General

Expose Yourself to as Much as Possible I recently read an research article saying “children that do chores become more confident” https://www.whiteheadlearninggroup.com/news/2021/8/19/why-kids-who-do-chores-are-more-successful-according-to-studies https://www.happykidswin.com/post/chores-for-kids-and-a-growth-mindset This really resonated with me, my first connection was not to my own childhood. But rather my years in the student life, where I have seen the value of exposing yourself and doing tasks one usually would not have done. My childhood Lets take a step back to kids. I do not have kids, but I have been a kid. Yes I did chores every week and joined my father in all the practical work he did. I also spent my years in primary school building lego, tinkering with electronics, building flame throwers, making movies, spreading viruses, hosting servers, pirating, video editing, building tree houses and doing all kinds of things. I could spend hours solving “tiny” problems and learning how to do tasks that I today view as simple. All of these hours made me very confident in my abilities to solve problems and building things and I’m pretty sure it is because I started so early. ...

This post is mostly a draft I had laying around since april 2023 when management wanted to implement MDM on all devices. So I had to note down my thoughts somewhere. The post was not finished, but I still think it’s worth a post. What and why I will not accept MDM on my work devices MDM - Mobile Device Management is a service that is used by IT managers to control and manage devices that are used by employees. This can be anything from enforcing password policies, installing software remotely or wiping devices if they are stolen. They are widely used in large companies to secure access to internal data and reduce risk of data breach. ...

December quick recap December went past quite fast, I had a quite a few great dinner parties with friends where we ate good traditional Norwegian christmas food. Then I spent the new years in Playa Flamenca next to Alicante, Spain. It was a great trip with old and new friends! January quick recap In January I started doing group training at the gym, that’s pretty fun and it’s a big differene from my usual casual weight lifting. Lifting 10 sets in the time I usually do 2-3 sets is quite exhausting, but good for my endurance. ...

2023 November Yet another month has passed and it’s time to recap what I’ve been doing! Monthly principle 🌟 Write meeting notes, documentations, questions, answers, etc. in public searchable spaces. This is something I have seen an increasing need for in my daily work life, you can read more about why in my blogpost Value of transparent notes. Finances 💰 My networth increased by 12.5% in November! Both crypty and stocks are even more up. ...

Transparent notes The value of notes and action items are undisputed. If you leave a meeting without any action items or notes, did you really have a meeting? I think not. The second layer of value comes from collaboration on the notes. Sharing your notes with colleagues allows them to also benefit from the notes. This is a very important step in building a strong resilient team. It also allows for a more open and transparent culture. ...

Motivation Winter is coming and gloves are worn, so unlocking the bike with the app is a bit cumbersome as I need to take off my gloves. I want to be able to unlock the bike by pressing my AirPods and say “bysykkel” which then unlocks a bike. Reverse engineering process In order to unlock the bike, I needed to find out how the Bergen BySykkel app communicates with the backend. I used the following process: ...

2023 October October, my birthday month 🎉 is over and it’s time to recap what I’ve been doing! Monthly principle “Never start a chat with ‘Hi’.” “Reduce use of this and that, be clear and consise.” “Include full context in chat/email messages.” This months principles is about making communication more effective. As a friend of me wrote on hos blog timharek.no/blog/no-hello, starting a chat with “Hi” and then waiting for an answer, is a waste of time. It’s better to just write the question you want to send right away and let the recipient answer when they have time. ...

2023 September Yet another month is over and it’s time to recap what I’ve been up to! Looking back on the month I am unsure what I have done haha, so it’s nice to check the calendar and Daylio. I watched Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back in Grieghallen with live orcestra, that was nice! And I also attended an alternative concert at the Griegacademy with modernistic classic music, that was also nice! Then I attended Kakkmaddafakka concert, despite the name they do not play punk music, they play excellent pop music. ...

2023 August Whosh August went fast! I’ve been super busy doing something every weekend and day! I had a lovely weekend trip to Copenhagen, a super nice city where you can bike everywhere and eat delicious food. And of course there is a nice night life as well. I would especially mention the freetown Christiania, the “lawless” area inside Copenhagen. This area naturally attracts organised crime as you will easily see if you visit the main street and “Pusher’s street” where they sell weed and other drugs openly with large signs. It was nice to sit in a caffe, drink a beer and see all the sellers run away when the police arrived to do a razzia. We were told that the police perform razzias 1-3 times a day, so it’s just another normal day where maybe one of the sellers get 3 months of jail time. The funny part of it is observing that everything was business as usual, 10 minutes after the police left. But Christiania is a very nice place to walk around in, it’s fascinating to see the homes people have built and think about how they manage rules, property ownership etc in a lawless town within Copenhagen. ...

