Category Archives: Travel

Trips, cities, airports, and life on the road.

Song Creation

Design, Music, Personal, Travel, Video, WordPress

I’m in New Orleans for the first time in 7 years for a beautiful wedding. My Mom’s side of the family emigrated here in the 1860s, and there’s a deep comfort in the art, traditions, and weirdness of Creole culture. Good music and food are ubiquitous.

I met up with WordPresser Blake Bertuccelli-Booth to catch a set by Jason Marsalis at Snug Harbor, featuring some great originals and surprising arrangements of Maroon 5’s “This Love” and the music from the Bejeweled Butterflies game. Great artists find inspiration everywhere.

Afterward, we went to see my friend Troy, aka Trombone Shorty, at his studio. (Troy and I met when we both received the Heinz Award in 2016.) He was with Silkk the Shocker and Reggie Nicholas Jr., working on beats and songs. Though I was there for just a short while, it was inspiring to see the act of musical creation.

A few days ago, Ed Sheeran went on the new Benny Blanco / Lil Dicky / Kristin Podcast Friends Keep Secrets. I haven’t watched the entire episode, but the twenty minutes from about 1:09 to the end where Ed and Benny come up with a new song I’ve seen 4 times now, it’s magical. Check it out, it’s one of the coolest things you’ll see this week.

I’ve seen Ed Sheeran loop his songs live, but this act of creation is very special, and I love the dynamic between him and Benny. It reminds me of that magical moment in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary where you see Paul McCartney and the band come up with the idea for the classic song Get Back.

Bar Gyu x Wapuu

Automattic, Events, Gallery, Travel, WordPress


For the Japanese WordPress community, I have planted a special Wapuu at the coolest spot in Niseko, Bar Gyu, aka the refrigerator door bar. 

Now on the handle you’ll find a special surprise. Anyone recognize which WordCamp it’s from?

Ioanna and Hisashi run one of the coolest bars in the world; it’s been on my bucket list to visit. Hisashi is a big jazz fan, he even gifted me two records from a Japanese jazz pianist in Sapporo called Ryo Fukui.

I can’t wait to play these in San Francisco, where I have a Shindo Laboratory vinyl setup. (Pics from visiting Shindo Labs in 2009.) Some more snaps from the town since I haven’t done much PhotoMatting in a while.

I actually didn’t ski this trip despite the outfit because WordPress and Automattic had too much interesting stuff going on. So I’ll have to return to experience the famous snow of Niseko. And if you’re ever in the area, definitely make the trip to check out Bar Gyu! Maybe drop another WordPress sticker on the door.

Bacon Egg Cheese

Design, Food, Travel

One of my favorite travel hacks is finding the Neapolitan pizza oven in the airport, as there’s nothing quite like a fresh pizza sizzling on your plate.

At Houston Intercontinental, which I know like the back of my hand, there was a divine experience at the C Gate nexus at Forno Magico, especially in the morning, when they offer a bacon, egg, and cheese pizza that I would beeline for whenever I had a morning flight. It’s big enough to feed two.

That said, I am disappointed to report that Forno Magico is no longer magical. They stopped salting the oven floor or rotating the pie, and the eggs were sloppily bunched. The dough was dry; it was like they’d never had a good pizza. They’re only heating the oven to 498, not the 905 recommended by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. It was edible but not a delight, as you can see here.

I hope they rediscover the art of firing pizzas they started with. They’re charging over $20 for it, so plenty of margin for fuel. It would also serve customers much faster! I’ll keep searching for great pizzas in other airports.

If you have a Gozney or Ooni at home (highly recommended!), try making a breakfast pizza. My friend Chris Young recommends this dough recipe.

Happy New Year

Personal, Travel

I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts with friends.

I resolved in 2025 to watch more films. It’s an art form I have many friends in, and when we have hung out, I’ve realized how shallow my understanding of the film canon is. I have a lot of catch-up to do, and it also requires a lifestyle change, as I’m usually at a laptop. Making space to enjoy a film for a few hours was a departure from my regular routines.

I watched 72 movies last year! This definitely came at the cost of books finished, if I look at my stats. But I’ve begun to really appreciate the contours of what I love about a movie now.

