# 21: My second brain, Ghost spam struggles, and Formbricks

Since the last time I wrote, a lot has happened:

I read "Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential" by Tiago Forte, which is quite good. I wrote a follow-up post describing how I use my second brain.
I discovered about ten of my newsletter subscribers were signed up by bots. I wrote a short piece describing the Ghost spam problem and possible solutions.
To combat spam, I moved my newsletter to invite-only. Now when someone enters their email address and clicks subscribe that data is recorded as a survey response in Formbricks, I will personally email them and confirm they actually want to subscribe.

My main takeaway: spam sucks, I want to get back to writing.

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#20: Replacing ChatGPT with Open WebUI

I've been using ChatGPT periodically for the past few years. Chatting with an LLM is generally a faster way to get answers to my questions than searching the internet. Just as I don't want Google to have my search data, I don't want OpenAI

#19: liberating a small piece of personal data

I'm back! I fell off my blogging habit for a bit, hope you didn't miss me too much. This week I set up a Python package eufree that reads weight measurements from my Eufy smart scale and sends the result to a custom TRMNL plugin for

#18: a mini e-reader and a mini manifesto

This week, I played around with the Xteink X4. It's a fun little gadget but it's not displacing my Kindle. My full review is here. I also wrote a short post describing my motivation for blogging. It's a little political, I want power to

Marder He Wrote #17

This past week, I updated my TRMNL post, and open sourced a TRMNL client for Kindle focused on battery life. I also ordered myself an Xteink X4 that I'm excited to tinker with. Let's go e-ink!