Sacrifice it is not

A great hour and 23 minute nap

Translation from DayOne entry earlier today:

With a son you better understand the concept of sacrifice. I’d always automatically started a counter in my head when holding someone in an uncomfortable position. You rationalize your effort versus the need for whatever support the person needs and out comes a number: 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 20 minutes.

With Robie I just know that as long as I’m able to do it, I’ll hold him to make him comfortable. It’s not a question of time, but of how much you can give.

My arm was numb for a while, but it was a glorious nap.

Siri on the spotlight

Thinking a bit more about bots, and the one place I’d see myself taking advantage of them is via Spotlight. Imagine hitting cmd+space and writing so it reminds you to buy milk, or track a package, even order a pizza.

Sounds just like Siri. But since I’m a child of the 80’s, I want the interface to be via text.

Rumors say the next MacOS (macOS 11?) is going to have Siri for sure. I just hope voice is not the only way to interact with it — that would make basically useless for me.

Bots, what are there good for?

Just realized that with all the talk about bots being the next big thing, I don’t use any.

I consider myself a very early adopter, is it then that I’m an old geek and bots are my new Snapchat? Or am I a good proxy for services over promising and under delivering?

Twitter forever

Over the past week profiles and articles on Twitter are again asking the question about how Twitter is going to survive. The icing on the cake arrived with news today that Snapchat surpassed Twitter on daily users.

There’s no denying that Twitter growth has stalled. But unlike friendster, myspace, and even their own Vine, its importance hasn’t.

The problem is that importance without growth means little to Twitter stockholders. My argument is that you could apply the same logic to email.

Of course, email is a platform. But for me that’s what Twitter should aspire to be. Just as Apple let go of the notion of the Mac beating Windows, Twitter has to accept that it won’t catch-up Facebook.

Twitter needs to either take two steps backward and allow its stream to be the foundation of other apps, or move forward and invent the next app.

If they push to become a platform, some would argue that as soon as the services grew enough they would abandon Twitter — but not even Facebook has been able to replace email as the communication tool of last resort.

The alternative requires them be way more aggressive and alienate current users. But in photos, videos, messaging and news… they haven’t been really successful¹.

Title: A new Macbook Pro

As we wait for Mark Gurman¹ to spoil the new MacBook Pro, the rumors are starting to pile. The latest shows an unibody frame with only four USB-C ports — and a headphone jack. I agree with Marco that the MacBook Pro has a great track record: there’s never been one I didn’t want — just many that I couldn’t afford.

Still, with x86 speed improvements not being as exponential as before, I will seriously consider a current generation MBP vs the new one. My main requirement is disk size: I want/need 1 TB SSD². A pimped out older model could be good value, especially if the newest one changes a lot.

All of the above is a rational plan, which I’m required to share before I go bezerk when Apple tells me why I need the newest one.

Update: And we have an official date for my madness: June 13.

On writing everyday — in May

Managed to post something everyday this month. I started with post calendar, but after a week it again became a last minute sprint at the end of the day.

Last week I had decided that after today’s post I was going to change strategy from posting everyday to writing everyday. Which would allow for some better quality, and a bit more developed ideas. But I changed my mind today.

I still don’t have a writing habit. It’s only when I check the blog after posting that I get the endorphin rush. So I’m going to try to keep the writing streak one more month.

This month I’m go to try to do more commentary on the news. Basically striving to be a passable copycat of Seth Godin style¹. Also will try to do more quick snippets posts — which I visualize as anything that would have been a few tweets together.

In case, thanks for reading and hope you tag along a bit more.

On tracking poop and sleep

The exact moment I realized parenthood had arrived was when I celebrated a really dirty diaper. And I have to confess how genuinely happy and relieved I was¹.

We’re almost six months in with Robie, and tracking output and input have now taken second place to sleep time.

Tracking your baby’s business is important. At some point the tiredness and sleep depravation starts blurring the days together. If can’t rely on your memory to remember your computer password — it happened — for sure you won’t remember if he ate 2 or 4 hours ago… much less what the last diaper theme was.

After trying a few apps, I can safely recommend BabyTime. It does three things really well:

1. Clear and good UI:
   There’s many eyesores in the app store. BabyTime is actually good looking and useful in how it displays information and how you enter information.

