I think you’ll like this and I’m pretty sure you haven’t been married to Angela for twenty years so she’s unlikely to give it to you as an anniversary present.
So you can get your own from Tiny Time Machines right here. I can’t tell you the price, it was a gift and I’m not supposed to look, but Angela wants me to make sure you know that there are import and customs charges on top of this. She paid £12.49 to get it into the UK.
Wired has an interesting piece on what goes on inside your mobile phone when you switch it back on after a flight. If you think about it at all, you think that it’s just sometimes a pain waiting for it to find a carrier. But according to Wired, it’s a street fight:
The average mobile phone is programmed to search out the five closest antenna signals. When you’re driving in your car this system lets you switch from antenna to antenna — usually without losing your connection. But in an airport, things can go haywire, especially as you’re switching from the powerful outdoor “macro” antennas that you’ve connected to on the tarmac to the smaller indoor devices that AT&T has tucked all over the airport.
For travelers, that means that the moments after you walk inside an airport are where you’re most likely to have a dropped call.
Why Your Phone Freaks Out When You Get Off a Plane – Robert McMillan, Wired (22 July 2014)
The full piece has a little interview with someone whose job it is to see that your phone wins the fight.
Well, I say polite. The original article has the ambiguous title of “Seriously, Fuck You, ‘Kindle Unlimited’:
Last week, Amazon informed us that for ten dollars per month, Kindle users can have unlimited access to over six hundred thousand books in its library. But it shouldn’t cost a thing to borrow a book, Amazon, you foul, horrible, profiteering enemies of civilisation.
Seriously, Fuck You ‘Kindle Unlimited’ – Maria Bustillos, The Awl (21 July 2014)
Now don’t mince words, what do you really mean?
For a monthly cost of zero dollars, it is possible to read six million e-texts at the Open Library, right now. On a Kindle, or any other tablet or screen thing. You can borrow up to five titles for two weeks at no cost, and read them in-browser or in any of several other formats (not all titles are supported in all formats, but most offer at least a couple): PDF, .mobi, Kindle or ePub (you’ll need to download the Bluefire Reader—for free—in order to read ePub format on Kindle.) I currently have on loan Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Original Sin by P.D. James, and The Dead Zone by Stephen King.
That’s nice. Here’s the thing, I want King, James and Moore (they sound like attorneys at law) to get paid. So I would in theory have no problem with Amazon charging a fee that included at least some money going to them.
But Amazon doesn’t go for details in its announcements. That’s why we always hear that the Kindle Fire has sold out but we never know whether they only made one of them. In this case, Kindle Unlimited definitely lets you borrow books but it’s tough to know which ones. Broadly speaking, right now the rule of thumb is that if you want to borrow it, it’s not available. Right now the selection is limited and must surely include books that are already out of copyright and available in all these other ways.
So right now, nuts to Kindle Unlimited. But it’s worth keeping an eye on.
And so is this Open Library of which Bustillos speaks. I’ve just followed her link to the Open Library site and signed up to check it out before hopefully checking out some books. There doesn’t appear to be any regional blocking yet; I was allowed through without any US address confirmation.
In these first few moments trying it out, I haven’t got very far, though. I tried searching for a particular author and got a list of her books, most of which had “Checked out” next them. I tried one that wasn’t and got options to buy from the usual suspects (Amazon, Abebooks and so on) or borrow it from a real-world library.
I like that library option, I like it very much: I expected that it would be some US-only service as Open Library is American but nope. Apparently my own local library, the Library of Birmingham here in the UK has a copy of the book I fancy.
So who needs or wants Kindle Unlimited? Do read Bustillos’ full article for more ranting and a little more detail.
I just don’t know what to say. Except that I’m sorry.
It’s about 22:30 as I write this and I’ve worked with a few interruptions since 06:30. But you have to wonder how many minutes of actual useful work I got done.