This is a long lead to recommend the movie Jay Kelly, which streams on Netflix with George Clooney and Adam Sandler. After seeing many great and terrible movies, old and new, I really appreciated what they did with this film, and it was one of the rare ones I watched entirely or in sections several times, gaining new appreciation for what they pulled off.

It starts with a “One-er,” which is a continuous shot with no cuts that moves between a number of different scenes in a really slick way. (Excellent episode of The Studio about this!) It’s a film way of showing off, as it must be incredibly hard to have hundreds of people all pulling off something flawlessly for a long period of time, not unlike a Broadway show.

Jay Kelly is George Clooney playing himself, which, as he says, is the hardest thing to do. There are meta-levels of reality and fiction, and so many allusions and callbacks, the entire thing is a work of art. You learn to appreciate what actors do and how film is made while watching a film being made in such a nice way.

So that is my recommendation for the year. In older movies, I really enjoyed Kate & Leopold, which also features an amazing Sting song that is impossible to find on streaming services.

Kanye’s Back

Music, Travel

In case you missed it, Kanye has started apologizing for the event he went through. I didn’t comment on it publicly when it happened because it seemed so strange to me that such a beautiful soul, who had created so much life-changing music with so much love, could express such hate. I’ve had close friends who are bipolar, so I’m familiar with the disease, and seeing Ye’s episode was really heartbreaking, both for the things he was saying and also that it was clearly a medical issue, unfortunately, playing out in the public sphere. (I can’t imagine anything worse.) Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Who knows what’s next, but hopefully this is the start of a new generative era for Ye, who clearly has the ability to innovate across many fields. Especially with no rap songs in the Billboard 40 for the first time since 1990! It does feel like we’re living through a New Renaissance right now, there’s an explosion of creativity and access. I’m wishing Ye peace and equanimity with the challenges he’s facing, and I’m definitely going to revisit some of his early work (The College Dropout (ha!) through Cruel Summer) that was so influential on me as I was growing up.

I’ve been following this cool open source project called Meshtastic, which is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” I finally got some time to set it up tonight. It was super easy; you just flash the Meshtastic firmware in your browser to any of the compatible devices. I got a Heltec v3 device for $35 bucks on Amazon. (I’d link but it’s out of stock, and I think there’s a newer version.) Apparently, there are enough people running nodes that you can bounce a message from Portland to San Francisco! I love the idea of parallel to the internet networks, and I’ve been meaning to get a HAM license, but in the meantime, this looks pretty fun.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

— Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect (1864–1912) (Hat tip: Erin, and the Summit folks.) (It’s an old quote but update in your head to include the ladies too.)

Linkrot

Design, New York, Press, Travel, WordPress, WordPress.com

One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, has a great new profile out in the New Yorker.)

I learned today from the Newspack newsletter that the Houston Press is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.

The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here. There’s a funny quote in there:

He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. “They have a ton of money…But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have time” to do WordPress. 

That “search-engine start-up” was Google! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running Automattic.

Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/feature2.html, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine, but not needing it is even better.

I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by Aaron Zamost: What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’? It describes the cycles that companies go through in public perception, and the beauty of revisiting it ten years later is that you can see which of the examples are still relevant, or the domains that 404. As someone who has been around this clock probably a dozen times now, I highly suggest this for anyone “going through it.” Some of the most powerful words in the English language: This too shall pass.

See also: The Zen fable or old Chinese poem of the old man who loses his horse.

Om 59

Automattic, Design, Personal, Travel, WordPress

I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others.

Om was one of the earliest users of WordPress and he was one of 8 people who came to the very first WordPress meetups at Chaat Cafe on 3rd street in San Francisco in 2005. (You can tell what an early adopter he is because he has the username “Om” on Twitter/X and Instagram and WordPress and probably more.) We had connected on the WordPress support forums when I helped him get set up around the 1.0 days. After I moved to San Francisco to take the job at CNET he connected me to people like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, and Toni Schneider who would become, respectively, an investor, board member, and CEO of Automattic. These are folks I still work with and consider close friends today. As a journalist, he had a keen nose for BS and made sure as a naïve 20-something in SF I was connecting with quality people.

