PicoBlog

I love the way the contestants on The Great British Bake-Off whip up "crème pat" for just about every other challenge. They do it almost automatically and I like that — it's a workmanlike way of going about making what's really a workhorse in the kitchen. Pastry cream — crème pâtissière — is the go-to filling for cream puffs, êclairs, fruit tarts, beignets (aka doughnuts) and all-American layer cakes (think Boston Cream Pie).

Did you know you see over 10,000 ads every single day? In the digital age, making your product stand out in the sea of competition is extremely difficult. The best approach is to figure out how to create value for your customers. But how do we define and measure value? A common misconception is that value equates to price. Good value means cheap, and bad value means expensive. In actuality, the value equation proposed by Alex Hormozi paints a much clearer picture.

This is a short note with a couple of iMessage tech tips. If you have an iPhone and you suffer from not being able to reply to all your messages, this is for you. There are a few features of Apple iMessage that make organizing text threads a bit easier—here’s the secret to marking messages as unread, pinning your favorite chats, muting the noisiest thre… ncG1vNJzZmirpJa%2FtcHPqZirnZ6pe7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZqGnp2LBsHnMmqmkZZGlva2xjK2csaxdorK0v8CgnKxlpaO%2Fpq3D

The CEO of Modal, Erik Bernhardsson, is a super well regarded former CTO. In this conversation, we spoke about his best practices for increasing developer productivity, a topic that he has thought a *great* deal about, as you will soon see. We covered: What is the secret to developer productivity? What are the common mistakes that CTOs make? How do the best practices change over the course of a startup’s life?

Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is a little different from the norm. We’re looking at a small guide to painting — written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. Sign Up If you’ve seen Miyazaki’s watercolor works, like the one above, you already know how amazing they are. He has the power to turn scribbly pencil lines and splotches of color into vibrant sketches that feel actively, restlessly alive.

There are a lot of generic ways you can build up your bar. This offering by MasterClass is as generic as it gets, but it’s helpful as a base to answer this question. So, I’m going to deep dive and identify every single thing you might need, and a few things you can save your money on. You’re welcome in advance. Don’t be overwhelmed by this process. Take baby steps and we’ll walk and eventually run together.

I’m Jeff, a Los Angeles writer-photographer, host of the PhotowalksTV series and former USA TODAY columnist, with my photo meets tech meets travel newsletter. As always, the edition is free, and supported by our friends at SmugMug, which hosts my photo website and allows me to sell prints to clients. Get access to our full archive of posts with a paid s… ncG1vNJzZmiilZuzpr7SqKWgqpGdrq560q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlno6S5or6MnpqloaCosm60zrBkraddpbWwwM6gqZqomGK8rw%3D%3D

Many people set themselves up for a deep trough in mental energy in the afternoon. It's also known as the caffeine crash. Yet, there is a simple habit to avoid feeling tired and groggy during that time of day. Delay your first caffeine intake until 90 minutes after waking up. From the moment you wake up and throughout the day, a chemical called adenosine builds up in your brain. This chemical drives your so-called sleep pressure.

When working on questions involving data and dynamics, I often need to get a quick handle on growth rates or proportions. Here are six particularly useful rules of thumb I’ve come across for these types of problems. The first three relate to growth, and the second three to proportions: If something grows at x% per month (whether an investment or epidemic), it will take around 72/x months to double. E.g. something growing at 6% per month will double in around 12 months.