Reading on Flo's Thoughts

Book Notes: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:53:27 +0100

A fantastic book that I only finished a few days ago. It’s interesting and somewhat devastating to keep in mind when this was written and how much has changed since then. Bill Gates finished this book during the pandemic and I would be curios to know if he’s still that optimistic. According to his website, he’s still optimistic, but with footnotes.

However, I think this book makes a great cheat-sheet for anyone who regularly finds themselves in discussions about climate change, what we can do about, and what the actual numbers are. I feel like I should always keep a few fresh copies of this book with me to hand out to people who want to start such discussions. It’s refreshing to read some positive notes on these topics. It left me in a similar mood as Hans Rosling’s Factfulness.

The Clever Cryptography Behind Apple's 'Find My' Feature

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 22:40:35 +0200

An interesting article about how Apple’s new ‘Find My’ feature works and how it compares to the previous iterations of the service. With Apple’s focus on privacy, I was a bit surprised to learn that with the current version they’re able to read the acquired locations:

In fact, Find My’s cryptography goes one step further than that, denying even Apple itself the ability to learn a user’s locations based on their Bluetooth beacons. That would represent a privacy improvement over Apple’s older tools like Find My iPhone and Find Friends, which don’t offer such safeguards against Apple learning your location.

Re-Evaluating the Kindle Voyage

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 22:50:24 +0200

I’d like to share my thoughts on the Kindle Voyage as someone who barely read until he got his first Kindle a few years ago. The Kindle somehow changed my relationship to the written word. I still don’t read very many books each year, but that’s only because I’m a rather slow reader. Nonetheless, the number of books and the topics that interest me have been growing ever since.

Writing in Markdown

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 15:12:44 +0200

Today, Matt Gemmell released a new ebook on Five Simple Steps. It covers all the basic steps to get you started with Markdown as well as some advanced stuff like tables. As you might have guessed from the choice of my blog software, Jekyll, and my interest in Markdown apps like Whiskey, Markdown is my favorite tool and style for writing these days.

You can find the book here.

ReadKit

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 10:00:00 +0200

Since Google Reader shut down I’ve been using Fever°. It’s not perfect, but it works for me. Especially on iOS where Reeder 2 (App Store US, App Store DE) allows me to read all my articles in the app. Unfortunately, Reeder’s desktop version never got updated to support Fever°. (At least not until the last time I checked which has been a while now.)

So, when at the computer, I had to read my feeds using the web interface which kinda sucked because it would reload every now and then and therefore lose my reading position.

Bye Bye, Google Reader; Hi There, Fever

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0200

Now that everyone said their goodbyes to our beloved Google Reader, I wanted to join in. Since 2005 Reader (and later the great iOS and Mac apps and front ends named Reeder¹) became my everyday companion and it’s probably among the top three sites I’ve visited over the past couple of years. So I was really disappointed to see it go. But I guess that’s what eventually happens to non-paid services.

Marco's Fanboy Theory

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 20:02:10 +0200

I just stumbled upon a blog post by Marco Arment called “Fanboy theory”. Since I’m having this talk quite a lot in my personal life I thought it might be a good idea to reference the article here.

Though I’m being called a fanboy quite often and I’d even say myself that I’m one (because I don’t think it’s disrespectful or derogatory, but that’s a whole other story) I try not to force or influence anyone to buy products they might not make reasonable use of. If you don’t want, need, or like what I’m using just get something different. I’m making a lot of jokes about being a fanboy as defined in Marco’s article but I’d suggest that you don’t take that too seriously.