Brent Deverman

Reminder: Setup Legacy Contacts with your Family

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Remember to setup Legacy Contacts with your Family on your Apple accounts so you can get into their accounts when they pass away.

Well formatted Swift Language ebook

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Swift language has a book in HTML form and here is a repository that generates PDFs and Epub versions of the book. It looks good and you can learn swift offline.

Dynamically generated user interfaces with AI

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I saw a demo on X of a dynamically generated user interface, I guess you can say a text to pixel web browser that made an impression on me so I’m noting it here because this is something to watch and I think it is going to be very important in the future. It is very slow like dial-up and it shows to me that we are no where near hitting peak token. This should be disruptive to Apple and they should be working on supporting AI generated interface. I tried to explore what it could come up with about Shenzhen.

Here is the tweet announcement:

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it… pic.twitter.com/C4BEi1lse8
— Zain Shah (@zan2434) April 22, 2026

It even got a comment from Andrej Karpathy:

One day we'll be talking about good old "hand-crafted" films and instead the norm will be watching AI-generated (infinite) content on demand
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) March 29, 2016

Using Encrypted DNS to Prevent Tracking on macOS

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Using encrypted DNS is one less way that you can be tracked, and some countries block certain websites through DNS. You can set up your Mac to use encrypted DNS, but you have to install a profile to set it up. A popular profile is this open-source one on GitHub. These profiles also work on iPhones and iPads. I have installed one of the “Cloudflare 1.1.1.1” configurations. The web page gives you installation instructions.

Health And Calorie Tracking Apps I’ve tried

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

For years I’ve been interested in what was called the “quantified self” space and so I’ve been using apps to track simple bio markers. I even managed the migration of a 13TB database and application migration to the cloud for the AI Vitality Hong Kong tracking app. Wanted to make a list of what I have tried and what I’m using for reference:

Tried but didn’t stick

Bevel – Was recommended by a friend and tried it for workouts. It seems to be a real “super app”, but I’m not sure why it didn’t stick. I think it was sending me a lot of initial notifications.
Cal.ai – Tried this one because I heard the first interview from the founder on My First Million Podcast, and what seemed to be a short time after I heard the second interview about how he had a huge exit.
OpenNutrition – Caught my eye because they have published their nutrition database online that can be downloaded.

Currently Using

Oura – Been using this app and the ring for like 7 years and really love the design. Check it for my sleep daily and sometimes remember to record my meals here.
Withings – Using this to take my blood pressure and weigh myself on their scale every day.
SleepCycle – Monitoring my snoring with this app.
Fud AI – Open-source calorie tracker written in Swift and Kotlin, just installed and will play around because it lets you bring your own AI key.

Heard about but Haven’t tried

Just heard about these but haven’t tried them noting them in case I would like to come back to them.

Noom
Lifesum

AI Follows List on X

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I started to put the accounts related to AI that show up own my X feed into an X list. These are the ones that I think are worth following that are either building in the industry or are thought leaders.

Bootleg concert recordings

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Internet Archive digitized one guys bootleg concert recordings. He donated over 10,000 tracks with ~2,500 digitized. I’m listening to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Live from 1986 as I write this.

Via TechCrunch

Points to know when applying for the Apple Developer Academy in Bali

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Want to get into the Apple Developer Academy in Bali? Joel and I have made a short to explain some of the steps and considerations when applying since it both took us two tries.

Advice to a young entrepreneur

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The other day I met a young lad who just graduated high school. He had just inherited his father’s business because his father passed away. He was asking for advice on what he should do, including if he should go to college. His mom was currently running the business, but the business was going down a bit.

I want to jot down the advice I gave him:

Should he go to college?

College of course, depends on his goals and if he is driven and can build in public and show his value some other way. Maybe college is not necessary, and he can find a job by just showing off his skills. It is easier than ever to learn some subjects. There might be opportunities in the AI era to go to college and get some domain expertise that would help, such as in the fields of biology, etc. When I found out he had the family business to help run, that seemed to be a pretty clear path.

Talk to the customers

He should talk to them to understand their needs and pain points. Set up a coffee with them and don’t try to sell to them; just show you are trying to learn the business and what their business needs are. Be curious about them and ask if they have any memories of his dad to be vulnerable and make a connection.

Finding new Customers vs Current Customers

It’s cheaper to keep and serve current customers than to find new customers, and the type of business does not make it easy to find customers with digital marketing.

Learn the product

He was confused about what he should prioritize, and he thought he needed to learn the ins and outs of the products first. I told him to just learn the basics, take the product catalog, and put it into AI and just tell the AI to give you the basic understanding of each product. Later, he can go in-depth to learn each product but can probably prioritize that after talking to each customer to understand what are the most important products his company sells.

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I dragged a project from Omnifocus onto the macOS Calendar app and it has a little open button for Omnifocus that takes me straight to the project. Previously I knew you could click on the link. The button seems kind of new. Tested on macOS Tahoe 26.4.

Data on the State of Apps

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I’ve been paying attention to the App market now that I have joined the Apple Developer Academy.

And two reports I’ve looked at are the

From what I can see it is going to be harder and harder to get your App noticed as more and more are released and users are not spending more time with apps. However in the AI space users are subscribing to apps.

I’m going to start paying more attention to Jensen

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Exended interview with Lex Fridman and Jensen Huang.

My Hong Kong Office Before my flight

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The IFC has an outdoor space that anyone can use.

Great place to work outdoors in the winter in Hong Kong

24-hour Cursor Singapore hackathon weekend

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Love dropping in with three other talented strangers and trying to build something while everyone is hitting their 4am breaking point. Had to learn everyone’s strengths and weaknesses in a short amount of time to ship. Now that the AI agent is building code, we spent less time on implementation details and more time on team dynamics and building something people actually want.

Meet our project:
**Scrollodex**: Personal gamified contact Pokédex with viral invite loop and relationship health status.

AI Coded with Cursor in Next.js with Convex backend. Other technologies used were fal and OpenAI API.

Try out the demo:
🚀 Vercel URL: https://scrollodex.vercel.app/

💾 GitHub: https://github.com/kaenugget/Scrollodex

We had the one pizza team of:
– Chen Chen for UX/UI design
– Kaelan Wan for Full-stack engineering
– Tatsuya (Tats) Kohrogi for product management and vision
– Brent Deverman to help fill in the engineering and other gaps

Really appreciate the effort the Cursor hackathon organizers spent on this 🃏 Sherry Jiang, 🥃 Agrim Singh, Kaspar Hidayat, Ivan Leo, gabriel chua

Coverage in the The Straits Times

Importing Solarized Theme for Mac OS Terminal

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I was looking to add a Solarized theme to my Mac OS Terminal and I found that there is a site dedicated to themes for terminals including Ghosty which I also use.

Identifying All Network Devices on your Local Network

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I needed to find if my Synology was showing on my network and after rebooting. Upon researching I found this command that will give you a list of ips and the MAC address for all your network devices on MacOS Sequoia:

arp -a

Once I had this list I could find the MAC address for the Synology and then identify the ip address to connect of my NAS.

Interview of Brent Deverman on CCTV4 half hour Chinese television program

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

In 2014 a camera crew came to Shenzhen to spend a week filming me for a China wide CCTV4 broadcast of a television show called “Foreigners in China”. They spent a week following me around as I ran my business NowShenzhen.com in China.

I had to speak a lot in Chinese and the video narration is in Chinese. Thanks to the magic of AI translation the English transcript is below. You can watch the video on YouTube and follow along with the English translation below.

Next up is "Foreigners in China"
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I came to this place last time, but it wasn’t open yet. Let me go check it out.
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Venturing into Shenzhen, he encounters a series of life challenges. We’re going to Hong Kong to eat Western food.
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Or, we’ll go to Hong Kong to buy some food and bring it back.
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Over 14 years, Manager Shen turned him from an exhibition participant into the "King of Teams."
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Now, I’m not afraid to talk to others or anything like that. It’s no problem. A small hobby has turned into a big career.
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See how he achieves success. "Foreigners in China" is about to make a spectacular appearance.
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Shenzhen Overview Zither Harp
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One, two, three
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One, two, three
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In a bar at a five-star hotel in Shenzhen’s Futian District, an American named Brent Deverman is nervously bustling about. The wine and knowledge-themed party he organized is set to start in just one hour. At this moment, his partners arrive together, making Brent’s expression even more tense. What exactly has happened?
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This is Shenzhen’s well-known wine and knowledge-themed event.
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The participants are foreigners from all walks of life.
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Such events are held once a month and are very influential among foreigners in Shenzhen. So, what makes it so special?
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Let’s go and experience it together. Hi, Brent, hello!
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Excuse me, good evening.
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Thank you, thank you. I see a lot of people have come today.
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Yes, a lot more than I expected.
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Way more than expected, yes.
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Yes, they all find it interesting.
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Would you like something to drink? Sure, great.
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Enjoying rich red wine and the smooth exchange of knowledge, more and more guests arrive. Amid casual conversations and an American-style party atmosphere, Brent’s nervous mood seems to ease a bit.
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We had a beer station set up, but the beer they brought had no fizz, so our members couldn’t drink it. That’s a problem. I need to communicate with them so this doesn’t happen again next time.
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So, how did you resolve it at the time? Did you need some emergency solutions?
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We worked with the hotel to substitute another beer, but it wasn’t as good.
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This wine and knowledge-themed party has been running in Shenzhen for 11 years. Despite setting high standards from the start—using five-star hotel venues and charging a 380-yuan entry fee—foreigners still flock to attend. Now, it has become one of Shenzhen’s most influential large-scale themed parties.
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Why do people like this kind of event?
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Because
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We can just
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Meet other foreigners. Chinese people call it making friends. For us foreigners, it feels happier to connect like we did back home.
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We all really like China, but sometimes, we need to be with other foreigners because we share the same problems.
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At the event, the organizer Brent Deverman also doubles as the host. He tells us that setting up a raffle is both to liven up the atmosphere and to give back to the attendees. It’s also a marketing tactic.
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I feel the atmosphere is very harmonious. Everyone is very friendly, exchanging business cards and getting to know each other. You could say that.
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It’s a
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Great platform.
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Brent Deverman in Shenzhen
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Has lived here for 14 years and successfully organized thousands of parties, big and small. Among the different party formats, the one constant is that Brent is always the focal point at the scene. Watching him navigate conversations with ease among the crowd, it’s hard to imagine that 14 years ago, he was known as a shy, introverted "homebody."
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At the beginning, I had a pretty introverted personality. But I realized that if I wanted to run this company, I needed an extroverted personality. So, I changed a lot. Now, I’m not afraid to talk to others or anything like that. It’s no problem. So, this is a huge change.
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So, what exactly changed Brent? The story starts in 2000. Fourteen years ago, Shenzhen, as a frontier of China’s reform and opening-up, attracted many foreigners seeking opportunities. As one of them, Brent, newly arrived, soon encountered difficulties. He found that venues catering to foreigners were mostly located in the bustling Futian and Luohu districts, while the area outside the city center where he lived was far less convenient.
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When you first came to Shenzhen, was it hard to find food you were used to eating? Yes.
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It was quite difficult to find these things. Yes, during my first year in Shenzhen, I didn’t even know there was a place called Shekou. Shekou has a lot of foreigners and many Western restaurants. But I only found out about it after a year. At that time, there was no subway, so going to Shekou was very far and expensive. So, we rarely went there to eat Western food. We might have to go to Hong Kong to eat Western food or buy some food to bring back.
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Hong Kong, just across the water from Shenzhen, was the place Brent frequented most for shopping and dining. The familiar bars, Western food, and wine culture often evoked nostalgia. So, every weekend, Brent would gather a few friends to roam the streets of Shenzhen, searching for authentic Western restaurants and bars, carefully recording the information he gathered. Within just a year, Brent became a "living map" of Shenzhen in the foreigner community.
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This is both a hobby and work. So, when I’m on the street, if I see a new restaurant or company, I definitely have to go in and check it out to see if my members would be interested.
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Nowadays, some foreigners say he’s the "Mayor of Shenzhen" because his influence is so great that, in their minds, he knows everything—where new places open, where ceremonies are held, where the best food is, and where the fun spots are. He knows it all.
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"If you have a problem, find Brent." This phrase quietly spread among the foreigner community in Shenzhen. Brent strongly felt that too many of his foreign friends faced the same life challenges as he did. When they met, the most common topics were which restaurant had the best steak, which made the best fish, or which brewed the best coffee. Gradually,
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Brent came up with an idea.
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Thank you.
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At that time, we had a lot of needs, and I thought others must have these needs too. So, we felt that if we discovered something, we could tell our friends, and they’d know where to buy this thing or where to eat this dish.
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So, we wanted to solve our friends’ problems because this is...
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It would help them a lot.
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Setting up a consultation platform to share the information he knew with foreigners in Shenzhen and those planning to come to Shenzhen, Brent shared this idea with three friends who shared the same interests. They hit it off immediately. The four young men began enthusiastically discussing the functional positioning of a website. They unanimously decided that since it was a hobby, they’d start by organizing a party each month, bringing together most of the foreigners in Shenzhen for both relaxation and information sharing.
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Why did the few of you think of starting a website like this back then?
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We’d go out every day to see what new restaurants or fun bars were around. Then we thought, we’ve seen so many bars that are new and pretty empty. So, we said, we have a lot of friends, we can bring our friends to these bars, and we can choose the music ourselves, DJ ourselves, or whatever. Then we can
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Make the bar more fun. Making things fun was the original motivation for Brent and his friends to build the website. The four young men worked their day jobs, and after work, they’d stay in their dorms, busy building the website. In August 2001, after 48 days of relentless revisions, Shenzhen’s first English-language information media website, ShenzhenParty.com, was born.
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When you first started doing this, building a website and sharing this information with everyone, what kind of reactions did you get from your friends around you?
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A lot of people told me, "I like your website, but you should add this, or you should add that, or you should change this."
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At that time, Brent built the website purely out of interest. He never even thought about making money from it. But soon after, an incident changed his initial intentions.
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YoYo Television Series Exclusive
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As the website progressed smoothly, three partners chose to leave at the same time.
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They didn’t want to invest money, so they thought this
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I couldn’t
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Support it alone.
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How would they overcome this困境?
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"Foreigners in China" continues with excitement.
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Today, I’m with Brent Deverman.
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We’re attending a wine event together. Brent says he attends events like this at least once or twice a week.
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But I noticed he’s not like other friends who
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Fully enjoy the party. Instead, he’s always busy. So, what is he busy with?
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Okay, okay.
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Hello, Brent.
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I see you’ve been busy. What are you working on?
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I’m busy taking photos. When I attend these events, I need to document them. I might report on my website what I ate and whether it was good or not.
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If it’s at a party.
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YoYo Television Series Exclusive. After two years of development, ShenzhenParty.com played a significant role in Shenzhen’s foreigner community. On May 1, 2003, Brent and his friends were organizing a party with over 50 participants as usual. Little did he know, a rare opportunity was approaching.
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Then they said, "Next month, we’re opening a bar at our hotel. Would you like to host a party at our hotel?" We thought about it and felt this was a good opportunity. They had live music, which I thought was interesting because Shenzhen didn’t have a good venue for live music.
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It turned out that the venue setup, event planning, and professional DJ at this party caught the attention of an important guest—the PR manager of Shenzhen’s Venetian Hotel. He immediately decided to entrust Brent’s team with organizing the opening event for the hotel’s soon-to-open bar. However, faced with this sudden good news, the young team found themselves in a dilemma.
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We had a problem: we didn’t know how to charge for planning events. We had never charged before. So, how much should we ask for? We didn’t know. We just made a rough calculation of how to charge. Also, when working with a hotel, you need a contract and so on, which we didn’t have. So, the hotel ended up drafting the contract, and it was fine. That event was very successful, with over 100 people attending.
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The success of the Venetian Hotel party not only brought Brent his first pot of gold through the website but also boosted the website’s reputation among Shenzhen’s foreigner community. However, just a few days after this high, Brent’s career hit a low. In 2000, the disposable camera company he worked for was overwhelmed by the flood of digital products in the market and went bankrupt. Brent lost his job as a result. To make ends meet, he started looking for work everywhere.
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The maintenance of the website had to be put on hold. I might have to shut down my website or something because if I don’t work on it, it’s too big now. I can’t do it alone. It needs investment. If I don’t invest, it might not survive.
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Just as Brent was struggling to find a job and feeling lost, an email from a website user seeking help sparked an idea.
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I thought, so many people already know about my website. I don’t even know these people, but they’ve used it and seen it. So, I felt there should be a market.
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I should be able to make money. The almost mythical "Shenzhen speed" gave Brent immense confidence. In just six years, Western restaurants and bars had sprung up everywhere around him. Entertainment and leisure venues for foreigners were abundant. If he could provide this information to clients, allowing them to choose freely without leaving their homes,
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The website would definitely have development potential. It’s a huge change in Shenzhen’s growth. We’re sitting in Shenzhen’s CBD now. When I first came, there was no CBD. So, when the CBD started developing, Shenzhen became very lively. Many new foreign companies entered Shenzhen, so foreigners came, and they wanted a good quality of life.
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However, when Brent excitedly proposed to his three partners to register a company and turn ShenzhenParty.com into a commercial venture, the three partners didn’t see a future for the website. Not only did they not support him, but they also chose to withdraw at the same time.
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They didn’t want to invest money, so they thought I could handle it on my own.
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The withdrawal of his three friends left Brent somewhat discouraged, but he still firmly believed the website would create commercial value. To reach more clients, he started running around Shenzhen’s streets every day by himself.
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We were the first English website in Shenzhen, so all the foreigners knew about it. Even many Chinese people knew about it.
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So, we’re not afraid. Do you feel like you’ve already established a certain status?
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Yes, exactly. No other website or platform has been around this long or maintained such high standards.
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Please don’t hesitate to like, subscribe, share, and support Mingjing and Diandian channels with tips. What truly boosted Brent’s confidence was the rise of China, this Eastern dragon, capturing the world’s attention. In 2000, the number of foreigners entering China reached 10.16 million. Since then, this number has been increasing by 10% annually. The successful hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympics alone saw over 48 million foreign entries and exits in that year. As one of China’s most vibrant cities, Shenzhen attracted a large number of foreigners to study, work, invest, and do business. Facing this growing demand, Brent keenly sensed a business opportunity.
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After 2008, development sped up. At that time, Shenzhen quickly became an international city. Foreigners could accept this city. The subway system was completed, so you could take the subway to many places. So, now, opening a restaurant or something is much easier to succeed. I think many foreigners want to live in Shenzhen now.
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So, how should the future direction of the website be planned? Beyond gatherings and entertainment, what are the greater needs of clients? Brent had to start thinking deeply.
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I started thinking from their perspective. If I were in a foreign country with no friends or relatives, just arrived with no money, and I could find a website to help me, make friends, find a job, find a place to live, and even have activities to join, I would feel incredibly convenient.
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He was the first person to create this website in Shenzhen. He worked on it every day, doing a little bit for his website. After a few years, the result was that it grew big. He met a lot of people, and many people knew about his website. As you said, it’s becoming more and more professional.
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To understand common needs, Brent set up a survey questionnaire during user registration. Feedback showed that most foreigners were concerned about practical life issues like where to find a dentist or where their children could go to school. As the research deepened, Brent began posting extensive life information on the website—schools, hospitals, entertainment, fitness, lawyers, and more. At the same time, he had to spend a lot of time convincing businesses to promote their unique services on the website to earn a small income.
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At first, we only organized events. Then we realized we could post classified ads. After doing classified ads, we knew we should have a database of restaurants and so on. Later, there were many different events hosted by others, so those events also needed to be on our website. So, every year, this changes.
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It’s precisely because of Brent’s dedication that not only in Shenzhen
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You wouldn’t understand
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The website needs maintenance.
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The vast amount of information needs constant updating. Sometimes I collaborate with bars or negotiate with hotels, so I need to understand the difficulties in these industries and know how to solve them.
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On the solitary journey forward, challenges abound. How will he face them? "Foreigners in China" continues with excitement. Today, Brent came to Shenzhen’s Futian District in Overseas Chinese Town. While seemingly strolling, whenever a bar or hotel opens, he goes in right away to introduce his website’s content and purpose to the owners. To attract clients to his website,
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He even offers businesses a free one-month advertising slot.
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Don’t you feel tired?
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I do feel tired, but I find it fun. I think these challenges are great. I like to give myself challenges. I like to give myself challenges.
00:24:18,220 --> 00:24:28,000