2023 July July has been a nice month with vacationing and hanging out with friends. I have also finally been able to work on personal projects again, which is great. Finances July was pretty good and overall my net worth excluding my apartment increased by around 5%. I am still a fan of last month decision to sell all my index funds and buy forex secured index fund. To track the difference in performance I purchased a small amount in the similar index fund but not secured. So far the secured fund has increased by 2.8% while the not secured has increased by 1.9%. Pretty decent extra ROI. ...

You might have seen my other blog post about the homemade trailmap I created in Mapbox Studio with data from OpenStreetMap. I have now finally created a static website that will generate and export these maps for any location in the world! The website is available at https://mathiash98.github.io/trail-map-generator and the source code is available on GitHub. The general implementation details: In Mapbox studio I created a plain style with close to zero data and labels, since I would like to render these myself with custom styling not accessible from Mapbox on low zoom levels. The user input the name of a relation that exists in OpenStreetMap. For example Eidfjord or Vestland. Then the site iterates through a list of predefined layers with their corresponding Overpass turbo queries. For example all peaks are downloaded with nwr[natural=peak]. Each layer is then downloaded from Overpass Turbo and converted to GeoJSON using osmtogeojson. Then each layer is added to the MapboxGL map as a source and layer with a specified style. Success! To enable export of data I installed the great package @watergis/mapbox-gl-export which enables exporting map to SVG, PNG, JPG in quite good resolution. ...

2023 June Last recap was a pleasure to write, so I will continue with the same format. Just writing something makes me more creative and writing more, I got to write my MacOS setup and have more ideas coming up. Finances June and end of june was a pretty mediocre with a small increase in the markets. I moved all the crypto I had in the Polygon network into Firi, to make it simpler to track my crypto. I have also sold all my index funds and bought “Storebrand Global Indeks Valutasikret N”. This fund is supposed to remove the risk of currency fluctations, which I think is a good idea now as the norwegian krone is very weak against the dollar and euro. Let’s say the NOK increase 10% in value. Then my index funds would have decreased by 10% because almost all of the funds are invested in foreign currency. ...

I have been using a Macbook Pro 14" with M1 Max and 32GB RAM for over 8 months now. It’s been a fantastic journey and the daily experience is so good! Good battery life, very fast CPU and things just works. MacOS got some quirks for a long time Windows user like the stupid fullscreen feature that Mac users use. Coming from Windows the most missed feature was to easily split screen in half using keyboard shortcuts, this is luckily solved with the free program Rectangle. Other than that I have not met any major issues, and will most probably go Mac for a long time forward. ...

2023 may I have been inspired by some of the other blogs I follow to start writing a monthly recap of what I have been up to. Some of the excellent blogs I read: Tim Hårek Tom Mac Wright Pengeblogg Sindre Kjelsrud I have not decided on the format yet but I have always wanted to write about the following topics: Finances Work Personal projects Recap from my Daylio app Finances I have been tracking spendings and net worth since mid 2018 and it’s very interesting to see how much money I spend on for example beer. I have a Google sheet where I import bank statements every 3-4 month and manually mark the transactions with a category. In the future I would like to automate this with some fancy classification, either on the text or with fancy machine learning. I would also like to automate import of transactions using the banks API, using the amazing free service GoCardless (previously Nordigen) which enables API access to thousands of banks in EU. ...

I don’t read news. News is useless noise in our daily lives. Yes, I think so. Think about how often you visit various newspapers everyday just to scroll mindlessly through the headlines without reading anything. Then move on to the next newspaper. Your life does not change by reading fresh news every day. When I tell people that I do not read news, they immediately ask in shock; "How do you catch up on important events around the worlds?". My answer is that I’ll always learn about it somehow, if the news is important enough and affect me. My life will not be different if I get to know of some terror attack ten minutes after the incident compared to waiting a day or two. My life will probably be worse by learning of it right away as there are very little confirmed information and lots of unanswered questions. More knowledge and less impulsive feelings are the main reasons to why I like to read about events after the incident has happened. ...

This is actually working Quite neat stuff, I hope I’ll post some blog posts here. It even has powerful search method!