Salam, !

That literally means "peace" in Arabic and is a common informal greeting in Islamic countries. It's also a close cousin of "Shalom" in Hebrew. Hope your weekend is going swimmingly and you're ready for your dose of the weekly random. We've had an influx of new subscribers, so for those joining recently, thank you and welcome!

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In this week's email...

• Week in the Life - read on the blog
• Creative Update - randInt S02 EP02 - Giving it away
• Gadgets & Tech - Amazing Marvin
• Read - Almanac of Naval Ravikant
• Watch - Lying with Statistics (~17min)
• Quote - "We're works in progress claiming to be finished projects"

Week in the life

The past week has been a continuation overall with working less hours even though there was an on call in there that had me getting home at 4am! Things are going to get busier from tomorrow so I'm savouring the last few days of calm.

I managed to unbox the Mavic 3 I ordered a little while ago and took it on the maiden flight yesterday. If all things go to plan, I should be flying this near Bell's Beach as you're reading this. If yesterday's flight was anything to go by, the images out of this thing will be AMAZING! Just take a look at this one from yesterday. Poor light since I didn't leave work early enough but yet the detail is amazing even in high winds!

While doing my yearly goal setting and review of previous years diary, I came to one conclusion that I kind of knew but it was confirmed on review: I'm the happiest when I'm learning stuff, making things and exploring. Be it biometric markers or generally feeling good, it always seems to correlate when I'm learning/making or travelling somewhere new. So this year, I'm going to start structuring more time for those things.

I've always wanted to dabble in video but it takes an INSANE amount of time to edit properly. So far, I've been diving in at the deep end and using the pro tools like Premiere Pro etc. Those are great, but the amount of fine control means that the time commitment required is too high for me to jump in given work commitments. Anyway, I'll ramble a bit more over on the new blog...

Creative update

randInt S02 EP02 - Giving it away

It's time for another episode of the randInt podcast and this time it's an actual minisode that's actually MINI!

This is a deviation for our normal catch up where instead we discuss philanthropy and charitable giving. Chandra and I have slightly different takes on this one, but both found a few things about charities quite surprising. Do you give to charity? Who do you donate to?

Gadgets & Tech

Amazing Marvin

After many years of bouncing around different to-do apps that all had elements of one thing or another, I've finally settled on Amazing Marvin to build from. Essentially it takes all the other popular apps out there and makes their features modular. You can make it look just like any of them, but if it's missing a feature that you really like from something else, you can just enable it!

Add in built in Pomodoro timers, cross platform apps and a constant feature updates and I was sold!

Read

Almanac of Naval Ravikant

Website for free version

Recently, I've been listening to a lot of talks that happen to feature Naval Ravikant. I have mentioned him multiple times in this newsletter as someone who has had a interesting journey and is currently encapsulating his learnings into what sounds like philosophy. This book is available for free at the website and is the authors attempts at capturing Naval's tweets/texts/podcasts/talks into one concise text.

I've only just started after having gone through much of the source material and am listening to it on Audible. Highly recommend trying the book out. For a free one, it's pretty darn awesome!

Watch

Lying with Statistics (~17min)

If you've played around with statistics, this video wont show you anything new, but the examples are SUPER interesting.

I had no idea so many criminal cases used/misused statistics in the past!

If nothing else, this video deserves a watch because it takes something pretty dry like statistics and actually makes it pretty interesting and entertaining.

Quote I'm pondering

“We're works in progress claiming to be finished projects”

– David Epstein

This quote stuck out at me from the book, Range, that I was reading last week. The book argues that people should have a variety of experiences before specialising and often the most ground breaking answers come from outside the field.

This quote was in reference to the fact that no one knows the future and no one really knows what they like or dislike until they try it or something similar. In that way, we don't know what we don't know even about ourselves...

So in that sense we can only be unfinished works as we try new stuff and learn more.

That's it for another week ! Hope you're enjoying the rest of the weekend. As always, I simply LOVE hearing from you and your opinions. Feedback is always welcome!

Stay random!

- Raffy

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