The Brooks Review

Month: November 2015

  • The Wrap Up Post

    I was pretty sure I would only get to 25,000 — maybe 30,000 — words for the month. But as I write this, I am already safely past the 50,000 word benchmark. I had always planned on writing a wrap up for the last day, as sort of an easy way to get in the last however many words I needed to, but I never considered I wouldn’t need any words.

    This was way easier than I thought. I wrote every night when the kids went to bed until 9pm, and then edited posts and published whatever was done. This really only worked because my wife was stuck in bed for the majority of the month healing from foot surgery — so there was little else for me to do.

    The first night it took almost 2 hours to get 1,300 words, but by the end of it I could crank out 2,000 or more words in just a couple of hours.

    It felt really good.

    I had always assumed I went through lulls with writing, but I think I just get lazy and fall out of the habit. I am going to be sure to set aside time everyday for writing from here on out, but taking my time more with the posts.

    As it turned out the hardest part was editing. I didn’t account for how much time editing would take, and because my goal was just not writing the words, but also publishing them, this became a big struggle. As I write this I have two posts waiting to be edited before the end of the day to hit my word goal.

    I need a better way to edit, so that’s next up on my list to tackle.

    Topics were pretty easy, but a large part of that is thanks to the iPad Pro having showed up at my house. Without a new device to write about — especially one as important as the iPad Pro — I think I would have been a little thin on topics.

    My biggest concern, more than the word count, was quality. I wanted to be sure to keep quality up, but since I typically take a week or more on each post, I was worried I might not be able to do this. I am not the one to judge the quality, but there are only a few articles which I look back on and cringe a bit.

    Overall I am pretty damn happy with what I produced this month.

    It was a fun month, and while I am not likely to do it again, I hope to keep my writing up and to be writing a lot more.

    Thanks for those of you who encouraged me, and who actually read the massive amount of words I published this month.

    Final stats:

    • 50,856 total words
    • 41 articles posted (including this one)

    Thanks!

  • Can the MacBook Pro Replace Your iPad?

    Fraser Speirs:

    If you have certain very specifically-defined workflows, and a work environment where you can guarantee yourself a chair and desk, you can probably get your work done on a MacBook Pro. For the rest of the world, there’s iPad.

    A must read.

  • Full Time iPad Pro

    Back in April I wrote about my internal conflicts between the rumored MacBook 12″ Retina, and the rumored iPad Pro. In that post I think my thoughts were best summed up as:

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  • iPad Pro Bags

    Depending on how you look at things, one of the best or worst things about switching computers is finding the perfect bag once again. I had found it with the MacBook, but the iPad Pro has sent me down the rabbit hole once again. Here’s a couple sentences on how the iPad Pro fits in each of the bags I have kicking around my closet.

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  • iOS Shortcomings

    A lot of people have been using iOS as a full time OS for far longer than I have, but this is new to me (mostly) and so I felt it worth noting some of the odd hang ups I ran into over the past few weeks. Obviously, these are not deal breakers for me, but I could see how some mix of them might be for other people.

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  • The Ever Resilient WordPress

    Fair warning: I am going to talk about CMS systems here and you likely should not read this, because there is nothing more detrimental to writing than playing with your CMS instead of actually writing. So don’t read this if you are prone to think there are better tools out there.

    As the title suggests, this is another installment of: WordPress is better than your CMS.

    No, really, it is.

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  • Needing Another iPad

    I’ll admit right off the bat to having no inkling as to which way this will ultimately fall, and I have also asked a few other iPad Pro users who gave me little more than a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The question at hand is: if the iPad Pro is staying in your life, is there room for other iPads and if so, which size? Most of the people I asked are iPhone 6 Plus users like I am, so we have a big phone and a big iPad — do we need a device between these two? It doesn’t even matter if the iPad Pro is your main computing device or not, it really only matters if the iPad Pro is something you plan on actively using a lot.

    This is a question I have been struggling with a lot myself — I know the iPad Pro is going to be my main computer going forward, so would it make sense to get an upgraded iPad to be a companion to this? I currently have both an original iPad mini and an iPad Air, so I know what the general sizes feel like. And if you are wondering why I would want to upgrade either: once you go split-view there is no going back and neither of those devices support split view.

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  • On Appropriating Gender Identity

    Good read, but this last bit from Kerri Hicks is what worries me the most:

    Will men be comfortable including me anymore?

    Yes.

  • Drowning in Information Overload

    Bradley Chambers:

    All of this is aimed at helping free up RAM in my brain to focus on what I want to focus on and eliminate various amounts of negativity. Like I said, I am not jumping off the Twitter train, but only engaging there in a window of time each day/week. I’ve also realized that I can get 90% as much enjoyment/benefit from social media with about 20% of the effort I was previously giving it.

    My most productive days are the ones where I don’t check Twitter. I’ve set it up so the fastest thing I can do on Twitter is tweet — I try to avoid the rest of it as much as I can.

  • The Smart Keyboard

    The one accessory I was eagerly anticipating using was the new Smart Keyboard, and it was also the last of the accessories I received. Having said this, let’s look at it.

    For the Smart Keyboard, Apple has taken the Smart Cover and added a keyboard on to the end of it, the keyboard can also fold away and create a noticeable bump in the cover — still it folds away in a relatively thin package. It requires no batteries, as it powers off the iPad itself using the new connector on the edge of the iPad Pro.

    It is quite an excellent keyboard.

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  • The iPad Pro as an iPad

    When I wrote about the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement the other day, I talked about it in a very specific sense: propped up like a laptop screen with some sort of keyboard attached to it — as you would a typical laptop. This time around though I want to talk about using the device as just an iPad, which means no keyboards connected to it.

