The Brooks Review

Month: February 2018

  • Triple Aught Design Context Organizer

    I’ve been looking for a solid organizer to use in place of my other options for carrying everything in my EDC kits. The idea being that if I can keep my standard gear all in one thing then I can have only one set of gear. As it is right now, I keep an entire set of gear in each bag, since I don’t have an easy way to move it from bag to bag. Thus I either spend a lot of money buying the same gear, or I have one kit of gear which is my favorite and the other kits made up of lesser goods (which is the reality).

    I’ve tried GORUCK Field Pockets and a few Maxpedition pouches, but today I take a look at Triple Aught Design’s latest offering the Context Organizer. The Context Organizer is fairly unique in this admin pouch realm, as it is expandable, able to hang with built in straps, and yet has tons of organization abilities in it. And it’s huge.

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  • iPad Productivity Report — 2/26/18

    It’s been a good break a since the last Productivity Report, but I’m back at this week. Taking a look at org charts, hand written note apps, email forward tip, and lastly an app for planning your road trips.

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  • Good vs. Better at Bad

    Joe Cieplinski:

    Here’s what I really want out of a virtual assistant: Assistance. Not trivia questions. Not timers. Utility. It needs to actually make my life significantly easier.

    Let me give you an example. And there’s no doubt in my mind this will be possible someday.

    “Alexa, book me a flight for Peers Conf.”

    If I had a human personal assistant, that’s all I’d need to say to get this task done. They would go straight to work, and I’d get on with my day.

    Great take on where these devices are right now.

  • The Case Against Google

    Charles Duhigg, in a long winding post about all the ills facing our society from these massive tech companies, encapsulates the issue really well here:

    Put differently, if you love technology — if you always buy the latest gadgets and think scientific advances are powerful forces for good — then perhaps you ought to cheer on the antitrust prosecutors. Because there is no better method for keeping the marketplace constructive and creative than a legal system that intervenes whenever a company, no matter how beloved, grows so large as to blot out the sun. If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings.

    His look at how Microsoft could have (should have?) crushed Google is very telling. Even if you don’t believe the idea that Google is “evil”, then you should at least believe that it’s not in Google’s best interest to help competitors…

  • Alto’s Odyssey

    This is a brilliant follow up game. It’s absolutely sublime. I’ve seen a few reviews mention how calm it seems, and I think that’s an apt description: calm beauty. Love it.

  • The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change

    Om Malik:

    That may be a very simplified version of a sequence of events, but the fact of the matter is money and obsession with growth and engagement are what makes Facebook go around. That is embedded in its psyche, its DNA, and it will never change.

    Good, short, read.

  • Impressions: OmniOutliner 3 for iOS

    Last week, Omni Group launched [OmniOutlier 3 for iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnioutliner-3/id1174101450?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d) — something I have long been waiting for. I was on the public-ish beta of the product so I’ve had plenty of time to use it. I am also a diehard OmniOuliner user, as it was the first Mac app I fell in love with. The problem, though, is that with OmniOutliner 3 for iOS — I struggle to speak positively about it.

    I thought about linking to it and letting that be that, no comment “hey new shiny” something of that ilk. I thought about writing a long and terrible post about where it misses the mark and how you probably shouldn’t buy it. Then I thought about writing a post about how it’s not really good, but it’s the best of a really poor app category so that by default makes it the best.

    And that’s the thing, OmniOutliner on iOS is the best outlining app you can get — by a huge margin. But that doesn’t mean it’s a wonderful app to use — I mean it tries to ignore that iCloud Drive exists.

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  • Facebook Funded Most of the Experts Who Vetted Messenger Kids

    Nitasha Tiku:

    When Facebook launched Messenger Kids, an app for preteens and children as young as 6, the company stressed that it had worked closely with leading experts in order to safeguard younger users. What Facebook didn’t say is that many of those experts had received funding from Facebook.

    What’s notable isn’t that they paid experts, that’s rather common, what’s notable is that it looks like the only experts supporting Messenger Kids are the ones Facebook paid.

  • Rising Early

    I really love ‘life hacking’ articles, specifically how they are based on sample sizes of one, often from people who have literally never tried anything else. (e.g. “I was born a vegan and that’s why I am amazing”, “Rich parents and how you can to”) And one of my favorite tropes is ‘rise early’. Why should you rise early? Because that person did it, started months ago actually, and shit has never been better? Is that really the object of desire? Are we so bad at being humans that the vast majority of people just don’t realize that all you need to do to make your wildest dreams come true, is to wake up before everyone else? But what happens when everyone starts waking up at 5am, then do I need to wake up at 4am? Why even sleep?

