The Kindle is Amazon’s e-book reader, gifted with an e-ink display and (initially) EV-DO connectivity:

Resources:

Date	Link	Notes
2010
Jul 28	New Amazon Kindle announced: $139 WiFi-only version and $189 3G model available August 27th in the US and UK	Looks very good. I’m going to wait and see what people say about the browser.
Jul 20	Kindle Sales Triple	Impressive.
Jul 07	Amazon’s graphite Kindle DX now shipping	Must… hide… credit card.
Jul 02	E Ink explains the new Pearl display used in the updated Kindle DX	Hmmm.
Jul 01	Graphite Kindle DX coming July 7th for $379, now available for pre-order	Graphite. Hmm.
	Amazon cuts the giant Kindle DX price to $379 from $489 and includes better-contrast display. Still a niche tool comp…	Now this is interesting…
Jun 30	Kindle’s 70% Solution	With delivery costs. Hmm.
Jun 21	Amazon’s Kindle conveniently falls to $189, Nook looks stunned and bitter	Makes it a lot more interesting.
Jun 15	Kindle 2.5 firmware now available for keepsies	Took them long enough.
Jun 10	Kindle 2.5.2 firmware available for manual update, but only for international types	For international devices only.
Jun 03	Kindle 2.5 update pushed back a few weeks for some ‘small adjustments’	Probably some teething issues.
May 31	Slim Kindle ‘Shasta’ to be first with WiFi?	Makes a lot of sense, and will likely push down the device price.
May 29	Amazon Kindle slimming down in August?	Would help if it was more widely available.
May 24	Amazon’s Kindle 2.5 software update begins to roll out	Interesting.
May 18	Kindle for Android	Worth looking into.
May 07	Kindle’s social networking-friendly 2.5 update gets an early preview	A bit more detail.
	Kindle 2.5 hands on: social networks, passwords, and more	I have to wonder how far they want to take this.
Apr 29	Kindle version 2.5 update gets Facebooked and Twitterized	A social Kindle?
Apr 22	Kindle officially going on sale at Target on April 25	Now this is interesting… I wonder if they’ll do an European retail deal with the likes of FNAC…
Jan 21	Amazon Opens Kindle to Developers, Changes Royalties	They saw the freight train coming.
Feb 08	More Authors Signing Exclusive Kindle Deals
Jan 20	Amazon hikes Kindle royalties to 70%, with a catch
	Amazon to start paying 70 percent royalties on Kindle books that play by its rules
Jan 06	Amazon Kindle DX with global wireless: ships January 19th for $489	I keep wondering what’s keeping them from shipping these babies from the UK or Germany…
2009
Dec 27	Kindle most gifted item in Amazon’s history, e-books outsell physical tomes on Christmas Day	Hardly a surprise.
Dec 25	Amazon Kindle gets its DRM stripped	Predictable.
Dec 23	Hackers break Amazon’s Kindle DRM	unswindle is already getting popular…
Dec 07	Amazon beefing up Kindle’s functionality for vision-impared users as B&N’s Nook stays silent	Seems like a logical step forward,
Dec 06	Questions for Jeff Bezos	48 e-copies for each 100 sold… Not bad.
Nov 30	Kindle is the biggest selling item on Amazon, bests sliced bread	I wonder if it sells better than whole wheat bread.
Nov 26	Kindle 2 finally gets native PDF support, screen rotation	A lot more info on the updates.
Nov 25	Amazon promises update to better ‘organize Kindle libraries’	I suppose they expect to have people buy hundreds of books.
Nov 25	Kindle 2.3 software update available, generation 1 owners need not apply	I’m still waiting for a completely European DX edition.
Nov 25	Kindle firmware update promises 85 percent battery boost, native PDF reader	Okay, so there was something clearly wrong with power management after all… Nevermind PDF support (which ought to have been there all along), I’ve always found it weird that my friends with a Kindle complained about battery life…
Nov 12	Will Amazon’s Kindle Software Kill the Kindle Hardware?	No. I sometimes wonder if jkOnTheRun was added to the GigaOm network just to ask obvious questions and grab page-views by replying to them at length, but that may be just my cynicism creeping up on me.
Nov 11	Amazon Kindle for PC: Now delivering books to your desktop	US-only. How quaint.
	Kindle for PC adds flexibility, but not a whole lot more	Summary: not worth the trouble.
Oct 24	Kindle software coming to Mac OS X	I’m frankly curious, but use too many computers for comfort and, given the issues about international pricing, won’t spend a dime over what a regular Amazon purchase would cost me.
Oct 23	Amazon Kindle for PC available ‘soonish’	Not that I expect this to be as useful as the mobile versions, but it’s an interesting twist.
	Amazon Hobbles Features For International Kindle	The bit about their delivering content without any photos just has to be a bug – otherwise, they’re just killing their own product.
Oct 22	Amazon’s international Kindle surprises owners with $20 refund, limited web browsing	So they’re coming to their senses – to some extent. Let’s see if the international edition of the DX will have proper browsing, otherwise I’ll certainly go for the burgeoning competition…
Oct 21	Who Named the Kindle (and Why)?(and-Why)	Interesting.
Oct 14	International Kindle won’t let you use terrible web browser overseas	I wonder if they will change this if they do a decent Euro version
Oct 9	Amazon confirms international Kindle DX is on the way too	A lot more interesting. Now they only have to make the pricing more sensible.
Oct 7	Kindle now $259, available worldwide with wireless delivery	I’ll wait for the DX and full integration with the UK store…
	Amazon Cuts Kindle Price, Offers Internation Edition
Oct 1	Kindle coming to the UK in October? Amazon might just tell us next week	Of course they will. It’s been brewing for months.
Jul 24	Jeff Bezos issues humble apology over pulled Kindle title	Might not be enough to save face, though.
Jun 19	Amazon Kindle DX Review	Bigger. Faster. Stronger. Worse keyboard.
May 25	Kindle formatting for web geeks	Some interesting notes on how it handles HTML markup.
May 7	Dallas Morning News To Senate: Amazon Kindle Is Not A Business Model For Newspapers	Me, I like their business model.
May 6	The Kindle Lets Amazon Make a Lot From the Few”	The ARPU from Kindle users must be amazing.
	Amazon Kindle DX announced: $489, ships this summer	Includes a gallery.
	Amazon Kindle DX first hands-on	Not that exciting.
	Amazon supersizes Kindle for textbooks, newspapers	No Wi-Fi, no expansion, and I wonder why it doesn’t have a 2-up mode when rotated, but the PDF support is a nice add-on.
May 1	Informal poll suggests nearly 70% of Kindle owners are over 40	Strange. Here’s a copy of the graph:
Apr 22	iSuppli: $359 Kindle 2 costs $185 to build, Whispernet says shhh	The overall value seems about right, although the Novatel module price is for a fairly high-volume tier
Mar 9	Kindle 2 Usability Review	Jakob Nielsen weighs in.
Feb 28	Amazon Gives In To Ridiculous Authors Guild Claim: Allows Authors To Block Text-To-Speech	Just sad. But the enlightened ones won’t be stupid and stingy.
	Amazon sorta capitulates, will let publishers decide text-to-speech availability
	Amazon Caves On Kindle 2 Text-To-Speech
Feb 26	Evolution yields revolution: the Kindle 2	Pretty thorough review.
	Why Kindle 2’s Screen Took 12 Years and $150 Million	Interesting discussion regarding this interview on E-ink.
	Amazon Kindle 2 review	Nice gallery and close-up shots.
Feb 25	Kindle‚Äôs Text to Speech Under Fire	And it just goes on and on…
	Further signs point to an international Kindle	Now this is a lot more interesting…
Feb 24	Kindle 2 dissected, found to contain space for a SIM card	Of course, it’s not that simple – you need a lot more electronics than just a card reader…
	Kindle 2 First Look	Complete disassembly, with loads of pictures.
Feb 11	Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech infringe authors’ copyrights?	This has got to be the stupidest legal issue regarding ebooks, ever. What about visually challenged folk?
Feb 9	Hands on with Kindle 2: what a difference a screen makes	Apparently, the screen is improved. However, there are mixed opinions on that.
	Kindle 2: Slimmer, Smarter	In which we read that 10% of Amazon sales seem to be Kindle books
	Amazon Announces Kindle 2 Ebook Reader	Good (if biased) overview
	Amazon revamps Kindle, hints at bigger things to come	Not much to come, really, but comprehensive article nonetheless
	Kindle 2 first hands-on!	Nothing much to see, really, although the response time seems good.
2008
May 18	Amazon Kindle Review	Very detailed review
2007
Nov 23	Bookishness	On the device’s lack of ergonomics and style
Nov 22	Amazon Kindle sells out on debut	Sold out, sure, but how many?
Nov 19	Amazon Kindle first hands-on	A small gallery
Nov 19	The Future of Reading – A Play in Six Acts	Mark Pilgrim, in his inimitable style, rips through the TOS.
Nov 18	The Future of Reading	The Newsweek piece that started it all.

…and enjoy doing it.

Update: revisions for 2010. Previously: better readability and Snow Leopard, lots of minor changes for Leopard, app updates, etc. You may also want to visit my Switch page, which tries to list suitable Mac OS X replacements for common Windows applications.

Introduction

Welcome! A lot of people have been moving to the Mac lately, so a while back I thought I’d jot down a few notes about my experience over the last eight years or so, which, over time, grew to become a primer of sorts. This page is updated on a yearly basis (usually around the holiday season, which is when I get the most visits from new Mac owners or people pondering the switch).

The motives for anyone switching will not be discussed here – discussing relative merits of computer platforms is very much like discussing cars, and therefore largely unimportant if you are getting what you want.

My main point to begin with is that quasi-religious beliefs that any platform is better than another are not just irrelevant, but plain childish and stupid. Before maligning the Mac, Windows or Linux, make sure you know what you are talking about – most people in the IT business have “pet hatreds” towards one platform or another out of sheer ignorance, and more than a decade in the business has shown me that anyone who only has bad things to say about any given platform probably doesn’t know what (s)he’s talking about.

So if you know you want a Mac, you’ve come to the right place for a few basic hints that might just save you a lot of time.

The major “under-the-hood” issue for non-Mac users is the underlying UNIX foundation¹ of Mac OS X – it not being Windows makes some people nervous, but, in the end, what matters is the user interface and the way it makes most simple tasks a lot easier to accomplish.

The second (and quite frequent) issue is compatibility. Which, by the way, has long ceased to be an issue at all.

Now that Macs are also completely Intel based, that usually comes in two flavors – document compatibility (not really an issue these days – see my software replacements page for more info on specific apps), and the ability to run other operating systems, like Windows.

The bottom line on that is: You can do anything on a Mac, period. The Rosetta emulator (which is now an optional install in the latest OS version) ensures pretty much all the old Mac software runs on new Intel machines with acceptable performance, and most relevant applications are all available for both Windows and the Mac.

