Productivity

This journal is generated by AI…

The Ulanzi TC002 Pixbar Smart Pixel Clock II is a clock with a 16×52 LED pixel canvas and a built-in battery. What makes it interesting to me is the HTTP API: I can send it GIFs and text, so I can decide what belongs on that little screen. I vibe coded ulanzi-tc002 to work with it. Two uses have become part of my day: animated pixel art from my Grok Bot, and a display that tells me whether my coding agents are still working.

AI agents write code fastest when the work is sliced small and a human stays on judgment. My workflow runs a four-step loop: plan the feature into units, hand the branch stack to the agent, review each PR myself, then let the agent address my comments.

Stacked pull requests let you review a feature in logical slices rather than one enormous diff. The challenge is managing the branches, synchronizing PRs, and surviving rebases without breaking the chain. gh-stack handles the scaffolding. It tracks your branch stack in a local JSON file, generates PRs that base each one to its parent, and works on any GitHub repo regardless of whether your organization has enabled native stacked PR support.

Renaming browser tab names may seem like a simple task, but it can actually be quite challenging.

I read the article Autofocus: The Productivity System That Treats Your to-Do List Like a River1 recently. I used to fill the time slots with tasks daily, but I rarely completed all the planned tasks. Even for the completed ones, I often missed the scheduled time slot. I felt stressed and guilty. So I decide to give the Autofocus Method a try.

Updates I have created an plugin for this feature. A simple CSS rule sets the minimum width of the active pane in Obsidian.

There are two apps both work for me in scoop extras bucket. scoop bucket add extras scoop install rbtray traymond They both require running their background process first. Rbtray minimizes a window into system tray by right clicking the window minimization button, while traymond us shortcuts Win + Shift + Z。

I have read the post Get Everything Done & Still Have Time to Play by Jackie Ashton recently and adopted some strategies into my process. Before I plan the tasks daily by allocating them into time slots in a calendar, it is tedious and time-wasting. It messes up my agenda, which is intended only to contain the events that I must do on time. And it makes me nervous and exhausted to follow a pre-defined schedule every day. My new process is much simpler. I review my life objectives first and group them into categories. Then I evaluate their importance in my current life stage and allocate my energy in percentage into them.

I categorize reading into 3 different categories: Skim Reading: This includes the feeds I subscribed in Inoreader, websites I frequently visit and articles shared from my friends. I quickly skim them using fragmented time, usually less than half an hour in total per day, and save the articles which worth reading to Instapaper. Insensitive Reading: Instapaper sends me 20 unread articles to Kindle every morning. If I can spare at least 10 minutes, I will read them on the Kindle. Challenging Reading: Papers are definitely in this category. There are also articles hard to understand, I will print them into PDF. I schedule the time in advance, usually one hour or more, and read the PDF files on Sony Digital Paper. I’ll share the detailed workflow and the IFTTT applets used in the process.