Book: Up the Organization by Robert C. Townsend

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.

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 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.

My top 10 Apple products

Yesterday was Apple’s 40th anniversary. While I’m definitely a fan of the company, some products go beyond just being great and into love territory as I look back:

1. MacBook Air (11-inch, Late 2010)
   I was lucky to be visiting the US when this laptop was released. I just walked into a store and picked the base 64GB one. I loved this laptop: it was fast, great battery, perfect size and extremely well built.
2. Newton MessagePad 2100
   I’ve written about my love for the Newton before, but it deserves repeating. The Newton defined the sort of geek I’m today.
   
3. iPod photo 40GB
   Podcasts, podcasts and more podcasts. I still have this iPod in a drawer and it basically was my home music player for about 5 years.
4. iPhone 3GS
   The original iPhone created the category, but for me the 3Gs was the first one to start delivering on the promise. Probably the iPhone I used the longest.
5. MacOS X 10.4
   The first OSX that was fast, stable, feature complete, and justified the feeling of superiority of regular users over Windows XP.
6. iPhone 4S
   I skipped the iPhone 4, but the 4S retina screen was amazing. And the design felt like what Apple had wanted to release from the beginning.
7. iPad Mini 2
   I had bought the original mini when it came out because it seemed like the closest relative to the Newton in size. When the retina version came out… I couldn’t help myself. It’s on my bag right now, love reading and browsing on it.
8. MacBook (white plastic)
   Previous to the intel switch I’ve had an iBook G3 and G4. Great portables, but always a side computer to a desktop. The Intel Core Duo in the first Macbook made it my first laptop that was also my main machine… and I haven’t gone back to desktops since.
9. Apple Cinema Display LED (27-Inch)
   My Dad completely surprised with one around when I moved back to Venezuela and I used it non-stop until left again. Just used it again on my last trip and it still rocks the colors.
10. Magic Trackpad
    I’ve dreamt of this input device for a long time before it came out. And unlike and lot of other stuff I have dreamt about… it didn’t disappoint.

My current and upcoming backup plan

Today was Backup Day. Every few months a friend¹ calls me asking for help when a laptop dies, or goes missing with all their photos. Trying to recover data from a damaged or lost drive is expensive or imposible.

For a fraction of the cost you can have a pretty bulletproof plan:

Overall backup:

1. Time Machine: 1 TB external drive I keep at work
2. Backblaze: backups everything.

Files specific:

1. Dropbox: All my files live in Dropbox folder + my desktop folder is symlinked.

Photos specific:

1. iCloud Photo library: in my work MacBook Pro and MacBook server at home.
2. Google Photos: sync app running from Macbook at home.

Upcoming updates:

1. Use Arq to upload photos to a third online location (Dropbox since I’m already paying for 1TB plan).
2. A second external drive to alternate with the work drive.

Homescreen 2 folder iconography

My Home Screen 2

How to organize apps and folders is an ongoing experiment of mine. After 6 years, I have more or less a stable solution for the second home screen.

You’ll notice that I use symbols to name folders. For some reason it makes classifying and finding apps easier:

• ⌘ System: Anything that can be filed as utilities or tools.
• ⚑ Location: Parkings apps, OpenTable, etc.
•  Apple: Default apps.
• Baby: You guessed it, Robie related.
• ▶︎ Media: Audio, video, etc.
• ♣︎ Games: Bang, bang.
• ☗ Home: Roku/Apple TV, weather, plane finder.
• ▲ Cooking: The triangle means heat in my head.
• ⦁ Photography: It’s like a camera lens!
• ☁︎ Cloud: Web services.
• ❝ Writing: Please quote me.
• ✈︎ Travel: Getting there is half the apps.
• ‰ Finance: Banks and anything that has my money.
• $ Stores: Everything that wants my money.
• ◍ Web: Browsers and other web apps.
• 🄰🄿 Aeropost: My job.
• ☍ Social: Lets connect.

Any other app left outside is something I’m playing with but hasn’t found a place in the main screen¹ or any of the folders.

On music and playlists (Part 3)

Last year I went overboard with excitement when I tried Apple Music. The music high lasted a month before the technical limitations of the service just became too much.

I experimented for the rest of the year if a subscription service was really needed — and if so, which one:

• Soundcloud: today they are announcing a subscription plan, but even last year if you wanted EDM all the time, this was the best option. The mobile app is good, but too gesture heavy. Among the ad-supported options, it was the least intrusive one. In the end, the lack of a native desktop client and a limited library of normal music didn’t convince me.

