PODCAST · technology
Digging for Fire
by Saadia Carbis
This is the audioblog stream for Digging for Fire, a blog about technology and education (and sometimes gardening).
Episodes
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Port Said
I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part two. Part one is here. On the 22nd of September, 1949, Ronaldo Fabri got on a boat, leaving behind…
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Why I believe in ghosts
I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part one. In 2009, Talia and I went on a Contiki tour of Europe. Despite being the only married couple…
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Mullumbimby
We're spending the last days of pesach in Mullumbimby. There's an amazing Jewish community here, full of young families and friendly faces. The Rabbi was kind enough to let us park our caravan in the yard of the shul, so we'll be very close to services over the next two days. This morning I was…
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Offline
When was the last time you were offline? Like, really offline. Not just signed out of Slack. Not Do Not Disturb. Not even airplane mode. I'm talking phone entirely off for a good 24 hours. Stay at home, with no internet, and no screens. It's a forcing function for your mental health. I challenge...
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Untitled
Out of sheer curiosity, I applied for a job that had a really interesting cross-over between Education and AI. I flubbed the interview. I felt very out of practice, but also, the CEO had very silicon valley vibes. She was operating at a way faster speed to me. Come to think of it, people often…
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Trapped in an Eternal Cycle of Enshittification
I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work. But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1 Of course, it was AI generated. I spent...
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Academic Integrity
Normally I start with a blog post that I then convert that into a podcast. But this is a podcast first, and I'm going to turn it into a blog post later. I don't have a script that I'm reading from. This is all sort of off the cuff. There's something that I've been meaning to talk about. To speak...
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Pirate School
Welcome to Pirate School! A new podcast hosted by me and Talia Carbis, about the chaotic, messy, wild world of home education. This podcast is basically just a chat about how we homeschool. We're both trained as teachers, so we do know a lot of those foundational education principles. And, of...
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Something Profound
Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Pull it down from the heavens Pull it up from the ground Say something, Say something profound Say something oblique Say something oblique Some obscure reference Something antique The less that they get it...
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The Eurocrats, iOS interoperability, and PebbleOS
Pebble is back!1 I wrote about it, Eric Migicovsky wrote about it, even John Gruber wrote about it, and it's now available for pre-order. But… iPhone users like myself have been warned. The experience will be hamstrung, due to Apple's lack of interoperability between iOS and third-party devices....
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'Murica
I've been interacting with quite a lot of Americans, Europeans, and Brits the last few days. I've learned two new things about the USA, and for once, neither comes from my typical sarcastic, antagonistic disposition toward "the land of the free". First, Americans share a common cultural…
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Drinking on Purim
It's pretty rare to find people who live an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle where there's no Orthodox Jewish community. But I do. Because I'm recognisably Jewish (I wear a kippah), I often encounter people who have questions and pre-conceptions about Judaism, which I'm more than happy to oblige. There…
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Constructivism for Normal People
My previous post was a little dense and academic. Sorry about that. We're not all educators, but we are all learners. Even though Ecological Dynamics was a little hard to parse, there's some really helpful learning advice contained there. I'm going to sum it up here in a more casual tone. And...
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Ecological Dynamics
I was recently introduced the sports psychology methodology called Ecological Dynamics. It's an approach to skill acquisition for physical activities which is becoming widely adopted by contemporary coaching practices. Elite coaches across the globe are leveraging these strategies to achieve...
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Dungeons & Teenagers
The dragon is closing in. The cleric is out of spell slots. The rogue is unconscious. The barbarian is bleeding out, and the wizard has one last chance to pull off something, anything, that might turn this around. The dice clatter across the table. Don't we all live for moments like this? We’re...
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Gymnopédie No. 1
Soundtrack for this post. What Satie is teaching me. Fast and quiet It's very natural to play allegro forte, fast and loud. It's much harder to play allegro piano, fast and quiet. Just because my days are busy, quickly moving from one task to another, that doesn't necessitate stress. It's…
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Social Course Correction
In order to, maybe, reach a wider audience, I’ve decided to change my position on social media. I recently ran into an X profile which declared itself “write only”. My plan is to create social profiles that do the same, auto-posting words and clips from this blog. l-w------- I've chosen four...
