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My WordCamp US Focus Mode
iOS Focus Modes are a game-changer! A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how I used them to totally change my relationship to my phone. This summer, I’ve taken things up a notch—tweaking my Travel Focus and even creating a Québec Focus for our recent family trip. If you’re curious about the…
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Forget Europe. Montréal est Magnifique!
aka “Oh look, Ryan went to another city and rode a bike. How original!” Bicycle people often cite European cities when advocating for more equatable transportation options in our North American cities – Amsterdam as the obvious world leader in cycling infrastructure, maybe Copenhagen, Paris for how quickly they’ve transformed their city or Oulu when…
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Why would you want to drive behind a slow cyclist?
Whenever I’m engaged in a conversation and the other party is saying something that doesn’t resonate with me, something I don’t get or something that just seems strange, I make an honest effort to put myself in the other person’s shoes. I do research, thought experiments, bounce scenarios off friends, hypothesize with LLMs, etc. I…
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Random Factoids I Learned Last Year
In September of last year, I started recording random information I had never known about. My criteria for recording this fact was basically “will I want to be reminded about this in the future.” I didn’t set out with a plan for these facts beyond recording them in a notes document. But heck, if I…
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A Case for Webrings in a Post-Social Internet
How’s that for a headline for the first post of a new year! Webrings hold a special place in my memories of the late-90s early internet. For those who never encountered one, or weren’t around back then, webrings were an early tool for content discovery. In the pre-Google and social media era, finding content —…