A Changing Mobile Landscape

For the past year or so I’ve been trying to decide what laptop to buy. My current machine, a 2006 MacBook, is on its last legs and really hasn’t been an effective mobile computer for over a year due to a drastically shortened battery and what appears to be a busted wifi antenna. The machine has done great things for me for the past several years and is the primary machine from which I’ve authored most of the posts on this blog. It managed to get me started with podcasting and has been my primary development machine for nearly all my programming projects, regardless of platform. The machine still performs quite well considering its age and how much I’ve used it over the past five-and-a-half years, really the biggest reasons for me to upgrade it are its newfound lack of mobility (no battery or wifi) and its lack of ability to run OS X Lion and by extension the new version of XCode because Lion will not run on the Core Duo line of processors.

The logical step seemed to be replacing the 13″ MacBook with another MacBook of similar size and capability. The natural contenders were the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, both 13″ models. Most of the decision for me had started to revolve around the specs of those machines. Which one could hold more RAM? Which could have a larger hard drive? Do I need an optical drive? These questions plagued me for a number of months and I continued to debate which of these laptops was the right fit for me. One day, while browsing the web looking for indications of an upcoming refresh of the MacBook line I had a bit of an epiphany. I needed to follow the advice at I’ve given to friends and family for years when it comes to technology — don’t focus on the specs, decide what it is that you want or need the technology to do. This was an exercise that I had completely failed to undertake.

Understanding My Technical Needs

As I began to examine just what I used technology for on a daily basis some themes began to coalesce from the jumbled mishmash of devices, services and applications. When the patterns first became visible I was a bit surprised, mainly because they were leading me down a path I didn’t expect — a path which I had felt until now was for the less geeky, the non-power-user… the normals. My analysis was telling me that I didn’t need to get a mid- to high-end laptop, in fact it was starting to look like I didn’t need a laptop at all…

How did I come to this conclusion?

In any given week there are a number of things that I use computers for, typically all of these tasks have been done on my main laptop which was the centre of my digital life. When I looked over list list closely, the first pattern began to emerge.

Podcasting
Audio Editing
Working with family photos
Software development
Blogging
Writing
Watching video podcasts
Reading blogs and news sites
Casual gaming

Power User Tasks

Some of these tasks are really best suited to the stationary environment that my MacBook has been confined to for the past many months — it’s better to be at a desk with a big screen, a fixed setup and a hard-line to the Internet. The big screen is particularly important for me when I’m working on software projects, editing audio and working on photos. Having the extra screen real estate for toolbars and being able to get into the details of a photo makes those tasks more enjoyable when I can plug the screen into my laptop. These tasks also require a computer with a reasonable bit of power, but still nothing I would call a powerful workstation.

Light Content Creation

By contrast, I prefer to do my blogging and writing when I’m not confined to my desk. These are tasks I’ve really enjoyed having the laptop for because they’ve allowed me to get out and write in other locales, whether its in my living room, in bed or at the local coffee shop. The portability of a mobile device allows me to be wherever my creative juices will flow, and where I can even get some sunshine on occasion. These tasks, however, don’t require particularly powerful hardware. Even the most basic laptop with a wifi connection is enough to be able to take on most small writing projects and blogging assignments.

Casual and Mobile Applications

The last set of tasks fall neatly into the “content consumption” category. These are also tasks that I would very rarely do at my desk, but would rather read and watch with other people doing the same kinds of things, such as my wife and I reading for a bit on a Sunday afternoon during our daughter’s nap. This means that I definitely don’t want to be tied down to my desk in the basement, mobility is a key feature for these use cases.

Looking through these three groups of tasks, or use cases, a brand new 13″ MacBook Pro would fit the bill quite nicely. It has the power and expansion ports to take care of all of the power-user tasks quite handily. The 13″ size is still small enough to make the device nice and portable so that I can take on all of my writing assignments wherever the mood strikes me, and I could still use it for reading blogs and watching video podcasts.

As I thought about it more I also realized that there were some down sides to my one-machine-to-rule-them-all approach. The first being the cost of mobility. Every time I want to switch between my power-user setup and my mobile setup, I have to detach all of The devices from the MacBook, and then reconnect everything the next time I want to code or podcast. While these could definitely be considered trivial problems to solve, my inherent geek laziness doesn’t relish the prospect of continually connecting and disconnecting cables for the next four or five years. There is also the issue of heat with the higher-powered MacBook. They do run fairly hot, and whenever I use one for more than 10-15 minutes on a couch or some other similarly loungy position I find the need to place a towel or pillow between me and the device just to keep myself cool (being careful to keep the fan vents clear of course). Lastly was the price, the mid-range MacBook Pro with more RAM and AppleCare would set me back a bit more than $2000 after taxes. While not insurmountable, it’s certainly not a trivial amount of money.