• Youtube Red: like almost every Google app on iOS, it’s a great service delivered in a quite-not-native mobile app. If the app was better it would be a serious contender, since the monthly subscription also removes ads in all of Youtube. But again, the lack of a native Mac app turns me off… maybe I’m not millennial enough.

• Vox: a great mobile and desktop app that can access Youtube and your own library. During this experiment I went back to the dark days of side-loading music from the web. Here’s where subscription services semi-infinite libraries and my inability to just enjoy music I already have reappeared. However, if you are already happy with your library, this is a great software alternative.

• Rdio: for a few days, I had a winner. The $3.99 streaming plan with 25 offline songs was a perfect fit. The Mac was great. Recommendations were a little weak, but overall it was a very good package. Sadly, not everyone agreed and the service was bought by Pandora and shutdown.

• Apple Music: out of scientific curiosity I subscribed again at the start of the year. Enough months had passed for the connections spasms and app quirks to be fixed. No dice. While again surprised by the great playlists, the overall service experience still left me unsatisfied.

• Spotify: last and not least for a reason. Spotify is still the clear winner. The Discover Weekly playlist is basically the only thing I’ve listened for the last two months¹. I can switch between iOS and the Mac app with ease, and the backend must use some voodoo magic become it streams even in Venezuela 3G speeds.

So I’m back as a Spotify premium subscriber and will add Ana again to the family plan².

A twitter is worth a thousand contact us forms

I buy a lot of apps. I believe good software is worth paying for. If a developer(s) has made your life easier, ze deserves a reward for the effort.

I imagine alcoholics also say bartenders deserve a drink to be ordered from them if a good spirit is featured in the shelf.

Regardless of the justification for my victimless digital addiction, I do have a very a simple rule to indulge in new apps by unknown developers: they must have a twitter account.

Saying that you would love to hear from me and just having a Contact Us form, tells me you really don’t.

I understand that managing a twitter account¹ can be a pain, but it’s exactly the sort of pain that sends the right signal about your app: somebody is standing by it.

On plans and execution

I tend to fall for plans. In product management you can always create beautiful and very detailed projects, with roadmaps, milestones and even use cases. Plans can create such a perfect mirage of the final product that you can believe the project is almost done¹.

If I had PM superpowers then smart people coming up with such plans would be my kryptonite. It’s not that I turn into a yes-man, but I recognize that even my pushback tries to inch the plan to a start.

However, I don’t think this is such a terrible problem. In most cases plans are like ideas: they set an objective and imply the assumptions used.

It’s not until the execution that real feedback can occur. Before it’s pure philosophical supposition — usually with more to do with politics than the actual project.

My recommendation is not to avoid plans, but to create them in such a way that they allow the learnings from the actual development to feed back to it.

And enjoy the FUBAR moments along the way. If you had a suspicion that it could happen — it doesn’t mean your plan was broken — it means that you’ve moved on from planning to executing.

On artificial goodbyes

When many of our grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated from Europe to Venezuela during the 20th century, they left behind parents, siblings, friends, girlfriends — with promises to write and come back to visit soon. Most lost touch and never heard from each other again.

Nowadays we still say goodbye with sadness, but rather than days or months before hearing about each other again, it takes seconds for a followup goodbye message to arrive. This has distorted our perception of time and distances.

The collective trauma a billion people would suffer if air travel and the internet were disrupted on the same week would likely be unrivaled in our history.

Of course there’s no need to panic. But sometimes we should remember that despite all our technologies, nothing beats a heartfelt goodbye with a hug.

On the multifaceted characteristics of cold showers

Cold showers are terrible. Scratch that, cold showers are an abomination. Why did we leave our comfortable urban environment for these infra-human conditions? Experiencing nature my freezing behind.

I may be losing the feeling of my arms, because it’s suddenly not so bad. More like the second drill at the dentist — when the numbness hides the pain and you’re kinda happy it’s closer to the end.

There’s a certain feeling of accomplishment when you go all in. A victory of mind over cold liquid matter. I’ve also managed to conceal my high-pitch noises enough to make them sound like coughs. Victory is mine.

I twist and turn. No more hiding. I’ve embraced my environment and are now free. Let water be water, its temperature has transcended meaning.