2. Sync:
   While the sync isn’t lightning fast, it works, and we haven’t had any lost data. It’s very useful to be able to reliably see what your partner has tracked. I wish it allowed for handing off tasks — right now only the device that started the tracking can end it, but its a workable limitation.

3. Responsive developer:
   There’s a lot of baby apps in the store that are abandoned. A few weeks back I emailed the support email wondering if I could get an export of the data, and within a few hours I had a reply with the data attached.

At $2.99 it’s a steal compared to some other apps and devices we tried. And although the app hasn’t been updated in over a year, it’s still delivers the best experience imho.

Hide visually triggering apps from your homescreen

Don’t know how I missed this post¹ from January by Tristan Harris: Distracted in 2016? Reboot Your Phone with Mindfulness.

The whole article is really worth a read, but one section resonated with my empty content calories App diet:

As part of its generous employee perks and benefits, Google stocks its micro-kitchens with seductive snacks and candy so its employees can keep snacking during work. But they ran into a problem: employees found themselves eating more unhealthy snacks than they wanted.

[…]

They made two interventions:

1. They put the candy into opaque, white porcelain jars with a lid (while putting alternatives like healthy fruit in see-through glass jars)
2. They replaced the candy’s visual packaging with a neutral white placard and neutral font (e.g. “Peanut M & M’s” written in Comic Sans)

[…]

We can do the same for apps on our home screens. Colorful app icons (the blue Facebook [F], or yellow-orange Instagram camera) visually trigger us to unconsciously consume just like candy wrappers.

His recommendation is to place the visually triggering Apps on the second folder page of the second homescreen. I instantly saw the light with this idea. So Tweetbot, Reeder and Instagram are back on the phone… but out of easy reach — and it seems to be working.

I truly think digital dieting is going to be a thing in the upcoming years. Many tecnologies have been competing for attention during the last century (books, newspapers, home movies, videogames, etc), but the bandwidth was so limited — and the costs so high — that it was easy to not be overwhelmed. The smartphone changed everything, and now we have unlimited stimulation for a very low costs (paid in cash or advertisement viewing.

Bossypants (283 pages)

Bossypants by Tina Fey

As expected, this was a fun, quick book. The fact that it’s read by Tina Fey herself gives it an additional conversational tone.

I enjoyed the SNL and 30 Rock insider stories, and I had to bookmark a breastfeeding section to share with Ana. She laughed out laud with it.

Not a life-changing book, but a solid series of stories told by a successful, smart and very smart writer.

New links page

I’ve tried many ways to post links on the site. Here goes a new one: 5typos.net/links.

This is nothing more than a linkroll of the latest 25 Pinboard.in bookmarks I find interesting.

You can think of it as window into my procrastinating wanderings on the internet — with a touch of whatever fixation I’m into this week.

Blendle: pay-per-article service is worth a look

I don’t know if Blendle is the future of magazines, but without a doubt it’s a future.

With today’s release of the iOS app, the shortcomings of the mobile web version are gone. Not only that, the App shines on the iPad. It’s fast, simple and very respectful of the print versions of the articles.

I added $10 to my account to see how much I can stretch it. I’m a bit concerned that the cheapo in me will start counting pennies and be too selective when opening articles. But after just one day of using it, I’m starting to value not seeing ads every other page — even on paid apps ¹.

Friction vs bankruptcy in productivity flow

Hello, my name is Roberto and I’m a productivity appcoholic.

There’s no denying that I constantly hide procrastination behind switching tools so I have a semblance of getting something done that day.

That said, sometimes it’s ok to declare productivity bankruptcy and move on to a new setup.

Roles and tasks change, and allowing friction with changing tasks is a good way to prioritize and apply your bag of tricks to new problems. But sometimes the whole environment changes so much that is your bag of tricks that need changing.

This week I returned to an old friend: Omnifocus. The combination of Apple Reminders, Fantastical and Trello that had ruled my life for the first quarter of the year, stopped making sense.

My tasks have gradually changed over the past few weeks. With the new site launched ¹, the intensity of the team sprints and scrumb planning have decreased. I don’t talk to developers every few hours, rather wait for weekly meetings or even send emails to them. The increased friction of keeping everything in Trello did not justify the time and effort — since there’s minimal collaboration in the new ongoing tasks.

