Than You Think

This point-of-view will probably run against prevailing advice. Delayed gratification is a good thing, they say. If you want to have fun, you’ll need to save at least, say, $1 million by the time you are 65 years of age. Because, of course, loaves of bread will be $20 when you ultimately decide to retire.

(For those who think $1 million is a lot, it’s really not. Approximately 40% of workers in Canada are funded through taxpayer dollars, and the majority of those have pension plans which hold large retirement assets. You may not be staring at $1 million in your online banking portal, but you certainly have access to healthy retirement income.)

But there’s more to the retirement income story which helps take some burden off today. You probably don’t need $1 million (or more) to retire. There are other sources of income to get you through.

The Canada Pension Plan is a very real savings asset. You can’t add it to your net worth statement, but a generally healthy retirement will yield $12,500-$20,000 a year (depending on when you started contributing and how much you contributed in your working life). When you turn 65 years of age, you also gain access to Old Age Security, or about $10,000 of additional income in the year. In total, most Canadians who worked and contributed CPP in their career, will receive upwards of $25,000-$30,000 per year. For a retired couple, you could potentially double it.

Then you can consider tax. The current basic personal amount (the amount of money you receive “tax-free”, for lack of a better term) is $16,000 federally. When you turn 65 years of age, you gain an additional $8,400 of “tax-free” income through the age amount. As a result, for many, many Canadians who receive CPP and OAS, a great deal of the income is tax-free.

So, backwards engineer the math — if a retired couple has about $50,000 (for round numbers) of tax-free income, they have $4,150 of tax-free money to spend on a monthly basis. Many don’t have a mortgage or rent. Many have lesser wants and desires. Many have a save-first attitude.

And this is the base for many Canadians. If you have any net worth of any kind, it adds to this amount. Tax becomes a consideration for all amounts above the basic and age amounts, but it’s not an unbearable amount of tax in the base brackets.

$4,150 per month is not a crazy amount of money per month, no. But it’s a strong start, and it eliminates some stress in your earning years to save for retirement.

Here’s my last comment on amounts of money you need in retirement: Remember the basic math that $1,000,000 of savings, with no rate of return at all, is withdrawn to nil at $40,000 per year for 25 years. This $40,000 adds to the $30,000 of CPP and OAS I discussed earlier. And in reality, an inflationary rate of 2% and a savings rate of 4% in a $1,000,000 savings account would require $50,000 per year in withdrawals to get it down to nil in 25 years. Now you’re at $80,000 a year in cash income (less some tax), which is more than the average Canadian salary right now.

All of this is to say: You need to save less for retirement than you think. Don’t use my words to go on a spending spree now — compounding is a very real thing when you mention retirement savings — but use it as a chance to reduce your stress and anxiety about the future.

The Second Cup

The Ultimate Color E-Ink Tablet Buying Guide

Chalid Raqami has the best e-reader and e-ink reviews on YouTube, bar none. This is an excellent comparison between the reMarkable Paper Pro, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, and Boox Note Air 5C. I thought the reMarkable would be blown out of the water, but appears to hold its own in certain categories.

Satchel & Page Executive Briefcase

I think I’ve found my desert island briefcase. I have likely written about it before, but there is something about the black leather option that has caught my eye.

Satchel & Page Carry On Pro Review

I’m clearly on a Satchel & Page kick. This review of the upcoming Carry On Proluggage option from Satchel & Page is splendid. I’ve saved more than a few videos from Desmond Wong to watch over the coming week.

Wes Huff on receiving the Gospel, rather than achieving the Gospel

Wes Huff continues to share the Good News in a wholly unique way.

Marcin Patrzałek Proves One-Guitar Masterpieces Are Real

This can’t be real. Seriously? I don’t think this video “proves” anything at all. But assuming it is real, this is some of the coolest music I’ve ever seen.

Current Reader

Here’s a unique new RSS app making the rounds this week. Side-note: I feel like serif fonts are making a comeback in apps these days (check out Acme Weather, a new weather app making the rounds as well). I’m here for it.

Highlight of the Week

“The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.””

— Derek Thompson

This resonates. Seriously, seriously resonates.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!

That’s work energy, to be clear. For whatever reason, creative energy seems to be at an all-time low. I’m not sure why. Sitting down to write this Sunday Edition has been perhaps the most difficult sit down since I started in January 2025.

