The Apple Photos app some­times cor­rupts im­ages when im­port­ing from my cam­era. I just wanted to make a blog post about it in case any­one else runs into the prob­lem. I’ve seen other ref­er­ences to this on­line, but most of the peo­ple gave up try­ing to fix it, and none of them went as far as I did to de­bug the is­sue.

I’ll try to de­scribe the prob­lem, and the things I’ve tried to do to fix it. But also note that I’ve (sort of) given up on the Photos app too. Since I can’t trust it to im­port pho­tos from my cam­era, I switched to a dif­fer­ent work­flow.

Here is a screen­shot of a cor­rupted im­age in the Photos app:

I’ve got an OM System OM-1 cam­era. I used to shoot in RAW + jpg, then when I would im­port to Photos app, I would check the “delete pho­tos af­ter im­port” check­box in or­der to empty the SD card. Turns out “delete af­ter im­port” was a huge mis­take.

I’m pretty sure I’d been get­ting cor­rupted im­ages for a while, but it would only be 1 or 2 im­ages out of thou­sands, so I thought noth­ing of it (it was prob­a­bly my fault any­way, right?)

But the prob­lem re­ally got me up­set when last year I went to a fam­ily mem­ber’s wed­ding and took tons of pho­tos. Apple Photos com­bines RAW + jpg pho­tos so you don’t have a bunch of du­pli­cates, and when you view the im­ages in the pho­tos app, it just shows you the jpg ver­sion by de­fault. After I im­ported all of the wed­ding pho­tos I no­ticed some of them were cor­rupted. Upon closer in­spec­tion, I found that it some­times had cor­rupted the jpg, some­times cor­rupted the RAW file, and some­times both. Since I had been check­ing the “delete af­ter im­port” box, I did­n’t know if the im­ages on the SD card were cor­rupted be­fore im­port­ing or not. After all, the files had been deleted so there was no way to check.

I es­ti­mate I com­pletely lost about 30% of the im­ages I took that day.

Losing so many pho­tos re­ally rat­tled me, but I wanted to fig­ure out the prob­lem so I did­n’t lose im­ages in the fu­ture.

I was wor­ried this was some­how a hard­ware prob­lem. Copying files seems so ba­sic, I did­n’t think there was any way a mas­sively de­ployed app like Photos could fuck it up (especially since its main job is man­ag­ing photo files). So, to nar­row down the is­sue I changed out all of the hard­ware. Here are all the things I did:

* Bought a new SD card di­rect from the man­u­fac­turer (to elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­ity of buy­ing a boot­leg SD card)

* Switched to only shoot­ing in RAW (if im­port­ing messes up 30% of my im­ages, but I cut the num­ber of im­ages I im­port by half, then that should be fewer cor­rupted im­ages right? lol)

I did each of these steps over time, as to only change one vari­able at a time, and still the im­age cor­rup­tion per­sisted. I did­n’t re­ally want to buy a new cam­era, the MKii is not re­ally a big im­prove­ment over the OM-1, but we had a fam­ily trip com­ing up and the idea that press­ing the shut­ter but­ton on the cam­era might not ac­tu­ally record the im­age did­n’t sit well with me.

Since I had re­placed lit­er­ally all of the hard­ware in­volved, I knew it must be a soft­ware prob­lem. I stopped check­ing the “delete af­ter im­port” but­ton, and started re­view­ing all of the pho­tos af­ter im­port. After ver­i­fy­ing none of them were cor­rupt, then I would for­mat the SD card. I did this for months with­out find­ing any cor­rupt files. At this point I fig­ured it was some­how a race con­di­tion or some­thing when copy­ing the photo files and delet­ing them at the same time.

However, af­ter I got home from RailsConf and im­ported my pho­tos, I found one cor­rupt im­age (the one above). I was able to ver­ify that the im­age was not cor­rupt on the SD card, so the cam­era was work­ing fine (meaning I prob­a­bly did­n’t need to buy a new cam­era body at all).