So it’s time for a change. Rather than clear big objectives, I now have many small tasks. Time to put the hammer away and bring out the drill with dozens of bits. It’s what’s needed to get the job done today.

Pebble Time 2

I need to finish my Pebble Time review, but the short version is that the Pebble Time is a better watch than the Apple Watch. And since the Apple Watch not at great smartwatch, then the Pebble pragmatically wins.

Or at least this is what I told myself when I preordered the Pebble Time 2 on Kickstarter today.

Archangel Comic

Just started Archangel by William Gibson. It’s really good. May even go and buy the printed edition.

Thanks for nothing and everything

Earlier today my best friend’s parents had a sadly common Caracas scare: armed thugs entered the house to rob them; tied them up and proceed to threat them with guns to say where the items of value were hidden (not even thiefs want Venezuelan cash anymore).

Luckily, the police arrived quickly and the criminals escaped without a hostage situation.

I’m now going to bed sad, because of how happy I was that they were both ok. It’s not always the case.

Still, how buried underground the bar has to be, when you actually tell your friend that you’re grateful that — other than his mom being freaked out and probably traumatized — everyone is ok.

I worry of how far my standards have fallen. And I’m in the relative near-mythical state of comfort in Miami. What other shitty kind of things are Venezuelans being grateful for everyday?

Stickies: Best kept Mac secret app

Stickies Assemble!

Three Stickies tips I use everyday:

1. Create a sticky from any selected text with Cmd-Shift-Y
2. Minimize them and arrange under Window > Arrange by. You can do Color, Content, Date, and my favorite: Location on Screen,
3. You can make a sticky float on top of all windows with Cmd-Option-Y or under Notes in the menubar.

I have a few dozen apps that can do snippets, but somehow still nothing beats the speed and versatility of Stickies.

Book: Up the Organization by Robert C. Townsend

Up the Organization

Rick Treitman gave me this book at the end of my Virtual Ubiquity internship¹. I remember thinking that a 30+ year old business book wasn’t likely to contain a lot of still relevant concepts. I was happily surprised.

The book is now 40+ years old, and it’s still the one book I open and skim every few years when I need some management recalibration. The book itself reads less like a book, and more like a combination of notes left from a retired CEO to his replacement.

From what to serve at board meetings to how to deal with ad agencies, I feel this book will be timeless.

Content apps update

It’s been a month since the great delete: Tweetbot, Reeder, YouTube, all gone from the iPhone.

I even broke down last weekend at 5am after a particularly good crying session by you-know-who, and installed Tweetbot for a few minutes — I’m only human.

Content Apps folders

These are the current apps¹:

• NYT Now: What can I say? I like my news liberal.
• Morning Reader: Extremely well curated news of what’s important in tech.
• Economist Espresso: Less than bitesize Economist. It’s working for me.
• mlist: Newsletter reader. I subscribe to: Vox, Next Draft, Daily Digg and Quartz.
• Nuzzel: So miss anything important in Twitter — I recognize the irony. If something gets RT or linked a lot, it can catch it.

Surprisingly, I’m going to stick a bit longer without Tweetbot and Reeder. Every time I get an impulse for the stream, I do end up consuming better content. Going to try one more month to make it a real habit.

On organizing project folders

Here’s how I organize folders on my desktop:

• [] Square brackets denotes a work project.
• {} Brackets are for personal projects — since they are sorted after square ones.
• Any folder that is not renamed to a project format by end of day, is deleted.
• Once a project is done, I replace the brackets for a YYYY-MM-DD and move it to the Archived folder.

Example

The desktop is a natural place to try to force some order, since it’s easily accesible from any save dialog (Cmd-Shift-D), also easy to try files to, and in the end it always finds a way to accumulating random files.

Another part of my system is too have a Symlink for the Desktop folder inside my Dropbox folder. This way my current working files are easily accesible from mobile, and any other Dropbox computer.

Now, folders and files naming within Project folders… that an OCD post for another day.

