Self-improvement - Sam Hardacre

Self-improvement

A collection of 15 posts

Reading goal for 2023: revisited

We're into October now so it's been 9 months since I set myself the reading goal for this year. I'm going to be honest from the outset, I doubt I'll hit the goal of 50 books. With 31 books left and only 75 days to go, I'd say it's pretty

Commonplace books

I've been finding myself leaning more towards traditional or analogue ways of doing things. I haven't used my Kindle regularly for years (only recently for our trip to Malta), favouring actual printed books. Having tried journaling digitally for convenience and have it fall by the wayside, I now favour writing

Trying out journalling

This month, I decided to start a journal. A real, hand-written journal. I've tried journaling a couple of times before and it didn't really catch on but something about this time is slightly different. I'm trying to take a bit of a step back from actively posting my thoughts to

Learnuary resources

I've not really had a chance to contribute any visual stuff to the Etherington Brothers #learnuary campaign yet but wanted to get something quick out there for people to start mulling over so I thought a short list of useful resources I find help me when drawing and writing. Drawing

2018 Reading List

2017 has been a shocking year for my reading. Other than comics, I've not finished reading a single book this year and I'm not at all happy about that. Admittedly, I've been busier drawing commissions than previous years so I've not been completely idle. That said, I don't think I've

Web Development

Sod it, time for a change

Last week at HuddsDigitals, we saw Seb Lee-Delisle [http://seb.ly/] talk about his PixelPyros [http://pixelpyros.org/] project which was showing at this weekend's Festival of Light. A few days later, I read Ashley Baxter's article on 24Ways [http://24ways.org/2013/levelling-up/] which talked about the process of

Structure

To my disappointment, I was unable to attend New Adventures [http://2013.newadventuresconf.com/] conference this year so while my Twitter stream was filled with people saying how buzzed and inspired they were, I was left wondering whether I could somehow conjure up some of that excitement for myself and

Self-improvement

First ride in 5 years

This morning I took the bike out for my first ride in 5 years. I had a route planned, knowing where I wanted to get to before heading home but didn't really pay attention to the actual distance involved. I managed to get into a good rhythm and was covering

Self-improvement

Life after RSS...

Back in 2007, I bought my first MacBook. I remember spending an hour or so that morning setting up the apps I needed, dropping some music into iTunes and adding email accounts to Mail. I discovered that here in the Mail app was where RSS feeds were dropped. I immediately

Self-improvement

Challenge for August

I'm very happy with the progress I've made in the last year, going from reading next to nothing at all to reading something, be it articles or part of a book, every day. As I'm a glutton for punishment and feel I need to make a dent on the backlog

Self-improvement

Making some changes

Back in December I wrote a resolution blog [https://blog.nocturnalmonkey.com/resolutions-for-2012/] post with some intentions for the year. So far they've not really come to fruition aside from learning a little more French than I thought I would while in Paris and I really want to be able

Releasing the dam

Over the last few months, I've been lagging behind in my reading of web related articles and watching of past conference videos. I've been saving many of them up for occasions when I need to kill some time which, until recently, rarely came along. Since starting my new job, I've

Self-improvement

Marked improvements

I've never been much of a reader. I've always liked reading but growing up I had a very illustrative, visual disposition which meant I spent less time working on my reading skills. As a result, when I hit my mid-teens and started to pick books up, I found the speed

Self-improvement

Resolutions for 2012

I very rarely write posts involving New Years resolutions because I never really head into a new year with any in mind. I had a few for 2011 but some fell by the wayside slightly cough gym. Having looked back on the last year I don't feel I've really achieved

Self-improvement

TV is killing my time

In November 2009, Luisa and I moved from our flat in the village I grew up in to our first proper house. I can't remember why exactly but due to the TV cabling being set up to receive Virgin Media (and we weren't subscribed to them) we were essentially without