Bullet journal #2
Open source Medium
Dave Winer ponders on the possibility of an open source version of the popular blogging platform Medium.
What if Medium had been designed from the start to be the Mother Node of a network of clones. The basic software would be available for installing on your own server, but if you want, there's a place you can put your document today, now, quickly, where everyone will be able to read it, now and for the foreseeable future.
— What if Medium were open source by Dave Winder
This is the kind of thing that I can get behind. I like Medium's approach to easy publishing but I dislike the fact that everything is on their network.
Exploring alternatives to GitHub
I've been a user of GitHub for a long time now. Ever since I started my career in Ruby on Rails I've had a GitHub account.
I'm looking again at alternatives to GitHub mainly out of curiosity. There's been some improvements to GitHub over the last few years and new features are gradually coming out but there are other options out there.
I did move some private repos to BitBucket a few years ago, but due to the lack of any extra features I moved these repos back. BitBucket just didn't have anything of added value that would keep me using it.
I tried GitLab a few months ago but I didn't really give it a fair go. I spent a couple of weeks using but I didn't really dig into it too much. I created my account there again to give it a try. I've been using it now for a week and I've moved a number of private repos over from GitHub. The nice thing is that as well as my repo GitLab has moved over my issue list for each repo. Another thing I don't have to worry about moving it across.
It's still early days to make a final decision on this but I've been impressed with not only what GitLab does at the moment, but the pace in which they are releasing new features.
The best thing and worst thing about GitHub is its community size. A lot of developers use only GitHub for source code hosting and although some people might see this as a good thing, it's like saying that Facebook is the only social network platform out there. Yes, there are a lot of people using GitHub but there are alternatives to it and I'm always willing to explore the alternatives to any development tool that I use.
Once I've spent another few months using GitLab I'll probably have a final decision on where I'll be hosting the bulk of source code. I won't be closing down my GitHub account if I do decide to use GitLab for hosting my source code. I still need a GitHub account for client work, but that's all it will be used for.
Time to read
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.
Comic book kind of guy
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.
Trillion Prime 27.5
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.
Slack: Necessary evil?
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 no more
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.
Subscription pricing for Day One
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