Some Brief Impressions of the Logitech MX Master 4 Mouse

I might throw together a true review of Logitech’s new MX Master 4 in the future, as this mouse is far, far more than I originally imagined. I expected the MX Master 4 to be an evolutionary step forward for the MX Master line. Each iteration prior has been evolutionary — I started with the MX Master 2S, then 3 and 3S, and now 4, and 4 is most certainly the biggest jump forward. Now, after a few days of use, I actually think it’s a worthy upgrade, even potentially for those coming from the MX Master 3S.

My three bullet points:

Haptics and the Action Ring — Initially, this Action Ring felt like such a gimmick. In the past, I used the thumb pad button to click, hold, and move between desktops or to use Exposé on the Mac. Now, the thumb pad defaults to Logi’s Action Ring. The Action Ring pulls up a circular array of icons, enabling you to use your mouse for quick shortcuts (almost like keyboard shortcuts or macros, but for your mouse). I am only just starting to customize this Action Ring. A few of my choices:

• A button to open our a “Clients” folder in Finder.
• A button to initiate Alfred.
• A button to launch Gemini right in the browser.

As you scroll through the options in the Action Ring, the MX Master 4’s built-in haptic feedback provides a new level of interaction with your mouse pointer. There’s so much here to love and feel.

Materials — The MX Master 4’s most notable physical change is the removal of the rubbery (and ultimately oily) material and the inclusion of what seems to be a hard plastic. I can tell almost instantly that this won’t pick up as many oily hand marks in the long run. I’m not sure at this time whether it feels better, but I’d suggest feeling better wasn’t a priority on this material selection. This material still feels great and is likely to ensure the MX Master 4 looks prim and proper on your desk far longer than any of its predecessors.

I’m also noticing a somewhat translucent plastic used at the ends of the actual finger mouse click buttons. It’s a subtle inclusion, but looks quite elegant.

Thumb scroll wheel — I use the thumb scroll wheel a fair bit, specifically inside wide Excel worksheets. I immediately noticed the larger (read as “more surface area”) of the MX Master 4’s thumb scroll wheel, which helps provide that much more control when scrolling left and right. In general, I’ve always felt horizontal scrolling to be a bit finicky in the past. The MX Master 4 seems to have smoothed this out a bit. Even moving left and right in Finder is a bit smoother. Though this could be software improvements, I think it’s at least in part due to a much larger thumb scroll wheel.

Overall, the MX Master 4 has completely surprised me. I was expecting far less — I was expecting more of a makeover and less of a major jump forward. Now, I’m left wondering if I should update my MX Master 3S sitting on my home office desk as well.

One Writing Tool Per Task

This article from Cogmodo caught my attention, if only because it’s something I’ve found to be quite successful for my own work in the past. I have struggled to use only one app for text-based tasks for a long, long time. I have tried to use, say, just Craft for writing here on this site, for keeping track of notes, and even for certain parts of my GTD productivity workflow. But it doesn’t take long for the context to be wrong and the one-size-fits-all app breaks down. I think the average person probably raises an eyebrow when they read about using five different apps for writing.

But there’s something to it, especially in terms of environmental design. I’m reading through James Clear’s Atomic Habits for the first time (I have a vast array of books I need to catch up on from the last 15 years) and I truly value his discussion on environmental cues. If you want to build a habit, you need to develop cues, and those cues can be items, actions, or other trigger mechanisms. So many cues are tied up in an environment — you likely associate sitting on the couch with entertainment, so it’s likely not the place to attempt to get hyper-focused productive work completed.

The same goes for software. If you associate an app with a particular thing over time, it’s very difficult to break that association within your workflow. For my writing workflow, I could not break away from Ulysses’s visual formatting — I appreciate how links are hidden behind the text and how formatting is noticeable inline (and any code fades into the background). I also couldn’t break away from Ulysses’s text check features — I attempted to use AI tools for editing, but it broke my focus just enough to make editing a headache outside Ulysses.

Overall, if you find the way one particular app handles a small portion of your workflow, rest assured you aren’t the only individual out there choosing to use more than three apps for one specific workflow. Cogmodo is using five different apps for writing, so you’re good to go if you want to use two or three.

The Second Cup

Coburn’s Icon Packs for iPhone and iPad

If you’re curious about how to use any of these icons to customize your iPhone, see this YouTube short video.

