That’s the way to do it: Alfred 2

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I’ve looked at what are called launchers – software that means with a keystroke or two you can zoom off launching apps, doing google searches, working just about anything on your Mac – and I did not do it as well as these people.

Curiously, I came to the same conclusion: Alfred 2 is the best. But reading their reasoning has both sold me on my own option and quadrupled how useful I think the app is:

We wouldn’t consider the OS X app launcher space a crowded one, but there are enough options out there that could make oneself think twice about clicking the download button. After numerous keystrokes and much reflective deliberation, we think that Alfred is the favorite launcher for Mac OS X.

Our favorite OS X launcher – The Sweet Setup

Read the full piece the whole thing but wait until you have a few minutes. It’s a good and detailed piece.

The glass is half-inched

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I was asked this week if I were as positive as my emails sound. I don’t know. But also I haven’t thought about it because the guy then said my emailers amused him. That made my day.

But whether I am at heart positive or not, some folk are and they have things to tell you and I about bad times:

It may sometimes take a while before I find an optimistic thread of thought but these three habits usually help me to do it.

1. Ask yourself questions that let you see the optimistic viewpoint.

When I’m in what seems like a negative situation my most common way of making something better out of that is to ask myself questions that promote optimism and helps me to find solutions.

Questions like:

What is one thing that is positive or good about this situation? What is one thing I can learn from this situation?
What is one opportunity within this situation?

full piece for the other two. I’m not teasing: I don’t want to steal someone’s piece, I just want you to see enough to judge whether it’s worth your pressing on.

Coping with email overload

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I like email. But:

Email. There is too much of it.

Every minute something like 200 million emails are sent. Day and night, billions of emails—big and small—ping from computer to computer. The average worker spends nearly one third of his time on email each week, sending and receiving 120+ per day. Business email is expected to grow from 108 billion emails sent and received per day in 2014 to 139 billion in 2018.

Like many people, I knew I had email overload. I knew that I was increasingly a slave to my inbox. I just didn’t have the clarity to really understand how bad it had become.

For my recent honeymoon, I decided I would take the longest break from email that I had ever taken: roughly two weeks (the previous record was probably not much more than 48 hours). As in, total email abstinence. I committed to myself and now-wife that I would take a complete break from all things email. I didn’t open it, I didn’t check it, I actually disconnected my accounts from my phone and my laptop.

In their place, I left a 2,000 word autoresponder where I laid out my reasoning: In the last decade I’ve received something like 150,000 emails. I’ve had anxiety attacks, I’ve interrupted meetings, parties, and major life events for the sake of supposedly urgent email intrusions.

This Is What Email Overload Looks Like – Ryan Holiday, Thought Catalog (20 March 2015)

Read the full piece for what happened in response to that 2,000-word autoresponder and what life lessons the fella learned.

Becoming Steve Jobs

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Nobody’s perfect. But some people are very interesting. I’d have said both of those things to you about Steve Jobs a long time ago but I’d also have added that I wasn’t that fussed. I’m not sure that I am now but if nothing else, that man got stuff done. You can well argue that it was all the people around him, but he got many or most of them and he got them doing the things they got done. He managed them, at the very least, and reportedly inspired them too.

Actual inspiration. It does happen. I have been inspired by people. I had a natter this afternoon that has set me off writing something I Do Not Have Time For So There but I will do.

But I’ve also had just the smallest, tiniest taste of what it is like managing people and I don’t want to go there again. I think I’ll have to, but I also think this time I’ll get to pick the people. Wish me luck.

Becoming Steve Jobs is a biography with a purpose: while it charts the Apple guy’s life, it does so to examine very specifically how he began as this wild child and ended as this venerated industry genius. Not how he got his ideas, so to speak, not what he did with his talents or his time, but how he worked with others and became great at it.

Or at least mostly great. Usually great.

The book is not the hymn of praise to Jobs that you might expect after Apple staff keep talking about it: instead it is very clear about his reprehensible traits.

Some of those you know, especially if you made it through the boring official biog, but there is plenty that is new in this book and I want to cautiously recommend it. If you’re an Apple fan, go get it, you were going to anyway. If you’re not, then go to Amazon and have a look at the Peek Inside stuff, see what you think. There is much to enjoy here and much to learn from, too.

Though I did just say the official biog is boring. If that’s down one end of the scale of biographies, there is one that is at the other end – it’s much better than either the official Jobs biog and it’s better than this new one. Unfortunately, it’s not about Jobs. It’s Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

Such a good read.

The Paper Round Problem

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This is you. I know this because this is me too. You have an idea and moreover you have a raging need to write it – but you also have a mortgage and bills and at times it is all very scary. The last thing you do is write.

Everything I’ve ever done, every job that has become a key part of my working life, has begun as a sideline desire. All of it. Whatever I was doing, whatever I am doing, there is something else that I fancy and I’m working at it late at nights. No question: late night tinkering leads to life-changing opportunities. Sometimes to life-changing necessities.

