Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Understanding other people is a tall order because everybody is different—but that’s what makes life worthwhile: our time on this planet would be mundane if we all had the same personalities, desires, values, and beliefs. And yet, even with our myriad distinctions, we all want the same things out of life: happiness, purpose, fulfilment.

Understanding Others by The Minimalists

Today it seems too many people are quick to play the "I'm right, you're wrong" card. The Internet certainly doesn't make it any easier.

Last week I was toying with the idea of switching from Todoist to Wunderlist. The quick path out was to switch to Wunderlist and start afresh. After a couple of hours though, I realised that even though Wunderlist is a perfectly good task manager, I missed the simple, clean interface of Todoist. I missed the Karma feature that let me do weekly reviews and whole host of other nice features that I had become accustomed to.

The problem wasn't the task manager itself, it was because I allowed my task manager to become too complicated. In the last three months my Todoist account has become cesspool of overdue tasks, dead projects and a garbage pile of labels.

I quickly switched back to Todoist and cleared everything out of my Todoist account. I removed all tasks, labels and projects. Having a blank slate to start with meant that I could simplify my Todoist account and start again with just the essentials. The process of clearing out my task manager was exactly what I needed. I just didn't see it until I looked at the pristine list of first tasks in Wunderlist.

Starting afresh with your task manager might seem daunting at first if you've invested time and energy into getting the right workflow for yourself. I thought I had a good workflow but in fact it was just a mess of confusion and it left me being rather unproductive towards the end of last year. Simplifying my task manager by starting with a clean slate means I can get back to the process of finding out what works again and ensuring that it stays that way.

Old ...

... but certainly not busted. Marco Arment takes a look at why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro is still a sought after purchase.

Despite the low-resolution screen, slow hard drives, very little RAM, and CPUs that were middling even in 2012, it’s an open secret among Apple employees that the “101” still sells surprisingly well — to a nearly tragic degree, given its age and mediocrity.

Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells by Marco Arment

Amazing that even after 3 years, this is still available to buy.

I'll admit I do love getting fresh new hardware, but the recent shift to hardware that prevents consumers from upgrading on their own is annoying. Yes, the new MacBooks are crazy thin, but I'd definitely trade for a thicker MacBook so that I can upgrade the memory and hard disk on my own.

There’s a lotta love out the for Tom Coughlin. Shame his coaching career didn’t end on a high. Still though, 2 SB wins.

Jen and Drew are napping, Ethan is playing Star Wars Battlefront and I’m working. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Photograph of handwritten notes

Today's commonplace entry courtesy of Nicholas Bate's learning tips.

My Kaweco fountain pen was quite nice to write with but I might downsize the nib in the future.

And yes, the cramped refers to my hand. Definitely not use to writing notes like this.

The Website Obesity Crisis

Maciej Cegłowski, the creator of Pinboard, highlights the growing obesity of the web and what can be done to improve it.

Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and not turn it into another medium for consumption, like we have so many examples of already.

Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster.

The Website Obesity Crisis by Maciej Cegłowski

Having read this I've just checked this site and I'm glad to say that the index page and a few of the longer form posts are definitely smaller than a major work of Russian literature.