I’ve long struggled with how to layout and ‘design’ my desk area. There’s two competing “best” ways to go about this: looks and ergonomics. And these are nearly mutually exclusive (you can’t have a beautiful desk which is also perfectly ergonomic), but I also have come to realize that I have been thinking about this all wrong. And, contrary to popular opinion, that the iPad is not the ergonomic nightmare most think it is.
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I have been seeing these pouches for quite some time now and figured it was about time I give one a try to see what the hype is all about. These are a heavy polymer substance (feels like soft non-sticky rubber) and have a single zipper across the top which is a weatherproof zipper with an oversized zipper pull. At each top corner there’s an eyelet to help with clipping the pouches to something.
Since I am a day late this week, we have some ground to make up for. Thus, the easily forgotten, but always satisfying Keebler Deluxe Graham’s are the snack pick for the week.
It’s been a while since I wrote a full iPad Productivity Report, so for the new year I am back at it. This will be the first of many to come over the next couple of months as some big rethinks are in the works for me with my iPad Pro setup(s). Today I want to address a few things I am playing with: font management, space needs, Notion, and Vellum. And then at the end I want to touch on a few upcoming things with my setup.
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I see a lot of comments/tweets/posts about people who get a new GORUCK GR1 bag, and then are not exactly sure what they should do with it from there (other than use it). This post walks you through how I take on a new GORUCK bag and the steps I take to make it mine.
This week brings us a new year and there’s only one way you should be ushering in a new year with your snacks. That’s by eating Entenmann’s Softees donuts, the variety pack which you buy for the cinnamon sugar donuts, but suffer through eating the others.
At the end of October, I started a little experiment. I stopped sleeping with my electronic devices in the same room as me. Specifically, that means my iPhone, and iPad(s). There’s a lot of research/studies/hypotheses around the impact devices have on our health, but there is one thing I believe in all those: the blue light from the devices is terrible for you at night.
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I reviewed a lot of products this year, and one thing I am always sensitive to is not leading people on a never ending chase towards ‘new and shiny’ for no reason other than it is ‘new and shiny.’ It’s the reason I try to keep my “best page” (for members) up to date: so that members always have a sense of what I find to be the best, no matter what I may be using/reviewing/writing about at any given time. To wrap up 2018, here’s a look back at the items I think were the best new items of the year, as well as other notables which fall into the best.
Shortbread, specifically my grandfathers. Unfortunately I am not going to share his recipe, but I will give away one tip in it “butter, lots and lots of butter”. Nothing says the holidays to me like good shortbread cookies.
The snack pick for this week is an all time favorite of mine, Marie Biscuits, the round delicious tea time biscuits you always find in places you duck into in order to kill time. They are delicious, and of course you can snag them on Amazon.
Note: Tom Bihn sent me this bag for the purposes of this review.
Some time ago Tom Bihn released the Guide’s Pack, which looked like an old school hiking backpack, but with some modern treatments. The limiting factor with that pack, is that despite being quite good, it is far more at home in the woods than in the airport or city. That’s where this Shadow Guide comes in, the same basic design, but rethought to work better as a city and travel backpack.
I’m worried about Apple’s stance that their ecosystems must be pure and free from debauchery, remaining family friendly at all times. Or to put it another way, free from pornography and swearing.This isn’t a straightforward thing, and it’s not clear what is good or bad for society as a whole, though I would argue that Apple’s approach of random censorship is more *bad* than good. And at best, absurdly hypocritical.
## Apple’s Current Stance and what we know as why
Generally speaking, iOS users today are restricted as follows:
– no pornography based apps
– sexual ‘wellness’ apps are fine, but hindered in what they show. For example: you could get away with depictions by way of illustration, but not out right photography of them.
– there amazingly does exist a plethora of ‘sexy’ games, but most seem to be benign truth or dare style text based games.
– iOS autocorrect will not allow you to swear easily, you have to jump through many hoops.
– any app that allows easy access to adult content, porn, is likely not to survive long, if at all. Unless it’s very popular.