This is a new restaurant. They make Peking duck, but unfortunately, they’re still in preparation, and only the owner can taste it. He said we can’t eat here today. What’s your name?
00:24:29,400 --> 00:24:45,620

My name is Steven.
00:24:45,900 --> 00:24:46,460

Steven, OK. I’m Brent. I run a website called ShenzhenParty.com. I might have forgotten to bring my business card, but I’ll call again. I want to feature some new restaurants on my website.
00:24:46,680 --> 00:24:59,900

And then
00:25:14,760 --> 00:25:15,880

A month ago, I came by to see you were preparing this restaurant. So today, while I was in Huanglan Coast, I thought I should come check if you’ve opened yet.
00:25:04,519 --> 00:25:13,220

Right now, our restaurant hasn’t opened yet.
00:25:16,039 --> 00:25:17,440

We’re still in the preparation phase.
00:25:17,760 --> 00:25:19,419

And everything we’re doing now is for internal testing among our own staff.
00:25:20,039 --> 00:25:27,500

Is that so? Like a simulation, I understand.
00:25:27,720 --> 00:25:29,820

Yes, and we’re not open to outside guests yet.
00:25:32,080 --> 00:25:33,000

So, right now, it’s like this every day.
00:25:38,080 --> 00:25:39,000

OK, so when will you officially open? It should be at the beginning of August.
00:25:41,480 --> 00:25:43,880

Beginning of August, right? OK, great. OK, so your email is here, right? And your phone number? I’ll have my assistant contact you, and we can help promote your place on our website. Can I take a look around?
00:25:44,059 --> 00:26:04,960

You can, but it might not be very convenient to open it up right now.
00:26:05,240 --> 00:26:09,520

It might not be convenient to show you around. Oh, is that so? OK, OK, OK, fine. Because after we officially open,
00:26:11,340 --> 00:26:15,120

We want to present the best to you. What you see now isn’t excellent; it’s just normal.
00:26:15,980 --> 00:26:20,799

OK, OK, fine, fine. Next time then, right?
00:26:21,140 --> 00:26:24,280

Next time, after we officially open to the public. The hotel manager politely declined
00:26:24,280 --> 00:26:30,100

Brent’s request.
00:26:30,159 --> 00:26:30,880

Scenes like this
00:26:31,299 --> 00:26:32,320

Seem to be something Brent is already accustomed to.
00:26:32,860 --> 00:26:35,039

Even though it’s late at night,
00:26:35,620 --> 00:26:37,659

He still has to keep moving forward,
00:26:38,039 --> 00:26:39,840

Seeking new opportunities.
00:26:40,299 --> 00:26:41,539

Thank you, everyone.
00:27:10,720 --> 00:27:10,740

Doing this work
00:26:44,100 --> 00:26:46,640

Is actually much harder than just organizing events at the beginning.
00:26:46,780 --> 00:26:50,820

Yes, going from a hobby to running a company has changed a lot. I didn’t expect so many changes, but I also didn’t expect Shenzhen to change so much. So, my website has changed along with Shenzhen, becoming a better city and a better website together. Walking the streets and alleys,
00:26:51,299 --> 00:27:22,200

It seems Brent works harder than others, but in his eyes, being able to move forward and breathe together with China’s fastest-developing city, he always feels lucky.
00:27:23,940 --> 00:27:36,180

Thank you.
00:27:46,580 --> 00:27:47,980

So, what do you think has been your greatest achievement in these 13 years?
00:27:38,900 --> 00:27:43,180

My greatest achievement in these 13 years is that I can do what I love and learn what I want to learn. I think that’s very successful.
00:27:45,220 --> 00:27:55,620

With the arrival of the 4G network era, people’s demand for information has become increasingly broad. For Brent, this is undoubtedly another major challenge. Shenzhen is a young city, offering endless possibilities to dreamers like Brent.
00:27:59,900 --> 00:28:16,340

And Brent continues to persevere,
00:28:25,380 --> 00:28:26,780

Persisting in turning his efforts into the success of his dreams.
00:28:22,740 --> 00:28:24,140

Brent, what kind of content does your website have now?
00:28:27,620 --> 00:28:30,420

Now, there’s a lot of content.
00:28:30,700 --> 00:28:32,720

It started with just events, but now you can find jobs,
00:28:33,300 --> 00:28:36,640

Rent houses, and more.
00:28:36,640 --> 00:28:38,360

Oh, and shopping and education. The content is really comprehensive.
00:28:48,580 --> 00:28:43,580

It’s very comprehensive now. Every year, we add more features.
00:28:43,799 --> 00:28:47,120

I’ve noticed that Brent’s website is no longer just about organizing parties. It now covers various aspects of daily life, especially meeting the needs of foreigners living in Shenzhen. Over 13 years, Brent’s website content has become increasingly rich, and he says he will continue to expand into new areas. Behind these changes is the rapid rise and development of Shenzhen as a city. Brent, I want to eat the most authentic and affordable Cantonese food tonight. Do you have any good recommendations? I do have a good recommendation.
00:28:47,760 --> 00:29:19,220

We have a Cantonese food section, and this restaurant, Lei Gai, should be pretty good. Can we have dinner together tonight?
00:29:21,179 --> 00:29:27,780

Sure.
00:29:28,160 --> 00:29:28,400

OK, great.
00:29:28,600 --> 00:29:29,600

Subtitle Volunteer: Yang Qianqian, YoYo Television Series Exclusive
00:29:42,820 --> 00:30:26,720

How to Schedule a Shortcut on Mac to Mute Volume Automatically at Night

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

https://youtu.be/8TsHZpTd-Y8

The Shortcuts App on iOS has an automation section that lets you schedule shortcuts to run at a certain time. On the Mac, Shortcuts application lacks this ability.

The other morning, my Mac calendar notification went off, and it woke up my wife.

To prevent this, I wanted to make a shortcut that ran every evening to mute the volume on my Mac.

Create the Shortcut

It is a simple shortcut to set the volume to zero percent.

Create a simple mute volume shortcut.

Running Shortcuts from the command line

What you can do is run Shortcuts from the command line and given this capability it means you can schedule it to be run.

shortcuts run "Mute Volume"

Scheduling the Shortcut

There are multiple ways to schedule processes on the Mac, and I decided to use launchd Dameon with launchctl. I chose this because this is the most “native” Mac way of scheduling.

Launched relies on a property list file (“plist”) in a certain format. An example format is below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.deverman.mutevolumeshortcut</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/usr/bin/shortcuts</string>
        <string>run</string>
        <string>Mute Volume</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Hour</key>
        <integer>1</integer>
        <key>Minute</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

After the “run” parameter you can change “Mute Volume” to your shortcut name.

Then you can change the hour and minute integers for when you would like the shortcut to run. There are other configurations that you can research online for other scheduling options.

Edit the above XML in a text editor and save it to the following location:

~/Library/LaunchAgents/

You should come up with a reverse domain name as a unique name for this run. I named my shortcut as:

org.deverman.mutevolumeshortcut

Save it in the above folder with a “.plist” suffix:

~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.deverman.mutevolumeshortcut.plist

The to get the system to recognize this you can run this command:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.deverman.mutevolumeshortcut.plist

This showed me that in System Settings ->Login Items & Extensions that the shortcut was active:

In System Settings Login Items & Extensions shows your new shortcut launcher.

You can even disable the shortcut here if necessary without editing the plist file.

Ensure the Mac wakes up to run the shortcut

Below is the command you should run to ensure your MacBook is awake when your shortcut runs. You will need to enter your system root password.

sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 00:59:00

This will make sure your computer is awake Monday (M) through Sunday (U) at 12:59am.

Managing and Validating with Lingon Application

For an extra $24USD, there is an app that manages “.plist” launchd files called Lingon Pro. This is probably great if you want to do more complex scheduling settings.

Lingon Allows you to view your shortcut launch settings.

Summary

It’s a lot of work to schedule a shortcut. Hopefully, Apple will put more attention on shortcuts so we can avoid this, but until then, this should help.

Exporting Ulysses Groups to an External Folder

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I’ve been using Ulysses for years, and it’s been great, but lately, I’ve realized it’s become a bit of a dumping ground for all sorts of notes and old projects I don’t need anymore. I got into Ulysses because of Markdown—love that simplicity—but over time, I got trapped in their proprietary XML format, which isn’t the easiest to work with outside their ecosystem. So, I decided it’s time to clean house, get back to Markdown, and focus Ulysses on just the content I’m actively publishing. Today, I’m gonna walk you through how to export your Ulysses groups to external folders as Markdown or other formats, and share some of the quirks and workarounds I’ve discovered along the way.

Step 1: Make Sure External Folders Are Visible

Let’s make sure you can see external folders in Ulysses. I actually had this turned off in my preferences for a while, so I had to flip it back on. Head to your Ulysses settings, and check the box for “External Folders” to make them visible in the sidebar. Once that’s done, you’ll see them listed, ready for action.

External Folders should be checked so they are visible in the sidebar

Step 2: Create a New Folder for Your Exports

Next up, let’s create a spot for your exported files. I’m doing this in Finder on my iCloud Drive, but you can store these anywhere. Just a heads-up—if you’re using a cloud service like iCloud, make sure no one else is messing with the files at the same time, or you might run into sync issues. For me, these are personal files, so iCloud works fine. Create a new folder and then drag it into the “External Folders” section in Ulysses. You’ll see it highlight as you drop it in.

Create an Empty External Folder

Step 3: Configure the Folder Format (Markdown or TextBundle?)

When you drop the folder into Ulysses, a dialog box pops up, and this is where you decide how your files are gonna be saved. My goal is Markdown, so I check the box for “Read and Write Markdown Files.” If you leave it unchecked, Ulysses will just store its own format in the external folder, which isn’t what I’m after—I’m trying to break free from that! You can also pick your Markdown extension (I go with .md).

There’s another choice below Markdown called TextBundle or TextPack. I did some digging, and TextBundle is this open standard that a bunch of Mac apps support. It uses the Mac package format to bundle everything together—text, images, all of it—into what looks like a single file. TextPack is just a compressed version of that, but I prefer TextBundle since I want easy access to the raw Markdown files without unzipping anything.

Configure your folder to support only Markdown or Textbundle instead of Ulysses. If you don’t check the box you will just store the Ulysses formatted docs in your filesystem.

Textbundle is an open file format that is better for storing images.

Step 4: Drag Your Group to the External Folder

Now, pick the group in Ulysses you want to export. I recommend dragging the entire parent group over to the external folder. Why? Because if you’ve got sheets at the root of the group (not in subgroups), they won’t come along unless you grab the whole thing. When you do this, Ulysses might warn you about data loss—stuff like images or annotations might not make it through, depending on the format you picked. More detail below.

First drag the parent group to the external folder in Ulysses.

Annotations and Image will be lost when you copy out of the Ulysses library if you choose Markdown. They will be kept if you choose Textbundle.

Step 5: Markdown vs. TextBundle—What Gets Lost?

Alright, let’s talk about what happens when you export. I did some experiments, and here’s the deal:

Markdown: If you choose straight Markdown, it’s super clean for text, but images? Forget it. They don’t copy over. You’ll see empty image links in the Markdown file, and there’s no URL or reference to even track down the original image. If your sheets are image-heavy, linking them back manually is a pain.
TextBundle: When I dragged my group to a TextBundle-configured folder, the images came along. They’re stored in an “assets” folder inside the bundle, and I can double-click to see them. You can right-click a TextBundle in Finder, choose “Show Package Contents,” and peek inside—there’s an info.json, the Markdown text file, and the assets. It’s all readable and editable with other text editors. The catch? Annotations still don’t survive—Ulysses doesn’t support them in external folders, so they’re gone no matter what.

So, while I wanted pure Markdown files, TextBundle is a solid compromise since it preserves more of my data, especially images.

