guonlin

Monthly Notes:#

Fang Datong's passing feels like it was due to the exhaustion from last year's work, so this year, for some reason, I've slowly become lax about making extra money. Coupled with the increasingly severe nosebleeds I've been experiencing lately, I've been thinking about taking a good rest. This issue has been recurring for several years; almost every morning during my wash-up routine, I would experience bleeding due to the rupture of the nasal mucosa on the right side of my nose. I never took it seriously before; it was just simple bleeding that would stop after about five minutes. However, in Beijing, the winter combined with indoor heating makes the air incredibly dry, and recently it has started happening more frequently—sometimes two to three times in one go. Sometimes it wouldn't stop, and I couldn't bear it anymore, so I made an appointment for a specialist check-up this Saturday morning. The doctor diagnosed it as nasal mucosal edema and erosion, along with exposed blood vessels, and prescribed medication for sinusitis, as well as a Tuesday procedure for nasal bleeding electrocoagulation. In simple terms, it means sealing the blood vessels, and I hope it will resolve the issue smoothly. This hospital visit reminded me once again how important health is.

However, after returning home at noon, I heard from Teacher K about Fang Datong's passing. Besides shock, I felt a sense of lament. The shock came from the fact that I remembered he had just made a comeback and released a new album last year; it felt like he had just started to be active again. Who would have thought that talent would be envied by heaven... Fang Datong was a pop singer who existed during my youth, and his songs accompanied the growth of all my peers. His unique style made him impossible to ignore; what a talented person he was, pioneering a new style of Chinese R&B, yet he left so suddenly... In a sense, bodily injuries and illnesses are random events—no one wants to encounter them, but when they do, one realizes the truth of life: suffering, aging, and death are also another half of completeness.

Death and Coincidence At the beginning of the month, I spoke with my parents on the phone and learned that my elderly aunt (91 years old) had passed away. Yesterday, my cousins noticed something was wrong and called relatives on my side. After just visiting her yesterday, she was gone today. Coincidentally, there was another elderly aunt and uncle in a similar situation; after noticing something was off a day earlier, many relatives visited, and she passed away the next day, which made me reflect a bit. Although I have only seen my elderly aunt twice in my life, she had a kind and gentle grandmotherly image. I remember one time visiting relatives during the New Year, and in my memory, there were spacious streets and new houses. Now my dad says that area has been designated as an economic development zone, and it has developed even better, with all buildings, while my home, which used to be in the same district, has gradually been forgotten in the development of the old city, as Qingdao develops to the east. On a side note, as I grow older, I will encounter more and more deaths around me. I should gradually find a suitable perspective to reconcile with life.

About Zhubai Previously, I subscribed to some interesting newsletters through Zhubai, and this month I saw the notification about Zhubai's discontinuation. It made me sigh that good products cannot last long, but it also led me to pay attention to quaily. Coincidentally, I started using Obsidian this month, and the software can install quaily's third-party plugin to complete article publishing and pushing. Thus, I smoothly registered and published the last issue of the monthly newsletter. I plan to complete the Guanglin monthly project by collecting interesting information across platforms into Obsidian for editing and layout, then using quaily's plugin to publish, and finally copying it in one click in its backend (quaily has a feature that converts local images to webp format), and then synchronously publishing on Xlog, so that the corresponding newsletters, blog sites, and RSS feeds are all set up. However, for now, I will still focus on Xlog, while quaily serves as a more diverse sharing channel.

Monthly Record#

1. Efficiency Tools#

PhototnCam
A newly discovered iOS third-party camera app, mainly for filter photography and editing functions. What surprised me is that it allows real-time filter adjustments and importing third-party LUTs & borders, and many details of the software are quite elegant. The price is also reasonable, and I have paid for it. The author is @JuniperPhoton, who has been updating the software development progress on Xiaohongshu.

HiPixel
An AI image super-resolution tool that uses AI models for high-quality image enlargement. The main highlight is that the native interface is very beautiful, and a similar tool is Upscayl, which I am also using.

Useful Wallpapers
A quick technique to help you remember information you want to retain, based on using the iPhone's lock screen wallpaper that you see every day, automatically changing every hour to reinforce memory. In the author's words: "I hope Useful Wallpapers becomes a self-brainwashing tool that leverages my addiction to my phone to challenge the brain's forgetting mechanism." Similar to the image below:

FocusFlight
An app that integrates the experience of not being able to use your phone while flying into a focus habit app. You can set the flight destination and time to simulate flying on a map, which is quite interesting. It also simulates the white noise during flights, making it easier to enter the flow state of studying during past flights.

TheBoringNotch
An open-source DIY tool for MacBook notch screens, with elegant animations that allow you to view music, file browsing, calendar, and other functions. I downloaded it to replace the previously used Folder Hub (which only had quick folder viewing functionality) and will try it out for a while.

iPreview
Last month, I shared a software that can preview folder contents on Xiaohongshu. Someone commented asking if there was a tool to preview compressed packages with spaces, so I asked DeepSeek, and there is indeed one. Besides previewing common formats of compressed packages, it also supports various documents, 3D models, and various source codes, etc., but it requires payment. I found it quite good after installation.

2. Literary Gains#

What I Learned from Writing a Weekly Newsletter
The 54321 Weekly I follow has reached its 100th issue. The author's insights have encouraged me. Unlike the author, who reads at a fixed time each week, I currently filter and record during my daily reading.

Tech Enthusiasts Weekly (Issue 337): Internet Entrepreneurship is Almost Gone
After reading this, I still felt a bit lost. The trend of the times always moves forward, and some things that have happened will not always happen.

Self-consistent Programmer
Interpreting various phenomena in the workplace, with the ultimate goal of emotional self-consistency, is readable.

The Technium: 50 Years of Travel Tips

What Makes Most Ordinary People Lose Money is Precisely the Bull Market
Recently, I did make a little money from tech stocks, but I indeed need such writings to remind me to run when I've made enough profit!

3. Design Related#

Visual Journal | Brand Case Studies, a very complete case-sharing website with a high-end tone.
How to Design a Personal Brand | EDUPUNK A very systematic article on personal branding.

4. Other Interesting Things#

• Detailed Explanation of 9 Key Papers and Innovations of DeepSeek worth a look, along with The Best Tribute is Learning: DeepSeek-R1 Analysis, both over 3 hours long.

• 🌅 Encountering the Fireworks of Taiwan! - Xiaohongshu Recording videos in the form of podcasts adds a more personal touch.

• Scientists Create the Lightest and Strongest Nanomaterial to Date Scientists have used artificial intelligence to calculate the lightest and strongest geometric structure of nanomaterials: “The final result is that the carbon nanocrystal lattice is light enough to rest on a soap bubble without breaking it, yet can support a weight over a million times its own mass.”

• Struggling with Posing and Expression Management? Try This Photo Method! _Bilibili_bilibili

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