Exercise is hard but it’s even harder if you have to use your brain and muscles at the same time. I wish a personal trainer would just teleport into my house whenever I work out, tell me exactly what to do, and then record my progress (and complaints) to improve the program going forward. Apps are too rigid or too complicated; personal trainers are expensive and require scheduling; but using Claude Code as a personal trainer has worked out well for me.

A stacked bar chart of training sessions per week from mid-March to early July 2026, colored by type (strength, cardio, yoga, dodgeball, crossfit). Most weeks have 2–4 sessions with strength (blue) as the backbone, hitting or exceeding the 2–3 strength-sessions-per-week target band nearly every week. Total: 45 sessions, averaging 2.8 per week.

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I’ve been working remotely since before it was cool, and one thing I wish more people paid attention to is meeting equipment. It’s annoyingly common to join a remote meeting with someone on flaky WiFi, with a barely-understandable microphone, and a camera where they show up as a shadowy blob.

All of this is fixable, and if you work remotely it’s worth spending a little bit of money to do it. Remote meetings where you can see and (more importantly) hear each other clearly are much nicer, and lead to more natural and collaborative conversations.

A home office desk with two monitors displaying nature scenes, a white circular key light and black webcam mounted on top of the left monitor, a Sennheiser gaming headset with boom microphone, split ergonomic keyboard, and blue-gray hexagonal acoustic panels on the wall behind the desk

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I’ve gone snowboarding about 30 times since I started learning a few years ago, but every time I’m on a lift, most of the other riders have been out 90 days just this season. In fact, almost everyone I see has been skiing or snowboarding for decades, and comes out almost every day.

It’s hard to stay motivated when I’m the worst snowboarder on the mountain.

This might seem like a big coincidence, but I’m also one of the worst runners I know AND one of the worst writers that I’m aware of.

Iron Man meme showing Obadiah Stane in a suit grabbing and yelling at a scientist in a cave laboratory. Top text reads 'SCOTT ALEXANDER COULD WRITE SOMETHING BETTER IN A CAVE'. The scientist is labeled 'MY HOMUNCULUS', Stane is labeled 'MY BRAIN WHICH I CONSIDER TO BE SEPERATE FROM ME FOR SOME REASON', and bottom text reads '...WITH A BOX OF MEMES OLDER THAN JESUS!'

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I used to get carpel tunnel symptoms while working on a computer all day, and the thing that finally solved it was a vertical mouse. Unfortunately, there’s only a couple options, and the one I like best has an annoying issue where the wheel wears out after a year or so. It’s cheap enough that this wasn’t a huge deal, but I finally got around to trying to fix it and realized it’s stupidly easy.

Close-up of a black Anker vertical mouse on a desk with blue annotation arrows and white text labels. The top arrow points to the black textured rubber ring around the scroll wheel labeled "Rubber part". The bottom arrow points to the silver ridged metal wheel visible beneath, labeled "Metal wheel".

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Do you have an insatiable hunger for potatoes? Do you have a fully-sated hunger for complicated recipes and having to cook all the time? This version of Pommes Anna, simplified and altered to an extent that will make French people cry, might be the recipe for you!

Casserole dish of baked potato slices resting on a stove, showing the randomly-layered top is crispy and browned while the edges are fully-baked

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I’ve always found it annoying to have a bunch of keys in my pocket (they’re heavy, sometimes poke into you, and create weird bulges), so I try to carry as few as possible. Unfortunately, I’ve reached a point where I have a fairly large number of keys that I need …

Keys on carabiners lined up next to a smaller key ring

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Car side and rear-view mirrors are designed to give you a view around your car, but they typically don’t show you the two spots directly to the side of your car (the “blind spots”). Luckily, you can increase the field of view of your side mirrors by over 200% and virtually eliminate blindspots by adding aftermarket blind spot mirrors.

Car side mirror with a small round blind spot mirror attached to its corner; the blind spot mirror reveals a car alongside that the main mirror doesn't show

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This is probably obvious to a lot of people, but I thought it still might be useful since I didn’t think of it myself for years. Since sometime in college, I’ve been the kind of person who wakes up groggily at 10 am and then drags myself out of bed. I’ve always been a late sleeper so I didn’t think much about it, but when I stopped taking allergy pills, I fairly quickly became someone who woke up around 8:30 am without much effort (still not early but not crazy-late).

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