Mark Jardine’s reMarkable Paper Pro Move Art

This is one way to use your reMarkable Paper Pro Move. Another is how I use it: illegible, gross chicken scratch that diminishes the e-paper tablet’s beauty. Jardine’s use case is far superior to mine.

Rivian R2 wishes as an R1 owner

Christian Selig (creator of the formerly popular Apollo Reddit app) discusses things he hopes to see improved in the upcoming Rivian R2. I saw a few of these beautiful vehicles in Seattle this past summer. One glance at the sticker price and my eyeballs popped out of my head. A beautiful machine, with a beautiful price.

“He’s Captain Canada. He’s Mr. Canada.”

I have been a Sidney Crosby fan since he pulled off a now-coined “Michigan” move when he was 16 years old in the then-QMJHL. He was named the league MVP in the QMJHL that year as a 16-year-old. It’s been over 20 years now of following and watching as many Crosby games as possible. To see Sid’s legacy continue to grow now, long after he was supposed to have slowed down, is surreal.

Somehow, I’m a bigger fan now than I ever was as a kid.

Quote of the Week

“Mental liquidity. It’s the ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information. It shouldn’t be controversial. But mental liquidity is so rare. Changing your mind is hard because it’s easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake.”

— Morgan Housel

I might need to cool it on Morgan Housel quotes. It’s been a few already, I know. His writing is just so darn quotable.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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This is our first ever hot vacation. And I’ll be darned, it took us far too long. There’s a reason so many folks flock to sunnier shores at this time of year.

Also, for the first time ever, I’m actually using the MacBook Pro’s nano texture display in the manner for which it was intended.

Also, also, I have discovered mojitos.

The Misfit Tree

My dad once told me as a kid that little things that make a person imperfect — a mole, a scar, a funny laugh — are what make them beautiful. That as I got older (he told this to me when I was a young child as a way to build my confidence over the small mole I have above my lip), I would recognize these little imperfections were truly beauty markers.

He was right, of course.

Everyone has a misfit tree in some way. Those characteristics are what make them unique and beautiful.

I Deleted My Second Brain

Joan Westberg’s commentary regarding her second brain — both the creation of her PKM system and how it altered her actual work and thinking — really hits home for me. Westberg’s main points:

But Borges understood the cost of total systems. In “The Library of Babel,” he imagined an infinite library containing every possible book. Among its volumes are both perfect truth and perfect gibberish. The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. The map swallows the territory.
PKM systems promise coherence, but they deliver abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it  -  and move on. But the insight was never lived  -  it was just stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder.
I stopped wondering and started processing.

I wrote for some publications back in the day, and my colleagues were huge into personal knowledge management. They still are! And though I believe these types of systems have the potential to unlock a connection here or there, I simply don’t believe these systems consistently produce enough value to justify their creation. Definitely not for me. If you swear by your PKM system, that’s wonderful — I’d challenge you to show me how it provides daily value to you and your work. That’s not a shot or a “Prove me wrong” question. It’s literally me asking for the sake of perhaps unlocking something new for myself.

But I’ve tried. I’ve tried again and again. AnyType, Obsidian, Roam Research, Apple Notes — I’ve tried them all in the hopes of somehow unlocking some newfound second brain power that shows its value over and over.

I have likely settled on a form of PKM — I save anything educational for work in Notion, which can be referenced via Notion AI by me or the entire office. For everything else, I save things to MyMind, which I use for writing inspiration or general personal research (say, for a renovation in the house). I suppose I also save highlights to Readwise and review those each morning, though this is more for spaced repetition than it is for making mind-bending connections between privately written notes.

I’ll probably strike a nerve by saying PKM systems are more likely than not more cumbersome than most people will find truly useful. Doing something for the sake of doing something — making yourself feel productive — is the least productive action possible.

“What history generally “teaches” is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.”

— Adam Gopnik

The Second Cup

The Best Cover of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck

I learned some words to this song thanks to this cover.

The Most Romantic Hotels in the World

It’s Valentine’s season, so why not ring it in with a booking at one of these outstanding hotels. I have this one saved in MyMind for some future parent-only travel.

Tuna for Mac

Interesting take on an improved Spotlight search.

A Great Mojito Recipe

Because this is what I’m going to make when I get home. In the summer, of course.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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I continue to read through The Almanack of Naval Ravikant and continue to highlight profusely. This week’s readings covered off decision-making and reading, and how important reading is to fight the issues caused by social media. Naval seems to focus heavily on reading for his learning, and he uses social media to hone his writing. I appreciate this use case, even if it perpetuates modern social media thinking.

