Recently
I wanted to throw out a brief update on what I’ve been building, writing, reading, and other stuff over the last month.
Listening
For several years now, I take a photo at every concert I attend. It’s a nice little reminder to myself about where I was in the show, and even though taking a cell-phone photo doesn’t produce great results, I love stretching that muscle from back in my concert-photojournalism days. Well, I’ve decided to start putting them up on this site (along with some words about each show). Here are my concerts from the last month:












I’m going to Lollapalooza this weekend, so there will be some photos from those shows next time.
Building
I painted and mounted some new pegboard in my studio office. It replaces the myriad thumbtacks and tiny shelves I had previously screwed to the wall to hold the smaller tools. Build places to house your tools - you will find yourself building more things with them when they are visible and near.





I wanted more greenery in my basement studio, but it hardly gets enough light to sustain me, let alone a plant and photosynthesis. So, I built my own mount and softening cage for some LED grow lights that I then mounted beneath a top shelf. It’s a bit tight, but it fits, the cactus is already reaching upward, and the mellow light puts some warmth in the workspace.
Writing
I’ve been updating the software and design behind my Notes Garden open-source software over the last few weeks: compressing the visual patterns, adding proverbs, building a custom index for organization, etc.
To support some of those changes, I’ve also released a new version of my open-source Ruby gem/library for interacting with the Readwise API: readwise-ruby v0.5.0
Harvesting
From the indoor garden we’ve been eating tomatoes and lettuce and kale and jalapeños (so many, I pickled them) and cilantro and sage and mint and more. Advice : pickle your jalapeños in cold brine. The first time I pickled jalapeños, I used boiling hot brine (as recommended to me by a cookbook) and it basically made pepper spray and a very unpleasant evening in my kitchen.
On the patio outside, I’ve been graciously picking the giant hydrangeas, eagerly plucking basil and mint, carefully funneling the solar panels into power banks.
We also harvested our first nectarines this weekend, and since then we’ve been eating a couple fruits from the tree each day to keep up with the ripeness.


Reading
I wrote up reviews of some books I’ve finished in the last month:





I’ve also been adding more notes to my Notes Garden - some recent favorites (each one links to its source article/book for you to read in full):






I’m currently reading Writing Tools (this is already changing my writing) and Braiding Sweetgrass (this is already changing my relationship to my environment), so expect to hear about those soon.
What have you been building? What have you been harvesting? This time of year, the two start to overlap…
Josh Beckman