What was amazing about 2024

1) My niece was born, and I am surprised at how much I love this child and want the best for her and how much joy I get from watching her grow. Since my sister cooked such a perfect human, I should convince her to have two more.

2) Movies - I don't watch many movies, but of the ones I did watch, I loved "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "Godzilla Minus One." Studios making movies might be coming to an end. I think very soon you will just be able to feed a story into an AI program, and it will spit out a full-length movie in the style of your choosing, just like AI is able to do with images today for free.

3) TV Shows - 'X-Men '97,' 'Dark Matter,' 'The Penguin,' 'Fallout,' and 'Kingdom.' Maybe I should stop listing TV shows in these reports because sometimes a show is great at the start, but they go bad in the later seasons.

4) Games - 'Dyson Sphere Program' - I don't know if I mentioned this game last year, but that is the only game I have been interested in playing this year. Hopefully, with pressure from Elon Musk and companies just losing money, wokeness will die in gaming and we will start getting games worth playing. Having said this, there were a couple of demos this year ('Crimson Desert' and 'Squadron 42') that got me excited for things I will be playing in the coming year.

5) Straw Water Bottles - These water bottles from Kmart with straws that pop out every time you open them, so you don't have to hold up the bottle to drink water, are so much more of a convenient way to drink water. I think I drank far more fluid this year than I have done any other year.

6) Freezer bags - These things have been around forever, but I only experimented with using them this year, and they are so much better than zip lock bags for separating and freezing single servings of meat in the freezer. They are cheaper, they take up less space, they are easier to handle, and you can buy them in lots of eighty at a time.

7) Wax paper - These have been around forever as well, but I learned a use for them this year. I have been using them to separate butter into single solid servings, and I love it. Also, eating butter feels so good; I have so much more energy and less inflammation now.

 

8) Coles flavoured sparkling water - It's been a long journey for me to step down from drinking litres of Pepsi Max a day to this drink, and I think this will be the last drink before I go to completely drinking water. But if I don't, I'm happy to stay with this drink. It has very few ingredients, just stevia and minimal flavouring, and can be diluted fifty percent with water and still taste great.

Passion fruit & Orange flavour is the best

9) Costco Forequarter Lamb - Forequarter lamb is my staple food of choice, and this lamb tastes very different from any lamb I bought from Coles or Woolworths; it's like the lamb from these supermarkets is domesticated while the Costco lamb tastes more gamey. Costco usually offers this lamb cheaper, and they don't hide the fatty and bony lamb pieces under the good ones. And you can buy these in bulk and waste less packaging and move and store more meat at a time.

Best forequarter lamb in Australia

10) Cooking Frozen Meats: This year, I discovered that I don’t need to defrost my red meat before cooking it in the air fryer. I just add about a third more cooking time. As long as the pieces of meat are frozen side by side in the same bag, rather than stacked on top of each other (to prevent sticking), they cook even better than defrosted meat. This method is so much more convenient than the way I used to do it!

11) The Supplement SAM-e: This supplement is expensive, but it significantly improved my sleep. After taking it for a few days, I was literally going to bed, falling asleep immediately, sleeping soundly (though I did wake up a couple of times to pee but fell back asleep quickly), and getting a full eight hours of rest. I am waking up feeling healed on this supplement.

12) The supplement Benfotiamine - This is high-dose vitamin B1. I learned of this from Dr. Berg. I've had inflammation in my feet for the last ten years, crippling me from any running, jumping, or doing anything that requires a lot of bending of my foot joints. I started taking these for foot pain, which has largely recovered, and I feel like straining my feet now will not cause too much inflammation. I think in about a year I should be able to start doing all the activities I used to love doing that require strong feet.