And yes, you can run Windows (or Linux) on Intel-based Macs. There are two ways to do it: The first should be familiar to computer enthusiasts and consists of doing dual boot using Boot Camp (for which Apple even supplies Windows drivers), and the other consists of using Virtualization packages to run the other operating system in a sandbox.

There are currently three main options for doing that: The first to appear was Parallels, which has been around since roughly mid-2006, and VMware’s Fusion, which reached public beta on December 2006 and was soon after released commercially (it’s my personal preference). A free (for home use) alternative called VirtualBox has also been around for a while but I haven’t used it much, so can’t really recommend it.

Anyway, those will not be discussed here at length, since the main point of this document is to ensure you feel at home in Mac OS X as quickly as possible. But they are recommended if you need to ensure a smooth transition where it regards specific applications that may not be available on the Mac – you’ll be able to keep all your old applications running alongside the new ones.

As to the bulk of this guide, the target is non-technical folk. However, I do throw in a few hints for people who are coming to Mac OS X with some computing experience and expect some “best practices”, so don’t worry if some points are a bit too technical.

Buying

Buying a Mac is not a normal experience anywhere. It’s a local thing, best done with local people (pun intended). In Portugal, where I live, that was for a long time been the case for entirely the wrong reasons, like the lack of “real” Apple stores, the recurring problems of the local retail chain (we got a “proper” online store in 2007 and a few premium retailers the last few years, but supply still cannot meet demand) and the quasi-underground nature of most user groups.

However, picking which Mac to buy (and when) is pretty straightforward. It’s mostly a matter of visiting the Apple site, reading the Macrumors Buyers’ Guide to figure out how recent each model is relative to the full lineup (but taking the predictions there with a fairly large dollop of salt), and then finding a store that stocks it (some people order theirs online – others, like me, want to go out, get it, and come back again without all that waiting around nonsense).

If you happen to buy a second-hand machine (which is common given the flurry of upgrades brought upon by frequent updates to the portfolio), you should check the CPU type and assume that any PowerPC machine manufactured on 2005 (and even early 2006, as Apple cleared stock) works reasonably well, but will not be a very wise purchase (unless it’s nearly given away) given that Apple has phased out support for it – OS version 10.6 (Snow_Leopard) now only supports Intel processors and PowerPC is not going to be actively supported beyond 2010 on any 10.5 (Leopard) updates.

In any case, when buying second-hand, make sure you plan for an upgrade to 2GB of RAM (or more), since newer versions of the operating system are more demanding in terms of resources, and RAM is the easiest, cheapest way to breathe new life into an old machine.

Things like form factors and target markets haven’t changed that much, so you’re looking to buy a new Mac and are unsure about which kind of machine is best for you this MacWorld piece (dated 2008) still provides good food for thought – the relative differences between product ranges haven’t changed, and a quick look at Apple’s site will give you all the details you could possibly want.

I will not go into warranties, support or suchlike – this is, again, a local affair, invariably dealt with by local people and legislation, and stuff like AppleCare isn’t available everywhere. So far, I’ve been lucky – a problem one of my Macs had (an original 15” flat panel iMac, which I started out in and since gave to my parents) was fixed within three weeks². It had a power supply failure, and fixing it required shipping a replacement part to Portugal. A similar thing happened to my iBook a good while ago, and the experience was mostly the same.

Unpacking & Testing

• While unpacking, look at the packaging. It is an art form in itself, and there are often neat graphical hints of how to unpack every Mac printed on the box. Do leaf through the booklets and such, but (here’s the important bit) don’t rush it. There are a few important things to know about each new model or accessory, even if you’ve had a Mac before.
• If you’re getting a laptop or iMac, I recommend you have a good look at the screen during the first few days to look for “dead” (i.e., stuck) pixels that won’t change color – manufacturing processes still aren’t perfect, and this is the most annoying kind of hardware problem possible – a minuscule thing that will stay with the machine for ever.

There is some controversy as to what amount of dead pixels warrants a replacement – search the Net for more info – but this is the kind of thing you want to check for right away to take advantage of any “immediate return” policies.

Depending on the model, you can often boot the Hardware Test off the first install CD (insert the CD and hold down Alt – or Option, as it is called in older keyboards – while the machine boots).

Amongst other things, it performs a display test – which is fundamental for picking up “dead” pixels before you start installing stuff (I used to use ScreenQuery, a simple app that filled the screen with solid colors, but it seems to have vanished). As usual, the smaller the screen, the less likely you are to have dead pixels.

Setting up Mac OS X

• The default behavior these days is for the Mac to prompt you for an installation language the first time it boots from the hard disk and, after installing a few files (a few minutes’ worth) configure your locale settings. If your Mac boots straight to the Finder or to the login panel, then someone else has used it before (sadly, this is a common thing with Portuguese retailers, who like to play around with their customers’ gear). If so, I recommend using the restore DVDs included with every Mac to restore it to a factory-fresh configuration.
• After setting up your keyboard, language and whatnot, the installer creates the first user account. This is the important bit: it is an administration account – call it “Administrator” or something like that and create another for yourself afterwards (if you’re a UNIX head, this is not root, which is disabled). Mind that this sets the computer name to ‘Administrator’s computer’, something you should change in the Sharing preference pane…

Many people think this is unnecessary until they discover (the hard way) that they threw some important system file into the Trash. Yes, there are warnings, but using the machine as an administrator tends to make people oblivious to them, and years of using all my machines as a “regular” user bestowed upon me painless system updates, zero trouble with the core system and no software instability whatsoever. In the end, it’s your call – I’m just providing time-proven advice…

You can create that “regular” user accounts in System Preferences after setup ends. This will not prevent you from making all the silly mistakes people do when using a Mac for the first few months, but it will significantly decrease the odds of you breaking something (you will be asked to authenticate as an administrator before any significant changes are made). Not to mention that it prevents unwanted changes to your system…

(Yes, you can break a Mac OS X install – or files that make subsequent upgrades fail – by mistake when you use the machine every day as an admin user. And yes, I will be repeating this advice several times).

• Network configuration is usually trivial. Macs use DHCP by default, and visible Wi-Fi access points will show up on the AirPort menu (to connect to a hidden Wi-Fi network, choose the “Other…” option in the AirPort menu). For those having to deal with older broadband connections, PPPoE support is built-in, and your card’s physical Ethernet address can be looked up in the Ethernet section of the Network preference pane in System Preferences.
• The firewall is configured in the Security tab in System Preferences . The defaults are usually sensible for most cases (and Mac OS X is very secure³), but it’s best to ensure it’s on if you’re directly connected to the Net.

The firewall is deceptively simple, but quite sophisticated – for instance, you can set access permissions on a per-application base (very useful if you have to run things that keep checking for updates without a way to disable them).

Best Practices

What not to do:

• Don’t use the administration account for anything other than setting up the machine and applications or changing “permanent” settings (if you want to, say, change network settings as a normal user you’ll be prompted for the admin password, and since you’ll do configuration changes less and less often as time progresses, this isn’t a problem).
• Don’t install “toy” applications as the admin user until you’re sure you’re going to use them. Most applications will run just fine from an Applications folder under your user directory.
• Don’t open files or mail attachments that come from unknown sources. This is a basic security measure that is valid for any kind of machine, even for a Mac – no operating system can protect your machine from your mistakes… One way to improve your odds is to open Safari preferences and uncheck the Open “safe” files after downloading option. There is no such thing as a “safe” file – you have to be sure of what you download.
• Never, ever move Apple applications (such as Mail.app) to other folders. Mac OS X updates are not always very clever at updating built-in apps, so you’ll end up with either two copies of your apps or a single broken one.
• If you’re a Windows user: Don’t try moving a folder on top of another with the same name – Mac OS X will replace the entire folder, i.e., it will not merge both folder’s contents and will cause you to lose your data. This is a very significant difference between the Finder and Windows Explorer that catches most people at least once, and is simply a matter of different traditions (plus the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, where things have worked like this from time immemorial). Drag the folder contents, not the folder itself.
• If you’re a UNIX user: Don’t fiddle with the system startup scripts unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing (which includes reading this and a bit more about launchd and the startup files themselves). Mac OS X doesn’t use runlevels in the same way as “classic” UNIX systems, and things like network configuration, system services, and whatnot are not (necessarily) stored under /etc. You’ll figure it out after a while, but don’t go in thinking this is “just like any other UNIX system”. It both is and isn’t like other UNIXes, and like other UNIXes, fiddling under the hood is not to be done lightly until you’ve read the documentation.
• Do not install stuff that messes with Apple’s defaults, including UI “skins”, funky plugins, low-level UNIX tools that overwrite (as opposed to coexist with) the supplied ones and other nonsense – that is a sure way to break the OS upon the next system update.

Things You should do:

• Did you read the bit above about setting up your own user account? Go back and read it then.
• Disable Safari’s Open Safe Files After Downloading preference. I have no idea why it still exists since there is no such thing as a safe file anymore, and like e-mail attachments, you should only download and open files from trusted sources. Yes, I am repeating this again, just to make sure you get it.
• Tweak Safari preferences. Me, I disable Top Sites, make sure links from applications open in a new tab and choose a blank page as the default – once you do this, you’ll never go back…
• Create your own Applications folder inside your home directory (Mac OS X will change the icon accordingly) and try out new stuff in there. If it breaks, you won’t break the machine for other people (and if a Mac OS X app breaks while running under an unprivileged account, it’s badly written for sure).
• Put things you want to share among users in the /Users/Shared folder. You may have to tweak file and folder permissions a bit, but it’s the easiest way (see my Address Book, iPhoto and iTunes pages for ways to share these applications’ data).
• Consider using a separate user account for playing around (yes, another one, besides your own and the administration one). Fast User Switching makes it very easy to try out new software like this.
• Set up separate accounts for kids. Use the Parental Controls preference pane to define things such as restricting which applications specific users can access to, and more.
• Use Exposé and Spaces. Learn how to use F8 to invoke the Spaces overview, F9, F10 and F11 to switch windows and drag-and drop files onto apps – there is nothing quite like it, and it’s a real time-saver (replace F9 by F3 on some newer keyboards, but the point here is that you should spend some time exploring this).
• If you mess around under the hood, be mentally prepared to reinstall your Mac from scratch after a month or so of heavy fiddling. This is mostly applicable to the UNIX heads who will ignore every other warning so far – “normal” users can disregard this hint, especially if you follow my main recommendation and don’t use the administration account for everyday work.
• Get as much RAM as you can possibly afford – 512MB used to be OK for general use six years back, but these days 2GB is pretty much the baseline for Snow Leopard, and new machines ship with 4 (I have felt little need to go beyond that so far, but folk into video editing will most certainly disagree with me).
• If your Mac didn’t come with a Magic Mouse (as late 2009 models do), then get a proper mouse. I’ve said before that Mac OS X with a single button mouse is like rowing with a single oar, and I mean it: Mac OS X supports multiple-button mice, scroll wheels, etc. – you can use pretty much anything you want.
• If you got a modern laptop, check the Trackpad preferences pane for the visual tutorials explaining how to use gestures to do all sorts of things with the trackpad – once you’re used to that, a mouse is often unnecessary, but you can use both at once.
• Drag Terminal.app to your dock as soon as possible (it’s in Applications/Utilities). UNIX won’t bite you, and some things are best done at a terminal, given appropriate care.
• During the transition period, you may want to use Microsoft’s great Remote Desktop Client to access your Windows XP and Vista boxes. VNC is good, but RDC is much faster and also allows you to transfer files across.
• Know your way around the Apple Knowledge Base. For instance, the Startup key combinations for Intel-based Macs is very useful when you need to troubleshoot the boot process, remove a stuck CD or DVD, etc., and things like Resetting the System Management Controller can come in very, very handy indeed.