5 word reviews of Google I/O

• Google Assistant: Ashamed to talk to iPhone.
• Google Home: If cheap, I’m getting one.
• Allo: Hangout failed. Gotta keep trying.
• Duo: Facetime called, bring it on.
• Android N: Parity OS, no parity hardware.
• Wear 2.0: This is not it either.
• Daydream: We’re still figuring this out.
• Instant Apps: What’s the use-case again?

Apple’s walled garden has no speakers

Or, I really want a sub $199 AirPlay Apple Speaker.

My original Jambox is starting to show its age, and I’ve been website shopping for living room/kitchen speaker with smart(ish) features. At least the ability to easily stream via wifi.

Of course, the usual suspects are the Sonos PLAY:1, the Amazon Echo, and… maybe whatever Google is announcing this week.

Missing is Apple from the list. Yes, the Apple Hi-Fi can be considered a flop, but I would have guessed some speaker system would have come out of the Beats acquisition by now.

I hate to use the ISJWSA¹ Apple argument crutch, but it did seem that music was more authentically appreciated back then.

Apple is possibly just pulling an Apple™ and waiting for the Smart Speaker market to be past early adopters before jumping in. But I’m a bit wary with this strategy: if the Apple TV is any indication, you shouldn’t let Amazon, Google and other players (Roku), get to far ahead. The Apple TV is stuck in 4th place in sales, without any indication of jumping ahead.

In any case, Apple needs to hurry up. Otherwise I’m making the case that we need a Sonos to loudly play… Rainbow Connection for the 100th time today.

Keyboard shortcuts for bookmarklets in Safari

Old tip, but always useful. You can add a keyboard shortcut to a Bookmarklet in System Preferences/Keyboard/Shorcuts:

Add Keyboard shortcut in System Preferences

Just use the bookmarklet name as the Menu Title, and use whatever key combo makes sense to you. That’s it.

Wavering confidence

Sometimes you loose confidence in what/how you do with your baby. It makes a tiring situation even worse.

Could be that a stupid book doesn’t deliver and makes things worse. Could be that your subconscious is right and you did screw up and spoiled him. Doesn’t matter.

Try to survive through the current episode. Don’t get bogged down in what we did wrong? questions. Calm the panic in your mind and the terror in your voice enough to be able to say: this is temporary — and try to believe it, you got nothing to loose.

Saddle up for the next round, because you have to and after you get your confidence back, will want to. I promise it will work again, you’ll regain the confidence and make things better.

Until you screw up things again.

Debugging is as fun as editing

Yesterday afternoon the Dropbox app on my Mac wouldn’t connect:

Forever Dropbox is starting… and Connecting…

I followed a few instructions on the Dropbox site, but nothing seemed to work. Even connecting through Cloak didn’t do the trick. But, the work VPN did.

Obviously something network related then. Going through Dropbox’s app few options, the Network/Proxies had a guilty look to them. Switching from Auto-detect to No proxy started the sync again.

In all fairness, and very sure the culprit is a Java¹ update I applied yesterday. But Java forums is the last place I want to go on a weekend.

Weekly News and Links

News

NYTimes reported on VIPs telling Apple You got to fix Podcasts. Podcasters replied to VIPs [shut up][twi].

HTC now officially stands for Holy Tech Colapse with 64% revenue drop in Q1.

Siri’s ex shows new AIfriend: VIV. Siri responds: Sorry, I cannot take requests right now…

New Instagram is both colorful and not — at the same time. I like it, others not so much.

Links

• Google Keyboard (Gboard) for iOS is really good… but no habla español yet.
• Opera launches free VPN app for iOS. Useful and fast.
• KeepingYouAwake: Caffeine clone for OS X Yosemite and El Capitan (including Dark Mode).
• Dark Sky - Hyperlocal Weather for Android. I use the iOS version.
• Soundshare — social music sharing. Geeks seem excited abouit.
• [WhatsApp for Desktop][whatsapp] rele… can’t even say it. Use BetterChat instead.

