Jane E. Brody reporting:
One girl among the 1,000 children she interviewed in preparing her book said, “I feel like I’m just boring. I’m boring my dad because he will take any text, any call, any time, even on the ski lift.” A 4-year-old called her father’s smartphone a “stupid phone.”
It turns my stomach to think my kids might ever feel like that.
I’ve found this to be the case in my own life, and it is the primary reason why I take most notes by hand during calls and meetings. I’ve even found that I don’t need to refer to notes as often when I take them by hand.
The downside to all of this though is: search. It is a real pain to search through my notes and find what I am looking for, when they are hand written.
Some time ago I tried Todoist as a replacement for OmniFocus. It didn’t stick, largely because they don’t seem to take encryption seriously, so I was back on OmniFocus. But the one thing missing from OmniFocus that I loved about Todoist was the email I received every morning telling me the tasks for the day. It was a really nice way to look at my day’s overview before I sat down at my Mac.
A neat little app was just release from Cosmic Owl called Nox. This app can send you a notification for sunrise and sunset. I loved using it while we were at Disney to know when the sun would set — typically I had the app remind me 15 minutes before sunset.
It gave me a good sense of when I would be slightly less sweaty.
Handy.
This is really neat and similar to what I do — except I have OmniFocus send me a daily email.
Conor McClure with the smack down on health:
The takeaway should be this: you don’t have to be a slave to the numbers to get the results you want. I would in fact argue the opposite: succumbing to the conventional wisdom of weight loss will only lead to unsustainable habits and disappointment. Take the long road, and be in it for life.
I’ve struggled with the personal journal concept my entire life. It’s something that I envy when I see others doing it, even back when it was a spiral notebook journal, but no matter what I do, I can’t keep it up for more than a week or two.
And I love Day One — it is a gorgeous app. I love many of the other journal type apps too. But none of them stick. And it’s not a problem with apps, it’s a problem with my approach.
Just about every 3-4 months I used to reformat my computer, doing a fresh install of the entire system. It was the best way to speed up the computer and clean out a borked registry.
I am, of course, talking about when I used a PC. I could do the whole process in an evening, and thought it was just an elite skill I had.
Michael Tsai:
Presumably the GPS does not perform as well without access to cellular towers or Wi-Fi. But this could potentially save a lot of battery life when you’re in an area with poor cell service. Plus, it would let you track your flight process while on an airplane, if you had the maps preloaded.
I can attest this is the case in 8.4, as my photos show from my recent flight. Phone completely in airplane mode, wifi off, all my photos are geotagged. Which is pretty neat as I snapped photos out of the plane and had no clue what I was looking at.
Alik Griffin comparing the Fuji X-T1 and Sony A7r:
My take away from all this is that you have two RAW files that are geared for two different users and it comes down to preference. Would you rather apply noise reduction yourself in post and have a sharper image at low ISO, or would you rather have a cleaner image at high ISO to start with? For me I would rather have clean high ISO since sharpness is a lot easier to apply than noise reduction. And I think most average Joe photographers would prefer this as well.
As with cameras on your iPhone, these days it is less about the sensor and a lot more about the image processor. No doubt in my mind that Fuji is leading the way in that regard.
Over two years ago I wrote a post about how to design a site for reading experience. In that post I explored visual clutter by looking at ad placements, image use, and image placement, as a method of determining what attracts your eye, and thus detracts from the reading experience.
My first stab at talking about a readable site was very focused on clutter, and yet very flawed, because of the fact that I looked just at clutter, and not more elements of the site design.
A good, readable, design is far more than just clutter.