A few years ago Eve got me a MagLite Solitaire AAA torch for Christmas. It’s been on my keys ever since, but I recently came across an LED conversion kit for it.
Until I started regularly carrying a torch around with me, I didn’t realise how many day-to-day situations I encounter in life that are improved by …. regularly carrying a torch. Looking in cupboards, looking for dropped earrings under tables in pubs/restaurants. Lost doodads in the rehearsal room/in the footwells of cars late at night, or even for things that have fallen under/off my desk etc.
As I understand it, MagLite were very late in updating/upgrading their range to LED’s and this complacency has meant they have lost a lot of marketshare to upstarts. There is an LED version of the Solitaire available now, there wasn’t at the time that Eve bought me mine. Which speaks to the thing that has always disappointed me about the device – how anaemic the light from it is. I mean, as I said above it does the job when you need it too; and it saved my bacon walking back to the car along a sea wall after dark with my Mum last year. But during daylight, it’s barely perceptible and once you have *some light* in your life, it turns out you want moar.
What it needs is a bright LED in it.
Wondering if there was anything I could do, I recently came across a conversion kit on e-Bay. It arrived the other day and I couldn’t be happier with the results!
The replacement bulb fits right into the existing pin holes with zero fuss. The only thing I was confused about was initially it wasn’t working. I had to flip the pins around 180 degrees, as obviously the current is only designed to flow one way though the pin.
When purchasing the kit it did warn that because of the heat sink, the focusing ring will no longer fully focus and you end up with a 3mm gap between the head of the torch and the body when everything is fully seated in the off position.
Check out the gap in the after image below and compare it to the before image above.
But I’m honestly fine with this as what you loose in focusing ability you gain in brightness. I took side by side comparison photos of original MagLite Bulb on the left and the LED kit on the right. Both photos are taken in ambient daylight.
As you can see, the upgraded LED is bright enough to cast it’s own shadow which is a major improvement! I just walked into our under stairs chaos-cupboard and was pleasantly surprised by how bright it was. It’s definitely going to come in more handy loading in, shipping out at gigs, or when I’m looking for the speaker cable that someone unhelpfully left dangling at the practice room.
I know its only a small thing, but for 10 quid its a major upgrade and well worth the money. Much better than getting a new one.
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I’ve read a lot of writing about the need to be mindful about how – and what – one consumes on the Internet recently. I’m sure you will have seen the links go by in my links section over the last weeks and months. Many of them align with my own thinking about taste and discernment online.
Last year I wrote about the need to practice discernment in order to clarify ones taste
When applied to taste, practising discernment means to:
Think critically about a cultural artefact youāve been exposed to for the first time. Its context, meaning, intent etc.
Engage in self-reflection about oneās own existing tastes and preferences. Eg: How does this new phenomena make us feel.
Have some awareness that this reaction may be shaped by oneās social class, education, and cultural background.
Lastly, being open to new perspectives in the first place.
The practice of discernment is the activity we engage in in order to refine our tastes.
But I avoided offering any specificquestion one should ask themselves during the moment of self-reflection in that post. The reason being – I had no good questions to ask or offer. But recently I’ve been trying out variations of the following: What About This Excites You?
Feel free to substitute the word ‘Excites’ with: Compels, Interests, Arouses, Animates, etc. I’m open to reformulation. The main thing is reflecting on how new phenomena encountered makes you feel – both in isolation and more broadly:
When you are sitting there looking at an individual tweet, watching youtube video, or looking at an Instagram post, ask yourself: “What About This Excites Me?“.
The question I’m finding, serves as good jumping off point to becoming more conscious of about the engagement with the media I’m consuming. This question helps me immediately identify whether my engagement is driven by genuine interest or merely habitual scrolling. more often than not
It encourages us to consider:
The value or joy derived from the thing I’m watching.
Whether the content stimulates thoughtful reflection or provokes a positive reaction.
If the content merely amplifies existing anxieties or contributes to a negative mental state.
The other day, because the red notification bubbles on instagram were infuriating, I installed and logged into Meta’s Threads app to clear them out before uninstalling it again. Immediately upon login, the app showed me some super dumb take, from someone I don’t know nor follow, and it annoyed me immediately me. I took the bait and clicked though to look at the dumb replies – so I asked myself the question – and I realised the element that was exciting me (as in siring my feelings / emotions) was how annoying the take was. That was it.
