A Bag of Holding

Michael Lopp has a big post about his new backpack:

My bag needs to walk a delicate line between form and function. I need it to elegantly contain my various nerd crap, but I don’t need to broadcast to the world that, yes, not only am I sporting my nerd gear, I also have a back-up of the aforementioned gear because I’ve built in redundancy. That’s how I roll. I’m a nerd.

He’s using a Tom Bihn Smart Alec, which looks very nice. I’ve always used backpacks, having never been able to bring myself to go the way of the manpurse. I have a couple backpacks in rotation now, but I don’t really love any of them. I’ve been thinking about investing in a Goruck, but after reading Rands’ post, I’ll be giving the Smart Alec some thought as well.

Decision Fatigue

John Tierney, writing about decision fatigue for the New York Times:

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice.

Via Justin Blanton

J. Eddie Smith Reviews the Kindle Touch

J. Eddie Smith, IV reviews the Kindle Touch, with a particular focus on how the experience differs from iOS:

I’m not saying the iPad fails as an e-reader. Honestly, it revolutionized how I read by being the first e-reader I ever took seriously. I’ve read at least a dozen books on it in the last two years.

But when it comes to reading longer form content (books), the Kindle Touch has made me realize that the absence of features in an e-reader is a feature itself.

I talked about why I own both a Kindle and an iPad in my $79 Kindle review, and I fully agree with Eddie’s points.

"Rote Simplicity"

Frank Chimero:

I’m skeptical of rote simplicity. It’s good for the people making digital tools to simplify their job and make one tiny widget, but a swarm of tools that all do one tiny thing well is still a complex system for the user to manage.

Ben Brooks offered a few thoughts about this, too.

I love apps that do “one thing well”, but as Ben points out, it’d be a pain to have to open 45 apps to do 45 different tasks. But I also can’t imagine having 45 different tasks to do, let alone needing an app to complete each one.

Looking at my iPhone home screen, I feel I’ve pared my apps down to the essentials. While the iPhone is capable of performing thousands of different tasks, I choose to use mine only for those that are most important to me. In fact, I can say I mainly use my iPhone for reading, writing, and capturing, in addition to communication. I could use it for a ton of other things, but these are the most important. I think that’s why my iPhone only has two to three pages of apps.

For me, it comes down to simplifying my priorities rather than only using simple apps. Ten pages of “one thing well” apps is a complex setup. Rather, I say be judicious in determining what you actually need to be able to do, and then choose the apps that meet those needs most effectively.

Use, Not Utilize

Randy Murray:

Use.

Use is the word you want.

Everything You Need

Brett Kelly:

Sitting here at my desk looking at my computer, I realized something. All of the tools I need to do any number of creative, world-changing things are literally right here in front of me.

The Secret Rule to Changing Anything

Leo Babauta offers the secret rule of changing anything:

When we have urges to eat something we know is bad for us, we often give in. But is it that simple? The truth is that our mind is actually rationalizing why we should just eat that cake, why it’s too hard to not eat it, why it isn’t that bad to eat it. It asks why we’re putting ourselves through pain, why can’t we let ourselves just live, and don’t we deserve that treat?

All of this happens without our noticing, usually. It’s quiet, in the background of our consciousness, but it’s there. And it’s incredibly powerful. It’s even more powerful when we’re not aware it’s happening.

David Foster Wallace's Syllabus

Katie Roiphe of Slate.com has an article about David Foster Wallace’s extraordinary syllabus:

If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ‘because the ideas are good’ or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.

Syllabuses have always intrigued me because of how revealing they can be. Although, I usually found professors to be much scarier in their syllabuses than they were in person. English professors, anyway.

Via Daring Fireball

Whatever Works for You

Marco Arment:

You should use whatever works for you. And I no longer have the patience or hubris to convince you what that should be. All I can offer is one data point: what I use, and how it works for me.

The Scratch Space

I bought a white legal pad from Office Depot the other day, and it’s taken up residence next to my MacBook Pro, along with a black Pilot G-2 0.38mm gel ink pen.

