House of Jacob

Welcome to the sixth edition of my Every Day Stack Updates.

I got some cats, did my best to not money launder, and gave an impromptu talk at an blockchain event in London.

Off we go.

Removed from the stack

• Matter: I can now definitively say I don’t agree with adding yet another feed into my life to stay on top of, even if that feed is filled only with content I subscribed to in chronological order. While I have no complaints about the app interface or its workings (I still think it’s the best among the dedicated newsletter reader types) I can’t get myself into the habit of using it. Email is easy, email is there, and since I’m in the minority who live the inbox zero lifestyle I’m happy to keep my newsletters in my inbox so they pressure me mentally to either get read, snoozed a couple of hours, or deleted.

• Done: Usually I’d introduce an app first in the proving grounds but in this instance it became annoying enough with their stupid upsell modal in the main user journey that it jumped the queue directly in to the bin. I was looking for an app to help me set some habits again and Done seemed to be a great fit. The design is nice and it has widgets that make it nice and easy to stay on top of. Too bad every time you touch it they try sell you their other products (or give them to you for free, and even that doesn’t make it clear enough to them that I’m not interested).

Added to the stack

• Two Kittens: These two little lads have brought a lot of joy with them, although they are also absolute menaces. I’ll spare you all the things they’ve been gifted as part of their current Every Day Stack as we’d be here for a while. They do particularly enjoy their water fountain since they are fancy bois.

• Adam Audio monitors: I had a Sony sound-bar in the living room for a while and well I’m too much of an audiophile to have liked it much. I eventually gave in and got some proper studio monitors and it has been fantastic. I now find myself working sitting on the sofa from 3pm until the end of the day on most days, with something from Cercle on in the background. 11/10.

• Revolut Business: I got a grant from Ripple (as in the company who made the cryptocurrency of the same name) to open-source a blockchain powered Discord Bot I initially built for some friends. For tax reasons it doesn’t make sense to get the grant money into my personal account so I had to register a company. That’s all fine, only err, fun thing, is they pay the grant money in crypto which meant I had to sell it all and withdraw from a crypto exchange into regular old Pound Sterling. This concept gave most banks an aneurysm causing them to promptly freeze and close my (perfectly legal) company’s bank account. Revolut have been the only one who were perfectly cool with this. The support person I asked three different ways if they are absolutely sure this will be okay before I started moving money around found it funny, and to be honest so did I in a way. Banks and regulators are so scared of crypto that it literally would have been easier to make use of the grant money in ways the tax man would never know of, but I decided to keep things all above board and pay them their taxes.

• HermanMiller Aeron: First company expense 😋 I’ve worked in a few offices over the years where they either have the fake/clones from other brands or the more budget models from HermanMiller; nothing compares, not even close. Right before covid hit I purchased a new chair and decided to go for a mid-range gaming chair as I didn’t want to bite the bullet and spend that much on a chair. Lawd what a fool! If you take anything away from this: please don’t buy a gaming chair, you’re not in a race car flying around corners the design doesn’t make any sense for your posture, and they are all bad.

• MacBook Pro 14”: I needed a nice and powerful laptop so I can work on the grant project so I went for the 14” with the M1 Max and 64gb of RAM; just about enough to run a Node webserver. Jokes aside this is the best conceivable laptop I can imagine. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it, it is just brilliant.

• Cafelat Robot Barista Edition: Seems like I’ve settled on one day a week in the office so that means my home coffee setup needed a serious level up, and boy did the Robot deliver. I can now somewhat consistently make the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life.

Proving grounds

• Arc from The Browser Company: This one is a real tough one. At first I didn’t like it at all, I mean I’m a web developer! I spend more time in a browser than most people would say reasonable, or healthy, or sane. There’s a lot of built up inertia there. While Arc doesn’t fundamentally change much (if anything) about how the actual websites do what they do, it does reimagine almost everything else around the website in terms of the browser experience. You know the top url/search bar with all the tabs all browsers have, yeah tabs are on the left now and the search bar is back to being a url bar mostly. Also built in split screen view which is a great idea. I’m using it full time on the new MacBook so giving it a fair go, more next time.

• Moneyhub: All your money (and debts) in one place! Back in SA we had a really nice “general” money platform like this where you give them all your logins (lol no Open Banking) and they’d log in and scrape everything once a day or so and give you a nice overview. Ever since coming here I’ve been looking for the same. I’ve tried most of the options and they either miss the mark entirely or get somewhat close but lack some fundamental accounts (at least to me). Moneyhub has a pretty basic design (which is better than an overly engineered one - hint Emma hint) but they actually built a scraper for the accounts that don’t support Open Banking (e.g. Vanguard UK) which means I can get a full big picture view.

That’s all for now, see you in three months, maybe.

Thanks for stopping by.