I tried delet­ing the cor­rupt file and re-im­port­ing the orig­i­nal to see if it was some­thing about that par­tic­u­lar im­age, but it re-im­ported just fine. In other words, it seems like the Photos app will cor­rupt files ran­domly.

I don’t know if this is a prob­lem that is spe­cific to OM System cam­eras, and I’m not par­tic­u­larly in­ter­ested in in­vest­ing in a new cam­era sys­tem just to find out.

If I com­pare the cor­rupted im­age with the non-cor­rupted im­age, the file sizes are ex­actly the same, but the bytes are dif­fer­ent:

aaron@tc ~/Downloads> md5­sum P7110136-from-camera.ORF Exports/P7110136.ORF

17ce895fd809a43bad1fe8832c811848 P7110136-from-camera.ORF

828a33005f6b71aea16d9c2f2991a997 Exports/P7110136.ORF

aaron@tc ~/Downloads> ls -al P7110136-from-camera.ORF Exports/P7110136.ORF

-rw–––-@ 1 aaron staff 18673943 Jul 12 04:38 Exports/P7110136.ORF

-rwx––– 1 aaron staff 18673943 Jul 17 09:29 P7110136-from-camera.ORF*

The P7110136-from-camera. ORF is the non-cor­rupted file, and Exports/P7110136.ORF is the cor­rupted file from Photos app. Here’s a screen­shot of the pre­view of the non-cor­rupted photo:

Here is the bi­nary diff be­tween the files. I ran both files through xxd then diffed them.

I’m not go­ing to put any more ef­fort into de­bug­ging this prob­lem, but I wanted to blog about it in case any­one else is see­ing the is­sue. I take a lot of pho­tos, and to be frank, most of them are not very good. I don’t want to look through a bunch of bad pho­tos every time I look at my li­brary, so culling pho­tos is im­por­tant. Culling pho­tos in the Photos app is way too cum­ber­some, so I’ve switched to us­ing Darktable.

* Delete the ones I don’t like

* Process ones I do like

* Export both the jpg and the orig­i­nal raw file

* Import those to the Photos app so they’re easy to view and share

I’ve not seen any file cor­rup­tion when im­port­ing to Darktable, so I am con­vinced this is a prob­lem with the Photos app. But now, since all of my im­ages land in Darktable be­fore mak­ing their way to the Photos app, I don’t re­ally care any­more. The bad news is that I’ve spent a lot of time and money try­ing to de­bug this. I guess the good news is that now I have re­dun­dant hard­ware!

Three years ago, ver­sion 2.0 of the Wasm stan­dard was (essentially) fin­ished, which brought a num­ber of new fea­tures, such as vec­tor in­struc­tions, bulk mem­ory op­er­a­tions, mul­ti­ple re­turn val­ues, and sim­ple ref­er­ence types.

In the mean­time, the Wasm W3C Community Group and Working Group have not been lazy. Today, we are happy to an­nounce the re­lease of Wasm 3.0 as the new “live” stan­dard.

This is a sub­stan­tially larger up­date: sev­eral big fea­tures, some of which have been in the mak­ing for six or eight years, fi­nally made it over the fin­ish­ing line.

64-bit ad­dress space. Memories and ta­bles can now be de­clared to use i64 as their ad­dress type in­stead of just i32. That ex­pands the avail­able ad­dress space of Wasm ap­pli­ca­tions from 4 gi­ga­bytes to (theoretically) 16 ex­abytes, to the ex­tent that phys­i­cal hard­ware al­lows. While the web will nec­es­sar­ily keep en­forc­ing cer­tain lim­its — on the web, a 64-bit mem­ory is lim­ited to 16 gi­ga­bytes — the new flex­i­bil­ity is es­pe­cially in­ter­est­ing for non-web ecosys­tems us­ing Wasm, as they can sup­port much, much larger ap­pli­ca­tions and data sets now.

