Matthew Lang

I’m typing this on my new Keychron K6 keyboard. It is a Christmas present from my wife, and I love using it.

This morning I decided to try and pair it up with my work laptop, a Windows laptop. It paired up beautifully. It even allows you to switch to a Windows/Android mode to make the key mappings better for those modifier keys on either side of the space bar. Now I can sit the one keyboard on my desk and switch my two laptops when I need to.

I have been looking at mechanical keyboards for a few years now, and while I have always considered getting one, I always put it off as I wasn’t sure what keyboard to get, what switches to select and what features would be supported. In the run-up to Christmas, though, my wife suggested that I make the jump and get one and call it a Christmas present from her. I did. And now, having used the keyboard every day for the last few weeks, there’s a thought running through my head.

I should have done this years ago.

How many times have you muttered those words? You realise that there’s a better way for you going forward, and you regret not doing it in the past.

You can end up quickly kicking yourself when you realise this. You end up looking back, wondering what would things be like now if you did that one thing years ago.

A change of your keyboard seems trivial, but it can happen with any change you make. You are cutting out caffeine at night, going for a walk every day, or reading a book at night instead of watching television. 

There’s another way of looking at this, though.

What if you never made the change to begin with, and you just kept plodding on, having never made the change?

At least now, having made the change, I know that I’ve made a change for the better. And it’s better to have made that change than never at all.

It’s world Sketchnote day today! A chance for the sketchnoting community to celebrate this under-appreciated form of note-taking.

I first encountered sketchnoting through Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes. I found that sketchnotes provided a way of organising visual notes more linearly.

Before I started using sketchnotes, though, I used mind maps. I’ve been a user of mind maps for almost three decades now. When I was studying for my exams in high school, my uncle introduced me to mind mapping. I used them extensively while studying. I can still remember the epic four-page mind maps I created for each topic.

Mind maps, like sketchnotes, are visual. However, unlike sketchnotes, they are organised radially with a central topic in the middle and sub-topics emitting out like spokes on a bike.

One minor gripe with mind mapping is that it is always difficult to gauge how much space you need for the final mind map. Sub-topics can grow out from their designated areas on the page, and despite having some idea of how much space you need, I always found that I ran out of room.

With sketchnotes, though, it allows you to be more linear with arranging your notes. Although sketchnotes on a topic might cover a couple of pages or more, they are linear, making for little wasted space and is easier to read.

I still use mind maps on the odd occasion for outlining or doing a brain dump, but for taking notes, I use sketchnotes. I also keep a log of the events of the day using sketchnotes. I call this my minilog. I keep it in a series of Field Notes notebooks.

After a long spell of not sketchnoting, I’m happy to say that over the last few months, I back to using it daily again and enjoying it over the previous few months.

You can use any notebook and pen combination for sketchnoting, but after a few trials with different notebooks and pens, I found the following selections good for my sketchnotes.

• Paper Mate Flair medium felt pen
• Faber Castell Pitt Artist pen
• Uni Pin Fine Line pen
• Zebra Double Ended Midliners pens (for highlighting and colouring)
• Any Field Notes pocket-sized notebook, preferably with the blank or dotted paper
• Dingbats A5 notebook

I also have two Sketchnote Ideabooks, but I haven’t taken these out of the wrapper yet. I want to use them, but I just haven’t got around to them yet.

If you want to get started on sketchnoting, check out Mike Rohde’s sketchnote page. It has lots of free material to get you started. If you need some inspiration, there are also many examples of other people’s sketchnotes on Twitter.

Over the weekend, I started reviewing my Feedbin account to reduce the number of unread items I see daily. Recently, I’ve noticed that I check my Feedbin account less regularly. I used to go through it a handful of times a day, now not so much. It’s not that there isn’t anything interesting there to read. There always is. I think it’s because I am scanning more of the headlines and just starring what I find interesting.

I’m also concerned by the number of high volume feeds that I subscribe to — Hacker News, Lobsters and Dev.to to mention a few. Also, I have been trying out using Feedbin to read some Twitter content. Neither of these plans is working out for me.

While perfectly manageable to use in Feedbin, the high volume feeds are becoming less and less of a required scan through daily. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve moved the Hacker News and Lobster feeds to my daily newsletter that I created using Mailbrew. Scanning the last few recent items is easier to read than continually checking through the day.

As for Twitter, I think I’ll stop reading it through Feedbin. Again, Feedbin does a great job of making Twitter work, and the ability to subscribe to individual accounts and lists is excellent. It’s perfectly usable. In my case, though, I think I would instead check Twitter myself a couple of times a day. I don’t need to see everything from the Twitter accounts and lists that I have added to Feedbin, so this week, I’ll remove these sources from my Feedbin account.

It seems an age since I have discovered many new websites and added them to Feedbin. The last time I said anything to my Feedbin account, it was a series of .NET development blogs that I thought would be useful for work. Aside from that, there’s hasn’t been much else.

Please let me know if anyone has any recommendations for interesting websites that I can subscribe to, then please let me know.

In the last few years, I have realised that there’s no best time to start a new habit. The critical thing to remember is that anytime is the best time to create a new routine.

I started keeping a small notebook and filled it with sketch notes of things that happened during the day. I started doing this at the start of December. The plan was to get to the end of the week without missing a day. I managed that quickly enough. The next goal was to get to the end of the notebook without missing a day. I managed that a few days before Christmas. I kept going, and today I hit the halfway point of my second notebook doing this.

Now, I don’t doubt I wouldn’t have managed the same exercise had I started on the first of January, but starting on the first of December allowed me a bit of time to get used to the habit and build it up during a time when I knew I would have many distractions. Had I started this exercise on the first of January, I would have had to contend with the kids being off school, taking the decorations down for Christmas and getting the kids ready to go back to school. Chances are, I would have missed one day. 

The point to this is that there’s no point in waiting for the right time to start a new habit. Why wait until New Year when you can start something in December? Why wait until Monday when you can start something on Friday?

There’s no single best to start a new habit. Anytime is the best time to start.

I’ve been trying to re-organise my Twitter following into a few different lists, but I wanted to see at a glance who’s on that list, so I put together a Ruby script that gets the profile pic for each user on a list and creates an image from it.

I finally got something working that offers a little bit of flexibility when putting the profile pics on the image. It looks pretty good, but it could still do with some improvements. At the moment, I have to pass in an array of the list member’s usernames for it to work.

Ideally, you would supply the list id on Twitter, and the script would look up the list members on its own. Still, I’m happy with the end result from tonight’s coding session.

You can see the end result on my All things analog Twitter list.