Productivity
The US version of Amazon has today announced Kindle Unlimited: for about ten dollars a month, you become a subscriber. It says here that you can rent as many books as you like but people are already discovering that not all authors are available.
That will change and at some point presumably the Kindle Unlimited service will come to the UK. But until it does, take a look at a video on the Amazon US site that explains how it all works.
They’ve got to be good to be worth buying for cold hard cash when you already have Apple’s own apps that do exactly the same thing. Yes. They are. This is Cult of Mac round up for nearly half a dozen such very good apps.
I’d like you watch this even if you have previously had no intention of replacing your existing free apps with new paid ones. Because I was like that, I thought I was still like it: since my iPhone comes with a calendar, for instance, and I actually find it fine, I resisted changing.
But now of the five they mention here, I’m already and regularly using two; Dark Sky and Fantastical 2. See why, and what else might go next:
Okay, that’s a come-on title. Of course you should join a group if it helps you. But the entire world says you should and you must so let me be a little strident for the alternative.
Because for some reason I have yet to find a group that was any use to me. Any real, actual, physical group: I’ve had good experiences with more nebulous, shifting, changing and semi-virtual groups. But that just makes me want more.
Similarly, I’ve friends who are in groups that aren’t just useful to them, they’ve become important. An important part of their lives. I think that is a precious thing and, I freely admit this, I am jealous.
So every now and again, I do try a new group. Once a group rather formed around me, which was perplexing and tricky to get out of. Another time, I joined solely because the group had its own radio studio – but then found that none of the writers were that interested in radio. Or really in having any kind of audience. They wrote for themselves which, if I didn’t already think was fine, I would’ve learnt was fine then. They had a great time.
But I’m not interested in writing for myself, I write to hopefully reach you. That wasn’t on the table with that particular group and it’s such a clear thing in my mind that I saw this and I took that exit sign as encouragement.
I wish I were as clear about whatever else it is I need.
Definitely criticism. This is all on my mind now because I tried a group recently and had believed they would be so critical – correctly critical but also harshly – that they’d take the skin off my arms. The pain would be well worth it for how much they helped me improve the material. But that didn’t happen: they treated me so gently that I concluded they just wanted to be polite. Also, they’re doing a lot more than that writing-for-themselves group but it wasn’t the serious, productive group I seem to need.
I can tell you that an informal buddying group devised by author Jeff Phelps has worked very well for me. I’ve had either one or two months with an individual writer: sometimes theatre people, sometimes novelists, sometimes poets. Every single one has been so interesting that they’ve made me feel interesting back. I’ve directly learned from them, I’ve just also had a good time.
Similarly, working with a loose collection of people to set various deadlines and meet them, that worked.
Actually, that was my idea. And as of next month I’m taking over the running of the buddying project from Jeff.
It would be great for this little tale if I could now tell you I will reshape this buddying group into exactly the form that suits me. That I would finally have a writing group that gave me all these benefits and gave them to me because I fashioned the group. But no, Jeff’s set it up so perfectly that I’m not going to change a thing.
So the hunt for a group continues. May you be more fortunate than I, and celebrate your good fortune by tipping me off about the details.
Cheques are a pain but online banking can go wrong with a typo. Perhaps this is another reason to use services like TextExpander or 1Password, to have the correct sort code and account numbers to hand. But when you’ve been given a new account to pay into, check it first.
Transfer a single penny.
If the recipient gets that, you’re good to go: you know for certain that it works.
There is the chance that someone else is sending a penny – why does that sound rude? – on the same day but yours will arrive with your reference.
It’s an idea nicked from PayPal which checks out your bank details by doing something similar: it deposits some random, if very small, amount and you have to confirm what that amount is. But that’s done as much to confirm that you are you as it is to check that the bank details have been entered correctly so I’d keep it simple.
This does depend on who you’re paying. If it’s a firm you don’t know, you may find it hard to learn whether they got the payment or not. But then if then phone up demanding to know where your big cash transfer is coming you get to say well, duh, if you’d check your accounts more often you’d be paid now.
Well, maybe not a eulogy. But otherwise, if you’re standing up there giving a presentation, Ragan.com – “news and ideas for communicators” – has advice for you. Here’s their example and if the rest of the article gets a bit happy-clappy, the example sings:
I occasionally speak to a group of part-time volunteers who are working to reduce the number of injuries suffered in house fires. I used this opening for one of my talks:
“I’m only going to speak to you for one hour this morning. During our hour together, someone, somewhere in America, is going to be badly injured in a house fire. By the time you begin lunch this afternoon, someone, somewhere in America, will die in a house fire. By dinner, another person will die. By the time you go to sleep, another person will die. As you sleep tonight, two more people will die.
