Here are two simple life hacks from Nonviolent Communication (NVC) which can lead to less conflict and increase your chances of getting what you want. When asking someone for something, consider what you will do if the the person you ask says “no”. If you have a Plan B, you are much more likely to hear the “no” without getting angry. When asking, try saying “Would you be willing to ….

In a hierarchical society such as ours, anger is a privilege of rank; parents & teachers can get angry at children; if children get angry, they are often punished. In most organisations, those in senior positions are allowed to get angry at junior staff; if junior staff express anger at managers or executives, they will often be disciplined or dismissed. This leads to a lot of people having repressed anger. This anger doesn’t go away, it simmers below consciousness looking for an outlet.

I deleted my Twitter account as I want nothing to do with the new owner. You can find me on BlueSky instead. It’s much nicer there with fewer trolls & bots.

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts as a layman. I have no psychology qualifications. The English language gained the word ‘ego’ when Freud’s translator didn’t translate the German ‘ich’ into the English ‘I’, using a Greek word instead. In the process some of the simplicity of Freud’s theory was lost. When we say someone has a huge ego, are we saying they have a huge ‘I’, a huge sense of self? I propose the opposite: we are observing someone with a small or weak sense of self.

This is a clock with environmental information display I made using an ESP32, a GPS receiver, light sensor and temperature sensor. The code is open source as are the STL files for the 3D printed open frame case. The github project includes a discussion on components I used and some potential alternatives. Find the files at Dual Clock

I couldn’t find any on-line documentation on controlling the WT32-SC01 backlight brightness so I experimented. After some trial & error I worked out which pin controls the brightness & was able to write a few lines of code to achieve this. As I spent some time doing this I thought I’d publish my code to save others some time. The project is on github