Step 6: Clean Up the Folder Structure

After exporting, you might notice Ulysses creates a nested folder structure in Finder that mirrors your group hierarchy. I didn’t want two levels of folders, so I went into Finder, selected the visible files (ignore the hidden ones Ulysses uses for tracking), and dragged them up a level. The sidebar in Ulysses updates automatically to reflect this. Then, I deleted the empty subgroup folder to keep things tidy.

Go to the Finder and move the contents of the folder one level down to reduce the folder hierarchy.

Special Case: Exporting from Ulysses Projects

Ulysses has this “Projects” feature where a project takes over the whole sidebar, hiding your external folders. If you’ve got a group in a project you want to export, you’ll need to open a new Ulysses window. Drag the group from the project window to the external folder in the second window. It’s a bit of a workaround, but it gets the job done. This is handy if you’re trying to move away from projects and keep only essential publishing stuff in Ulysses.

Drawback: Publishing to WordPress with External Files

One bummer I ran into is with publishing to WordPress. If your content is in a TextBundle, the images preview fine in Ulysses and seem to publish to WordPress without issues. But if you’ve got a Markdown file with images referenced in a subfolder in Finder (not as part of a TextBundle), Ulysses won’t upload them to WordPress. It just fails in the preview stage because it doesn’t translate those file system references. So, if blogging is your thing, TextBundle might be your best bet for exporting while keeping images intact for publishing.

Files referenced in the file system won’t be converted and uploaded to WordPress like they are if you use the Ulysses native library.

Final Thoughts

That’s pretty much it, folks! Exporting from Ulysses to Markdown or TextBundle is a great way to declutter and get your content into a more portable format. TextBundle ended up being my go-to since it saves images, even if I lose annotations. It’s not perfect, but it works for what I need. If you’ve got questions or run into snags, drop a comment below (if you’re reading this on my blog or watching the video on YouTube), and I’ll do my best to help out.

Preventing Garbage Code from Entering Your Git Repository

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I was just reminded of a successful approach to prevent problematic code from contaminating our codebase from a previous project. In our project we used HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and we frequently had failed deployments to our staging server due to syntax errors. With multiple devs working and users performing UAT on this server it really slowed us down. The following quality control measures dramatically increased our team’s velocity and stability.

Git pre-commit hook

Git can run a bash script before a commit happens using a pre-commit hook. Our team created this bash script that looped through the committed files and ran various checks on them to make sure they met criteria agreed by the dev team.

Coding Standards in PHP

For the main language of PHP, we used two tools, the first being the PHP Interpreter to ensure that the PHP could compile, and then a linter that would ensure that the PHP was also meeting the team’s agreed upon coding standards.

Blacklisted items

We had to create a special list of items and functions that we did not want to see in the code base. This included:

Debugging functions like vardump()
Merge conflict markers (<<<<<<<, =======, >>>>>>>)

These checks were manually added in bash. These blacklisted items applied to both PHP and JavaScript.

JavaScript

Separately, we used another tool to validate the JavaScript before allowing it in our repository. This area is much more mature in terms of tools than when we implemented this.

Drawbacks

Since we used this technique, DevOps has gotten more sophisticated and a lot of these checks are usually put in the DevOps pipeline. However, for large code bases this can give a more immediate feedback to the developer.

Developers need to set up tools on their local machine.

If a developer wanted to, they could bypass this, so putting these checks in the DevOps pipeline is also a good idea these days, especially for open-source software.

Summary

Focusing on these areas above to make sure the code worked with the interpreter and met the team’s agreed upon standards reduced the amount of time that our server was down and increased the team velocity.

Reference

Git pre-commit hook example on GitHub

Interview of Craig Mod on Tim Ferris Show

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

As someone who spends at least two weeks a year in Japan with my wife the two Tim Ferris interviews with Craig Mod were a fun listen.

Craig speaks fluent Japanese and organizes walks across Japan. He is very open about his personal life in the interview and has a great story how he met the famous Japanese star Tamori after nominating the city of Morioka in the New York Times 52 best city list.

Recommendations of Brent Deverman

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

People who have endorsed Brent Deverman’s work on Linkedin recommendations:

Brent led a large Oracle database migration to PostgreSQL and Azure, persevering
through to project completion and successfully bringing four environments into
production across two cloud regions.

He established the initial timeline, budget, and resources for the project and
consistently guided the team to adhere to them.

Engaging Microsoft under a consulting contract ensured regular team
communication to build and validate the correct solution architecture and
resolve issues with PostgreSQL on Azure.

His engineering mindset fostered a strong understanding of project requirements
and enabled him to effectively communicate with the platform team, driving the
project forward.

Brent collaborated with the platform team to identify dependencies between
building environments, migrating data, and converting Java code.

I would highly recommend Brent as a team member for your next technical project! – Gilles Pelvin Associate Director, Programme Delivery Vitality @ AmplifyHealth

Brent successfully transitioned from the role of developer to product manager, with roadmap responsibility for one of CNN’s most distinct and popular international properties: CNN Travel. He proved to be an ideal fit for the role — not only technically savvy, but driven to make the product a powerful destination for consumers and advertisers. – John J. Hashimoto AI Product Strategist | Board @ The Assembly (NC)

I worked with Brent when I was associate editor at CNNGo.com, which at the time was Turner Broadcasting’s first real go at a regional focused lifestyle, travel and destination geared site. Brent was “the guy who got things done” when I was there. Digital media and social media was still really coming into it’s own at the time and it was always a challenge to figure out exactly what is needed when it comes to content management systems. What I loved about working with Brent was his ability to provide what I needed editorially within a system that was challenging to work with. He would constantly strive to make things as easy as possible for the editorial staff and have the site running silky smooth.

The man is a wizard. – Chris C. Anderson

Brent is smart, intelligent and, more importantly, passionate about his work. With his analytical and data focused mind, he has made significant contributions to CNN Travel. His communication skills and down to earth attitude makes him a very likable person and an asset to any organization. – Krishna NairKrishna Nair

Brent is a great person to work with because he is friendly, helpful and reliable. If you ask Brent to take care of a task then he’ll make sure that it gets completed efficiently and on time. – Jenny Wong

I worked with Brent on CNN Travel project for almost 3 years. He is one of those rare people that have a healthy balance of technical and people skills. He is the epitome of a true leader/manager: he leads by example, helps you if you’re stuck, respects and considers your suggestions, shows his appreciation for your work and gratitude to your extra effort, and gives insightful feedback and positive criticisms. He always seems to have lots of creative ideas on how to improve our site and/or leverage new technologies or APIs.

Likewise, he developed further my creative side on thinking outside of the box, especially for investigating/fixing hard bugs. I’ve learned also from him on how to prioritize tasks and implement them effectively and efficiently. He is very supportive also of open-source projects. He encourages his developers to contribute back to community and share what we have learned. I have a number of successful open-source projects because of him. Essentially, he made me a better person and developer.

I will highly recommend Brent for any development team because he is an exceptional person. He has high expectations on his developers, but even if he’s your boss, you will feel that he values your work and he is your friend. A number of times, I’ve heard him say that he wants his developers to be smarter than him (I bet only few managers could openly say that) which only further illustrates his selflessness, humility, and team-playing skills. – I worked with Brent on CNN Travel project for almost 3 years. He is one of those rare people that have a healthy balance of technical and people skills. He is the epitome of a true leader/manager: he leads by example, helps you if you’re stuck, respects and considers your suggestions, shows his appreciation for your work and gratitude to your extra effort, and gives insightful feedback and positive criticisms. He always seems to have lots of creative ideas on how to improve our site and/or leverage new technologies or APIs.

Likewise, he developed further my creative side on thinking outside of the box, especially for investigating/fixing hard bugs. I’ve learned also from him on how to prioritize tasks and implement them effectively and efficiently. He is very supportive also of open-source projects. He encourages his developers to contribute back to community and share what we have learned. I have a number of successful open-source projects because of him. Essentially, he made me a better person and developer.

I will highly recommend Brent for any development team because he is an exceptional person. He has high expectations on his developers, but even if he’s your boss, you will feel that he values your work and he is your friend. A number of times, I’ve heard him say that he wants his developers to be smarter than him (I bet only few managers could openly say that) which only further illustrates his selflessness, humility, and team-playing skills. – Ranel Padon

I had the pleasure of working with Brent on CNN Travel Drupal website project.
I was particularly impressed by his ability to handle our team because of his strong and broad technical and project expertise. He was able to help us to provide solutions, keep us always focused and motivated. He always ensures that we are working on the right tasks, and our work will be completed in the expected time frame. I am grateful for his professionalism, hard work, loyalty and friendship. Brent is not only an exceptional manager, he is also a great Agile coach. – Jonathan Jacinto

I’m really thankful working with Brent. I learned lots of things besides Drupal stuff. He teach me how to be a better programmer, debugging and code defensively. Making better decisions is also what Brent thought me. He is a reliable project and development manager that I would recommend for both small and large projects. – Adrian Cruz

Brent is an extremely intelligent, focused and detail oriented person who is able to deliver on everything he sets his mind to. While not the natural socialite, he has been able to build and grow Shenzhen’s most popular social networking site and deliver on all other commitments. – Andy Clark

Brent has been a good friend and business partner since I moved to Shenzhen 5-6 years ago. He is the go to person for both business and pleasure inquiries in Shenzhen. Whether it be the best restaurant in town or the best office to rent, Brent will be able to help. Brent is professional, enthusiastic and is greatly knowledgeable about marketing in South China. – Deborah Negrash

Brent joined my team at an early stage in the development of CNNGo, spearheading the technical production aspects of the product, and directly managing the engineering team. Brent was able to quickly take the lead in the planning and execution of our product development, which included upgrading and migrating the product to a considerably more robust and scalable state, and using his extensive Drupal experience to its fullest. Brent has a detail-oriented and logical approach to his work, meaning that you can count on him to capture and prioritize tasks, plan systematically, and manage the delivery of customer value consistently. He has a strong knowledge of the SDLC and web development methodologies, as well as the important human factor required to get the best out of diverse and distributed teams. He makes a great lead for any kind of digital production team. – Josh Webb

I enjoyed working with Brent on the CNNGo.com website. Brent has grown the site from a few select cities to something that spans the globe. To facilitate this expansion Brent overhauled how the site was developed and managed. Brent had a vision and set about making it happen. Today’s travel.cnn.com is a testament to the work of Brent and his team. – Dave Hall

Brent and I started within the same week at CNNGo and he proved to be a genuine person who is great to work with. He has a broad knowledge on what it takes to run a successful online publishing site, meaning that he’s able to straddle many of the intricate parts involved. He sets realistic deadlines and reasonable expectations, meaning he is more reliable than most others. – Mun Yin Liu

Brent is one of the best technical managers I have ever worked with and his knowledge of Drupal is second to none. He was instrumental in implementing the SCRUM agile process at CNNGo / CNN Travel and in making continuous performance improvements to the stability and responsiveness of the site. I appreciated his keen sense of being able to prioritise and execute large backlogs of work with highly constrained resources. I wouldn’t hesitate recommending him for both large and small projects. – David Gilbert

Brent and I worked together on a few photography assignments several years ago. He also helped bring exposure to my photography business and my events through his website. – Jesse Warren

With his rich experience and skill in Event management and Social management in Shenzhen, Brent took over the Shenzhen Wine and Cheese club with ease and made each gathering a success.
He knows lot of people, lots of new and interesting places in Shenzhen and top notch wines suppliers.
I really enjoy attending the club’s events and would highly recommend Brent to anyone who wishes to use the services that he has to offer. – Erna Chou

Brent has worked hard to make the ShenzhenParty THE primary source for information about what is going on in Shenzhen for it’s English reading viewers and members.
When we have an event to promote it is always ShenzhenParty.
When we want to find out where we can find something, we use ShenzhenParty. You know it has a strong market position as people constantly refer to it as the source for their information around town and in different circles.

Brent is also very proactive to share information or lend a helping hand. He has helped me many times by connecting me with valuable contacts of both a personal and professional nature. I’m very happy and confident to recommend Brent Deverman. – AJ Boelens

Shenhenparty has been a great place to advertise. We have received higher returns from them than from any other place we advertise online. His team is great and is always willing to help. – Drew Eric Noftle

It is my pleasure to write a recommendation for Brent Deverman. For about a decade, Brent and his website http://www.ShenzhenParty.com have been making Shenzhen a more enjoyable place to live by organizing events and providing an online forum for the rapidly growing population of expats in town. I vote Brent “Shenzhen Expat of the Decade” for the service he has provided to the community. – Michael (Mike) Bellamy

Brent has been a great asset to the Shenzhen Wine & Cheese. He excels at organizing great events and helping people make great business and personal connections in the community. – Niamh (Furey) Given

Back when I first met Brent at I was coming to Shenzhen on business trips and began using ShenzhenParty.com to find my way around town. Later I moved to Shenzhen and used the site to connect with people for business and fun. I find my self using Shenzhen party more for finding fun events to take my family to. – Sid Mewara

I’ve used Brent’s services via shenzhenparty.com many times since 2002. This has been through attendance of parties, comedy shows, and other events organized or promoted by the site, by use of their ads section to sell items, and through search of the site’s extensive trove of information about all things Shenzhen. I’d heartily recommend both Brent and shenzhenparty.com. – David Learn, CAS

SHENZHEN PARTY, BRENT AND MYSELF HAVE WORKED SIDE BY SIDE FOR MANY YEARS. ME AS A CLIENT, SHENZHEN PARTY AS A SERVICE PROVIDER. IN ALL OUR ASSOCIATION SHENZHEN PARTY AND BRENT HAVE ALWAYS FULLFILLED MY REQUIREMENTS. JOB APPLICATION SUCCESSES, SOCIAL OUTLETS AND INVITATIONS, WHATS ON IN THE COMMUNITY, WHATS ON FOR EX PATS. AS AN EXPAT IT IS SOMETIMES VERY LONELY EXISTANCE LIVING AWAY FROM FAMILY AND FRIENDS BUT BRENT AND SHENZHEN PARTY FILL THIS VOID SOMEWHAT. MANY THANKS SHENZHEN PARTY AND BRENT, I FOR ONE AM VERY PLEASED TO HAVE MET YOUR ACQUINTANCE. – SUE INMAN

When the bucket was passed on to me by Grace Granlund to run & manage the Shenzhen Wine & Cheese Club, I felt I had to do as great a job as she did. Tough to do as she was a really great hostess. Then after a few years had gone by and I had to move away, only one person I know can do an even better job than myself, Brent Deverman. Brent and Cherry are a great team, professional and courteous, they know a lot of people and seem to carry on the events with ease. I’m very happy to know that the Club is in very good hands because of Brent and the ShenzhenParty team. I’m looking forward to attending some of the Club’s events in the years to come. – Shierley Koval

Brent helped Shenzhen, China get on the map with the first english website portal. We all look to this site when first coming to Shenzhen and are often there for finding the newest events and job postings.

His site also helped Shenzhen Team coworking get lots of attention and visitors at opening parties and other events. – Michael Michelini

Brent has been a great supporter of our businesses in Shenzhen; both as a customer and a business partner via Shenzhen Party. We use the site to advertise promotions at Xpats and the The Kitchen plus have recently hired staff via the classified adverts section. Shenzhen party is a real focal point for expatriates in Shenzhen and Brent is very focussed on providing a leading edge website and supporting local businesses. He is one of the best known people in the city and well respected by his vast network. – Ian Jones

As founder of Shenzhen party, you brought exposure to our business and provide information that helped me in my life in Shenzhen. Thank you for the convenience and confort you have contributed to. – Francois Lachman

Brent is the one constant in the ever changing City of Shenzhen…….
He has been at the leading edge of both business and social development for China’s most rapidly evolving city. Shenzhen Party the website which he has founded, stands out among the pack for the range of information and tools which it provides for the English speaking community. Therefore, Brent has made a difference for many individuals and companies in Shenzhen. – Matthew Siegel

We hired Brent three times to organize companies opening throughout his platform shenzhenparty.com. Every time we worked with Brent things went very smoothly. His ability to study the environment, define the exact needs and deliver things on schedule at each step of the process are much appreciated from all. Highly recommended as well to organize online advertising campaign or web consultancy. – Mihran (米然) Papazian

First of all, thanks to Brent’s inspiration in creating the website Shenzhenparty.com and his hard work and dedication building it up over years, it is now an indispensible part of expat life in this under-rated and huge new-China city. Brent himself is basically also an essential part of Shenzhen despite betraying the motherland with forays into the free world of HK.