Multiple mem­o­ries. Contrary to pop­u­lar be­lief, Wasm ap­pli­ca­tions were al­ways able to use mul­ti­ple mem­ory ob­jects — and hence mul­ti­ple ad­dress spaces — si­mul­ta­ne­ously. However, pre­vi­ously that was only pos­si­ble by de­clar­ing and ac­cess­ing each of them in sep­a­rate mod­ules. This gap has been closed, a sin­gle mod­ule can now de­clare (define or im­port) mul­ti­ple mem­o­ries and di­rectly ac­cess them, in­clud­ing di­rectly copy­ing data be­tween them. This fi­nally al­lows tools like wasm-merge, which per­form “static link­ing” on two or more Wasm mod­ules by merg­ing them into one, to work for all Wasm mod­ules. It also paves the way for new uses of sep­a­rate ad­dress spaces, e.g., for se­cu­rity (separating pri­vate data), for buffer­ing, or for in­stru­men­ta­tion.

Garbage col­lec­tion. In ad­di­tion to ex­pand­ing the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of raw lin­ear mem­o­ries, Wasm also adds sup­port for a new (and sep­a­rate) form of stor­age that is au­to­mat­i­cally man­aged by the Wasm run­time via a garbage col­lec­tor. Staying true to the spirit of Wasm as a low-level lan­guage, Wasm GC is low-level as well: a com­piler tar­get­ing Wasm can de­clare the mem­ory lay­out of its run­time data struc­tures in terms of struct and ar­ray types, plus un­boxed tagged in­te­gers, whose al­lo­ca­tion and life­time is then han­dled by Wasm. But that’s it. Everything else, such as en­gi­neer­ing suit­able rep­re­sen­ta­tions for source-lan­guage val­ues, in­clud­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails like method ta­bles, re­mains the re­spon­si­bil­ity of com­pil­ers tar­get­ing Wasm. There are no built-in ob­ject sys­tems, nor clo­sures or other higher-level con­structs — which would in­evitably be heav­ily bi­ased to­wards spe­cific lan­guages. Instead, Wasm only pro­vides the ba­sic build­ing blocks for rep­re­sent­ing such con­structs and fo­cuses purely on the mem­ory man­age­ment as­pect.

Typed ref­er­ences. The GC ex­ten­sion is built upon a sub­stan­tial ex­ten­sion to the Wasm type sys­tem, which now sup­ports much richer forms of ref­er­ences. Reference types can now de­scribe the ex­act shape of the ref­er­enced heap value, avoid­ing ad­di­tional run­time checks that would oth­er­wise be needed to en­sure safety. This more ex­pres­sive typ­ing mech­a­nism, in­clud­ing sub­typ­ing and type re­cur­sion, is also avail­able for func­tion ref­er­ences, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to per­form safe in­di­rect func­tion calls with­out any run­time type or bounds check, through the new cal­l_ref in­struc­tion.

Tail calls. Tail calls are a vari­ant of func­tion calls that im­me­di­ately exit the cur­rent func­tion, and thereby avoid tak­ing up ad­di­tional stack space. Tail calls are an im­por­tant mech­a­nism that is used in var­i­ous lan­guage im­ple­men­ta­tions both in user-vis­i­ble ways (e.g., in func­tional lan­guages) and for in­ter­nal tech­niques (e.g., to im­ple­ment stubs). Wasm tail calls are fully gen­eral and work for callees both se­lected sta­t­i­cally (by func­tion in­dex) and dy­nam­i­cally (by ref­er­ence or table).

Exception han­dling. Exceptions pro­vide a way to lo­cally abort ex­e­cu­tion, and are a com­mon fea­ture in mod­ern pro­gram­ming lan­guages. Previously, there was no ef­fi­cient way to com­pile ex­cep­tion han­dling to Wasm, and ex­ist­ing com­pil­ers typ­i­cally re­sorted to con­vo­luted ways of im­ple­ment­ing them by es­cap­ing to the host lan­guage, e.g., JavaScript. This was nei­ther portable nor ef­fi­cient. Wasm 3.0 hence pro­vides na­tive ex­cep­tion han­dling within Wasm. Exceptions are de­fined by de­clar­ing ex­cep­tion tags with as­so­ci­ated pay­load data. As one would ex­pect, an ex­cep­tion can be thrown, and se­lec­tively be caught by a sur­round­ing han­dler, based on its tag. Exception han­dlers are a new form of block in­struc­tion that in­cludes a dis­patch list of tag/​la­bel pairs or catch-all la­bels to de­fine where to jump when an ex­cep­tion oc­curs.

