This week I had the privilege of speaking to design students at two universities about my career. Here are some of the things I shared, most of which were answers to their questions.

5. Visual hierarchy is hard.

6. I know of only one way to successfully ship products and that is to ship imperfect products.

10. Creativity is storytelling.

Tell beautiful stories with your work! If you don’t believe you can change the world through design and the stories you tell with it, you’re selling yourself short.

A simple tutorial about effectively using pdb. Contribute to spiside/pdb-tutorial development by creating an account on GitHub.

Books I have written about Python and other topics.

Looking for the best dishwasher brand for a reliable clean every wash? Our group of appliance experts have their top pick—find out why.

♣️🌞 Welcome to Summer in Vegas. All Vegas Summer Poker Tournaments – in one place! Looking for a live poker tournament on and off The Strip this Summer? We’ve got you covered!

Decades of sitting at  a desk can wreak havoc on your muscles.

And all his desk work, which may appear to be mainly work of the mind—reading and writing—also trains his muscles. Teaches his muscles how to be, or how not to be.

Sitting in a chair, he unconsciously teaches groups of muscles on the front of his body, flexor muscles, to tighten—including upper-body muscles that pull the arms and shoulders forward, such as the biceps and pectorals, and lower-body muscles, at the junction of the pelvis and legs, that pull the hips forward.

The pernicious engagement of those muscles—as well as disengagement of the opposite sets of muscles on the back of the body—helps explain why, after sitting for a while, he feels stiff and starts to ache.

“Left to its own devices, your flexors will tighten up and take you back to the fetal position, whence you came—if you don’t do something about it.”

So, before the sitting starts, Stocking tries to compensate for some of his extensor muscles’ impending deprivations.

The biggest muscle in the butt, the gluteus maximus, is a priority because it is the biggest, thickest, most powerful muscle in the body—and the significance of this muscle would be difficult to overstate.
No other mammal even has a gluteus maximus.

Stocking’s strategies for avoiding gluteal amnesia include the hip thrust. With the lower edges of his shoulder blades pressed against the side of a bench, a bed, or a sofa, and with his feet flat on the floor in front of him, his knees bent and his trunk muscles braced—to keep his spine in neutral position—Stocking extends his hips and contracts his glutes.

Stocking’s favorite exercise for the upper body is the row. His favorite form of the row is the reverse pullup.

It was like a revelation when chain-of-thought AI became viral news as a GitHub project that supposedly competed with SOTA's with only 2 developers and some nifty prompting...
Did all the companies just jump on the bandwagon an weave it into GPT/ Gemini / Claude in a hurry?
Did those companies already have e.g. Gemini 2.5 PRO thinking in development 4 months ago and we didn't know?

Painting a door might seem straightforward, but achieving a professional finish requires careful preparation and the right techniques. Whether you’re refreshing an old door or giving a new one a flawless coat, following these expert steps will ensure a smooth, durable result.

• Drill one 3/16-in. hole in the bottom of the door and two at the top, then turn 4-in. by 1/4-in. lag screws 1-1/2 inch into the door. Spread the sawhorses apart just enough so that the door doesn’t touch either side but rests entirely on the bolts.

• Clean Off Grime Before You Prime

• Fill All Holes, Even Small ones

• Prime the Entire Door Before Painting

• Search for Flaws After Priming

• Sand Between Coats (180 or 220)

• Use a Special Mini Roller (high-density foam)

• Protect Freshly Painted Doors From Sticking (masking tape)

Declan Chidlow takes us on a really interesting tour of the often, under-reported world of print stylesheets, how to use them and also how to debug them.

Physical, absolute units

When we’re writing CSS, we tend to use relative, responsive units such as rem, em, etc, which scale based on user preferences and such.
Sometimes, I find myself forgetting that CSS even has units of standard, absolute measurements, but we have a lovely collection at our disposal. It is worth keeping in mind they aren’t always accurate on screen, but they usually are when physically printed.

Hopping, a plyometric move, has been show to build power which translates to better running at higher speeds.

Six-Week Daily Hopping Program:

Week 1: 5 sets of 10-sec. hopping/50-sec. rest (total hopping: 50 seconds)
Week 2: 6 sets of 10-sec. hopping/40-sec. rest (total hopping: 60 seconds)
Week 3: 8 sets of 10-sec. hopping/30-sec. rest (total hopping: 80 seconds)
Week 4: 10 sets of 10-sec. hopping/20-sec. rest (total hopping: 100 seconds)
Week 5: 15 sets of 10-sec. hopping/10-sec. rest (total hopping: 150 seconds)
Week 6: 15 sets of 10-sec. hopping/10-sec. rest (total hopping: 150 seconds)

Progressive daily hopping exercise improves running economy in amateur runners: a randomized and controlled trial
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30798-3

A Moxon Vise is a great tool to have when you start to work with hand tools. It's essential for dovetails and other joinery methods that require you to work on the end of a board.

Easily clamp it on your workbench and store it away while not in use!

Best thing about this Moxon Vise, the hardware only costs $40!

