Author: William Gallagher

As if Google Glasses weren’t creepy enough already

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I’m sure I’ve seen this in films. The hero looks at you through glasses and on the screen comes up information about you. In this case, your age, gender and most specifically what mood you’re in.

But of course now that you can actually do this with Google Glasses and some newly-announced software, you’re not a hero. And it’s one of those cases where software need only pretend to be clever because actually all it’s got to do is tell you that the person you’re looking at through these things is pissed off at you.

I can see that something like this might help people with Aspergers’ who have trouble recognising facial clues. But I feel a punch to the face clears up many confusions.

PC and Mac: You Need a Budget software on sale (briefly)

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Very briefly. Appsumo is offering a discount on this budgeting application, You Need a Budget, for Mac and PC which comes so highly recommended that I’ve just bought it.

Usually retailing for $60 (approximately £36), it is on sale via Appsumo for $30 (approximately £18) – but it’s only on sale for 72 hours. And I don’t know how many hours into that I heard about.

Go take a look now: you can guess what a budgeting application does but there’s a video showing why this is a good one.

Ask Me Anything – and now be able to read the answers

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Previously… Reddit’s Ask Me Anything interview platform has become the place to go because the most amazing people pop up on it. There’s no interviewer, there’s just you and this person. Plus maybe someone typing, if they’re not hot on the keys.

President Obama did an AMA. Do you need anything more?

Yes. You need to be able to read these things. If you happen to be on the site when the AMA session is live then you can follow it fine, I imagine. I’ve never used it live. It won’t be exactly as cut and thrust as a verbal discussion so it’ll be a bit boring while you wait for text answers to appear. But it will surely work and you will surely understand what’s happening.

You don’t when the interview is over. It is a mess. Rabbit holes’ worth of comments and sort-of questions and discussions and threads and sporadically an answer from the interviewee. It’s just unreadable. There have been attempts to fix this before but they’ve been by third-party websites that cull the interviews and curate the results. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but if you need someone else’s website to make your interview with the President of United States comprehensible, there is a lot wrong with your service.

Now Reddit has released an Ask Me Anything for iOS. Android will follow soon. It’s free and it works well: give it a go and find out just what a gorgeously astonishing range of people have answered questions on AMA.

The creativity spectrum and you

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I’ve heard people tell me, “I’m just not that creative.” I don’t believe it. You are creative and ingenious and resourceful and brilliant. Creativity doesn’t have to be defined by the bounds of art or literature. Your creativity can reveal itself in so many different ways: parenting, relationships, wardrobe, problem-solving, ideas, shoelaces, Tumblrs, cooking.

Everyone is capable of creativity.

What I Wish I Knew About Creativity When I Was 20 – Kevan Lee, Buffer (26 August 2014)

I’ve also heard people telling me that they’re not creative but I believe them. Maybe I just rankle at how each time it’s happened to me, the person has been proud of it. You can argue that they are just claiming to be proud, that it’s a defensive attack. But that’s to presume everyone really wants to be creative and I think that is as wrong as these proud non-creatives are.

Still, maybe I just mix with the wrong crowd. Lee’s full article is part a reassurance that there is hope for the not-we and part an exploration of what we would tell our younger selves now if we could.

Specifically, he has 17 points which I’m sure would be useful for sending back in time but are also interesting for us as we are today.

Don’t stop til you get enough

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Also, be stupid.

More specifically, be stupid about what you can do, what you will get done, about what is enough.

Today I had occasion to be in Droitwich for most of the whole day and for most of most of the whole day I was on my own writing in various corners. A library. A tea shop. I liked both of those.

But I was there because I was doing this thing that meant meeting a guy at the start and at the end. I told him in the morning that in between I was going to write 10,000 words of the book I’m doing. I said it as a way to say I was fine hanging about, he should forget me. But in my heart I also said it as an absolute truth. I would write 10,000 words today.

I didn’t.

I wrote 8,500 words instead.

Doubtlessly, just doubtlessly, I will have to revise a lot of those and may yet throw them all out as I so often do and have done. But the fact that I was even a little bit cut off from everyone and the fact that for some reason I had my eye on the word count, I flew to 8,500.

The number doesn’t matter and the fact that I’ll willingly throw it all out again tomorrow doesn’t matter. What does is that there are points in today’s work where I kept on writing just to see where I went. And there are points where I went to interesting and new places.

Sometimes I need to just write quickly to get something down that I can change. I know that. I didn’t appreciate that sometimes the very same technique makes me reach into newer areas.

Part of me wants to share that with you for the next time you’re stuck for a word or a sentence or a thought. But part of me just wants to remember it myself.

Bit late now: why you shouldn’t have taken a holiday in August

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Don’t do it in any August, any year. So if you’re the sort to already be plotting a world cruise for August 2015, bump it to September. Or bring it forward to July. Anything you like, really.

Just not August:

Let the slackers and the fashionably exhausted crowd burn their vacation days. Their absence makes August the best month to get work done.

7 Reasons to Skip Vacation in August – Ilan Mochari, Inc.com (7 August 2014)

I’m sold. Read all seven reasons in the full piece.

Thanks to Lifehacker for spotting it after I’d been away.

Dot dot dot – waiting for them to finish a text reply

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You’ve seen this in iMessage, you’ve seen it WhatsApp: you’ve sent someone a message and your screen shows you three little dots. Without ever being told, you knew that this means they’re writing back to you.

Actually, stop for a second. That’s really clever: without ever being told, still we know exactly what it means, we know exactly what it is happening.

Until the dots vanish and theres no reply.

“The three dots shown while someone is drafting a message in iMessage is quite possibly the most important source of eternal hope and ultimate letdown in our daily lives,” said Maryam Abolfazli, a writer in Washington who has tackled the topic. “It’s the modern-day version of watching paint dry, except you might be broken up with by the time the dots deliver.”

Bubbles Carry a Lot of Weight: Texting Anxiety Caused by Little Bubbles – Jessica Bennett, New York Times (29 August 2014)

You are not alone. Read the full piece.

No dice. How to choose what task to do

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Actually, there’s more to this video than that but the presenter says a lot of things I do and she also knows the difference between dice and die. I like her already.

Here’s Edie Blue of the site Mandarin2English on picking your tasks and using a die to pick which one to do.

I should’ve called this Do or Die, shouldn’t I?