13) The self-service car wash in Minchinbury - I had never known this was a thing, but one time this year we had to make a trip to a Bunnings that was not local because they did not have what we wanted. When we noticed an interesting-looking car wash that we had to check out, it became one of the most fun discoveries my brother and I ever made. It's a car wash where you just pay for the time you will be in it, and while you have your car in the bay, you can press several buttons to make the various pipes in the bay produce different sprays; one of the pipes even has a brush that you can use to brush your vehicle. It's the best thing ever! The first day we discovered it, we cleaned three cars there and even took our mom there as a fun day out.

14) Handheld foam spray bottles - I don't know if these things came out this year or if they have been around forever, but I love them. They are these little two-liter bottles with a spray and pump attachment at the top that allows you to pressurize the fluid chamber so you can either create a spray or a solid stream of water with the device. It uses so much less water than using a water pipe to wet vehicles and is even great for doing things like watering gardens because you don't have to drag a water hose to where you want to water.".

15) Hobibear barefoot shoes - For some reason, wide-toe barefoot shoes have been extremely expensive until now, but not anymore. Hobibear breathable barefoot shoes are extremely comfortable and low-cost. Just avoid getting the leather ones until they figure out breathability because they will cook your feet.

Hobi's are so comfy

16) Amazon Returns - This is amazing! If you buy something from Amazon like Hobibear leather shoes and they don't work for you, you can just return the item. You don't even have to post it - just pack it up and drop it off at a news agency. That is so good. Thank you, Jeff Bezos! I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but Kmart returns are pretty good too. As long as you return something in the same condition you took it, they will let you return it for thirty days. This is how businesses should operate.

17) The website Cronometer - I have been taking supplements and trying to eat healthy forever, and it has normally been very difficult to know if I am getting all of the correct nutrients. But thanks to this free website, I know exactly what vitamins and minerals I am short on, so now when I use supplements, I am no longer wasting money on things I am already covered for like omega-3s, which I thought I needed to get from fish, but there is plenty of omega-3s in red meat, and when I do take the supplement, I only take the minimum amount to cover my RDA for that micronutrient. Vitamin E, for example, comes in 1000 IU doses, so I only take that once a month because the amount I am short per day is far lower than that. I take cod liver oil for Vitamin A, and I only take that three times a week. I need more magnesium, so I take my magnesium malate capsule every day, plus twice a day three times a week. I feel amazing doing this because I am not wasting money or health by causing hypervitaminosis, and I feel as healthy as a twelve-year-old with how much energy I have.

18) The website AliExpress - It's full of low-cost products from China, I may even buy a bunch of it and go sell them at the markets, so I can meet new people and hopefully make my money back.

19) Canva - It's an amazing, easy-to-use photo and video editing program. I mainly use the free version, which has plenty of useful features, but I have used the paid version as well, and it enables so much creativity. The story behind Canva is really inspiring as well; this half-Asian girl from Perth had an idea to make photo editing easier and managed to gather the programmers, money, and support to become a multi-billionaire with this program. I have a box full of ideas that I think are worth millions that I gave up programming on because it got too hard and because I was not around the right people, but now with AI assistants and the ability to follow the steps of this girl, I think I am going to start programming a few things again... I will probably give up after a few months... but I am inspired for now, lol.

 

20) CapCut - Like Canva, this is another alternative to Adobe programs, and it is all free. ByteDance put it out into the world so that people can make videos for its TikTok platform, and it is very easy to learn and has amazing features like avatars that will look like they are speaking your script. 

21) YouTube summaries of Movies, TV shows, and manga - Who has time to watch a movie these days? They are not very interesting after you have seen so many already and know what is filler. Whenever I watch shows now, I spend a lot of the time just clicking on the skip-by-10s button; I don't want to spend the time. I just want the story, so these summaries, which are very entertaining, cut out all the filler in the movies and just give you the stories. I've spent hours watching these and have moved onto manga now, and they are a very good service.

22) It's impossible to mention exciting technology without talking about multiple exciting things Elon Musk's companies have done:

    - SpaceX caught the giant Starship lower stage with giant chopsticks - I watched this live when I was     going on a first date with someone I really liked, and when the rocket was caught, I think I stood up        and cheered.

