Flemming Funch

It only just dawned on me that a recovery phrase for a wallet is THE thing that allows you to recover it later, even if the wallet host shuts down and disappears. With the recovery phrase, the wallet can easily be reconstituted elsewhere, or swept into an existing wallet elsewhere.

That was probably only a recovery key for login access. Each wallet had its own recovery key which I had never written down before, which hadn't been mentioned, and which were somewhat hidden away in a side menu. Those codes would have been lost in a few weeks when the site finally shuts down.

The problem here, other than that no Portis had given us no notice of shutting down, was that in the original signup, it had provided a series of 12 words to write down as recovery keys. I was under the false impression that this had something to do with the recovery phrases of the crypto wallets.

Just managed to rescue my wife's crypto at the last moment from the Portis wallet I had set up for her a couple of years ago. Portis is shutting down, but there's no mention of it on their site, no email, no nothing. I did not get this message, but only found it by chance on the net.

I went by and climbed the fence for a walk in my future garden. Another week at the very least before we can do the final signature so that it actually is ours. Lots of things growing, and I discover new things whenever we visit. More different kinds of trees than I remembered.

"Imagine you're at a party. A guy offers you a drink. You say no. He says 'Come on, one drink!' You say 'no thanks.' Later, he brings you a soda. 'I know you said you didn't want a drink, but I was getting one for myself and you looked thirsty. For you to refuse at this point makes you the asshole. He's just being nice, right? Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us. If you drink the drink, you're teaching him that it just takes a little persistence on his part to overcome your 'no.' If you say 'Really, I appreciate it, but no thanks' and put the drink down and walk away from it, you're the one who looks rude in that moment. But the fact is, you didn't ask for the drink and you don't want the drink and you don't have to drink it just to make some guy feel validated." -The Art of "No" (Jennifer P.)

10 hours of thinking vs 1 hour of doing

Just make it exist first. You can make it good later.

Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil, and the fact it rains.

I still don't understand what people see in LinkedIn. OK place to put one's resume, but always seemed like one of the scammy kinds of social network that tells you you got a message or a visit, but want to charge you extra for actually seeing it.

Primordial Soup. Campbell's Cream of Darkness Soup.

It is taking forever to go through the steps of our house purchase. Lots of paperwork in France. All is approved, but we have to wait another week before we can accept the mortgage, and another week before we can sign the final sale papers. All considered, it has gone quite smoothly. Just impatient.

Yesterday I was confused about a leasing contract. The AI explained the details to me, and authored an extra legal document which sorted out the weak points, and the parties accepted and signed my document without hesitation. I feel pretty cool.

Having ChatGPT analyze legal documents and explain them to me before I sign, that's a bit of a game changer. Sure beats just signing things unread.

"Everything we do is in service of our needs. When this concept is applied to our view of others, we'll see that we have no real enemies, that what others do to us is the best possible thing they know to do to get their needs met." --Marshall Rosenberg

My simple recipe for happy relationships: Don't have them with anybody who's jealous, who thinks they own you exclusively, who's trying to police that you don't somehow cheat on them. Walk the other way. Have relationships with people who care about your well-being and who can talk about everything.

As compared to for example, any kind of Microsoft DOC format. They don't even try to keep being compatible with themselves.

If PDF/A is an available choice for saving a document, it is better than plain PDF for anything you're hoping to be able to look at many years later. It includes everything needed in the package. I only just recently learned that. Even without it, PDF has always been the most future proof format.

Sanity - The mind in touch with reality - is the only protection that's ever going to exist. --Byron Katie

I'll happily shop lots of other places than Amazon, if they can only deliver somewhat comparable service. Like, tell me when my stuff will be there. As opposed to just taking my order, sending me a confirmation email, and a week later, nothing, no shipment, no status, no estimate.

USB-C plug have been sort of loose, falling out easily, on my iPhone 15 Pro. I thought I might need to have the port replaced. I looked around for USB-C plug that could lock to the port, didn't find any. Eventually a Youtube video led me to cleaning out the port with a sharpened toothpick. Dit it!

Leave footprints of kindness wherever you go

After starting to look for and buy a house, Facebook in particular has supplied me with an endless stream of houses for sale. Luckily none of the suggestions have made me regret my choice in any way. Sure, there are castles I can buy for very little, but still several times more than my budget.

One thing ChatGPT (or some other helpful AI) is great at for me is to face old festering government/administrative things that otherwise keep me worried. Did I file this thing right? What about that 30 year old tax bill? What about that car I don't have any longer, etc.

I like by Brother printer. I.e. it just works and I've had zero problems with it. That was indeed the word on the street (OK on Reddit). My Xerox laser printer was always getting stuck, having phantom jams, needing restart, etc. For the record, this is an MFC-L8390 color laser printer.

At some point I was sure that this was the time, the generation, where we (humanity) would get our act together and create a glorious abundant world for all of us. Now I think I will content myself with just personally making it through my life reasonably well.

If everything continues to go according to plan, my house purchase should go through in around 3 weeks. The bank is still crossing Ts and dotting Is, which gives a certain amount of stress, but it appears to be all good.

I'm switching to Obsidian, after using Evernote for some years. Some things about Evernote really annoy me, like the automatic linking, and other features they keep adding that I don't want, and the lack of a Linux client. Obsidian is certainly more of an open source DIY thing, but so far, so good.

"Contact us for a quote" - that's the sure way I will move on to a competitor, unless there really is nobody else. Give me at least some approximate range, or I will assume you're scamming me.

Teams seems like a good drop-in replacement for Skype. Just a shame for Microsoft that they did a lousy job in making that clear, so in my circles people have already moved on to alternatives.