Big thank you to everyone who replied to last week’s issue – a bunch of you said that you quite enjoy it when I send emails with recommendations for stuff I’ve been reading, watching, playing around with etc, so I thought this week we’d do a roundup of My Favourite Things from Feb 2026 🙂
1 – AI Tool: OpenClaw – I’ve been hearing about this new ClawdBot AI thing (now renamed to OpenClaw) on Twitter for the past few weeks, but after a glowing endorsement from my brother, and then the same day, another equally glowing endorsement from one of my entrepreneur friends in Hong Kong, I decided to give it a whirl and see what all the fuss was about. And man… the future is here. I’ve been obsessed with this thing for the past 48h pretty much non-stop, and know it’s going to be a major major part of my life productivity system for literally everything moving forward. If you’ve been hearing about it for a few weeks and like me, were putting off playing around with it, consider this another piece of data that “yes this is amazing” and “yes you should give it a go”. Along with “yes you should take the security settings seriously” and “yes it’ll take some tinkering to get it to work but it’s worth it”.
2 – Book: Backwards with Purpose – This is a 2-part Harry Potter fan fiction series that I finished a couple of weeks ago. It’s incredible. It’s set in an alternate universe where our heroes defeat Voldemort in book 7… but… okay you know how in the “proper” / “canon” Deathly Hallows, there’s the Battle of Hogwarts at the end and basically all the good guys (minus a few sad exceptions) survive and live happily ever after… well, in this fan fiction, the good guys do still defeat Voldemort, but it’s just Harry, Ginny and Ron that survive. Everyone else dies during the battle, including Hermione, the rest of the Weasleys, pretty much everyone else at Hogwarts etc. So then Harry, Ron and Ginny are super depressed… and so they attempt to travel back in time 7 years to fix things. To defeat Voldemort without all the sacrifices. So they travel back to when they were 10/11 years old, except they retain all their memories and skills, and that’s the premise. It’s really really well done, it’s really clever, it handles time travel in a really interesting way, I loved it and couldn’t put it down for weeks.
3 – AI Tool: Claude Code / CoWork – Yep, it’s another hyped AI tool. This is another one I’ve been sleeping on, but for like 6+ months rather than a few weeks. I thought I was pretty pro at using AI because I’m always chatting to Claude, I’ve got loads of projects on the go etc, but my powers have levelled up like 10x since I discovered Claude Code. The key realisation was: “wait a minute, you can do WAY more than just coding with Claude Code”. If you find the thought of using a terminal user-interface daunting (like I did until recently), Claude Cowork is 100% worth exploring too – it’s basically Claude Code but in a more accessible interface. I won’t go into the technical details here, but just in case you’re anything like me and you’ve been hearing about Claude Code/CoWork but haven’t tried them out… this might be your sign to give them a go. Or not – I don’t want to add to the “I’m behind with AI” feeling that we all perpetually have these days… but still…
4 – Podcast: Jason Fried x David Senra – Absolutely loved this conversation. Jason Fried has been a long-time hero of mine, I’ve read all his books and love his approach to entrepreneurship, which has very much inspired my own “Lifestyle Business” philosophy. His whole vibe is: “look, a business doesn’t need to be this huge massive thing that’s always growing and that takes over your life. It can totally be a small(ish) thing that you enjoy working on, with a small team of people you like hanging out with, building cool product(s) for a small(ish) number of customers who get a lot for value from them”.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