    - Robotaxis - He showed off beautiful driverless cars. Maybe in the future we won't be buying and        owning cars because it will be cheaper just to call a driverless vehicle to take you places.

    - Boring Tunnel - The Boring Company built a tunnel that starts inside Tesla's giant factory in Texas     and will be delivering Cybertrucks out into a different land area of the Tesla property in Texas.

His companies have done several other noteworthy things, but those were the things I was most impressed by this year. There is more great technology this year:

Anduril, a company founded by Palmer Luckey - is developing and showing off all sorts of new military tech that are sure to scare China and anyone else who would want to mess with the United States and its allies. And this is a new defence company coming in with things the military needs that the old companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin can't develop fast enough.

AI advancements - There are so many that it's hard to keep up, but I will mention a few. This year we got the first AI video generations by the program Sora. When it came out, it was really good, and over the year different companies have come out with programs that generate video even better than Sora. AI voice dictation by a company called ElevenLabs has gotten incredibly realistic, and music generation from a program called Suno is very good. It's possible that by next year, full realistic-looking movies could be generated by AI. A human would just need to tell it what type of story they are interested in, and the AI will create something unique for us.

This was a pretty good year, full of new personal discoveries and advancements in the world. I hope in '25, I will have a bigger list.

Dearest Aryanna

As of me writing this, you are about three months old. I've been lucky to have been one of your primary caregivers since you were born because Ma and Daddy needed help and trusted me with you. I don't know if I will be around to advise you when you read this, but I hope in reading this you will be able to avoid the battles I went through to gain this wisdom. A lot of what I say may not make sense when you first read this, but don't worry, they will make more sense when you get older and experience more things.

A word of caution before you start reading further. I sometimes found that advice I have taken from others has blown up in my face, even when it made perfect sense; advice often has depth and texture, but explaining every detail would lead to creating a very large novel for every point. Even if you were willing to read every detail, there is no substitute for real-world experience. The technology, society, and social pressures you will live in will be different to another's; with experience, you will understand how to best apply mine and anyone else's advice.

Take full advantage of your family. It’s not just your three uncles and grandma on your mum's side your great grandparents had many children, most of whom ended up in Sydney. This means you have an army of accomplished uncles, and second cousins, many of whom are fun, generous, and willing to help. Stay connected with them, and when the time comes for work or opportunities, you’re bound to have a family member who can open doors for you. You don’t need to attend every birthday and help with every house moving, but you will need to go to a few families get together and enjoy their company.

Don't share too much on social media - social media is there to addict you with attention so the social media companies can make money while you can miss the great moments of your life because you are collecting images for social media likes, use a fake name and profile picture so you are not searchable unless someone tells someone, or you give someone your profile. You can always change this. Engage with your friends and family with direct messages and in person. Do share a few things publicly make sure this is not for fishing likes and comments but rather a form of telling your friends and family what you are going to talk to them about when you see them next.

Don’t use the same password for all your accounts. Ideally, each account should have a completely random password, securely stored in a password manager. If that seems too complicated, make small variations to your passwords instead. For example, if your base password is 'Fraya&kali@307', and you're creating an Xbox account, add 'xbox' to it, making it 'Fraya&xboxkali307.' For Netflix, you could use 'Fraya&netflixkali@307'. An even better approach is to only use specific letters from the platform's name. For instance, always choose the first and last letters—so for Xbox, the password becomes 'Fraya&xxkali@307', and for Netflix, it would be 'Fraya&nxkali@307'. This way, you can easily remember your passwords while making them even more secure across different accounts.

Never store sensitive documents like your tax file number, USI, or copies of your driver's licenses, birth certificate, or passport in your email, online storage, or image gallery. If you need to send these documents, delete them immediately after you're done. If you want to keep digital copies, store them in a password-protected folder on a drive that's not connected to the internet. This way, your important information stays safe from potential breaches. If you want to keep scanned copies of these documents, just save them on a thumb drive in a hidden folder that you keep securely somewhere.

