Category: Articles

In July of 2012 I established my site as a paywall with a time delay for all the articles to be free (originally 7 days, revised down to 3 days and then 2 days and moving around randomly since then depending on my mood). It was $4 month, or $40 a year — over the years there’s been odd discounts ($30/year for a couple weeks) and a short lived Quarterly membership ($7 every 3 months). The original paywall cost me $1,500 to have developed and took close to three months to implement. Since then I have hired people to do minor updates to the system, but amazingly it has kept plugging away mostly as it was originally intended.

At the time I implemented this, there was simply no commercial option I could buy, or use, which had all the features I wanted (using Stripe as my payment processor was a major hurdle at the time as most plugins didn’t support Stripe). Had I waited just a couple months more, all the widely used plugins would add most of the support I wanted and needed, but I had made my bed and was already signing up members.

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Most people are decidedly not developers, by the way.

It’s a statement I hear all the time — people either asking me to convince them the iPad Pro is better, because they want to be convinced, or because they want to prove me wrong. Either way, people either want to get it, or they simply cannot fathom how such a setup would actually work.

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I’ve now had the Lanier for some time, and have really put it through its paces, so I thought it was a good moment to stop and talk a little more about this very little bag. In my first post I wrote:

And yet there’s something about a true briefcase like this — a notion that people who carry a bag which is generally more restrictive, have somehow figured something out in their life that most of us have not.

I don’t think I could state it any better than that today. This bag is small, but it is in that smallness where you find a calm with it. It is not just small, but because it only has two handles to carry it with — it demands that what you put in it not weigh too much.

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After being in our new house for just over a week, I was getting around to unpacking my office (only the garage left to do) and as I opened box after box, more wires sprung up. I shook my head and kept piling them away in more areas of the new office.

Fast forward to the other morning and I’m reading an article from The Wirecutter posted on The New York Times — a guide to cutting the cord from Cable TV. Another thing I have been working with since moving — for the first time we are going to have two TV areas in the house, should I get two cable boxes? Do I need two cable boxes?

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The other day I was talking to a good friend about how much we both still love the 12.9″ iPad Pro — we use it a lot for work and leisure. We then talked about the smaller 9.7″ and we took some pot shots at it, but now I feel bad — because I undervalue how much a part of my workflow the 9.7″ iPad Pro has become.

When I purchased the smaller iPad Pro I envisioned using it as an auxiliary device — much in the same way I envisioned using the iPad mini. The iPad mini has never fit in well with my life, and with a larger plus model iPhone — it’s even more redundant. But I use the crap out of my 9.7″ iPad Pro, just as I do with my 12.9″ iPad — both end most days with their batteries nearing depletion.

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With iOS 10, newer model iPhones can shoot RAW images (DNG format), but they cannot do this from the native camera app. Which means you have to rely on third party apps, so I set out to find which would be the best to use.

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I fully admit that this is not an earth shattering problem, but the sheer amount of people asking me to elaborate have caused me to pen this post.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I was rather upset by the ordering process for iPhones this year.

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For years the Apple mantra was always “just works” and as Apple became more entrenched with their just cause of protecting user privacy — Google went the opposite way. Deep machine learning pushed Android to be preemptive and understanding — Google Now being the primary focus, but certainly not the only place this happens. Back on iOS we have always been siloed where one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, unless you explicitly tell each hand what the hell is going on. A task as tedious as it is to read about.

And while I typically don’t write iOS reviews, iOS 10 is Apple’s first step into the future of software which customizes itself to the user — and they figured out how to do this without compromising your privacy. People have been hesitant to embrace iOS as their only platform, but iOS 10 is what is going to push a great many people over the edge.

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Over the weekend a few others have expressed similar thoughts, but let’s face the fact that this stuff is likely bigger than most of us realized when Apple made its announcements.

Here’s Will Oremus on the matter:

The AirPods can’t store files or access the internet on their own, of course. They need your other Apple devices for that. But as processors continue to shrink, they’re likely to grow more independent with time, as the Apple Watch is beginning to do.

Exactly.

