I drink too much coffee. 🐕 🏳️🌈 ☕️ ✊🏽 📍 D.C.-ish https://drearicheli.blog
I am not a seasoned birdwatcher by any means, but I love watching birds. I live near a very large state park that has undertaken extensive efforts to conserve birds native to our region, so we’re fort…
Every week I save dozens of links - articles, funny YouTube videos, Bluesky posts, Instagram videos. The only thing there's more of than links I save is apps that promise to organize all these links. …
About five months ago, I made the decision to stop using DayOne for journaling and use Obsidian for journaling instead. It felt like a big decision at the time, as I had journaled in DayOne for over 1…
I started using Wispr Flow this week. I was potentially influenced by the YouTubers waxing about the incredible productivity gains achieved using AI speech-to-text apps, or I just like trying new stuf…
These days, everything I read about AI gives me a bad case of whiplash. Educators are fed up with Ai, so much that they are going back to pen and paper assignments in class. At the same time, the gove…
I was shocked to learn that our local water company, WSSC, maintains a beautiful azalea garden. We visited this week when the azaleas had just peaked and it was absolutely stunning. Five acres of noth…
AI tools are something I use daily. I am not an AI power user but more of an AI-tools-make-me-a-bit-more-productive kind of person. Personally and professionally I use AI tools like Claude and Gemini …
A vegetable garden is an exercise in patience - waiting for things to grow, waiting for the right time. It's also an exercise in avoiding temptation and amateur weather forecasting, especially in the …
This year has been a fast transition from slow-prep mode to full swing with our vegetable garden. Spring was a beautiful season with rapidly warming temperatures in the D.C. area. Temps are still swin…
It’s hard to avoid the GLP-1 craze these days. Over half my friends are on a GLP-1 or have tried one, and those are just the ones who have outright admitted to it (I suspect a number of people are clo…
Springtime in the D.C. area is always amazing, with the cherry blossoms and many other trees bursting with color all at once. But this year has been particularly exception. It's like technicolor every…
We had a couple of extra days to fill this spring break, so decided to head up to NYC to see a Broadway show (Book of Mormon….it was hilarious!) and do a few other random things. We travel to NYC fair…
Thanks to conservation efforts in our region, eastern bluebirds are once again common sightings. But they still amaze me, with their bright coloring and gentle nature. This bluebird couple appears to …
Contrary to what many non-locals think, the Tidal Basin in D.C. is far from the only place in the D.C. area to see the cherry blossoms. In fact, in my experience as a lifelong local, some of the best …
Today we made a trellis for the tomatoes! Supplies needed for this endeavor were: This video provided us with the inspiration.
I first noticed the 90s revival a couple of years ago when my daughter wore an outfit that looked a bit like Quinn from Daria. Then my friends’ kids talked about getting CDs and listening to bands lik…
We took a trip this weekend to Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania (about 45 minutes west of Philadelphia). It’s still early spring so we were there for the indoor conservatories, especia…
Lettuce, scallions, and a few other cold-weather things have been planted outside, and seedlings started indoors. But the biggest update is that the garden beds are being rebuilt. A friend is replacin…
I was excited to see make this announcement last week: I use GoodLinks for saving most things I find on the web because it does great saving most things (and parsing text from most news outlets, inclu…
One cool thing about the app that keeps me alive is that people are always innovating on how to make it better. When I saw this video by Diabetech about a new customization someone built to use Ai foo…
It is an app that is testament not just to medical technology, but to the spirit of innovation and what a group of very ordinary people can accomplish when they come together to work on a problem. You…
A few photos from an amazing trip to Acadia National Park in Maine (August 2022). This is a beautiful national park. We stayed in downtown Bar Harbor which was also fun, a great little town to explore…
The Amazing Digital Circus episode 8 finally dropped today. I adore this show. There’s a crazy juxtaposition between the colorful, childlike cartoonish visual effects and the deep, dark nature of the …
Someone on Mastodon reminded me that I wrote about Taio years ago. So I thought it would be a good time to revisit my use of Taio because, yes, I still use it with Obsidian. I mostly use Taio to acces…
Here are a few apps that I once loved, but have since disappeared from the App Store. This app was the juiciest time killer of all time, especially during the workday. Geared towards college students,…
Our family is obsessed with Stranger Things. As we watch it all the way through for the third (fourth?) time, I can’t help but now notice the little inconsistencies and loose ends that don’t add up. H…
Nestled in the western portion of West Virginia, New River Gorge National Park is the newest national park and happens to be just a 5 hour drive from the D.C. area where we live. We decided to check i…
A Great Crested Flycatcher. A pretty rare sighting, as these usually stay up in tree tops. Blue jay, one of my favorite birds. Northern Flicker woodpecker.
