
The best things and stuff of 2014 - untothebreach
http://blog.fogus.me/2014/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2014/
======
NhanH
I will need a follow up blog title "How to be productive" or something
similar.

But seriously, I can't fathom myself doing half the stuff being listed in the
post in a year.

------
chrisball91
I've read in the region of 250 books across 4 years and managed to develop
some good habits for getting through books.

1) Aim for one book a month or one book every two weeks. Divide the number of
pages by the days in your chosen time frame and commit at all costs to reading
your set number of daily pages.

2) Take opportunities like going to the toilet, catching the train, being
driven somewhere, waiting for food to cook and the 20 minutes before you sleep
for the night to get some pages read. 3) Get an ebook version and listen to
this while shopping, walking the dog, driving to work or any other redundant
time where holding a book is not possible.

Getting a couple of pages in here and there every day adds up very quickly and
before you know it, it's become a habit. I do stress though that you must be
really interested in the content of the book or the motivation just dips and
if your forcing yourself to read through it anyway, the information doesn't
sink in.

------
cheeseprocedure
When I see these end-of-year book lists, I wonder if I'm the slowest reader on
the planet.

~~~
lmm
Arrange it so your commute is by public transport. I get through a few books a
month without really trying; having a routine where you read a bit every day
is how you do large amounts of reading.

~~~
cheeseprocedure
Yeah, I'm lucky enough to commute by transit. I usually get through at least a
couple books a month, but I have trouble reading beyond the pace of speech.
I'm a total book junkie so it's a constant source of frustration :)

~~~
lmm
Deliberate practice. Make sure you're not subvocalizing the words as you're
reading; you should be just looking at them and understanding them. There are
gimmicky approaches to reading faster, but I haven't found them to be helpful.

~~~
Micaiah_Chang
One approach that I learned was to use your fingers to underline the current
line that you're reading, going at a "normal" speed when you're tired and then
trying to "drag" your eyesight along when you want to push yourself.

The reason given is that it prevents you from accidentally rereading a line or
skipping over one or changing lines midsentence.

This seems like one of those gimmicky approaches, and I remember being sold on
this approach rather than being entirely convinced. Have you seen this before?

------
_nullandnull_
> Norwegian Wood, The Contortionists Handbook

I hope he reads both these books consecutively. These two books are worlds
apart but both equally excellent. It would be an interesting contrast.

~~~
phaemon
I'm disappointed that these are two different books, rather than the title of
one.

------
acidx
Surprised to see that my blog post about Lwan made to such list.

~~~
ddoolin
This may sound strange since it was mostly a technical post, but your blogging
about Lwan inspired me to really delve into HTTP servers. So much so that I
grabbed a copy of the HTTP/2 draft spec and am working on implementing it (in
a very non-serious way). I've always been fascinated by HTTP servers and
realizing that I knew very little of what you were writing about motivated me
to find out more.

~~~
acidx
Awesome! If you ever open source it, Show HN. Or write a blog post about it,
maybe I can get around implementing HTTP/2 in Lwan as well. :)

------
hammerha
That list seems more than mine of my life.

------
gluggymug
"Favorite code read ... Z3 (Verilog)"

As someone working in ASIC design and verification, that code is not a good
read IMO. I am stunned it even synthesized. The use of "initial" and "task" is
not generally for describing hardware.

------
shoshin23
I really liked Read-Eval-Print-Loop, I hope he goes on to publish a few issues
in 2015.

~~~
e40
I love going to some random page [1] and seeing a photo I took. :)

[1]
[https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove002/read](https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove002/read)

------
ExpiredLink
Interests and tastes obviously differ vastly. I haven't noticed any of those
"best things and stuff of 2014" and I feel no impulse to click on one of those
links after skimming the list.

------
polynomial
" Number of books published: 1 "

" Number of books written: 0 "

[http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/images/divide-by-
zero.jpg](http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/images/divide-by-zero.jpg)

~~~
kngl
Written last year maybe?

~~~
fogus
That would be the most likely answer... and is indeed the correct answer. ;)

~~~
agumonkey
Why should we trust you ?

LE: don't waste time downvoting people, I was obviously absurding.

~~~
zanny
"looks at site in the OP" "looks at username of parent" I'd buy it.

