Steve Holden's Blog

Ideas & Freedom Matter

I recently learned that one of the authors of The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living -- Ryan Holiday -- had his Naval Academy lecture cancelled:

For the last five years, I've been reading this book as part of my daily morning devotion practice (MORE INFO).

I am so sorry this happened. 

Ideas matter. Freedom matters. Freedom of speech matters.  Critical thinking matters. Learning matters. 

Sticking your head in the sand is stupid.

Banning books is a sign of weakness and fear.

While you can't watch the planned talk, here is the video of the talk that Ryan recorded later:

TIP - Google Search Without AI Results

Google recently created a new search option that provides no AI results.

Here is the basic link:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

The key part of the link above is the addition of &udm=14.

You will get a search result related to what %s is if you click the above link.

So you could change this to whatever you want, like (weather):

https://www.google.com/search?q=weather&udm=14

Anything you put in the search box will inherit the &udm=14 tag, and your search results on that page will continue to exclude AI results.

 

TIP - EPUB format for Kindle

The last couple of days, I've encountered several situations where I wanted to quickly send content to my Kindle Paperwhite via the Amazon send to Kindle email service.

They support several formats (PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP, EPUB).

One piece of content I update weekly in Obsidian is in MD file format.

I converted that content to a graphic, to text, to PDF, and then to EPUB.  

I found the EPUB to be the best for me.

The conversion was simple: I cut and pasted the content in Obsidian to an open document in Google Docs and then "Download" (from the File menu) the EPUB version.

Once downloaded, I use Google Gmail to attach the EPUB to an email to my personalized Kindle email address.