The shenzhenparty.com website is highly recommended for recruitment and advertising needs, packing a punch more serious than the ‘party’ moniker would suggest.

Brent is a verified China Hand and possibly one of the first people you would nominate as a Shenzhen Hand (that is, if enough people outside had heard of Shenzhen enough to care to find hands for it). – George Baily

Shenzhen Party provides a valuable service to the English speaking population of Shenzhen. I have used the website successfully to market our restaurants over the past 5 years. – Joel Silverstein

a honorable and sincere nice guy with good work – Chester Chen陈志康

Brent is a well-known figure in the social circle in Shenzhen. We have worked together in several occasions to launch new products with effective results. He has a strong personal relationship with all his business partners and will never fail to promote his business partners whenever he can. I will not hesitate to recommend Shenzhenparty.com as the preferred webiste media partner to those who wish to build their brands in Shenzhen. – Vincent Leow

On Several Occasions Brent and I have worked together on Projects in Shenzhen, Brent has deep and valuable experience with Event management and Socil management in Shenzhen. I would recommend to anyone who wishes to work with brent or use the services he has to offer – Scott Welsh

Brent and his company ShenzhenParty.com are real professionals and a solid media partner to work with here in Shenzhen. – Steve Hitchcock

Brent has done an incredible job of creating a focal point for the expat community in Shenzhen, China to refer to when planning their social activities and finding local service providers. It’s a pleasure to know Brent and to see how this website has evolved over the years…..if you want maximum visibility in Shenzhen area, consider http://www.shenzhenparty,com – Desmond Koval

Brent has provided one the best resources in Shenzhen cultural scene. Great concept, implementation and a wonderful resource for ex-pats as well as locals. – Mehdi Rashidi

Prior to my locating to Shenzhen China I was in need of general information about what part of the city I should live, where to locate needed services, and also looking for consulting work. For all of this I turned to Brent Deverman’s web site. In addition I posted advertisments looking for an assistant and to secure some translation work. Brent does very good web services, content development for his clients advertising campaigns, and is available to answers questions. His web site has become famous in Shenzhen and beyond because of his dedication and hard work. For these reasons I recommend Brent Deverman, – Kevin McGuire

Keeping Up with Ollama Model Releases

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Simon Willison comes through again with using a script to monitor the Ollama models page that generates an Atom feed, which you can put in your RSS reader to monitor when a new model is released. I’ve put it in my Reader to monitor for the local models.

Using MacWhisper for Dictation with Ollama for Local Mac Dictation

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Mac supports dictation. I thought it was all done locally, but that might not be the case for all things: “Dictation processes many English voice inputs on your Mac. Information will be sent to Apple in some cases, including for search.” This is according to the System Settings keyboard page.

MacWhisper Pro has been adding more and more audio capabilities, and I just noticed it now has a dictation setting. Once I gave it permission to access my system, I set it up to activate after pressing the right “option” key. This triggers the dictation and then does some processing with an AI service.

It turns out that you can add Ollama as an AI service to MacWhisper and choose a local model. I added “llama3.2:latest” as the Ollama service. Then back to the Dictation setting, I was able to select Ollama and when I tested dictation. Post-processing can happen specific to the current app you are using. Now all the dictation and any AI post-processing should be happening locally on my computer and I should be able to avoid the wishy-washy behavior of the built-in dictation.

Dealing with Time Zone support in Calendar and Meeting Invites

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I’ve learned how to adjust meeting invite time zones by trial and error, but never really documented the options and differences in platforms. Tidbits tried various permutations for time zone support and I learned that I’ve used the floating time zone before, which isn’t supported on iOS and iPadOS.

Narration of Hong Kong Harbor Slides in 1970

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

From Gwulo.com

TouchDesk Vision Pro App for Drawing on your table

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Played around with the Apple Vision Pro app called TouchDesk which allows you to use your desk as a writing surface. I was drawing with my finger on my desk. It felt quite natural. I’m not an artist so don’t know if I will use regularly but commend the effort.

Find Serendipitous Connections as You Travel using Mozi app

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Can this app Mozi Solve my problem of keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances when I travel?

Ever since I read the book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi, I was constantly searching for a technical solution to help me keep in touch with people and set up meetings as I traveled around. I recently realized that while in Paris, I missed meeting with a friend from my Wine and Cheese club because I didn’t have time to monitor my socials.

I’ve evaluated many tech solutions over the years and just heard about a solution by the founder of Blogger, Twitter & Medium, Ev Williams.

The app is called Mozi. I just onboarded myself, and below I’m going to go through the onboarding and highlight some of the things I think this app has done well and maybe some improvements it could have.

The goal of this app is to allow you to know when your friends are traveling nearby and meet them in person. For people that travel a lot, especially around Asia to Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, I see its potential for having serendipitous meetings as you travel.

I’m actually part of a private entrepreneurship community called the Dynamite Circle that has a specific functionality built-in, and I’m usually updating where I’m traveling so I can meet with entrepreneurs that are a part of this community. It would be great if this functionality was expanded beyond this community, and that’s precisely what Mozi promises to do.

The app allows you to create trip plans and identifies when there are overlaps in your trips with your friends. You can also create local events for the city you’re in to meet with people. That’s a great use case, but I haven’t tested it because I don’t have enough friends on the app yet.

Technical Notes

The app is well-designed. The developers created what appears to be a native iPhone app and didn’t seem to use any cross-platform technologies to build it. Admirable. That allows it to be petite, about 42 MB in size. Great if you are in a networking situation and somebody needs to download the app to connect with you.

It’s more remarkably feature-rich than I would’ve expected for an app that was just released a few months ago. You can even subscribe to a calendar feed so that the trips you’ve entered in the app appear on your calendar, which is a great way to make sure that when you’re scheduling things, you have those trips visible.

Onboarding Experience

The onboarding is pretty well done and has many explanations of why you need the app. When signing up, it would be nice if I didn’t have to provide my mobile phone number and could use email instead. Some people may not want to provide a lot of personal information to this app if they just want to use it with very close friends.

This app harkens back to the old Web 2.0 apps during the social era when you could upload all your contacts, and that’s what it asks for — it prefers to slurp up your whole contact address book. I wasn’t so keen to do this, but if you do, you can then find any other people who are on this app and privately connect to all of them.

The App attempts to be a sort of CRM for your friends, so it asks for quite a few optional details to build your profile, which would be nice if it synced up from your default address book card. If you fill this out completely, you will have the superpower of knowing your acquaintance’s spouse and pets names.

On-Boarding Screen #1 of Mozi

On-Boarding Screen #2 of Mozi

On-Boarding Screen #3 of Mozi

On-Boarding Screen #4 of Mozi

Privacy & App Permissions Required

Be mindful before you share all your friends personal information with a 3rd party

The permissions the app asks for are access to all of your contacts and notifications. Later in the app, they will ask for access to your location in certain situations. I did find that if I said no to accessing all my contacts, I could still use the app. I could go into iOS settings and give only partial access and add only people that I wanted to add. Not only that, but I think you can set this up so that you don’t provide any access, and once you create your profile and trip plans, you can share links to those with other people. They can see those links and decide if they want to get connected with you on the app. You can probably use this without uploading your full address book and still get value.

Most of the “data” you have to manually enter, such as your trips. The app doesn’t use location services to alert people you are in the area. I speculate that this is because Mozi didn’t want people complaining about the app “tracking” you. However, this seems like a contradiction when the app is asking you to upload all your contacts, which is not advisable these days. Perhaps this approach is intentional, as Facebook has normalized the behavior of users sharing their friends’ personal information.

Another minor privacy issue is that even though more users are trying to get away from Meta properties and this app is a suitable alternative, it uses WhatsApp to verify your mobile number.

Trip Planning Features

Two types of plans exist a trip and a local plan.

Entering your travel plans is a bit of a chore as you have to do it manually. As someone who is used to forwarding flight itineraries to Flighty and TripIt, this seems like work. I wonder if I will remember to update this as much as I should, but I have put my future travel plans in the app already, and it’s allowed me to share a page of all my travel plans. It offers many built-in viral-type features that enable sharing links, so other people might want to join the app when they see these shared links. Helpful features like QR codes and profile page sharing help to spread the word and connect with other people.

Making plans and trips uses as few fields to fill out as possible, and it’s an easy process, so in the end it is not a big chore. The only thing that could be more useful would be the ability to enter these plans from my Mac, so a Mac version would probably be preferable when entering lots of travel plans.

Images of your destination are automatically chosen when you add a plan.

Potential Network Effects and Adoption

I think a big blocker will be getting the right percentage of your friend network on the app to make it a regular check-in. I’m not sure if it’s better to have around 30% of the people you know so you’re bumping into each other as you travel, or if it’s just good to have the core people you know that you’re really good friends with and make sure that you meet when you travel. Maybe both use cases are applicable.

In cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, I’m often traveling for business and out of the country, so I think this app makes a lot of sense. Many of the people I know from my Shenzhen days have dispersed around the world, and I want to make sure I reconnect with them as I travel. Throughout Asia, numerous people travel for conferences and exhibitions, and this app makes sense to stay connected. I currently use the app Flighty to track where my close friends are flying, but it’s not an extensive group of people, and I think this app could be better for a wider audience of friends and acquaintances.

Future Potential

There’s another app called Clay, which has kind of the flip side of this technology, where it can make sure your address book is always up-to-date with current information about your contacts. What I would love to see is a merge of Clay and Mozi to have the latest information on where people are, what they’re doing, and their contact information. You would have a very great personal CRM that would be worth paying for.

Currently, this app is free. They likely intend premium features you’d pay for, following Ev Williams’ strategy of initially offering something for free before monetizing it, like Medium.

Who Should Use Mozi

All in all, this is a full working app that allows you to find friends while traveling and if there’s a chance to meet with them when you’re in the same city. This is the kind of thing that hopefully helps build more in-person relationships, so this app is probably going to gain traction at the moment when many users are reconsidering their relationship with traditional social media. It takes a good spin on how to find somebody in the city and even keep your business travel connections warm. I tend to do that as I’m traveling—find who I should be talking to when I arrive in a city—so I think I’ll be using this app.

Reference

Show Keyboard Presses on Screen Recordings

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Tidbits highlighted the free open source app Keycastr to display the keystrokes and mouse clicks you are typing while you are streaming or recording video.

My Cool Tools Interview with Kevin Kelly: 4 Tech Essentials Revealed

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

A long time ago, I appeared on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools Podcast 🎙️. While I’m
usually reluctant to watch myself back, I couldn’t pass up sharing this one –
I’ve always admired Kelly’s work as the founding executive editor of Wired
Magazine and his thought-provoking writings since.

Let me share some of the Cool Tools I’ve been experimenting with:

Tool #1: 🔧 Rust Programming Language
I’ve been using it to create simple command line tools. The Rust language
continues to gain momentum for writing safe code that compiles and runs fast.
Its language constructs prevent the memory mistakes common in C++.

Tool #2: 📚 Reader App from Readwise
This smart RSS reader transforms how you consume independent blogs and long-form
content. It not only tracks your progress but harnesses AI to summarize articles
and PDFs. A great “read-it-later service” that integrates with their smart
repetition system, prompting you to review marked quotes.

Tool #3: 🎒 Minaal Daily Carry Bag
Best designed bag for my daily needs. It perfectly carries my S’well water
bottle, iPad, MacBook Pro, Apple Vision Pro, and sometimes my gym clothes around
Singapore or wherever I travel.

Tool #4: 🌐 GL.iNet Slate AX Router
My wife and I bring a lot of tech when we travel, including our Sonos Roam.
These speakers can’t authenticate on Hotel WiFi, but this portable WiFi 6 router
allows us to stream music and secure our traffic on a VPN. It helps our devices
bypass the Great Firewall when traveling in China.

💭 What Cool Tools have transformed your daily routine? Share on X.

Watch the full episode here:

Watch a Working Japanese Typewriter

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

After studying Chinese and now Japanese it is fascinating to watch someone type on this.

Benedict Evans Articulates clearly the deep research problem

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Deep Research is the new feature that has been added to all the AI company LLM models. Many charging a lot for this capability. Benedict goes through a sample report generated by OpenAI on their website and in a thoughtful way rips it to shreds.

Thanks to Larry Salibra for sharing this one.

Rare interview with the founder of TSMC Morris Chang

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The key company that builds most of the processors used in your phones and devices is TSMC. The Acquired podcast flew to Taiwan and interviewed the founder of TSMC, Morris Chang. Lots of good stories of how they started and how TSMC started building chips for Apple.

Your data goes through Ciena’s Fiber compression algorithm

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Ciena figures out ways to increase throughput of fiber channels. The Verge Decoder podcast interviewed the CEO Gary Smith. It is one of those companies that you have never heard of but has been plugging away for 20 years. It’s a public company and all your data is squeezed down fiber lines using their technology.

Encouraging Effective Future Behavior through Feedback

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I have been listening to the podcast “Manager Tools” for over 10 years and practicing their recommendations in my own company and projects.

Mark and Mike got together after their retirement for this cast and went into detail regarding the “The Purpose of Feedback” in a 3 part podcast series.

I summarized the three podcasts to make sure these gems are committed to memory.

The purpose of feedback is to:
Encourage effective future behavior

Organizations can’t really “encourage” so the task of encouragement falls onto a manager.

It doesn’t matter if the feedback is negative or positive. There is only one feedback model. (see below)

The tone of all feedback is positive to “encourage”.

Encouragement creates stronger relationships, Stronger relationships improve trust. Trust improves results and retention. Results and retention are the two key deliverables of every manager in the world.

Effective feedback doesn’t focus on the mistakes. Trying to do a root cause analysis will result in feedback that is too long. The purpose of feedback is not to talk about the mistake.

The shorter the model is, the better. 10-minute feedback session will result in you not providing feedback, but 10 seconds of feedback will be more effective. Feedback should be about small things, don’t try to accumulate a pattern of behavior.

Simply ask for something different in the future. Make it about the organization and not the individual. Describes a gap between what they did and what the goals and objectives are.

Feedback is a verbal measure of a directs contribution or lack of contribution to the mission and goals of the organization. (Some directs might feel judged, and you may need to say that you are not judging.) Managers and professionals don’t judge. They plan and measure.)

This is where you are, relative to what the organization needs from you.

Managers jobs are not to look for mistakes, but to encourage staff to be effective. Fear-based tactics don’t work and don’t help with retention.

Steps to give feedback

Hey, can I give you some feedback?
When you did that thing you did. (behavior)
The outcome that happened
Thank you, well done/Can you work on that? Can you do that differently?

The purpose of feedback is either, change their behavior in the future or do more of the same in the future. Don’t punish people or spend a lot of time talking about the past because that erodes trust. There is nothing you can do about the past.

Behavior is the engine of all systemic organizational success: not systems, processes, code, margins profit.

It is all about behavior. Behaviors have to be aligned to goals.

Motivations, intents, and attitudes. Intent is not what is important for the organization, so focus on behaviors. Motivation trap: All motivation is self motivation.

Behaviors can’t be faked. No need to guess or interpret.

Aggregated effective behavior leads to results.

Give feedback only about behaviors. Behaviors that you can give feedback on are:

The words you say
How you say them
Your facial expressions
Your body language
Work product: Quantity, Quality, Accuracy, Timeliness, Documentation, Safety

When receiving negative feedback, directs will want to switch the conversation to what they meant. Tell them you know they meant well. Intent is not what is important for the organization.

All work behaviors are available to everyone all of the time (meritocracy). The manager needs to know what behaviors to ask for that align with the organization’s goals.

Use this model to stop the manager’s judgment and arrogant teaching.

Effective management is all about behaviors.

Summary: Encourage effective future behavior.

Here are links to the three individual podcast episodes.

There is a full page of Podcasts related to feedback.

New Open Sourced VPN: Obscura

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

When new Rust applications come out I pay attention because the language attempts to make code more secure. Obscurais a new VPN open sourced on GitHub. It claims to not be able to log my activity and it is supposed to disguise traffic from network filters. It is actually reusing Mullvad VPN exit nodes. As I’m going behind the great firewall I’ve bought a month to test it.