If you ever want to sell your phone or computer for some extra cash it's best you did not do it, but if you are still going to do it, use special programs to completely wipe the hard drives. If possible, remove the hard drives and destroy them. Deleting files doesn't actually erase them, they remain on the drive, waiting to be overwritten, but with today’s large hard drives, that rarely happens. This means someone could recover your information and use it against you. Protect yourself by ensuring your data is truly erased before selling any device.

If you are creating new nonessential online accounts, use a temporary throw away email and use fake name, address and age if that will give you access to the service. At best this will protect you from spam and at worst this will protect your anonymity from data breaches. Use plugins like Temp mail to do this, you can always change the temp email to your real email in the settings if you need to. Do not do anything illegal when doing this because you can still be tracked down because your IP address will more than likely be stored in any online account you create. You usually won't need to re-enter your email address once you have created a username, but if you do, just take a picture of the temporary email on the site you are using it on and it should be auto saved to your google account, for future use if needed.

Learn to touch type, including the number pad and typing numbers and their alt keys on the alphanumeric keyboard. This is a very easy thing to learn. You can practice typing for an hour a day for a couple of months while listening to some sort of podcast in the background. I recommend starting with the free online program Keybr, then moving on to Typing Club and finishing all its lessons; those are just the ones I like, use the ones that you like and enjoy doing. Touch typing just has to be learned once, and it is like a permanent upgrade. The sooner you add it to your life; the more possibilities it will open for you. When you are writing pages of text while your friends are completing one sentence, you are basically an upgraded human.

Learn the English language thoroughly. This is another permanent upgrade that you can add to your life. You will be writing a lot in life, especially when you are in school, so this will be a very useful upgrade. Know what a vowel and consonant are, and understand nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, Clauses (independent and dependant), Conjunctions, Conjunctive adverbs - know what they are in a sentence. Learn to use all your punctuations well. It's easy enough to understand the period, comma, and question mark (.,?), but other punctuations like the semicolon, apostrophe, and hyphen (;'-) require a little more effort to understand. Most people go through life not knowing all this, but you knowing this will have you running faster in life than the people around you. 

Be very careful when you are angry. It will give you a lot of energy to do things, but it will be dumb energy and using it will more than likely worsen the situation. There are two things I recommend when it comes to anger:

• First, go outside and go for a walk around the block a couple of times. Anger is energy that wants to go somewhere, and if you are stationary or just pacing at home, it will get stronger. But a walk will dissipate it, and then if the problem still exists, you can deal with it with more thought.
• Second, and this is also for when you're feeling hurt or defeated, use 'The Work,' which is a system of questioning your hurtful thoughts by Byron Katie. When you do this, you will often find that the opposite of what you think is true, and you will laugh at what you were stressing about.

Guard your advantage - In school and at work you will often find that you are in competition with others or at least you will find that you will get treated better than others if you do better than others, so if you know of some trick to do the job well, don't share it with others and make sure they don't know that you are hiding a secret so share some of your less valuable tricks when people come to you for help, but don't share your best tricks.

Learn from the best - While you should guard your advantage, you should do all you can to learn from the best. Learning from the best is a shortcut to getting very good at your job or school. I once worked as a salesperson at Toyota, and every month we were told who the best salesperson was. After a lot of compliments, I got to ask him everything he does to be such a great salesperson, from how he keeps track of his customers, what shortcuts he has saved on his web browser, to what's in his desk, his scripts, his morning routine, and even what shoes he wears - a lot of these smaller habits make a big difference.

I didn't just talk to him, of course. I learned from everyone what their best ideas were. It wasn't always a formal interview; Your questions have to seem like normal conversations, don't do anything that draws undue attention onto yourself, most people are happy to blab about their successes if someone is happy to listen to them and usually your manager has a vested interest in you doing well. Do this, and your roles will be so much easier.