Keyboard Tips

These started piling up a bit, so I decided to group them together in a single section.

• Spend some time getting used to the accelerator and “special” keys. They make sense after a while, but having the extra Command modifier key and a different meaning for Home and End plays havoc with some people’s reflexes. (See below for a way to change this if you really want to, but I recommend opening a text editor and playing around for a while to get used to the way things work on a Mac).
• Windows users will like to know that Alt-Command-Esc will display the “Force Quit Applications” dialog. You can also force quit an application by clicking on its dock icon while holding down Ctrl+Alt.
• The Command-Tab bezel doesn’t just let you switch between applications – you can also select an application and quit it immediately by keeping the Command key down and doing Command-Q.
• Remember that Command-H will “hide” applications (i.e., there’s more to life than minimizing windows), and that clicking and holding on an docked application icon in Snow_Leopard will zoom out to an Exposé view of all that app’s windows.
• The screenshot key combos are mostly well-known, but here’s a brief summary:
  • Command-Shift-3 to snapshot the whole screen – the snapshot will be saved to the desktop (you can change the file format by manipulating a preferences file, but PNG is good enough for most purposes).
  • Command-Shift-4 to get a selection cursor. In this mode:
    • Hit Space to snapshot a specific window. In Leopard and Snow Leopard, this will include the drop shadow – you can use the “Grab” utility to take screenshots without it.
    • Hold down Control when clicking to save the snapshot to the clipboard (instead of the desktop), ready to paste into any application.
• There is a set of startup key combinations here that you might find useful. Some are obsolete by now, but most are still valid and may be very useful to folk getting second-hand Macs.
• People using a Mac mini with standard PC keyboards are likely to have trouble with the way keys are mapped (especially non-US layouts, which swap accent and symbol keys), so I strongly recommend getting an Apple keyboard.
• If you’re using a Mac with an external non-US keyboard, the screen brightness control is often unmarked – try the function keys above the help key.
• MacBook users will also want to know about Command-F1 to toggle between mirrored and extended desktop modes (a lifesaver when you have a bum LCD screen) and Ctrl-Alt-Command-8 to toggle ‘white on black’ display in low-light situations. (Command-Alt-8 will also toggle zooming). But those who really want to get to know their laptop keyboards will want to look at this 15-inch PowerBook G4 Developer Note, which is still mostly applicable to modern MacBooks.
• If you use Remote Desktop with a Portuguese keyboard layout at both ends, the Alt Gr key can be emulated by using Ctrl+Alt (so the ”” symbol is on @Ctrl+Alt+2, etc.)
• If you use VNC and non-US keyboards, I’ve found JollysFastVNC to have excellent international keyboard support when connecting to other machines.
• If you’re keyboard-oriented, go into System Preferences | Keyboard and Mouse | Keyboard Preferences and Turn on full keyboard access. Now you can deal with dialog boxes the way you’re used to, as well as accessing menus and toolbars with the keyboard.
• If you hate digging through Applications to find what you want, hit Command-Space to invoke Spotlight and start typing the name of the app. If that isn’t flexible enough for you, consider getting something like Quicksilver or QSB. Think of any of these as a keyboard-based application launcher. The last two are much, much more, but it takes a while for their power to sink in.
• Can’t stand the apparently useless extra enter key that Apple put where Alt Gr ought to be on laptops? Try using fKeys to remap it to something more sensible.

If you’re a hard-core Windows user and the Mac’s way of dealing with Home and End really bugs you, here’s a tip from Aaron Adams (the original link vanished, so this seems to be the only remaining copy of this tip on the Net):

To change the Mac's home and end keys to behave like Windows in all applications, create a text file named /Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict (if the folder doesn't exist, go ahead and create it) and add these lines:

/* Home/End keys like Windows */
{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /*home*/
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /*end*/
"$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /*shift + home*/
"$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /*shift + end*/
}

Logout and login, and the home and end keys will work like Windows.

Alternatively, you can use something like DoubleCommand to change global key bindings – but if the Terminal is the only place where the default behavior annoys you, Snow Leopard’s terminal allows you to customize key bindings and the relevant escape codes.

Finally, there are plenty of resources out there regarding using external PC keyboards on the Mac and re-mapping keys in a straightforward fashion. The Windows-to-Mac Key Switching at Ars Technica is one such example.

Windows-centric tips:

As mentioned above, these won’t cover Boot Camp, Parallels or Fusion. Think of this as a list of things that are different in Mac OS X and that you will need to get accustomed to.

• Remember that moving files replaces the whole folder, not just its contents.
• No, there isn’t a Start button. You can drag applications to the Dock for quick access, or even drag the entire Applications folder to the right-hand side of the Dock, forming what Apple calls a “stack”. Click on it, and you’ll get a graphical menu of the contents that you can customize on a per-stack basis.
• If you really miss Alt-Tab like application switching (on a window basis, like Windows), look at Witch. You can bind that to Alt-Tab and leave the standard Mac Command-Tab switching in place.
• Check the Keyboard Tips section above for ways to force-quit applications. You won’t use them much, but you’ll feel better knowing they’re there.
• Applications can be started upon login by going to Accounts in System Preferences, clicking Startup Items and adding them to the list.
• File shares can be browsed via the Network icon in the Finder. Mac OS X works a little differently than the standard Windows network browser, but it’s all there.
• File shares are mounted directly by pressing Cmd-K in the Finder and entering a Samba URL like so: smb://server/share (do not even think about using the Windows backslash (”\”) for anything other than authenticating as domain\user, that is not the UNIX way to do things).
• Mac OS X will mount network file shares automatically on most circumstances, although there might be some issues with username and password caching (i.e., some file servers will always ask your Mac for your password, even if you check the “save this password” option).
• Windows DFS shares (the \\domain\path type) are not directly accessible to Mac OS X. You need to either figure out the real pathname to the share (smb://server/share) or spend a good while figuring out how to integrate your Mac with Active Directory. I have some notes on the first option here for those of you in corporate environments.
• Installers don’t work the same way – most applications can be installed by just dragging and dropping them into your Applications folder (applications can ultimately reside anywhere on your hard disk, but it pays to be tidy). Installers are mostly used when it’s necessary to set up large volumes of files or application resources (fonts, libraries, etc.).
• Properly written installers will run from a non-administrative account, ask you for the administrative password, and go about their business. If an installer fails in a non-administrative account, contact the developer and have them fix it – their installer is broken and not performing up to specs (Adobe is a notorious offender in this regard, for years now).
• Snow Leopard has pretty decent Exchange integration built-in if your organization is running the 2007 edition – check with your IT staff, it’s been good enough for me over the past few months.

UNIX-centric Tips:

• All disks (file shares, external hard disks, etc.) are mounted under the /Volumes directory (which is hidden, but accessible via the Terminal).
• Disks with identical names (such as file shares) will be mounted as /Volumes/name, /Volumes/name_1, etc.
• SSH integrates with the login keychain and works beautifully sinceLeopard. Check the output of ssh-add—help for more info, notably the -k option.
• Mail.app had, over the years, a tendency to not use the SOCKS proxy settings in System Preferences properly – it did name resolution wrong, and SMTP over SOCKS didn’t work. It’s actually improved a bit, earlier versions would not work at all. If you need to access remote mailboxes via a SOCKS or SSH tunnel, get Thunderbird.
• Safari, however, does honor SOCKS settings, and seems to be fully SOCKS 5 compliant – which means it will perform hostname lookups remotely through the SOCKS proxy.
• X11 on the Mac might have some issues with your keyboard layout (check my HOWTO section for more hints on that) and X display permissions, but will work perfectly via ssh -X or -Y. And yes, Apple made X11 a pain to install on Tiger for some obscure reason, but came to their senses in more recent versions of the OS.
• Although I personally recommend MacPorts, check out Fink if you’re a Debian convert. It’s not really Debian, but your apt-get addiction will get a quick fix. Fink is especially nice since it does not, ever, mess around with your Mac OS X system directories (it hangs off /sw, /sw/bin, etc.), and has the most packages available in binary format. Be prepared, however, for some packages not being the same versions you’re used to in Linux – some Fink packages lag behind quite a bit, even easily ported stuff like ImageMagick.
• If you’re a BSD guy, MacPorts is your thing. It hangs off /opt by default, and seems to work a bit better on Intel-based Macs, and the available packages also seem to be better maintained.
• Need PHP and mySQL? Here’s a HOWTO/Enable PHP on Mac OS X, which needs updating for some Snow Leopard details but should be enough to get you started. mySQL now publishes an excellent set of native installers and management tools, so head on over to their site.

NTFS Disks

One of the things people ask about the most is how to access external hard disks formatted in NTFS (the filesystem Microsoft introduced in Windows NT, and which has become the default in XP). Mac OS X has built-in read-only support for NTFS, so you can access your data just fine in most cases (the only exception is if you use NTFS encryption, which is not supported by anything other than Windows right now).

If you really need to write to NTFS volumes, there are currently two main options:

• A commercial driver from Paragon, which has full support for compressed files and folders and excellent performance. That’s what I use.
• The Open Source NTFS-3G driver, which is slower and has a few more limitations, but which is free and relatively easy to install. It’s now launching its own commercial version, but the free one will still be around.

Other Stuff

• Read John Gruber’s piece on Software Update, and his more recent one on why “Repair Permissions” (one of the most common – and stupid – troubleshooting suggestions in Mac forums) is voodoo. Either have a number of good tips, and, more importantly, banish some of the most common misconceptions about either process.
• Resetting a Mac OS X password can be done by rebooting from the install CD and using the “Reset Password” option in the installer (but do note that this will not change your keychain password and you’ll need to change the password again after you login)
• Resetting an Open Firmware password requires zapping the PRAM three times (restart holding Cmd-Alt-P-R three times) – some folk say you should change the Mac’s configuration as well (removing or adding RAM), but I fail to see the logic in that.