If the answer is this does not excite me, when why are you looking at it? If the answer like the above is negative then stop watching it/close the app. And because I’m increasingly becoming a ruthless motherfucker, mute or block the person who made the content.
On the other hand, expanding the question out to the activity itself – “Why am I watching YouTube right now, and does it excite me?” zooms out our awareness as a whole. This reflection is crucial.
I personally, have often rationalised my behaviour of consuming online/social media somthing along the lines of ‘spending time here has the potential of finding something valuable’. This is in fact the unspoken/implicit promise of social media. Which masks the truth that the whole machine is structured around you advertising.
For me, over all spending any more than 20mins on any social platform: twitter, instagram, youtube etc often does not justify the time invested. So the wider zoomed out question about what about this behaviour is exciting me throws up things like:
Whether my engagement is an intentional choice, or a mindless habit.
How this activity aligns with or distracts from my personal goals and well-being.
Am I getting any real payoff from time spent versus the potential for discovering something truly enriching.
The answer to point three is almost always …. no.
Coming back to one of the most important phrases I’ve ever written on my blog: ‘Your Attention is Sovereign‘.
Every act of discernment online represents a choiceāwhether conscious or notāabout where we direct our cognitive resources. By asking “What About This Excites Me?” we can perhpas slowly reclaim control over the choices we make in the present, future AND ones we’ve made in the past. This question isn’t just a reflection; it enables a recalibration of our engagement strategies toward more mindful, intentional consumption. It helps us refine our tastes and personal aesthetic sensibilities.
It also works the other way around. Sometimes people send me links to videos, articles etc and the question works there too. “What about this excites you?“. Ask them for more details beyond ‘I think it’s cool’. Ask them specifics, why is it cool? why do you like it? why did you want to share it with me etc/ You don’t need to do this for everything, all the time, as that would be too much.
But it is worth trying every now and then, when you become aware of the fact you have been sat at your laptop, or looking at your phone for a long time.
The moment I finished editing this weekās show about Cal
Newport’s Slow Productivity, I realised to my horror that Iād made
it before. Doing the things that actually need doing, when they
need getting done? Finishing Projects? It turns out that this is
probably the greatest challenge of my life.
Iām at a total loss.
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length,
written and recorded by @thejaymo
I’m going to be blogging on thejaymo.net in a more informal way, if you are subscribed by email you won’t get notified but i’ll be doing a round up every week in Terminal Access.
Thereās a point in childhood when your awareness comes into tune with the coordinates of grown-up reality. The stories on the news are no longer an irrelevant blur, but something you try to make sense of. Years ago, some friends of mine set up a site called First Political Memory, and whatās striking about the stories they collected is how they map this moment in development. The chances are, your first political memory will come from around the age of eight.
If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.
Iāve been through close to a dozen reorgs. This article contains the advice I wish Iād been given earlier in my career when I didnāt yet have that experience. Reorgs are disruptive, and nobody really tells you what to do in the wake of one. Itās easy to feel adrift
I finished reading ‘Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet‘ by Katie Hafner which I started a number of weeks ago. It’s a 1994 book about the creation of ARPANET, and is full of fascinating details about BBN, early computing, networking etc. I really enjoyed it and can’t stress to people enough how good it is.
I’m still reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with Americaās Best Nonfiction Writers on Their CraftĀ by Robert Boynton. I’ve taken to reading 1 interview a night before going to sleep, which means it’s going to take me about a month to get through it. I’m learning a lot about the masters of late 80’s early 90’s narrative non fiction. So many books are creeping on to my wishlist. Peabody award winners, Pulitzer prizes etc.
I started reading ‘Voice of the whirlwind‘ Jon Williams’ follow up novel to the cyberpunk classic Hardwired.
Finally, this week Zsela has announced their debut album ‘Big For You‘ and accompanying tour. The UK date is at the roundhouse in November as part of Pitchfork music festival. I can’t wait.
Lilly of the Nile, is a propulsive art pop song that suits her Contralto like voice. If the whole album is as good as the lead single then we’re in for a treat.
Remember Kids:
I like scientists for their science and not for their politics.