[twi]: https://twitter.com/gte/status/729809925073981442 “Guy English on Twitter:”“We want you to share your customer demographics with us. You can trust us because we’ll immediately tell our press pals about our meeting.”“” [cana]: http://canarymail.io/ “Canary Mail | Easy, Elegant, Email Client for Mac” [shor]: http://shortcatapp.com/ “Shortcat - Keyboard productivity app for Mac OS X” [whatsapp]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000621/Introducing-WhatsApps-desktop-app “Introducing WhatsApp’s desktop app - WhatsApp Blog”

Send to LaunchBar: Chrome Extension

With yesterday’s Send to LaunchBar bookmarklet, I created a Chrome extension.

Send to LaunchBar Extension

Main benefit is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut, so feel über-geekier for not using the trackpad or mouse.

You can download it from the Chrome Web Store.

Thanks again to @PeterLegierski and his Bookmarklet to Extension tool.

I also updated the the Tweetbot This extension with a new minimal icon and a fix to support https:// pages.¹

Bookmarklets for text manipulation — LaunchBar edition

A few years ago, I posted a few bookmarklets for copying the Title and Url of websites in different formats.

I still use them frequently, but in many cases I drop the resulting text to LaunchBar via its Instant Send functionality. By combining the old bookmarklets with the x-launchbar URL Scheme these new bookmarklets save me 1 step — and make me feel kinda cool.

Classic bookmarklet installation applies, just drag the LBxx links below to your bookmark bar¹:

1. Send Markdown link to LaunchBar: LB𝙢𝙙

[Make time for time - 5typos.net by Roberto Mateu](http://5typos.net/259/make-time-for-time)

2. Send Markdown Reference link to LaunchBar: LB[𝙢𝙙]

[5typ]: http://5typos.net/259/make-time-for-time "Make time for time - 5typos.net by Roberto Mateu"

3. Send Title and URL to LaunchBar: LB𝘵𝘹

Make time for time - 5typos.net by Roberto Mateu
http://5typos.net/259/make-time-for-time

This last one is my current favorite. Since it works in Chrome, I can click on any page and easily invoke Share using Reminders or Share using Notes. Since Chrome doesn’t support OSX 10.11 share functionality, it cuts even more steps from my flow.

2016-05-12: Fixed an issue with the 3rd bookmarklet, it would not work if the text selected had a space in Chrome.

Aurora (466 pages)

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora is one of those slow burning Sci-Fi novels that never actually explodes into a plot point, but it doesn’t become boring because of it.

It is a slow story, but it packs enough elements that it’s easy to just sit back and enjoy the ride. It also throws a few philosophical questions up in the air, without anyone in the book having the answer. If you enjoy putting the book down and pondering a bit about what just happened in what you read, you can expect a few of those moments.

In the end the book does have an agenda. It’s a going far away from home to realize what you had all along kind of story. But it doesn’t bend backwards to try to fit the resolution into it.

I did feel some disappointed with the Artificial Intelligence story arc. Without spoiling it, through the book the AI (rightly) becomes one of the main characters. The way this happens is a very interesting technical and psychological twist. However, there’s no epilogue about some of the events that took place. This which doesn’t quite fit into my understanding of the rest of the characters.

You don’t have to run and read this book. But if you enjoyed Red Mars, like deep space travel sci-fi, and have some reading time, it’s not a waste of time.

Update on 5:2 Diet

Two months ago I started fasting, or more accurately, restricting heavily my calories (600 for the day) every week on Monday and Wednesday — following an article in NYTimes.

Before reading anything more, please read the disclaimer at the bottom of the post.

Back to me. I’m happy to say I’ve lost 3.9kg (~8.6 pounds) since. According to the Happy Scale app:

• On March I lost a moving average of 2.2 kg.
• For April, the moving average was of 1.9 kg.

Moving averages are important because the after the two fasting days the weight loss is over-represented. But if you check the moving average, you notice the slight slope.

The slowish weight loss is perfectly fine by me. Since I’m still surprised it’s working at all. Over the last 8 weeks, I’ve travelled two weeks for work and went to Venezuela another two — scenarios where I always gain weight.

Excluding last week, I didn’t add any exercise or activity to my routine, and only on the last three weeks have I been a bit more careful on what I eat on most non-fast days.

What I eat on fast days:

Initially I was skipping breakfast, but the hunger in the afternoon started crossing the threshold of manageable. Lately, I eat two hard boiled eggs on my way to work, and drink my iced cold brew coffee through the morning. You also need to drink lots of water. There science and practice behind this, trust the lab coats on the science, trust me that you need to have a glass of water always next to your keyboard (careful with laptops) to drown the whining in your belly.

