Battery-free electronics
This is a wonderful short piece about a researcher creating electronics that do not have any batteries and generate their own electricity.
Changing expectations will be the most difficult part of changing climate change.
My wife and I just welcomed our first born into the world, and all I could think of driving to and from the NICU was this short film. The behind the scenes also shows how much effort this task takes and deserves to be recognized.
Library Magazines
Libby on iPad
If owning an ipad comes up in conversation, I am very quick to mention the Libby app. I believe this is the successor to the Overdrive app, but it is an access point to local library’s digital content. For example, the Chicago Public Library has an amazing catalog of great magazines, movies, audiobooks and regular old ebooks. Magazines is what I love about this the most, I think it’s pretty great to have regular access anytime to the most recent issues of titles like Wired, Guardian Weekly, Popular Science, Bon Appétit, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Macworld and pretty much any other subject you are interested in. To my knowledge, the magazines don’t have the same, if any, restriction on the number of copies or licenses the library has access to, because I have never had to “get in line” or wait any amount of time to borrow a digital magazine.
Libby magazine library
The layout and design of the app itself is pretty great too. You can flip through the print layout like you would imagine swiping through and zooming in on a PDF of the magazine would be, but they also have a button to isolate just the text an images of each article in a single column, making it extremely comfortable to read no matter the artistic license they took to layout the article. I find the iPhone/smartphone app is pretty comfortable on its own, but I’d be lying if I said the ipad app wasn’t part of the reason I wanted trade in my old MacBook Pro for an iPad. There’s a handy little “finger print breadcrumb” button that is basically a history browser of the pages you’ve looked at if you’ve jumped through the magazine non-linearly. And there is a table of contents menu to browse and jump to different articles, just like you would through a print magazine.
Bookmarks
Basically, I’m very impressed by the experience of this and the thought that went into it. I love how focused the medium of magazines can get, and I think it’s pretty amazing to have access to this many publications and the experience the Libby app gives is the icing on the cake. I do still love reading print magazines and spending and afternoon in a bookstore, but when that luxury isn’t always available, this is the next best thing.
Time Tracking with Toggl and Alfred
A habit I got into when working at an ad agency was time tracking. (timesheets!) I’ve heard it said several times that people ‘just can’t make it a habit’. Knowing I was going to have to give a report of my time (kind of a deep thought) was what kept it off the back burner and in the forefront of my mind. So that is an advantage I’d say I have as far as time tracking: I’ve already kind of made it a habit.
But one thing that I think made it easier to make it a habit was the tools I found. Being able to keep my hands on the keyboard and do almost 100% of my time tracking made it a lot easier for the habit to fall into place. So, here’s my time tracking workflow that I haven’t seen too many places around the web, so I thought I’d share what works for me.
Toggl is a great time tracking service, their only flaw might be that it offers too many options. I believe they target teams and workforces so they have a lot of team tools and you can also add tags to your time entries if you want, but the only hierarchies I need are: Client > Project > Entry.
Alfred is another great tool for a Mac computer, and it really is one of those tools I feel “naked” without when I use someone else’s computer.1 One great feature it has is workflows, or plugins.2 It really makes it a build your own Swiss Army knife and the Toggl workflow someone made is really well done. I find it the right balance of control and simplicity; you can control almost every aspect of your toggl account and even view basic reports right in Alfred, but it’s not so complicated that it’s annoying to use. 3
Toggle Alfred interface
So when these two tools combine, it is pretty effortless to start and stop time entries. Once it’s installed, and set up with your account, it’s pretty quick to start and stop timers, and make new entries on existing projects. Plus, the Toggl desktop app keeps the current timer in the menu bar, so it’s always in my face if I’m tracking time or not and how long I’ve spent on the current task. The one downside of this workflow is you can’t create new clients from within the workflow, so you do have to pickup your mouse for that. But I did just learn recently that you can do all of that from within the desktop app, you don’t have to go to the web interface.
And on that note, their desktop app is pretty great. It’s very sensitive, in that, if you click anywhere in the timeline view, it assumes you want to make a new entry and is difficult to remove those blank entries, but the timeline view itself is very helpful. Not just for editing existing entries, but if I do forget to start a timer, I have the track desktop usage feature enabled and I can go back and look approximately when I started on a specific task and add entries in the past pretty easily and accurately.
So that’s what works for me to track my time, if you’re an Alfred user already and need to track your time, I can’t recommend this workflow enough.
I’ve written before about using Alfred to make editing selects much quicker.↩︎
Workflows is a paid feature of Alfred, but I got the lifetime supporter pack probably almost 10 years ago now and I think it’s worth every penny.↩︎
A side note, I found this other workflow that has toggl as well as Harvest integration, so if you use Harvest, that might be worth a look.↩︎
Companies in Maine will now have to pay to help fix the broken recycling system
Some good news to share.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to clean up and it’s a small relief to see this measure of corporate responsibility starting in these borders.
This made me smile.
I get that this is partly marketing, but I believe you can see that everyone working on the show does it because they love it; they want to be there. Kind of a rare quality these days. And I think this does deserve a look back—it’s not hard to imagine a world where this season could have horribly derailed.
And even more respect for the costume and makeup department.