Family guy and web developer
Just as it is important to set aside time to think, it is important to block out time for reading. If you believe that such time will be available later in the day, it is likely that you are mistaken.
— Reading Time by Michael Wade
I'm slowly getting back into a lot of things in the last couple of weeks. Blogging, writing and even reading. Churning through a few books at the moment, but plans are in place to make reading a bigger habit of mine in the future.
A sobering read about the future of the planet and what climate change effects could result in in a hundred years time.
Heat is just one of a number of problems we face in the future.
Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.
— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
And the problem of pollution doesn't get any better
Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.”
— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
And finally there's the problem of the rising oceans.
Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.
— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
I've read about the recent attempts by scientists to create devices that trap and process carbon dioxide emissions but everything so far as been on a smaller scale. Reading this article on the NY mag website, I immediatley thought of the Aliens movie and the massive terraforming plant that features in that movie. Nevermind terraforming other planets, perhaps we'll have to terraform our own planet first in order to survive.
I'm not sure if Nicholas Bate is a comic books kind of guy, but I'm sure he'll make an exception for The Beatles: Yellow Submarine comic when it comes out.
Singletrack World are testing a new British built steel hardtail, the Trillion Prime 27.5.
I wish there were bikes like this 20 years ago. The mind is willing but the body is beyond the kind of shenanigans that this bike is built for.
I've been using Slack for a few years now. I use it more for work than anything else. I am part of a number of different client teams and it's through these that we do most of the day to day communication. I have to be honest it has become something of a necessary evil to have, but it is an easy way to stay in contact with clients. For clients that have only a handful of employees then I recommend that we just stay in touch with phone calls, emails and of course whatever project management tool that works best for the client.
Benjamin Pollack's post about his issues with Slack are good points and with more people turning to apps like Slack, it's worth remembering that Slack isn't a great tool and should only be used if there is a genuine need for it other than, "Hey I need this right now!".
Perhaps the greatest argument against using Slack isn't the filtering of communications or the notifications.
It's the version of Markdown that Slack uses for it's messages. It's just not Markdown.
5. Its version of Markdown is just broken
I’m going to use up an entire heading purely to say that making *foo* be bold and _foo_ be italic is covered in Leviticus 64:128 and explicitly punishable by stoning until death.
— Why I Hate Slack and You Should Too by Benjamin Pollack
What grieves me more is that there isn't a week goes by where I don't end up sending a message formatted incorrectly because Slack has it's own version of Markdown.
Slack isn't a necessary evil but teams should consider Benjamin's points before deciding if Slack is worth using.
Give me email and a phone any day of the week.
Fixie Friday has run its course. There won’t be any more scheduled Fixie Friday posts on the first Friday of the month. Instead, I’ll just be posting bikes when I see them.
Day One's change to subscription pricing model is taking some flak but I think it's a good move for them and ensures that it will be around for a long time to come.
Subscription pricing isn't new to apps, but it's on the rise and this is largely in part because upgrade prices alone for apps are not sustainable.
A great example of app pricing in my book is the Todoist app. While the Todoist app itself is free, they also have a premium subscription which really adds value what you get from using Todoist. It's subscription models like this that are the way forward. Paying for the software you use on a regular basis. In a lot of cases the pricing is very reasonable and I certainly wouldn't argue over paying between $20 and $50 per year for software that I value and use on a daily basis.
David Sparks rounds up the changing landscape of app pricing nicely.
The traditional model for productivity apps was the upgrade price, where developers released a new version every year or so and everyone paid a reduced fee upgrade price. I know the App Store has made improvements over the last few years but, having zero inside knowledge, I can’t help but feel we will never see upgrade pricing in the App Store. In the meantime expect more quality apps to go to the subscription model and, if they are apps you love (or even like), I’d encourage you to support them through the transition.
— Productivity Apps and Subscription Pricing by David Sparks
It seems that a lot of the things I'm reading online point towards long-form blogging again.
Gregory Brown sums up the change nicely in way I didn't think of.
Instead, I thought about how it might be nice to have a couple hundred blog posts rather than thousands of tweets. How it might be nice to build a few dozen deep relationships with people who read my stuff here, rather than hundreds of shallow relationships in 140 character bursts.
— Bye Twitter, Hello Blogging! by Gregory Brown
Deep relationships through blogging. I've already met a number of great people through my blog. It's about time I started writing here again to keep those ties going.
It's been a while since I took another stab at learning Vim. If you don't know what Vim is then all you need to know is that it's a major geek out text editor. Savvy?
Each time I've tried to learn Vim though I've started with an existing Vim configuration file. Getting up and running from a blank file just never appealed to me. The problem starting with another person's configuration though is that while everything is there that you need, there's a huge number of commands and shortcuts configured that in the beginning seems a rather daunting task to remember.
This time I've started with a blank slate so that every time I need to customise something in Vim I make the change in my configuration file to fix the problem and move on. Needless to say it's taken me a while to get the configuration file to a point where I would be happy doing client work with Vim as opposed to Sublime Text.
The surprising result though is that while I might be working a little slower than if I had been using Sublime Text, I'm actually learning more about Vim than I ever did before.
I'll report back in 3 months with an update to see if using Vim has stuck this time. I'm optimistic that it will this time, although I have been caved in the past.
Time for another quarterly delivery of Field Notes memo books. This time it's the Campfire edition.
There are three memo books in a set but the boys were quick to snag the "Night" covers of this set and lucky for them there was two of them. This is why in the picture above I'm only left with the "Dusk" and "Dawn" covers!
When I subscribed to Field Notes I wasn't really banking on the fact that my sons would be using them as much as they are are. Ethan is using the memo books for his golf and Drew is using them for drawing. I may have to bump up the order number next year!