Books, for Naval, have to teach him something, and they have to teach him something fast. If a book doesn’t capture attention by the end of the first chapter, onto the shelf it goes. This is the second time this type of reading habit has been discussed in the last few weeks. Which is likely to say that it’s a great way to read and learn ideas.

More importantly, it leads me to wonder if readers can learn anything on this blog in a short period of time. Presently, at best the site is a reflection of the things I find interesting or the things I come across during the day. I don’t delve too far into my area of work expertise, simply because there is so much other information online someone could consume to get their fill of financial expertise.

But maybe this is something I should try more often? Perhaps I should lean more into the things I actually know something about, rather than — like I noted above — perpetuate the world of people talking about topics they know nothing about? I don’t know if I could pull off 52 new topics per year in this sort of format. And that’s a ton of money talk for me to get wrong.

Either way, I appreciate the thought experiment. This book continues to be a goldmine of great ideas.

Crouton

I think I had come across Crouton a while back and largely glanced past it. I don't understand why — this is one of the prettiest apps on my iPhone right now. From the app icon through every view in the app, Crouton is a lesson in modern iPhone app design.

More importantly than design, though, are the myriad of ways to add a recipe to the app. You can share a URL from a website and Crouton will auto-populate each field, grab a hero image, and even break part the preparation steps. If you add a recipe from a photo (say of a physical cookbook), Crouton will use AI to grab details from the photo and add in the preparation steps individually. It’s truly impressive.

This may actually be the first recipe and meal planning app my wife sticks with. I’ve shown her a few different apps over the years — mainly Paprika and Mela — and she bounced off those instantly. Crouton has worked well over the last few weeks, and I think it’s largely due to these quick input methods baked into the app. (See what I did there?)

A Few Extremely Minor Impressions of a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

Our office is right next door to a Telus store, so our next-door neighbour often has cool phones to try out for a short period of time. I rarely take him up on the offer — I’m pretty entrenched in this Apple ecosystem. But this time I accepted. This time, I took a Galaxy S24 Ultra for a short spin.

I mean short. I’m not even sure if I’m allowed to call it a “spin”.

Here are my two or three very short impressions, though.

• The hardware seems great. The screen is bright and crisp, much like the iPhone 17 Pro Max. The soft curved edges feel great in hand. The camera has all the specifications one could ask for (though I haven’t actually tested the camera) and the front-facing camera is minuscule and out of the way. I’d have no shame pulling out this phone — it’s just as much a piece of jewelry as any iPhone (or, well, any iPhone apart from the iPhone Air).
• Software customization is nice, but finicky. I love the ability to more finely adjust the size of widgets, for instance. I also loved when I found the ability to change volume levels right from the clicky buttons and the “…” menu — this was a truly remarkable find. This said, I have installed four different software updates in my first day or two of minor use. This part has been a terrible experience.
• The included pen is very handy. I think pens/styluses and digital devices are a “to each their own” sort of thing. Some people don’t use an Apple Pencil with the iPad, others only use it. Some would use a stylus with their phone, while others will never touch it. I’m one who would use it if I had one. The ability to highlight text with a pen, markup a screenshot, or more finely select text has been pretty darn handy. I wish Apple made some sort of compatible stylus for the iPhone.

Other than blue bubbles, I believe I could make an Android phone work. Most of my favourite software is web-based these days, ensuring I could keep 99% of my habits if I switched. I’m not sure if I want to make an Android phone work. But I could plug my nose and make it happen.

“I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. For example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the Universe, then you would have to bend the entire Universe to your will. If you're the most important thing in the Universe, then how could it not conform to your desires. If it doesn't conform to your desires, something is wrong. However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba—or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should "actually" be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don't apply.”

— Eric Jorgenson in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

The Second Cup

Zoomundblitz on Instagram

This is such a remarkable still-life photograph. Every detail is fit and finish. Zoomundblitz’s profile is packed with amazing compositions like this.

Inside Looks: A Mark III Preview

I have simply never been able to stick with any iPhone camera app besides the stock camera app. I think it’s because of Live Photos — I simply love the ability to have that Harry Potter-like movement in a photo — but I can’t be sure beyond this. Halide has long been the only other app I have tried or will try. Between the app’s flair and actual functionality, Halide is a camera app for photographers actually wanting to get more than a snapshot out of their phone.