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I started a new experiment the other day, born out of a few comments from readers. They all remarked how much better it is to edit writing with the software keyboard, over a physical one on the iPad. Which is funny because I was actually thinking about working on setting up a mechanical keyboard again, but realized I packed them away (getting ready to hopefully move).

So I tore off my Smart Keyboards and stowed them in a drawer and committed to using the software keyboard for a week. I expected long fits of rage, but what I’ve found is that I quite like it.

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There is a very frustrating notion circling — the idea that managing files, or sharing files between apps, is hard on iOS. I’ve read three posts of late about them, each I will omit for varying reasons. The fact of the matter is that managing files on iOS is not hard — it is tricky and requires a modicum of brain power at times — but hard it is not.

In general the complaints are two fold:

1. Sharing files between apps is difficult.
2. Opening certain types of files is so cumbersome that many users will think it is not possible.

I’ve been using iOS full time for long enough now, I actually wondered if it is me who is out of touch with the level of difficulty, so I took this as a problem to investigate.

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When I started this site, my email was hosted on Google Apps, then I moved to Media Temple, and from there my @brooksreview.net emails have been hosted on whatever server my website was hosted on. This was never an issue for me, and I always wondered why people hated hosting email themselves, because it’s taken me 6 years to come to a breaking point. I was pumped to finally move to a Mac mini server so I could host all my email on a Mac using Mac tools. That was quite some time ago, and it’s been chugging along ever since. Sure, it goes down when I screw up the server, but thats part of the fun.

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Editor’s note: these shirts were sent to me at no cost for the purposes of reviewing.

It’s been a while since I reviewed undershirts — the regular ones, not fancy merino undershirts — but I received some NVSBL undershirts to test and then I took my damn sweet time testing them. There’s two types of people who wear undershirts: those who want their undershirt to be seen and those who don’t want it to be seen. I don’t understand the former group — but the latter group is doing it right.

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Fail early, fail often?

No.

Don’t let the fear of failure hold you back from doing something you think you can do?

Yes.

Though.

Not as catchy.

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When I last wrote about sit-stand electric desks, I took a look at the Jarvis desk — at the time one of the cheapest desks you could get, while still getting a very quality product. I left that desk behind when I changed careers, and went without an electric desk for quite some time.

In the intervening time period there has been no shortage of new options that came to the market — all of which seem to be competing on one thing: price.

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My wife and I wanted to buy a new couch — the problem we ran into though was the new couch is huge. I typically can see how and where things fit very easily in my head, but this one needed some more planning because even I wasn’t sure.

This seemed like the most natural use for an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil if I had ever heard of one. In the past I used various CAD programs on my Mac, or often Adobe Illustrator to help me figure it out. This time I downloaded a ton of apps to try and see what I could do to plan out this room.

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Last year Outlier released the “Ultrahigh Backpack”, which is a Dyneema (a.k.a. Cuben Fiber) rolltop style backpack. It looks tremendous. The size is comparable to the smaller GR1, and the price is $350. It remains a drool worthy backpack, however the rolltop style of the bag always made me hesitate the many times my finger hovered over the buy button. I just wasn’t sold that it was the style of backpack I would find useful.

This year, in addition to updating the Rolltop backpack design, Outlier introduced the Ultrahigh Quadzip Backpack. Taking the same design cues from the roll top, still making it out of the same fabric, but this time allowing the bag to be fully unzipped with a quad zipper design (more on that in a bit). At $298 I still hesitated to buy it, but given the bag purge I was already committed to, and my general dissatisfaction in my daily carry backpack situation, I went ahead and bought the bag.

This is a stunning backpack.

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This release, of the best writing software money can buy, is a bit of a dream release for me. It adds two spectacular features:

1. Typewriter Mode
2. Complete WordPress publishing

It’s no secret that I love, and use, Ulysses all day long — nor is it a secret that I publish with WordPress and only use iOS. This storm of factors means that I have a very specific set of requirements to make a dream writing app, and The Soulmen (the company behind Ulysses) asked me what I still yearned for in their app. The above features were at the top of my very short list.

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