The Rethink

After having considered my options a bit more carefully I began to realize that having a portable desktop-replacement like the MacBook Pro really wasn’t what I needed. I don’t write code away from my desk (except on a few very rare occasions), and I certainly don’t podcast away from my desk. When I looked at my mobile use cases, a great many of them could easily be accomplished with a a much lighter device -gasp- a tablet. In some cases the tablet experience would arguably be better than the computer experience. The tasks I wasn’t convinced would be good on a tablet were the writing and blogging tasks. My experiences trying to write using the onscreen keyboard of my iPhone had convinced me that I was going to need a physical keyboard to do that kind of work. That said, there are physical bluetooth keyboards available for tablets which can make that experience very similar to working with a laptop. The external keyboard has the added advantage of being removed and stowed when not in use.

Now the catch here (because there’s always a catch) is that the tablet can’t handle the more powerful scenarios laid out in my Power User Tasks section above. It’s limited storage, memory, processing power and screen real estate meant that I would still need another solution to supplement the tablet. This will likely be a mid-range Core i5 or Core i7 Mac Mini, but the need for that device isn’t quite as urgent, so the existing stationary MacBook will continue to fill that role until the next refresh of the Mini line, hopefully around the same time as the Mountain Lion launch.

Decision

With that last piece of the puzzle out of the way, I reached a final decision to extend my Apple ecosystem and picked up a 32GB 3rd generation iPad earlier last week. I have some additional tools coming to supplement the device including a case, a keyboard and a stylus, but details on those will have to wait for another blog post. So far I have been able to do all of my mobile tasks on the iPad, including writing. I banged out this entire post on the iPad using the on-screen keyboard. There were certainly more errors here than on a physical keyboard but it’s certainly serviceable.

Admittedly I didn’t give much consideration to purchasing a non-iPad tablet. This is partly because of my existing Apple “lock-in” with the iOS devices I’ve had in The past, including my iPhone, there is some amount of money invested in software. Having all of Those applications instantly available on my new iPad is nice. In addition, the iPad and iOS are a known quantity more than the other tablets.

While it has only been about 5 days since I made the decision to essentially abandon my use of laptops for the next few years (with the exception of my office-issued machine) I’m really enjoying it so far. There will undoubtedly be more to come on this topic as I learn everything I can about integrating this newest piece of technology into my workflows.

Email Consolidation with Gmail

What is it

This article was inspired by an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast talking about strategies to manage email. With those tips in mind I set about carving out an email strategy that would help me get my multitude of email accounts down to a reasonably dull roar.

The concept is simple. The fewer mailboxes you have to check, the simpler checking email becomes. It can also be easier to answer the question “what’s your email address” when you don’t have so many to choose from.

This is admittedly a problem that only a relatively small subset of people will have. There are always going to be people out there who only have a single email address and who would never need to read through this article because one is about as consolidated as you can get.

This series will get into a fair bit of detail on what features of Google’s email service best serve these needs, and how you can put these things to work for you.

Why would I do this?!

To illustrate, a parable:

Bill was a busy man. He would spend his time every Saturday going from bank to bank moving money and paying bills. He had accounts at many different banks. His reasons were as varied as the banks and the accounts themselves, but each of them had add perfect sense at the time. He had a chequing account with a bank that was partnered with his employer, that’s where his pay was deposited. He had a savings account with a bank he’d been with since he had his first job 15 years ago. He had a joint account with his wife at another bank which was partnered with her employer (where her pay was deposited) and an account with another bank that held his mortgage. While each individual account was in and of itself a good idea, and seemed wise at the time, all of Bill’s Saturdays were sing consumed with trying to manage and move money between his various institutions. Bill could save a lot of time and energy by replacing some or all of these accounts with single account. In short, consolidate. By having his pay and his wife’s pay deposited into the account that their mortgage is drawn from it would greatly reduce the complexity of his life – and might even open up a few hours on Saturday to do something more important.

That story should sere to illustrate my point, but in case it wasn’t clear, let me be blunt. Shutdown and if necessary re=point your old email addresses to a new single collection point. Instead of bouncing around between who-knows-how-many different email inboxes, you can manage everything from Gmail or from one of the client solutions that ties into Gmail’s IMAP services.

It sounds like a lot of work

It is. I won’t sugar-coat the truth by pretending this is something you’ll get done in 10–15 minutes. You won’t. If you’re still interested, Here’s how I went about it:

1. Identify accounts to kill

The first step in the process is to figure out just what needs to be cut. Be ruthless. Any account that receives way too much spam should be considered to go on this list. Another good set of candidate accounts is those that only allow POP access. Many ISP accounts, and some free email accounts are set up like this. If you can eliminate your dependence on your ISP’s email account, you will eliminate a major barrier to leaving that ISP if you need to down the road.

2. Identify accounts to keep

If you already have a Gmail account it may be at the top of your to-keep list – assuming of course it’s not the one you’ve been using to sign up for every shiny new cloud service, I which case you may need to dump it. I also recommend keeping any important email addresses that you have, even if you don’t use the email service. I have an address from school which is useful for getting some student discounts. I’ll talk about how to handle this later.

Finally there’s the question of what to do with work and personal email. As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is keep them separate. This is one case where mixing work and pleasure is not a good thing.