Dinner is simple: remember all those horrible diet recipes that you typical see? the sad looking lettuce with celery and a grilled chicken breast plate? yep, that’s it. You can waste a lot of time — As I have done — trying to squeeze the most out of your 600cal, but in the end I’ve found it easier just to embrace the crazy diet day for what it is.

Do you go crazy on non-fast days?

Not really. The first few weeks I actually stayed on a healthy diet mode for the rest of the week. Lately I’ve been choosing a serious cheat day on the weekends. But I’m still trying to loose weight, so pizzas every non-fast day are logically not the most efficient way to go about it. Even if it’s allowed by the diet.

One thing I’ve noticed — specially on weekdays, is that I’m starting to prefer a lighter dinner. I just sleep better.

Is fasting hard?

Yes at the beginning, but you get used to it. And like pushing your body to the limit with exercise, there’s a strange mind/body click that makes you feel like the pain is right somehow.

In addition, the intermittent fasting creates two complementing phenomenons the end up being a sort of virtuous cycle:

1. The psychology of just for today: When you’re hungry and know you won’t be eating that bowl of pasta you want when you get home, the idea that tomorrow you could eat it, makes the experience much more bearable.

2. Hunger is an excellent condiment: Not being a salad person, I’ve been surprised how delicious lettuce with celery and a dressing of olive oil and greek yogurt can be.

And then what?

I plan to continue the diet for two more months to see if I hit a wall or if I can get to my perfect weight of 76 kilos. According to the proponents of the diet, once you hit a healthy target weight, you should shift to a maintenance mode and only fast one day a week.

Disclaimer: needless to say that you should ignore anything I write regarding ../kb/Health stuff — and probably about geek stuff too. I’m peeing a lot more on the fasting days, so I’m likely messing my kidneys, or liver, or both. This post is just to document my experiment. It should we seen as a warning of what not to do, and not an endorsement of any kind.

New Gadget: Canon PIXMA PRO-100

Mother’s day is here, and I can finally talk about the newest arrival in our household: the Canon PIXMA PRO-100.

I’ve been following this printer for some time as a gift to Ana, but the $389 price on most websites was outside our range. Luckily, an update may be coming because Canon has some rebates during May. I bought ours in Adorama for $399 with 13”x19” Photo paper (50 Sheets) and the $250 rebate¹. With Adorama’s free shipping and no tax outside NYC, the $149 after rebate price makes it an excellent option from what I’ve researched.

The printer has some excellent reviews online, and pretty good karma from photographers that know their stuff. The Wirecutter — my go-to gadget review blog — recommends it as their Budget Pick.

It’s currently sitting underneath my ingenious wrapping in the living room, but I look forward to reviewing it once we get some real world experience with it.

And don’t forget, call your mom.

★★★★★

We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider

I heard a chapter of this book in Tim Ferriss website (who’s also a producer), and really enjoyed it. Given the free chapter, I believed book had a more productivity/self-help/improvement angle… and I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

Tim Kreider is your cooler hipster friend that you openly judge — and are equally fascinated by — because he can’t enjoy a normal live. And at the same time you secretly envy him, since you’re aware he sees through your normalcy as well.

The book is a series of essays/stories with a minimal thread of relation to each other. Not all of them captured my attention equally — I abandoned the book a few times for a week or so. But it never was about quality of the story, in many cases it was an overload of sincerity that made me cringe because how close it resonated. You might not agree with his opinions and choices, but his ability to share his thoughts and emotions make it imposible not to relate somehow every few pages.

And this is where I enjoyed the book the most. It’s one of the best written books I’ve read. At least it’s the book I’ve said to myself the most times: I wish I’ve written this.

If you enjoy hearing the stories of a friend who’s life is (and has always been) a mess over a few drinks — and concede s/he does make some good points, I highly recommend this book.

Weekly news and links

News:

Apple appears to be working on a revamped Apple Music with black & white UI, ‘huge artwork’, lyrics integration. The service has 13 million paying subscribers, so just like the Apple Watch, it’s doing well, it’s just not great.

