September/October links

I quit my former job in early September and found myself with about a month before my next start date.

My friend Nic B. is hot on bike touring, and he convinced me to give it a try during my job gap. You have the luxury of moving at near-car speeds, but you have the option to become a pedestrian or hop on a train whenever you want. All you need is a pannier or two with some clothes, food, water, and a bike lock, and you’re off. It’s a flexible and minimalist way to see a new place.

So, I rented a bike in London and rode around the UK for three weeks from mid-September to early October. I went partly to reconnect with a group of old friends from when my family lived near Cambridge for five years during my childhood, while my dad was stationed at RAF Lakenheath and Mildenhall with the Air Force.

I also wanted to see the country through my 32-year-old eyes and update my understanding of it. You conceive of your childhood places in a kind of mystical way–or at least I do. Every part of the area where I grew up near Newmarket seemed much smaller than I remember. My friend Oliver and I laughed about how, as kids, we’d play in the woods, feeling like we were miles away from home. Revisiting those old haunts now, we realized we’d never actually ventured more than a few hundred yards.

I wended my way through Cambridge, across to Anglesey in Wales, and then up to the highlands in Scotland, mixing in trains for long hauls. It's marvelously easy these days to get around a foreign country with essentially nothing more than an iPhone and a passport. I tapped to pay for the trains, for food, for beers. And I navigated around using a great little app called Komoot, which I would recommend to anyone (it finds the most bike-friendly way to get from point A to point B, even if the routes are slightly longer than sticking with high-traffic roads).

Anyhow, more writing and videos to follow about this trip.

From the past couple months

From me:

• Scenes from New York Pt. 1 [Short video]
• Scenes from New York Pt. 2 [Short video]
• Middle and South Teton single push [Short video]

A tribute to David Knowles (aged 32), one of the hosts of the Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast who passed away tragically on September 8. I’ve been listening almost every day since February of 2022 and I will miss his voice [Link]

A Washington Post series on unseen, yet exceptional, people in government. I found myself deeply invested in this man’s journey to make coal mines more safe [Link]

NotebookLM AI podcast hosts realize that they’re not real and have a meltdown. For some context here: NotebookLM is a new offering from Google that lets you upload media (like a PDF) and turn it into a podcast where two artificial hosts discuss the content [Link]

Changed my life in one day with another AI tool called Granola. I'm in a lot of meetings for my job and it's a constant battle between paying attention to what people are saying and writing notes. I constantly forget specifics or action items. Granola takes care of all of that for you. I also like the super clean note-taking interface, and that you can go back to meetings and query the chatbot about specifics the notes don't cover [Link]

Just a delightful little video [Link]

A YouTube channel dedicated to historical video game world records and how they were achieved [Link]

Lord of the Rings, ruined by AI [Link]

A British guy hitchhikes through Xinjiang. This was a channel I unearthed during my long train rides across England. I found myself a bit envious watching him, since it made my solo adventure through a pretty safe, English-speaking country seem kind of bland in comparison [Link]

Play Green Day's Dookie album on your toothbrush [Link]

A syllabus for generalists [Link]

The .io top level domain so beloved by tech startups may be in jeopardy after Britain relinquished sovereignty of the Chagos Islands (formerly, the British Indian Ocean Territory) [Link]

Aviation in Talkeetna. I rode with K2 during my climb of Denali in May! It's a beautiful little tribute to flying around the Alaska Range (Via my friend Sam D) [Link]

The booming psychedelic industry for middle class women [Link]

Google on the difference between sauces and dressings [Link]