Essential Applications

I now have an entire page devoted to apps that switchers may be interested in, but the following summarizes my own experience and may be of general interest:

I originally went out and bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 – I now use the 2008 edition, but most people will probably be OK with iWork for home use.

Since the move to Intel, the only other “essential” was some form of virtualization to let me use some odd Windows application or tool every couple of months or so. I bought Parallels, but then moved to Fusion (which I recommend) due to my using VMware products for years at work and finding their software more reliable overall.

Besides those and some of the utilities I mentioned above, my current list of “essentials” is:

• Dropbox for sharing files transparently across all of my Macs and PCs.
• Evernote for syncing my notes not just across all of my Macs, but also to my iPhone and other devices.
• Flip4Mac to open Windows Media files in QuickTime and Safari (check out Perian as well if you want working DivX support).
• Adium for instant messaging (MSN, Jabber and Yahoo, plus a lot more). It integrates seamlessly with Address Book, so you’ll never lose your buddies’ contacts.
• Growl for desktop notifications of all sorts (new mail, IM, you name it). It’s now bundled with Adium, and it installs itself if you configure Adium’s “new message” notification to use it.
• MenuMeters to keep track of network traffic and CPU usage – they’re simple, unobtrusive and very, very effective.
• Pixelmator for image editing. There are plenty of similarly-priced alternatives out there, but I happen to like its feature set.
• Socialite if you absolutely must have a desktop app for news, Twitter, Facebook, you name it – I tend to do such stuff on a mobile and use browser bookmarks and Google Reader for most of my news and social networking needs, but I like to be able to shut off all the Internet “noise” by closing an app.
• Chrome as an alternate browser. I use Safari for everything (and it is my default browser) and Firefox’s XUL Extensions make it more useful for debugging web applications, but Chrome has an increasing amount of useful tricks, not the least of which is a completely chromeless full screen mode.
• Remote Desktop, available here.
• The Citrix client (10.x or above) which I use to work remotely.
• A VNC client. These days you merely need to type vnc:// on the Safari address bar to invoke the built-in Screen Sharing client, but I like to have JollysFastVNC to connect to other machines, since Apple’s client does not work properly with international keyboards.
• Colloquy (if you happen to hate IRC as much as I do, this makes it bearable).
• Skype for the occasional conference call and file transfer (Adium works too, but not across all firewalls).
• Tofu for reading long documents and web pages. Makes for much easier reading when you’re tired, since the column display lessens eye movement.
• TextMate as an all-singing, all-dancing text editor with a built-in mini- IDE and Subversion support.
• VideoLAN for opening any sort of media.
• CyberDuck for FTP and SSH file transfers.

And that’s it, really. I hope that this guide proves useful to get you started. Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you have any suggestions for improvements, and consider donating to the site.

But, most importantly, enjoy your new Mac.

—

¹ If you are a UNIX geek, bookmark Amit Singh’s What Is Mac OS X? now and go read it after you finish this (it doesn’t currently cover the latest version of Mac OS X, code named Snow Leopard, but it provides excellent info on its background and origins). ↩

² Three weeks is unacceptable in the rest of the civilized world, but a couple of issues in three years (and, incidentally, seven Macs) is pretty good. Although Apple really should consider improving their presence in Portugal, there are now not just premium retailers but also service centers, so we’re on our way to parity with the rest of Europe. ↩

³ But, like any computer, it is only as secure as you make it. I have never had any need for anti-virus applications and the usual paraphernalia that security vendors peddle to Windows users, but that is largely due to the fact that I don’t run any weird apps, keep my system updated, and use a non-administrative account daily. The less privileges your apps have when running, the less likely you’ll have problems. ↩

With the recent arrival of my iPad, I’ve been looking for ways to re-purpose my netbooks (a Dell Mini 9 and a Samsung NC10) aside from selling them off or recycling them, and it’s been an interesting (if perhaps entirely too geeky) experience.

The Samsung (which I won at a company trial) is, at this point a nice, glossy doorstop, largely due to the infamous white screen problem (a mis-designed, faulty, broken or loose LCD ribbon cable that makes the screen white out for a few seconds every now and then).

Despite a decent keyboard (with a UK layout, which doesn’t bother me in the least) and a so-so screen, the build quality is crap (a QA problem that seems to pervade every single piece of Samsung consumer electronics gear that I’ve handled for a while now), and even with it being quite speedy and having fueled quite a few posts, I have cast it aside for the moment.

As to the wondrous, tiny Mini, I’ve procured an extra SSD for it and had a go at installing Fedora 13, an endeavor that was cut short due to the apparent inability of the base spin to do proper suspend-resume (still a common problem for a lot of current Linux distributions, sadly), the lack of an easy way to encrypt my home directory (a basic security feature that ought to be included in all operating systems), and the utterly asinine policy regarding inclusion of proprietary (but perfectly good and fundamentally useful) Wi-Fi drivers.

It bears mentioning at this point that the Mini has a dark (and quaint) secret: You can all too easily get it into a state where Bluetooth, 3G and Wi-Fi can’t be re-enabled without booting into Windows, and since re-installing Windows is a major pain in the posterior, I opted for leaving it installed on the original SSD and just getting another.

Jolicloud, my next stop, got the driver bit right but failed the encryption requirement, so after a bit of soul-searching and double-checking to see whether there were packages for the kind of things I wanted to run, Ubuntu it was, despite my long and frustrating history with it.

And no, it didn’t get the Wi-Fi working right from the get go as well, but at least it knew enough about proprietary drivers to let me enable it with a couple of clicks.

Apps

The stuff I wanted (or rather, still need) to do on a netbook is pretty clear cut, and revolves around three things:

• Coding (for which I require a moderately sophisticated text editor – I prefer TextMate, of course, but vim will do – and Python, plus Mercurial and a few other doodads)
• Managing my growing e-book collection (for which I need some desktop-only knick-knacks I will get to in a little while)
• Moving “regular” files around (photos, media, etc.)

Everything else (reading books or news, writing, browsing, e-mail, social noisemaking, remote desktop/Citrix, basic document drafting and editing, etc.) can be done on the iPad, so the list of stuff I needed to install could easily be pared down to:

• Calibre (where all my long-form reading material is easily transmogrified into whatever format I require)
• Dropbox (where everything I’m drafting lives in)
• Evernote (the tougher challenge)
• Sigil (the hidden gem)

Evernote has always been a particularly tough nut to crack for folk running Linux, because not only is their web UI on the far side of ugly, there is also no decent way to view and draft notes short of trying to stack an ancient version of their Windows client atop the rather wobbly and incomplete bag of tricks that is WINE.

That was until I found NeverNote, which is written in Java (and therefore fails to adopt the system theme, slows down at odd moments, etc.) but gets a surprising amount of things right. It’s already good enough for me to draft text-only notes (provided I don’t mind their growing extra line breaks now and then, which may be a result of editing the same note on 3 different clients), tick off to-dos and (most importantly) access my ever-growing collection of notes offline. It’s not Evernote, but it mostly works and saves me the bother of installing WINE.

As to Sigil, it is probably the app I use the most right now, since I am revising a book. Or, rather, an e-book that will eventually see the light of day before Autumn (time permitting) and that has absolutely nothing to do with my regular endeavors. Or pretty much anything else, really.

It is, however, a great way of learning more about EPUB and e-book readers’ idiosyncrasies, and the app is heartily recommended.

Then there come the niceties, which are not essential but useful to have on a netbook:

• Acrobat Reader (because it’s marginally better than the built-in Linux PDF viewers for rendering some documents, even if not by much)
• Adobe Flash (because there are still morons designing Flash-only websites in Portugal)
• Chrome (because it’s WebKit, which is useful for basic testing of iOS webapps, and because I can’t bring myself to use Firefox anymore)
• Pino (because there is no way whatsoever I’m using Gwibber until it actually works)
• Pinta (because I can’t abide the GIMP and wanted a basic image editor)
• Shotwell (same goes for F-Spot, and because I sometimes need to plug in a camera to an actual computer)

In case you’ve noticed some of the above are the defaults in Fedora 13, congratulations – you get extra geek brownie points.

Finally, for the relatively small amount of e-mail I expect to do on it, I decided not to install any extras whatsoever and just use Evolution, which I (and many others) rate as the greatest misnomer ever in the history of MUAs. I loathe it, but it is better than a webmail interface – and the iPad’s mail client is faster and more efficient than either.

Looks

Typography and UI design are, sadly, dark and eschewed arts for most Linux developers or packagers (how else can you explain Ubuntu’s hideous brown, orange and purple theme?), so I eventually came to terms with having to tinker with fonts and themes to be able to look at the screen without flinching.

For years now, I’ve carried around a tarball of TrueType fonts for the sole purpose of making Linux bearable – not only for the UI, but also for documents and browsing. It has all the basic staples: Arial, Georgia, Verdana (to cater to the Microsoft hegemony), Helvetica, Lucida, Myriad, Palatino (to lessen the effects of Mac abstinence), Calibri, Candara, Consolas (because occasionally Microsoft gets their typography about right), and a few others to fill in the gaps (dingbats, symbols, decent monospaced fonts, and generic odds and ends).

And yeah, I have Comic Sans and Marker Felt in there as well (because I’m a stickler for consistency, even if that includes the bad bits sometimes).

This time around, however, I decided to figure out if there was something already built in that was borderline readable and tolerable as a system font besides the horrendously ugly sans serif font GNOME defaults to. After scratching my head trying to remember where I had come across some tasteful and readable dialogs lately, I remembered that Jolicloud had looked quite good (oddly enough to register), so I popped in the USB stick again and had a look at their settings.

As it turned out, they’re using Liberation, a set of sans, serif and monospaced fonts that are not just metric-compatible with the usual Arial, Times and Courier fare, but also render properly (and legibly) as UI fonts, so I just grabbed them and set things up with a mostly nice theme to look like so:

Usability and Tweaks

It’s poor, obviously, but tolerable. My usual irritations about every app using a different widget toolkit and copy/paste of rich text or images never quite working properly remain, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

As to other tweaks, the minimalist dock I installed is my only concession towards accomodating both my muscle memory and the long time habits of a Mac desktop, and I have decided to leave it at that. Since I am not actually using the netbook intensively (if only because it heats up considerably, another sharp contrast to the iPad in 37C weather) tinkering is not on the cards.

Breakage and Flakiness

There are, as usual, a number of things that could work better – the battery life is roughly 3/4 of what I get under XP, suspend/resume sometimes doesn’t actually work, Wi-Fi often fails to re-associate for some odd reason, Dropbox gets occasionally stuck “Connecting…” although it works fine when relaunched, and the machine has yet to properly shutdown without tossing up the usual ugly text messages (seriously, guys, is it that hard to leave a splash screen as the last process standing?), but my personal favorite is the VNC client showing a yellow tint when it connects to a Mac server.

It kind of sets the overall tone for the Linux experience – everything works, provided you don’t mind it not working perfectly.

But, ironically, it’s the ideal flip side to using an iPad.

