$1 Counterfeit, Chicken Church, Johnny Decimal & PCB Maps.
#77 of 10+1 Things | Abu Dhabi
🏠 Going home.
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Last week was business as usual with client work and other projects. I managed to run a couple of times and hit the gym a few days.
I’m the kind of person who tries to track everything just for the sake of it, and I usually love it. But last week I decided to break free.
Since I have a fair bit of knowledge on how to work out at the gym, I just went by the feel of things with no plan and no reference to earlier workouts. It felt good with no extra pressure, and I kinda liked it. The counter argument is that without knowing your last workout, it’s really hard to push further and make incremental changes. So I’m double minded, but this fresh perspective felt great.
Speaking of changes, next time you’ll be reading this from Kerala, India!
I’m going home for a month to spend time with family and enjoy the monsoon. Last year’s biggest regret was missing it (living in a desert city makes you appreciate rain differently), and this year the monsoon is arriving early in the last week of May instead of June. So excited!
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
✈️ The Locals Don't Know: This fun essay argues against the classic "do what the locals do" travel advice. The average local probably hasn't visited their own city's famous museum in years, while the tourist is out there paddling a canoe into the sunset having a great time. Just do whatever excites you.
🗂️ Johnny.Decimal: This is a numbering system designed to organize your digital life so you always know where things are. Instead of nested folders with names like "Final Final v2," everything gets a short unique number. The site walks you through it really well and it's one of those things that just clicks once you see it in action.
🧬 The Origins of Indians: As an Indian, this was a fascinating read about where we all came from. It traces how our understanding evolved through linguistics, archaeology, and now genetics. Almost all South Asians carry ancestry from the "First South Asians" who arrived 65,000 years ago, later mixed with Iranian farmers and Steppe pastoralists who brought Indo-European languages.
🎨 Palette Inspiration: This site has over 22,000 color palettes extracted from masterworks by 3,000+ artists, from Renaissance to Impressionism. You can browse by artist, style, genre, or color, and there's a neat color harmony explorer that shows you which hues master painters actually paired together. A really cool resource if you're into design or art.
🔥 MOOP Map: Burning Man has this strict leave-no-trace policy where a 150-person crew stays behind to inspect all 3,700 acres for MOOP (Matter Out Of Place!). This journal describes how they map every piece of debris and meet a federal standard of less than one square foot of trash per acre. The biggest culprit in 2025? Over 2,300 forgotten lag bolts.
🐔 Indonesia's Chicken Church: There's a giant chicken-shaped church sitting on a hilltop in the middle of a Javanese forest. A man named Daniel Alamsjah built it after receiving a vision of a dove in 1988, but once they added a crown on top, everyone thought it looked like a rooster. It was abandoned for 15 years before going viral and now gets 2,000 visitors a week.
💵 $1 Counterfeiter: This interesting story is about Emerich Juettner, an old man in New York who printed crude one-dollar bills for nearly a decade. His fakes were terrible but nobody bothers to inspect a $1 bill. He got caught, fined $1, and ended up making more money from the Hollywood movie about him than he ever did from counterfeiting.
📚 Chasing the Monsoon: I'm heading home to Kerala for the monsoon this year, one of my favorite seasons. And every year around this time, I try to re-read Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater, a fascinating travelogue about his 1987 journey following the Indian monsoon from Kerala to the Bangladeshi border. It's a small ritual that makes me feel like I'm back home when the rains hit, even when I'm living in a desert city most of the year.
“The Bangalore woman cried, ‘Yesterday there were dragonflies in our hotel garden. They are a sign. We knew monsoon was coming soon!”
~ As always, resurfaced by Readwise, a FREE tool that let's you remember what you read!🗺️ PCB Metro Maps: Steven built interactive metro maps on PCBs for Washington DC and Vancouver. A small microcontroller pulls real-time train location data from metro APIs and lights up tiny RGB LEDs at each station when a train arrives. Each board costs around $30 to make and the design files are open source on GitHub.
📸 The Time Between: In this beautiful project, Navid Baraty blends double exposures of cities like New York, Chicago, and London with landscapes like Death Valley, Bonneville Salt Flats, and the Alaskan wilderness. The results look impossible but somehow convincing. It's a stunning reminder that what we build in decades sits within terrain shaped over millions of years.
🎵 Claude FM: If you like listening to music while working, Claude launched a cool lo-fi stream called Claude FM for thinking and building. It's a super cool chill mix that's made and curated by actual musicians. You can even pull it up right inside Claude Code with a
/radiocommand.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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See you next week!
With Love,
Rishi
"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The navigator adjusts the sails.”
~ William Arthur Ward.