raamdev

I'm personally trying to fix the habit of constant checking of HN so that I don't miss out on the good stuff with a weekly email that I can review once a week. [1] Admittedly, breaking the habit of checking HN throughout the day is a bit harder to break than subscribing to the newsletter, but in theory it would be an excellent solution. :)

1. http://www.hackernewsletter.com

I started a habit of writing 1,000 words every single day with the intention of improving my writing. I've written at least 1,000 words every single day for the past 291 days (okay, I missed one day at day 264). The writing has been in a private journal, not on public blog, although I've published hundreds of thousands of words to my blog over the past 15 years, just not much in the past few years.

I'd say the greatest insight that I've had from writing 1,000 words every single day for nearly the past year has been that simply writing 1,000 words every single day is not enough to foster real improvement. The habit definitely helps you overcome the initial resistance that you might feel towards getting started, and if you're not already good at typing or transferring thoughts in your head into words on the screen, I'm sure it helps with that too, but there comes a point at which, if you actually want to continue growing and becoming a better writer, you need a goal other than "write every day".

For me, the act of writing something that I intend to publish, to share with others, forces me to work on the writing, to tweak it, to think about how it can be made better, to question its clarity, to question the value of what I'm sharing. If what I'm intending to share contains a story, then knowing that it's going to be shared forces me to work on storycraft, to think about how someone else is going to interpret what I wrote. None of that happens naturally when you write privately, when your only goal is to see the word counter pass 1,000.

I've found that the greatest advancements in my own writing have come when I was blogging regularly (comparing posts from one year to another makes this very obvious). Whenever I've stopped blogging regularly for long periods of time, I find that my writing stops improving, even if the overall amount of writing I'm doing on a regular basis doesn't change that much (e.g., Slack messages, comments like these, etc.).

I'm not saying that you cannot improve as a writer when you write privately, just that improvement requires working toward specific goals that you know will challenge you to improve. Write a haiku. Write a short story. Look up from your laptop, find an object, and then try to write 1,000 words describing that object in as fine detail as possible. Do the same thing with an emotion that you've felt. And if you can, share what you write. Even if others don't give you feedback, the very knowledge that somebody, somewhere, will likely be judging your writing will cause you to subconsciously work a little harder to write better, to rewrite and to edit (which is the work that actually produces good writing).

I've been a software engineer for the past 20 years but I'm really looking at changing things up and doing something totally different—I just can't stand spending so much time in front of a computer anymore (I find myself looking for excuses to do physical activity away from the screen). This sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'd enjoy, and I'd get to learn lots of useful skills and serve my local community at the same time. I'd be fine with taking a pay cut.

Do you have any advice for someone wanting to become a firefighter? Or any resources that you can point me to?

This. The longer I 'work from home' the more I discover the importance of separate physical spaces for certain activities. If I spend enough time on entertainment in the same space that I work all day, over time working in that space seems to become more and more 'energetically mixed' (for lack of a better term) and it seems to get harder to focus on specific non-entertainment tasks. I now refuse to eat, sleep, or indulge in entertainment in the same space that I work. I don't even let myself read fiction books where I work. I try to do all deep thinking while walking outside, read fiction in bed before sleeping, and only work while standing at my desk.

> I tried cafes and libraries but, oddly, they no longer worked for me—the noise and the people walking by suddenly became a huge distraction.

> I find it astonishing that startup indie devs pay out for an office, with all the extra bills that entails. Work from home, keep your overheads as close to zero as possible.

I've been a solo dev for nearly a decade (8 years) and I found that sometimes it makes complete sense to pay for an office. Before my daughter was born, I was able to work from almost anywhere: noisy cafes, at home, the library, etc. But after she was born it was like my brain needed a space away from home where I could close a door and have a room all to myself, a place where I couldn't hear family sounds or be within walking distance of anyone I knew. I tried cafes and libraries but, oddly, they no longer worked for me—the noise and the people walking by suddenly became a huge distraction. I couldn't focus. I decided to rent a tiny artist studio for $350/mo that I found on CraigsList and it was the best $350 that I spent each month in terms of direct impact on my ability to get work done.

If you remove everything from every human body except the skeleton, you'll find that the joints of every skeleton have very similar (nearly identical) range of motion. When I say design range of motion I'm referring to the commonalities that all of our skeletons share. The human skeleton has two arms, two legs, a hip bone, a skull, a spine, hands, and feet. Each of those are connected by joints and all of the joints have a range of motion that is, for all intents and purposes, the same. (Again, excluding birth defects, post-birth accidents, etc.)