I am one with nature. I’ve saved water, electricity and improved my health. This is the way to treat the temple of the body.

But I’m sure as hell not showering tomorrow morning.

On minimalism not being optimal.

After every Apple event, a battle is fought in my head: should I rearrange my setup to embrace whatever new amazing, magical, revolutionary, great, incredible, beautiful device/software/service is introduced?

It always seems that not embracing the new it™, would be like leaving productivity on the table. A suboptimal state that could be improved if I just buy tablet X, and switch to smartphone Y. Of course, it goes without saying that either the laptop will need to be exchanged for a proper desktop or… and this goes on-and-on for many permutations.

To balance all this — in addition to fiscal responsibility — there’s the voice of minimalism. The one that is a bit worried every night when it notices how many of the things you will take to a dessert island need to be charged. The one that reminds you how happy you were 20 years ago when you had equivalent toys with 1/100th of the speed, capacity and connectivity. The one that twitches when it notices the ebook version is more expensive than the same book’s paperback.

I struggle with minimalism because I hide my consumerism behind the banner of optimization. Sometimes I try to remind myself that real minimalism is not about a minimal and elegant process that make things easy. But rather about a well worn set of tools that allow to make things — it’s up to you to make it easy or not.

On the fun of learning

Two hours ago I didn’t want - or knew how - to play backgammon. Now I still don’t know but really want to play again tomorrow.

I half joke that at a certain age you don’t want collect new friends, music or hobbies. That’s just a bad excuse for being lazy.

I’m glad my brother in law nudged me to play. It made me feel the pain of thinking. And the fun of learning.

5 word reviews of today’s Apple event

• CareKit: Boring… if you’re lucky/healthy.
• Apple Watch price-cut: Same slowness for $100 less.
• Apple Watch new bands: Nylon one looks very nice.
• tvOS 9.2: iOSification of the TV continues.
• iOS 9.3: Night Shift really does help.
• iPhone SE: Not “just” small iPhone 6s.
• iPad Pro 9.7-inch: iOS 10 must justify it.

Happy Birthday Twitter

Nine years ago — less than a year after the first tweet — I sent cover letter that I’m still proud off:

Virtub/Buzzword Cover Letter

Not only did it open the door to a summer and fall internship, but I don’t cringe when I reread, unlike so many other things from back then. In the context of Twitter, I feel pretty smug about my prediction:

Everyday I get people to use Backpack, 30boxes, Democracy and Pando. I’m also sure Twitter is going to reach the tipping point soon. But I still understand why some of my favorite tools, such as del.icio.us or flickr, can’t be “sold” in a simple enough way so that the average user gets excited and use it.

To appreciate how difficult it’s to still be relevant — or alive— after 10 years, we just need to check up the other services I mentioned:

• Backpack: Frozen in time. Basecamp is alive and well, but I was sure its little brother was going to make it.
• 30boxes: Zombie. Site is there, but service was beaten by Google Calendar.
• Democracy (Miro): My naiveness at play. Bitorrent didn’t decentralize video sharing as much as I expected.
• Pando: Dead. I didn’t fully understand how Dropbox would change the model.
• Del.icio.us: I see dead apps. It’s dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.
• Flickr: Dead man walking.

So there. I manage to congratule Twitter by talking about myself… which is basically how I use Twitter.

On Selfish Empathy

My mom is having a hard time in Venezuela. She broke down and cried a little today during breakfast. It’s happening a lot lately.

It used to be canine matters that set her off: a street dog too close to cars, an abandoned thin puppy, even a lost dog poster. We would laugh at/with her about her craziness. She’s known to stop on highways to pickup a stray dogs, and her car smells like a drunk sailors cabin because she carries dog food in case she sees a hungry dog¹.

But now it’s being set off just by her telling me about the previous day.

Things are pretty bad in Venezuela. The country is probably going through its biggest economic crisis in the last 80 years. My dad closed down most of the family business two years ago, so they’re suffering the crisis as consumers — and with the erosion of savings — but there’s no business to bankrupt anymore.

In comparison with the rest of the country my parents are very well off. My mom has to deal with lines here and there, but since they’re empty nesters, they are fine with what they find and usually bring supplies on their trips to visit us.

Still, my mom can’t help to absorb and own the worsening misery she sees everyday. She keeps blowing her budget helping not only dog foundations, but buying medicine for a nice old lady she met pharmacy line, or buying books for a gardener kids.