But late nights also lead to doubt. And the days that follow the late nights can be bad. Nothing happening, not with this tinkering, not with the day job, and the pressures are a wall with a mirror on it. It’s a mirror telling you that you should not be doing this thing, you should not be writing that thing.

It’s the mirror telling you that you should get a paper round instead. Something to bring in even a little bit of cash now is better than frittering away your life with this stupid idea of writing. What cuts so deep is that this is true. Often enough, anyway.

You can tell yourself that you are investing in your future – because you are – but that is a tough sell when your present is tough going. You need to pay the bills now but you need to do this tinkering because that will pay the bills in the future and because it is the tinkering that you’re here for. I don’t believe in souls because I’m not religious at all but I do believe in a need to be more than we are.

I’m here to write. I think you are too.

So let us do that, let us recognise the necessity of it in every sense. And, okay, sometimes we’ll see each other down the newsagent’s.

And this moment… and this moment…

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I have a built-in resistance to things like meditation; while you can point me at the statistics and show me that it is a good thing, I still kick against it and I don’t know why. But it might be to do with the terms.

There’s this thing called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Bollocks: it’s talking to yourself. Before you can persuade me that this is good, you have to get by me thinking you’re trying to con me by giving it a pseudo-scientific name.

Emotional intelligence. Bollocks. It’s street smarts. I am forever against this term because of an Emotional Intelligence expert who tried to show me a mathematical formula for why this was more powerful than regular intelligence. He didn’t have enough regular intelligence to answer a simple question about a base assumption that the formula depended on.

He also told a group of us that one man with Emotional Intelligence can defeat an army and in fact is literally unstoppable. I don’t really mind that he had no answer when someone asked what happens when such a man is in conflict with another one. That just amused me. I mind very much that he genuinely had not thought of this before.

I miss out on some things because of this twitching bias.

I’m generally okay with that as it’s also a useful filter against the nonsense. But I am now persuaded that mindfulness meditation helps.

I just had to tell myself that it was really shutting up for a minute and stopping thinking.

The Sudoko Theory of Life

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Wait, what’s less than a theory? This is a small thing. Let’s call it the Sudoko Hypothesis of Life.

Whatever it is, it goes thisaway:

If you cannot see the solution, step away and come back to it

If you can clear your mind or, much better and much easier, fill your mind with another issue, another problem, you will come back to the puzzle and see the answer. Okay, maybe not the whole answer, this is Sudoko afterall. But you are guaranteed to see the next number to fill in.

You’re also guaranteed to wonder how in the hell you didn’t see it before, but give yourself a break, you needed a break.

Finally: how satnav and GPS find routes

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This may only scratch an itch of mine but it’s a big itch and I’ve had it a long time. It’s very easy to understand how GPS works – it’s triangulation – even when you know exactly where you are on the globe, how in the hell do you work out the best route to Tesco?

I think about this a lot and I’ve asked people about it who ended up explaining GPS like I hadn’t just said I got that bit. Usually I don’t get anywhere. But noodling around this evening, look what I found: the explanation.

There’s this guy, right, and he was preparing to demonstrate some fancy computer.

For a demonstration for noncomputing people you have to have a problem statement that non-mathematicians can understand,” [Edsger W. ] Dijkstra recalled in an interview not long before his 2002 death. “They even have to understand the answer. So I designed a program that would find the shortest route between two cities in the Netherlands, using a somewhat reduced road-map of the Netherlands, on which I had selected 64 cities.”

“What’s the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen?,” Dijkstra said. “It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about 20 minutes.”

The Simple, Elegant Algorithm That Makes Google Maps Possible – Michael Byrne, Motherboard (22 March 2015)

Read the full piece for some basic maths on an admittedly simplified version of how it’s all done. But it’s how it’s all done. I am so pleased right now.

One law for rich and poor alike

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The story about how rich kids profit from the way they use the internet and poorer kids don’t just puts me in mind of a saying that we all tend to get wrong.

This is how we think it goes: “One law for the rich and one law for the poor”. Meaning, we believe, that there is a different law for each. We can discuss whether that’s true but we would struggle to doubt it.

But the original line is starker and I think far, far nastier. It goes:

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] – Anatole France, poet (1894)

Rich kids use the internet differently

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Well, they still have computers and phones and they’re glued to web browsers but if you’re a rich kid, you are using the internet to get ahead. And if you’re poor, you’re not.

Compared to their poorer counterparts, young people from upper-class backgrounds (and their parents) are more likely to use the Internet for jobs, education, political and social engagement, health and newsgathering, and less for entertainment and recreation,” Putnam writes. “Affluent Americans use the Internet in ways that are mobility-enhancing, whereas poorer, less educated Americans typically use it in ways that are not.”

Rich kids use the Internet to get ahead, and poor kids use it ‘mindlessly’ – Jeremy Olshan, MarketWatch (17 March 2015)

Read the full piece for how and maybe why.