Everybody knows that Pablo Picasso was well known for his super-minimalist studio. And that very expensive notebook he wrote his grocery list in. And who can forget his visionary writings like 29 Ways To Clean A Paintbrush For Under $10?
Wait, he wasn’t known for that?
What made him a good artist then? Oh yeah. He made things.
I stumbled across MinimalistMac today, a site I’m sure I remember reading years ago. Its articles and links romaticise the ideology of broad desks, blank computer desktops, and utilities that make it easier to do things. A clean, organised workspace definitely has a good impact on the psyche, and it’s maybe this reason that people read sites like MinimalistMac: they provide a view of creative zen.
Here’s my argument: Why must the writers of these sites so happily sing the priases of Simple™ note-taking applications, to-do list managers and text editors? The idea of simplicity has transformed from a personal ideal to a marketable tag-line, pushed on every person that product is advertised to. Everyone wants to work Simply™, right?
Now, I’m not bashing software developers. It’s important to state when your aim is to produce a simple tool, and these tools are often indispensible to the right people. There’s not a minute that goes by that I don’t use Quicksilver, because I’m a complete keyboard shortcut junkie. That’s the critical part: simple tools often only fit certain people.
When such software is marketed to the wrong people, it becomes a sap on your attention, time and energy. They become extra problems. But here’s the kicker that keeps people coming back time and time again: they’re easy to solve. Simple! Productive!
I could happily sit here all day, tagging each and every one of my emails from the past seven years. Do I need tags for my email? Someone probably does, but I don’t. ‘Prouctivity’, in this sense, isn’t necessarily productive.
Does any of this sound familiar? it should do, because it doesn’t just apply to $20 to-do list managers.
I’m having trouble starting this essay, but it’s so much easier to go make a cup of coffee, or eat something.
I’m dreading making this phone call, but while I’m here, I’ll check my email.
Hey, this article is really inspiring me to make things – I better head over to Twitter and mention it!
(Not that I’d mind the last one, of course.)
What I’m asking of you: Next time you’re tempted by something promising ‘simplicity’ and ‘increased productivity’, stop and think: Does it really deserve your time? Does it have the right to divert your attention from what’s more important? A clean desk is nice, as is a crisp new notebook, but challenge it. Control your time and energy in ways that help you make things.
I know, it’s hard to resist temptation. It’s an uphil sprint sometimes to get to starting, but when you get there? It’s all downhill, I promise.
Back in 2004, Ben Tucker created OpenPodcast.org. The idea: Let anybody contribute to a community-run podcast; anything that gets sent in, goes out to the world.
This was one of the first steps to making podcasting a feasible platform for regular people. At the time, ‘podcasting’ was new, hacky, and took a level of technical understanding to implement. OpenPodcast.org served as a platform for content producers, back when implementing the system yourself was difficult.
I found OpenPodcast.org in 2005, and I was blown away. Every morning, hours of audio would just turn up: rambling telephone monologues (which became the basis for many early audio-blogs), independent music, as well as produced shows like the Sound-A-Day Podcast. I was experiencing a whole new world of content, thanks to this free, unmoderated platform.
In 2006, OpenPodcast.org went offline. It simply disappeared. Devoid of the service it provided, many producers moved to Blogger and Feedburner, which were making podcasting simpler. Content found its new home, as well as a better prospect for being found amid the sea of new media.
The death of OpenPodcast.org left the internet devoid of one particular service, though: a constant, always-on tuner for the audible world. Open, centralised platforms like OpenPodcast.org allowed for an intimate view into people’s everyday lives, from all across the world, in one place.
What’s replaced it? I would say AudioBoo.fm. It’s the only thing to fit the bill since OpenPodcast.org’s demise, allowing people to add a slice of their life to a collective pool. While slightly UK-biased in its active user base, it is truly a successor to the type of service OpenPodcast.org delivered almost five years ago.
In an effort to start tracking my daily word count, I wrote this script. It checks in a folder for changes to the word count of text files since it was last updated. I have the script update the word count nightly, using a cron job.
Get It
The script can be found on pastebin, or as a zipped Python file here.
Usage
In the first few lines of the script, two variables are set:
default_path: Set this to the path to check for updates. The script recurses into sub-directories.
default_threshold: This classifies what is deemed ‘recent’, and by default is within the last day (timedelta(day=1)). This is defined as a Python timedelta object, which is documented here. You can replace day=1 with other arguments, like day=2 or week=1. The script currently works with dates, not times, so things like hour=1 will not work properly.
Once configured, the current word count of recent files (within default_threshold), compared to any previous record (created using the update command), can be found by running wc.py with no arguments. A simple number-only output can be achieved by running wc.py raw.
The word count can be “updated” by running wc.py update. This makes a record of the word count of any recently modified files, in a file called .wordcount, in the default directory. It makes sense to set up a cron job or task to do this in line with the default_threshold value.
It is also important to note that the script will only perform word counts on text files (.txt). It theoretically supports any other plain-text files, but currently filters by file extension.
I hope this first version of the script is at the least a useful example of Python’s simpler operations, as well as Pickle, the module which allows objects to be written as binary files.
As my first experiment with the Python programming language, I made a script that helps me look at things in my todo.txt file.
Even if you don’t know Python, this should be pretty easy to follow. I’ll step through it with you!
#!/usr/bin/env python
#Filename: todo.py
# A script to do things with todo.txt
These lines are just housekeeping. We’re saying where Python is on the system and what we’re here to do.
import os
import sys
import re
Bringing in a few things to help us do things. os helps us get the location of the todo.txt file, sys allows us to read command line arguments, and re lets us do regular expressions.
One of these days I’ll make a write-up about my own personal backup solution, but today I came across an interesting command in the OS X terminal that should be of benefit to a lot of tech-savvy Mac users.
For my personal backups, I have a shell script I run daily to take care of everything. The script outputs text as it does its backup, so that once it’s done, I can see if it had any problems. This works great, until you start to use cron jobs.
Cron jobs are a powerful part of a UNIX system, similar to Tasks in Windows. The idea is that you can set a certain terminal command to run at a specific time, at certain intervals, in numeric ranges, and all sorts. To me, this seems like a great way to automate my backup system.
The problem is, cron jobs are part of the system’s background processing. You don’t see it. So, if I set up my backup script to run, say, at three in the morning, I have no clue if it ran or not without checking my log files. Ideally what I would want is to open up the Terminal.app, and have that run the script, rather than cron.
So how do you do this? With the open command.
open is useful for lots of jobs in the terminal. All it does is it opens the specified file in the default application, as chosen by Mac OS X. For example, a command like this:
> open ~/todo.txt
would open my todo.txt file in the default text editor, such as TextEdit or TextMate.
But here’s the ninja move: you can use the -a flag to specify the application. So, if I want to open up my backup script in the terminal, I tell cron to run this command:
> open -a /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app ~/backup.sh
So now, rather than running silently in the background, an instance of Terminal.app pops open, and starts running backup.sh. Just what I wanted. Thanks OS X!