Make it a hobby to reduce or eliminate as many ongoing costs as possible. For example, if you're paying $1 a week as a bank fee, it might seem insignificant, but over a year, that's $52.00. That’s enough for a week's worth of food; it may only be sardines, offcuts, and butter, but that could be the difference you helping your best friend prepare for a wedding or staying at work. Even small fees can add up quickly.

Once you start working, it’s easy to fall into the habit of buying fast food, coffee, soft drinks, or snacks daily. The damage of these small indulgences will do to your free time and freedom to do what you love is massive compared to bank fees. Just because more money will hit your account next week doesn’t mean you’ll always have a steady income. A little effort to make things you enjoy at home or find lower-cost alternatives can go a long way. Better yet, eliminating your desire for treats altogether will not only save you money, it will also save you time from when you are not preparing or going to the shop and when you don't have to work more to get what you want, and mental energy from just not thinking about it.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experience:

1. Coffee Habit: When you were born, I used to get a coffee for myself and your mom from a service station near us every morning. At $3.00 a cup, it added up to $42 a week. I didn’t like that because I wanted to stay off work as long as possible to help your parents with you. After getting to know the guys at the servo, I learned what coffee they used and got some used coffee grounds to replicate the grind level. I already had a hand grinder and coffee press at home, and after observing their coffee machine a few times, I managed to make coffee that tasted better at home for less than 50 cents a cup. The bonus was that I no longer craved the servo coffee.

2. Pepsi Max Addiction: For years, I was addicted to Pepsi Max, drinking over a litre a day. Quitting cold turkey didn’t work for me, so I gradually substituted it with drinks that tasted less and less like it. I started by switching to Coke Zero, which is less sweet than Pepsi Max. Then, I tried strong citrus soft drinks, but that wasn’t enough, so I went back to Coke Zero for a while. Next, I transitioned to energy drinks, then to Coles stevia-flavoured sparkling water, and finally to a 50-50 mix of sparkling water and plain water. I haven’t fully switched to plain water yet. I hope you never have to deal with an addiction like this. If you do, the gradual substitution method is a great way to reduce that expense.

Notice in these examples that I am not depriving myself. I learned to make the expensive coffee at home, so I was still getting my coffee fix without the high cost. With the Pepsi Max, I slowly moved to alternatives that didn’t make me feel deprived. Eventually, when I switch to plain water entirely, the desire for the drink will be gone, and I won't feel like I’m missing out.

Do not buy new cars - a $4000 second-hand vehicle will do the same job a $40,000 new vehicle, so why waste the money? Also, a new car often becomes less useful than a used vehicle because:

• You have to be extra careful with it; you won't want it scratched, so you will be taking extra time to park it.
• If it does get scratched, it will hurt more than if you just had a low-cost old car.
• You may have to maintain a job you don't like because you are trying to pay for an expensive vehicle. Even if you like the job, an extra $36k will help you do so many other meaningful things rather than just having a vehicle that you will get used to in a month.
• You may not want to take your vehicle in many situations because you don't want it damaged, making it less useful than a used vehicle.
• It won't be very easy to swap to a new vehicle in case of an accident or if you just want to try something else when you have an expensive vehicle.
• If you are frugal, an extra $36k will allow you to not work for five years, and with this time, you could get a new degree and start a career that you might want to get into.
• It will be more expensive to service a new vehicle, and you will have to go to the manufacturer's service centre to get the vehicle serviced. With an old car, you can just take it to your local mechanic.
• With a lower-cost vehicle, if something needs repairing, you will have extra cash for the job.
• New cars devalue very quickly, but with a used vehicle, you will either be able to sell it back into the market at the same or higher price.

I could write so much more, but you get the point. When you do go for a used vehicle, just ask me or your Ritu mama to come with you to inspect the vehicle before you purchase it, and we will make sure we get you something good.