Clever idiot claims he’s Bitcoin’s Satochi, forgets smarter nerds love debunking stuff.

Spotify’s navigation on the iPhone moves to the bottom of the screen. I would give it a thumbs up, but my hand is still crippled from stretching to the top left corner.

WhatsApp in Brazil is blocked from 72 hours. Actually, less than 24. Zuckerberg celebrates. But Telegrams is the happiest.

Links

• Quitter for Mac: automatically hide or quit apps after periods of inactivity.

• Hazel 4 released: automated organization on the Mac.

• ResetPlug: smart plug reset router power if WiFi fails.

• Jumpy Wall: endless wall jumper game for iOS.

Homescreen Apps: Carbo

There’s a fascinating truth I rediscover every few months:

Nothing beats pen and paper.

It’s actually not so much a rediscovery, more like the outcome of an epic struggle to prove this statement wrong… and failing miserably each time.

Since I have tried all productivity Apps¹ — and own most of them — this is particularly painful. In addition, my handwriting appears encrypted even to me, so I can’t even embrace the analog world if I wanted to.

But every time my intricate digital productivity system goes bankrupt, Carbo comes to the rescue to bridge the smoldering remains with post-it notes, Baron Fig notebooks and cheap yellow pads.

My Carbo flow

Exaggerations aside, my current system combines some ideas of the Autofocus System, with pomodoro technique, and a dash of GTD. With Carbo and Day One being the glue that holds everything together by forcing me to have accountability at the end of the day.

Whatever your system, if you need digitize notes I can’t recommend Carbo enough. Someday (soon?), an iPad Mini with the Apple Pencil will come for the rescue. But for now: nothing beats pen and paper, with everything stored in your computer.

Make time for time

I’ve started scheduling the drive home in my work calendar recently. Monday’s and Wednesday’s, there’s a 30 minute Drive Home meeting.

Nowadays I’m mostly working with the Costa Rica team, and they’re two hours behind until the next daylight savings time change. This makes it very easy to stay late because things are happening on Skype and Trello.

So I’m forcing myself to get home early — also arriving way earlier than I’m used to. This has opened two quiet times on the week where I fly through my pomodoros.

The meeting in calendar serves two purposes:

1. Internal reminder that getting home takes time.
2. External signaling of availability.

If somebody schedules a meeting at this time, at least a conflict will appear.

I’m playing a lot with the concept of tasks taking time (and space) on the calendar and will write more about it soon.But this small change has shown consistent results of actually making me arrive home recently.

Update: On empty content apps

Two weeks after deleting all apps with streams from my iPhone, I’m extremely happy with the decision.

Tweetbot and Reeder have been by far the most difficult to live without. I’d go as far as to say I had an addiction to checking these two apps whenever I had an idle moment — and sometimes not so idle either.

I’ve dealt with the withdrawal by limiting these two apps to the Mac and iPad. To my surprise, two things happened:

1. I didn’t miss any breaking news: checking less through the day didn’t make any nugget of gold fall through the cracks.
2. I opened both apps less on the Mac/iPad: somehow the above reinforced that I was missing anything, my instant checking anxiety went down — maybe a carbs analogy would be appropriate.

Not cured, but taking my medicine

I eventually plan to have both apps installed again when I feel I have control. In the meantime, today 4 apps were installed ¹ (3 old and 1 new):

• The Economist Espresso: One by product this last two weeks was that I started reading print magazines again. I devoured an Economist last weekend — like the good old days. Since the whole magazine every week is a bit overkill, give the app a try.

• NYT Now: I missed it, and the content the good kind of colesterol.

• Morning Reader: it’s an excellent review of what’s happening in tech, and was I opening it a lot on the browser either way.

• Linky: I’m reading more, so I have more to share! or so I tell myself. It’s a content producing app — although it’s more crap I’m dumping in the stream… so sue me.

Let’s see what happens in two weeks.

★★★★★

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

A week after finishing this book, I’m still thinking about some of the chapters. I will listen to it again for sure.

Don’t have goals, have systems, Fail forward, Happiness = health + freedom. Some of the self-help mantras Scott Adams shares on this book make sense in hindsight, but at least for me, the angle was new and refreshing.

