Scott Fillmer

Every year I wish I had read more books. Once i get into a book I’m good, but when i finish it takes me forever to get back into that groove of the “next” book. I tend to bounce from book to book until I find that next one. That next one right now is Tony Reinke’s new book, God, Technology, and the Christian Life.

There are so few tehcnologically deep, well written, books that combine faith and technology, but this is one of them, so far. I’m just getting started, but Reinke’s balanced objective voice shows how science, technology, and faith in God all coexist and often compliment each other. I can’t wait to get to the meat of the text.

Books in the technology genre are some of my favorite, but they often get outdated very quickly. Some that have stood the test of time and are favorites of mine are (in no paticular order):

• Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
• Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
• Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
• The Art of Invisibility by Kevin Mitnick
• The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
• Viral by Leonard Sweet
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke

I’m sure there are plenty of others, those are just some on my list. 📚

I love macro photography. True marco 1:1 magnification (or greater) has been a long time favorite of mine for many years. The butterfly in this post was one such shot I took a while back with a Nikon 105mm Macro lens. When Apple announced the new iPhone 13 received a “close focus” lens i was really looking forward to trying it out, yet I rarely remember to use it.

When I do remember to get in close with the iPhone I’m quite pleased with the results. It isn’t true full 1:1 marco photography, but it’s pretty darn close for shots you can take on a phone. The two shots here (not the butterfly of course) were taken of frost on my truck a few days ago. The shot in red was on the hood of the truck, the grey/green was the windshield.

I love the RSS feed and think it’s one of the most powerful tools someone can use to filter and currate content on the web. It’s also one of the most undervalued and underused options. Unfortunately on March 13, 2013, Google announced they were discontinuing Google Reader, stating the product had a loyal but declining following, and at that point, Google pretty much killed the popular use of RSS.

My RSS reader still has several hundred feeds that transferred over to Feedly when Google shut down, but I haven’t opened Feedly in some time. There are several different sites I’m actively using now that have great RSS feeds so I went back to looking at readers and the two main players are Feedly and Inoreader.

Fastfoward to 2022 and I’m pleasantly surprised how great these two apps have been developed. But I’m torn between the two, and both have subscriptions to get full features. Reviews really push Inoreader and the features they offer, but I have found Inoreader to be somewhat confusing, complicated, and complex to do what I want, read. Feedly may be the old non-flashy app but the UI for reading is amazing.

What a great time to be on the internet right now. It feels like a time back in the day when really cool and exciting things were being created faster than you could figure out. In 2022 we’re on the cusp of another internet revolution. This time it’s a decentralized, web3, crypto baked in blockchain with endless possibilities just on the horizon. I’m somewhere between Photography and NFT’s and The Case Against Crypto and love learning about new tech.

In my relentless search for the best parts of the internet I finally came across micro.blog through a post by @gruber and it was just what i was looking for. A super simple, clean ui at the cross roads between long form blogging like Wordpress and all the other overused social networking sites.

I’ll be doing short quick updates here, usually including some type of photography or technology based discussion that might be a foggy sunrise shot on my iPhone, or trying to figure out airdrops and nft’s. You can find me in other spaces too like scottfillmer.com or my blog at iscott.io or my current NFT site at sftokens.io and maybe some unstoppable domain eventually. For now, this will be my one long form entry here, I’ll go micro next time.