Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

The last 10 weblog posts

20250420 Week 16

Earlier this week I went ahead and put most of the weblog content back into a private post status. Right now only 64 posts still remain in a publicly posted state. I’m thinking about making a shift to publishing books and journal articles and just making that my primary method of communicating written prose. Right now I’m committed to producing a weekly missive for the Lindahl Letter and a weekly summation of posts here on the weblog. Outside of those commitments I’m going to have to start focusing my writing efforts on producing manuscripts of varying length and quality. Some of those are going to get chopped down into academic papers and some of them I’m going to just publish as books. That is where things are going. My writing plan probably needs to be updated based on this new strategy. We will see what happens on that front here in the next few weeks.

This weekend is a big sports weekend for the City of Denver with both the Nuggets and Avalanche beginning playoff series. Right now I was able to watch the Nuggets game on Altitude+ streaming and the Avalanche game will be on Max streaming services. We added the Max bundle option to the Disney streaming package. That means we get Peacock as a part of our internet service plan and we are selecting Disney+ as our primary streaming service for the family during the month of April. We have been trying to keep only one active streaming service subscription per month. Oddly enough the kids really just want Disney and have no interest in switching back to Netflix or maybe Paramount for a month. I’m sure at some point Paramount will release some new Star Trek content that will create enough need to switch that something happens.

This week I published a Substack post for the Lindahl Letter publication: Lindahl, N. (2025, April 18). Will vibe coding break quantum resistant encryption? The Lindahl Letter. https://www.nelsx.com/p/quantum-resistant-encryption
20250413 Week 15

This week I switched it up and allowed the ChatGPT plugin to take over search on Google Chrome. That feature came out forever and a day ago, but I had a use case for it now and thought I would give it a go. This worked fine for some things, but for trying to get to a website or lookup something maps related I ended up installing DuckDuckGo. My main goal in this pursuit was to just stop Googling things as much. Most of the time I don’t really need to utilize Google services.

Right now I’m writing on my MacBook Air and it would be possible to just mostly switch to Apple technology. Between using an iPad and a MacBook Air I could functionally just switch over. Part of that would be trying to use an internet browser that just cannot be tracked and is pro security and privacy. One alternative to even taking that path is just allowing ChatGPT to handle all my required searches. My guess would be that Sam Altman and the OpenAI team generally do not really care about indexing my searches and knowledge graphing my interests and are more worried about being first in the pool to actualize some type of AGI.

Using this new framework throughout the week my overall searching for things has radically diminished. That is probably for the best. I’m not entirely sure easy access to relatively useless information is all that productive anyway. Focusing on higher quality information gathering and research is an important pivot. That is for the most part the right direction to head. Generally people are going to keep moving away from the open internet into other types of interfaces. It’s entirely possible that people will just task an agent with doing all the web searching for them and never really have to traverse the internet. That path forward is going to be interesting. A lot of the online content is getting worse and worse anyway as the slop farms crank out more and more content optimized for SEO that has been put through an intellectual blender.
20250406 Week 14

My online efforts this year have been focused on Substack posts and Bluesky. For the content being created on Substack, I maintain a backlog and prepare weekly missives. Those blocks of content are generally about five paragraphs long and are refined during a five-week development process. Right now, my backlog includes 36 future blocks of content that have not yet been drafted or otherwise developed. Outside of those larger blocks of content, I have been posting real-time thoughts on Bluesky. That balance seems to work well enough, providing both a longer-form and a quicker content delivery method.

I have continued creating this type of weblog content, although I have been trying to determine whether it should simply be folded into the Substack effort. At the forefront of my thinking is whether these scattershot weblog posts need to come to an end and be refined into the weekly missive format. That did involve creating a new weblog post category and adding the week number to the title format.

Going forward, it might be more effective to open a Google Doc and compile thoughts and short writings throughout the week before posting content. This type of writing has generally remained separate from what ends up on Substack, as the process does not typically produce an essay or a focused block of content. However, I could potentially weave the two approaches together, which might result in a stronger overall set of content.