(Note, I would try Leica’s LUX app if it wasn’t so unbearably expensive. And I have a Leica, for Pete’s sake.)

Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why

Ideally, I’d have something to say that’s insightful after this great piece from Om Malik. But all I can think is, “Even if we come to grips with the reality that velocity is more important than truth in modern journalism, it’s not going to bridge the divide between two polar-opposite viewpoints on reality. One side thinks the other’s velocity is more important than the truth, and the other thinks the other side’s velocity is more important than the truth.”

Our Keyboard Design Reveal

This appears to the offspring of an ergonomic split keyboard, like the Moonlander from ZSA and the Magic Keyboard from Apple.

I Built a Studio That Feels Like An Apple Store

Talk about being dedicated to a long-term project. It would have taken some seriously long-term vision to build this studio, especially in the midst of design changes from Cupertino.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!

I began The Almanack of Naval Ravikant this week. I’ve never read a book so slowly — it feels like every line could be highlighted. Here are a few highlights I’ve had from the book so far:

If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous or envious of them. They’ll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them.

And:

Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned. When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed.

And:

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

I could go on. So far, this book is an absolute goldmine.

I’m reading this book on the reMarkable Paper Pro Move once again. After discovering snap highlights and notes weren’t actually annotations in an ePub or a PDF but rather just coloured-ink, I put the reMarkable away for reading — I want to send these highlights to Readwise for later, and Readwise requires actual annotations to save highlights. But this week, I discovered reMarkable Web, which appears to be able to extract snap highlights from your ePubs and PDFs and enables you to send these items to Readwise or other apps. The reMarkable is such a wonderful size for reading on the couch in the evening, so I’m ecstatic to have a potential option for extracting actual annotations from ePubs and PDFs on the device. I’ll report back on the experience when I finish the first book.

Three Weeks with Akiflow

I began writing a segment for this Sunday Edition about Akiflow, but it became a bit long. I’ve thrown it up on the blog as its own post as a result. If you want to get my initial thoughts on Akiflow, go check out the link here.

In short:

• I love the design.
• I adore time slots.
• I continually run into integration issues.
• I am surprised the iPad app exists. It’s terrible.

Akiflow is an interesting app for time blockers and I highly recommend you check it out.

Notion 3.2 Brings AI to Mobile

It’s pretty rare when I include strictly news in this section. For that, apologize. This one feels like a big deal though, at least for me.

I record a ton of meetings each day. Notion AI Meeting Notes is some of my most-used software right now. With the big iPhone 17 Pro Max battery, it’s super easy to simply place the iPhone on a coaster in front of me in a meeting and have it record the meeting. That gigantic battery can record meetings all day before needing a charge. Before the client can walk out the front door, I can send meeting minutes and action items out the door with them and have everything logged for the actual work to be done.

But this all has to be done with some planning — as of right now, you can’t add an AI Meeting Notes block to a page right on your iPhone. I thought I was crazy the first time I ran into the limitation.

Notion 3.2 brings AI Meeting Notes to the iPhone, ensuring you can record meetings in a moment’s notice. I’m going to be genuinely grateful to not have to set up the AI block on my Mac only to hit the record button on the iPhone.

As of right now, the last major feature I’m looking for is the ability to record a phone call directly into Notion. Perhaps Notion 3.2 is the key to this. My sense would be, though, that “call” likely means a Zoom/Teams/Meet call and not a phone call itself. I suppose we’ll see.

The Second Cup

Clawdbot

I’d be crazy not to include this as a major link in the Sunday Edition. Clawdbot looks like one of those “3 steps forward moments”, where suddenly you get the “Aha!” after watching the bot work through an Excel sheet instantly. I’m very excited to see where this goes. (If I could figure out how to install it on my computer? I am not good at this stuff admittedly, but if I can’t do it, plenty of people won’t be able to do it.)

The Top 5 Hotels in 2025

As voted by The World’s 50 Best Hotels.

I never really got onboard the Airbnb train like others. I tried it once and we were notified that we shouldn’t admit that we were Airbnbers, as the building had banned Airbnb a year before. I hated the feeling of being an intruder in the building.

Hotels are the way. Perhaps not these hotels. But one can dream.

Iris.Fun

Interesting things are going on here. It looks like the first major app they’ve added to the platform is a calendar app. One to keep an eye on, perhaps.