Tip of had to Larry Salibra for bringing Obscura on my radar.

Genmo a good site to make some short AI Videos

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Checking out Genmo to create AI-Generated Videos. Gotta take the temperature of this ever-evolving part of AI.

If we could just combine Singapore and Hong Kong we would have a perfect city:

When I asked for a Scottish Terrier, I didn’t expect such a cute puppy with the floppy ears. Seemed to do a good job with the mechanics and even threw in some tulips. I figured an all-black dog would be challenging, and it blew out the highlights when trying to simulate the sun shining off the fur.

Will check back in a couple of months.

New Launcher App Pieoneer forces my hands off the keyboard

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I preordered the new Mac App called Pieoneer when I saw the cool design of the app.

My first stumbling block was when I forgot what the last symbol on the right in this graphic means:

After searching, it is of course the “Tab” key, but normally an App would let you know that. Strangely, if you click on the button and customize the keypress it writes “Tab” instead of the symbol.

What stopped me from using the program after I figured out how to call the Pie on my screen was that to select an option, I had to move my hand to my trackpad and then click.

For me, a launcher keeps your hands on the keyboard, and so I’m going to stick with the built-in spotlight. It was a promising design.

Using Mullvad VPN on Apple TV

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I wanted to watch the “LA FireAid Concert” from Singapore, however, seems the concert was restricted internationally. I use the Mullvad VPN and realized they didn’t have an Apple TV version of their app.

Fortunately, I also had been playing with a private network app called Tailscale.

My first attempt was to use my Mac as an exit node of Tailscale while connected to the Mullvad VPN. This routed my Apple TV traffic through my Mac and then through Mullvad. Once I realized I had to approve the exit node in the Tailscale interface, it was a success!

For the first five minutes it was great, and then it started buffering and stopping. I was so close and tried to find out why Mullvad didn’t have an Apple TV app. According to their website, it is on the roadmap, but meanwhile, Tailscale actually has a Mullvad integration. For an extra $5 bucks a month, you can use Mullvad as an exit node. So you can set up the Tailscale app on Apple TV to connect to Mullvad. Once I paid for this add-on, I was able to get my Apple TV to direct its traffic to Mullvad and the buffering and skipping stopped.

Parcel Shipments stopped from China and Hong Kong

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

During my decade in Shenzhen, Drop-shipping became a big business. The first startup I joined was based on it before it had that name. Some of it was based off a postal loophole that just got closed. AliExpress shipments are going to drop.

Update Feb 17, 25: 🩴 International inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts

Sonos alarm not triggering

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Tried the Sonos Alarm and woke up late

What I’m doing now 🇮🇩

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Updated 19th March. Accepted into the Apple Developer Academy and moved to Bali for 10 months. 🇮🇩

Published a Stream Deck Plug-in to eject disks safely.

Learning

Did a one-week challenge at the Apple Developer to build my first app (without using AI to build).

Travel

Stopping by Hong Kong 🇭🇰, Taipei 🇹🇼, and Singapore 🇸🇬 before I head back to Bali in March.

Work

Working on other plug-in ideas using Swift.

Released an open-source command-line tool and MCP server called FocusRelay for Omnifocus to be used in Claude Code or other AI tools to access my Omnifocus database with AI.

Looking for clients that need command-line interfaces or MCP servers for their AI tools.

Finishing up a Shopify website for my friend.

This page was inspired by Derek Sivers and his /now page.

Charlie XCX in Hong Kong

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Near Crew Coffee shop in Wanchai

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

My quick list of restaurants in Hong Kong friends have recommended to take a date:

Jean may – French
Giando – Italian
Grissini – Italian
Fireside – BBQ
Kozy – Japanese Okonomiyaki
Birdie – Japanese Yakitori
Uoharu魚治 – Japanese Izakaya
Mutekiya’s– Japanese Izakaya
Lawry’s – Western Prime Rib

Querying CSV files using SQL

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Change Log podcast mentioned the ability to query CSV files with SQL as if they are tables. I searched and found a post from Simon Willison: One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite. Great tool to have in the back pocket.

Getting rid of the Google login overlay on websites I browse

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

So happy that Michael Tsai documented how to remove the Google login overlay on websites that I’m browsing. It always gets in the way of the content and I waste time dismissing it daily.

Image from Apple Community Discussion

How The Apple Watch Ultra GPS Capabilities are better

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Trying to find how the Apple Watch Ultra has a better GPS than the other Apple Watches and found an article from The Verge that’s a good read. Original watches use the GPS L1 band and there is now a GPS L5 band that is starting to roll out but has not completely. The L5 band performs better in dense environments with tree cover or skyscrapers. Apple Watch Ultra combines the data from both bands, Wifi Signals and cell towers for better accuracy.

Trends of 2023 from Benedict Evans: Generative AI

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Benedict Evans yearly presentation is a good checkpoint to look at what trends were happening this year and what might be coming in the future. Of course AI is the biggest trend but the presentation poses questions that will be answered about where it is going and specifically questions how AI will be bundled or unbundled to in future products.

Exploring the Real-World Impacts of AI with Brent Deverman and Panel

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Join us for an exceptional journey through the landscapes of AI at the “Hong Kong Spartans’ Spotlight Series” on November 15th. Hosted by the Michigan State University Hong Kong Spartans Alumni Club at the Whale Club, this night promises enlightening discussions and insights into the transformative world of Artificial Intelligence.

Moderated by Richard Lai from Engadget, the panel brings together a tapestry of expertise and insights. Engage with Brent Deverman, founder of ProjOps.io, and Janelleh Tang, a Digital Project Consultant at Rosewood Hotel Group, as they share their rich experiences and perspectives on AI’s evolving realms.

Event Details:

📅 Date: Wednesday, 15 November 2023

⏰ Time: 7pm – 9:30pm

📍 Location: Whale Club, 1/F, Lyndhurst Building, 29 Lyndhurst Terrace, Central

RSVP and secure your spot for a night of dynamic discussions and networking opportunities on the event registration page.

Find more details and stay updated at the Facebook event page.

Join us in this exploratory journey, navigating the promising and complex horizons of Artificial Intelligence!

Is AI a Frankenstin’s Monster, Terminator or Savior?

I hung up on my Mom while FaceTiming her

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I just hung up on my mom because the button in the right is green. A red button with a phone icon as used in the Phone app instead of an “X” would have been a better indicator.

Bintan Island Weekend Getaway: Nirwana Resort Review, Activities, and Dining Options

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

My girlfriend and I planned an Easter vacation trip excursion from Singapore to the Island of Bintan in Indonesia. We decided to try this as there is a ferry costing 113USD in Emerald business class that takes 1 hour, so we figured it would be cheaper than flying to Chiangmai.

Our Hotel Stay

Nirwana resort has beautiful gardens

Arriving at the Nirwana hotel, we were greeted by a fake Ralph Lauren Polo store, which was indicative of the level of the resort. (The real Ralph Lauren is not allowed in Indonesia because the local copy has the trademark.)

It was clear that the resort has suffered from the pandemic and probably the lack of Chinese clientele as the “Hot Pot” restaurant opened in the height of the Chinese tourism boom of 2017 was closed with other facilities deserted as well, such as the “local” pub and bowling alley.

Internet Access

Hotel participates in an Internet “scam”.

The reason I, personally, won’t stay at this hotel again is because of the restrictive and customer unfriendly internet policy. Upon check-in, you are given Wi-Fi access, which only covers one device.

Fortunately, I brought along a travel router and was able to get around the one device restriction.

However, the hotel does not only restrict the number of devices, they restrict the internet speed. The top tier was around 3MB/s at 13USD a day!

On principle, we didn’t pay for the upgrade, however this made finding things outside the hotel to do by searching the internet a slow task.

The Food

Overall, we found the food quality sorrowfully lacking at the resort, especially when you consider the price. An additional annoying thing was at each restaurant they would not give us a copy of the receipt after we charged it to our room. We had to take a photo of each bill to ensure we could confirm if there were any “mistakes” at checkout.

As the resort is broken up into multiple places to stay, the restaurants are spread around each one, and you have to take a free bus to get to each one that goes every half hour.

Breakfast was included in our stay, but was mediocre. The coffee machines would often break down, and we would have to wait for them to be fixed. The capacity of these machines was not enough to keep up with the large number of people at breakfast.

Even though it was Easter weekend, there was nothing exceptional on Easter Sunday at the breakfast.

Steamed fish Nyonya style

In the evening, we first tried the The Kelong Seafood Restaurant which is on a pier in the sea, so it gets points for a special location and view with a “floating bar” called Calypso bar that is a key location to watch the sunset on the island. The food was fine, and the fish was fresh. The view was great, but the food didn’t give me any wow factor, and the total meal and drinks cost two people 104USD.

Kelong Seafood restaurant and Calypso bar are part of the resort but rest floating on the water.

Fried Indian cauliflower and Gadogado

Trying to find other places to eat, there was what was supposed to be an Indonesian restaurant called “Spice” however when we went there, we were presented with an extensive vegetarian Indian menu. Still, we were able to find some Indonesian food; however, my girlfriend complained about how the chicken dish was dry a and I found the beef satay to not “melt in my mouth”. This was not 60USD well spent.

Wish I could return this salad 🥗

In-between our out-of-hotel excursions, we wanted to have lunch and chose the Nirwana’s Dino restaurant. It was surprisingly busy at 2pm and after waiting quite a while, we both came out disappointed with our Caesar salad and burger for 53USD!

Activities

Some activities we tried are snorkeling and bike riding. Many of the activities promoted seemed to have a “cheese” flavor to them, such as paintball. Maybe they are better for families. The one horse available for the horse riding activity made my girlfriend sorrowful after she saw how it was stuck outside tied up waiting for a customer.

Bike Rental

While the Nirwana Resort Hotel is on an extensive property called Nirwana Gardens, it is not a big enough property to keep you entertained while riding bikes for a full hour. We returned our bikes with almost twenty minutes left on our clock, as we had already gotten bored. Bike rental was around 17USD for two people with the duration of 1 hour.

Trying to pass the time by biking the whole resort.

Snorkeling

One of the more positive experiences was taking the boat snorkeling. However, even for this, we had to wait an extra ten minutes for a late arrival couple. Once on the water, it was beautiful to see the shore of the island. Arriving at the snorkeling spot, the boat had to find a spot we could go in that didn’t have much oil floating on the water. Once we dove in, the clown fish were plentiful and there was much to see, even with many of the coral dying due to climate change.

The Beach

Nirwana resort beach on a good day. Q

One of the treasures of the resort is the beach. The resort actually has two beach sections. One is out in front of the main hotel and the other is where the beach club is and is the gateway to all the water sports activities.

The beach in front of the hotel has sand that is fine and soft, and on nice days the water is clear and blue. We were able to relax, read and listen to the waves with the occasional swim.

Second “activity” beach 🏖️

Late Checkout

As our ferry back to the island was not until late in the afternoon, we asked for a late checkout and were told it would be an additional 40USD. Instead, we decided to check out at 12pm and go into town.

Outside the Hotel

As we were trying to find better food options than what was in the hotel, we spent a lot of time using the slow internet to search for restaurant options that would satisfy our Indonesian food craving. Unfortunately, the hotel is a ways away from the main city in Bintan.

Banyan Tree

Practically, next door was the Bayan Tree Bintan resort, and we wanted to escape there for better quality food, however, during the Easter weekend we were told the restaurants were fully booked.

Taxies

There is no Grab taxi on the island and at the Nirwana Resort they were charging around 20USD to go even short distances on the island, however , we did find there are also electric taxis which are half the price.

Half the size for half the price.

Day Spa

One of the main things we wanted to try was massage. Luckily, a friend recommended a massage place that was near the hotel, and they picked us up and dropped us off. To get around the expensive taxi from the hotel, we also asked the spa to take us to the Warung Yeah! restaurant for dinner, and then paid about 10USD extra to pick us up later and take us back to our resort.

At first, the spa was asking to pay partially in cash and credit card. We just said flat-out “No” and then we were able to charge the massage to our Visa. In total, we went to this spa twice on our trip as the massage experience was superb and acceptable price for 90 minutes totaling 96USD for 2 people. The name of the Spa is D’Bintan Salon Day Spa.

Warung Yeah!

Wurang Yeah! From afar.

On TripAdvisor, we saw that one of the higher-rated restaurants was Warung Yeah!. Upon arrival, we found it was a very casual Indonesian dining restaurant located on a public Lagoi Bay beach. We ordered multiple Indonesian dishes for more than half the price of a meal in the Nirwana Resort. In the two times we ate there, (yes, it was that good) we spent less than 20USD.

Lagoi Bay is a spot for sunsets

The beach that this restaurant is located at is also a perfect place to watch the sunset. There used to be a shopping mall and other attractions around this area, but they seem to be closed down.

Mangrove Boat Tour

The mangrove tour is good way to pass a couple hours.

Though we wanted to kayak the mangroves, we couldn’t find an appropriate last-minute option, so instead we took a Mangrove boat tour booked through TripAdvisor for around 60USD for two people. This was well executed as they picked us up at our hotel and brought us to the cute jetty where we boarded a small speed boat to travel up the brackish water. The boat consisted of a captain and guide to explain what we were looking at, and it was a great experience to be out on the water again and in narrow mangrove waterways. Most of the wildlife we saw was snakes, but the captain was excellent and spotting them and pointing them out, including a python.

Pythons resting in the trees

Summary

Overall, my impression of Bintan is that it is really focused on extracting money out of Singaporeans coming for the weekend and not providing enough value to the customer. If you are going to come here for the weekend, you would need to stay at one of the very high-end resorts that has good food and plan to stay in that resort except for maybe a spa excursion.

If you have had a better time in Bintan, feel free to tweet bdeverman.

Running Python Scripts in BBEdit with zsh and picking up environment variables

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Trying to get an API key from an environment variable placed in “.zshrc” when running the Python script in BBEdit. Turns out that for non-interactive shells, environment variables should be exported from the “.zshenv”. This was all documented on the BBEdit website.

Telling my friends what to do in Japan’s Kansai Area

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Kyoto

Visiting Kyoto is one of my top trips. You can beat the intense mix of history and food packed together is such a small area. Be sure to include a day trip to Arishiyama.

Reservations are recommended in Japan in general, even if they are hard to make for non-native speakers.

Food treasures

Eighty percent of the Japan experience with the food eaten with friends, while a 20% is visiting everything else.

Start at Ponto cho in the Evening

Ponto cho alley is the starting street for food in Kyoto. This alley is adorned with cute lanterns and full of tiny restaurants on each side. Only pedestrians can walk on this street. No cars allowed.

Hakoya

Izakya with Obanzai special Kyoto food Kinpira Gobo (Braised carrots and burdock root).

Kyoto Mamehachi

This restaurant just specializes in Tofu, and it is worth trying Tofu made in multiple ways.

Soba Noodles & Donuts

Honeke Owaria Soba Noodle Restaurant

The 550 year-old Soba restaurant

One of the coolest noodles in Japan is Soba noodles. Kyoto has a special looking and special tasting Soba noodle restaurant. This place is 550 years old! The noodles are served in layered noodle baskets that you open and prepare your noodles one by one. Accompanied with the Soba noodles, are many additional items to mix in such as strips of egg omelets and sea weed, shrimp plus sesame seeds. Take a bit of everything and mix it with the Mentsuiyu soup and dip the noodles in. Be sure to slurp when you are eating the noodles. It is not impolite!

Thee stacks of Soba

Nicotto & Mam Donut for dessert

Enter the Donut Shop

Down the street is a donut shop featuring Kinako flavored donuts 🍩 (soybean powder) that make a good after meal dessert if you can fit it in your stomach. This is a strong 💪🏻 recommendation from my Japanese friend, and you won’t be disappointed with the quality of donuts. Not too sweet, they contain the perfect balance of sugar.

Selection of Donuts

Osaka

Here some of my favorited places in Osaka unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to track down their names and address yet.

Recommended Restaurants

Oden

Cabbage with Cheese inside

Tonpei Okynamiyaki

What does Optimize video streaming while on battery do?

