Books wrapped by headphones

How to consume books while hiking, driving, or washing dishes. Hint: Audiobooks.

The thing is, as much as I enjoy reading paper books and also books in my kindle, it’s nearly impossible and highly irresponsible to do it while walking, washing dishes, or driving, it really isn’t safe. Now, I’ve known about Audible for a while, but for some reason, just never tried it until recently. However, listening to podcasts while driving, running, hiking, washing dishes, etc. it’s something I’ve been doing for a while now. Listening to audio while doing other physical or very repetitive activities is not only possible but enjoyable, and yes, I really do wash dishes just so I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks.

Audiobooks crossed my life recently, it was during a road trip to Florida last year when I experienced listening to an audiobook from beginning to end while driving for several hours from Texas to Florida.

The audiobook was Becoming by Michelle Obama, my wife had asked me to buy it, and so we ended up listening to it during this road trip. The book was long but very entertaining and exciting, it was great overall. We learned a lot about Michelle Obama, and also her husband, President Obama. But what it surprised me the most, it was the audio format was actually easy to follow, We truly enjoyed it. And this is all it took to be hooked to audiobooks.

The next thing I did after that was to buy another book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I’ve wanted to read for a while and since I knew I was about to drive from Austin, TX to Seattle, WA, I thought it would be a great way to consume this book. It was, and it is now one of my favorite books I’ve listened to or read this year so far.

The thing with audiobooks is that, while they aren’t as polished as podcasts, they are a pretty good way to consume books, especially if you can’t find the time to sit and read. Now, for me, audiobooks aren’t a replacement of paper or kindle books, but they are definitely an option when you want to consume a book while doing an activity where reading isn’t an option.

Ad: Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks

In the end, whichever way you find more sustainable and entertaining for you to consume books, just do it. Eliminate all the barriers that are preventing you from learning and discovering new things usually hidden in books/audiobooks. I recently wrote about how reading help you find success, the post is in Spanish, but you can easily translate it or wait until I post an English version of it. Go read/listen more. Cheers.

Failed to authenticate HTTPS connection. Conflicting certificates for localhost when using Visual Studio for Mac

Lately, I have been trying Visual Studio for Mac as this version of Visual Studio has evolved significantly. However, something I noticed is that since I don’t use it often, the local SSL certificates created by dotnet in the Mac get a bit screwy.

There is a possibility that you might end up with a conflicting certificate for localhost from creating or setting up applications in the past.

If you work with the Mac version of Visual Studio, and you ever get the following error, run the commands at the bottom to clean up the existing certificates for localhost and create new ones.

Failed to authenticate HTTPS connection. System.IO.IOException: Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.

Open the terminal window, browse to your dotnet project and execute the following commands:

$dotnet dev-certs https --clean
$dotnet dev-certs https

Happy coding!

How to Monetize your Blog with Google AdSense

google adsenseHow to monetize your blog? When you’ve had a blog for a while with plenty of content and visitors, one of the options you have it to monetize it is displaying ads.

You care about your site and your content, and you should care about the ads you choose to show in your website.

Google AdSense offers relevant ads and it gives you control over the look and the position of these ads.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use AdSense to monetize your blog. Continue reading →

How to remove the date from your WordPress blog posts

In this blog post, I will show you how to remove the date from your WordPress blog posts without losing traffic. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there, it is widely used not just for blogs but also for full featured websites by professionals and businesses. One of the reasons of its popularity is that you can get a simple blog started within minutes. There are a multitude of free plugins and themes available to you to help you create and launch your blog in a short amount of time.

One of the most common mistakes people new to WordPress do when starting a blog is to leave the default permalink option. The default permalink option often includes a post id or the date and name of a post. While the date and name of post isn’t the worst option, it is also not the best one if you care about search engine optimization (SEO). Continue reading →

Installing Windows Home Server (WHS) Connector in Windows 7 64-bit

I bought a Windows Home Server about two years ago, I use it primarily for backups and file sharing in my home network. It is a good solution for a small home network such as mine because it is sufficient, it is not overkill and it is easy to manage.

A few months ago, I put together a new PC which I use for development when I am home and for gaming. I installed Windows Ultimate 64-bit in it and up until today, I didn’t worry about connecting it to the WHS because I didn’t have much to backup, now I do. Continue reading →