Ask Me Anything… nicely

Posted by William Gallagher

Go take a look at this and bookmark it: a new site is taking the text from Reddit Ask Me Anything interviews and formatting them so that the bleedin' things are readable. Seriously, have you tried reading those on Reddit? If you're online at the right time, as they unfurl, fine. But if you're not, they are an exasperating mess where you just give up trying to follow what question threads led where and which are or aren't being shown when you do or don't click on one bit and God help us, there's more?

I question the moral right of a site to take another one's content but this links back properly so far as I can see and it adds value. Specifically, it adds the value that you can now read this stuff.

Not every Reddit AMA is up yet but it's got a lot already and it's adding more here.

Bless maths: it really is better to buy bigger pizzas

Posted by William Gallagher

If you can think of a productivity excuse for telling you this, I’m all ears. But I’m thinking of all those all-day and late-night writing sessions when you know that healthy, decent, good food is absolutely the last thing you need. You want calories and you want them in a handy form that you can wedge in your gob in the most efficient way.

So we’re talking pizza. And I cannot believe I didn’t realise this before, but it is true that the bigger the pizza, the better value it is. By far.

The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.

And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.

74,746 Reasons You Should Always Get the Bigger Pizza – Planet Money

Planet Money is on the NPR website: America’s National Public Radio. It’s the nearest equivalent the US has to BBC Radio 4 and I’m a fan for its great music programming. But it is American so naturally its statistics are for America. So while you know that the maths is the same here for the size, we don’t have the same level of research into pricing in the UK.

Someone’s going to have to try every pizza in every restaurant in the UK. I’m up for the challenge.

The 1,000 day rule

Posted by William Gallagher

You know the idea that if you just work on something for 10,000 hours you will be great at it. Please check back with me in hour 9,999 and we’ll talk again. I’m less cynical about the number 1,000 and specifically an idea that it takes a thousand days to make your business work.

Any number is bollocks, really, so if you are on day 1 or day 999 and things don’t look like they’re on track, I wouldn’t lose sleep. But this is one of those ideas where the point of the number is not to plant a stick in the ground and say this is the finishing line. It’s to say that the finishing line is way over there, it isn’t on your first day or at the end of your first month.

Dan from TropicalMBA claims:

I was chatting with my friend David from Greenback Tax Services the other day about these misconceptions. I said: “people don’t understand they need to be poor for 1000 days.” Our basic hypothesis: you’ll be doing worse than you were at your job for 1000 days after you start your muse business. I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times. For many of us it’s been almost exactly those 1000 days it took for us to get back to the level of income we enjoyed in our corporate days.

The 1,000 Day Rule: What Living the Dream Really Looks Like

He then goes on to outline what many of those 1,000 days looks like on the way.

Creativity 101: maybe you can learn to have great ideas

Posted by William Gallagher

Or maybe not. We do tend to divide ourselves into creatives and non-creatives, both sides of that either claiming superiority or at least dissing the other. But the New York Times says hang on a minute:

Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill. Pin it on pushback against standardized tests and standardized thinking, or on the need for ingenuity in a fluid landscape.

“Learning to Think Outside the Box” – New York Times

It’s a feature about Buffalo State College and how it has added an introduction to creative thinking course. Read more at the NY Times and if you fancy it – and you’re in the area – take a gander at the Buffalo State College’s creativity site too.

Unread RSS app review – bright and appealing but not there yet

Posted by William Gallagher

If you already use RSS and have any Apple news sites in your set, you will today be reading raves about Unread, an RSS reader for iPhone. This is not one of them. But it's close. And the more I use Unread, the more I like it – but the more it bothers me, too.

There are two elements that make Unread notable and very attractive: gestures and text. The text reportedly uses a font called Whitney and it is visibly small yet particularly clear. Reading is a true pleasure on this app. I wish there were an iPad version: Unread feels like the thing to kick back with and relax while you read rather than when you're darting about.

Then you don't have buttons anywhere, you have gestures: you just pull at the screen. Tug left to go into an article, tug right to go back. Unread uses iOS 7's swipe-to-go-back feature that is so natural you keep trying to do it in apps that haven't got it yet. In Unread, it feels natural but also very quick: it's as if thinking what you want to do is enough to make it happen. See an article, start reading an article, and don't notice that you gave a short tug on the screen to go into it.

Then a tug inside an article will get you a menu with options for sharing and for marking articles as read.

That was my first irritation. I had a website's feed that I scrolled through, reading the headlines and the short stand-first introductions to each article but I didn't especially want to read further on any of them. To clear the list of unread, I had to tug to get a menu, choose Mark All as Read, then confirm that before continuing. You can switch off the need to confirm but I confess it took me a surprisingly long time to find the Settings page that allows this. (You just keep swiping left, across from the article, across from the feed, across from the list of feeds, just keep swiping. Once you know it's there, it's far faster than it sounds.)

Getting rid of the confirmation was a boon but I still had to do that Mark All for every feed. Read every article or Mark All as Unread. Those are your choices and it's the same for every RSS reader yet in Unread it is a pain. Reeder has a little button at the foot of a list of articles: tap that and you mark all as read – and you also go immediately back to list of feeds. With Unread, you swipe to get the Mark All option, tap on that, and it does go to the list of feeds but with a beat pause at the list of articles you've just marked as read.

Maybe that's all part of the unhurried feel to the app, which is appealing and is a stated intention of its design. But where in Reeder tapping that Mark All button is natural and quick, somehow having to elect to bring up a menu first makes Unread feel like a chore. I like the lack of buttons and I very much like the swiping around gestures, but this one is a niggle.