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

In macOS Ventura on my M2 Mac, I found an option in the “Options…” panel of battery settings called “Optimize video streaming while on battery.” What are the trade-offs of turning this on? Lower quality video when on battery? While watching Netflix, I didn’t notice a difference, especially since I wasn’t watching Netflix in full screen. After digging into the help, I found this comment:

What is the impact on the batttery when this is turned on?

While on battery power, play high-dynamic-range (HDR) video in standard dynamic range (SDR), which requires less energy.

More details are provided in an HDR article. The forum posts on macOS Rumors and Reddit don’t really provide any additional information. Has anyone published any benchmarks on this? If so, please tweet them to me.

Sending Flowers in Singapore

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Was searching for flower delivery in Singapore and found Floristique. I liked that they had a “Wholesale” section on the website where I could pick the individual flowers; however, I’m not certain that I really got the wholesale price after checkout, 3 hydrangeas were 36SGD plus tax. There was no delivery fee, and they could deliver in the afternoon when I ordered in the morning. This is slightly lower than in Hong Kong where I would pay around 75-80HKD per stem of hydrangea. That did not include any delivery fee. Note that due to the wholesale interface, I accidentally ordered 6 stalks when I should have clicked on the 3rd stalk.

Selecting all 3 in this photo gives you six stalks when you could select the last one to get just 3 stalks which is usually enough to wow your significant other.

Other flower delivery services I considered was Little Flower Hut. Their flower arrangements were not to my liking; however, they do offer one-hour delivery.

If you have any other more reasonable flower delivery services, please tweet me.

Seagull in motion

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Seagull in motion in Malibu

Seagull in motion

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Seagull in motion in Malibu

Automating a New Macintosh Setup

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

In the past I have used the migration assistant tool to copy my files from Mac to Mac whenever I would get a new one. After almost 20 years of doing this I wanted to setup my new screaming M2 from scratch.

Automating App Installs

There are a couple command line tools that help this and I have created a bash script in github to run on the computer. Be sure to customize for your own situation.

Once this script is run on the Mac half the work will be done. The next steps below are for setting up the data.

The script and explanations below should only install M1/M2 compatible apps. Nothing on Intel.

1Password Data Setup

Setup 1Password coud Sync
Enable Local vaults
Setup iCloud vault sync

Keychain

Copy keychain file from original Mac

BBEdit

Enable Sandbox Access

Spark

Login to gmail account
Don’t allow notifications

Hazel

Register License from 1password file
Give Full disk access
Add back Hazel folders, sync rules with each folder and enable rules on other computers.
Activate Hazel Notifications
Enable App Sweep and Delete files from trash after 1 week
Turn off Notifications for Files events and trash events

Bartender

Register Bartender
Setup bartender to hid everything but Fantastical and DayOne.

Dash App

In Dash preferences choose the Sync folder on iCloud Drive/Dash and everything is setup.

Timing

Launch and setup
Copy data from old computer

Freedom

Log into Freedom and make sure it is setup name device.

Fantastical

Need to create new app password for iCloud calendar.
Add accounts iCloud, Google, Meetup.com
Set default calendar and default reminder list

Omnifocus

Install Omnifocus Beta from TestFlight
Copy over Omnifocus Archive to new computer
Check that ctr-option-space is global shortcut

WeChat

Copy chat backup to new computer.

Install What’s App Beta

Download M1 WhatsApp beta.

Slack

Sign into Slack Channels.

ChronoSync

Setup backup

Safari

Enable Extensions in Safari

Time Machine

Setup backup to Synology
Setup backup to external drives

Anki

Discord

Xcode

Launch and accept dialog boxes.

Visual Studio Code

Enable Syncing using GitHub account

OBS

Setup for Highest recording
Create source for Elgato
Create Source for Insta360 Link
Create Source for Screen Recording

Apple Music

Check Download Dolby Atmos

Deauthorize previous computer or you might reach the limit
Check older authorizations to free up

Finder

Set finder settings to open to home directory and show external disks

Home Folder

Copy over select Home folder contents

System Settings

Trackpad speed

Increase trackpad to max speed.

Configure Shortcuts

Disable unused sharing utilities and shortcuts

Keyboard

Enable Dictation

Spelling

Enable Show Input Menu in Menu Bar

Extensions

Disable/enable extensions

Storage

The storage control panel lets you delete the GarageBand music creation libraries.

Notifications

Configure notifications including:

Turn off notifications from calendar because I use fantastical
Turn off notifications for mail
Turn off sound notifications WhatsApp

Unlock with Apple Watch

Turn on Unlock with Apple Watch

Brave Browser

Setup Syncing
Verify Brave Rewards

Clay

Sign into Clay with Apple ID

Git

Set .gitconfig file to contain your commit information.

`git config --global user.email "myemail@example.com"`
`git config --global user.name "My Name"`

– Create new GIT ssh key and associate it with account

Generate SSH Key

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "email@example.com"

Setup ssh to reference Keychain.

touch ~/.ssh/config
open ~/.ssh/config

Add the following to the above file:

Host github.com
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  UseKeychain yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Add SSH Key to Keychain

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add --apple-use-keychain ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
gh auth login
gh auth refresh -h github.com -s admin:public_key
gh ssh-key add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Reference Articles

Battle to take Hong Kong in World War II

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Interactive timeline showing the battle of Hong Kong in 1941. Traces in detail how the Japanese troops took Hong Kong from Hong Kong Baptiste University History Department.

R.E.M. Concert Setlist from 1995

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Really grateful to the woman in my Michigan State University dorm that gave me her ticket to see an R.E.M concert and cool that I can find a record of the 1995 concert online.

Making a Bootable macOS Monterey External Backup

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Was trying to research how to create a bootable backup on a USB-C external drive under macOS Monterey. I am using a backup tool called ChronoSync, so I started to research and found a tech note about bootable backups.

No longer can you just make a copy of your main hard drive and make it bootable. You need to first install macOS on an external hard drive, according to Macworld.

The above article recommends that I format the drive as an macOS Extended format. Is that correct? I thought that we were using APFS now, and my internal drive is formatted as an APFS Volume Group.

I couldn’t test this because when I clicked “Show All Disks…” in the installer to see external drives for installation, the installer told me that I could not install on the volume I had chosen because it was part of an AppleRAID.

AppleRAID volumes do no support installing a bootable drive.

Looks like I will buy a dedicated backup hard drive and update this. If you have any suggestions on external drives for bootable backups, then tweet me.

Buying a Wireless Charging Station in Hong Kong for AirPods Pro, iPhone, Apple Watch

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Recently was searching for a wireless charging pad that would support an Apple Watch, AirPods Pro and iPhone. There are some really well-designed stations, most that are quite pricey.

Satechi

One of the more stylish manufacturers of charging gear is Satechi. However, I balked at ordering this due to the extra shipping costs from the US to Hong Kong.

Friends say Satechi works well, but feels cheap

View Trio Wireless Charger With Magnetic Pad

Nomad

I found a version of this in the Wanchai computer center a while ago and this is the brand I use, but I didn’t see it the last time I walked around the computer center. Overall, it works well, though some days I wake up, and my watch has not been charged.

Using this for years it works well and just realized it supports charging 3 items.

View Base Station

Belkin

After trying to find a charging pad that I don’t have to ship from the US to Hong Kong, this Belkin one seems to be the best looking and supports new fast charging methods for newer phones and watches. This is also available in the Apple Store in Hong Kong.

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

In researching the DeFi landscape for a project, I have found the following Podcasts that I have been listening too regularly now.

Modern Finance

Kevin Rose was the founder of Digg and has been investing and playing with Crypto. This one only has a couple of episodes under his belt, but Kevin has done a great job with his other podcasts however since it is not his full-time gig he sometimes goes on hiatus. Definitely has access to the right people and asks good questions.

Listen to Modern Finance

Fintech Insider

This podcast has already recorded over 500 episodes and talks to all the movers and shakers especially in the European FinTech space. 11:FS concentrate a lot on banking and payments but also get into crypto. I like this podcast because they regularly have the CEOs and founders of European Fintech on the cast.

Listen to Fintech Insider

The Defiant

This is a newsletter and podcast. I find The Defiant newsletter and podcast tackling topics before they become mainstream, so it seems like a good way to stay ahead of the curve.

Listen to The Defiant

Summary

This is a starter pack of podcasts and I will update this post if I come across others.

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Steve Jobs is great at analyzing the market, explaining the pain points of the customer and key competitive strengths of NeXT.

Importing Word files to Ulysses

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Was trying to figure out how to import a Word file into Ulysses and found an article that you can just drag and drop the file into the library.

Some Command line hacks to speed up TimeMachine backups

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Made some big changes to my photos library and need my TimeMachine on Big Sur to backup faster over the network to my Drobo.

Searched and found a few tips. First one is this command to remove process throttling:

 sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

This still was not enough so then I also tried the renice command:

sudo renice -n -20 -p 565

To get the process id I just used activity monitor and looked for “backupd” in the Activity monitor.

Now I see the “backupd” process jumping up to as much as 50% of the CPU. Since I am on an Apple Silicon M1 I wasn’t too worried about it slowing down.

Updating Series 3 Apple Watch to WatchOS 7 runs out of space

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Every time there is a new update to WatchOS 7 my series 3 watch does not have enough space to update. Dr. Drang has written a rant and some tips on how to get this to work.

Syncing Google Drive on M1 Macs

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

As of this writing Google Drive’s native Mac application is not supported on M1 Macs because it is a kernel extension and those don’t run intel code on the M1 architecture.

Manipulating Files in the Finder on Google Drive when Drive is no longer a folder

As I have many Hazel rules that sort files into my Google Drive files, I have been trying to find a way to sync my files from my local folder.

I found that Transmit had support for Google Drive and I could log in to my Google Drive using that App. Then I remembered that Transmit had the feature to turn a cloud service into a local drive, however after further reading I found this no longer worked as they don’t support the Transmit Disk feature anymore.

After migrating from my Intel MacBook Pro to my M1, I tried to do some sleuthing to find where the Google Drive data was stored to see if the files were readable locally.

I found the files stored in:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS

Unfortunately, the files were not stored as a human-readable folder structure and instead seemed to be in another database format:

Google Drive storage in the Library folder

Syncing from Google Drive to a Local Folder

This seemed to indicate my only option was to use Transmit to sync the Google Drive files back down to my local drive to recreate the local copy of the files. One of the drawbacks of using Transmit Sync is the inability to sync the Google Docs documents like sheets.

Syncing problems down to the Local Folder

After doing the sync down to the local folder did not sync everything. I found quite a few errors of syncing down event XLS files and with the Transmit report, it was hard to figure out why.

/SZP GM/Accounting/Payroll Report/SZ Party Payroll Report - 201807.xls - Could not download “SZ Party Payroll Report - 201807.xls”.
/SZP GM/Accounting/Canceled Platinum Business MasterCard 2017-2019/hsbc-6.pdf - Could not download “hsbc-6.pdf”.

Updating my Hazel Rules

Hazel lets you change the folder with the “Relocate Folder…” option…

Hazel change of folder destination

WARNING This change all my rules to use the new folder and then started to move all my pdfs that were stuck in my downloads folder since my migration to my M1 Mac.

Uploading to Google Drive using Transmit

Now that Hazel had copied my PDFs I thought the next step was going to be to upload them to transmit. Just to be careful I used the “Simulate” command in Transmit to make sure that the upload was going to work? I got some confusing results as shown in this screenshot.

Upload sync unexpected results

The files that Transmit considered to be changed were not just the PDFs that hazel filed. This si where I got gun shy to complete the upload and have published this blog post to send to Panic to see if they have any advice. Will update it after.

Automating sync

If I can get the
Panic has a video about how to set up a regular sync using automator.

Other Options

I saw a link to the program Insync which claims to be able to replace Google Drive file stream but I have not tried it.

Reference

AppleScript and Transmit

50HKD Lunch #1 until December 31st

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Pasta from Casa Pasta by Ermanno Lelli in Sheungwan just open and hidden up the stairs until December 31st, 2020 all kinds of pasta are 50HKD due to soft opening.

Italian sections of pasta with the American Macaroni and Cheese thrown in.

Grab your take away pasta and eat outdoors in the nearby park or cool stairs in this part of Sheungwan.

Tried the Gnocchi as that is my go to pasta. It had the right amount tomato sauce and cheese.

Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese

Carbonara is the one they recommended the most.

Desserts imported from Italy also available

Casa Pasta by Ermanno Lelli, HK branch
shop D, ground floor, 2-8 Po Hing Fong, Sheung Wan
6821 0095

Interview with Napoleon Biggs from 852RebootHK

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Recently did an interview with Napoleon Biggs for his Reboot Hong Kong site addressing how Hong Kong and Shenzhen can help each other reboot during COVID-19. Watch the interview on YouTube below:

Look up your Hong Kong address in Chinese Characters

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I found that the Hong Kong Post office has a page where you can look up your exact Hong Kong address in English and in Chinese characters. This is called their correct addressing tool. They have additional information about Hong Kong addresses as well.

Automating changes to Display arrangements on macOS

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Now that I use Sidecar to turn my iPad Pro into a second screen I got a bit tired of going to the display preferences to change where my iPad was physically sitting each time. Since I am hot desking I have to put it on the left or the right and that changes almost daily.

Originally, I thought I would fix this would Keyboard Maestro but it can’t change the display layout and it is too hard to automate it to do the preferences.

I found a stack exchange thread with a link to displayplacer. This is a command line tool that can be installed by homebrew which will do the job of display preferences.

After following the instructions to install the tool you can capture your current screen configuration and then run a command to switch.

I created a Keyboard Maestro macro that monitors when the iPad is plugged in and then prompts me to turn on sidecar and choose the side of the desk where the iPad sits.

Restaurant loved by Bruce Lee, famed for its roast pigeon and featured in Hong Kong films, looks to the future | South China Morning Post

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Lung Wah Hotel restaurant, loved by film stars including Bruce Lee and famous for its roast pigeon, is celebrating its 70th anniversary next year, and has big plans for the future.
— Read on www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3106864/restaurant-loved-bruce-lee-famed-its-roast-pigeon-and-featured

G4 Cube Memories

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

My first job out of college brought me to New York City to setup around 10 G4 cubes as web servers for an Ecommerce company. These beautiful machines fit well on the racks.

20 Macs for 2020 #13: Power Mac G4 Cube (#8) – Relay FM

There may have never been a Mac more aligned with Steve Jobs
— Read on www.relay.fm/20macs/13

Glass Animals Socially Distance COVID Video that works

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Ethan Hawke: Give yourself permission to be creative from TED Talk

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Psychological Tricks and Tactics used to make people buy more

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Found this info graphic for tips on how to upsell, cross sell and more.

View post on imgur.com

Loffee Coffee in Sai Ying Pun

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brent Deverman (@bdeverman)

Dirty: Coffee in Hong Kong

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Dirty is the way I like my coffee now. #coffeeaddict #coffee #coffeelover #coffeeshop #coffee #coffeetime #coffeephotography #dirty #dirtycoffee #☕️#咖啡 #咖啡店 #咖啡廳 #咖啡館 #咖啡厅 #咖啡拉花 @jmtcoffeeshop

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brent Deverman (@bdeverman)

Lunch at Aria

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Aria in the LKF California Tower

Signed up for AppleCard from Hong Kong

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I got the US AppleCard from my iPhone physically in Hong Kong by changing my region to USA and going through the application process. They no longer asked for my US driver’s license which I did not have when it launched or any other form of ID. Now off to the Apple store to get my 3% cash back.

How the Wubi Chinese character input method came to be and why it is not more popular

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Radiolab released a podcast that is a backgrounder on how China created an input method to type thousands of Chinese characters in early computers with western keyboards called Wubi. It explains how the input method still helps the writer remember the essence of the written characters while currently the dominant (and slower) input method of Pinyin results in even native Chinese speakers forgetting how to write the characters. The podcast reminded me how I’ve been using predictive input two decades before it became common for gmail to suggest how to write my emails.

Determining product market fit of an unreleased product or why I have trouble unsubscribing from Superhuman

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

After reading how Superhuman set their product strategy, it revealed to me why I continued my subscription while canceling many others during COVID. Thanks Rahul Vohra for giving such a great example of using Sean Ellis’s framework from the Hacking Growth framework.