    Looking at it this way gives us three different setups to talk through: flat on table/desk/lap, propped at an angle on a table/desk/lap, and held in your hands. For the sake of brevity I am just going to talk about these placements in the sense of a desk, but know that I mean any flat surface you sit or stand working at. And for the sake of further brevity you can assume the iPad Pro works the same in your lap, with much less comfort overall. So if say the iPad works great flat on a desk, it would just be OK in your lap like that.

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  • Mysteries

    With great search engines and no shortage of expert bloggers out there, we have solved a lot of life’s little mysteries. You want to know about the tax code, there’s probably a couple dozen people on Reddit’s Explain it like I’m 5 threads who can explain it all to you. Or you can look it all up and read it yourself — why would you — but you could.

    There are other little mysteries though, and I think they are better left as mysteries. Better left as mysteries because it is far more fun to speculate as to why they are the way they are, then it is too look up why and know the real answer. In this post, I shall explore some of those mysteries without looking up the real reason — because fun is fun, and people really need to learn to be ok with guessing.

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  • Some Important Updates

    Last month a veritable shit storm hit Twitter and many blogs, with the seemingly unwarranted attack on an anonymous blogger going by the name “Samantha Bielefeld”. This week I have been given a lot more information about this person and it makes me angry. Very angry.

    While I still believe gendered, and personal, attacks on anybody for their opinions is fully unwarranted, it has become increasingly clear to me I have misplaced my trust in this person. That misplaced trust was something this person appears to have been depending on and I regret this very much.

    Further, I apologize to you my readers for abusing the trust you have placed in me. And I apologize and thank those who tried to warn me early on, and who I disregarded.

    I have a long standing policy of not deleting posts, and this situation makes me wish that was not true, but I have gone back and edited all posts related to this matter to reflect the current situation.

    I hope to write more on this in time, but that time is not right now.

    To save you searching, and to keep you up to speed, the updated posts are:

    Lastly, I apologize to Marco Arment for calling him out so harshly when it seems far more likely now — he knew something I did not know and was trying to walk a difficult line.

    That is all for now.

  • Which Do You Enjoy More?

    The other day, on Twitter, my pal Pat tweeted this at me:

    @BenjaminBrooks Ultimately, isn’t the method you enjoy the most going to be the one that produced the best results?

    This of course made me think: which method of note taking do I enjoy the most? Hand written notes, or typed notes. I’ll be honest, when faced with that question the only thing I could come up with was: UUuuuhhhhhhhhh.

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  • Apple Pencil

    When Apple announced the Pencil alongside the iPad Pro, a lot of people saw it as the killer feature of the device. People wanted it more than anything else Apple announced that day. I wasn’t one of those people. That’s not because I didn’t think it was cool, but strictly because I thought the new iPad Pro, and its accompanying Smart Keyboard, was a far more interesting set of tools.

    Still, I got the Pencil when they started shipping and have been using it a lot more than I had planned. Initially, when people would ask me how I liked the Pencil, I would tell them the same thing: “It’s really nice, but I am not sure I have much use for it.”

    I still feel that way at times, but honestly it is a much better device than I thought it would be and I think it will become increasingly more useful.

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  • My Cat

    Technically he isn’t my cat, he’s my wife’s cat, but ask anyone (including the damn cat) and he is my cat. You see my wife had a cat when we met, this small, shy, skittish cat named Mojito. Overall, ‘Mo’ was a pretty good cat, but she had one fatal flaw: she liked to spit up.

    I don’t mean puke, because most of the time it was just this gross clear liquid, and you see she would shoot this crap all over our place if we left for any substantial period of time. Out all day? Twelve gross as shit piles of clear liquid. It drove us nuts.

    The only thing which helped was cat pheromones called Felaway. This stuff worked well, but was expensive and was only good for us being gone for half a day. Progress, but not enough. It was so decided that getting another cat, would solve this problem.

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  • Publishing Articles to WordPress With Workflow on iOS

    Federico Viticci:

    Fortunately, great things do happen in the third-party iOS ecosystem. Today’s update to Workflow (version 1.4.2) adds, among more actions, a brand new WordPress action to publish posts and pages to configured WordPress blogs (both wordpress.com and self-hosted ones) and which can be combined with any other existing action or workflow for deeper automaton. After using a beta of this action for the past few weeks, I can say that it’s, by far, the best automated publishing workflow I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to go back to anything else.

    Holy shit, this is awesome.

  • iPad Pro in the Clasroom

    A great post about using the iPad Pro in a university setting. I really wish I had an iPad Pro when I was at university — it would have been so much better. I love seeing posts like this.

  • Using iPad Pro as a Laptop Replacement

    I should clarify, this post is not about whether you can replace a laptop with an iPad Pro — at least not in that I am going to go through scenarios and talk about all that crap. That type of article is far too subjective to be worth your time, and I am guessing you could probably figure this out on your own. Instead, I want to talk about what it has been like for me to use my iPad Pro as a laptop, as a primary computer.

    My typical setup for this was the iPad Pro on a small tripod type stand, with a Magic keyboard paired to it via Bluetooth. In short, this setup works far better than I thought it might, but still has a ways to go before it isn’t annoying at times.

    Most of my daily activities center around being able to type, and this setup is beyond ideal for this, and my other large activities are Skype and GoToMeeting, both of which work perfectly well on iPad Pro. This leaves a bunch of smaller tasks, which are not deal breakers should they not work well with this setup.

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  • iPad Pro Review: No Country for Old Macs

    Jason Snell:

    Unfortunately, the hardware has outpaced the maturity of the operating system and app ecosystem. This is a product that can be used to get real work done, but if Apple had spent more time adding iPad features to iOS, the argument in its favor would be a whole lot easier to make.

    Spot on.