Quote of the Week

Since I didn’t publish a Fresh Link this week, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the week:

“When you sprint, you sprint hard. When you rest, you rest hard. The most successful people apply this same approach to life. They aren't grazing for hours. They sprint, then rest.”

— Sahil Bloom

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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I’ve been a time-blocker/time-boxer for a long time. “Wake”, “Fitness”, “Prep” and “Admin and Email” have been the first four time blocks each weekday for the last two-plus years, and “Deep Work” usually ensures I can hammer out the most important task of the day before noon. If nothing else, time blocking has provided me peace of mind in knowing I have some time set aside to do a particular thing each day.

The method in which in that time blocking is completed has changed more than a few times, however. I used Sunsama a few years ago, but ultimately found the daily planning and shutdown rituals to be a bit too much each day. I tried using a combination of Reminders and Fantastical for a bit, but found things just didn’t quite jive as well as I liked. I also tried Notion and Notion Calendar for a bit, though this melded work and home life together a little too closely.

Akiflow has long been a time blocking option — it competed directly with Sunsama multiple years ago when I was deep into Sunsama. Akiflow’s biggest hiccup back then for me was its Google-first feature-set — I wasn’t in the Google ecosystem at the time, so Akiflow was a non-starter.

Fast-forward and I’m in the heart of the Google ecosystem, and I’m eager to try another new method for tracking tasks, deadlines, and projects, all inside a time blocking methodology that I feel I can’t live without. Akiflow has lasted longer than I originally expected it would in my personal tool stack, and it may well stick it out through tax season. But it isn’t without its faults.

Here are three quick anecdotes from my first three weeks with Akiflow.

Time Slots

Akiflow introduced a third type of input that makes a lot of sense for time blockers: time slots. When creating a new item, you have three choices: a task, an event, and a time slot:

• Tasks are check-off items added to your calendar, which default to a 30-minute duration. They can be applied to a project (which I treat as “Areas”) and be locked to a particular calendar (say if you have a “Work” or “Personal” calendar).
• Events have whichever duration you choose and act quite like a regular event created in any calendar app. Projects/Areas can be applied to the event as well.
• Time Slots are effectively events inside which you can hold tasks. Time Slots can have a project applied and can be added to a specific calendar of your choosing. You can then drag and drop tasks from your task inbox inside the time slot.

I find myself using time slots all the time. In general, my day revolves through multiple two-hour blocks. Inside the “Admin and Email” time slot at the beginning of my day, for instance, I drag and drop any emails or administrative tasks from Notion that I want to get done before my day really starts. In the first “Deep Work” time slot, I drag and drop the big project work I need to get done — whether that be a Notion link directly to an office project inside Notion — or a task with a link to a Craft document where I can build out more tasks and research.

Time slots are a true epiphany moment for me. Akiflow has taught me I was actually using events as time slots rather than the true concept of an event.

If not for time slots, I’d like have put Akiflow aside at this point.

iOS Apps and Quick Capture

Akiflow’s iPhone app is quite excellent. It looks great, uses screen space quite nicely, and allows for quick daily organization throughout the day. I especially like Akiflow’s widgets on iPhone — they are big, bright, and easy to use.

There are some issues here, though.

First is the iPad app — Akiflow’s iPad app is feeble. The app can’t be used when the iPad is in landscape orientation, and the rest of the interface is quite simply a blown-up copy of the iPhone app. One would hope a proper iPad app would be at or near the top of the priority list.

Second is Akiflow’s capturing methods on iPhone. I found the entire process kind of tedious. Tap on the button in the right corner, and you can throw together a naturally parsed sentence to create your task, event, or time slot. The hiccup is in the final “Add” button — instead of hitting the big checkmark on the keyboard to add the task and get back to the main view, you have to hit “Create” in the top-right corner to actually create the task/event/time slot.

This doesn’t seem so bad in writing, but it’s difficult on iPhone and when on the go. Oftentimes you only have one hand to type in a task or quick thought that hit you, and needing to navigate to the top to hit “Create” or to save an edited item simply gets in the way.

Overall, I quite like the way the Akiflow iPhone apps works and operates. The app is very well-designed and flows pretty smoothly on a small iPhone screen. The iPad would be better if it simply didn’t exist, however, and I hope this is in the cards for the near future.