However, I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone. You need to be OK with hearing advice based on lots of anecdotes. On Scott Adams defense, he’s upfront about this and has no problem with the idea that you’re just going to laugh at him through each chapter.

But as I said in the beginning, I’m very likely to listen to it again soon. I cherry picked some of the concepts and I’m planning to put them in practice, and I’m looking forward to calmer reread. Which is about the best recommendation you can give a book I guess.

Nothing says IU as 123

Mike Clouse:

Megan and I will text “123” to each other a few times a day. This little code goes way back for us and it just means, I love you, and I’m thinking of you. It only takes about 2 seconds to do, and always seems to come when I need it most.

Ana and I started doing this last year. I highly recommend it. It’s just a simple ping to tell your significant other s/he is in your thoughts.

You don’t need to wait for a response, or a read receipt. Just send it and go on with a busy day.

And if writing 123 is way too much effort, you can use Launch Center Pro or an app like Other to script it — not that I would ever do something so geeky.

Projects are not born

I’m dropping all labor pains and newborn analogies for software and projects from my vocabulary. They were useful descriptive abstract concepts, but recent family events have changed this.

In a classic ironic twist, the new Aeropost.com website was launched today. We’ve been working on it all year, and I’m very proud of it. It has a whole new CMS that gives a great foundation for upcoming features.

Very thankful to all the people in Costa Rica that actually did all the work.

Cutting back on empty content apps

I’ve decided my next experiment: delete all Apps that are full of empty calories content.

Two unrelated items¹ made me realize I need to take extreme measures to waste less time on garbage:

1. Dumbphone by Marc Jenkins:

Since I can’t rely on my own willpower, I’ve removed all of the Apps on my phone that don’t provide significant value. I’ve removed all temptation. And this morning, it worked.

Love his paired down home-screen. It basically forces you to Learn, Create, Do, or turn off the iPhone move on with your life.

2. Wasted Hours by Matt Lubchansky:

Wasted Hours

This struck a nerve. It made me laugh, but also a bit more uncomfortable that I would like to admit.

The usual suspects

Gone are: Tweetbot, Reeder, Narwhal, Product Hunt, Hacker News, Instagram, Nuzzel, Pinner, Morning News, FB Messenger, Youtube and even Linky. This is going to hurt a lot.

I even deleted Google Inbox. Going to force myself to use Gmail or even Apple Mail. Why? because all the Apps mentioned lead me to waste time and think I’m doing something. Scheduling an email for later is not much better than streaming endlessly remixed crap, just to find the occasional gold nugget.

I’m not going offline, just taking the first step and taking these time voids from the iPhone. I’ll try to get my RSS, Tweetbot, etc fix on the iPad mini.

Dammit… it just occurred to me that I need to delete them all from the MacBook also.

Original content in music services

Funny how the push for original content in video streaming services doesn’t have an equivalent in music streaming ones.

Some albums are exclusive on some services for a time, but rarely is an album/band only available on one of the services.

The business model for music, and the replayability make it different than TV, but maybe the need for differentiation will push more to original content from each of the music services.

When in doubt, TK it

Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

[…] do what journalists do: type “TK” where your fact should go, as in “The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.” “TK” appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is “Atkins”) so a quick search through your document for “TK” will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards.

According to pinboard, I bookmarked this in 2009, but it feels like I’ve been using it forever.

Not only for fact checking, but everything that would unjustly break a writing flow. Sometimes it’s a word you have on the tip of the tongue and you can’t find, and others it’s a whole idea you know you can get back to and not loose much.

This is one of my favorite and most useful writing tools.

On the Amazon Pebble

I think Pebble could be a worthwhile member of the Amazon ecosystem:

1. Alexa everywhere: With the Amazon phone out of the game for a while, an Alexa interface you carry on your wrist is a good second-best to the smartphone. It’s also a more even playing field against Siri and Google Now — compared to stuck inside an App.

2. E-ink screens: Amazon already has the most beautiful E-ink screens on the market — there has to be some economies of scale in R&D and production on it.

3. Dash button: As simple as the physical thingy, but you carry it all the time.

Needless to say my Pebble Time experiment is going really well. Really hope they survive a few more device iterations.