    Allow me to add my anecdotal evidence of one to the mix.

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  • Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app

    Sarah Perez:

    However, it’s not likely that all Onavo users understand they’re actually feeding Facebook the information that allows it to take on any challenger to its social networking empire. (That empire also includes WhatsApp and Instagram as well as smaller acquisitions like tbh and MSQRD).

    Noooo, whaaaaat?

  • Tim O’Reilly Eyes The Future Of The Tech Industry By Peering Into The Past

    Rick Wartzman writing:

    “It’s kind of how we progress as a species,” adds O’Reilly, the author of, most recently, WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. “We start out starry-eyed and optimistic with all the possibility of a new technology,” only to realize that there are shortcomings that need to be addressed—and often are addressed, even as some people invariably resist in order “to preserve the profits that they’re making.”

    Some really interesting points.

  • All the Things Productivity Course and Things 3 Tutorials

    Shawn was kind enough to provide me an early look at this course and it’s really well done, and I mean it’s about the best task manager you can get — what’s not to like?

    Oh, and in case you’ve been longing for a podcast like think featuring me and Shawn, he recorded an interview with me about all my nerdy task management ways.

  • Aerogel Insulation at Everyday Wear

    This is a great write up about a new insulation that seems pretty amazing. Yeah it’s got NASA marketing hype around it, but if what all Steve’s research says is true, it’ll change the way “warm” jackets look.

    And in case you want more thoughts from me on Outlier, I recently wrote another Outlier shirt review.

  • Thoughts on New iPads

    Spring is the time of year when many are expecting new iPads to emerge from Apple — likely new revisions to the iPad Pro lineup. Last year we saw the introduction of a new size: the 10.5” iPad Pro, as well as other nice to have features. The big question this year, though, is what Apple might introduce because no matter what Apple does it has to solve a bigger problem: device orientation.

    Is the iPad a portrait, or landscape device? It’s clear with the iPhone: portrait. And with the Mac: landscape.

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  • Living in a Smart Home

    Amit Gawande:

    Dumb and powerful, now there’s the super villain from any sane person’s nightmare.

    The power is in the data, not the devices. Right now some of that data is mostly noise, but it won’t be long before machine learning makes that “noise” into a billion dollar industry.

  • Smart Home is a Home that’s always spying on you

    Om Malik:

    I for one, refuse to use Alexa and Google Home in my apartment. I don’t trust them, much like I don’t trust Facebook. Apple seems to be doing a good job of keeping its nose clean, but who knows when they come under pressure from “activist” investors.

    So much promise, but without any regulation by the government, we are asking for trouble.

  • The House That Spied on Me

    Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu:

    I’m going to warn you against a smart home because living in it is annoying as hell.

    I have shockingly few smart gadgets. And what I do have, switches, are not great. They all lack “just works” factor, and that’s crucial for these devices.

  • What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death

    John Herrman on his five year old iPad:

    It was, in contrast to the iPhone from which it descended, understood by its users as simply good enough — not life-changing, but handy. It was to be used until its users started noticing it, at which point it was to be replaced. It was, like the iPhone, immune to attachment. But unlike the iPhones, which might be reclaimed by a cellular carrier as part of a scheduled trade-in or just shoved aside by a two-year upgrade, iPads tend to linger. They have time to reveal their tragic thingness.

    This is a pretty good read. I understand why older devices don’t move up to newer version of iOS, but it does suck that they eventually get put in device purgatory.

  • Namisu X-01 Brass Pen

    When I last talked about pens, I talked about my Machine Era pen, which is brass and heavy. Today it’s about the Namisu X-01 in brass, which is amazingly heavier than the last.

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  • The Indie Blogging Problem: Money

    I’ve been writing this site for long enough now that I’ve seen a few shifts in the blogging community itself. When I started writing here, people were starting to jump on the band wagon of blogging in force. I read a plethora of sites, all publishing nearly daily (like this one), written by people trying to make *it*. Trying to strike out full time with their writing in some way. And all of these sites had the same model: small advertisement from something like Carbon, The Deck, or Fusion and weekly RSS feed sponsorships. This is the ‘Daring Fireball Model’ of monetizing a blog. Hell, even some of them sold t-shirts every year, same as John Gruber.

    I used this model too. I made roughly between $400-600 a month from the small ad (I think $600 was the highest I ever got to on that) and charged from $250-$550 per week for RSS Sponsors (near the end I just started cranking up the price to see what the fuck would happen). It took me at least one full day per week to manage all of this. It took away from my writing and my focus. And then in 2012 it started becoming a race to the bottom, because while my site was still seeing large growth, the advertisers were unwilling to pay more, and in fact wanted to pay me *less* for the same.

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