Since we met we’ve both had a shared love for photography, and I’ve seen Om blossom into an amazing photographer with a really unique style and approach, in fact you can even buy some of his photography prints.

Over the years, we’ve dipped in and out of shared obsessions with cameras, watches, shoes, fashion, and design. We have a fair number of matching things in each. In photography we’ve shivered in minus thirty weather in Antarctica and Jackson Hole at odd hours to catch a special shot. We’ve traveled to Europe and Japan dozens of times, being very early (pre John Mayer and Kanye) to brands like Visvim. When I wear something like a bespoke, hand-made piece from 45R to speak at WordCamp US, he recognizes it off the cuff and even knows the one store on Crosby Street in New York where you can buy it. He is a tastemaker and an aesthetic connoisseur in every area he’s interested in, from food to coffee to pens, and everything in between. Sometimes we’ll start a journey together, for example, trying nice pens, and years later, I’ve moved on and he’s gone deep into collecting dozens of them, being in obscure forums and Reddits, or attending events like the SF Pen Show last month.

When you walk into a coffee shop with Om he doesn’t just know the barista’s name, he knows their dog’s name and the story of every person working there.

I’m 500 words in, and I still haven’t even scratched the surface of describing Om’s journey, from growing up in Delhi to becoming a journalist for a Japanese publication in New York, a book author, party promoter, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, photographer, and explorer. If you want to understand the AI bubble we’re in right now, you should read his book Broadbandits on the crazy telecom / Enron bubble. This is a long way to say, happy birthday Om!

Post-Earthquake Tea Grit

Automattic, Press, Travel, Video, WordPress

The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day.

Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we got to chat about the hero’s journey of entrepreneurship, my earliest “Hot Nacho” WordPress scandal and the context of current battles, 996 work, jazz clubs in San Francisco, and more. Kleiner never invested in Automattic (I don’t think we ever pitched) but I have always had huge respect for John Doerr, Brook Byers, Bing Gordon, Mary Meeker, Ilya Fushman, and Mamoon Hamid, so many of the people at KPCB. You can watch on YouTube or listen in Pocket Casts.

It’s a busy speaking season! I just spoke at the Intelligent Change summit, and will be at SaaStock in Austin on May 14, SXSW London, on June 4, Brilliant Minds in Stockholm, and WordCamp EU in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7.

Berkshire Hathaway Meeting

AI, Automattic, Open Source, Travel, WordCamp, WordPress

I’ve checked off a bucket list item: I’m attending a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. It’s really an event! Thousands flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for the legendary Q&A sessions with Warren Buffett and shareholder deals. They’ve made it quite the circus, with every Berkshire Hathaway company having a booth of some sort, and typically selling their goods at a discount or with exclusive items you can only buy there, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Squishmallows (which of course I got, to complement my bronze busts).

It’s strange to have a Dairy Queen booth selling $1 ice cream (cash only!) next to NetJets, but those juxtapositions are part of the Berkshire vibe—it’s very high/low, like Costco (a big Berkshire holding). There’s also an element of WordCamps or a Salesforce Trailblazer event in that you can tell there’s a “type” of person that’s easy to spot who’s a Berkshire enthusiast. A lot of Berkshire brands are also WordPress users: Duracell, GEICO, Acme Brick, Berxi, MiTek. I think there is a lot of mimetic overlap between the values of open source and the values of building a Berkshire company.

As with any big gathering, the side events are also great, and I was honored to have a fireside chat with a friend and Buffett protégé, Tracy Britt Cool. To an audience of about 60+ CEOs in the Kanbrick community, we talked about Automattic’s history and some of the latest happenings in tech; AI was definitely on people’s minds in the Q&A. They had questions for me, but I also feel like I have a ton to learn from this group that has built founder or family-owned businesses with an average of 80-100M of revenue, the kind of thing that is the engine of the American economy.

It makes me pine for the day when we can have more shareholders in Automattic; I think it would be an amazing cohort of folks that believe in open source and the open web, invested together and learning from each other, and I could imagine an event very much like these shareholder meetings. It’s so much more powerful when you build a business where your customers are also a community.

