What would be the impact on everyday life if a nuclear EMP destroyed all electronics in our lives instantly? First there are a lot of dead from car / plane crashes, then most patients in hospitals, then many due to running out of water and food. And what’s left of the society then collapses into barbarism, violence and fighting for resources.

It’s possible something like this would happen should the nuclear weapons of today be used. The book is hard to stomach, but everyone should be aware of the possibility and be at least knowledgeable in survival without modern technology (if not outright stocked up in a doomsday vault).

One Second After - W. R. Forstchen

Please everyone, read this book. It’s sad, disgusting and heavy, but it’s probably a documentary for events that may happen one day. It’s very well researched and the plausibility and realism make it even scarier. It hasn’t turned me into a prepper, but in part motivated me to make our house as self-sufficient as possible. Also it made me aware of small useful things in my surroundings that I used to be blind to.

I’ll do one better: UniGetUI. It handles Chocolatey, Winget, Python system packages and even other managers. All in a neat UI, nice search, auto updates.

Standing desk (electric, not crank operated) + tiny under-desk stationary bike. Sitting the whole day working/gaming and still getting to do some physical activity is great.

3D printer (I’ve got Prusa MK4+MMU3). It’s an amazing versatile utility, great skill to have, and a fun hobby. Don’t buy cheap chinese clones, it’s not worth the hassle.

I took up online tutoring and teaching programming for kids. It has great benefits:

• It’s an hour or so after work, it has a fixed schedule so it forces me to clock out
• it makes me focus hard so I completely forget about work
• it pays for itself (not my corporate day-job rate, but I’m not doing it for free)
• I can try out languages and tech I’d normally wouldn’t be able to in my day job, or I’d have to invest my free time for a side project
• I have a background in teaching… I like it, it’s fun and refreshing
• I’ve helped many kids jump start their interest in programming even in families that know nothing about tech at all. I’ve helped a few of them to get accepted to the school they wanted to and pursue a career in programming

All in all, teaching after work makes for a great hobby and a strong barrier for my day job so I don’t find myself working late anymore.

The requirement for Recall is a neural coprocessor with substantial performance, specifically to be able to run the model locally.

SAO / Matrix level immersive VR

I collect unfinished projects.

Getting a used mid-range printer is quite affordable. Or try looking for your local maker space, so you don’t have to buy your own. It’s never been easier to get into 3D printing than today.

Also, it’s quite easy to sell custom 3D prints. Thus it’s not that hard to cover the cost of materials (or even the printer itself).

I hate using Excel for this reason. ALMOST all functions are translated, so you’re never sure what to look for. If you find a solution for a problem online? Doesn’t work, you’d have to rewrite it in your language. And you can’t even switch the language in settings, because it’s tied to the OS language (maybe you can in recent versions, haven’t bothered to check for a while).

There’s OSTRAJava, a parody esoteric language based on a very specific regional accent of the Czech language.

Teaching programming for kids, 3D printing, photography, playing the saxophone, gaming (pretty much exclusively coop), playing board games.

How’s that ruined? That’s epic!

I know it’s not a good advice, but having something very serious happen in your life might shift your perspective. In my case, getting (through) cancer made me realize it’s not worth stressing for stupid little things and greatly deepened my stoicism.

The brain also named itself (along with everything else)