An annoyance is that Unread shows you the list of all your newsfeeds – whether they have any unread articles in them or not. You always get the list and there's either a number next to them or there isn't. The designer of Unread says the app isn't meant for people with hundreds of feeds as I have, but that's what I have, so the fact that I have to scroll past many that don't have anything in them is another chore for me.

But I was persuaded enough by reviews to buy Unread – for a brief time it's on sale at £1.99 UK, $2.99 US – and I'm trying it as my only newsreader. Part of the appeal of it, though, is just having a new view after a long time with a familiar one.

If there were an iPad version, I can well imagine my using that for a relaxed read in the evenings and sticking to Reeder in the day. For now, it's iPhone-only and for me it's a mix of great elements and chores: I really don't know whether I'm going to become a fan or drop it as I have so many RSS readers before.

Stop visiting websites. Make them come to you.

Posted by William Gallagher

It genuinely astonishes me how many people haven't even heard of RSS. If you have and you're even now looking at this through an RSS newsreader, hello. I've got nothing for you: skip along to the next story from your next favourite website. But if you haven't heard of it before, you have now and I want to evangelise you into trying it yourself.

This is what happens when you try it, this is what I do every day. Sometimes many dozens of times a day. Waiting for the kettle. Standing in a queue. Taking a break from work. I'll just read the news on my iPhone or my iPad or my Mac, whichever is in front of me at that moment. And whatever news has broken since I last looked. There are websites I read every single article on yet rarely go to. There are others whose headlines I read every day and often then go to in order to read the full article.

It definitely means I read more websites than many people, but I don't take any longer doing it.

To do this, you need an RSS newsreader. There are eleventy-billion newsreaders in the world and there are ones for PCs, Macs, iOS and I presume also Linux and Android. Windows, OS X, anything. Everything. There are free ones aplenty but I bought one called Reeder for iPhone/iPad which cost me a whole £2.99. I would be surprised if I haven't read a million words in that app.

But just Google “RSS” and your computer or phone of choice and take your pick.

Then go to a website you like and look for the RSS button. It's that orange one with white stripes like radiating waves and it's often the orange one that says RSS next to it. Click on that and you'll either wallop off automatically to your RSS newsreader with the site just waiting for you to say yes, add this one forever – or you'll get a new webpage. Copy the link, open that in your RSS reader, say yes, add this one forever, and you're done.

RSS isn't the friendliest concept: you understand it but some sites make it hard to find and then offer you options you're not interested in. If you're given a choice of RSS links, one will be called Atom and one will be called RSS. I truly have not one single clue what Atom is: I've never tried it.

And I have tried a lot of sites. Something like 300 at the moment.

Two quick things. You'll notice I've now said RSS umpteen times and not told you what it stands for. I think it's like DVD; you know what it is and you watch a billion DVDs but you may not know that it stands for Digital Versatile Disc (or was going to stand for Digital Video Disc originally). RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Exciting.

The other thing is just that I can't recommend Reeder without warning you that the Mac version isn't on sale at the moment. Various changes to the world meant it stopped working and the update isn't here yet. It's taking quite a time but I like Reeder so much I'm waiting for it.

That's it, carry on. And see you in my RSS feed. I've got two. Oh, yes. Two. Get me. Actually, yes, get me: my personal Self Distract blog has an RSS feed at http://williamgallagher.com/selfdistract/feed and The Blank Screen is on http://williamgallagher.com/feed

Thirty years of Macintosh

Posted by William Gallagher

I would not being doing the job I am, I would not be enjoying it the way I am, I would not have had the wide-ranging, bouncy career I have – if it weren't for the Mac.

I'm not kidding.

Apple's Macintosh made such a difference in my life that today, on its thirtieth birthday, I've written about it over on my personal blog, Self Distract.

I'd very much like you to take a look.

Star Wars – May the Force help you work

Posted by William Gallagher

I saw the original Star Wars when I was seven years old and it changed my life. We all have faith in something; usually a mixture of some personal beliefs with modern science. I am like that also. Mostly, I just believe in what works. Which, for me, is The Force. I admit it.

James Altucher of 99U advocates following Star Wars for sage advice on how to be more productive.

He's quite serious. And has a lot to say to persuade you.

Odd that leaves out Yoda's “Do or do not – there is no 'try'” though.

Amazon goes timey-wimey

Posted by William Gallagher

This is not scary: Amazon hopes to ship items to you before you've ordered them.

It actually isn't scary, it makes more sense than you'd first thing but that first thinking you did either went the 1984 Big Brother route or the Doctor Who timey-wimey way. The truth is boringly in the middle, but:

The Seattle-based giant has patented a method of shipping products before customers even place an order. In December, Amazon was granted [a patent] for what the company describes as “anticipatory shipping,” or a way of initiating the delivery process before a customer even clicks buy. The idea is to cut down delivery time and, possibly, make it even less necessary to visit brick-and-mortar stores. The document describes a process for boxing and shipping items the company expects customers in a specific area will want — based on previous orders, product searches, wish lists or the contents of a shopping cart before checkout.

That's from Time magazine.

Your pocket now carries everything Radio Shack could offer in 1991

Posted by William Gallagher

This won't speed up your work or give you anything useful that can help with what you're doing today, but it will give you pause. And it will make you appreciate the iPhone in your pocket anew – by comparing it to an advert from 1991.

The ad is for Radio Shack – which was known here in the UK as Tandy but was in other ways identical and doubtlessly ran ads like this – and Trending Buffalo says:

The back page of the front section on Saturday, February 16, 1991 was 4/5ths covered with a Radio Shack ad.

There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.

Read the full article to see the tastefully understated 1991 print ad in full plus the fifteen things Trending Buffalo is talking about. And maybe even why the writer is called Trending Buffalo.