There is a currently very brief discussion about this issue on Reddit. Part of the reason I want to tell you about this is to also point out that Reddit has useful productivity chatter. But here’s the start of this one in particular:
Taking away your bathroom breaks, lunches, Internet breaks, and staring into space, how many hours are you actually productive? This question is directed to office workers, primarily.
For me, it’s about three, MAYBE four hours. I feel like I get the same amount of work done if I come into the office for 3 or 4 hours (vs. 8 hours) because I stay focused for those 3 or 4 hours because I know I only HAVE those 3 or 4 hours…whereas during a normal 8 hour day, I’ll work for 30 minutes, get distracted for another 30, etc.
Do I just get mentally fatigued easily, or is this normal?
Go add your tuppence, would you? But have a break first, obviously.
This is a clever idea: if you want to find something on twitter, it stands to reason that the best information is the one that has been retweeted the most:
Go to the Twitter search box, type any search term and append the operator min_retweets:[number] or min_faves:[number] to filter your search results. For instance, here’s a sample search that will only shows tweets pointing to the labnol.org domain that have been favorited or retweeted at least 5 times.
labnol.org min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5
If you are brand manager trying to find out the most viral tweets generated for an event or a content, the min_retweets and min_faves search operators may save you several hours. You can also archive tweets to a Google Spreadsheet automatically.
A Twitter Search Trick You Didn’t Know About – Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration (25 July 2014)
The full article explains that you can do this most easily on Tweetdeck, the twitter client that includes a feature specifically for this, but the trick works everywhere with a bit of effort.
Hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting this.
I can’t tell you if this is any good but its function is handy and its price is free so if you’re a distracted Windows user, take a look and let me know what you think, would you?
From the official site:
Focus Better and Get More Done
FocalFilter is a free productivity tool that helps you focus by temporarily blocking distracting websites. After the block timer runs out, your websites are available for you to view again.
1. Run FocalFilter.
2. You choose which websites to block.
3. Set how long they should blocked for.
4. Get more work done.
I am still tickled that the one thing I am currently dragging my feet over is writing a review of the productivity tool OmniFocus 2 for Mac. I use this constantly. I waited a year for that to come out. But still I haver. I did write several thousands words about it but threw them away: I felt it wasn’t a review as much as it was a manual for using it. There are plenty of places that tell you how to use OmniFocus, I need to get my head straight over what I feel I can usefully tell you.
And getting your head straight is what OmniOutliner is for.
The clue is in the name – actually, the two clues are in the name. OmniOutliner is an outliner made by The Omni Group, the same company that does OmniFocus. They make many applications and, truth be told, the only reason I looked at OmniOutliner first was that I adore OmniFocus so much. It also helps that OmniOutliner is affordable where the other products are expensive. Well, the graphics package and the project planning one are cheap for what they do, they’re just expensive if you only want to play with them. I’d play with the trial versions but I know that before long I’d be convincing myself to buy it.
This is what happened with OmniOutliner. I got the trial of version 3 and before the end of the day had bought it. Before the end of the week there was a beta release of version 4 and I switched to that. Fortunately for my wallet, when version 4 came out officially, I was able to get it for free because I’d bought 3 so recently.
I am going to rave about OmniOutliner, I think there’s little chance you hadn’t twigged that yet, but it isn’t an unqualified hymn of praise and I think I am a very low-level user of it. I now use it extensively but, for instance, there are close to myriad options for doing outlines that look pretty. I don’t mean that dismissively: there are design tools that make outlines clear and easy to read even when they are swamped with information. I’ve had a play but I keep coming back to the plain and basic outline.
