惯性聚合 高效追踪和阅读你感兴趣的博客、新闻、科技资讯
阅读原文 在惯性聚合中打开

推荐订阅源

N
Netflix TechBlog - Medium
T
The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
aimingoo的专栏
aimingoo的专栏
A
About on SuperTechFans
Stack Overflow Blog
Stack Overflow Blog
B
Blog RSS Feed
Microsoft Security Blog
Microsoft Security Blog
H
Hackread – Cybersecurity News, Data Breaches, AI and More
人人都是产品经理
人人都是产品经理
让小产品的独立变现更简单 - ezindie.com
让小产品的独立变现更简单 - ezindie.com
J
Java Code Geeks
Cyber Security Advisories - MS-ISAC
Cyber Security Advisories - MS-ISAC
B
Blog
MongoDB | Blog
MongoDB | Blog
L
LangChain Blog
WordPress大学
WordPress大学
小众软件
小众软件
IT之家
IT之家
腾讯CDC
月光博客
月光博客
量子位
Blog — PlanetScale
Blog — PlanetScale
P
Proofpoint News Feed
freeCodeCamp Programming Tutorials: Python, JavaScript, Git & More

James Zhan in real life.

Signal…Kind of Sucks as a Messaging App Weeknotes #5, August 17–23 Stop Trying to Distinguish AI-Generated Writing From Human Writing Because You Can’t Weeknotes #4, August 10–16 Weeknotes #3, August 3–9 BusyCal: A Calendar and To-Do List Hybrid Mac App That Finally Clicked With Me Weeknotes #2, July 27–August 2 “No AI” Statements Are Much More Than Mere Statements Do We Have a Future? To Comment Section or Not Re: “Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts?” No, but maybe… Responsive List Spacing for Bear Blog Canada Day Sent Me to the Emergency Room Thank You, Canada Blog Redesign (V4) and a Deep-Dive Into Typography The Worst Way to Teach Your Child to Care About Their Culture Shoulder Bag Rabbit Hole: PGYTech OneGo Solo V2 (6L) vs Ulanzi Travel Sling V2 (PB038/B120) An Underrated Feature of MacBook Neo: A Colour-Accurate Display (Neo vs Apple Studio Display) New Coffee Grinder, New Coffee Knowledge and New Roaster I Tried Nespresso for the First Time as a Coffee Snob My Love for Light Roast Coffee | Coffee Questionnaire Failed McDonald Logo and a Lamp With a Clock—What the Hell Happened to Apple’s Icon Design?! First Week of RTO in All Its Hilarity (And Some Nice Things) Major Blog Redesign (V3) 2025 Was My Least Productive Year, But… How I Accidentally Became a Professional Audio Engineer
Weeknotes #1, July 20–26
jameszhanirl · 2026-07-28 · via James Zhan in real life.

Writing my response to Michael Harley’s blog post arguing against the merits of weeknotes has, ironically, had me think more about weeknotes and seek out more weeknotes to read. I’d toyed with the idea of creating my own weeknotes for a while and, rather than dwelling on it endlessly, I’ve decided to just give it a try and see how I like it.

I enjoy reading other people’s weeknotes; even though many are just self-reflections and happenings of the bloggers’ lives, I’m inspired by the conscious act of thinking out loud and documenting. Often times, I do get something out of people’s weeknotes—could be something that amuses me, some new knowledge or some new links.

Ever since I retired from my audio engineering side business, I’ve been living a pretty relaxed life. While that has allowed me to take the time to do things I enjoy, sometimes I feel that I don’t fully know how I’ve spent my time or how I’d like to spend the “upcoming” time (e.g., the upcoming week). In other words, I think I’m living too much in the present sometimes.

I hope that writing weeknotes will help me bring more intention and awareness of my life overall and document noteworthy things for me to look back. I don’t have a solid idea of exactly what to include—I will figure it out as I go—but one section I do want to have is:

What brought me joy

Damn good Canadian blueberries

I love blueberries and I eat them as part of my breakfast almost every day. I often go to bed thinking about eating blueberries (and brewing coffee) the next day. The quality of the blueberries that my go-to grocery store stocks can unfortunately vary drastically, so finding a good batch means I have several days’ worth of tasty blueberries to look forward to eating.

New coffees arrived

new coffee beans

I ordered some coffee beans from 2 roasters I’d never tried before via Eight Ounce Coffee. One was roasted by Sorellina and the other Prodigal. I’ve been meaning to try both for quite a while. They arrived on the same day I finished the current bag so I got to brew one of them immediately—I was so happy!

