Category: Articles

I’m completely enamored with using the iPad Pro as my full time computer (as anyone who follows me on Twitter can attest). There are still a good amount of apps that need to be updated to fully support the larger size of the iPad Pro, and to support rotation (looking at you Dropshare). Still, there have been some real gems that I have found, and I wanted to highlight them in no particular order.

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Note: This bag was provided to me by Lodinatt for the purposes of this review.

Whenever I open a box containing a new bag, the most immediate response I have is not what I see, but what I feel in the materials used to build the bag. I had not heard of Lodinatt before they contacted me, and I am betting you haven’t either, so I had no clue what to expect when I opened that box.

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When I upgraded to iOS 9, I finally consolidated my convoluted note taking setup. Moving from Simplenote, Vesper, OmniOutliner, and a couple other notes apps to just Notes.app for everything. And I really like Notes.app, as it has come a long ways — but the UI leaves a lot to be desired and I often can’t get to what I need fast enough. Still, it synced perfectly, added a lot of features and generally worked well.

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One of the things I love about the GORUCK Bullet Ruck is how small it is — for a daily carry bag, where your kit is very small, you really don’t want to have a large bag as your carry bag. The problem with a large bag is it will allow your stuff to swim around in the bag, and ultimately your gear will be out of sorts when you get to where you are going. The bag itself will also be heavier and take up more space than you need — both when you take the bag off, and on your back — which can get annoying when you realize just how little you are carrying with it.

The problem I ran into, which lead to this bag is the Bullet Ruck is too small for my iPad Pro, and with that being my main computer, I really needed something to replace the Bullet Ruck. As I dug through my pile of bags to see what would work, I began to realize the smallest backpack I had which would fit the iPad Pro is the GORUCK GR1. While I love that bag dearly, it’s a very large bag for runs to the coffee shop with just an iPad Pro. Luckily, Incase was running a massive sale over the holidays and I picked up the Incase City Compact Backpack.

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I was a bit surprised at the feedback from my last post on Newsletters, not at the amount of feedback, as much as how black and white the issue seems to be. People were either in agreement with me, or were baffled by my conclusions. I asked those who responded in disbelief that newsletters could be bad, to provide me with longer thoughts, and there’s one article I think encapsulates the position in favor of newsletters well.

First, a point of clarification though: I used the term newsletter without specifying what the hell I meant. An error on my part. I simply mean an email newsletter that is filled with original content. What I don’t mean is emails, like this site’s daily email, alerting readers to new posts — in other words automated newsletters aren’t what I am talking about.

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A month has passed now since I undertook my own version of the NaNoWriMo challenge — writing and publishing over 50,000 words to this very site for the month of November. At the end of it I wrote a bit about the experience, but I don’t think it is until just now that I fully am able to realize the impact it had on me in a more long term sense. It hasn’t made me a better, or worse, writer — that’s all status quo. It has, however, helped my writing come far easier.

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Twenty-fifteen started with a trend that was hard to ignore: newsletters were a big thing. I couldn’t for the life of me understand it, and perhaps I still don’t understand it, so I asked many of the people I know who run seemingly successful newsletters and they espouse how amazing they are. Each time I asked someone I felt like they looked at me with disbelief that I don’t see the way.

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The three computers I am talking about are: iPad Pro, Surface Pro 4 / Surface Book, and MacBook (12” retina model). You probably suspected the first two given what I have been focused on of late, but that last one you might be questioning. Allow me some context before you label me as having lost my mind for claiming the MacBook is a part of the future of computing.

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At the end of November I concluded with a post about how I was going to be all in on the iPad Pro and use it as my primary work machine. And then, as I was looking through Apple’s News app, I started to see a lot of people talking about the Surface Pro 4 versus the iPad Pro. The Surface Pro line has always intrigued me, and by all accounts many thought the Surface Pro 4 was the culmination of all of Microsoft’s work, and done very well at that.

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Note: This backpack was sent to me by Standard Luggage for the purpose of writing this review. Also all photo credits go to my wife, Erin Brooks, she’s way better than I am.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, my sister (she was still in high school at the time) made it to state finals for track — which meant she was competing in eastern Washington. I took a long weekend and travelled out with my family for the two nights. I packed a almost-full duffel bag.

Sounds like a reasonable amount of gear, right? It would be, except the bag I packed in was 72 liters. Mean it was huge and I basically packed for a weekend in it. ((Funny enough, this worked out great as a rain storm moved in and I was the only one with clothing for such an event — and extra clothing for my dad to borrow. Still though…))

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Since I became a rather loud MacBook only user, I’ve been seeing people asking on Twitter, and asking me directly, which shoulder bag is the best for a MacBook. I really didn’t have any good answers because I rarely use shoulder bags, and because I didn’t have any small enough not to be silly for the MacBook.

There’s a lot of good looking options out there, but I wanted to be able to test something affordable for a change. So I reached out to Tom Bihn and asked if I could stop by to test out a few different bags, and possibly swipe one for a while to test out.

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Here we go again, another round of iOS content blocker testing. Before I get into the testing, I want to point out why certain apps were tested while others were not tested. I can assure you I downloaded/purchased/unlocked every content blocker I could find on the App Store. I lost count how many there were after they were all installed, but I was starting to worry I may never stop downloading them.

I was not looking forward to testing these, it takes 10 minutes on average to test each content blocker — and well you can do the math when I had more than 30 installed. That’s a lot of time. So I needed to pare the list down in a way which made sense without testing them first.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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