Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #99, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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I started reading Wanderlust this week. I had kept it in my to read list for a long time. For most of the time I had it in my bookmark list, I could have picked it up any time. It had mostly been available to borrow.
The subheading for the book is - ‘A history of walking’.
I guess that tells you all you need to know about why I wanted to read this. I am about 50 pages in, in a 400 page book. And it feels like a book where I want to highlight everything.
Like this,
To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
I wrote about this, once upon a time in why I walk the same route everyday.
The thing that I have noticed now, walking the same route everyday, is the little buds sprouting from the branches on the trees on the way. I took a picture today. I could not get the camera to focus on the little sprouting leaf.
But my eyes saw them just fine.
It was beautiful. We moved here in autumn, so I haven’t yet seen this path I walk on, full of the green of the leaves.
I can’t wait.
On waiting and other things, I read today - Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself - Jason Liu by Jason Liu
In the short term, you would be much happier if you accepted and admitted to yourself that the reason you don’t have what you want is simply because you do not want it badly enough. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. Then the next question is: Do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want? It’s not the last question, but it definitely is the next question.
And this section above seemed so serene.
I find ourselves struggling with this now. Me and Prerna. Do we want to achieve what we want? Mostly, yes. Then we need to work. And that might not make us as happy as we would, sitting next to each other on the couch, lazying off. But that is what we need to do now.
Two other things changed this week.
1. I replaced Net News Wire as my RSS reader of choice and installed current in it’s place.
I have thoughts. Of course, I do. I am getting to use the new ways of doing things, getting to terms with the new mental models. One thing I miss, is control. The way I used to use NNW, was go to each source, read whatever I wanted to read, mark the rest as Read.
Current works differently. I am in a stream/river/feed. I release whatever I don’t want to read. Whatever I read, gets marked as read. And so on. There are no unread counts in the app. I can dip in, read what I can and then leave.
What I find myself doing is reaching for inbox zero. To ensure that there are no items in the river. I think it will take time to change the way I read. And be a little bit calmer.
I will report back on how this experiment goes.
2. I replaced my keyboard. Say hello to Nuphy Air 75
Savya broke the USB C connector on my Keychron K2. I was happy to use it in wireless mode, but the battery discharged and I just could not charge it. I reached out to Keychron support and a few hardware stores in Helsinki. No one wanted to fix it. Keychron said they could ship the part for free, but I would need to pay for shipping and of course fix it myself.
I have not soldered in my life. I could start now. But I guess it will be cheaper and better to get it fixed the next time I am home, in India.
And so, after all that, I ordered the Nuphy Air 75 V2. I talked to Claude, it suggested some keycaps that I would enjoy for writing. It came, and I had kept it in a cupboard for a couple of days. I had wanted to unbox it, type on it, but there were so many other things to do - taxes, home maintenance stuff, walking, reading.
It is such a joy to type on. So much better than the Keychrons. I love it. And it looks good too. I love it. So far so good.
/five things to share
1. Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making subscribers pay extra by Jay Peters
Using OpenClaw with Claude AI is about to get a lot more expensive, thanks to Anthropic’s new policy changes. Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to an email sent to users on Friday evening. Instead, if users want to use OpenClaw with Claude, they’ll have to use a “pay-as-you-go option” that will be billed separate from their Claude subscription.
Capacity management is a real problem for these companies. This past week was the first time I hit a limit while using Claude Code. My usage is fairly nominal with Claude so it was surprising. But they are struggling with managing the increased usage of their tools.
The second thing I wondered was this - the problem with using a service like Claude is they can keep tweaking the limits as they wish and they get all the data. They are in a growth phase now, but they will look to enshittify it at some point in the future. How will things look then?
A scary thought.
2. Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison
People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders. Your coders need to have solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and churn out the code. That’s changed completely. My programming work, I need two minutes every now and then to prompt my agent about what to do next. And then I can do the other stuff and I can go back. I’m much more interruptible than I used to be.
Kind of goes against the whole deep work principle. Times sure are changing.
3. This even smaller credit card-sized e-reader has one tragic flaw by Andrew Liszewski
I was thrilled to find the X3 fits perfectly on the back of my iPhone 16 Pro, and then once again disappointed to discover its magnets aren’t strong enough to keep it securely in place. Magnetic accessories like PopSockets or the OhSnap Snap Grip have a satisfying “thunk” when attaching them to your phone. Attaching the X3 to my 16 Pro feels more like the devices are exchanging a weak hug. They don’t remain aligned when holding the two together, and on several occasions the X3 fell off my phone while being inserted or removed from a pocket.
I want to buy a phone sized device which can help me read. The problem is what I read. Not just books. I Use RSS to read from the web. That, is the missing component in this and all the other devices like this.
But damn is it tempting.
4. What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? by Kelsey Rexroat
Super-readers read on lunch breaks and before bed, on buses and in grocery lines, and sometimes—confessed sheepishly—during meetings with the camera off. [..]
Phones and e-readers make this possible, turning idle moments into opportunities to microdose literature. Reading is not scheduled so much as threaded throughout the day.
I find doing this myself.
For this article, the writer did not include people who read audiobooks. I use audiobooks extensively though.
Whatever works.
5. For $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air by Joanna Stern
It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just pulled the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope onstage at Macworld.
Within minutes, Windows PC executives everywhere lost their minds. They grabbed the nearest office envelope, tried to shove in their plastic laptops, and tore straight through the paper. Engineers were summoned. Assistants were dispatched for larger envelopes.
A fun read. Through three transitions, the following event remains the same - race to become the MacBook Air.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.