Found some of my HyperCard Stacks

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Amazingly the Internet Archive has archived some of my HyperCard Stacks that I made when I was in high school. What is even cooler is if you click on the links below, you can run the Hypercard stacks in your web browser. So cool to bring some memories back. Thank you Bill Atkinson for making the precursor to the web and inspiring me to program.

Command Key Enhancer 1.0

StackSmith 1.0

Simple Sample Font Printer 2.0

Simple Style Creator 1.0

So cool to see my work from 1992 I thought it was lost forever. Don’t forget to donate to the Internet Archive.

How to get recaptcha to be unblocked in China

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I have some sites that I want to be accessible in Shenzhen. They include being able to post content to my sites. Unfortunately many Google services are blocked in China. One such service is the recaptcha service for spam protection. Fortunately in the Google recaptcha FAQ, they provide a solution. It does not specifically mention China however when implementing this it worked.

The gist of the solution is that you need to replace references to “www.google.com” with “www.recaptcha.net”.

Resources

Recaptcha issue in China

How to copy multiple sheets to the Clipboard in Ulysses Mac

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Was trying to copy a few sheets in the writing application Ulysses to the clipboard. I found what to do but it is confusing. You think the normal copy function would work by selecting multiple sheets:

Copy doesn’t work like you would think here.

But it results in the following when pasting…

ulysses://x-callback-url/open?id=W3qZJyl-Npi55m4SlsCwHA
ulysses://x-callback-url/open?id=w2dUH4mafDX5PXWm0mKeqQ
ulysses://x-callback-url/open?id=eRznbiOJJOuj7RUgQKSNkA

Instead I found that if you try to share the sheets as if you were publishing them you have an option to copy to the clipboard:

The “A” graphic here stands for “Copy to Clipboard”

The “A” icon in the above screen shot is the option you should use to get the contents of multiple Ulysses sheets in to the clipboard. You can choose the format in the format section so that you don’t have to take the text as Markdown.

After clicking the icon in the share sheet just switch to another app and paste the text.

Would like a legal Uber in Hong Kong

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Hong Kong government needs to start to welcome these companies with arms more open than Singapore. It is embarrassing that Taxi’s in Shenzhen have eschewed cash for WeChat pay while in Hong Kong we are expected to pay in bills. How about some reform that helps balance the change to the taxi industry while giving it a kick in the pants so when the Chinese tourists come back Hong Kong meets their digital expectations.

Uber eyes headquarters move to Hong Kong – provided city first changes regulations to legalise service: source | South China Morning Post:

“There is a real demand for ride-hailing services. The government should relax the regulatory regime to allow Uber to legally operate in Hong Kong. But it should also find ways to assuage the discontent of the taxi sector. For example, it could require Uber to pay a tax and make other requirements ,while providing some form of subsidies for taxis to offset their loss of income.”

Rewrite All Apache URLs to redirect to specific page

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

If you have a situation where your website is down or there is some problem, you can let the world know on every page by using a rewrite rule.

I had to enable mod_rewrite to get this to work. This meant in my version of apache I needed to move the file “rewrite.load” into the active module directory and restart apache.

sudo mv /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
sudo apache2ctl restart

Once the rewrite engine was working we could do more complex redirects with regular expressions like this.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/websitedown.html
RewriteRule ^ /websitedown.html [R=302]

You can get a little more complex with regular expressions. This excludes everything under the bundles directory if you need a place to store some CSS or images for your Website down page.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/bundles/.+

The above code can be put in /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf which was the default on my new server. After saving run the command to restart apache:

 sudo apache2ctl restart

The above rule looks for all requests that are not going to websitedown.html and then sends a 302 redirect to the same file. This allows to pass thru the request for just that file. We use 302 because this is a temporary situation and we don’t want google to get confused.

Once we fix this situation we will remove this redirect.

Resources For Redirecting

Content Migration with Python and WordPress Presentation

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the online PyCon conference. This is an online conference for Python programmers. I am working on migrating ShenzhenParty.com content to WordPress.

Topics covered:

Useful Python Libraries for performing these tasks
Retrieving posts information from the old CMS with REST API
Writing Post data to a CSV
Setting up Python Google Sheets Access
Matching data in Google Sheets and Updating Google Sheets
Creating posts in WordPress with the Application Password Plugin
Searching WordPress posts by slug

Watch the video of the talk:

Video presentation of content migration tips with Python

PyCon Presentation Page and Slides Download

Reading old HFS formatted CDs using Parallels

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

When I found some old CDs from college I tried to read them in Mac OS X Catalina and was shown an error message. You can read the investigation I went through on the previous linked post.

My friend suggested I try to mount the CDs in a virtual machine so that that started me down a new rabbit hole.

To sum up Apple dropped support for reading HFS in Catalina.

I knew that Parallels could do Mac OS X virtual machines so I thought it would be simple to create.

Turned out to be more complex than I thought and took a lot of google searches so let me try to summarize here.

First Parallels can install but it needs the original installer. Lots of articles tell you to get the older operating installer from your purchase history but if you are on a brand new MacBook Pro 16 inch those old installers won’t show up because your computer doesn’t support them.

It turns out that Apple has a TechNote for most of the older operating systems. I chose the TechNote for macOS Sierra: How to upgrade to macOS Sierra. You will find a download link for an installer around step 4.

Download the disk image using the download link on this step

Once you have this on your drive there is still more to do.

In Parallels go to File > New.. to bring up the installation assistant. Originally I tried to find this disk image from the option “Install Windows or another OS from a DVD or image file” but that didn’t work.

The image file you just downloaded can’t be recognized with the middle option.

Parallels had a support document on installing Mojave that for some reason I didn’t quite understand so one support email later I had clarity on what needed to be done.

You want to scroll all the way to the right on the below screen:

Start by installing macOS Catalina off a recovery partion.

First you need to create a virtual machine based off of Catalina. This is just a temporary virtual machine that allows you to get to the older operating system installer.

Go through the motions of setting up the Catalina operating system.

Once you setup the Catalina virtual machine you have to install the “Parallels Tools” on the Catalina operating system. That takes place from the Actions menu. The VM will be restarted and you can then see shared folders between your real Mac and the VM.

Then it is best to quote directly from the tech support email because this is what gave me the lightbulb moment:

Transfer the installmacosx.dmg to the new virtual machine that is created.

Open installmacosx.dmg and run the .pkg file inside the virtual machine.

Once the installation finishes, the app file will be generated in the virtual machine’s Applications folder.

Move the .app file to the Documents folder of your Mac and run Parallels Desktop Installation Assistant. The installation .app will be recognized automatically and you will be able to proceed with creation of virtual machine.

To sum up the above you just want to use the temporary Catalina virtual Machine to run the installer. Once you get the OS installer application you can drag it back to your real Mac using the Parallels shared folders.

Installer extraction completed

Now you create a new virtual machine all over again but this time you can choose the “Install Windows or another OS from a DVD or image file” and it will find the installer.

Parallels automatically recognizes the installer.

Now just go through the process of installing a Mac virtual machine.

Link your VM to the physical CD reader

Once I just made sure that the CD reader was linked to the Virtual Machine, I was able to copy my files to a folder and enjoy some old college memories of long forgotten documents.

Legacy Comments

MC 2020-05-10T11:27:08
It seems that in the Free Systems on the “Below Screen” there is now the choice of Install Mac OS 10.12.6 Using the Recovery Partition, which allows you to directly install the latest version of Sierra without all of the extra steps.
Marshall 2020-05-08T12:42:35
I was referred to this page by Parallels Tech Support, as I wanted to install Mac OS Sierra as a VM on my late 2016 MacBook Pro in order to run legacy software. I noticed that when scrolling right under “Free Systems,” immediately to the left of the Catalina option, was an option for Mac OS 10.12.6 (i.e., the last version of Sierra). Clicking on that option installed Sierra as a VM without any problems, and without requiring the additional steps you have outlined above. Go figure?

Tried to Mount some old HFS CDs from College and Catalina refused

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I was trying to mount some old HFS formatted CDs from college and found out that they don’t mount on Mac OS Catalina from this thread.

I was getting the following error:

Could not mount CD. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49153.)

I opened terminal and ran the command

diskutil list

This confirmed the CD was formatted as HFS which is now deprecated in Mac OS Catalina.

Luckily I found an article that documents this very error. So it was off to try to install HomeBrew.

From that post I ran:

brew install hfsutils

Getting a list of disks in the CD-ROM drive went like this:

diskutil list

Then it was time to mount the disk. I had to make sure that I mounted “disk2s1s2”

Apple_HFS Disk 1 (System Folder) 666.2 MB disk2s1s2

Make sure to select the right partition on the CD:

sudo hmount /dev/disk2s1s2

This will give you a list of items on the disk:

sudo hls

I wanted to just copy everything so I created a new directory in my home folder to hold the contents of the disk

cd ~
mkdir "Disks"
cd Disks
mkdir "PB HD Disk 1"
cd "PB HD Disk 1"
sudo hcopy -r ":*" ./

After you copy files don’t forget to unmount

sudo humount

A big limitation: not able to copy directories

It turns out when you do this it doesn’t copy folders so I don’t see a way to copy everything off the disk onto another one. So these techniques all work for one or two files but not for slurping everything onto one of your hard drives.

If you know how to copy all the items from a disk mounted by hfsutils please tweet me.

In the meantime I think I am going to try to install Mavericks on my Mac mini and see if I can us HFS there.

Update August 16th 2021: @SheetJS sent me a gist shell script that will copy and skip the errors.

Resources

HFS Utils
hfsfuse
Fuse for Mac OS
Read HFS standard file system on Catalina on Reddit
hfsutils(1) – Linux man page
Sierra no more support HFS standard format
Disk Utility User Guide – File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac

Researching Hiking Dragon’s Back in Hong Kong

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Took a look at the best routes to get to Hike on Dragon’s Back because I wanted to end up in Shek-O beach. Turns out that the Hike actually ends up at Big Wave Bay. Still it is close enough to Shek-O.

The resources I used for my research turned out tho be an article on Hong Kong Cheapo. Some of the most beautiful photos and drone footage came from Drone and DSLR.

To really plan my route from my home I checked CityMapper from SaiyingPun to To Tei Wan.

Now I’m prepared and looking forward ot the hike.

Can’t clone a Git repository on Git hub in an organization

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I tried to create a Git repository in a new git hub organization. It was a private repository and when I tried to clone the repository to my local I got the error “remote: Repository not found.”

This happened in both the Git Tower client along with the command line client.

Trying to Google the error found a GitHub faq and an article. These seemed to be some of the reasons:

You did not authenticate
Your password has changed
You are not a collaborator
Incorrect case or a word misspelled
The git repository has been deleted

Jeff Geerling seemed to have a similar problem but his solution didn’t apply to me. There was also of course a question on StackOverflow.

Since I was copying and pasting the clone link from Github, the repository must be named correctly. I had not previously cloned this repository however I had linked it to Netlifly.

I created the repository and the team so I definitely was a collaborator but I added myself anyway again under managed access.

I have no problem logging into Github with 2FA and cloning repositories from my personal GitHub account so this was not the problem.

So the only one of the possibilities above seemed to be an authentication error. Based on the GitHub FAQ article I setup and verified my SSH keys.

The responses on StackOverflow suggested to remove my entries in my Mac Keychain related to GitHub and so I did. I even deleted my account from Tower and I deleted my Personal Access Token from Github.

After trying all the authentication suggestions in the stackoverflow article I am still stuck if you have an idea please tweet me.

Finally found a way to turn off autoplay on Netflix

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Finally a way to turn off autoplay on Netflix. The auto play of previews and the auto play of next shows are now turned off on my Netflix account.

Netflix Help documentation

How to Access your other computer’s home folder when connecting to target disk mode in Mac OS X Catalina

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Just bought a new MacBook Pro 16 inch and when I was trying to transfer files over from my previous Catalina MacBook Pro, I wanted to create a direct connection. There is a way to put your computer into Target disk mode if you have a thunderbolt 3 USB-C cable.

I held down the “T” key when I started up the old computer and then plugged in the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C cable.

You can also use the startup disk control panel to enable this.

No Permission to access my Documents folder

Though I was able to navigate to my home folder and documents folder on the other computer, I was denied access.

Tried reaching the internet for an answer but nothing came up so thought I would write this post on how to get yourself access to these folders.

My first instinct was to use the Get Info command on the folder. When I did that the obvious thing was to change the “everyone” name access to “Read & Write”.

This didn’t work nothing changed. Wanted to jump to the command line to fix this but after going for a walk I realized I hadn’t tried clicking the the plus button below the Sharing and Permissions section.

Once I authenticated as an admin user and then click the “+” button, a dialog box came up to ask me to assign a user.

Just select the user on your current computer. Another line will be created in the Sharing and Permissions section.

A new line will be created with your username of your computer and you can change the kind of access from read only to write access.

Now if you look at the screen shot above you will see the “Do Not Enter” visual is removed from the icon and if you double click on the folder you can open it no problem. Your access control lists (ACL) are all setup and you may copy any files you want.

Clear dial-in info with BlueJeans Office Plugin

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

In my corporate job, my company uses a video conferencing system called BlueJeans. In addition we use Office365. Put these two together in a corporate environment with offices around the globe we end up with a lot of “alignment” meetings. Rather than have to communicate with everyone how to dial-in, I just installed the BlueJeans Office 365 plugin. Every meeting invite I send I can just click the Bluejeans button before sending it and the plug-in fills in all the meeting details with a link to my Bluejeans ID and including phone numbers so people who don’t have Bluejeans can dial-in on their phone. When you standardize the way you put Bluejean’s links in your calendar invites convenient things happen. Connect your Office 365 calendar to the BlueJeans App and the app will show you a list of meetings with the dial-in information picked up from the meeting invite. All the hassle of connecting to a meeting is removed.

MacOS X Mojave text replacement shortcuts not working

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I had a problem with my MacBook not expanding my text replacement shortcuts. In looking at the settings everything was turned on and should have been working. It had a simple solution to fix I just had to add a new text replacement and this fixed it.

5 things I learned about Hong Kong restaurants in the span of eating a pizza

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

It is amazing what you learn from restaurant owners when you are the only customer. Just got a lot of insights into Hong Kong restaurant business models that I wanted to share.

Higher rents lead to smaller places

Some restaurants have seen their rent triple in the last decade. Higher rents lead to smaller places. As landlords demand more rent restaurants have no choice but to move into smaller places while landlords cut up spaces into smaller ones and rent them out. Witness the closing of Grappas Cellar.

Delivery leads to smaller places and higher prices

Even though there is fierce delivery competition in HK among Deliverroo, Foodpanda, and UberEats, the restaurant still has to pay them about 30% and this can be passed onto the customer. Next time you open your food delivery app check the prices and then walk to the restaurant and compare the prices off line. (This is not including the delivery fee.) Hong Kong customers are so price insensitive about delivery that they will pay the extra 30% plus delivery fee even if they live right above the restaurant. No joke!

On top of this, delivery has reduced the number of customers coming to the restaurant which also encourages restaurants to take smaller footprints with the higher rents.

FoodPanda becomes the lifeline of small restaurants in Hong Kong

Delivery kitchens instead of sit-down restaurants

Rather than pay the up to 20,000HKD per year costs of keeping your restaurant license and facilities compliant, you set up a delivery-only kitchen in a warehouse and license it as a Food Factory for a few hundred HKD. This also gives you the flexibility of setting up multiple restaurant “store fronts” on the delivery apps. Be an Italian restaurant, Spanish restaurant and Chinese restaurant all out of one kitchen.

Need discounts to get butts in seats

Hongkongers choose restaurants by how busy they look. A full restaurant with a line outside is good. An empty restaurant bad.

Without lots of customers, you can’t get lots of customers.

How do restaurants solve this chicken and the egg problem?

Enter popular discount app Eatitgo. Diners get steep discounts – often 50% off – and restauranteurs get butts in the seat. The cost? The restaurant pays HK$12 per booking via the app plus the cost of the discounts.

Eatitgo App helps restaurants give the appearance of a busy place for customers that walk by.