In an effort to preserve my sanity while editing Textile under Linux, and since there seem to be no usable language definitions whatsoever for doing syntax highlighting of said while using gedit anywhere, I finally decided to roll my own basic (and hopelessly naïve) version of it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE language SYSTEM "language.dtd">
<language _name="Textile" version="1.0" _section="Markup" mimetypes="text/x-textile">
  <pattern-item _name="Bold" style="Data Type">
    <regex>(\*[\w]+\*)</regex>
  </pattern-item>
  
  <pattern-item _name="Heavy Emphasis" style="Data Type">
    <regex>(\*{2}[\w]+\*{2})</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Italics" style="Preprocessor">
    <regex>(\_[\w]+\_)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Emphasis" style="Preprocessor">
    <regex>(\_{2}[\w]+\_{2})</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Citation" style="Preprocessor">
    <regex>(\?{2}[\w]+\?{2})</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Superscript" style="Preprocessor">
    <regex>(\^[\w]+\^)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Subscript" style="Preprocessor">
    <regex>(~[\w]+~)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Removed Text" style="Preprocessor">
    <regex>(\-[\w]+\-)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Added Text" style="String">
    <regex>(\+[\w]+\+)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Code" style="String">
    <regex>(\@[^@]+\@)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Span" style="String">
    <regex>(\%[\w]+\%)</regex>
  </pattern-item>
  
  <pattern-item _name="List item" style="Keyword">
    <regex>(^ *\*[*#]*[ \t]+)|(^ *\#[*#]*[ \t]+)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Directive" style="Keyword">
    <regex>(^[\w{}()]+\.)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Footnote" style="Comment">
    <regex>(\[[0-9]+\])</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="URL" style="Comment">
    <regex>(\"[\S]+\"\:[\S]+)</regex>
  </pattern-item>

  <pattern-item _name="Image" style="Comment">
    <regex>(\![\S]+\!(\:[\S]+)*)</regex>
  </pattern-item>
</language>

Just save the above as ~/.gnome2/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs/textile.lang, restart gedit and you’re set – you’ll then be able to pick Textile from the syntax highlighting menu.

If you really must delve into the intricacies of the above (please do, it certainly needs improvement), I should take the time to point out that the documentation (such as it is) is squirreled away here and here, but that it is not particularly useful.

Have the appropriate amount of fun.

Somewhat against my better judgement and everything I keep telling myself regarding first-generation Apple products, I got a Wi-Fi only iPad, thanks to an acquaintance who was on Madrid on a work trip¹.

As to 3G, and although I had originally planned to get it built-in, shortage of 3G devices meant I have to make do with a MiFi or the ancient 3G router I left at my relatives’, which isn’t half bad – I get to use regular SIMs and get full HSUPA into the bargain (plus longer battery life), so I’m not really sorry.

After all, the number of times I used an embedded 3G modem on a netbook at home or weekends during the past year and a half (rather than using a router or a phone) was likely under a couple of times a month anyway, so it’s an acceptable compromise.

It bears mentioning that I don’t really like the idea of having 3G modules embedded in everything – for home use, it is too wasteful and problem-prone when you can just put up a tiny box and set up the connection once for all your gear, using one SIM card.

If I were getting the iPad for work it would certainly be a very different story, but that can wait until the next hardware revision… With the thing currently sporting HSDPA only and half the RAM of an iPhone 4, there’s certainly room for improvement.

But that has zero impact on the user experience, and, like most people, I’m loving it. There are a few UI quirks that my previous dives into borrowed devices hadn’t revealed, and touch-typing at cruise speed requires a little adjustment at first (there are no physical cues as to where your fingers lie and the key spacing is actually a bit larger than you’d expect), but nothing that I can’t get used to.

Regarding text input, there are only two caveats so far:

• Not having Portuguese input is a pain for some things, and I hope it arrives with iOS 4 – especially because that was the first release that got the auto-completion well and truly right for us here.
• Using a terminal session over SSH can be… interesting. Muscle memory keeps telling me to do stuff that the soft keyboard can’t easily replicate, but, oddly enough, using vim is easy.

Killer Apps

App-wise, I was pretty much set from the get go, so I won’t bore you with the usual tales of woe regarding the lack of such and such app (Facebook and LinkedIn, I’m looking at you), or debate the latest, as yet unproven fads (like Flipboard, which has been hyped six ways from Sunday yet doesn’t quite hit the spot) but merely point out that besides grabbing all the iWork apps, I already had most of everything else:

• Reeder is simply brilliant, and the great UI design only sinks in after you use it for a while. It’s the first thing I tap on every day.
• Evernote works pretty much great (for plaintext notes), although it’s still a mite crashy.
• Dropbox, despite being read-only due to what are essentially iOS limitatons, is easily the most useful thing to get files across (and Droptext nearly good enough – would actually be useful if it could create folders, which is the only serious omission)
• Echofon (which I had stopped using a while back) is pretty amazing on this device, sporting a clean UI and a nice feature set.

All I need is a simple, sensible image editor, and I’m set – Photogene is good enough for basic image manipulation, but something a tad more featureful might be in order later – for now, Keynote does good enough diagramming, and MindNode lets me sketch out mind maps in a jiffy without all the visual clutter other, similar apps, er… “feature”.

Like pretty much everyone else, I think this thing was built for Instapaper and Stanza. iBooks is cute, but not very flexible or practical if you generate your own content.

Stanza, on the other hand, grabs everything I have on Calibre over Wi-Fi without any tedious tethering and will open EPUB files I browse to via Safari or get via e-mail, so it’s an order of magnitude more useful (not to mention more customizable in terms of reading layout).

Immobile Me

Which brings me to the one glaring feature still missing from Apple’s devices: network syncing. I’ve recently ranted on about how pathetically retarded it is to have to sync stuff via USB, and the iPad drives home that point in spades.

Stuff like AirVideo goes a long way towards bridging the gap, but it’s ridiculous to see nearly every developer reinventing the file transfer wheel, with apps like Documents To Go and GoodReader (which I already used before) sporting over half a dozen different ways for you to get your data in and out of the device.

I call it “connectivitis”, and it’s downright preposterous.

Every app that I’ve come across recently devotes well over half its Settings options to let you set up different ways to transfer files – I’ve been trying to pick the ones that work with Dropbox and generic web servers, but there are also FTP clients, proprietary helper apps that you install on a desktop, and (woe betide) even nearly full-featured embedded e-mail clients where you must (again) configure your e-mail accounts to let the apps get at your files.

This is the elephant in the room about using an iOS device, and completely against the MobileMe concept, which actually included the promise of a sync hub for Mac apps (remember when Yojimbo came out?).

I’d love to see Apple fix all of this nonsense with a standard way to sync data wirelessly across its ecosystem (even if at the expense of giving me another reason to keep my MobileMe account – maybe even the best one yet), and can’t wait for iTunes 10 to see if that pans out in some way.

But there is lower hanging fruit – for instance, why iBooks doesn’t fully support the iOS “Open With” feature through the browser is a mystery to me (but then again, the iWork apps suffer from the same omission, so it might be coming soon).

Until they sort out this mess, I’ve set Calibre to download the Economist and a couple of other online magazines and e-mail them to me automatically, thereby ensuring lots of short-form reading material (plus I like it that Stanza doesn’t even try to look like a book).

I can do without files, such as they are, for a little while, even if that means jumping through a disproportionate amount of hoops.

Other Devices

Has this killed off my Sony Reader, then? So far, the answer is no – not because reading on it is hard (it isn’t, at all), but rather because when I want to read books I don’t want distractions or the temptation to pop over to my e-mail or feeds “for a second or two”.

If I have to travel light I’ll likely take only the iPad, but the Reader is roughly half the size and a third of the weight, so it’s not hard to take along. And, despite the iPad having excellent battery life, the Reader is likely the only gadget I have that I practically never charge – well, of course it needs charging every couple of weeks or so, but that’s equivalent to “very seldom” in this high-powered, technicolor, hysterically interactive gadget universe we now live in.

It is nevertheless true that I now find my iPhone a tad small, but that is why I am still taking the iPod Touch with me to read news over breakfast – not just because it’s so much more practical in terms of form factor, but also much easier to clean cheese and marmalade off of.

The iPad is now what I sit down and relax with instead of a netbook for both consuming media and drafting documents, but I go and sit at a desk or with my laptop if I need to code, do fine tweaks on files or print stuff².

Netbook-wise, my initial inclination is to dump the lot as time permits. But it’s very likely indeed that I will keep one around with Fedora 13 in case I need a different flavor of UNIX for fooling around with (or if Chrome OS ever comes out for real).

But yeah, two thumbs up for the iPad (and, given that I’m now contentedly tapping this away on it with my feet up, two big toes up for it as well).

—

¹ Actually, thanks to two people – Nuno, who bought it for me, and Pedro, who dropped by ninja-like late in the evening on his way back home to actually deliver it. The fact that we needed to resort to cloak-and-dagger-like tactics for me to actually get my hands on an iPad before it became technically obsolete is a testament to how badly screwed up Apple retail is these days – regardless of volumes, priorities and suchlike, selling them in Spain but not in Portugal (even if only via online store, which ships across Europe) is completely and utterly ridiculous. ↩

² And even then, there’s an app for that, although it also suffers from the ailment of having entirely too many different ways to get at your files. ↩

If you’re looking for my Amazon.co.uk wishlist, it’s here.

This is a short list of the things I find interesting enough to contemplate buying (I’ve outgrown the “gadget freak” stage some years back, but it’s always nice to contemplate my options).

Rather than the old, verbose format I had for this page, I decided to be a bit more systematic and use this URL as a scorecard for gadgets and software I’m likely to lust after every now and then, and why I won’t buy some of them anytime soon. Score reflects likelihood of acquisition and not product value.