Relaxed vec­tor in­struc­tions. Wasm 2.0 added a large set of vec­tor (SIMD) in­struc­tions, but due to dif­fer­ences in hard­ware, some of these in­struc­tions have to do ex­tra work on some plat­forms to achieve the spec­i­fied se­man­tics. In or­der to squeeze out max­i­mum per­for­mance, Wasm 3.0 in­tro­duces “relaxed” vari­ants of these in­struc­tions that are al­lowed to have im­ple­men­ta­tion-de­pen­dent be­hav­ior in cer­tain edge cases. This be­hav­ior must be se­lected from a pre-spec­i­fied set of le­gal choices.

Deterministic pro­file. To make up for the added se­man­tic fuzzi­ness of re­laxed vec­tor in­struc­tions, and in or­der to sup­port set­tings that de­mand or need de­ter­min­is­tic ex­e­cu­tion se­man­tics (such as blockchains, or re­playable sys­tems), the Wasm stan­dard now spec­i­fies a de­ter­min­is­tic de­fault be­hav­ior for every in­struc­tion with oth­er­wise non-de­ter­min­is­tic re­sults — cur­rently, this in­cludes float­ing-point op­er­a­tors and their gen­er­ated NaN val­ues and the afore­men­tioned re­laxed vec­tor in­struc­tions. Between plat­forms choos­ing to im­ple­ment this de­ter­min­is­tic ex­e­cu­tion pro­file, Wasm thereby is fully de­ter­min­is­tic, re­pro­ducible, and portable.

Custom an­no­ta­tion syn­tax. Finally, the Wasm text for­mat has been en­riched with generic syn­tax for plac­ing an­no­ta­tions in Wasm source code. Analogous to cus­tom sec­tions in the bi­nary for­mat, these an­no­ta­tions are not as­signed any mean­ing by the Wasm stan­dard it­self, and can be cho­sen to be ig­nored by im­ple­men­ta­tions. However, they pro­vide a way to rep­re­sent the in­for­ma­tion stored in cus­tom sec­tions in hu­man-read­able and writable form, and con­crete an­no­ta­tions can be spec­i­fied by down­stream stan­dards.

In ad­di­tion to these core fea­tures, em­bed­dings of Wasm into JavaScript ben­e­fit from a new ex­ten­sion to the JS API:

JS string builtins. JavaScript string val­ues can al­ready be passed to Wasm as ex­tern­refs. Functions from this new prim­i­tive li­brary can be im­ported into a Wasm mod­ule to di­rectly ac­cess and ma­nip­u­late such ex­ter­nal string val­ues in­side Wasm.

With these new fea­tures, Wasm has much bet­ter sup­port for com­pil­ing high-level pro­gram­ming lan­guages. Enabled by this, we have seen var­i­ous new lan­guages pop­ping up to tar­get Wasm, such as Java, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Scheme, or Dart, all of which use the new GC fea­ture.

On top of all these good­ies, Wasm 3.0 also is the first ver­sion of the stan­dard that has been pro­duced with the new SpecTec tool chain. We be­lieve that this makes for an even more re­li­able spec­i­fi­ca­tion.

Wasm 3.0 is al­ready ship­ping in most ma­jor web browsers, and sup­port in stand-alone en­gines like Wasmtime is on track to com­ple­tion as well. The Wasm fea­ture sta­tus page tracks sup­port across en­gines.

Slack is ex­tort­ing us with a $195k/yr bill in­crease An open let­ter, or some­thing

For nearly 11 years, Hack Club - a non­profit that pro­vides cod­ing ed­u­ca­tion and com­mu­nity to teenagers world­wide - has used Slack as the tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We weren’t free­load­ers. A few years ago, when Slack tran­si­tioned us from their free non­profit plan to a $5,000/year arrange­ment, we hap­pily paid. It was rea­son­able, and we val­ued the ser­vice they pro­vided to our com­mu­nity.