Despite being used to the 0.7mm, I switched to the 0.38 upon Shawn Blanc’s recommendation, thinking the finer point might help my atrocious handwriting. It doesn’t. But I like it, and while I’m not sure if it’s better than the 0.7, I think the finer point gives me slightly better control. The 0.38 has a scratchier feel to it, which is foreign, yet satisfying. Time will tell which prevails.

I bought the legal pad because I’ve been having the urge to write things down while I’m at my computer: to-dos, thoughts, ideas, outlines, etc. I try to use my iPhone and iPad to take notes and capture things because it cuts down on clutter, but sometimes it feels better to scrawl something on paper. So now I have a legal pad here on my right. I like it.

The scratch space has already proven itself to be very practical, particularly since I’ve started using it to plan out my day. I was getting depressed because I started falling into the habit of completely wasting my days off. My Mondays, for example, are twelve-hour affairs, but my Tuesdays are mostly free. Amidst the nonstop Monday action, I always found myself wishing I had time to do this and that. I’d tell myself, “Oh, I can do that tomorrow.” But when tomorrow showed up, I usually had no idea where to start or what to do first, so I ended up getting distracted by something. Suddenly it’s dinnertime, and I’ve gotten nothing accomplished. Not good for morale.

So I started planning out my day the night before, like so. It works. Instead of wondering what I should be doing with myself when I wake up, it’s right there in front of me. The list inspires me to action. At the end of the day, I can see what I accomplished. And it’s damn satisfying to cross things off with my shiny new Pilot G-2 0.38mm.

We’ll see how the scratch space evolves, but I plan on covering every inch of the page with ink before throwing the sheet out. There’s a kind of romanticism to filling a page with your brain’s miscellanea. I can write down anything I want, no matter how trivial or earth-shattering. Getting things out of your head and onto paper is good. It keeps your brain from getting overwhelmed and you from having a breakdown. That’s worth adding a third item to my desk.

"We are star stuff."

Video: An out-of-character Stephen Colbert interviews astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Here’s Tyson around the 24 minute mark:

Atoms and molecules in your body are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of stars that manufactured these elements over its lifespan, went unstable on death, exploding its enriched guts across the galaxy, scattering it into gas clouds that would ultimately collapse and make a star and have the right ingredients to make planets and people. Which means we are a part of this universe… not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us.

[…]

We knew that we are star stuff. We knew that we are star dust at the middle of the 20th century. That connects us to the universe like no other fact. That’s beautiful.

Via Kottke

Perfectionism as Practice

Cal Newport discusses the difference between controlled and pathological perfectionism:

The important part of my process — the part that separates this obsessiveness with the pathological variety — is that when my interval is done, I stop. Inevitably, I’m still well short of an ideal output, but what matters to me is not this specific outcome, but instead the striving for perfection and the deliberate practice this generates.

In other words, I want to keep getting better, not necessarily make this particular project the best thing ever.

Really, really good stuff.

Black Friday

Dan Bahls on Black Friday:

Thanksgiving is a one of our better ideas. We, theoretically, reflect on how fortunate we are to have what we have. The day after Thanksgiving would be a great day to start thinking how we might start addressing wrongs perpetuated on anybody trampled in the process of putting together the comfort and security we are so thankful for. Instead, we’ve turned it into a symbolic date for acquiring shinier objects in anticipation of how we can best miss the point of our next major holiday. Perhaps worse, it infects Thanksgiving itself, turning the holiday into, effectively, a paean to culinary gluttony in preparation for commercial gluttony.

Via Marco Arment

Get Back On Track

Leo Babauta has some advice for getting back on track after your holiday gluttony:

I indulge myself nearly every holiday, and feel guilty too — for about a minute. Then I realize that guilt does nothing to get me fitter. I realize the only thing that will get me fitter is eating healthy today — yesterday doesn’t matter — and being active and working out today.

I know I needed to hear this after my four-day weekend of living like a ravenous sloth. Fortunately, we have complete control over when and where we get back on the path, and right now sounds awesome.

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope you found yourself in pleasant company yesterday, and I hope you didn't kill anyone for a television today.

