Philip I. Thomas

Here is my monthly newsletter about what I'm up to, which I send in place of social media. What I did in December• Visited Boulder • Launched a print edition of Contraption Company, which was a fun project - and began shipping snail mail to subscribers around the world. I also published Building less, tinkering more, and walking away sooner, Digital gardening, Outage, tacit knowledge, and a new project, and today shared Trivet - a Google sign-in plugin for Ghost blogs.  • Got an Oura Ring. A random person in a sauna described Oura to me as sycophantic, and I increasingly find myself agreeing with that - I slept 4 hours one night and it gave me a "moderate" sleep score of 56 / 100, whereas Whoop would have probably given a 5. • Hosted a book launch party in SF for Sinan's Building Agentic AI. • Mister Jiu's was my favorite restaurant I went to this month. • Attended the Substack Utopia Debates. Things to share• Books: Finally finished Walter Isaacon's biography of Ben Franklin - my favorite part was learning about Franklin's negotiations with France and England to end the Revolutionary War. I re-read Working with Americans: Tips for Danes, which is an anthropological look at US culture - including chapters like "The enthusiasm gap and why you have to act excited to succeed in the US". Read Shopkeeping by Peter Miller and immediately bought three copies as gifts. Read New Nordic Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place: A Compendium and this passage resonated with me: “In many ways, the closing decades of the 21st century were all about having more of everything, a period marked by an aesthetics of abundance. In the private home, kitchens grew bigger and glistened with chrome and cool surfaces. Since then, things have changed. The glossy sheen of the mass-produced gave way to a desire for something warmer, for objects that radiate individuality, history and a sense of place.” • Articles: I enjoyed the NYT's profile of author Solvej Balle and picked up her books to read. Our Geniuses Define Our Times explains Taylor Swift.  • Magazines: Read some Brutus and Popeye magazines I got in Japan - they're really well-done, and I wish I had downloaded their Brutus app to use its maps feature while in Tokyo. • Videos: Been watching Chris Young's videos - he wrote Modernist Cuisine and now does science-y videos about cooking techniques. Noma Just Entered Specialty Coffee, so... I Visited. Recreating New York with Stanley Kubrick. Why Restaurant Owners Have to Get Up at 2am to Get the Best Seafood (I didn't know NYC had an equivalent to the Tsukiji Fish Market). Watched the Shōgun series (from 2024). • Podcasts: Tim Wendelboe's deep dive on ROEST shared the history of coffee roasting. • Music: Pocket Change 2 is a great album for mornings. • Random: I learned about British debt collection laws - the powers of high court enforcement officer don't really have a parallel in the USA. If somebody owes money, a writ can allow them to enter a private house or business and seize things to sell and cover the debt. Plans for December• On my way to Cleveland now for a few days