Update: I knew this would be a special one because it was Warren’s 60th, but he really went above and beyond by announcing his intention for Greg Abel to take over as CEO at the end of the year. The standing ovation was a special moment, 60 years of 19.9% compounding returns! I think the future of Berkshire is very bright because he’s shared so much of his worldview that there are others that have made it their own.

Greatest Hits

Meta, Open Source, Travel, WordCamp

I’ve been blogging now for approximately 8,465 days since my first post on Movable Type. My colleague Dan Luu helped me compile some of the “greatest hits” from the archives of ma.tt, perhaps some posts will stir some memories for you as well:

Where Did WordCamps Come From? (2023)

A look back at how Foo Camp and Bar Camp inspired WordCamps.

Getting Real Feedback as a CEO (2018)

How do you make sure you get good information when you’re CEO? Something we’ve been trying that’s been working is having an anonymous internal forum. Like Blind, but internal to the company, and really anonymous, without anything linking a user ID to a comment.

Wix and the GPL (2016)

That time Wix built their closed-source mobile app on GPL code.

What I Miss and Don’t Miss About San Francisco (2015)

Self explanatory 🙂

Advice About Advice (2015)

Why you need to think things through from first principles and not just blindly follow advice.

Why the Web Still Matters (2014)

A guest post by Ben Thompson of Stratechery on why “the web is dead” comments were wrong in 2014. Still true today!

The Four Freedoms (2014)

A discussion of Stallman’s four open source freedoms. Our open source Bill of Rights, if you will.

The Intrinsic Value of Blogging (2014)

On ignoring vanity metrics and blogging for intrinsic reasons

What’s in My Bag 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2025

What I’ve been carrying in my travel bag 

Why Your Company Should Have a Creed (2011)

I’m really jazzed that dozens of companies have adopted this or similar ideas since then.

1.0 is the Loneliest Number (2010)

On the importance of releasing quickly and getting feedback.

The Twitter API (2010)

A discussion on the Twitter API missing the boat on, as Jack Dorsey put it, becoming a protocol.

I Miss School (2010)

Just like they say, youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it.

What Startup Idea Would I suggest? Start a Bank (2009)

There’s been a lot of action in the payments space since 2009. For new companies, we have Square (2009), Stripe (2010), and Wealthsimple (2014), among others. Ally Bank (rebranded from GMAC in 2010) has also been trying to provide a modern customer-focused experience.

Six Steps to Kill Your Community (2009)

Platform and product anti-patterns.

In Defense of the GPL for Open Source Projects (2009)

This was a response to a popular post about how GPL open source projects would lose out to projects under licenses like MIT, BSD, and Apache. I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now. 

The Way I Work (2009)

Self explanatory 🙂

Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage (2008)

On the importance of performance, reliability, and security. This was a core priority for us and it shows. We dominate the competition on third-party performance comparisons at the platform level and on the default user experience, and our security is top-notch.

The Price of Freedom and Open Source Licenses (2007)

A response to a user who wanted the ability to remove GPL freedoms from WordPress.

The PHP5 Transition (2007)

How PHP5 forced us to divert time and attention away from users to deal with migration costs.

Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg (2007)

At Startup School, Kapor advocated for having team diversity while Zuckerberg advocated for a “young and technical” because the best work comes from young people. Now that Facebook (Meta) has grown up, Zuckerberg is doing what Kapor said companies should do and not what Zuckerberg said companies should do! Zuckerberg’s trusted people aren’t young anymore and aren’t being replaced by the young.

Sun Isn’t Relevant to Startups (2007), and Followup (2007)

A discussion of Sun’s Startup Essentials program and Jonathan Schwartz’s (then CEO of Sun) reply.

The RSS Feed Validator is Dead to Me (2006)

The RSS 2.0 feed validator is old news today but the experience here is a good example of why people didn’t take any of these validators seriously and they’re all old news

There’s No Correlation Between Hours Worked and Work Done (2006)

Self explanatory 🙂

Should We Have Hidden Options? (2005)

A discussion of the hidden cost of hidden options.

We probably missed some, if there’s a post you think should be included leave it in the comments.