Such a shift would move the output from more targeted research notes in an essay format to a style of writing that leans a bit more personal. That blending could be the right evolution for this writing effort. This post reflects the first move toward a weekly weblog output. By the end of the process, I want to be producing content that offers more of an ongoing narrative rather than single-serving pieces written only to push the conversation forward.
20250324

Doubling down on the obvious thing might not be the easy play anymore. I’m trying to figure out the best way forward in terms of creating prose on a daily basis. Spending more time producing short content for the weblog is always the easy way out. It’s a 15-20 minute commitment to just put a few thoughts down and move along. Right now my efforts are more aligned with producing weekly content. Part of that is that my weekend writing routine is very strong in terms of taking the early morning hours on Saturday and Sunday to create content. Moving back to a more consistent daily writing posture might require making a change in my routine. The best way to make this happen may be switching up my scheduled writing time from first thing in the morning during weekdays to the evening just before bed. Right now I have that time reserved for listening to an audiobook, but it could be easily swapped out for about 30 minutes of solid writing time before falling asleep.

Today is one of those rare days off during the week where I can elect to sit down and spend some time writing and watching the Curse of Oak Island: Drilling Down this morning via the on demand feature of the cablebox. This writing effort was powered by an extra set of espresso shots this morning which just seemed to move everything into the next gear this morning. Over the course of the last few days I have reset my staged posts for the Lindahl Letter so that we have 2 ready to post and 5 that are currently drafted. Beyond that set of working posts I have a backlog setup for weeks 194 to 236 of topics under consideration. One of the things that probably needs to be done is really kicking the tires on that backlog and refining it to be the best possible set of topics. I’m pretty sure that a few gems are hidden in the Google Keep notes I have taken that need to be incorporated into the backlog during the refinement process.
20250314

We just reached Tab 70 and that seems like a good run at producing weblog posts in this particular Google Doc. My intentions were to be a better and more committed daily writer. I had put a Glitty case on my MacBook Air, but I decided that I prefer to have no case on the device at all and just let it roam free in the world. That does not really impact my commitment to daily writing. That ongoing narrative for the weblog needs to be recentered, refocused, and probably clarified as we begin to move forward with a more regular writing cadence. At this point, I’m thinking about spending some time writing a bit of reflective thoughts at the end of the day.

Right now I’m watching the 3rd period of the Colorado Avalanche game and trying to figure out much much more writing I’m going to complete. Ten minutes of hockey time is probably enough to produce a bunch of prose. I’m not saying it is going to be high quality awesome prose. It may just be a few sentences about writing sentences which are not really in any way awesome.
20250301

We ended up having dinner at Casa Bonita tonight and it was not the same as it was a decade ago, but it was something that could be explained as an update to the previous version. They have the whole process pretty well built into an entertainment conveyor belt with food and cliff divers. That is really all I have to say about it. We will see if it is something we end up doing again or if it was more of a one off in terms of future dinner planning. My guess as of right now would be that it is a one off that might happen again if somebody was visiting and the reservation timing worked out.
20250228

Don’t worry or panic about this being Tab 67 in my weblog posts Google Doc. I’m watching the Colorado Avalanche play some hockey tonight and surfing the internet. I just had two shots of espresso and I’m totally ready to watch the entire game. The game is on our main TV thanks to the Altitude+ streaming application they launched this year. During the last game technical problems created a bunch of friction to being able to watch the game. For the most part the streaming service has worked out well enough and it makes it much easier to watch Colorado Avalanche games when the vast majority of them are on the same streaming application. I know where to go and that I just need to configure the settings to keep the stream video quality on the 1080p feed instead of being automatically set. Hockey viewing needs all the possible pixels to make the puck visible and easy to follow.
20250225

Today or tomorrow I’m going to need to give week 183 a bit of writing polish and revision. It’s all staged and ready to go out, but enough time has passed that I should be able to actually edit it for content and clarity. Sometimes you need some time to pass before you can edit or review your own work with any degree of perspective on the content. For me that window is about two weeks of separation between the writing event and the editing event. At that point, I generally have moved on to other things and circling back to do some editing is basically tabula rasa at that point for better or worse. We are quickly approaching the drafting of the 200th Substack post in the series. I’m not entirely sure why that milestone has so much meaning to me, but I’m very sure that it actually does seem like a major one that needs to have some type of fanfare.

