How to upgrade your Kindle while keeping your existing notes, bookmarks and reading progress

For many years I’ve been using a Kindle Touch as my primary device to read books and long-form web content. I also employ a strict regimen to capture my learnings via my BookTracker app. Recently, I upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite for its better screen resolution and warm backlight. I thought that the upgrade would be as seamless as that of a phone’s, and I could easily migrate all my notes and reading progress over....

September 5, 2022 · 8 min · 1671 words · Tiffena Kou

How to produce an interactive visualization using Matplotlib in Python

Problem with 3D charts I’ve been using Jupyter notebooks inside Visual Studio Code as my Python coding environment, and really enjoy its capability to mix markdown, code, text output and charting in the same place. Recently, I want to visualize the distribution pattern of my dataset for trimming. As I plot a 3D graph using the Matplotlib library, a static inline graph works fine in my notebook, but it provides not much value as it flattens one axis where my data are concentrated....

July 28, 2022 · 4 min · 732 words · Tiffena Kou

Danshari - a radical way to declutter before clutter even happens

What is Danshari Danshari is a mental model pioneered by Hideko Yamashita via a book series in the 2000s, as a way to organize our lives by making deliberate choices. Per Yamashita, she got the idea from her yoga practice and a pilgrimage stay in Koyasan. I used the term mental model and not housekeeping tactics because I truly believe that this has far more practicality beyond just organizing our...

July 1, 2022 · 4 min · 1972 words · Tiffena Kou

Integrate Firebase CLI & Hugo with VS Code for a seamless development environment in Windows

In my blog post about deploying a Hugo site to Firebase hosting, I mentioned the inconvenience of jumping out of Visual Studio Code to use the Firebase CLI for project creation, maintenance and deployment. I’ve finally resolved this issue so that my workflow can now be kept 100% inside VS Code. My current workflow Here’s my current workflow on a Windows machine. I author my blog (via markdown and javascript/html files) in VS Code, then use Hugo to stage to localhost and generate static files for the site....

June 22, 2022 · 5 min · 965 words · Tiffena Kou

Why do we procrastinate or aim for unachievable perfection, and how to fix it?

Are these scenarios common to us or those around us? We want to create an app that millions will download and use everyday. We want to write a blog post that will be cross-linked from all popular sites and social media accounts. We spend so much time over-planning that we postpone starting the actual work. Once we actually sit down and work, we are shocked by the stark reality and keep stumbling upon blocks after blocks....

June 19, 2022 · 4 min · 799 words · Tiffena Kou

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 3 : Metrics

This is Part 3 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to assist in converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 and Part 2, I’ve explained the why and how of the book tracking system. Now let’s dive into implementing the metrics to track our investment. How many books am I reading now?...

June 10, 2022 · 8 min · 1625 words · Tiffena Kou

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 2 : Build the app

This is Part 2 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 I discussed why we need to take an investment view to scrutinize the output of what we read. In this post, I’m going to show you how I build the book tracking system using Google Sheets, Apps Script and AppSheet....

June 1, 2022 · 16 min · 3209 words · Tiffena Kou

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 1 : Learn better

Why we can’t recall what we read This is Part 1 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 2 and Part 3 I will explain the technical details of building one. Have you spent a lot of free time reading books, only finding out later that you can’t recall anything?...

May 23, 2022 · 7 min · 1370 words · Tiffena Kou

Setup your own blog in under 1 hour with Hugo and Firebase, all for free!

Current Problem I have been using various free hosting providers such as x10hosting with self-hosted Wordpress blog in the last few years. I encountered various problems such as, poor site performance if you are using free hosting plans. creating a self-hosted WordPress site needs to be configured with many sets of credentials including the hosting provider, cPanel, the WordPress admin portal itself and the mysql database for WordPress. All these loops expose security vulnerabilities one way or the other....

May 15, 2022 · 8 min · 1532 words · Tiffena Kou