6.8

AI, Open Source, Themes, Travel, WordPress

WordPress 6.8 Cecil is out, and it’s a great release. It’s unbelievable that it’s already been downloaded over 6 million times as I write this. That feeling never gets old.

It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions:

  • Can we iterate faster with canonical plugins?
  • What’s the fun thing we can put in to celebrate 7.0, and when will that be? (I was rooting for real-time co-editing like Notion/Canva/Google Docs.)
  • How can we use AI to automate our manual work around WordPress.org?
  • Can AI help us make 60k+ open source plugins and themes in the directory more secure? (I think so.)
  • What should we do with our 13k issue backlog? (That’s a lot of bug gardening.)
  • How will AI change how people build and update sites?
  • Just like RSS and web standards supercharged WordPress for the podcasting and search revolutions, what standards or APIs can we ship to help 40%+ of the web work with AI agents? (Plus an entire rabbit hole of all the new sloppy crawlers using so many resources.)

Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one point, I used Google to search for things and would visit their top result, which is great for website owners. Nowadays, Google pulls almost everything I need into the results page, so I don’t see as many random sites. But on Perplexity, sometimes I’ll read the answer and then visit 4-5 of the sources it cites to learn more, so I’m visiting 4-5x more random websites, usually powered by WordPress, than I would have even in the early days of Google. We don’t know how this all plays out yet.

These questions are also against the backdrop of some of the brightest minds in WordPress spending more time with legal code than computer code, which could last until 2027 or longer with appeals.

Speaking for myself, I was in my first deposition today. I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted. Hence, I’m posting about 6.8 after it’s had 6 million downloads. I’m more impressed than ever by what smart lawyers do, and the entire thing, though sometimes imperfect and frustrating, is a blessing to our democracy. However, I can’t wait to return to spending the plurality of my days with engineers and designers again. I’m sure many other folks in the WordPress community would agree.

WordCamp Asia and Maha Kumbh Mela

Travel, WordCamp

It’s been fantastic being in the Philippines for this year’s WordCamp Asia. We have attendees from 71 countries, over 1,800 tickets sold, and contributor day had over 700 people! It’s an interesting contrast to US and EU WordCamps as well in that the audience is definitely a lot younger, and there’s very little interest in “wpdrama” du jour, in fact I’ve had tons of amazing conversations of support and talking about the strength and growth of the community.

Some of the earliest international WordCamps I went to were in Manila and Davao, back in 2008. (I’m going to share some pictures at the start of my talk.) Between that and spending lots of time in Daly City when I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 I have developed a fondness for the cuisine, creativity, family orientation, and warmth of the culture here.

After this I’ll be taking a bit of time off for a trip to the big Hindu religious pilgrimage in India, the Maha Kumbh Mela, which is currently on a 144 cycle. It’s the largest human gathering in the world, with some days measured with tens of millions of people visiting. I’ll be returning to my Photomatt roots as well and bringing my big camera rig, right now a Nikon Z 7II, and two lenses: 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8.

What’s in My Bag, 2025

Audrey, In My Bag, Travel

It’s another year, I have ordered all the things and tested all the cables, there’s a little bit about tech and a little bit about life. Here’s what made the cut, now I’m going to be factoring in weight of everything as well.

The flat-lay this year was taken at my sister Charleen’s house, where she hosted Christmas for our family for the very first time. Charleen and I have worked on the home in Austin for several years and it was awesome to see it all spruced up for the holidays and also for my Mom to visit it for the first time in 13 years. Part of the idea of my sister being in Austin is that if there’s a hurricane or anything in Houston my Mom can just drive up a few hours and be totally comfortable, so we put in an elevator, solar panels, Powerwalls, fiber, and Starlink. Her house is also my Austin headquarters when I’m in town, she set up a nice desk for me to work. Christmas was the beta-test, with Mom + nurse + four dogs all up in Austin; the whole circus was cozy and comfy for the holidays.