Last Update	Item	Cost	Pros	Cons	Score
2010
Jul 21 Apr 10 Nov 30	Canon S90	€369	I’ve been meaning to get something between my 350D and Lumix DMC FX-33, and any of these three seems like a good mid-point – the S90 fits my spartan “less is more” attitude (more info here), and the TZ7/TZ10 would be a nice step up from the 33. The TZ7 has a decent zoom, for starters.	I can’t really justify spending money on any of them given the time I have for photography these days.
	Lumix DMC TZ7	€254
	Lumix DMC TZ10	€340
Jul 12 Jun 19. -Jan 27	iPad	TBD	It’s perfect for most of what I want to do at home and as a personal computer for notetaking. Fooling around with netbooks is losing appeal fast and developing web apps for it is very interesting.	Given that the iPhone 4 has a superior display and twice the RAM, it now looks like an iffy purchase. The unfathomable delays in getting them in Portugal make it almost certain that the first generation device will be available less than 6 months before a refresh, and hence a bad investment. Glass looks fragile considering I have two young kids in the house, am unsure if I need 3G built-in.
Jul 12 Jun 19 Jul 29’09	HP C7280	€ 329	I’m told that it works properly with a Mac even for scanning via Wi-Fi, which would be a welcome change from my PSC 950.	Ended up buying an Office Jet 4500 that doesn’t require four separate ink heads, although I really didn’t want to buy another HP printer.
Jul 12 Jun 19	OmniPlan	$149.95	I like the idea of having a clean, polished native project management app.	Had a good look at Merlin, which is what I’d get instead if I needed. Plus there are now loads of free apps that mostly work, most real project management is done via web apps these days.
Jun 19 Feb 17’08	Apple TV	$329	Smaller than my PS3, better UI.	The Mac mini won – it’s dead, Jim. No content for Portugal (or most of Europe), no DivX support, no DLNA support.
Jun 19 Jun 29 Jan 19	OmniGraffle Pro	$149.95	The best diagramming application on the planet, period. Visio replacement.	Have found umpteen ways to use Powerpoint to do pretty good diagramming over the last year, couldn’t justify the expense.
Jun 19	iPhone 4	TBD	Amazing display, better camera.	Not sure it’s worthwhile given that I have a perfectly good 3GS and don’t really want to carry the phone around at home. Will surely be bloody expensive for, as a matter of principle, I only buy unlocked phones (I believe in customer choice).
2009
Dec 17	Panasonic Lumix GF1	€809	After reading this essay and this review, I couldn’t help but wonder if I shouldn’t get one and enjoy it.	Expensive as heck, including the extra pancake lens.
Nov 5	LaCie Network Space 2	TBD	Storage appliance with smarts, of which I’ve heard nothing but good things (reg. older model)	I don’t really need it and have been trying to wean myself off the “home server” notion
Nov 17 Oct 28	New mini	€ 549	Needed a single box to store all my music and photos, can be plugged in to my TV, left idle/sleeping and woken up by the iPod remote via WoL	Need to buy Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Would remain idle 99.9% of the time, so it’s hard to justify both expense and energy-wise. Went ahead and bought it anyway as a birthday present for myself, Magic Mouse and all. I need something with oomph sitting on my office desktop for handling photos and managing music on the limited free time I have, and this is pretty good bang for the buck.
Nov 17 Oct 25	27” iMac	€ 1799	Sheer lust, can be used as an external display	Don’t use desktop machines anymore, can’t justify it for home use Just got the new mini instead. Also, many folk have been having hardware issues.
Oct 25 Oct 14’08 Jan 19’08	Cinema 23” Display	€ 899	(poof)	The 27” iMac makes it look like a bad deal, so it’s out of my list now.
Aug 1	LG BE06-LU10 Blu-Ray burner	€ 300	Nearly cheap enough, even though DVD media is still cheaper	Recording backups I can only read on a single device until Apple makes up their mind about including internal Blu-Ray is a risk.
Aug 1 Feb 17’08	PX-B920SA Blu-Ray burner	TBD	Would likely solve all my backup problems. Plextor hardware tends to last ages.	There are now cheaper and better alternatives What I really want is an external USB or Firewire drive that I can hook up to any Mac or PC.
2008
Oct 21 Jun 29 Jan 19	MacBook Air	$1799	A great travel laptop for running Citrix and Office 2008 in a sane environment.	No wide-area connectivity built-in, and using a Huawei E172 would take up the single USB slot. The new consumer MacBooks make it look dated and flimsy, and there are now a gazillion ways to get OSX running on cheap netbooks if I really want the portability.
Apr 5 Nov 21	Kodak Zi6	US$180	Cheap, apparently records as straight H.264	Not available here yet, obsoleted.
Apr 5 Sep 3	Sanyo Xacti 1010	US$800	Finally, an HD camera I find interesting	I’m more of a photo guy, even considering my pocket camera does video too. Obsoleted.
Jan 19	Time Capsule	€ 499	Might be a sensible way to centralize storage and backup for my machines	Hideously overpriced. Useless to backup my wife’s Windows machine. Does not work with FileVault on my laptop, plenty of sad tales on the web
Jan 19	Blu-ray writer	~$400	Blank disks are now around € 20, and provide 25GB of capacity for off-site backups.	1TB hard disks are 60% cheaper than current writers, lack of support from Apple.

Although my typical day these last couple of weeks starts at 6:30 (or earlier) cradling an infant and a milk bottle and seemingly consists of hours of jiggling the accoutrements of baby care (and rattles) with half-hour blissful intervals now and then as the youngest dozes off contentedly, I’ve already managed to do a bunch of stuff that has been on my backlog for ages, namely:

More is sure to come, although my priorities right now are enjoying the kids, puttering about the house doing various chores and reading (sometimes all at once).

But I’m definitely having a great time.

Textile is, like Markdown, a simplified markup format that can be easily converted into HTML.

Resources:

AirVideo is a streaming and transcoding solution for watching all sorts of media on iOS devices on a LAN or via the Internet.

Resources:

Fake is a browser with an Automator-like graphical workflow pane that makes it easy to do repetitive testing on web apps.

Kin is Microsoft’s “vertical” mobile proposition, based on their acquisition of Danger on 2008. Both initial devices bear testimony to their Sidekick heritage, and were unmistakably targeted at the youth segment.

However, the whole thing tanked faster than the Titanic.

Notational Velocity - Version 2.0β2 Release Notes

Two of the best things on my Mac now sync programmatically and without the need for either spit or baling wire— that means syncing with “the cloud,” syncing with my iPhone (App Store link), and, by extension, syncing with every computer I own via the game-changing Dropbox. Yes. Big.

If you live in text files and crave seamless, no-brainer syncing (that doesn’t require growing a neckbeard), that little icon represents a milestone in the evolution of simple, low-friction workflows.

[via Fletcher, whose SimplenoteSync.pl has been a godsend in the interim]

43 Folders - Interview with “Linchpin” author, Seth Godin (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

I talk with Seth Godin, whose new book, Linchpin (Kindle, Hardcover, Worldcat, ISBN), comes out today. Topics include, “The Lizard Brain,” Bob Dylan, protecting the well, and beating back the fear and resistance that drive mediocrity.

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By the way, here’s Seth’s lizard brain video mentioned in this episode:

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain on Vimeo

Seth’s Blog: What Matters Now: get the free ebook

A few months ago, Seth Godin asked about 70 people to talk about a word or phrase related to their own idea of What Matters Now. He collected them all into one big ol’ file, and now you can download a PDF of all those contributions, including pieces by folks like Elizabeth Gilbert, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pressfield, and, improbably enough, yours truly.

My essay’s called, Enough.

Wanna read more of these? Download the PDF of What Matters Now, or view it here using this squirrely widget from that totally annoying Scribd site.

I honor any project to write something — especially to write a long piece of fiction. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but, like most people, I have always been too scared to attempt it.

So, kudos.

But, here’s the thing: it’s hard to start writing, and it’s almost as hard to keep writing. Believe me, I know. And, there will be times every day when you get discouraged or you want to throw in the towel because you feel lost or depressed or useless or just plain tired. Empty. That’s the word. Empty.

All I want to say is, keep at it. You can do this.

Every time you sit down to write represents a new chance, and I really encourage you to make yourself see it that way. That means set aside the time (with a beginning and end, if possible), take it seriously, and, most importantly, try not to think. Thinking is not writing; thinking is thinking. Thinking does not make books.

So, keep your hands moving [PDF], don’t self-edit, and above all, don’t let past failures (or successes) have any place at your desk during the time you’ve set aside to do your work. There’s no good that can come out of trying to see the present, creative moment through the overly emotional, shaded lenses of either the past or the future. Just be in the room with yourself and, as my pal Andy says, keep moving the cursor to the right.

And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.

The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to figure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?

Just as thinking is not writing, advice is not writing. Got it? So, don’t blow your day on metajunk.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat yourself to the best advice about becoming a better writer (see below), but it does mean you sure as shooting better not be reading blog posts about “surprising writing tips” during your Special Writing Time. Personally, I love books about writing, writing advice, and just plain talking about writing. But, I also know (all too well) that something that seems or feels helpful can quickly turn into an anti-pattern. Especially when it does anything to stop that cursor from moving rightward.

Seriously. Read the next sentence out loud to yourself three times. No, do it:

When I’m reading about writing, I’m not writing.

And, of course, the irony is, nearly every (good) book on writing will eventually end up telling you – or leading you to see – the same handful of things.

1. Set reasonable goals and honor them
2. Draft with complete abandon; edit with surgical precision
3. When you sit down to write, focus without distraction; when you’re not writing, keep it off your mind
4. Read great books (actual big books, not blogs or magazines) as often as you can
5. Just write, and just keep writing, and just keep writing, writing, writing. Then write more.

Good luck with your novel, and have fun. For what it’s worth, here’s a few of my favorite books on writing (alphabetically, by author). Just remember: if you read them during Writing Time, you must smack yourself. Hard.

• Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day; Sounds like a BS title, but it’s not. Again: process. How to think and when. How to approach a daunting project sensibly by “parking on a downhill slope.”
• Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Shut off your monkey mind, get past discursive thinking, and keep that hand in motion. Like meditation, writing is a practice. You do it because you do it, that is why you do it.
• Hart, A Writer’s Coach; Failures in non-fiction writing are almost always failures of process (especially during pre-writing). A must-buy for journalists (and serious bloggers).
• King, On Writing; Writing is a craft, and it’s difficult, and it matters. If you don’t believe it, get hit by a goddamned van. (N.B.: If you need to pick just one of these, get On Writing. No question. It’s the best.)
• Lamott, Bird By Bird; Just so very, very wonderful. Heartfelt, funny, and desperately useful, if only for learning “The Shitty First Draft.”
• Zinsser, On Writing Well; The Grandaddy of writing-as-craft books. Learn how making prose is like building furniture. You’re an engineer of words. Friend, you’ll close this book with a new obsession for tight and precise prose writing. I don’t pull it off every day (let alone every sentence), but it’s damned sure on my mind all the time.

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) - Vimeo [NSFW]

Here’s a video I made about a video I made. Consequently, it’s also about writing a book, fake self-help, the long road to developing expertise, and the ups and downs of repeatedly asking the world to tell you who you are.

The video is long. As usual. This is how it works.

I’d had this fancy idea that I’d do a DFW-style dump of annotations about what I talk about over these 40 minutes, and I might add that later, but for now here’s all you need to know:

Dish soap cleans dishes; Stuart Brown says everybody needs Play; Rands has a cave where he doesn’t multitask; The Dreyfus Model has five stages; Andy Hunt wants you to Think & Learn Pragmatically; my pal, Sean Hussey helped me figure some of this stuff out.

And, oh, what the heck. Here’s how to supercharge your zen turbocharger with “5 Surprising House Hacks!” [even more NSFW]

[Index Card Photo: Inbox Zero Tumblr]

MaxFunCon: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work (via TSoYA)

Here’s the audio from a short talk I presented a few weeks ago at Jesse Thorn’s awesome1 MaxFunCon in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The talk is subtitled, “With All Due Respect to the Seduction Community”2, and it contains my typically NSFW use of, well, words, I guess.