Check out the Moxon Vise kit here - https://lddy.no/fq2t

For more details, check out my website - https://www.3x3custom.com/tutorials/diy-moxon-vise

** Tapering/Jointing jig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwp0a-_YxSo

*if you include word2vec.

https://jaketae.github.io/study/word2vec/#testing-the-model

Creatine, known for boosting athletic performance, is being studied for benefits to bone health, cognition, sleep, and mental health.

Alternatively, people take three to five grams a day, which can take longer for the muscles to saturate. Candow takes 10 grams a day. Comments: 2.5g / day.

If you are going to try creatine, researchers say to look for creatine monohydrate. Most people buy it in powder form and mix it into drinks or even food.

When it comes to tools for note-making and personal knowledge management, the old Chinese curse definitely applies these days: we live in interesting times.

At this point in the adventure, some folks will say, “Mark, why not use both Logseq and Obsidian? You could have the best of both worlds by using Logseq for outlining and Obsidian for fleshing out the ideas you outline in Logseq!”

An acquaintance on Mastodon, @Ellane, does something like this, making fleeting and reading notes in Logseq, while reserving Obsidian exclusively as a repository for her own thoughts.

I Love Logseq’s Best of Class Annotation Tools
Hands down, Logseq’s built-in tools for viewing and annotating videos and PDFs are better than their equivalents in any other tool.

https://medium.com/lifefunk/logseq-and-others-why-im-still-using-logseq-a932f1947624

Logseq is a tool to write outlines. Don’t try to make it behave like any old plain text editor, as the outline structure is fundamental to how Logseq functions.

By nesting blocks underneath other blocks, you create a hierarchy in your notes. Forget files and folders; in Logseq we organize things by branch

https://www.reddit.com/r/logseq/comments/12hxo9c/logseq_vs_obsidian_is_there_actually_a_difference/

I use both but for different things. They’re so different that I consider them complimentary rather than competitive. Neither one is really a drop-in replacement for the other.

Logseq makes blocks and outlines first-class citizens. You can switch to document mode and hide the bullets but they’re still there in the file.

Obsidian makes plaintext .md markdown files and prose first-class citizens. You can link to blocks and use nested bullet lists, but not as seamlessly and powerfully.

Logseq makes it easier to work with blocks, transclusions can be edited in place, and you can automatically be building another page consisting of blocks you’re writing in your daily journal or another page. The PDF and (I hear) video annotation is much better in Logseq. The Logseq apps are still in beta and can be buggy. The mobile app has far fewer features than the desktop app and doesn’t support themes (except by pasting CSS) or plugins. The toolbar can’t be customized and the only way to access the full command palette is with a Bluetooth hardware keyboard.

Obsidian runs faster and produces cleaner and more interoperable markdown documents. It’s much better for longform writing. The app itself has been in stable release for a while, and long before that it was less buggy than Logseq is now in my experience. There are far more plugins (nearly a thousand as of this writing) and themes (over 100). The mobile app has nearly all the features of the desktop app, supports most plugins and all themes, and is highly customizable, especially with the Commander plugin. On a phone, it puts almost all the power of Obsidian in the palm of your hand.

IMO, Obsidian is more versatile and Logseq is more specialized.

I use Logseq for tasks and all the transitory things going on in my life currently and in the not-too-distant future—lists, temporary reference, etc—and Obsidian for my long-term notes and for writing. If I had to only use one, it would be Obsidian, but I’m glad I can use both because I also really like Logseq’s very different set of strengths.

A consistent mobility practice that includes flexibility exercises can help runners maintain proper form and mechanics, and prevent injury.

• Child's pose to upward-facing dog
• Primal squat with alternating reach
• Cat-cow
• Quadruped thoracic spine rotation
• World's greatest stretch with down dog
• Dynamic kneeling hamstring stretch
• Roll down to plank walk-out

https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a44418434/mobility-exercises-for-beginners/

• Knee hug to hip stretch
• Leg swing
• cat-cow
• quadruped hip cars
• Hip flexor stretch with overhead reach
• Down dog to cobra

https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a63446746/stretching-for-beginners/

• Child's pose
• Thread the needle
• Thoracic extension
• Seated pec stretch
• Hip flexor stretch

https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a64578236/hip-mobility-plan/

• Hip circles
• Seated Hip Lift
• Crescent lunge

The feedback we get from users is not what it seems! As software creators we apply a lens that makes us take user feedback in many different - often unhelpful - ways from how it was intended. Here's a list of user feedback myths to help jog assumptions.

Song suggestions:
Today, the length of that limited monopoly on a song is 95 years after its publication. This is very good news if you’re performing or recording gems like “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey” (Hughie Cannon, 1902), “Fascinating Rhythm” (George and Ira Gershwin, 1924) or “Beautiful Dreamer” (Stephen Foster, 1862). The copyright protection for songs published in 1924 expired on January 1, 2020, putting some of the greatest ukulele tunes of all time, such as “Everybody Loves My Baby,” “Nobody’s Sweetheart Now,” and “It Had to Be You” in the public domain. (On January 1, 2021, it will be 1925 songs that lose their protection, and so on.) Once copyrights have expired, you’re free to perform, record, and reuse a song without permission. But what if you’re interested in something a little more recent?