We know about the why for some of this:
– [here’s info autocorrect and swearing](https://bgr.com/2018/11/07/iphone-keyboard-autocorrect-problems-swear-words/)
– [here’s a peek into banning pornography on iPhone](https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/08/steve-jobs-on-why-the-iphone-doesnt-allow-unsigned-apps-they-dont-want-a-porn-store/)
It’s all what you would expect. There’s too great a risk for unintended consequences with autocorrect working with curse words, and Apple generally feels pornography is a slippery slope which is not manageable for them. Which is fair, until you realize the complete shit that makes it into the App Store already then your like, wut.
But these two rather simple decisions have quite a ripple effect on our lives as a whole.
## Swearing
There’s something innocuous feeling in Apple’s refusals to acknowledge curse words. At first glance this seems rather obvious, it would be too easy for a kid talking about a duck, to send a message that says fuck. I am going to go out on a limb and say that a machine learning based autocorrect system will quickly learn that fuck is far more common than people talking about ducks. Which is perhaps why it is so ducking annoying that iOS doesn’t make cursing easy.
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Note: Tom Bihn provided these bags as review samples.
Perhaps it is time to call 2018 the year for great duffel bags, as there has been no shortage of them this year. Adding to that established mix is Tom Bihn’s new Road Buddy Duffel Bags which come in both 36L and 60L sizes. I was told that these are decades in the making, and a partial revival of something Tom Bihn has been working on since day one, as well as a modern take on that idea. They are part duffle bag, part gym/gear bag, and part Aeronaut style travel bag.
And I love them.
For years now I have struggled with the same problem, which is admittedly a problem for very few people. The problem is that I travel with just one bag, a small 20-26 liter bag, typically a GORUCK GR1 and I only store it at my feet on the plane. But when I get to where I am going, especially for business travel, I want a smaller bag which I can use to carry my iPad and a few essentials. All of which makes the GR1 overkill for most of those types of tasks.
I’ve never solved this issue, and I have tried numerous bags and setups. Some are hard to pack in my larger bag, taking up too much room, others are too large on their own while packing down nice. And a great many simply look terrible, such that I wouldn’t want to taken them anywhere but a hiking trail.
We are at the cusp of the great holiday shit show as I like to call it. Right now is not the time for the great unknown or experimentation. It’s now the time for comfort food — for food that makes you feel good right now and terrible later down the road. That means, of course, the snack pick for this week is Doritos.
For a while now I have been using a handy little shortcut which randomly selects an item from a text file. This allows me to create a really simple text file, with each ‘item’ on a new line, and have Shortcuts randomly select one and tell me which one. I’ve been using this on days when I want to do a workout at home, and have it select the order in which I do things. Or when I am raffling off something and need to select a random name. Building a text file on iOS is dead simple, and from there I just need to select which text file Shortcuts pulls and I get a nice little random item picker.
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Last spring and summer GORUCK started teasing that they were about to release a boot. Some people found images of those boots online, and I quickly formed the opinion of: yikes. While I find GORUCK’s bags to be aesthetically pleasing, the preview images of the boot, I found to be comical. Surely it could not be real.
Then GORUCK announced the boot as part of a pre-sale, I didn’t order one, because as it turns out the boot looked exactly as I had seen. And at $195, I was not willing to pay that for a boot I found to be hideous. A couple months ago people started receiving their boots and checking them out. For the most part the impressions I read were along the lines of these being the most comfortable boots out there.
In February of 2017 I made the decision that I needed to get in shape. I was larger, and more out of shape than I had ever been in my life. And while it wasn’t a dire situation, I could tell that I was more physically winded by things which had previously never troubled me. And this fact was now troubling me, so I made a simple decision: get in shape.
If my recent G-SHOCK purchase taught me anything, it is that I really like G-SHOCKs. They are versatile, durable, and more than anything else: functional and extremely comfortable. The issue was that I had not found the one that I loved — the one that was right for me.
So I kept searching.
I am a news junkie, and a completionist. That combination means the day I discovered RSS and, specifically at the time Google Reader, was the peak of my news obsession. It’s been downhill since then.
While I still use RSS, most sites now abuse RSS in egregious ways. They randomly republish their entire feeds every month, or they don’t offer feeds for the ‘latest’ content instead forcing you to go find categories to subscribe to. Some flat out ignore RSS, instead telling you how great their miserable newsletter is.