What got me excited as a child, teenager, and 20-something: Finding a new toy.

What gets me excited as a home owning 40-something: Finding the solution that cleans the kitchen sink made out of god-knows-what without scrubbing.

The Wellborn Method™️ for wrapping gifts:

Step 1: Exhaustively search your home for scissors and tape.

Step 2: Gather wrapping paper, bows, and labels.

Step 3: Wrap exactly one gift.

Step 4: Inexplicably and utterly lose the scissors and/or tape.

Step 5: Go to step one.

While the Stream Deck is certainly appealing, did you know that you can get much of the same functionality using an iPad and the “Run script over SSH” action in the Shortcuts App?

iPad Music Shortcuts

Rate Four Stars

Rate Song Over SSH

Whereas the macOS “Default for display” with 4k monitors is 2X (where each point is represented evenly by 4 pixels), Windows 10 defaults to 1.5X. To get crisp 2X on Windows 10, you need to change the “Scale” from the default 150% (a.k.a. 1.5X) to 200% (a.k.a. 2X).

Windows 10 Display Settings

I was running my 4k 27″ display in scaled mode for about a year and a half, before switching to “Default for display” earlier this year. While everything does look a bit oversized, the added sharpness you get when points are evenly divided by pixels is worth it.

HP Z27 Default Settings

American Debt Reckon – Consolidated

Note: This post is a consolidation of a series microposts originally published December 6th, 2021.

Americans have created a society built on systematic debt wherein many, if not most, of its citizens perpetually live with five or even six figure debt.

People coming of age have a choice between quickly amassing debt upfront from higher education in hopes that higher wages will pay off in the long run, or slowly accruing debt incrementally from low wage jobs that don’t always quite pay the bills.

Higher education is still the best way to go, but earning better wages often also requires living in areas with extremely high cost of living. Many of those who are able to pay off their education loans will still face crushing mortgage payments.

And this doesn’t even touch on debt from medical treatments or elderly care. It’s almost as if America capitalism is Sisyphean for most people in that it isn’t designed to help them build capital, but rather to give them just enough money to manage their debts in perpetuity.

Slack is a great service because it makes it possible to have multitudes of conversations. Slack is a bad app, because it does very little to help manage them. 3/3

This worked pretty much as expected with one exception. Each of the now threaded replies were considered unread, even though they were also posted in the direct message. 2/3

A recent experience I had with threads is a good example of how Slack is both a great service and a bad app. When was discussing a particular design, a coworker was replying to my specific questions/points using threads with “also send as direct message” checked. 1/3