However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an ex­tra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll de­ac­ti­vate our Slack work­space and delete all of our mes­sage his­tory.

One could ar­gue that Slack is free to stop pro­vid­ing us the non­profit of­fer at any time, but in my opin­ion, a six month grace pe­riod is the bare min­i­mum for a mas­sive hike like this, if not more. Essentially, Salesforce (a $230 bil­lion com­pany) is strong-arm­ing a small non­profit for teens, by pro­vid­ing less than a week to pony up a pretty mas­sive sum of money, or risk cut­ting off all our com­mu­ni­ca­tions. That’s ab­surd.

The small amount of no­tice has also been cat­a­strophic for the pro­grams that we run. Dozens of our staff and vol­un­teers are now scram­bling to up­date sys­tems, re­build in­te­gra­tions and mi­grate years of in­sti­tu­tional knowl­edge. The op­por­tu­nity cost of this forced mi­gra­tion is sim­ply stag­ger­ing.

Anyway, we’re mov­ing to Mattermost. This ex­pe­ri­ence has taught us that own­ing your data is in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant, and if you’re a small busi­ness es­pe­cially, then I’d ad­vise you move away too.

This post was rushed out be­cause, well, this has been a shock! If you’d like any ad­di­tional de­tails then feel free to send me an email.

To use the Mastodon web ap­pli­ca­tion, please en­able JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the na­tive apps for Mastodon for your plat­form.

Over the past month or so, many YouTubers have been re­port­ing ma­jor drops to their video view counts. Theories have run wild, but there’s one ex­pla­na­tion in­volv­ing ad block­ers that makes the most sense, but YouTube is­n’t con­firm­ing any­thing di­rectly.

Since mid-Au­gust, many YouTubers have no­ticed their view counts are con­sid­er­ably lower than they were be­fore, in some cases with very dras­tic drops. The rea­son for the drop, though, has been shrouded in mys­tery for many cre­ators.

The most likely ex­pla­na­tion seems to be that YouTube is not count­ing views prop­erly for users with an ad blocker en­abled, an­other step in the plat­for­m’s con­tin­ued war on ad block­ers. This was first re­al­ized by Josh Strife Hayes, who no­ticed that view counts on TV, phones, and tablets have been steady, while views on com­put­ers have dropped by around 50% since the mid-Au­gust trend started. TechLinked, a chan­nel in the Linus Tech Tips fam­ily, con­firmed sim­i­lar num­bers within its sta­tis­tics.

This aligns with one of the pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tions that YouTube it­self hinted at in an ac­knowl­edge­ment of lower view counts.

Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad block­ers and other ex­ten­sions can im­pact the ac­cu­racy of re­ported view counts. Channels whose au­di­ences in­clude a higher pro­por­tion of users uti­liz­ing such tools may see more fluc­tu­a­tions in traf­fic re­lated to up­dates to these tools.

The rest of the post ad­dresses prior spec­u­la­tion that YouTube’s new AI-powered age ver­i­fi­ca­tion tools were to blame — which YouTube adamantly says is not the case — while also of­fer­ing other pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tions such as “seasonal view­ing habits” and com­pe­ti­tion on the plat­form.

YouTube says “there is no sys­temic is­sue that is im­pact­ing cre­ators” re­gard­ing lower view counts.

This ad blocker sit­u­a­tion does seem the most likely ex­pla­na­tion, though. In a prior video, Linus Tech Tips had noted that while view counts were down, ad rev­enue was not. If com­puter views are the only ones down, it stands to rea­son that view­ers us­ing an ad blocker are not be­ing counted cor­rectly, es­pe­cially if ad rev­enue is­n’t tak­ing a hit from the lower view counts. YouTube’s hint that ad block­ers “can im­pact the ac­cu­racy of re­ported view counts” cer­tainly sug­gests this is pos­si­ble, even if it’s not firm con­fir­ma­tion.