I was telling my friend Rob Reid the stories of my Mom and sister’s homes said I had to listen to the song Get Mama a House by Teddybears and B.o.B, it’s a good earworm and I will say that getting them both in beautiful homes they love has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve spent money on. So as advice for other entrepreneurs, get your momma a house! 🙂

TL;DR on the gadgets: The most significant change to my bag has been the introduction of the Daylight Computer, which I think everyone should have and is a genuinely new platform, and that we’ve finally reached reliability and excellence on retractable USB-C cords, these Baseus cords available in a variety of colors and 3.3ft and 6.6ft lengths. I give them out like candy, everybody loves them. I’ve also started wearing Havn hats/underwear/shirts/etc to block unnecessary EMF. (They used to be called Lambs.) And I’ve found great nootropic benefits with DryWater and Celsius. Without further ado, here’s the list:

THE BACKPACK

  1. Aer Fit Pack 3 backpack. This is still my go-to, and it’s embroidered with Automattic and WordPress logos. This is part of our standard swag at Automattic, and I’d like to get a WP-embroidered one on our .org swag store when that’s back up.

DEVICES

  1. 16″ Macbook Pro, right now the M4 Max with 128 GB RAM, amazing what you can run locally on this this thing. I’m very excited about inference at the edge in the coming years.
  2. iPad Pro, which I use as a second display when I’m on the road using Apple’s screen mirroring giving me another 10 inches of screen.
  3. Daylight Computer DC-1 represents the first truly new platform I spend time on. It’s a healthier way of computing and I would like to increase my % screentime on it in the coming years. Also amazing for kids.
  4. Kindle Paperwhite, this might lose to the Daylight in the future but I do like its form factor.
  5. iPhone 16 Pro, you use your phone so much just always have the latest model. This is my primary phone.
  6. Google Pixel 9 Pro finally is iPhone-parity for me, I use this mostly for tethering with Google Fi and testing our apps on Android. I got the pink one, it’s really a beautiful device and I could imagine a world where it was my daily driver but there’s just so much convenience in the continuity features of an all-Apple life. It’s the little things, like copy and paste, that really hook you.

One nice thing is that the iPad and two phones all have connectivity plans, which I try to spread across different providers so I always have something that works or I can tether to.

POWER/ADAPTER

You should ABC, Always Be Charging!

  1. Baseus 8-in-1 USB-C hub, 99% of the time this is used as an ethernet or HDMI connector, it’s pretty reliable and not too heavy. (86 grams)
  2. Anker 150W Charger Block, this is just a little extra, I could probably drop it.
  3. Anker 47W Nano Charger, nice for setting up a charging station by the bed.
  4. Baseus 100W power cable, with detachable charging block. This is the core of the entire system, and most of the time I just use this. It’s chunky at 236 grams but anchors everything else.
  5. Belkin 37W Dual USB Car Charger, which I find myself using mostly in Europe when in transfers.
  6. USB-C adapters, just in case.
  7. Whoop 4.0 Charger/Battery Pack, I really enjoy the stress and sleep tracking features of the Whoop, and this keeps it charged. I did a podcast with their founder Will Ahmed.

CABLES

  1. Insignia Micro USB 3.0 Charger, this is by far the most cursed cable I carry around, which is for taking photos off my Nikon SLR.
  2. Cable Matters 4K HDMI Cable, I like the ultra-thin and this can be clutch when connecting to a conference room or hotel TV.
  3. Baseus 100W/5A retractable cables, now in two sizes 3.3ft and 6.6ft (about 100cm/200cm). These are my favorite new things! Love love love.
  4. Apple Watch Magnetic Fast Charger, I also usually wear an Apple Watch Ultra. I don’t do too many notifications, but it’s amazing for finding my phone.