On top of the skeleton we add muscles and tissues and everything else, with the muscles doing the vast majority of the supporting work for the skeleton, i.e., for the most part, the muscles (and tendons) dictate the effective range of motion, i.e., what the skeleton is currently possible of doing. But muscles can be stretched and lengthened, or they can be neglected and become stiff like an old rubber band (e.g., from sitting in the same position for years on end). Stiff muscles restrict range of motion, preventing the skeleton (which, without the muscles, would be fully capable of achieving its design range of motion) from achieving the full range of motion.

Are we all built to some universal specification? That depends on how you define "built" and how you define "universal". Our cells "build us" and our DNA defines a specification. Humans do follow a general standard: between 4.5-6.5 feet tall, two legs, two arms, one head, bipedal motion, etc. There are no 3-foot, 8-arm humans (like an octopus) and no humans with a 8-foot nose (like an elephant).

There are plenty of factors that can affect what range of motion each of us will be able to achieve, including injuries, age, and lifestyle (you're not going to become a world-class runner sitting at a computer for 12 hours a day 7 days a week), but if you're a relatively healthy 20-50 year old, and you put in the time required, you can go from being extremely stiff and inflexible to doing splits and backflips.

Yes, I have an IKEA bar table that I bought second hand and I stand at that for 8-12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. It was kind of exhausting for the first 6 months or so but now it actually feels really weird to sit at a table and work. I really like how standing for long periods of time forces me to want to move. I find that I walk away from the computer and go outside for short walks a lot more frequently than when I used to sit. When sitting, I found that several hours could pass before I realized how long I was sitting. Now that I've been standing and working for so long (over 2 years now) sitting feels like an absolute luxury and I've started to associate standing with working and sitting with relaxing.

One of the most amazing books I've read about simple ways to correct the muscular imbalances that result from too much sitting is Pete Egoscue's Pain Free at Your PC [1]. His other book, Pain Free [2] is also extremely effective and informative.

The first part of Pain Free explains how muscular imbalances form and, most insightful to me, how every human body has the same design range of motion (with a few exceptions due to birth defects or disease), that is every human body is designed to have the same range of motion but muscular imbalances formed as the result of specific repeated activities (or lack of activity) impede that design range of motion. All of the exercises in the Egoscue Method require no special equipment, only simple things like a chair or a wall (which further convinced me that it's not a fad out to sell something). Highly recommend reading these books if you're interested in this topic.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-Revolutionary-Stopping-Chro...

2. https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-Your-PC-Computer/dp/0553380...

The only reason I ever remember preferring FTP over HTTP in the 1990s was because FTP usually meant that I could resume large downloads if my connection dropped mid-download. That was a big deal when it took several hours to download something. That benefit largely disappeared for me as broadband got faster and the connections became more reliable.

I've always been incredibly curious about all the life around me but at the age of 35 it finally started to bug me that I had no idea what, for example, the dozens of types of birds around me were called. For the past few months I've started making it a point to identify every single bird that I see around the yard, to spend a few minutes locating a photo of it and listening to its call and reading information about it on Wikipedia. Just in the past few months I've identified over two dozen birds that I grew up seeing and hearing and now I finally know what they're called.

What I'm realizing is that it takes active participation and interest in indentifying things to really learn their names and their histories, not just a passing interest.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a site [1] and an app that is amazing for identifying birds. My favorite feature is how it also lists birds that are similar, which makes it a lot easier to find the specific bird you're looking for. I then compare visual information with the auditory information of the birds calls to make a concrete identification.

1. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/search/

Dropbox also has a pretty good mobile photos backup feature if you're a Dropbox user.

My problem hasn't been where to backup photos but how the heck to manage (and make use of) tens of thousands of photos. I mean, 50 years from now when each of us has several hundred thousand photos, what exactly are we going to do with them all? And our children and grandchildren? Those are going to be pretty big (and ever-increasing) photo albums. We need better ways of managing and making use of them. Apple has made good progress here with Moments and facial recognition and grouping by location, but all of that is siloed in Apple's infrastructure.