It’s just that I keep coming back to it for so much. I used to be a determined explorer, always writing to see where the writing would take me. I write Doctor Who radio dramas, though, and those require a treatment outline before you get the gig. And I wrote a 170,000-word book about Blake’s 7 which was the biggest single project I’d ever done and it needed support. I needed support. Then I had a project that required me to deliver ideas to a company. When I agreed to that I thought it would be a doddle but their definition of an idea was 1,200 words of fully worked out story. To do it and to hit the deadlines, I found I was slapping down a thought in OmniOutliner and then seeing how I could expand it. If the story had this, what would come after it? What do I need to get us to that moment? The story would grow from a thematic idea, a one- or two-liner thought into a detailed beat sheet that I would then follow as I wrote up the idea.
That’s the bit I’ve always loathed: having such a detailed plan makes me feel as if I’m not writing, I’m typing. The story is told, so far as I’m concerned. But in that case I fashioned stories faster, I groped toward them quicker. And then there was longform prose in Blake, I think I got into the habit of going to OmniOutliner.
The day I realised I had a problem, though, was when I turned to it on a domestic project. Not writing, just something I needed to do. Usually I’d have done that in OmniFocus but I needed to think through the steps and I found myself writing it in OmniOutliner.
Then in the last 18 months I seem to have grown a new career in public speaking and in producing events. For both of them, I rely on OmniFocus but I get to my task list through this outliner. Truly, my heart is still an explorer yet I can’t deny that outlining is helping me now with many events and I think a giant part of that is down to OmniOutliner. I’ve piddled about with outliners in, say, Microsoft Word, and it’s been a shrug. OmniOutliner has become a pal.
Last week I did a gig in a college, I took over a three-day writing course and it was an interesting combination of their existing course outline and what I could bring to it. The course outline was rather good, I thought, so I didn’t change any of that, I just worked to see what I could do that would fulfil what they needed and what the students wanted. I planned the three days out in OmniOutliner and you should see it. I can’t show you because so much of it is confidential and I’m just always wary of discussing any detail that’s to do with education and students.
But it started as a copy of the main headings and main times from the college’s existing plan. Then I prefixed it with questions for the college staff so naturally it then also included their answers. I have several writing exercises I particularly enjoy so I have those already outlined in other plans so I dropped them into this outline and moved it around. Added more, deleted bits. Made it fit. Then during the three days I wrecked that lot apart, moving things around, splitting things, adding, deleting. And making huge amounts of notes right there in the middle of the outline. About the one thing I didn’t do was record anything but I could’ve done. There is a button for recording audio. It’s right there.
And speaking of being right there, I did most of this on OmniOutliner for iPad as I ran around but I could also check it and change it on OmniOutliner for Mac.
That was flawless: the outline was just there, whichever machine I went to.
But I did get display faults on the iPad. I have a Belkin keyboard case that when you pop up the iPad in just the right way it links to the external keyboard and takes away the usual iPad one. I found several times that as I broke the connection to the keyboard, because I was folding it away to let me walk around, OmniOutliner would get confused. I wouldn’t get the Apple on-screen keyboard the way you would expect but I would get a toolbar across the middle of the screen where it would be if the keyboard had appeared.
I had no way to fix that in OmniOutliner, I would work around it by quitting and relaunching.
But I look at this outline now and it’s got that glorious feel of a book you’ve worked on for a term. It no longer makes any sense to anyone but me, it is crammed with details even I will forget. And those details meant I was able to write up the student feedback very, very quickly: everything I wanted to say about them I had already made notes about right there in the outline.
I was accused tonight of using too many apps and I think my considered response is just you try to take them away from me. OmniOutliner is now in the tool bag, it is part of what I do, part of how I do it. That’s quite rare: OmniFocus has a permanent place there too but I’m a writer and I haven’t settled on one word processor yet. So you don’t get in easily. But then you can’t take these tools away from me easily, hardily or in any way at all.
Here’s The Omni Group’s own video about OmniOutliner 4 for Mac:
Introducing OmniOutliner 4 from The Omni Group on Vimeo.
And here’s the firm’s video for OmniOutliner 2 for iPad:
Introducing OmniOutliner 2 for iPad from The Omni Group on Vimeo.