Discovered and fell in love with a typeface by an indie typographer

I was lurking on Future Fonts as usual, and Missive Serif caught my eye. I love the slanted crossbar in the letter “e”, the wavy diagonal stroke in the capital “N” and those terminals are just gorgeous. I decided to test it on my blog and I was immediately blown away by how great it looked for not only headings and UI elements but also body text. It was as close as I’d ever seen to how I’d always envisioned the typography of my blog should look like. Missive Serif is only available in Light and Bold styles for now, as it’s a font family in progress. I bought a license to support its development, and implemented it for the blog site title and the UI elements in the nav and the footer. I’m really happy with it and eagerly waiting for more styles to drop!

Catching up with my cousin

I only have 1 relative from my side of the family in Canada. C lives in Hamilton, which is a ~2-hour commute to Toronto via public transit. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of years so when she told me she’d be in my neighborhood, we arranged to grab some coffee. We had a nice time catching up. She went through some tough times a few years back so I was very happy to see that she’s doing well in life now.

Octarine redesign

I’ve been using Octarine for personal knowledge management and really enjoying it. This week, the dev released a major redesign that not only addressed some of the pain points I had, but also made the app look much, much nicer overall. I’m a sucker for great design and aesthetics, and this redesign brought me so much joy.

Watching my wife play Chrono Trigger

This game is one of my wife’s all-time favourites; she’s raved about it to me for years and so when she decided to replay it, I joined to watch. We’re more than halfway through the game now, and we’ve had a blast! Such an intriguing story, and the soundtrack is amazing.

Piano

Two weeks ago, I decided to finally get back to practicing the piano. I hadn’t practiced at all for 7 months by that point, and I was starting to get small panic attacks from the worry of losing all my muscle memory for all the pieces I painstakingly learned before the hiatus. And then I had reached a phase where the more I panicked about it, the more I had wanted to avoid it.

Somehow I found the means to haul my ass onto the piano bench. Thankfully, I didn’t lose much progress, but this time I don’t want to fall off practicing the piano again, and so, to help encourage myself to practice consistently, I started a Piano Journal page here to track the habit and log some reflections after each practice. It’s been working well so far and I hope to keep it up!

Blogging

I finished and published my opinion piece, “‘No AI’ Statements Are Much More Than Mere Statements,” arguing for “No AI” statements in creative works. I worked on it for multiple days and went through multiple revisions—I had so much fun! It really brought me back to my English major days writing many argumentative essays; it felt good to exercise those writing skills I learned, especially when less and less people nowadays can write well thanks to over-reliance on AI.

But what really shows the magic of the indie blogging space is that I first discovered the basement blog through Bear Blog’s discovery feed, which then led me to discover the basement community (I’m only 30 and I already miss that kind of traditional forum—discord can’t hold candle to that), and then just a few days ago, I connected with the creator behind those two sites on the topic of learning Cantonese—such serendipity it was!

Other stuff

  • My MacBook Pro has 4TB of storage but somehow I’d only less than 1TB left and I struggled to free up space. Turned out, the culprit was that whenever I removed a OneDrive folder from syncing, it kept a copy of the entire content of that folder on my home folder? Why would it do that?! So all this time, the space was used up by these folders that I no longer needed. I got rid of them and now I have so much space back. Thank god.
  • I made whipped cream for the first time. Ate it with strawberries with my wife and it was so delicious.
  • My broken toe is feeling much better. I can finally put a shoe on the foot without hurting the toe, but I still can’t walk with the normal shoe. Looks like I will have to continue to wear the foot brace to walk outside.

Upcoming week

  • Practice the piano at least 3 times
  • Transfer more notes to Octarine and keep everything organized. I want to finally make a good personal knowledge base
  • I have two blog posts that I was actively working on and then lost steam. One of them was supposed to be a simple one but somehow I turned it into something much more elaborate. That’s unnecessary and I need to just finish and post it
  • I tested the OutIn Fino electric coffee grinder and got a bunch of grind size photos ready to post on a couple of subreddits. I should finally do that
  • I really need to get started with applying for a visitor visa for my parents. I’ve procrastinated doing it because I just don’t want to touch immigration again after getting my Canadian citizenship, but it’d be good for my parents to get the visa in case they want to come to Canada

Reply via email. Subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.

#weeknotes