Lately I feel like the world's slow burn has been set to broil. Things are not good. And often times, I feel kind of hopeless, like we are going to have no choice but to succumb to authoritarianism an…
I have kept a digital journal for a long time, starting with Momento on my iPhone way back in the day, and then switching to DayOne about 14 years ago. For 14 years, I used DayOne fairly frequently as…
According to Obsidian, the graph view is a core plugin that lets you visualize the relationships between the notes in your vault. Online there is a love/hate relationship with the Obsidian graph view.…
A fun little CSS snippet for Obsidian that makes the entire vault appear in Monospace font. Because Monospace just feels more productive. Or something. Eliminates the need to do custom font installati…
Vegetable garden prep is underway. We’ve cleaned, repaired the fence, and even started planting some lettuce.
It is currently January and this means it is pretty cold out and nothing is growing. We did plant some garlic, which should be ready to harvest in about July, but other than that, our garden is bare. …
The minute I heard The Forkiverse Experiment episode of the Search Engine podcast, I was all in. I requested an account before I even finished listening to the podcast. I have long been a fan of decen…
Evernote is getting a lot of flack lately and for good reason. It was recently acquired by Bending Spoons, a company that has acquired a number of other apps and proceeded to enshittify them. It appea…
My read-it-later and bookmarking workflow is a mess. Digitally, my stuff is just…scattered. Random tidbits in Apple Notes, links and notes in Obsidian, remnants from when I used Readwise and synced th…
Seeing how I cannot seem to use an actual camera to take pictures, I am doing my annual exercise of taking stock in the photography apps I use on my iPhone. When upgrading to the 17 Pro iPhone recentl…
(or why I don't make New Years' resolutions) Just two months down in 2026, and I have already failed at the one thing I resolved to do - make use of my digital camera instead of always using my iPhone…
For most of the last 15ish years (maybe even longer), my primary camera has been my iPhone. I’m not a photographer but I enjoy taking pictures, sharing them with others, and occasionally posting to so…
When I decided to move my journaling from DayOne to Obsidian, there were two things I knew I was going to miss - the calendar view and the map view. Way back when I last used Obsidian, there was not a…
About a year ago, my tween kid started talking obsessively about The Amazing Digital Circus. Like many of my tween’s obsessions, I got to listen patiently as she described the plot, the characters, th…
The last week of February 2026 was a crazy week for AI. The current regime tried to compel Anthropic to provide unfettered access to Claude to basically do whatever the fuck they want, to which Dario …
It is easy to get on the AI hype doom bandwagon. Concerns about AI wiping out the entire working class or AI doing entire jobs with no need for humans, and market analysis pieces about AI that have th…
I hate the cold weather part of spring, which is where we are right now, but I love seeing all the little signs of spring starting. Like birds! And trees blooming!
Last year I read Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Wiliams, a tell-all book about the inner workings and people of Facebook/Meta. My thought while reading it was “holy shit, these people are evil.” The o…
Welcome to my corner of the internet in the ATmosphere. This blog has no theme. It’s just a random assortment of my thoughts on various topics. You may like it, you may not. I don’t really care. Find …
