Okay, actually, maybe you are. We’re writers, it’s what we do. But the Swiss Miss site just found this video of a designer being really sarky about how everybody is now calling themselves storytellers. I’ve never heard of him before, I just really enjoyed how he makes his point.
You are not a storyteller – Stefan Sagmeister @ FITC from FITC on Vimeo.
Yes, I was suspicious and/or cynical at first. Fuz Designs has launched a Kickstarted campaign to create Noke, a padlock that requires no key.
You’ve got a lot of questions already but I can predict some of them:
1. Eh?
Lock your bike or whatever you want by snapping the Noke padlock to it as you would any other padlock. Then to unlock it, just press on the Noke – if you have your smartphone with you.
The Noke looks Bluetoothily for a phone that it recognises and if yours is there in range, the padlock opens. You don’t even have to take your phone out of your pocket or purse.
2. Battery
Yeah, that was my first thought: what happens when the battery dies on the Noke. You are screwed. Except that you get a warning on your smartphone Noke app long before that happens and there is also a little secret way around it that you set up in advance.
There’s only one more thing I would say: Fuz Designs made the Everdock, which I backed on Kickstarter before and now use every day. I backed it twice over, buying two of the things. So I both like and trust the firm.
Now, watch their video. I can’t embed it so you need to visit their Kickstarter page – but that does also have a lot more detail. A lot. Check out the Noke Kickstarter page by Fuz Designs.
I’ve mentioned this before but I’ve realised more about it. One of the key things I recommend you do is to check your bank balances every day. That’s it. It keeps you focused and, moreover, it keeps you really aware of how what you do pays off.
Now, that’s not to say that you can or should only measure your productivity and worth by how much money you earn. I’m a writer, I’d be insane to do that.
But it is a measure you can see and now that it is so easy to check our accounts online, it’s a really fast and handy measure.
The reason I’m telling you this again today is that I’ve now been doing it since 2011. Today is my third anniversary of checking all my accounts every single day: I have checked without fail 1,095 days in a row.
And this is what I have just realised: while I might want those balances to be healthier, the fact is that whenever I doubt I’ve got the discipline to do something, I can now look to 1,095 days in a row where I did.
I’m just after telling you that it is 265 days since The Blank Screen news site launched – but I didn’t tell you how I knew that.
It’d be good if you thought I was some incredibly organised savant type but, no, I just know about Wolfram Alpha.
You’ll think it’s a search engine when you see it but rather than looking for websites that happen to have something like the answer you want, Wolfram Alpha does its best to work out that answer. It’s easier to give you examples so here are the last few questions I’ve asked it:
How many days is it since 26 November 2013?
How deep is the English Channel?
What percentage of 2Gb is 250mb?
What is the date in 934 weekdays?
How far is New York from here?
What is 16% of 919.86?
When is mother’s day?
I need to explain that last one: mother’s day is on different dates in the UK and the US and I get easily confused. I’m sure one year my mother got two presents though, curiously, she didn’t complain.
I’m not saying that Wolfram Alpha is flawless: I asked it what the tourist population of Paris was and it threw up its hands. (I worked it out from a combination of tourist board information and general Paris statistics though, maddeningly, I can’t remember it now. I do remember looking out across from a café and being sure that something ridiculous like four out of five people I could see would be tourists.)
I am saying that not enough people know about Wolfram Alpha and when it’s the right tool for you, it is superb. Plus it’s free – with an option to pay for a premium version – which you can go to right now on the web at the official site. You can also get an iPhone or an iPad app for it.
Well, at least call it proof that small moves add up. As I write this, it’s 18 August 2014, The Blank Screen news site has been running for 265 days and we’re closing in on 1,000 posts. That’s coming soon but we’ve already exceeded 250,000 words posted.
A quarter of a million words since 26 November 2013.
That’s something like three times more words than the book that started all this, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition).
If we’d written as much fiction in this time, we’d have a trilogy of novels. If I had a dollar for every word I’d be writing to you from New York and inviting you over for a coffee and a dinner.
I do want to revel in this a bit, I do feel rather good about it, but I also want to think about how you can as equally argue that it happened by accident as that it did from hard work. I won’t dismiss the work it took but right now, today, I don’t see any of that, I just see that consistent, regular effort has built something I didn’t have last year.
Next time you or I reckon we don’t have time for something or perhaps that we don’t have enough time for it, let’s remember that, truly, small moves work. I could be less smug about it, mind.
Wince. I think I’ve been on both sides of this. Can’t even quote you a single line as an example, I want you to take the quiz in full.
Just, whatever answers you choose, go back and try some of the others later, okay?
We’re about to hit the 1,000th article on this productivity site and as proud as I am of that, I think it’s rather hard to find anything older than a week or two. So I’m producing a book version which will feature the best 100 articles or so. I’ll make sure you get a special heavily discounted price, okay?
I have my favourites, I have the ones that other sites have picked up and championed, plus of course I have the statistics of which pieces did the very best.
But I’d like to have your opinion. If there’s a piece you particularly found useful, would you let me know? I’ll mention this again on this week’s email newsletter but in order to hit the 1,000th deadline, we have to move quite quickly.
So if something pops into your head right now, please email me right now, okay? I’ll be able to take your thoughts until the end of the week – Friday 22 August 2014.
Thanks – and, blimey, who’d have thought we’d get to 1,000 at all – let alone already?
Just take a look at this video and tell me you don’t want this now and don’t want this everywhere:
Amplifon – Sounds of Street View from Amplifon UK on Vimeo.
There’s more. Go take a live demo – and wear headphones to get the full stereo 3D sound picture – on the official site.
My three main forms of social interaction summed up by actress Anna Kendrick in a single tweet:
Texts: Cool! What does it say? Emails: Oh God… what do they want? Phone call: I basically assume someone has died.
Tweet by Anna Kendrick (@AnnaKendrick47) (17 July 2013)
Spotted by Swiss Miss.
I don’t need this and I’m not suggesting that you do either, but, well, we all have friends who might find this a wee bit useful, don’t we?
Sobrr [is] a social networking app that deletes everything posted to it within a day. Photos, messages, even friends and new connections all disappear after 24 hours, a spin on the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat. The idea, summed up by Sobrr’s catchphrase, is to help users experience “life in the moment.”
Sobrr’s 24-hour limit does two things. First, it offers users a social media safety net. That photo of you doing a keg stand? Share it! It’ll be gone before you sober up. Second, it encourages users to repeatedly check Sobrr for new content they know will soon be deleted.
The full piece is here but you really want to go to Sober directly, don’t you? I mean, your friend wants to go there.