President Eisenhower
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The moment I finished editing this weekās show about Cal
Newport’s Slow Productivity, I realised to my horror that Iād made
it before. Doing the things that actually need doing, when they
need getting done? Finishing Projects? It turns out that this is
probably the greatest challenge of my life.
The moment I finished editing this weekās show, I realised to my horror that Iād made it before.
One of the wild things about making a podcast with a searchable public archive every week – especially one that touches on aspects of one’s creative life – is that after half a decade it can reveal recurring currents of thinking that might otherwise remain unexamined.
2 years ago I made an identical show to the one I made today – pulling at the same threads, cataloguing my same issues.
And so, through the magic of archives, todayās episode is about my ongoing struggle with personal time management and prioritisation going back to 2018.
Hereās the opening of todays episode to set the scene:
Iām currently reading Cal Newportās newest book “Slow Productivity” and Iām enjoying it very much. I must confess, I didn’t get around to reading “Deep Work” until the pandemic lockdown. My initial impressions of the book and its contents was soured by the haphazard and counterproductive implementation of some of its ideas at a company I was working at at the time of its release. However, “Slow Productivity” seems like a timely book, and its call for intervention in workplace culture, especially in this post-pandemic era is well met.
One of the reasons I picked up the book is because, since returning from Thailand at the beginning of the year, I’ve been re-evaluating my own work processes.
In fact, I can follow this thread all the way back to Episode 18-24. Where the first point for this episode is taken from.
In 2018 I said:
Multitasking is largely misunderstood by everyone. Multitasking is holding a conversation whilst juggling, or walking along the road whilst speaking to a friend. Multitasking can *only* occur when one of the behaviours you are ātasking onā is so automatic that you can just leave it to run whilst you do something else. What most people call multitasking, especially in a workplace context (or whenever we are in front of a computer screen to be honest) is actually task switching. Moving between singular tasks rapidly.
In the last year or so, I have become a big fan of āeating the frogā first thing in the morning. In fact, Iāve found that the thing I’m most reluctant to get going on every day is usually the most important. So I’m getting that done as soon as Iāve finished my morning journal has been working really well. And then I reward myself with some time checking my RSS reader.
But I’ve fallen into a bit of a trap, one that Newportās book has helped me clarify.
My trap has been to think that I should work a little and often across lots of projects. Pushing them all forward a little bit, which ultimately means everything is trapped in a perpetual state of āthe doingā. And has meant that nothing actually gets finished.
And in 2022:
I use Todoist to manage my day to day. In the app I have a daily recurring task called āPush Things Forwardā. I only tick it off if Iāve done either of the following things during the day. Write 300 new words or spent 20 minutes editing/noodling on something Iāve already drafted.
In order to qualify, the effort has to be in addition to all the things I had scheduled to do that day. Hence the taskās name: Push Things Forward.
The problem is ā he says. And this is by no means a world shattering observation. Noodling on 15 things and having a further 27 things I could start on means that Iām not finishing anything. My behaviour is literally the lady sweeping the sea meme. Iām not making any significant progress in any direction at all.
I even mentioned Todoist this morning:
As I’ve written before, I run my life out of the todoist app with a GTD like structure
But then I went on to talk about Newports classification system.
Newport says that all self-directed work should be broken down into missions, projects, and goals. And you should only work on one project at a time, finish it, and then move on.
To maximise my chances of it happening Iāve decided that Iām only going to do one thing at a time.
He says that all self directed work should be broken down into missions, projects and goals. And you should only work on one project at a time. Finish it and move on.
Here was my proposed solution two years ago.
For the rest of the year at the beginning of each month, Iām going to look at the ideas pile, pick one or two things on the list. Then work on them to completion, to the exclusion of everything else that would usually butterfly my attention away
Iām going to full screen the things that need doing, and then do them, one at a time.
And what I was proposed this morning:
Itās been very easy for me to classify and re-prioritise things I want to do at the project level. Iām going to focus on doing one thing at a time, completing tasks, achieving goals and finishing projects. Over the next few months Iām looking forward to seeing if things get finished.
If Iām being super honest, being unable to finish anything doesn’t just go back to 2018, but right the way back to young adulthood.
Yet mediation, the practice of sitting for long periods with nothing but oneself, simply experiencing the joy of being alive is something I have no problem with at all?