I’m here today because I want to prevent that from happening. And I’m going to need your help.”
Five great ways to open a speech – Brad Phillips, Ragan.com (14 July 2014)
Good, eh? Read the full piece for more.
That’s it. Holding down the Control key (aka CTRL, aka Apple key on Macs) and tapping the letter L. This will speed up your life.
Because when you’re in a web browser, any web browser, doing that leaps you up to the address bar. More, it highlights that address bar. Just do Ctrl-L and begin typing the URL of the next website you want to go to.
Or since most browsers now have what’s called an omnibar – one space that doubles as both where you type www.whatever.com and where you type in what you want to search for – just Ctrl-L and type anything you like.
Trust me. It’s so much faster than going to the mouse and clicking away like a prehistoric computer user.
It’s an app for finding places and services near you: I just used it to find the nearest supermarket in general and the other day to find a coffee shop in particular.
Stop reading, go getting. It’s free now, I don’t know when it will go back to it’s regular price. If you’re reading this late, go get it anyway. It’s worth it.
Well.
I alternate between Localscope and Where To? – whose name I have to fight to get right because its icon has the word Exit so prominently that I call it that.
Both do the same thing, both must surely use the same sources. But in general, I’ve found Where To? is more accurate yet Localscope is good and looks great. Where To? just looks to old.
But I’ve just been talking while you downloaded Localscope. Now you’ve got it, try it out.
It’s a small thing – well, probably a big job for The Omni Group to implement, I don’t know – but there is a strong chance you just squealed. I know I did.
TextExpander lets you type a short code like a couple of letters and have sentences, paragraphs or more complex text appear magically. It is great for things you repeatedly but actually it’s only really great on Macs: it works everywhere on Mac, everywhere, it’s perfect and I think mandatory. On iOS, it’s only able to be great if the app you’re using directly supports it.
Now OmniFocus 2 for iPhone supports TextExpander. Fantastic.
Very many of my tasks in OmniFocus start off as email messages that I get. I’ll routinely forward them to OmniFocus to deal with later but often I don’t bother to do anything more to help me out. If the subject is the famously useful “Re: re: re: re: re:” then maybe I’ll change it to something else. But often I don’t and later I’m not sure what the task was. With TextExpander, I can have a snippet – as it’s called – where by typing something like “aaa” will expand out to “Ask Angela about” and then I can type the rest or it can be the existing email subject.
I wish OmniFocus for iPad did this too but that’s being updated so I think you can be safe in assuming that TextExpander support will be in the next release.
Here’s OmniFocus in all its forms on the official Omni Group website. And here’s TextExpander.
At least, it did in 1895 when Swami Vivekananda when Brain Pickings says:
The renowned Indian Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda, then in his early thirties, traveled to New York, rented a couple of rooms at 228 West 39th Street, where he spent a month holding a series of public lectures on the notion of karma — translated as work — and various other aspects of mental discipline. They attracted a number of famous followers, including groundbreaking inventor Nikola Tesla and pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James.
Oh, you are smart: you’ve seen that the title of that article includes 1896 when the quote says 1895. Very good, very impressive. But it’s okay: the article date refers to when these lectures were published as a book. You’ll never guess when. You’ll definitely not guess the title: it’s Karma Yoga (UK edition, US edition)
As ever with Popova’s work on Brainpickings, the article is about a book yet contains so much that it is an absorbing read by itself. Read this and you don’t have to read the book. Though equally, read this and you’ll want to.
Among the most timeless of them is one titled “The Secret of Work,” in which Vivekananda examines with ever-timely poignancy the ways in which we mistake the doing for the being and worship the perspirations of our productivity over the aspirations of our soul.
Before I began producing the odd little event, I thought it was all pretty much like wedding planning. It is, but give me a wedding any day: the church isn’t likely to back out at the last minute and if any guests don’t appear, that’s one less family row to worry about.
I have found it profoundly satisfying to sit in an audience knowing that this thing around me is happening because of me. Other people are hosting it, my work is entirely done – until afterwards, anyway, when you start settling up the bills – I can just enjoy it like everybody else.
But I can’t imagine the difficulties of organising the a weekend-long event with very many star guests and a hoped-for 3,500 attendees. The makers of Dashcon 2014, a convention devoted to but not in any way endorsed by Tumblr, don’t seem to have imagined the difficulties either.
It only took a few hours for DashCon 2014 to degenerate into the most catastrophic fan convention in recent memory.
Over the course of one weekend, the organizers took $17,000 from conventiongoers as part of an emergency fundraising drive, failed to pay any of their high-profile guests, and attempted to compensate disappointed ticket-holders by offering them an “extra” hour in a children’s ball pit. The ball pit only fit around six people. There was apparently not a very long queue.