The forces at work

The economic and digital forces above have really changed the Hong Kong restaurant scene driving out the larger venues that can support live music while forcing restaurant groups to be more creative to bring in customers such as installing instagrammable motorcycles.

About the author

Brent Deverman, now living in Hong Kong, has almost 20 years in the food and beverage industry as owner of ShenzhenParty.com working to promote local restaurants in Shenzhen, China.

Editing by Larry Salibra.

Featured image: Hong Kong Chinese Food photo by Josh Graciano on Flickr/Creative Commons This restaurant sign is actually in Boston 😉

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

These Are the World’s Most Expensive Cities for Expats in 2019

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Chinese tech hub Shenzhen becomes key trade war battleground as US strikes at Huawei, its ‘dragon’s head’ – South China Morning Post

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

An Incredible Fossil Contains a School of 259 Fish – The Atlantic

Meditation tip with Oura ring

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Oura ring just released an update to their software that lets you record a meditation moment.

I use other apps to meditate. (Currently Waking up by Sam Harris.)

If you still want to get the benefit of quantifying your meditation you can have your ring measure while using a different app. Just use these settings:

These keeps the Oura app silent and allows you to use another guided meditation app.

After you finish your favorite meditation app, then switch to Oura’s application and remember to rate and review your moment to learn your heart rate variability.

Legacy Comments

Oura 2019-06-03T19:06:11
? ?

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Across China: “Sino-British Street” seeks rejuvenation – Xinhua – English.news.cn

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Norsemen is a funny TV show to watch on Netflix. Listening to an interview with the creators.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

It is a shame that Panic software can’t make enough money off Mac and iOS and feels compeled to release a Gameboy.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Why doesn’t my apple watch show me what music I am playing on my iPad? Left out feature.

Reduce your costs of using Mailchimp almost instantly

Legacy Comments

JohnPhilpin 2018-11-02T00:33:47
@deverman I thought I was going to read about Dylan … but no. Personally I have never understood why they don’t build a viewing gallery for visitors.

Legacy Comments

sheilabocchine 2018-10-08T12:53:04
Privato?! Mmmmmmm I miss Turkish breakfast!

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

20 minutes by cab I can be playing volleyball ? and watching a beautiful sunset on the beach drinking piña coladas. So grateful to be able to live here. #piñacoladas #hongkong #hkig #asia #volleyball #sunset #bluesky #dusk #beach #sea #islandlife

Legacy Comments

bdeverman 2018-10-07T20:05:27
Repulse bay has one.
workerb99 2018-10-07T19:37:07
Which beach has vollyball nets? Looking amazing.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Panda ? graffiti all over Istanbul. #istanbul #bosphorus #graffiti #outdoors #panda #bluesky #art #travel

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Learn about my travels and my life. Scan my name tag to follow me on instagram. #hongkong #hkig #hk #instagram #photos #nametag #life #digital #photography

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Appreciate I can get spicy ? Dandan noodles in Hong Kong. #dandanmian #担担面 #hongkong #asia #川菜 #四川 #sichuan #noodles #面 #辣 #spicy

Legacy Comments

500internal_server_error 2018-09-26T11:58:20
🔥🔥

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

View of Wanchai Exhibition Center. #running #around #hongkong #hkig #asia #bay #outdoors #victoriaharbour #tamarpark #island

Legacy Comments

vitaly_ostglobal 2018-09-25T14:15:00
I like this place. Nice view.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Hong Kong blue sky+clouds #hkig #hongkong #asia #skyscraper #outandabout #wanderingeyes #central

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Legacy Comments

doctor.vanilla 2018-09-02T14:38:29
The perfect pull time.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The High speed train from Shenzhen to Hong Kong is opening very soon! It will be a game changer.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Playful elephant showing it all off in Bali. #bali #asia #elephant #statue #island #indonesia

Legacy Comments

help_the_elephants_today 2018-08-29T16:04:38
Awesome!

Legacy Comments

salsa_rose1218 2018-08-19T19:19:19
@mart.in.china like china?
mart.in.china 2018-08-19T19:08:35
@salsa_rose1218 🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳
salsa_rose1218 2018-08-19T17:24:15
No him, no sz!

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Crystal clear water ? #新西兰 #newzealand #southisland #wanaka #nz #lake #clouds #mountains

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

China has the best furniture. #baroque #china #asia #sichuan #goldtrim #pillows

Legacy Comments

jamesdeanmovie 2018-08-27T07:51:48
nice
deverheaux 2018-08-18T00:34:45
😃
miszhanis 2018-08-17T23:37:10
Salute Mayor!

Legacy Comments

miszhanis 2018-08-06T22:18:32
Salut Mayor!!

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Getting into Chaozhou food. Just add vinegar and sugar. #chinese #china #asia #潮州菜 #chaozhou #asia #lunch

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Baby pandas ?#Chengdu #china #asia #animals #bamboo #lazy #babies #pandas #sichuan #nature #mammal

Legacy Comments

miszhanis 2018-08-03T09:06:55
I wanna go here!! They’re so cute! 🐼

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Want to go climb some palm trees. #coconuts #tropical #palmtrees #island #thailand #asia #sunset

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

A nature day. #flower #shenzhen #china #asia #outdoors #wildlife #green

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

On the way to my new office area in TST. #hkig #hongkong #work #commute

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Origami on your bed when you check in. #tokyo #japan #asia #hotel #paper

Legacy Comments

bdeverman 2018-07-26T19:19:28
@500internal_server_error no Idea how.
500internal_server_error 2018-07-25T21:08:52
Can you fold it?

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Busting a digital myth: The naturally gifted product owner

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Empty London Underground #london #europe #subway #mtr #mrt #underground #uk #platform

Legacy Comments

cnhnancy 2018-07-12T08:49:35
England lost 😭

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

My first ever App Store purchase was OmniFocus from the Omnigroup.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Sleep deprived and feeling crabby. ? #srilanka #asia #beach #wildlife#marinelife #life #pinchers #sand #sea

Legacy Comments

emmatianqi 2018-07-12T17:40:43
🙌 same here I need a RISE break

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

RISE conference starts today. Though I can’t make the day events I’ll be out at night. Message me if you are around and want to have a drink.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

A sunset ? that could be anywhere but this one was on the Shenzhen coast. #shenzhen #sunset #daycomplete #asia #sun #china #outdoors

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

When is the next time I could be sitting by a pool in Thailand? ? #Thailand #island #asia #travel

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Who is in beautiful Hong Kong this week for the RISE conference? See you around the events. #conference #tech #exhibition #asia #hongkong #rise #riseconf @riseconfhq @hypercasey

Legacy Comments

rorooooosa 2018-07-09T11:53:01
woo nice

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

When it rains in HK I feel like this caged bird. #bird #cage

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Nature finds a way. #srilanka #beach #sand #sprout #asia

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Camouflage boat in London #uk #london #thames #boat #camoflauge #unitedkingdom

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Sunset in San Diego. #sunset #usa #california #sandiego

Legacy Comments

wenbing.zheng 2018-07-01T11:13:45
I missed SD!

Legacy Comments

robertsgriffith 2018-06-21T08:44:53
Spicy Sichuan – love it!

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

I was the skeptical of another interview podcast but have to highly recommend After On as he interviews thinkers from all fields half of which I was reading about in the 90’s in Wired magazine like Stuart Brand, Rodney Brooks and Chris Anderson. Many of these people, the host Rob Reid has hung out with before so the conversations are really casual and in-depth.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Craving the spicy food of Chengdu, Sichuan. #china #asia #spicy #chengdu #chinesefood #peppercorns #sichuan @ma321809

Legacy Comments

lucyhuangyuyan 2018-06-23T11:26:59
Thank you!😀
bdeverman 2018-06-21T18:10:19
@lucyhuangyuyan no I am posting out of order. Happy birthday tomorrow!
lucyhuangyuyan 2018-06-21T16:27:21
you in the ChengDu now?
mandipants86 2018-06-21T10:31:31
Yum!
ma321809 2018-06-20T16:57:07
@bdeverman let’s do this!!!
bdeverman 2018-06-20T13:59:13
@ma321809 hell yah! Miss this restaurant.
ma321809 2018-06-20T12:48:23
Should we take a short trip back to Chengdu again just to eat??? Lol

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thefutureisfemale2621 2018-06-02T11:05:07
love it lets share it dm ([@ proudfitfam]) for feature 😆

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Abandoned mining ⛏ equipment @janrapids #nz #newzealand #southisland #mineshaft #mining #miningequipment #rust #outdoors

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Multiple pork sandwich ?. #bacon #pork #porkbelly #sandwich #michigan #food #meal ?

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A flower day. #Singapore #gardens #gardensbythebay #asia #citystate #flowers #bright

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bdeverman 2018-05-28T11:27:46
@yvonnechiong 😅 not really there I post my photos out of order.
yvonnechiong 2018-05-28T10:39:28
Enjoy Singapore!

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Cool tip: press Commad-shift-period to show/hide invisible files in the Mac finder.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Deer ? of Nara Japan #wildlife #deer #asia #japan #park

Error with jsonfeed wordpress plugin and micro blog

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Anything can happen in China ??. It is full of possibilities. You can be invited to a party on a floating house with a horse stable and live peacocks. #2009 #longgang #china #asia #shenzhen #floating #house #surreal #raft #amazing @mattjohnponchard

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

The Telegraph is just starting to talk about [obtaining registered users] after they realized they were decimated by Facebook. From the founding of ShenzhenParty.com it was always about registration and user generated content such as events. Above link is a great podcast to listen too though on Digiday.

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While if you are in Shenzhen you will still have to take the ferry to Macau and Zhuhai, starting this summer Hong Kongers will be able to drive from across the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. CNN takes you on a ride across the bridge now in their video.

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Hiking in the green. #hiking #nz #newzealand #bluesky #green #clouds #farm #field #mountains #hike #man #roadlesstraveled

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I am testing a post from a new micro.blog client called Icro.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Sunset in Hong Kong from the Royal Yacht Club. Thanks for inviting @napoenchine Congratulations ?! #yacht #shenzhen #asia #hongkong #sunset #cityscape #bluesky #sea #bay

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Thanks to @hiufu for taking us to the famous Tung po restaurant. Search for her video on @cnntravel #hongkong #restaurant #cookedfoodmarket #asia #foodie @privatesky @karla.cripps @vycl7 @jedurston @haruhanaka

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littletroubleinbigchina 2018-05-08T17:37:52
Nicely done
christy8311 2018-05-08T11:46:04
Wow, that’s a skill to open a bottle

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Chirag 2018-05-06T13:06:05
@deverman Interesting branding too. The 21 grams in our neck of the woods is an ‘Urban Balkan Bistro’ 🙂

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I went to a shenzhen cafe called Decameron to check it out after ShenzhenParty.com featured it and updated the article a bit.

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Arms started flailing after I realized there was no way to go but down in my New Zealand ?? bungy jump. #bungy #bungee #jump #nz #queenstown

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xpats_bar 2018-04-24T23:36:34
🎶 I believe I can fly 🎶
chernomor.aleksandr 2018-04-23T16:47:34
Brave!!!
rorooooosa 2018-04-23T15:03:42
啊
tina_chen9061 2018-04-22T23:38:32
Cool!

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Going back to 1986 to read the The New New Product Development Game seeing glimpses of an Agile Scrum developement process.

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Views in Queenstown are stunning. #nz #newzealand #paragliding #mountains #lakes #boating #southisland #outdoors

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franklysnapping 2018-04-22T08:02:28
Such a beautiful spot 😍

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zanda_photography 2018-04-12T14:25:47
?

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Fresh paint in my neighborhood.

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poppy_shmy 2018-04-09T22:07:41
?
yldacc 2018-04-08T16:45:02
Impressive content!

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Video of They Might be Giants song Don’t Let’s Start (official version) shot at the New York World’s fair grounds.

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Nearby “the office “.

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robertsgriffith 2018-04-01T03:35:38
Nice shot!

Hong Kong is dotted with bitcoin ATMs as well as ATMs for converting physical fiat currency into other digital currencies such as buy cash and Etherium and Bitcoin cash. ATM fees are not always transparent and some ATMs are 24 hours and some are not so research closely before you go.

Crypto Exchanges

Online crypto exchanges based out of Hong Kong have also sprung up including OKCoinand ANX.

Blockchain meet ups

Blockchain events in Hong Kong happen all the time and you will find them on meetups or eventbrite.

The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong also organizes events.

Fintech Incubator

They Hong Kong government Cyberport is now supporting and incubating Fintechs. This government support helps promote blockchain in the city. The government of Hong Kong seems very supportive of blockchain based technology and keeps regulation favorable.

Blockchain Conferences

Attend Blockchain conferences such as Token2049. The first instance of this conference sold out very quickly. It is a sure thing that more Blockchain conferences will be organized here.

Also just heard about the Immutable Blockchain Summit that was held in Hong Kong.

Podcasts to Prepare yourself

Lots going on with Blockchain in the ASIA region and here are some podcast interviews to get you started.
– Jason Goldberg on Simple Token
– Jehan Chu on Hong Kong and Crypto Currencies
– Max Ward OpenPort Logistics

Thanks to Chris Moore for his insight and feedback on the Hong Kong blockchain scene.

Article original published on NowShenzhen.

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Involved in multiple site migrations now have to read this guide: Site Migration Guide: SEO Strategy, Process, & Checklist – Moz. Who wants to help migrate ShenzhenParty.com? thanks to Chris Moore for sharing.

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FaceBook has lost the plot

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Was working next to the Tate Modern last week. Thanks to @peterbale and Bal Cheema for getting me in. Picasso exhibition showed his very productive year of 1932.

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Committing to spend more time at Hong Kong beaches this year. #beaches #hongkong #outdoors #sea #coastline #asia #sand

Legacy Comments

i__am__tingting 2018-03-31T03:51:06
Looks goodly
buywhat9_ 2018-03-30T15:00:49
Aw sweet
agnesltyx 2018-03-22T05:17:38
Great stuff!
judy_yx 2018-03-21T16:35:09
Made my day
tyler_vivid 2018-03-20T17:59:39
Amazing absolutely
haruhanaka 2018-03-19T15:48:56
Whose dog is this?

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2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

Japanese reality TV Terrace House Opening Doors just dropped the new season on Netflix. I am watching an Interview with Lauren Tsai from the previous season. Thanks Larry for letting me know.

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Listened to an interview of Frank OZ promoting Muppet Guys Talking. Growing up on The Muppets looking forward to hearing the creative process of making the show.

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“Even if you are falling that’s ok there is a trampoline waiting for you. It’s so easy you just have to believe.” Thanks to Chuck Thompson for sharing the video. Chuck do you know how many shrimps Flamingos have to eat before they turn pink?

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Major League baseball to open baseball store in Hong Kong.

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I see the building of minimal viable products like this way too much. Gave me a chuckle.

Reading Homo Deus

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

You can get any electric sign made for your fly by night copy company in Shenzhen. ?

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A great way to eat Toufu.

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#tourist #Osaka #castle #sunset #reflection #japan

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Fulfilling Sunday morning hike in Hong Kong.

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Sunday horse races in #hongkong. How to pick the winners?

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The Shenzhen Daily has published an article about one of the founders of Shenzhen Party written by Newman Huo:

YOUNG American entrepreneur, Brent Deverman, said he had no regrets after moving to Shenzhen when he graduated with degrees in computer science and East Asian studies from Michigan State University in 2000.

“If I hadn’t chosen to come to China eight years ago, I would never have been able to have so many opportunities I had in Shenzhen. I’d probably have ended up as a software engineer for a company in Detroit,” said Deverman, 31, from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Read Full Article

Past Programming: TI-85 Calculator

2026-05-16T01:03:39Z

In my high school days I purchased a TI-85 Programmable graphic calculator. This was at the same time when I was getting on the internet and American Online. A few of the programs that me and my friend Vance O’Neill made are floating on the net and for posterity I link to them here:

Shadow Paint 2.6 Review

Palace Game Review

ateball.85p

CNTRGRAV Read Me

Hang Man Game
Hang111- This is a TI-85 implementation of Hangman(tm). It comes with two dictionaries. By Shadow Software(tm), shdwsoftwr@aol.com