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Call me
Inspired by Matt Webb's Unoffice Hours, I've opened by calendar for 30 minutes every week. Whether you'd like to chat about a recent blog post, how I organise, homeschooling, podcasting, film recommendations, or anything else, I'm available. All you need to do is book a call. You will need to be...
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The Joy of Hacking
Whenever I'm working on something new, my end goal is to distill it into the simplest version possible. Clean, readable, minimalist. Usually, that process starts with chaos and complexity. Whether it's a coding project or a TTRPG concept, the genesis is the same. Throw together a whole mess of...
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Wednesday
Derived from the Old English Wōdnesdæg, Odin’s Day. A Norse god of complexity and contradiction, war and wisdom. In the Romance languages, mercoledì, miércoles, and mercredi, named for Mercury. A Roman god of trade and travel. These gods, it seems, aren’t on my side. Wednesdays have been a…
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Wind & Truth
This is a special audio-only episode of Digging for Fire, where I discuss Brandon Sanderson's latest Cosmere novel Wind and Truth with special guest Lior Carbis. Spoilers!
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The Good Kinds
There are three kinds of ads. Heat seeking missiles [BAD] Data aggregators purchase your data, analyse your location, purchase history, browsing history, app usage, and more, then create a complex profile of you with AI assisted inference. They guess, (and nearly always accurately) your income,...
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Zag
Keep ‘em in suspense. Make all the promises you need to. Walk right on up to the door holding all the answers. Then, zag. There’s an art to timing a good zag. Too early and you lose impact. Too late and you lose trust. A good storyteller knows how to zig, but more importantly, knows precisely…
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Limitless Adscapes
"I love that Facebook shows me the ads I want to see!" Have you ever come across anti-privacy apologists? "Privacy is dead. It's a thing of the past. You just can't expect a right to privacy in the modern world." This is such a dark road to go down. The end-game is a black mirror episode where…
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Everything new is old again
I noticed something weird about the things that interest me. I’m fascinated by emerging technologies. I’m all about the bleeding edge, more than happy to trade software bugs for early access. Give me the beta! I had an early smart watch, I was early to the smart home (much to the chagrin of my...
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Failed to Launch
Depending on where you’re at in life, and what kind of processes you have in place, you may dive right into the idea. Perhaps you work on it nonstop, stay up late tinkering, and overall just can’t get put it down. At some point you’ll start to add some definition and try to bring shape to the…
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The New Cigarette
In the early days of the cigarette, smoking was considered a harmless or even beneficial activity. Cigarettes were considered stylish, sophisticated, and doctor-approved. By the early 20th century, smoking was so deeply embedded in modern culture that it was hard to imagine a future without it!…
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Learn as you go
Everyone is making it up to some extent. This is the secret I didn’t learn until years into my career. I often thought I was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on, and was in awe of the geniuses always surrounding me... ... Often people are making things up as they go along....
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Steganography
Tuesday morning, I'm in the car with my son, and the topic of steganography comes up. Eli is an adventurous kid – he loves playing games involving treasure and discovery with his mates. No prize for guessing how fascinated he was with the concept of hiding secret messages in plain sight. He…
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Writing Chair
In 2020 I started writing a novel. It was an ill-fated endeavour, but I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned is that it's useful to have a separate "space" for writing. I used to cycle into my city office on Eagle St., then take my laptop and a coffee somewhere else to write....
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Gloriously Human
I've been having an ongoing argument with a friend about AI's role in recruiting. Whether you're a job-seeker or employer, things are getting pretty dire. If you're looking for a job, one in five advertised positions are "ghost jobs" – fake, or already filled. The number of ghost jobs are…
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🥙 Pita: Devlog 2
I'm building an app called Pita. It makes publishing and managing your podcasts easy (and pretty). This is the second update. The first is here. One of the problems with hosting your own podcast is that you still need the audio files to be served from somewhere. Depending on the podcast, these...
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Pebble
On the 25th of February in 2015, I backed what would become my most beloved kickstarter project. The Pebble Time smart watch. I chose the Pebble Time Round edition, which I still believe to this day is the most beautiful smart watch that's ever been built. I was a long-time Apple Watch holdout...
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Fever
Try asking DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square or Uyghur Muslims or Taiwanese Independence. I'm not using it. ChatGPT has better voice recognition and can remember things about me. I like that. Can't login with Apple over the web, just in the app. It should be banned like TikTok. Exporting Chinese...