AUDIO

  1. AirPods Pro Gen 2 for pairing with the iPhone, these are so good and if I forget them it’s the first thing I pick up at the airport electronics store.
  2. Pixel Buds Pro, for pairing with the Pixel 9 Pro, also amazing I just don’t use as much.
  3. Custom ear plugs, for protecting hearing when the sound or music is too loud.
  4. UE Premier custom headphones, this is still the best audiophile experience I have, great on planes.
  5. USB-C Headphone Jack Adapter
  6. Belkin RockStar 5-Jack Audio Splitter
  7. Belkin RockStar 3.5mm Audio w/USB-C Charge Adapter

MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRONICS 

  1. Aranet4 CO2 monitor, this can change your life, if the area you’re in isn’t well ventilated then you run cognitively lower without even noticing it.
  2. Logitech mouse, with quiet clicks, I find a mouse is just ergonomically an easy productivity upgrade from the built-in trackpad.
  3. Flipper Zero, the funnest little cloning gadget I’ve tried.
  4. Pixel G1s RGB Video Light, can be used in party mode to set lights.
  5. USB-C chargeable Candle Lighter
  6. Petzl E_LITE Headlamp
  7. Universal Airplane Phone Holder

PERSONAL ITEMS

  1. Passport
  2. Hermes business card holder, which I’ve been using more since spending more time in Asia with the increased community activity there.
  3. Thread Wallet elastic card holder/wallet 
  4. Hay catch-all Pouch
  5. Sea2See Sunglasses
  6. Marunao mint case
  7. Lockpick set, you can learn to unlock most locks in a few hours of training. Like the Flipper this is kinda a hacker tool.
  8. Blue Rock, a little worry stone you can hold in your hand and rub.
  9. WordPress ring, because I’m married to the game.
  10. WordPress pin, spruces up any outfit with a little open source rizz.
  11. Plastic holder with stickers for our various brands and products, I love seeing WordPress or Tumblr stickers in random places, and sometimes place them myself.
  12. Notecards from Ugmonk Analog, you can rabbit hole their entire site to upgrade your desk game. Lovely stuff.
  13. Maruman N196A Nemosine Notebook.
  14. OHTO Needle-point Pen 0.7mm, picked up in Japan and I like for when I want to draft something more thin-lined.
  15. Montblanc Heritage Egyptomania Doue ballpoint pen, which I like for signing important things and also crossing out todos on the Ugmonk cards.

TRAVEL ESSENTIALS

  1. Icewear Merino wool gaiter
  2. Lambs EMF WaveStopper beanie, literally a tin-foil hat.
  3. RAINS insulated gloves
  4. Gore Thermo Beanie
  5. Olo InVision Eye Mask 
  6. Herb Bar essential oil blend, always nice to have something good-smelling around. Not endorsing this specifically, but I always have some essential oil around.
  7. Immunity Throat Spray, suggested to me by the mushroom GOAT himself, Paul Stamets, I saw him use this at an event we were both at. When I travel or am around a bunch of people I’ll do three sprays in morning and night, and I’ve often been the one in my group to not get the “conference cold” that goes around.
  8. Z-Biotics, introduced to me by my friend Sid, it’s kind of a game-changer anytime you drink, lessens the negative effects of alcohol. It works so well there’s a possibility of moral hazard. They have some new stuff around fiber, it’s an interesting company to follow.
  9. Celsius energy powder packet, this is nice to turn any drink into a Celsius, when you need an extra boost. Be careful with these as they have 200mg of caffeine! I try to avoid after 2pm, and not in first hour I wake up.
  10. DryWater electrolytes powder packet, I’ve switched to this over LMNT because I like the ingredients and sourcing better. Electrolytes when you first wake up is better than coffee, I’ll often mix this with tea.

If you want to get super-nerdy, here’s a spreadsheet with the weights. Basically I’m 10.7 pounds of computing devices (Macbook, iPad, Daylight, Flipper, iPhone, Pixel), and ten pounds of other stuff. Add in a bottle of water or other random things I put in the bag ends up being ~22-28 pounds most of the time, which I’d like to get down.

But with my backpack I can tackle a really wide variety of situations. It’s fun! If you have any tips or suggestions please leave them in the comments! I’m always trying out new gear.

Matt 4.1

Birthday, New York, Travel, WordPress

Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.

Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:

This lead me down a rabbit hole to an amazing (WordPress-powered) site called Lyrical Brazil that takes the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics and translates them. Please read that entire blog post. It turns out this song was written by a police officer who was shot and then paralyzed from the waist down, then started a Brazilian music school Candeia which was a fixture of Portela samba school. Here’s the lyrics of the song, translated:

Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat)
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live
Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry
If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)

Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.

One of the things I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.