I’m thinking of ways to live in better simplicity and with more intentionality. I find this deeply challenging in practice, so I’d love to hear what works for you!

I’m thinking about this from three angles:

• Psychologically, I’m trying to be more satisfied with what I do have rather than wanting to make more money. When I spend on a luxury, I’d prefer that it feel meaningful. I’d like to better control my impulses.
• Financially, I’d like to have lower expenses so that I can save more for meaningful purchases. It also provides some comfort to know I’m living beneath my means.
• Ethically, I’d like to use less electricity (environmental reasons) and also donate more to useful charitable initiatives in my community. Years ago I was influenced by Peter Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and still take its principles seriously.

So I’m looking for two categories of advice:

• Ways to spend less money on anything in particular, sacrificing (yes) some luxury.
• Substitutes for expensive activities/experiences/objects that provide the same or more emotional value.

My current lifestyle is relatively simple except that I enjoy traveling a bit too much. I used to fly a lot, which was pricey and bad for the environment. I miss my foreign friends though!

I live in a bustling part of a large city, which is amazing except it means I’m constantly presented with expensive temptations. I like this place and don’t wish to leave, so I’m relying on habits/systems & willpower here.

Examples of things I do already:

• My city is pretty cheap for its amenities. My building is more affordable than most in my neighborhood. (I originally planned to move to New York, but…) It has various comforts, but I’m trying to use the appliances less. It’s hard to keep the AC off in the heatwaves though! And the dryer is so convenient.
• I live in an apartment with a roommate. I enjoy the companionship. It also cuts most living expenses in half. I’ve thought about buying a small condo, but that seems hard to do without raising my monthly payments. I’m getting attached to my neighborhood/area, limiting my options somewhat.
• I ride a bicycle instead of owning a car. I take the bus to work, or sometimes bike (about 25 miles each way). I walk a lot, which lets me see the city up close. I only use ridehailing services once or twice per year. I was thinking of buying a folding bike to cut the commute time in half (train -> bike), but I hesitate to buy a budget one; I’m afraid it’ll break.
• Meals lately are mostly staple ingredients (rice, beans, frozen vegetables, canned fish) and cheaper ready-made meals. I try not to buy anything over 25¢/oz ($4/lb). I think my grocery runs average 15–20¢/oz ($2.40–3.20/lb) at Walmart or Aldi. I have a bunch of bougie preferences I’m trying to get over—fancy pasta sauces and such. I prefer cooking on intuition rather than recipes (impatient). I love restaurants for the experience more than the taste of the food. I kinda miss eating out more often, it’s just so wasteful.
• I love socializing, but the drinks and coffees and lunches and dinners add up fast! Much of my social activity is community organizing and dancing, which is itself inexpensive/free, but that often involves regional train trips and business lunches and miscellaneous weird expenses, so I’m slowly doing less of that in some ways, which is both good and bad.
• Importantly, I’ve been working on being more satisfied with doing less. Not going to every event. Not buying the snack I want. Not seeing faraway friends as much. Not going back to Paris another time. 🙄 Finding ways to frame these changes positively (“going to the things I care about most,” “living with intentionality,” “making friends closer to home”…) is possible but something I continually struggle with.

Whatever your financial station I would be very interested to hear what you do to maximize your happiness on your income and be more satisfied with life’s simple pleasures!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I prefer physical buttons and something that does not have a large screen and looks simple enough that it could be OEM. Does anything like this exist? All options seem to be cheap and ugly with flashing lights, or a giant touch screen.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Spoiler discussion for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Hello!

First, some context- I have a very particular way I keep track of my work and take notes throughout my work week. This is currently managed through an ever-growing list of Notion pages. And Notion is great! It does a ton of stuff really well, but it's also suffered from a lot of feature bloat over the years and has just enough oddities to irk me on the daily.

So, I built a thing. I call it True To-do because it's fun to say and I'm okay at software and less okay at marketing. It is an opinionated daily work tracker with a lot of little features:

• You can set a standard template that gets auto-copied to certain days of the week
• Supports infinite nesting and expanding/collapsing of those nested items
• Unfinished work the from the previous day can be auto-copied to new days
• It has various tools like a data roll-up and data controls
• It supports loading itself as an offline desktop app (PWA)
• Has many configurable settings for making the interface go from full to minimal
• Dark theme!

It is also 100% free, has no tracking, no cookies, no ads, doesn't ask for your email, your data does not leave your device, and is pretty performant (better than Notion, at least). It was written heavily with AI, but not by AI - It was directed, reviewed, and corrected by me.

What it does not have is any kind of user account feature. Everything stays on the device and will not transfer between devices unless you manually export and import the data. Maybe I'll add support for that at some point, I'm not sure. It is also only okay on mobile/tablet- this app was really made for desktop.

Anyways, give it a play around. It was purpose built by me for me but love to share the things I make when I think others may get some use out of them as well. I welcome feedback / bug reports / suggestions / etc.

https://hobblyhoy.github.io/TrueTodo-Pages/

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I’ve never played the original and am playing through the first game in the remakes and was curious if:

• you generally like the remake series so far?
• the characters had the same personality you imagined now that they’re fully voiced?
• the overall atmosphere/vibe is the same/similar?
• Anything else you’d like to mention as being surprising or disappointing when comparing the two.