You can get OmniOutliner for Mac from the App Store but don’t. Get it directly from The Omni Group instead because that’s how you get major updates for free or cheap. On the official site, OmniOutliner 4 for Mac costs $49.99 US (equivalent to £28.90 UK). There are family and education discounts, see the site for details, but there is also an OmniOutliner Pro 4 for Mac that costs $99 US (£58.33 UK). I have no idea what the difference is with the Pro version but the site explains.
Then you have to get OmniOutliner 2 for iPad from the App Store where it is £20.99 UK or $29.99 US.
What’s it called when a book as one title followed by “Or” and another one? As in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus? This is The Worthy and Best Way to Present or A Longer Term Review of David Sparks’ Presentation Field Guide.
This iBook was released on 21 July and I started reading it immediately. I remember saying on the launch day that:
This book was released sometime overnight, I got it around 8am, I’m maybe a third of the way through the text – I’ve not looked at the many videos yet – and I have a complaint.
He’s so persuasive about preparing your presentation before you ever go near Keynote or PowerPoint that I resent the bejaysis out of him. I have one presentation to give tonight and three tomorrow. I wanted a quick fix! I wanted a magic sauce!
David Sparks’ Presentation book now out – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (21 July 2014)
In the end, I actually gave five over those two days, 21 and 22 July. It’s complicated. But it was also true what I said about how good it made me feel that I was already doing some things Sparks recommends: that’s how persuasive and convincing he is, I read this book and feel that he’s right. Therefore whatever I do that is the same is also right, therefore I am right, therefore I feel good.
And then there’s the stuff he recommends that I don’t do. It was quite hard doing those five presentations with the book’s advice about planning in my head. The book’s very specific advice about how using Keynote is actually the last step, or at least toward the last step, as you should know what you’re going to say through planning and thinking first. The fact that I thought I had three and it became five rather tells you that I didn’t plan or, in my defence, couldn’t plan ahead.
I have not given a single presentation since then. But I have some coming up and I am using Sparks’ advice from this book. That may be the best review I can give it except that I think this leaves you only with the idea that the book is useful. It doesn’t tell you that it’s also fun.
Those five presentations went well but they were hard and they were part of a bigger project I enjoyed yet I’d got at the last moment. Even so, even with trying to plan in the gaps during the first day and then learning I really had to rework everything overnight, I was still going back to this book to read it at points because I was enjoying it.
Actually, as I write this to you, I still haven’t watched the videos or listened to the audio interviews. The book works without them but I’m expecting to find that they’re a good watch and listen too.
The therefore hugely recommended Presentations: a MacSparky Field Guide by David Sparks is available now in the iBooks Store for £5.99 UK, $9.99 US.
That’s a harsh headline since I’m really just setting you up for its sequel, The Worthy and Best Way to Present which follows in a thrice. But I was reading this form the Harvard Business Review:
Addressing the individuals concerns of stakeholders in the room will go a long way toward winning you allies. “If the finance person frets about keeping expenses under control, discuss expense numbers,” says [Raymond] Sheen [author of the HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case]. “If you have someone who is interested in growth in Asia, show how your project helps the company grow in the region.” Research past presentations and the outcomes to make sure you have your bases covered. If there are “issues that other projects have had, you should have an answer for those,” says Sheen. You might also consider giving decision makers a preview of your presentation ahead of time, and asking for their input. You can then salt their recommendations into your presentation, which will increase their investment in your success. “When you let people feel like they co-created your content, then they’ll not only support you but then they’ll feel empowered as ambassadors,” says Duarte. “They’ll feel like they’re representing their own idea.”
The Right Way to Present Your Business Case – Carolyn O’Hara, Harvard Business Review (21 July 2014)
And, sorry, O’Hara, but my mind wandered very quickly there.
The whole piece is a bit dry but its advice is solid, if ironic: reach out to people more, communicate more and avoid being a bit dry.