> The spacecraft captured the view on April 12, 2017

That's the anniversary of the first human spaceflight, celebrated as Yuri's Night (and also, awesomely, my birthday):

> Yuri's Night is named for the first human to launch into space, Yuri Gagarin, who flew the Vostok 1 spaceship on April 12, 1961.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri%27s_Night

I read in John Medina's book Brain Rules for Baby that one of the most important things you can teach children is to associate difficulty with progress, to understand that learning how to do something most likely requires failing a bunch of times before you figure it out and that failing is okay, that it doesn't mean you're incapable but rather that you're actually making progress.

My daughter is three years old and for the past year or so, whenever she becomes frustrated that she can't do something—whistle, pronounce a word, build a lego set, draw a letter—I calm her down and remind her that not being able to do it is part of learning how to do it. I often use the example of how she didn't always know how to walk or talk, that she failed lots of times but she tried and tried and tried and eventually she got it, that after falling down so many times now she's running around the room and talking non-stop.

I've been blown away by how that reframing of difficulty has made her seemingly unstoppable. Sure, she still gets frustrated and overwhelmed, but when she starts whistling—full on whistling at three years old—and she tells me, "Daddy! I tried and tried and tried and eventually I got it!", I can't help but think that there's something to this. When she doesn't know I'm watching, I've observed that she seems a lot more determined to do things even when she's repeatedly failing—she doesn't give up as quickly as she did (often quickly followed by a tantrum) before I started explaining to her that learning requires challenge.

> Printing the paper saying we won't fill glasses used 48 times[1] more water than the water in the glass!

If that's the case, then wouldn't it just take 48 customers to a given table (who don't request water) to start saving water?

I'm self-employed. I've been running a small business for the past five years (with a partner) and we have a small globally-distributed team (5 people total). We build, support, and sell commercial (and free) open-source WordPress plugins.

While it's awesome making a living working on open-source software, the business side of things is no longer fun or challenging for me, so I'm in the process of transitioning to something else, namely more of what I love: writing and publishing.

I live in New Hampshire and walk 50 steps around the side of the house before sunrise to a small shed that I turned into a wifi + power-equipped cabin with a big window overlooking a lake. Best commute ever. I'm no longer jealous watching birds walk around in the grass while I'm stuck in traffic doing a job that only a robot should be doing (driving). Now I enjoy the company of wildlife (there's a family of gofers nesting under the shed), watch loons and red-tailed hawks and woodpeckers and take frequent walks outside to think.

I've been keeping a journal with Org-Mode for nearly three years now. I also have an easy system of adding entries via my mobile devices, which was a huge thing I missed at first. Here's what I finally came up with as a solution that works really well for writing Org-Mode journal entries from my iPhone and iPad and getting those entries back into my main Org-Mode journal file:

- I use the Drafts app [1], which has a incredibly powerful feature that lets you create custom commands that include a series of steps, such as "Append to /refile.org file in Dropbox", which I have setup as a "Save to Journal" command

- I have a TextExpander snippet that includes the proper Org-Mode format for an entry, complete with a the date and tags and even a default entry title all filled in. All I do is type "Jjj" inside Drafts and I'm ready to start typing my journal entry.

To write a journal entry from my mobile device:

- I launch Drafts, type my TextExpander abbreviation ("Jjj") to fill in the Org-Mode template, then just start typing my journal entry.

- When I'm done writing my journal entry, I hit the "Save to Journal" action in Drafts, which appends that entry to my refile.org file on Dropbox.

- Once a week or so I open the refile.org inside Emacs and for each entry I run a custom function [2] that refiles that entry into my main journal-2017.org file. The function properly files the entry into the right spot in the datetree. Processing my refile.org file literally takes a few seconds, as I have that function bound to a key that I just run with the cursor over each entry.

I've been using this process for a few years now and it's incredibly easy and reliable, not to mention completely free of any proprietary data formats, which is exactly what I wanted for journaling. I'm using a similar process (Drafts app + TextExpander + Dropbox) to make Ledger CLI [3] entries from my iPhone very easy, so that I can keep my financial ledger up-to-date when I'm out.

[1] http://agiletortoise.com/drafts/

[2] https://github.com/raamdev/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/conf...

