Lists – Bilal Hafeez

9 TV Shows I’m Loving

I’ve just finished a great run of binge-watching TV. Here are my favourites:

Money Heist (Netflix) – excellent Spanish thriller, which centres around a seemingly perfect robbery of a printing press. As the robbery proceeds we get flashbacks and glimpses of the lives of each the robbers. Gripping, I’m addicted. By the way watched it with subtitles not the dubbed English voices

The Boys (Amazon) – I couldn’t stop watching the 8-part season (surely season 2 will follow). This subverts the superhero genre by showing them as sleazy, fragile and corrupt. The plot revolves a group of regular people trying to bring the superheroes down.

It’s My Blog’s 4th Birthday! Here Are the All-Time Most-Read Posts

Roughly four years ago, I posted my first blog. It was review of a book on “Raising Boys” by Phil Zimbardo. The punchline was that boys were suffering a crisis of masculinity as they withdraw into the world of video games. I followed that by a blog called “My Optimised Morning Routine“. This eclectic mix of topics with a focus on well-being has set the tone of my blogs ever since. It’s also resulted in spin-offs like my curated newsletters and podcasts.

My 5 Best Purchases Of the Year So Far (2019)

I like sharing my purchases and my last list was very popular. So here’s my list for 2019 (so far).

1 Moleskine Smart Writing Set Ellipse (£199)

I got this as a gift and I love it. It’s a special Moleskine notebook and pen that you use like a regular writing set, but it cleverly “records” everything you write, which you then see perfectly replicated on a Moleskine app. Amazing. It can even transcribe your writing into digital text, although it doesn’t work for me as my writing is too messy. I find writing with a pen and paper much better than tapping on a screen. This gives you the best of both worlds. You write and it is stored digitally.

Who’s the Most Famous Person Of All Time?

How do you compare the fame of an actor today to a Greek philosopher from two thousand years ago? Well, the clever people at MIT have come up with a system called Pantheon to do just that.

It looks at the biographies of historical figures that feature in more than 25 languages in Wikipedia. This gives a sense of broad impact of the figure. Then they make adjustments for number of page views, bias towards English language bios and age of the historical character (so if a bio is still being written on someone from two thousand years ago, that means their cultural is very big).

78 Great Oscar Wilde One-Liners On Love, Life and Money

Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and playwright, is perhaps the most quoted artist aside from Shakespeare. He even has a quote on quotes (“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”). It helps that he was incredibly witty, but it’s the honesty and truth that underlies the quotes that have made them stand the test of time. Here are some of his best:

50 Practical Life Tips For 2019

The internet is full of junk, but every now and then you discover something that harnesses the full power of the internet. That something is the “LifeProTips” thread on the discussion site, Reddit. The thread allows people to post practical life tips, which others can upvote. Over the past year, I’ve discovered useful tips like:

“When using a public bathroom, choose the first stall” (research shows people go for the middle or last ones)
“Keep cookies soft by storing them in an air-tight container with a slice of bread. Cookies will absorb the moisture from the bread, staying ultra-soft for up to two weeks!”
“Boarding a Southwest Airlines flight [or any airline without allocated seating] and want to keep the seat next to you open? Pull the vomit bag from the seat pocket, hold it in your hand, and rest your head on the back of the seat in front of you. No one wants to sit near someone puking” (sounds cool, haven’t tried it yet)

To share the wisdom, I’ve collated the top 50 most upvoted tips of all-time:

My 5 Most Read Blogs Of 2018

I’ve been writing blogs for almost four years now and this year I written almost 50. I’ve checked the stats and I’ve had 45,000 hits on my site in 2018(!). The 5 most popular were:

My Favourite Books/Movies/Apps Of 2018, What’s Yours?

The year is almost over, so it’s time to send my list of favourites for the year: books, magazines, movies, TV and apps. I’m sure I’ve missed much, so let me know what you liked, and if I get enough, I‘ll send out a readers list!

My 5 Best Purchases Of the Year So Far

I’m not a big shopper, but I do occasionally stumble across something that makes a genuine difference to my day-to-day life. Here are five from this year:

1) Netgear RBK50 Mesh Wifi System (£289)

I have a house with thick walls, so there is no chance the WiFi network from my router can span the whole house. In the past, I used an adapter that plugged into the electric sockets to extend the network. The problem was each plug created its own wifi zone, so I ended up with 5 zones in the house. This prevented me from connecting all my devices via wifi, which was a pain. Continue reading “My 5 Best Purchases Of the Year So Far”

5 Apps I Regularly Use That You Haven’t Heard Of

I’ve been streamlining my iPhone app use over the past year, and so I have a new shortlist of my favourite apps. Here they are: Continue reading “5 Apps I Regularly Use That You Haven’t Heard Of”