3. Identify accounts to create

This is a place to give some thought. If the stuff you’re keeping doesn’t fully fit the bill for the addresses you need you may need to create one or two. If you have your own domain, you may want to consolidate down to have your email addresses live there. This can add a sense of personality or style to the email addresses you use.

4. Map old to new

Decide which old addresses that you’re keeping need to flow into which of the mailboxes you’re keeping. This is an important distinction – you don’t have to keep the actual mailboxes for each of the addresses you want. For new addresses that are aliases, you may be able to do this from your domain hosting provider’s admin panel. For addresses that were formerly mailboxes you had been using it will involve some trickery. This is a step that helps to have some visual aids.

5. Import messages

In each of the new Gmail accounts that will be receiving messages from old addresses you need to setup mail import from the existing account using POP.

Open your Gmail settings
Select Accounts and Import
In the section Check mail using POP3 click Add a POP3 account that you own
Follow the prompts to configure that account

6. Forward old email accounts

If your email provider for the old account supports email forwarding you can set that up instead of using up one of your POP mail slots.

7. Tell your friends!

Once all of the configuration is done, you need to tell people about your shiny new address(es). Send emails out to all of your contacts who need to have your new addresses. Send these messages from the new accounts so that people who reply to the messages will already be using the new ones. And don’t forget to BCC everyone, please.

Ubuntu School – sudo Your Last Command

Sometimes we just forget that we need to specify elevated privileges on our Ubuntu machines. I do it all the time, particularly when I’m setting up a new machine.

Thankfully there’s a shortcut for those of us who are forgetful. If I want to restart the box I can use a command like:

shutdown -r now

But of course that command requires elevated privileges:

shutdown: Need to be root

With the fantastic !! argument for sudo you can repeat your last terminal command:

sudo !!

Now you can quickly and efficiently re-run that last command you forgot to sudo!!

Firefox Shortcuts for Bookmarks and Searching

It’s not new information, but since I just figured this out recently, I thought I’d punch it up here. When you add a new bookmark in FireFox there are a few fields that you get prompted to fill out:

These fields are only a portion of the information that Firefox can keep for a particular bookmark. Among the most useful of these is the keyword field.

For people like me who prefer to use the keyboard over any form of pointing device, this is fantastic. I can open a new tab and type in the keyword of the bookmark I want, in this case ‘kdm’ and firefox will load the bookmark in question.

Even though most browsers have a built-in search bar, that’s another toolbar that eats up real-estate in your browser. If you’re screen-space-challenged or you have a disdain for toolbars. Take your bookmarks to the next level with a parameter.

By adding in the string %s you can create search bookmarks for your favourite searching sites. As a helper, I’ve included a few search links below which already contain the %s. Just right-click the links below and use the ‘Copy Link Location’ or ‘Copy Shortcut’ options.

Google (ca, au, de, jp)

Bing

Yahoo

Wikipedia (de, fr, pl, it)

Stack Overflow

Memory Alpha

Learning by Disaster

I was reading an article on Raymond Chen’s blog today really made me think. The story, for those who don’t care to read it, essentially is about a service (shell.windows.com) which was created by a Microsoft developer as a proof of concept. He ran it off a computer under his desk at first and that’s where it sat… until it stopped working one day. Now that service is run on proper infrastructure in a Microsoft data centre.

In the industry I’m in, this story really hits home. It’s very common for us to make decisions based on the short-term, tools which we don’t expect to be around for a long period of time. We should have learned over that this kind of “short-term gain” strategy almost always leads to long-term pain.

The lesson: Take some time to make sure that tools you build can be left unattended even after the cleaning crew vacuums under your desk.

The Solution Spiral

A mentor of mine in my early working years taught me a whole lot of very valuable lessons that have served me well, and that I’ve tried to carry forward as we bring new folks on to the team. This is one of those lessons.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of being confronted with a problem in either our personal or professional lives where we’ve needed to devise a solution. Your first instinct is often close to the truth, particularly when the problem is in an arena that you are familiar with. The key lies in the first steps you take to refine the solution: will you solve the problem or lead yourself down the solution spiral?

When we propose a solution to a problem, particularly in a group setting, humans have the tendency to get attached to that solution. As people try to help refine the proposed solution and question it we have a tendency to get defensive and force changes to your idea to plug the holes that other people are trying to poke in your idea.

p style=”text-align: center;”> Image credit xkcd

The key is being able to step back and look over the situation. Find the simple solution. Look at what you want to solve, and see if there’s a way to solve the problem quickly and easily. If you need to get from Vancouver to Los Angeles there’s many routes you can take. The best choice isn’t likely to travel by way of Boston.

The lesson: Find the solution that most closely resembles the solution you’re trying to solve.

Thanks to the FOG for this invaluable lesson.

Twitter Acquires Sandy and Stikkit

Here’s a clip of a post I did over on the AGP Blog about the acquisition of Sandy & Stikkit by Twitter. It’s going to be very interesting to see what Twitter decides to do with the newly acquired technology, particularly in the wake of reduced services in nearl every country outside the US (read: no more SMS!!!). Here’s a clip from the feature-length version:

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services. I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago. The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…

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The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: productivity