We have an air bike in our base­ment. If you are un­fa­mil­iar with air bikes, they are sim­i­lar to sta­tion­ary bikes with foot ped­als but also have han­dles you push and pull with your arms. It uses air re­sis­tance, so the harder you pedal and move your arms, the higher the re­sis­tance.

It’s also known as an as­sault bike. 😬

Which is apt, be­cause it’s a butt-kicker of a work­out. I use it about once a week, more fre­quently in the win­ter when it’s too cold to run, and less of­ten in the sum­mer when I can get out­side more. And I kind of hate it!

Before I even drag my­self to our base­ment, I’m al­ready dread­ing it. The only way I can con­vince my­self to do it is by find­ing a suit­ably en­gag­ing show I can dis­tract my­self with on my phone while I huff and puff.

Every time, I start my warm-up and think to my­self,

“It’s only 30 min­utes, I can do this!”

Like clock­work, within the first three min­utes, I think, “Maybe I will only do ten min­utes to­day and do some pi­lates or weights in­stead.”

After ten min­utes, I think, “OK, surely I can make it to 20 min­utes, and that will be enough”.

After 20 min­utes, as I gasp for air and sweat soaks through my shirt, I think “Well, I al­ready made it to 20 min­utes… I guess I will just fin­ish it.”

And then I pro­ceed to huff and puff to the end, wherein I walk my wob­bly legs back up the stairs to do a cooldown. At which point I think, “That su­u­u­u­u­ucked…” And then con­grat­u­late my­self on fin­ish­ing as I try to get my heart rate back to nor­mal. 🥵

This men­tal dance hap­pens, with­out fail, every sin­gle time I ride.

I share this anec­dote be­cause it il­lus­trates how tricky mo­ti­va­tion can be, es­pe­cially when faced with some­thing you don’t want to do or have been pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on. There are any num­ber of things you have to deal with in your life that you don’t want to. There are even things you might gen­er­ally en­joy that feel like they are hang­ing over you.

The pat­tern of­ten goes like this:

* Before you start, it feels daunt­ing, and the prospect lingers in the back of your mind. You know it needs to be done, but you re­ally, re­ally don’t feel like it. You leave it un­til it starts to loom larger and larger.

* When you fi­nally con­vince your­self to start, it’s not what you want to be do­ing, but it’s gen­er­ally fine. It’s of­ten not even as bad as you thought it would be, and it feels good to make progress.

* As you near the end, you can even push your­self a lit­tle to wrap it up and get it off your plate.

* When it’s over, you feel re­lieved, like a weight has been taken off your shoul­ders, and you are both pleased with your­self and a lit­tle an­noyed that it took you so long to deal with.

Motivation is a topic that comes up with nearly all my clients, as they nav­i­gate the var­i­ous com­plex­i­ties of their lives. In some ways, mo­ti­va­tion seems sim­ple. You ask your­self, “Why can’t I just make my­self be mo­ti­vated to do the thing?”, what­ever the thing might be. However, as you beat your­self up about it, con­sider that many fac­tors in­flu­ence our de­ci­sion-mak­ing and the feel­ing of be­ing mo­ti­vated.

Humans are com­plex crea­tures, with nu­mer­ous brain chem­i­cals and hor­mones in­flu­enc­ing our over­all phys­i­cal and emo­tional state, which them­selves are con­stantly im­pacted, some­times dras­ti­cally, by things like:

* Have you been sleep­ing well and enough?

* Have you been eat­ing well and the right amount for you?

* Have you been im­bib­ing in al­co­hol or other things?

* Have you been mov­ing your body reg­u­larly?

* Do you have any phys­i­cal or men­tal con­di­tions?

* Are you in pain?

* Do you have sig­nif­i­cant life stres­sors at this time?

* What time of day is it?

* Where are you in your nat­ural hor­mone cy­cles?

* How old are you?

* Have you had any con­flicts in your life re­cently?

* Did you move your body in a way en­tirely within your usual rou­tines, but ap­par­ently in a way that is no longer ac­cept­able?