Integration Hiccups

Lastly, integrations. Akiflow touts its integrations pretty heavily on its website and, when they work, they work pretty nicely. For emails, you can either label or star an email to send it instantly to Akiflow. Notion items can be added to Akiflow through properties. And there are a whole slew of other integrations for developers and designers.

All would be well in this department if the integrations worked. I’ve had to reset and reset my Notion integrations multiple times. When it is working, the integration takes forever to sync. I truly don’t need to wait 15 minutes or more for a Notion item to sync over to Akiflow. By that point, it’s faster to simply copy the item’s link in Notion and paste it into the dedicated field in the task/event/time slot in Akiflow.

Second, emails — I cannot for the life of me get my Gmail account to send emails over to Akiflow. I’ve tried the option to star an email and to label an email, but they simply won’t send over. When I emailed for help, I was provided an email that required me to turn the integrations on and off, to delete and reinstall the app, and to restart the app. Once again, this shouldn’t be too big of a deal. But finding 15 minutes during the week to troubleshoot an app that should work is not in my cards.

Summary

It’s a good thing time slots are such a fantastic option for managing a calendar and a productivity system. If not for time slots, I would have paid Akiflow the cash for the short subscription and called it a day. Instead, time slots are Akiflow’s absolute saving grace at this time.

Presently, my productivity system looks largely as follows:

1. Plan my day and brain dump my tasks in handwritten notes in reMarkable.
2. Create those time blocks and time slots in my actual calendar.
3. Drag and drop tasks into time slots throughout the day.
4. Rely on Akiflow to remind me of all tasks, events, and time slots as each day progresses.

Akiflow is a bit complex and costly (though I recommend traveling the off-boarding path if you are looking to save some money), but I can see it sticking it out thanks to its implementation of time slots. Time slots are one of those retrospectively obvious features that just work for me, and I hope to see more of this type of feature in other apps like Fantastical in the future.

I have this internal goal to read 12 books this year. And though I’m not sure if I can make it, I am certainly seeing the benefits of more daily reading. Meta-wise, my reading workflow is still being built out. So far, it’s pretty simply done inside the Kindle app, with highlights being fed into Readwise for spaced repetition. I started the year reading on the largest iPad Pro, but this has been quickly supplanted by the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It’s a wonderfully sized device for reading.

Another device that looks great for reading: the Viwoods AiPaper Reader (or the Colour model here). I’m probably starting to accumulate too many devices at this point, so the Viwoods is going to stay on my wishlist for now.

Reading has helped with more than just knowledge workflows, though. I’m in the middle of Morgan Housel’s most recent book, The Art of Spending Money. So far, I preferred Housel’s first book, The Psychology of Money, which opens with the following lesson:

Here’s the thing: People from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons.

I despise — yes, despise, hotter-than-a-thousand-suns despise — the attitude of “things being obvious”. There is seldom a situation where “This is the correct way to do things” when it comes to situations people argue over. If people have differing opinions about something, it’s because it’s a complex topic, and it takes walking a few miles in that person’s shoes before you can better understand the reason for the debate.

There’s this little video going around from the latest Landman episode (I’m not a TV-watcher in the slightest, so I haven’t seen the show). The young lady meets with her principal or advisor, and she brings up a heated topic for discussion. The principal — a 60+ year old lady — takes a huge deep breath, pushes her chair back, and looks sternly at the young lady. When asked what she’s doing, the older lady says, “I’m preparing myself to be offended.”

Golly.

“I’m preparing myself to be offended.”

Rather than consider the young lady’s commentary — of which she has no idea what the young lady might say — she just jumps to a half-cocked, ready-to-fight persona. Rather than look for a teaching moment, the old (“wise”?) woman readies herself for verbal warfare. There are remarkable scenes in The Great Gatsby — the one with Leo DiCaprio — where two men verbally berate each other, and the loser of the argument is the one who flinches, loses control of his temper, and raises his eyebrow. The scene is mesmerizing — there is an active verbal assault on each other’s belief systems, and neither party in the debate even becomes flush red in the face.

I’m not wise enough to know where in the world this problem came from. We jump to conclusions faster than a 180-character post or a 10-second video on TikTok. If the first words out of a person’s mouth aren’t reflective of what you believe, it must be because that person is Insert the most vitriol adjective for someone here. “If you don’t believe what I believe, you are, quite simply, a fool.” “The truth is just so obvious to everyone but you.” You know, stuff like that.

