posts in random

Using Transcripts

18 April 2025 – Written by Valentin Huber – in blog and random

I much prefer listening to reading in general. It’s just easier for me to follow and learn that way. However, if you are working with dense material, such as nonfiction books, audio is not always the easiest to work with. I find myself seeking back a couple of seconds or manually transcribing a sentence or paragraph for my notes fairly often. This is annoying. However, there is a better way, using modern transcription engines and players. So here is my workflow:

Live Albums

13 May 2024 – Written by Valentin Huber – in blog and random

I’m a big fan of well-done live recordings and over the past years, my mind has accumulated a list of great live albums, from all over the genre spectrum, in no particular order:

Undistractionate Instagram

12 December 2023 – Written by Valentin Huber – in blog and random

Instagram is great at sucking as much time out of you as possible. While I enjoy seeing what people I know get up to, I find myself spending hours looking at random reels that add little value to my life. So I wrote a quick adblock list to block the app parts I don’t actually want to see. Specifically, it blocks:

The “Explore” tab
The “Reels” tab
Any suggested posts after you’ve seen all posts from accounts you follow

Undistractionate YouTube

25 February 2022 – Written by Valentin Huber – in blog and random

One thing I’ve done in the past is use a combination of hacks to hide certain distractions in YouTube to prevent me from falling down rabbit holes. Requirements (this is personal and might be different for you!):

13 minutes to the moon

30 January 2022 – Written by Valentin Huber – in blog and random

“13 minutes to the moon” might just be the best podcast ever made. Produced by the BBC, with a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, it explores two of NASAs Apollo missions to the moon.