I Am My Settings

Devir Kahan on the issue of choice and stress:

There is a certain bliss when you don’t have to make a choice. Or more specifically, when a choice is made for you. Most all of our stress comes from having to make choices, so why not take some of that stress away? Well, because having choices made for us can result in some bad choices, and ones we don’t agree with. I need to be able to choose and configure certain things just how I like them.

I totally agree. Choice is a source of stress, perhaps not in a harmful way, but in a this-is-making-me-hesitate sort of way. But really that hesitation evidences who and what I am, which is awesomely nerdy.

When it comes to app settings, I’m usually pretty good with the “set it and forget it” strategy. In fact, the first thing I usually do upon installing a new app is go through its preferences, tweaking them as I see fit. Once the app is configured to my liking, I don’t revisit the settings unless additional preferences are added via an update. Something like buying a stick of deodorant, however, can take me upwards of ten minutes, even though it doesn’t matter at all which scent I choose. (Must be the fear of smelling like the wrong kind of tree.)

As a nerd, I like to fiddle. I like settings and preferences. Like Devir says, customization allows me to make things my own. People may complain about how iOS’s closed system isn’t customizable like Android’s in the sense that you can’t change how the icons or the operating system looks. But I feel my iPhone is so uniquely my iPhone because of the apps that reside on my home screen, the apps I’ve chosen to put there. These apps, with their respective qualities, values, and features, define me. OmniFocus represents my love for GTD; Twitterrific my love for simplicity; Reeder my love for quality writing; Instacast my love for nerdy podcasts; Music my love for eclectic artists; Notesy my love for capturing random thoughts and ideas.

I guess my point is that my passion for tinkering — for making little choices — allows me to arrive at a place that suits me best. My former girlfriend once made a comment while I was driving, something along the lines of, “There’s a reason for everything you do, isn’t there?” And yes, that’s exactly it. There’s a reason why I keep my sunglasses in the overhead compartment in my car instead of in my center console. There’s a reason why I use a cassette adapter to listen to my iPod, rather than an FM transmitter. There’s a reason why Reeder is on my home screen, but Instapaper isn’t, even though I love both.

The reason is I’ve tried — or at least considered — the alternatives and, in doing so, have determined what’s best for me. Some people can’t be bothered with changing fonts or scrolling through settings, but for me, those few minutes are well spent because they ultimately allow me to remove friction from my experience. Choice is a wonderful thing because it gives me control. As long as the choices don’t overwhelm and paralyze me (as in the case of deodorant), I find joy in making these little decisions; they’re a product of my identity.

Squandering Life-Changing Events

Tyler Tervooren, writing for The Art of Manliness, asks what man hasn’t squandered a life-changing event?

Without a doubt, a truly life-changing event can take a man’s dreams and make them a reality in rather short order. The problem, of course, is that you get no control over these things. You have no say in when an event like this will come, so instead, you wait impatiently for one to arrive, all the while praying that it never actually occurs.

But in the meantime while we wait for these life-changing events, we’re squandering many smaller ones every day.

Definitely warrants multiple readings.

Six Life Focuses

Colin Wright explains his six life focuses:

To that end, I aim to make sure that I’m always on the path to greater self-reliance, and as a result, self-confidence, so that other people and things in my life can be happy additions — rather than desperately sought-after saviors — to my lifestyle.

I share all six.

The Marketing of Conspiracy Theories

Seth Godin on the marketing of conspiracy theories:

People don’t embrace them because they’re true, they embrace them because they are more satisfying, they show agency and intent, and they provide a level of solace by implying external causes to significant events.

What Should You Do If Someone Puts a Gun to Your Head?

Justin Freeman’s very detailed advice on what you should do if someone puts a gun to your head, including robbery, hostage, and kidnapping scenarios:

No two gunpoint situations are alike, and they will all be very dynamic situations. My advice is to remain calm, be as compliant as you can, be aware of your surroundings, and do what you need to in order to survive. But the obvious best case scenario is keeping yourself out of the situation that put you on the business end of a firearm.

Via Ben Brooks