* Did you sleep in a slightly dif­fer­ent po­si­tion than usual, and now your back will never be the same again?

I could go on, but you get the idea.😅

All of these fac­tors (and more) con­spire to shift your mood, phys­i­cal en­ergy, and men­tal en­ergy, of­ten mak­ing it harder to muster the mo­ti­va­tion to do things. What, then, can you do to move things in the right di­rec­tion? How do you mo­ti­vate your­self to do a thing you don’t want to do?

Here are sev­eral ways to help en­cour­age ac­tion when you feel un­mo­ti­vated.

There are many ex­ter­nal and in­ter­nal fac­tors, as listed above, that con­tribute to mo­ti­va­tion.

* When your body is­n’t feel­ing good, it’s harder to make it do things.

* When your mind is tired, dis­tracted, or over­whelmed, it’s chal­leng­ing to fo­cus and ac­com­plish tasks.

* When the thing you need to do is­n’t im­por­tant to you or some­thing you don’t like, it’s hard to make your­self do it.

When you know why you aren’t mo­ti­vated, you can think about what you could change to make things eas­ier on your­self. What fac­tors do you have con­trol over?

* Environment - Is there a place you can go or a thing you can add that will make it feel eas­ier? For ex­am­ple, I have my writ­ing desk set up in a quiet cor­ner of my bed­room (not the of­fice I share with my hus­band) to help make writ­ing eas­ier, even when I am not feel­ing it.

* Mood - Is there some­thing that will help boost your mood? Go for a ten-minute walk, treat your­self to a donut, text your best friend for a pep talk, turn on your favourite tunes… any­thing that will give you a lit­tle pick-me-up.

* Body - Are there things you can do to take care of your body to make it feel bet­ter? Try some stretch­ing, take a nap, med­i­tate, read a book, get some fresh air, go for a run, eat a com­fort meal, or do any­thing that will help your body feel less stressed.

* Negative or fear mo­ti­va­tors - Is the thing you are not mo­ti­vated to do be­ing mo­ti­vated by neg­a­tive or fear mo­ti­va­tors? These in­clude things like fear of judg­ment, fear of con­flict, shame, guilt, or oblig­a­tion. These mo­ti­va­tors only go so far and de­serve fur­ther ex­am­i­na­tion to de­ter­mine their place in your pri­or­i­ties. Maybe they aren’t things you need to do in the first place.

The key point here is to iden­tify where you have con­trol and where you don’t, and then do your best to adapt your cir­cum­stances to make it eas­ier to take ac­tion.

When you think about the var­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties and tasks you do each day, what is it that en­cour­ages you to do them? Some of those things will be neg­a­tive mo­ti­va­tors, as I men­tioned above, but oth­ers will be things you do for fun, be­cause they are in­ter­est­ing or re­ward­ing. These are some tac­tics to con­sider for things that might help mo­ti­vate you:

You know what makes clean­ing out the garage a lot bet­ter? Some good tunes. Throw on an au­dio­book while you cook din­ner. Watch a good show while you huff and puff on the air bike! Think about the things you en­joy and con­sider how you can com­bine them with the thing you’re try­ing to mo­ti­vate your­self to do.

Sometimes it can be chal­leng­ing to push your­self to do some­thing when there are no ex­ter­nal mo­ti­va­tors. Ask a friend to be your ac­count­abil­ity buddy, or hire a pro­fes­sional to help you stay ac­count­able for the thing you’re try­ing to do, such as a coach, trainer, teacher, or di­etit­ian. I know that one of the sig­nif­i­cant value-added ben­e­fits my clients get from work­ing with me for a few months is hav­ing some­one they have to re­port back to on their progress!