It’s about how to get started—just started—with any project that really matters to you.

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Foam Barriers (and Granite Fears)

It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place. And, as I said in the talk, I think this often comes down to perceived barriers. Barriers to even the most modest kind of starting. Barriers that seem entirely real, external, and immovable.

But, why “perceived?”

Thing is, when you really put your back into it, and push against your barriers a bit harder, they often turn out to be nothing very substantial at all. More like fake foam boulders that just look lifelike because they’re illuminated by the unreliable light of fear. See, fear’s the really hard part.

Yes, the barriers give you a theoretically dignified toupee for carpeting over your neuroses, but the underlying fears are still unspeakably real. And, you totally know it.

So, just humor me. Think about something you’ve been really excited to make or do.3 Maybe something you’ve been thinking about starting for weeks, months, or even years. Dance lessons? Short story? Web comic? MAME cabinet? Tree house? Doomsday laser? Excel spreadsheet?4 What stops you?

Remember now, we’re not talking about finishing a project or even making something that you know will be the greatest thing ever made. Just starting. What’s the barrier for you?

Well, at least in my experience, if you’re honest enough to push past those sensible, well-worn consolations of generalized procrastination and unrelenting “busy-ness,” you’ll discover how many hang-ups trace back to some dumb, shameful fear. Yeah, I know. Crazy hippie talk, right? Still.

Any of these sound familiar?

• Fear of Apathy. “I can’t start this until I’m positive the work will never become dull or difficult.”5

• Fear of Ambiguity. “I can’t start this until I know exactly how it will turn out (as well as the precise method by which I’ll do it).”

• Fear of Disconnection. “I can’t start this until I’m totally up-to-date and current on everything.”

• Fear of Imperfection. “I can’t start this until I know the end product will be flawless.”

• Fear of Incompletion. “I can’t start this until I’m already done with it.”

• Fear of Isolation. “I can’t start this until I know making it will never be lonely.”

• Fear of Sucking. “I can’t start this until I’m already awesome at it (and know that even horrible people whom I dislike will hail me as a genius).”

• Fear of Fear itself. “I can’t start this until I’m guaranteed that making it will never be scary.”

There are probably a lot more, but these represent a few of the greatest hits spinning on my own particular jukebox.6

And, sure, there’s a lot of overlap, or if you prefer, design redundancies. Because once you let one fear hang out with you, it starts bringing all its buddies along to the party. And The Fears are a tightly-knit, mean-spirited posse who egg each other on and love nothing more than trashing your house while you sob in the guest bathroom. Fears are total dicks.

Then, There’s That Talking Lizard

To make matters worse, when it comes to strictly creative endeavors like making art7, your regular, old, garden-variety fears find an enthusiastic ally in the entirely rational, if philistine, voice of your Lizard Brain.8

Listen for it, because that voice speaks so often and with such consistency and unquestioned authority that it can begin to sound like common sense—even intuition. It’s the voice that sees you thinking about making something, then calmly, firmly reminds you where you’re going wrong, wrong, wrong:

1. Grow up. “You already have plenty of things to do with your Real-Life Obligations without wasting time dicking around with some doofy ‘art’ project. That’s for kids and people with sandals in California.
   So, stop being childish.”

2. Eat your vegetables. “Even if you cannot be talked out of making something, remember that those Real-Life Obligations all need to be completely taken care of before you even consider trotting off to pretend you’re David Foster Wallace.9
   So, stop having fun.”

3. No one notices and no one cares. “Why bother? Even if you were talented and interesting (which you’re not), you know no one will notice if you never make anything at all. Because no one really cares. Including you.
   So, stop trying.”

4. Your time’s passed, Li’l DaVinci. “Seriously, look at yourself. If you were ever going to be anything other than what you are or make anything other than what you’ve already made, you would have done it years ago. It’s too late now.
   So, stop evolving.”

See? What’d I say? The lizard’s a dick, too.

But, honestly, do you ever hear yourself providing a running commentary on how much you suck? Giving yourself a spirited anti-pep talk? Sure you do. I do. Everybody does—including people who produce unbelievably, unexpectedly successful work.

It’s not that successful and productive people don’t see those same barriers or feel that same fear—it’s just that most of the good ones have figured out how to either accept the fears as a natural part of the process, or they just choose to ignore each fakey barrier the second it appears.

And, that is precisely what this starting business is all about. Putting aside every “reason,” and announcing to your Lizard Brain that it can either evolve or suck a nut.

Not that this is easy. But, you know that, right? Exactly.

The Switch Flips

Think about the times you’ve tried to get started, but things just weren’t happening for you. What wasn’t right? What were you feeling?

Could be lots of things,10 but I’ll postulate one theory on how a lot of us knowledge-worker types get derailed at the point right before we really get started. At the point when we’re most susceptible to an attractive nuisance.

So, imagine the place where you go to make whatever you make. Could be a studio, a library, an office, a cafe, living room, or what have you. You’re sitting there. And, of course, you’re not doing Real Work for your Real-Life Obligations. You’re trying to make something new and perhaps wonderfully unnecessary. “Something useless,” the Lizard Brain whispers, “That no one will care about. That you won’t finish anyway. That you’re too busy to do….”

You’re now shamefully staring at your blank page or an empty canvas or a fresh Compass install or that unpopulated Excel spreadsheet. And your poor mind is already feeling like a lost duckling. You’re desperately casting about for something to save it—if not a big idea or the muse of “inspiration,” at least something that you really know. Something that you can get the hook into. Something that’s…important.

That? That right there? That is the enemy, my friend. That fear of your own inability and of the triviality of your non-work is so toxic. Because it opens you up to insane anxieties about what’s happening outside the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you.

It’s all those fears tearing ass like a colony of E.O. Wilson’s ants. In growing numbers, they’re on to the scent of your anxiety, so now they can build new and customized barriers in record time.

Then, in what can amount to a split second, a switch flips. The Lizard Voice has gotten too loud to be ignored. You’ve come to what you believe are your senses, and you feel compelled to escape this Elysian dream world of nonsense and feelings and unfinished thoughts and “what the hell was I thinking?” After all. You’ve got real shit to do, right?

Ah. Those three horseman of the maker’s apocalypse have come to your rescue: the unknown, the ambiguous, and the incomplete.

Better go check email. Might be something “important.”

The Opposite of That Thing

So, are you getting the perverse irony at work here?

Given that your fears know you too well, they can capitalize on any uncertainty that they know you’d find intolerable. So, even a surprisingly trivial matter—so long as that matter might represent items unknown, ambiguous, or incomplete to you—can suddenly seem extremely important and will swiftly divert your attention from the cool stuff you’d like to be doing onto….oh, whatever that other stuff might be. Better find out.

And, yes, I’m waving at you here, email inbox.11 J’accuse, you horrible little troll.

But, you’re getting it, right? How the Lizard Brain lies and you believe it because it’s easy to believe?

When your resolve melts—when that switch flips and you’re pulled away from a generative kind of anxiety to be thrust into the more caustic and strangely addictive anxities of “real life”—you’re giving up a precious part of your real “real life” in exchange for security of the familiar. Problems you understand. Anxieties you’re comfortable being anxious about. Busy, busy, busy.

Problem is, all of this becomes like chugging saltwater.

Drinking saltwater is a terrible idea. Because it makes you thirstier than you were before you started drinking it. So, you have to drink more saltwater. Then, that makes you thirstier still, so you end up drinking more saltwater. Which makes you also drink more saltwater. And so on. Until you die. Still thirsty.

Ditto empty email checking. Ditto anxiety about anxieties. Ditto every other Lizard Brain impulse to solve a perceived problem by amplifying the thing that’s actually causing the problem.

Tolerance: Bulwark Against Fakey Barriers

If making anything substantial really matters to you, you’re going to need to take the cure. And, the antidote is nasty, difficult, and tastes way worse than saltwater. The answer? You do the hard thing. No matter what it takes. You stick with it at the time you’re most tempted to run away.

Like I said in the talk, developing those invaluable tolerances (the tolerance for ambiguity and the tolerance for sucking) requires the exercise of some very small muscles. The muscles are super-hard to locate, and once you do find them, they hurt like a bitch to exercise. But, doing that exercise repeatedly will pay you back ten-fold.

Because that next time you’re in the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you, and you start to feel the fears building barriers, you’ll know what to do. And you’ll know how to do it. Because you’ve done it before.

There’s no trick here, guys. No system. No diagram. No hack. No tips, no webinars, and no Digg-able bulleted lists. It’s simply work.

You sit, you work, you tolerate. Then you do it again.

Enough. Just for Now.

I’m not sure whether this is precisely relevant, but as I’ve been working on the “Large Writing Project” I’d mentioned in the talk (more on that soon), a particular phrase keeps going through my head:

How do I know what I need to know…for now?

Not, “I can’t start this until I know everything about everything,” or “I can’t start this until I’m 100% up-to-date on every aspect of my life” or “I can’t start this until my skills, tools, expertise, and experience are flawless.”

Just really asking yourself how you know whether you have enough of anything—be it information, tools, skills, or coffee—just to literally start. Just start. Not forever. Just for now. Start.

So, how about instead of waiting for the perfect conditions, maybe try thinking about this stuff in a kooky, opposite way:

1. Assume there will will always be tools that are better than the ones you have now.
2. Assume that events in the world will continue to happen or not happen regardless of whether you learn about them immediately.
3. Assume that you understand and control an embarrassingly minute percentage of the universe.
4. Assume that none of this matters if you’re determined to make something you care about today.

You already have everything you need. It’s all there. And it doesn’t take sandals, or perfect pitch, or iPhone 4.0, or full-screen mode, or a ★★★★-star reputation on the seduction community forum to get started. Or re-started. Or re-re-re-re-started.

Seconds Away

Your Lizard Brain is absolutely right when it tells you that most people won’t notice if you don’t make something, and that a lot of people won’t particularly care if you do. But, how you choose to respond to that existential kōan will say a lot about your potential as both an artist and as an engaged human.

Because, if you’re relieved that universal apathy provides legitimate cover for eight blissful hours of “managing email,” then you’re in luck. Every day for the rest of your life. Punch out.

But, if you’re like me, you may find you’re invigorated—even challenged—by all that bigger ambiguity. By knowing that, at any time, you might be seconds away from starting something amazing that seemed impossible a minute ago. Even oddly prepared to drop the lizard crap whenever the need arises.

Weird to think how insanely different your day could be today. Purely depending on what you do in the next 10 or 15 seconds. If that switch gets flipped in the right direction, then stays there.

What can you tolerate? What will you start? Now.

See? You’ve got enough of everything you need. You’ve already started. Now just keep going.

