Jamie Thingelstad

View from the upper seat in the Urban Wing sauna while the fire is getting started. The translucent walls make it very bright and warm inside — it was 70 °F from the sun before I started the fire. Added a hygrometer, a second sand timer, and trying Eucalyptus Sauna Scent for the first time.

Arrived at the cabin tonight and were greeted with a two-foot-high snow plow line to shovel through. Cleared enough to barrel through.

Took my first 0.25 mg dose of semaglutide. Hoping for minimal side effects. Got it from Fairview Compounding. No injector so had to do the shot on my own which was easy once I did it. 💉

I’ve been exploring ways to get semaglutide for myself. This update from today’s Economist changes the equation a lot!

Novo Nordisk slashed the monthly cost of Wegovy, its weight-loss injection, from more than $1,300 to $499 for American patients not paying for it through health insurance. Discounted jabs will be sold directly to them through the firm’s own online pharmacy. Competition between weight-loss drugmakersis heating up; last week Eli Lilly reduced the price of some of its Zepbound injections.

I tried getting Wegovy directly and paying out of pocket and the price was crazy of course. I ended up getting a prescription from a reputable compounding pharmacy for just $285. However you then have to administer the injection yourself, with no injector. At this new price it is about a $200 premium for the Wegovy brand and to get it in an injector.

Finbarr Clancy of The High Kings with an incredible performance of “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”.

and when I awoke in my hospital bed
and saw what it had done, I wished I was dead
never knew there were worst things than dying

Wow. 😢

Morning sauna session. 🔥

OmniFocus 4.5.2 shipped recently and with it was this little snippet in the release notes.

Shortcuts — Sync OmniFocus action has been added.

This caught my eye and I was sort of looking for it. When I listened to Omni Group’s 2025 Roadmap on the Omni Show Ken Case made a reference to creating an automation to sync his OmniFocus tasks. I thought that was a great idea and tried to figure out how to make that work and didn’t find an easy way to do it. When I saw this new Shortcut action I connected the dots. Case was referring to a not-yet-released version.

Now why would you want such an action? OmniFocus sync is super capable for me. I’ve never had it lose data and it is super stable. With that said, when a device gets very far behind, meaning it hasn’t been synced for days or weeks, the “log of updates” gets longer and longer. This causes sync to get slower on all your devices and the device that is out-of-date takes longer to get caught up. To be fair, none of this really impacts my user experience more than a couple seconds but I like to keep my devices in sync and ready to go.

This is where less often used devices become an issue. I regularly will go a couple of days without using my iPad. And my Vision Pro may go a week or two in between sessions. Both of these devices have OmniFocus natively and the sync backlog could get long — particularly on the Vision Pro. Using this Shortcut along with a time-based Automation this is no longer anything to be concerned with. Now early in the morning before I’m up my iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro automatically sync OmniFocus and are ready for each day. No long “log of updates” and when I do go to them it is super fast to get caught up.

Now if I could only do a Shortcut Automation like this on my Apple Watch. That is the last device I have that routinely gets very behind, and sync to OmniFocus on the Watch is slow. I’m sure Omni is working on that!

Today I Learned: LLM’s are exceptional at making custom word lists for Pictionary-style games. Just added a couple new word lists to SketchParty TV!

High winds this week blew two of our neighbor’s dock sections into our yard.

This view of my Urban Wing sauna is still super pretty for me. Sauna up to 180 °F and ready to sweat.

Cheers to 96 quarters of growth with the Growth Cup at the SPS Social.

What a wonderful evening of Irish music. It was just under a year ago that we first saw The High Kings with my cousin Josh and his wife Dawn. We saw them a second time in August at the Parkway. This one was the best evening of the three. The Fitzgerald Theater was a great venue for them and I think the crowd knew nearly every word of most every song. They performed “Red is the Rose” and the audience became the performers. It was beautiful.

The High Kings also announced that they would be returning this summer for the Irish Fair of Minnesota!

We finished watching Shrinking S2 and now I’m bummed we have to wait for the next season. This is one of my favorite shows in a very long time.

Right before my birthday I decided use the Shortcut I wrote to calculate my version number and make it a widget on my phone using SuperWidget. I have an automation that runs at 5:00 AM each day to update my version number. It sits right next to my Four Thousand Weeks rings. It has been interesting for me to “feel” that the version number has real meaning to me, in a way the rings don’t. Each day is a new version. Jamie 5.3.53 is today, and will never be again. What do I want for 5.3.54? And how is it already over 1/7th of the way to 5.4.0!

I created a custom GPT for the Weekly Thing! You’ll need a ChatGPT account (I think free is fine) and you can go to: Weekly Thing GPT.

This is a custom GPT that I’ve made available to anyone. It is loaded with all 310 issues of the Weekly Thing published so far. You can ask it all sorts of questions about topics in the Weekly Thing and it does a pretty great job with it all. Some things you can try asking it that I thought were fun:

1. What is the Weekly Thing view on social media?
2. What is worse, Facebook or TikTok?
3. Summarize issue X.
4. What are the prevailing themes of the Weekly Thing by year?
5. Show me a list of articles on X along with the issue they were in.