Is there any way to turn the process or thing you are un­mo­ti­vated to do into a game? Can you add re­wards if you do a cer­tain amount, or set a goal for how many days you make progress in a row? For ex­am­ple, one of my mo­ti­va­tors for do­ing some kind of fit­ness every day is keep­ing up my streak! 2817 days in a row as of pub­lish­ing. 😁

Beyond small planned re­wards, hav­ing some­thing to look for­ward to as you make progress on your task or ac­tiv­ity can also help en­cour­age you to con­tinue mov­ing for­ward. Maybe you take a day off, or­der your favourite take­out, or sim­ply share it with some­one you care about.

For more specifics on types of mo­ti­va­tion, read my ar­ti­cle, What Motivates You? Learn the Types of Motivation and How to Use Them, where I get into more de­tail about in­trin­sic and ex­trin­sic mo­ti­va­tion.

If part of why you feel un­mo­ti­vated is that what you need to do feels big and over­whelm­ing, of­ten the best thing you can do is try to break it down into smaller, more man­age­able pieces. What is the small­est amount you can do to make a bit of progress?

* Commit to spend­ing 5 min­utes on it

* Choose a small cor­ner of a room you need to clean

* Write the text, even if you don’t send it

* Plan in your cal­en­dar when you will do it, so you don’t have it sit­ting in the back of your mind

* Talk about it with your part­ner or a friend

* Switch tasks to take a break and come back to it

Often, get­ting over the hump of start­ing some­thing is enough to help push you through it. Even if it is­n’t, at the very least, you have made some amount of progress, which you can build on.

If the thing you need to do is some­thing you need to do reg­u­larly, like writ­ing, fit­ness, prac­tic­ing an in­stru­ment, or clean­ing, you can’t rely purely on mo­ti­va­tion to drive you. Even for things you en­joy, it’s easy to push some­thing off “until you feel like it”. But with so many fac­tors af­fect­ing your mood and en­ergy, the times when you feel like it will be fleet­ing. Instead of re­ly­ing on mo­ti­va­tion, try to es­tab­lish a rou­tine that fos­ters con­sis­tency.

* Plan your in­ten­tional week so you have an idea of when you in­tend to do it

* Book it in your cal­en­dar

* Set a cer­tain amount of time you will put aside each day or week to chip away at it

A lit­tle bit, con­sis­tently, will go a long way.

Sometimes, when you are not feel­ing mo­ti­vated to do some­thing, it’s rea­son­able to just put it on the back burner. Maybe it’s just not a pri­or­ity right now, and that’s to­tally fine! Ask your­self, is this a glass ball or a plas­tic ball? If it’s plas­tic, set it aside for a bit and fo­cus your time and en­ergy on other things.

It’s ok to de­cide now is not the right time, but make it an in­ten­tional de­ci­sion in­stead of some­thing you avoid and feel bad about!

If you’re strug­gling with mo­ti­va­tion, you’re not alone! It’s nor­mal, it’s nat­ural, and there are tons of dif­fer­ent, ever-chang­ing fac­tors that will change how you feel. Do your best to ex­am­ine where you are at, con­trol what you can con­trol, and make progress where you can!

Need some help get­ting mo­ti­vated? Get in touch!

Ton Roosendaal is to stop down as chair­man and Blender CEO on 1 January 2026. The news was an­nounced dur­ing to­day’s keynote at the an­nual Blender Conference.

Roosendaal — the orig­i­nal au­thor of the open-source 3D soft­ware, and its pub­lic fig­ure­head for the past three decades — will pass on his roles to cur­rent Blender COO Francesco Siddi.

Roosendaal him­self will move to the newly es­tab­lished Blender Foundation su­per­vi­sory board.

Other new Blender Foundation board po­si­tions will also in­clude Sergey Sharybin (Head of Development), Dalai Felinto (Head of Product) and Fiona Cohen (Head of Operations).

“We’ve been prepar­ing for this since 2019,” said Roosendaal, “I am very proud to have such a won­der­fully tal­ented young team around me to bring our free and open source pro­ject into the next decade.”

We aim to up­date this story with a brief ret­ro­spec­tive of Ton’s time as Blender CEO and the growth of Blender dur­ing that time, so check back for up­dates.

Read the of­fi­cial an­nounce­ment that Ton Roosendaal is step­ping down as Blender CEO

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