---
title: "October 13th, 2020"
author: Brennan K. Brown
---

Another busy bee week! Time seems to be flying by for me. On the forums, I was given the _Regular_ badge, meaning I can change thread titles, such as "Brennan's Beeminder Journal 2020" to "Brennan's Beeminder Journal", which allows this Beejournal to continue ad infinitum, huzzah!

Regarding _/morning-pages_, the solution I found was to use [**URLminder**](https://help.beeminder.com/article/88-urlminder), this will track the word count of (multiple) Google Docs or Dropbox documents. I figure I'll add a new document each month, as I find that's a good time-frame to segment writing. And unlike Draft, URLminder lets you change the deadline time, which was my entire problem in the first place. The caveat being that I'll need to adjust to writing somewhere else consistently.

This week's verbal contract will be: To get a better at understanding API. Although I've found multiple new systems within the unofficial integration lists that I'm excited to use, it made me realize how much more potential there is--and perhaps the frustration that 3rd party solutions seem so ephemeral. [Khan Academy](https://github.com/Khan/khan-api/blob/master/README.md), for instance, have deprecated their API entirely. [FreeCodeCamp](https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/open-api) hasn't had theirs updated in nearly two years. Is interest in this kind of things just too niche?

On the other hand, I think there's benefit in there only being thirty or so high-quality official integrations. I know when I first was starting out, I didn't feel overwhelmed by the paradox of choice.

## New Systems

As I've written about a few weeks ago, limitation breeds creativity for me. It's been fun trying to work with just the official integrations, but this would not be an experiment of self-improvement if stagnation was allowed! Exciting things are going on, I'm trying a bunch of new stuff.

- [**/ClozeMaster:**](https://www.beeminder.com/brennanbrown/clozemaster) Supplement my French learning with Duolingo
- [**/Meditation:**](https://www.beeminder.com/brennanbrown/meditation) It's so cool how you can use Apple Health to track mindful minutes with different meditation apps. I'm still have to figure out my favorite but right now I'm using Headspace.
- [**/Prayer:**](https://www.beeminder.com/brennanbrown/prayer) Using Rosarium ([Beeminder's blog post about it](https://blog.beeminder.com/rosary/)), my relationship with spirituality is _complicated_, but I definitely enjoy the Rosary prayer, and it's a good way to start my days with the right intentions.

P.S. I figured out why RescueTime was still measuring time even though I was AFK. It has to do with a pesky [design flaw](https://www.unixreich.com/blog/2013/linux-nvidia-optimus-on-thinkpad-w520w530-with-external-monitor-finally-solved/) ([more detail](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_W520#Nvidia_Optimus_Setup)) of the ThinkPad W520 (which, by the way, is the best laptop ever minus this one thing).

P.S.S. Also added a link to @narthur's [beewiki](https://www.nathanarthur.com/beeminder-wiki/) to [journal.bar](https://journal.bar), I hope it catches on! 😊
