Author: William Gallagher

Taking the scorched Earth policy to your social media

Posted by

0

I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help.

Reboot or Die Trying – David Roberts, Outside (2 September 2014)

That’s serious social media use. I had no idea that there even was a daily limit on Twitter. But after hitting it and generally just going far too far on all of these things, Roberts quit. Cold turkey, near enough, for a year.

He claims to have five things to tell you, five things that you can only know from having a year away from technology – or, presumably, reading about it.

I’d tell you some of the five but this is on Outside magazine. Outside. I barely know what the word means. Read the full feature and if it’s that crucial, let me know.

Update: the 1,179 news stories I won’t read

Posted by

0

Five days ago I wrote about The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read. If you’ve heard me wibble on above ten minutes then you might figure that these 319 are sports stories. No. I ignore sports but just as one amorphous blob of nothingness, I don’t understand it enough to determine individual news stories.

The 319 were the Apple news stories in my RSS newsreader. And right now there are 1,179 articles about Apple. That’s quite a lot of stories and I would like to tell you about them, except I still won’t read them.

I may never read them. You can be sure that a gigantic majority are to do with the launch of the iPhone 6 and whatever else Apple may or may not release tomorrow. I’ve been staying away from the firehose of news because most of it is wrong, much of it is clickbait emptiness as well as wrong, and you end up being convinced that Apple will announce the discovery of alien life.

After tomorrow’s event, there will be many more stories and I might read some of those. But these 1,179 are dead to me.

All of which is a long way of saying that a lot gets written about Apple, that a lot gets read about Apple by me and that is KILLINGLY DIFFICULT to ignore 1,179 articles.

Apple is streaming its event live on apple.com from 6pm UK time tomorrow, Tuesday. I’ve skipped the articles but I’ll be watching the event. If you enjoy these as much as I do, please write in and explain what I get out of them.

Stop me. This is a bad new habit

Posted by

0

I’m a bit swamped. And today I set an alarm to prod me into a particular task at a particular time.

That’s not a time in my To Do list: I don’t find the timed reminders in OmniFocus all that useful because I just don’t find them. I’ll pick up my phone and discover a reminder notification is there. If it made a sound, I didn’t catch it.

This could be a problem with my iPhone: I have difficulties with the alarm sometimes going off and sometimes not. It will always display the alarm notification, the one with stop or snooze buttons, but it might not make any noise. I would be considering my hearing if it weren’t that sometimes it does work.

For a year or more now, I’ve been setting two alarms: one for 04:59 and one for 05:01 because one or either or both will sound and I’ll take that.

I suppose I’m just using the same workaround to solve my tasks problem but I really don’t like it. I set three alarms today for three certain things that had to certainly be done. When it came down to it, I postponed one of them. And I snoozed all three several times.

This is just a senseless waste of my concentration and I’ve got to stop it.

If something works, fine. If it doesn’t, why keep doing it? I need to take a step out, I think, and re-examine my OmniFocus To Do lists.

Hang on, I’ll just set an alarm for that.

When one keyboard just isn’t enough

Posted by

0

IMG_0696.JPG
Previously… I first enthused about the Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard for the IPad Air, then I had some problems with it and posted a little less enthusiastically.

Not so much less enthusiastically that stopped using it.

But while I was writing about this, I did mention how I’d previously used a couple of external keyboards for my iPad. One went to Angela, a very good and quite cheap Logitech one that she still uses and an Apple wireless keyboard. In some ways better than the Logitech, in some ways not as good. But more expensive. And when I had that and Angela had her Logitech, we would even write together. Sitting in a café in the Lake Distract, propped-up iPads leaning against each other.

Now that I’m used to carrying the Belkin keyboard case around, though, that Apple wireless keyboard has lain forgotten in my office.

Until this weekend. I’m behind on a book and we were going to lose quite a bit of time to a workshop I ran in Newcastle and then a London trip to see Kate Bush. (Yes, by the way. Yes. Astounding. It wasn’t a concert, it was a delicate shotgun.) But Angela then got a thing to do during both Saturday and Sunday and I planned to hole up and write.

And for some reason, I brought my old Apple Wireless Keyboard. As well as the Belkin case.

I am persistently tapping the wrong keyboard; there’s a handy iPad key on the Belkin one that isn’t on the Apple one. Plus, I had thought I would never get used to a particular design decision on the Belkin where they moved the semi-colon to beside the keyboard. I still get it wrong when I’m writing on that but it turns out that i must be at least seeping in to my muscle memory because I keep pressing the Belkin key on the Apple keyboard.

But I can’t pretend that this isn’t true: I’m enjoying the writing and it is working faster because I’m on a very good keyboard. A very good and also full-size keyboard.

And if you think I look daft typing with two keyboards, you’re right. I’m just fine with that.

Why we have the 40-hour week – and why we should keep it

Posted by

0

I’m all for working long hours and I remain convinced that I am contributing to the work/life balance argument by not having a life. But:

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the “sweet spot” is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.

Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week – Geoffrey James, Inc (24 April 2012)

That’s the crux of it, really, but read the full piece for a little more of the history of the 40-hour figure and how it’s applying to office workers as well as Ford’s factory ones.

Fork. This cutlery will help you eat healthier

Posted by

0

As I raise the fork to my mouth to deliver another Brussel sprout, it starts to violently vibrate, and I almost drop it on the table. The hostess eyes me suspiciously.