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Compasses over Maps
We use the word "goal" to talk about so many things. I want to get better at piano. I'm committed to doing yoga every morning for 3 months. Someday, I'd love to run a marathon. These are all "goals". Business school teaches that goals should be measurable, within a set timeframe. Sales targets…
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Black & White
There's something special about black and white photography. We cannot help but perceive colour all around us, so the black and white image doesn't capture the world as we see it, but rather, as we remember it. It is said that we dream in black and white. I don't think that's true. Dreams, like...
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Raising Pirates
I've always been a troublemaker. It's in my blood. You see, through my father's line, I am a descendant of Cornish pirates. You may have heard of the Pirates of Penzance. The Gilbert & Sullivan opera was written about real pirates who harboured in a town named Penzance, at the southern tip of the...
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Starting Point
I recently wrote about the way AI is making it possible to build software essentially for free. That's not exactly true – at least not yet. Starting work on a new project is hard. It's the classic blank page problem. While AI doesn't yet do such a great job of programming, one thing that it's…
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🥙 Pita: Devlog 1
On June 28, 2005, Apple release iTunes 4.9. From the release notes: With iTunes 4.9, you can now browse and subscribe to podcasts from within the iTunes Music Store. Podcasts are frequently updated radio-style shows downloadable over the Internet. You can also transfer podcasts to iPod, for...
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Malleable Software
Ben Thompson's aggregation theory posits that the internet created an entirely new disruptive business paradigm, because for the first time in history, products could be distributed with zero marginal cost. Now, large language models have triggered a second wave of disruption: while the internet...
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Housekeeping
A little housekeeping post, with a few updates to the website. First of all, if you're reading this in your RSS reader, THANK YOU for keeping the dream alive. You might like to click through for this post, because I've made some small changes to the website.
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Documenting Uninteresting Minutia
I was inspired by something I saw on Joshua Wold's blog a few days ago. He was reflecting on why we write. When I sit down to put words to the page I have an idea of what I want to write. But I’ve purposely chosen not to plan it out. The experience is much the same for me, except that sometimes I...
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Circle of Fifths
My method for practicing bass guitar is based on the Circle of Fifths, inspired by a method taught by Scott Devine. The Circle of Fifths is a music theory concept which links each of the 12 notes in a sequence. Start with a note, and increment it by 5. Play that "fifth", and then increment…
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Turn-Based Podcasting
Every so often you'll come up with an idea that you're pretty sure nobody has tried yet. 99% of the time you're wrong. But I think our invention of the turn-based podcast falls into that 1% of truly unique ideas. Joshua and I have been working asynchronously for nearly our whole careers. So when…
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Syndication
On a drive with Talia yesterday, I wanted to tell her about some of the interesting things I discovered while writing my Input 2024 post. The conversation went something like… Saadia Let me tell you about something I wrote, since I know you don't read my blog. Talia How do you know I don't read…
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Input 2024
Since 2021, I've recorded every Book, Film, and Television series I've seen each year. Usually, I'll write a round-up post at the end of the year with long lists of every title. For my 2024 roundup, I've decided to keep it a little more succinct. Those who know me know that I think a lot about...
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Loofah
Growing up, we always showered using (what my Italian mother called) a straccio. It wasn't until I was old enough to shop for myself that I encountered the plastic "shower puff", known also as a loofah1. That word – loofah – occupied a very singular place in my mind (synthetic shower accessory)...
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Peacock Resolutions
Twenty twenty-five is such a great number. Check this out: (20 + 25)² = 2025! And if that doesn't convince you: (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025.1 Clearly we're living squarely in auspicious times.2
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Media Literacy
In 2024, I led a series of Film & TV classes for a small group of homeschool students. The curriculum was designed to explore a variety of tasks and topics, offering the students insight into different career paths within the filmmaking industry.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
This is the audioblog stream for Digging for Fire, a blog about technology and education (and sometimes gardening).
HOSTED BY
Saadia Carbis
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Digging for Fire have?
Digging for Fire currently has 52 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Digging for Fire about?
This is the audioblog stream for Digging for Fire, a blog about technology and education (and sometimes gardening).
How often does Digging for Fire release new episodes?
Digging for Fire has 52 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Digging for Fire?
You can listen to Digging for Fire on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Digging for Fire?
Digging for Fire is created and hosted by Saadia Carbis.
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