Do not buy new phones - while not as expensive as a new vehicle, a new phone will not add anything more to your life, it will just have a camera with a few extra pixels that you won't notice and a slightly moved around design, that will be covered up by a phone case. a five-year-old phone will literally do everything a new flagship phone will do. It is also a good idea to go for a less powerful phone because smart phones, apps and many websites are made to be as addictive as possible so people stay on these devises all day, and companies can keep collecting data on you and keep presenting you with ads to increase their profits.

Do not get into a phone contract – Staying on the topic of phones, avoid signing up for phone and data contracts, especially for a new phone. You’ll be locked into the contract for years, and you’ll end up paying two to three times the cost of the phone. The extra data you're paying for will mostly be wasted on distractions. If you need a replacement phone, just buy a second-hand or a mid-ranger, you won't notice much difference. I currently use a cancel-anytime service with Flip Mobile, paying only $9.90 per month for unlimited calls and texts, plus three gigs of data. This is more than enough for checking emails, banking, GPS, and making internet-based calls and texts, I can even stream a few videos. When I ask others how much they pay for their phones, I am shocked to hear numbers between $40 and $120 a month. When I mention they don't need to pay so much, they insist they need the data. But in reality, they don’t. Instead of watching videos, I read or listen to podcasts which I have downloaded via Wi-Fi, but mostly I just let my mind wander, let your mind rest you don't need to fill every waking moment with engagement, especially don't fill your time with things to do, if you are upset about something - feel your feelings and draw any lessons you need to learn from it so you can do better in similar situations in the future.

Stupefy Your Smartphone – Many people don’t realize how much of their time and productive energy is zapped by smartphones. The creators of smartphones, apps, and websites are primarily focused on keeping you engaged with their products for as long as possible so they can profit from you. For a year, I swapped my smartphone for a “dumb” phone, and during that time, I read thirty books, learned front-end web development, and even built and uploaded an app to the Android app store, and this was before we had AI assistants. You can achieve this and even more, sweetheart. With easy access to knowledge online, you have opportunities to learn and accomplish far more than we could when we were growing up. However, it’s easy to get pulled into apps and end up spending all your time on them, especially when you let your guard down. This is why it's a good idea to “stupefy” your smartphone.

Dumb phones are not practical in today’s world (and I encountered some challenges during that year), you can take steps to limit your access to the most addictive apps on your smartphone. Start by removing social media, shopping, web browsing, and content aggregator apps. Then, go into your phone’s settings and disable the app store. You can always re-enable it later, but by adding these extra steps to access time-consuming apps, you’ll have a greater chance of resisting the urge to veg out on your phone. This way, you can still enjoy the essential features of a smartphone while keeping distractions at bay.

Shield your internet access - As bad as distractions on the phone can be, distractions through your PC are far worse, because usually when you sit at the computer, you are doing so to do something useful. However, every site you go to for information will use all sorts of tricks to make you stay on their site as long as possible. Here are a few strategies to fight this:

• As soon as you update Windows, it will put in front of you all sorts of clicks to news, weather, traffic, and stock updates. It's a trap; Microsoft is trying to take you away from your current task and keep you away as long as possible for their benefit, so disable it all as soon as possible.
• It's best to not even have social media, but if you do use it, use plugins like uBlock Origin and FB Purity to completely block sections of those sites meant to get you off task.
• For YouTube, use plugins like YTBlock to never see words that are too irresistible, and a plugin like Zen YouTube will let you remove all of YouTube's suggested and recommended videos.
• Even when you are on websites for learning, like Udemy, you will find that it is constantly trying to upsell you, so liberally use plugins like uBlock Origin and popup blockers and turn off unnecessary notifications.
• If you catch yourself automatically going to websites or sub websites that waste your time, use plugins that block websites or put timers and passwords on the site. The extra friction it will take for you to input a password to get into a website will be enough to remind you that you have recognized this site to be an emotion, time and willpower vampire and that you have put a restriction on the site when your will and emotion was fuller. 

These are just a few of my suggestions. You will be in a constant battle against these companies where you will be trying to use your time and money for your benefit, and these companies will be trying to take your time and money for their benefit. Be on a ruthless war against the machine.