My guess is that at 200 weeks of writing content I’m going to try to switch to a more video based delivery compared to the audio based podcast style version that previously was attempted. I think I can just use my computer setup to record a video style podcast or maybe I could use my mirrorless camera to record something of a little bit higher quality. Previously my best sustained video production efforts actually happened on one of my previous phones using PowerDirector to just put the clips together and edit. That series of content lasted around 100 days and worked out well enough. I think whatever gets put together this time around should be planned from the start to deliver a higher degree of quality.
20250223

Today (really this afternoon) I might have spent some time watching YouTube videos about Biosphere 2. I’m not entirely sure exactly how that happened, but down that rabbit hole my afternoon lounging time disappeared. My next step in this space might be to find an audiobook about the Biosphere 2 which might provide better background information than the YouTube videos. Apparently, I had flipped over my Disney+ subscription to include Max this month. That was a good thing as a documentary called Spaceship Earth (2020) is streaming on Max right now about Biosphere 2. This seemed like a lot more content at about 2 hours compared to the YouTube videos I had been surfing around.

This weekend I booted up a video game called Diablo II: Resurrected on my newly built computer and things worked out very well in terms of the thermals. My previous Dark Base Pro 900 case struggled with the thermal demands of bringing that game to life in stunning 4K resolution. Oddly enough the Dark Base Pro 901 case with the stock fans worked from the start. I am using the MSI Mystic Light software to control the RGB on the case. Things are set up so that the case actually changes colors above 40 degree centigrade. Overall both the CPU and the GPU have not really even gotten into a range that I would consider hot. Thermally the new case and computer build are working out really well.
20250222
This week we have entered a new desktop computer technology era with a mostly new computer build this year. I ended up selecting a motherboard and after that it was easy enough to select a CPU, RAM, and a CPU cooler. Honestly, I had meant to make a YouTube video about the build. Strangely enough, I was excited enough about the arrival of the new parts that I just built the system, engaged in some troubleshooting, and started enjoying the new computer build. No actual video was shot during that whole process. It was something that happened pretty quickly and now the system is built and sitting under my desk.

Requisitioned and received new hardware for this build:
- be quiet! Dark Base PRO 901 Black – 3 Silent Wings 4 PWM computer case
- MSI MPG Z890 CARBON WIFI LGA 1851 Intel Z890 SATA 6Gb/s ATX Motherboard
- Intel Core Ultra 7 265K – Core Ultra 7 (Series 2) Arrow Lake 20-Core (8P+12E)
- be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 (this fan purchase included the thermal paste used in this build)
- CORSAIR Vengeance 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6600 (PC5 52800) Desktop memory model kit
- 2x SAMSUNG 990 PRO 2TB SSD, PCIe Gen4 M.2 2280
Reused hardware:Reused hardware:
- CORSAIR RMx Series (2021) RM1000x CP-9020201-NA power supply
- ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 Video Card TUF-RTX3070TI-O8G-GAMING
- LG Black 12X BD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM SATA Internal Blu-ray Burner
- 3x WD Blue 2TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch
- WD Black 1TB SN850 NVMe SSD M.2 (My operating system was and still is on this drive and working fine after the motherboard transplant)
- Corsair gaming mouse wired
- K65 RGB MINI 60% Mechanical Gaming Keyboard — CHERRY MX SPEED
- Rybozen USB 3.0 Switch Selector, KM Switch Adapter 4 Port 2 Computers
- ATDEC monitor stand
- 38 inch Dell computer monitors
- External Audioengine speakers
Where are we going next with this computer build? I’m considering doubling the RAM with another vengeance kit to 128GB and maxing out my motherboard m.2 slots by purchasing 2 more of the Samsung 2TB drives. That is where things end up and unless some amazing CPU breakthrough happens this will be my main desktop computer until some type of hardware failure occurs and something has to be replaced.

Dark Base Pro 901 computer case