Every person has a story or a past. There are reasons — almost always complex reasons — for difficult decisions that were made and which resulted in a poor outcome. Never is someone “crazy” or “stupid”. They are a product of their lessons, their upbringings, their circumstances. It is our job — as reasonable human beings who control our emotions — to query those lessons, upbringings, and circumstances and attempt to discern why a person does or believes the things they do, or why a certain situation ended with those particular results.

There’s always, always, always more to the story. Figure out the story and figure out the result. Skip the story and make your assumptive-self fall further down the ladder.

This is about as blunt and harsh as I can get. I’m tired of presumptions. I’m tired of irrational polarity. I’m tired of 10-second decisions. These actions push people away, when the only chance to build a bridge is to bring people in.

One other thing I read this week:

Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.

The hard thing to do is give the benefit of the doubt to someone you vehemently disagree with. What’s easy in life when giving someone the benefit of the doubt? You assume a lot less about the world around you and focus on the things in your life you are grateful for.

Easy decision: Choose the hard thing to do.

A Quick Thought on AI-Written Material

I worked with a client recently who made an interesting remark about artificial intelligence. He’s older, successful, and wise — you get the drift. He said he prefers finding written material with spelling mistakes in it because then he knows it’s not written by AI, and he knows the writer knows everything in the material. The opposite being: If you’re using AI to write something, it’s easy to not know what’s inside your writing, and you may be writing something you didn’t intend to say or didn’t intend to include.

I’m neither positive nor negative on AI — like I described above, it’s complex. AI is a fascinating tool for certain parts of my work, but I’ve immediately noticed brain rot creep in around topics easily handed off to an AI bot. Long-term, I imagine I have to come up with a workflow to combat the brain rot.

In summary, though, I appreciate the gentleman’s insight regarding AI. Every so often, the spelling mistake is the key to landing the deal.

Marshmallows and the Best Life

Kevin Wild, a long-time reader of this site and writer of one of my longer-read sites as well, posted this thought-provoking piece recently. It’s short and sweet and is sure to make you wonder which path is the right path. Head over there to read his post before reading my commentary below.

Read it? Good.

I appreciate Kevin’s perspective. Like all things in life, I imagine “Screw it, I’m eating the marshmallow now” is best done in moderation, with a healthy balance of leaving marshmallows for the future in other areas of life. You can’t YOLO your way in every decision or situation. Kevin will surely know this, and I will never imply he doesn’t.

But.

I fear “YOLO”-style thinking chains human beings — that they become slaves to experiences, to pursuing a “best life” defined by gratification. That if you don’t get to experience something, you’re falling short of your potential in some way. If you miss the experience, you aren’t living your “best life”.

I believe there is a great deal of freedom in letting go of this pursuit of gratification. Instead of chasing gratification and satisfaction, I believe most human beings would find more meaning in serving others. Human beings exist to serve, not to be served. And so there is freedom in letting go of an endless pursuit of gratification and adopting a pursuit of service to others.

Perhaps, to bring it back, the best life is one where you don’t eat the marshmallow at all, but build a factory so everyone else can eat marshmallows instead.

The Second Cup

I went to Tokyo with just a 35mm prime

First off, Adrien’s voice is just so soothing. This is almost an ASMR video. Second, I had a giggle when Adrien said something like “Don’t worry about disrupting someone in a big city; if you come back, you are never going to see them again next time.” My wife and I honeymooned in NYC in 2013, and we went to a baseball game. There was a gentleman selling beverages at the game who had a strong New Yorker accent. We then travelled back to NYC one year later and went to another baseball game, but with an entirely different team. There he was!, the same gentleman selling beverages in a different stadium for a different team. Now, the likelihood of seeing him again increases because it was baseball, it was summer, and so on. But I found it insanely unrealistic to have run into the same gentleman two years in a row in a foreign city.

A Visualization of the History of Paris

I’ve always loved Paris. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a photogenic city.

Interior Browns and Greens on Instagram

I wondered where my wife was getting her interior design inspiration these days. Our bedroom is now entirely brown and green.

Fresh Links From the Week

Here were a few things I shared from the past week. If you want to stay on top of the list throughout the week, don’t be afraid to subscribe via RSS.

• Bowlus Rivet: An Ultralight Luxury Travel Trailer
• Akiflow: A Time-Blocking Digital Planner and Calendar

I really need to start posting more of these during the week.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!