[3] http://www.ledger-cli.org/

I think working for a few years in IT roles where I was on call 24/7 in case a server went down, where I worried that any call I got might be a disaster call, trained my brain to always consider the sound of my phone ringing as a possible emergency. I've been using the iPhone "Old Phone" ringtone for years now and when my alarm goes off I usually catch it by the first or second ring (confirmed by people who have actually called and woken me up). One other thing I've learned is that if I use an ascending alarm, where the ringtone starts quiet and slowly gets louder, it takes a lot longer for me wake up, presumably because my subconscious learns that an ascending ring is most likely not a phone call... my wife and daughter are awoken long before me if I use an ascending alarm, but if I just use a normal one I'm able to wake up and turn it off before it wakes them.

I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only way to trick my brain into forcing me awake: my subconscious has no way of knowing if it's an actual phone call that I need to be awake for or if it's just the alarm, so it forces me awake to figure that out. Its worked for years now.

Yeah, and Falcon 9 is several times the size of New Shepard. There are several nice graphics here that explain the differences between Falcon 9 and New Shepard: http://space.stackexchange.com/a/13188

I read Story by Robert McKee after I read The Story Grid and I found Shawn's explanations and descriptions more precise and to the point than Robert's. I also really like how Shawn, for the most part, uses a single story (The Silence of the Lambs) in his examples and how he keeps going back to it. Using a single story, I felt, helped me better grasp the context of each example and allowed me to 'grow' with the dissection of the entire story. The grid itself was also extremely useful as it provided me with a framework, a cheat sheet that I could reference at any time to understand where I was in his overall analysis of the story.

If you're writing fiction (or doing any sort of storytelling for that matter), The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read. The podcast is amazing—it's the first podcast I've found worth listening to from the very beginning—and it has opened my eyes so much, helping me understand the fundamentals of story structure and how great novels "work".

I've read Stephen King's On Writing and several other books on novel writing and as a programmer what I really liked about The Story Grid was its analytical approach to storytelling, as opposed to a more emotional, intuitive, "just keep writing and eventually the good stuff will come" approach.

I've been using a self-hosted version of Full-Text RSS [1] to turn excerpt-only RSS feeds into full-text RSS feeds (which I use in conjunction with Calibre [2] to generate a weekly Kindle book containing all of the latest articles to read on my Kindle). Full-Text RSS works great and the developer is very responsive.

1. http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

2. https://calibre-ebook.com/

I felt the same way about GTD for the longest time, until I decided to read the small book and see what the fuss was all about. It completely changed the way I look at productivity and getting things done. GTD is not so much about David Allen or The GTD Method, but about a logical, structured way of processing inputs into your life. The more inputs you have, the more you'll benefit from the ideas (I consider them ideas more than 'methods') presented in the book.

I don't follow GTD exactly the way David presents it in the book, but that's just the thing: What I learned from the book was not a specific method, but how to think about task management in a way that makes sense given the limited capacity of my brain to remember a large number of transitory things.

I've never used Time Machine specifically because I heard early reports of it not saving someone who suffered a total disk failure. I haven't bothered trying it since then. (First impressions are powerful things.)

I've used Carbon Copy Cloner (a glorified rsync + a great UI) for 5+ years and I've survived no less than two total disk failures. The best part is that CCC makes my full-disk backups bootable, so I can literally plug in my USB drive (or my 256GB SD Card--yes, I do full-disk backups to SD cards) and boot my entire laptop directly from the external drive, bypassing my (possibly defunct) internal disk. That allows me to continue working while I wait to get my laptop replaced.

When the new laptop arrives, I install CCC and do the imaging in reverse, copying the external disk to my new Mac. Then I reboot and my laptop is back to the way it was the last time I used it. (This depends on replacing my old laptop with a new one using the same hardware, but that's not difficult if I stay within a few years of the latest hardware.)

sha256sum of f.lux-xcode-master.zip and every file inside, downloaded just a few hours before the original link went offline: https://gist.github.com/raamdev/97c625b323fa288cf785

For future reference, you can get a RapidSSL certificate (recognized by 99% of browsers) for ~$6/year here: https://cheapsslsecurity.com/

Using Google Chrome, I had to turn off "Click to play" Plugins and switch back to the default of "Run all content" in Chrome's Content Settings, otherwise visiting https://exchange.coinbase.com/trade (while logged into my Coinbase account) showed nothing but a blank page with a background color (i.e., there were no grey boxes where I could "Click to play", as I would've expected).

What I would love is to see more intelligent lightning systems that use the current time and location (easy, given most lightning is fixed) to automatically dim a certain amount depending on the time of day, much like the F.lux app [1].

1. https://justgetflux.com/