Favorites
Books
- Longitude by Dava Sobel
A curious story about the ingenuity it took to accurately keep time for navigation at sea. - Classic Feynman by Richard Feynman
Feyman’s insatiable curiosity is admirable and consequentially his tales of antics and discovery are wonderful to read. - If You Can by William J. Bernstein
A succinct guide to saving for retirement.
Television
- Planet Earth II, Life, Planet Earth I, Frozen Planet, Blue Planet I, Blue Planet II, Big Pacific All of these series have absolutely breathtaking footage of wildlife in amazing high definition from unbelievable perspectives.
- Simpsons Amazing because even 20+ years after it was written, much of the satire is still on point and hilarious.
Sites
- bogleheads.org Self described as “Investing Advice inspired by Jack Bogle,” this is a Wiki + Forum full of quality personal finance advice with no for profit conflicts of interest
- yarchive.net This site, especially the “Computers” section has archived some incredible knowledge that’s fun to poke around.
- foodtimeline.org Amazing site with tons of info
Games
- SimCity 2000 I’d be in favor of legislation that makes SimCity 2000 mastery a prerequisite for public administration. At first it seems like just building roads, zoning and electricity, but it also incorporates public health, workforce education, public safety, property values, tax rates, transportation/congestion, pollution, commerce, redevelopment and more, making it fun and challenging.
- Age of Empire 2 Centered around gathering wood, food, stone and gold to build a civilization, success requires excellent balance of defense, offense, growth and research and eventually gets into trade and diplomacy. (Update: Microsoft released an updated Rise of Rajas expansion pack on 2016/12/13!)
- Lemmings These game developers must have had fun, because Lemmings is twisted and addictive.
Software
- Google Photos A wonderful application for managing digital photos centered on automatic tagging and labelling. (See my review.)
- f.lux Reduce night time eye strain by changing the color of your screen to make it more reddish as the sun goes down. (Note: Apple Night Shift and Android Night Light are new built in solutions for this.)
- flycut A simple clipboard manager the integrates with the OS X status bar.
Quotes
- “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
― Founding Fathers - “I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors.”
― George Washington