The devil fork is called the HAPIfork, but I immediately slip into calling it the “food-shaming fork,” and the name sticks. The moniker isn’t really fair — the fork doesn’t actually take into account what type of food you’re eating. Instead, it measures how quickly you eat, and zaps you with a Pavlovian vibration if you don’t take enough time between bites. It’s supposed to train you to eat slower, which studies have shown can help you feel fuller sooner, thus leading to weight loss. (This effect generally takes about 20 minutes.)

I Ate With a Food-Shaming Fork for a Week – Jessica Roy, NY Mag (1 September 2014)

It’s a very big fork, like a sonic screwdriver with prongs on the end. So there’s also the embarrassment factor of being seen with this, let alone with it, well, um, vibrating like that.

Read Roy’s full feature for how the week went and how the weak survive.

Refresh app: just when you get used to it feeling creepy…

Posted by

0

It’s still not out in the UK so you’ll just have to trust me here, but there is this iPhone app called Refresh which parses your calendar and prompts you with conversation starters for people you’re about to meet.

Refresh is very clever and it seems supernatural how it combs sources like LinkedIn to present its information. But as well as the fact that I will never use its suggested conversation openers – I prefer “Hello” to “Say, weren’t you on holiday in Marakesh from 16 July to 18 August?” – there are oddities. And these oddities keep reminding you of how Refresh is sitting on the very line between useful and creepy.

It’s meant to prompt you before a meeting and it does so, but not always. I forgot that I still had it after reviewing the app. Until one day, two months later, it pinged with details of the woman I was meeting to discuss a writing project. I showed her what it said and she revealed that it was all wrong: she had purposely lied on LinkedIn and Facebook in order to defeat this kind of thing.

But then I had a meeting right after that and Refresh didn’t do anything. But then I had a third meeting and it pinged.

A few weeks later, I was going to an event I’d produced and it pinged with what it called a dossier about a particular someone else who was going. That was freaky-plus because my calendar just had the event name and there was nothing I could see that named her – and didn’t name half a dozen other people that Refresh was ignoring.

But still, you know, even though I could just delete it and walk away, I am drawn back to it. There is something so smart about what it does that I’m fascinated at the algorithm. Plus, it gave me the name of someone’s partner and I’d forgotten it. So thank you, Refresh.

Except, last night I got something new. Have a look, see what you think. Is this what I was really doing last night?

IMG_2674.JPG

That was August 2014…

Posted by

0

Previously… each month I account for what I’ve done in order to make me think of how you’ll look if I haven’t done anything. Especially, especially, as I keep telling you to do things.

It spurs me on and thank you for that but it does sometimes backfire a little. I went into August expecting that I wouldn’t get much done at all: I lost a good ten days, maybe two weeks to a holiday. It was a special one: my 20th wedding anniversary.

I know you look at this list and think that there is something here, I did something. It is solely because I do a little every day. So losing all that time was going to make a big dent in the month. Yet I think I may have over-compensated because I ended up doing about 20,000 more words than in July.

So August wasn’t as rubbish I feared, I’ll give myself that. September’s dire, though.

Writing: approximately 86,440 words
Book: “Filling the Blank Screen” (70,000 words with 50,000 taken from The Blank Screen website)
Book: “The Blank Screen Writers’ Guide: Blogging” wrote approximately 13,600 words
The Flare, a GISHWHES short story (140 words)
Guest blog for Marianne Cantwell’s Free Range Humans (approximately 500 words)
124 The Blank Screen news site entries totalling approximately 42,300 words
6 Self Distract news site entries totalling approximately 9,900 words

Press and publicity:
Bio to Roz Goddard for West Midlands Readers’ Network book

Pitches:
4 (1 successful)

Approaches to me, like reverse-pitching:
3 (3 successful)

Events and copywriting:
Producing Steven Knight event for BBC, Writers’ Guild and RTS
Producing Erica Whyman event for Writers’ Guild
Asked by Birmingham Rep to contribute to programmes

Other:
Delivered drama, acting and diversity votes for Royal Television Society Awards
Joined Reddit productivity subsite and began posting
Meeting re ongoing audio project

Attended:
Chateau Impney tour
Doctor Who: Deep Breath in cinema
Shed Heaven II
Polly Tisdall’s leaving do

ENDS

Another iPad mind-mapping app on sale (briefly)

Posted by

0

Yesterday I told you of how iThoughts is on sale and also said:

It looks to me as if there are really two contenders in mindmaps for iPad. I have one – MindNode – and the other is iThoughts.

Mindmapping iOS software iThoughts on sale (briefly) – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (5 September 2014)

Today another one goes on sale – and this one goes down to free. Dream-X isn’t as slick as the others: it’s variously spelt Dream-X and Dream X, for instance, and while it is very good at having tutorial videos built right into the software, they’re a bit fuzzy. You can only get the mind maps out of it via an image: you can’t export in a way that other applications can pick up.

Specifically, you can’t export in OPML which means you can’t take the image and have it be read by a To Do app or project manager.

But you may not want that at all, you may prefer keeping a map as a map. And Dream-X lets you explore the whole idea of mindmaps. If you’re musing about mindmaps or know what they are and just aren’t sure whether they’re for you, give Dream-X a go.

Bounce an AA battery to find out if it’s spent

Posted by

0

I don’t exactly know that I needed the whole of this 5’32” video to grasp the concept: if you drop an battery it will bounce if it’s empty, it won’t if it’s full.

Empty. Full. Really I suppose I mean empty as in used up, full as in still has a charge. The folks behind this video call them good batteries vs bad batteries, though that just seems harsh.

Watch the start for proof and a demonstration of how you don’t have to throw the batteries on the ground to test this. Then carry on for an examination of why it may all be true.