For six months now I've been writing my morning pages every weekday morning. The idea of morning pages is to write three pages of longhand writing every day. Weekends are precious in our house, so until the boys are more independent in the morning I chose to just write during the week.
So far I've been mostly consistent. There has been the odd weekly break every month, and there's some days I've been too rushed to do it. I have written morning pages on more days than not over the past six months though, so I think that's quiet an accomplishment.
The tools of the exercise are a pen and notebook.
Right now I'm using a Lamy Safari fountain pen and Volant Moleskine notebooks. The Lamy is great for this exercise as I find it comfortable to hold. I choose the Volant notebooks as I wanted a notebook that would last me more than a month but still be comfortable to write in. It does the job well.
Today marks the start of the fourth notebook. I'll be reviewing my writing over the last few months to see what's fit for publishing. It's not all gold, but there's the odd gem in there, and that's exactly the whole point of this exercise for me. To get some writing in and find the stuff that's worth telling the world about.
LENKR Wooden Handlebars
I seen this very nice wallet on Tools and Toys and the first thing I thought was, "There's no place to slide in a small pen like my Fisher".
Complete. Pen. Snob.
Update: I stand corrected. There is one!
Anyone got any pointers to finding topics to blog about from a web dev perspective?
Too Late for Twitter?
I love this idea of paying a subscription fee for using Twitter, but I fear that it might be too late for Twitter.
Before you scream at me to tell me I’m a dope for suggesting this to Twitter, let me give you this tease: Like anything in this world, in the most efficient economies, you get what you pay for. There’s a bright side in paying and that’s a better user experience. It’s why there are so many apps in the Apple Store that have a regular version, which you get for free, and a Pro version, which you pay for.
— My $4.5 Billion Gift To Twitter by Darren Rovell
I've not been a fan of the whole Twitter experience since signing up again and I'm getting little in value from it. This is largely because the people I follow (who were regular tweeters in the past) are no longer that active. There are some benefits, but most days I never check my timeline and instead steer towards a couple of curated lists I have.
The Pitfall of Free Services
There's little doubt that the world wants free online services. Darren Rovell's poll on Twitter might not be completely unbiased as it was conducted on Twitter, but the results of the poll are clear. People want free stuff.
When it comes to online services and apps, I tend to favour those that come with subscription plans or a one-off cost for a license. Why? Well, because I want to support the team behind the software and the money they get from me helps towards keeping that service alive and running.
The pitfall of a free service though is that once you've dug that pit and put a sign up saying it's "It's free!", everyone wants to jump in. It then becomes hard to get those people back out and into paying for the service.
There are exceptions to this rule, such as companies that offered the right incentives to get customers to pay or services that rely on ads to subsidise the free service. These are the exceptions though and success in their service doesn't means that others using the same method will be successful as well.
Traditional businesses (retail e.g.) never give anything away for free. You always pay for something. It's simple numbers. If you want something you have to pay for it. More and more online services are realising this and bootstrapping their service from the beginning. It's good to see. I just wish more of the services that I love to use online would have stayed clear of the "It's free" pitfall from the beginning.
With current trends towards front end frameworks and micro-services, it's refreshing to see advice that goes against these trends in software development. Applies to more than just software development as well you know.
When starting an application your goal should be to ship a MVP (minimum viable product) as fast as reasonably possible while still maintaining quality. To help make that successful you need to be minimal. Evaluate if you really need to start with a front-end framework or if you can get by with static HTML and JavaScript where needed. Build a monolith instead of starting with microservices to avoid the unnecessary overhead that affects development, infrastructure, and team productivity. In every situation you encounter, ask yourself if what you’re trying to do is really necessary.
— Start Simple by Thoughtbot
More Raspberry Pi Goodies
The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 3 and now Western Digital's new dedicated PiDrive makes the argument for buying a couple of Pi 3s even more compelling.
The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to "reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.
— Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi by arstechnica