Don’t be confused, my mom is no saint. She gulps down a (few) bottle of wine every so often with her neighbors, and she can be intense when she decided X is what you should be doing. But seeing her so affected is new for me. I could blame it on age — which is what she does — but that’s not it.

She’s just being exposed to a worsening misery in her day-to-day and has lost the ability to filter it. After listening to her, it was obvious that she wasn’t really sad about anything that was happening to her. She’s just sad that it’s happening, and the injustice of it happening in a country without any real excuse for it to happen.

So it breaks my heart to have to tell my mother to worry less about everyone else. That it’s ok to fingir demencia (feign insanity) and forget about other people’s troubles more often.

Because it’s a lesson I don’t think I would want Robie to learn.

My Setup: Media Boxes

I’ve been a cord-cutter for about 10 years. While my current setup has its quirks — it’s a dream compared that first Mac Mini with Front Row.

Roku 2

When we moved to Miami two years ago, I opted for a Roku 2 — to the surprise of many. The main reason is that I use Put.io to sideload some content, and there’s a very simple streaming App for it. I also had Plex installed on my 2008 MacBook media center, which is great for content you want to look pretty and organized.

One small issue I had with the Roku was that it couldn’t control just my soundbar volume. Or to put it more accurately: I couldn’t figure out how to tell my Samsung TV to ignore the volume control, even though I had the audio disabled.

Enter the [Logitech Harmony 350](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J7KM5X4/?tag=rmateu-20. Which worked pretty well, although the lag was very annoying at times. This was also a bummer, because the Roku remote is so well designed. I really love the size and weight, and the headphone jack is brilliant.

Apple TV 4

With the new Apple TV, the missing App’s were no longer an issue. Plex was in the store, and I was sure someone would do an App for Put.io.

To my surprise, [Fetch], an App I had originally bought just to manage Put.io files one the iPad, introduced a tvOS version. Very quickly it has become the killer app in my Apple TV.

The easiest way to explain [Fetch] is to imagine a Plex version that runs in an external server. However, I have to say that the recognition engine seems to work even better than Plex. Which means it’s very good¹.

One thing that’s not good at all is the Siri Remote. It did manage to configure itself perfectly to only control the soundbar. Hurray for Apple elegance. But, unless you are a certified hipster™ and watch TV on the floor — where the remote has nowhere to hide — then it’s an elegant slab of slippery invisibility.

The makes matters worse, there’s the Touch surface of the remote. I can imagine the same hipster Apple engineer sitting on the white room and smoothly scrolling back and forward his favorite movie… but never turning off the lights and watching the whole damn thing without letting go of the remote.

All the innovation in scrolling the remote brings — and its by far the best — is lost by all the times you move in your couch and the video pauses because the remote thinks your butt wants to skip ahead.

We mostly watch the Apple TV now, but I do arrive home sometimes to the TV source changed to the Roku. Which means the average user in my home sometimes prefers the 2 year old Roku, which is about 1/3 of the price.

This isn’t exactly a clear win for Apple’s future of television.

108 minutes

Some may remember the hatch in Lost where Desmond had to push a code every 108 minutes. Otherwise — some catastrophic event would happen.

I can’t help but be reminded of this button every time I see Ana in action with Robie during the day. Since we¹ are mostly breast-feeding, our bundle of joy eats about every two hours — which includes the 10 to 20 minutes he takes to eat. Which leaves Ana about 100 minutes to do everything she has pending before the cycle starts again.

The level of commitment needed for this is only something I can imagine. I haven’t been paid enough ever to worry about a task every two hours, of every day, for a least half a year.

And that’s the rub: I couldn’t compensate Ana all the hours, even at the minimum wage in the US.

Of course, all of this purely philosophical since Ana can’t even stand a few hours away from Robie. But the economics of it are real: we couldn’t afford to buy motherly love.

Very convenient that Gmail’s Inbox brings Smart Reply to the web the same day Boxy 1.1 ships.

I still can’t use Inbox only on the desktop, but Boxy is the best of the quasi-app’s.

The useful (but slow) website Letterboxd has an App. I have abandoned so many movie apps that none are likely to survive. But I do like the lists on thus one.

Testing yet another Safari extension to bookmark the current page in Pinboard. I like the simplicity of this one — but the search continues.