Thanks to my funny, literary pal, Jason B. Jones, today, I’m visiting lovely, warm Connecticut to do some talks and whatnot at CCSU. I mention it because I’d started typing this little post mid-way through the long eastbound flight that delivered me here from three fun (but very long) days doing a comedy thing with You Look Nice Today and Jordan, Jesse, Go! over on that other, top-left, edge of our nation.

So, I was tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where your wallet hurts your butt, and coffee tastes weird, and you try super-hard to sleep, but – well – you’re just too tired to sleep. And, I was fine with all that. Who can complain about being sleepy from hanging out with Adam and Scott? Exactly.

Except. The lady in the seat directly behind me was having grave problems with her “mud room.” Big mud room problems. I know this because she talked about it for several hours in excruciating detail.

I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts of the numerous and surprising ways that the room in which wealthy persons remove their shoes might contribute to causing a carefully-coiffed, 60-year-old woman to come unglued over “priorities.” Suffice to say, fixing this problem was a “high priority” for her. So, she said, repeatedly, as I shifted my wallet, let my coffee go cold, and balled the little blue pillow under my neck.

“Priority! Mud room!” I audibly mumbled, just loud enough to be heard exactly one row back.

Priority. Man, that’s a tough word. Because, depending on who you talk to, most people say “prioritizing” is either a giant problem, an underused skill, or a “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Me? I think priorities are simple to understand precisely because their influence is so staggeringly clear and unavoidable to behold, then act upon. Ready for this one?

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.

Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.

An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?

When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” – to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and “n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.

Kind of unique. Sort of pregnant. “High” priority.

This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe – real, imagined, or prospective – in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.

Even though their influence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shuffle them around like Monopoly pieces?

Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely – and this is really the important part – everything else in the universe can wait.

Related example. You ever had a loved one – especially a very young relative – pass away unexpectedly? Brutal. What did you do when you found out? Did you “re-prioritize” your day and move a few things around? Or did you drop everything and join his or her loved ones in taking care of what needed to be taken care of? You just saw what needed to be done and likely had no compunction about telling everybody at work they’d either have to wait or move on without you.

And, let’s be clear: this is not all about “urgency.” Yes, an injured child and a grieving family need help now in a way that an M&A discussion or a CPR class may not. But, again. It’s not a question of order or shuffling. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.”

Day One Buddhism.

Because, once you see what’s really there – once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture – you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more. Even in spirit.

Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?

Maybe a mud room is a priority. I think more likely it was this lady’s emotional obsession. If I were the sort of person who coached people on these things, I’d ask her what piece of information she needed to get moving on the “mud room” project, then get it, do it, and move on. That said, dozens of thousands of feet in the air seems like a crummy place to realize a mud room is your “priority,” but I’m not here to judge. Much.

What I will tell you is that these ideas about scarcity and mutual exclusivity fly in the face of most “productivity” and “effectiveness” nonsense, and frankly, they make most people bristle. Big time. When I tell someone who’s making 10 times the salary I’ll ever make that it’s literally impossible to have seven priorities, they look at me like I’m the biggest, dumbest hippie in the world. Sheesh, right?

For the Cult of Priority folks, two things:

First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely? Have you ever “re-assigned” “priority” to some task? Really? Because that sounds more like procrastination than management, let alone “effective” action and decisive execution. Sounds more to me like getting paid $10,000,000 a year to re-arrange your spice rack – then wondering why your company, marriage, and back porch are all crumbling under your “prioritization.” Sounds like maybe you’re just feeling crummy about not understanding your job and your life. Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.

Also, number two – and this is a biggie – I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is defined by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terrific opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.

No, no, no, no, sorry, later, nope, forget it, later, no, no, no.

Because only babies and crazy people get to pretend that reality actually changes when you close your eyes and hum. And, reality is the thing that priorities hang on. If you think you can change it by taxonomies and meetings, you still have only two arms, only now you’re also screwed.

So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don’t ask yourself whether it’s a “priority.” Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of.

Once you see and accept real priorities, the rest just turns on the mechanics of fearless completion.

Anyhow. To get up to speed, please read these in order: Matt said something, Josh said something, I said something, Andy wrote this awesome post, Jason responded, then, Anil responded. For extra credit, and to get you in the mood, go back and re-listen to Gruber’s and my talk from this year’s SxSW.

I will wait here. Please read them all. This will take a while, and you should only continue if you’re okay with that. As ever, it’s kind of the whole point.

[Time passes, and then:]

Privileges, Fiat, and the Consequence of Guessing Wrong

Weird thing you eventually realize is the extent to which we all rely upon a certain amount of guessing about other people’s motivations. Call it a heuristic or a shortcut or whatever, but in order to make scalable sense of a very strange world, we each have to apply existential algorithms and SWAGs to help us turn a lot of unrelated crap into a sensible story that we can live with.

But. It is important to remember that it is just a story. And the truth behind our assumptions is often not only different than we thought or hoped, but can even be really difficult to understand, summarize, or fit back into our original story.

Eventually, you also learn that it’s sketchy to blame the truth instead of a broken story.

Which is why I said what I said about how All Things D’s Voices section obtains and presents the work of writers who do not actually write for them. It’s why I’m uncomfortable letting other people decide, by fiat, that their insight into my own motivations gives them permission to reuse my work however (and, importantly, wherever) they please while unilaterally setting the licensing and compensation to terms they’ve decided are appropriate.

In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and – what? – I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant for-profit corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-profit corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?

Well. In my own case, anyone who guessed that motivation has guessed amazingly wrong. And, it’s not the kind of wrong without consequences. So, before I take up the rest of your morning, I’ll try to say this well and mostly once:

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And – if and when I choose to give away the things that I make – nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

But, let’s start at the beginning. With a series of computer networks that were designed to help scientists keep talking after a nuclear holocaust. The network, of course, is the internet, and its oldest and best-known profession is advertising.1

Days We Were and Weren’t Working for Mad Men

As giant, popular websites have begun to struggle with a years-old decision to hang every nickel of their fortunes on CPM ads (and, consequently, on constantly increasing the volume of page views that make those ads theoretically profitable), readers, fans, and independent makers of content have been forced to watch, fidget, and, wince at their increasingly awkward tarantellas.

Because, as my friend, John Gruber, and I have grown fond of saying, page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting influence on whatever thing you really want to do – on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing. Yes. Even if that thing involves not “just being a blogger”,2 maybe a few of us have the temerity to eventually crave something alongside or way beyond toiling in this noble, grinding, and often ghettoized occupation.

But. If your motivation is solely to be a blogger with a site that runs ads, it will necessarily mean thinking a lot about how you’re going to generate page views. Because without ads, most blogs would be lucky to generate bus fare.

When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded (and, that those delicious and life-sustaining ads are served along with them), it becomes unbelievably tempting to start doing things that you know are total bullshit. God knows I’ve done it. Probably dozens of times. Few of us haven’t followed that siren’s song in one way or another, but hopefully you evolve. Sometimes, you don’t.

The Lumpen Metrics of Page View Addiction

And, that is where things start turning to shit.

You “page” your articles to the point of hostile unreadability. You disguise or bury links to source articles in a way that makes your article seem a little more canonical than the real thing. You encourage unmoderated comment threads in which cheering an uncivil race to the bottom of the Port-O-Let means triple page views. You may even compel your indentured “writers” to hew to a stifling regimen of post volume, pointless stock art inclusion, and even compulsory word count – simply because the cargo cult of statistics whispers which coconuts make the best headphones. You conspire to trick, deceive, annoy, and badger your audience up to precisely that moment when they say, “Screw it,” and just never come back.

You ruin the fun for surprisingly little money and eventually discover, to your surprise, that whatever shred of credibility you originally brought to your enterprise has disintegrated into a light dusting on some backfill banners.

Also, “links.” Wow. Links used to really mean something different. When I first started enjoying blogs (maybe 11 years ago), links represented a semantic, curated map of the places where one writer’s attention tended to go.

Today, links have been converted into a wildly inflated currency – farthings that get hoarded and begged, then pushed around, re-counted, and stacked in ways that make you seem a lot less Charles Dickens than Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then, Presently, the Dark Night of the Soul

When page views run your life, you eventually start fibbing about what you really care about. You start pandering to an audience whose depressing lust for new pellets keeps them pecking at a feeder bar for every waking hour. And, yeah, these pigeons eventually become the sole leverage behind your going concern; lose the pigeons and there’s no point pushing pellets, right? Why else would you bother tending the coop?

And, finally, as this weird darkness metastasizes, you may unintentionally abandon those finicky but influential creators of culture and content upon whose work and authority your whole rag and bone racket ultimately depends. Because, let’s be honest: people who make things tend to recognize bullshit the second it plops into the domain where they have expertise. So, a smart blogger knows horeseshit page games like a veteran carpenter can tell you which chair’s made out of masking tape and balsa scraps. (“Dude! No! Don’t sit there!”)

Thing is: the silence or indifference of the readers and fans you lose will never register in SiteMeter, or Mint, or Google Analytics. There’s no overt trace to warn you when things have gone awry. So, you may never know when someone awesome has decided you’re a charlatan.

Because, friends, when page views run your life, you get dumb. Fast. And you start making terrible decisions.

The Ingratitude. The Temerity.

So, where does some small-potatoes nobody like me (or, in this instance, my pal, Matt Haughey and Delicious.com founder, Joshua Schachter) get off? Some giant for-profit publication (whose most evergreen topic, like my own, seems to be “How Everyone on the Internet Keeps Doing It Wrong”) shows the largesse to republish some digital peasant’s scribblings in their esteemed forum – and they complain? The very idea. Guys, this is a GIANT compliment, right? Because it “drives traffic!”

Hey, traffic. Right. I guess I’ll need that for all those page views, right? Well. Only kinda.

See, links and traffic are great. Seriously. Especially when you’re getting started and when they come from a site run by people you respect and admire as much as I admire Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (this beef aside, those two are the real deal). Links and traffic are, as I said, the coin of the realm in some sense. They build awareness about what a person does, and they expose a person’s work to a large enough audience that one even hopes a few “ideal readers” might end up landing somewhere in the mix.

But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if – as I said in that email to Andy – what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.

So, Who Died and Made You So Fancy, Mr. Fancy?

Anyone with the patience to read or hear anything I’ve had to say over the last year knows that saying what I have to say in the way I want to say it is orders of magnitude more important to me than driving a lot of pointless page views from people I never cared about reaching anyway. No offense, internet, but right now, I need links like Chasen’s needs chili.3

And, to clarify why I include myself in this particular discussion, even though ATD did not boost my own articles for their site, this kind of unilateral and dodgy “repurposing” of my work has happened to me many times. Even setting aside the truly black hat scraping that happens dozens of times a day, I’ve received this kind of left-handed compliment numerous times over the past 4 years.

The example that, for a variety of reasons, sticks out most prominently in my mind happened in May of 2007, when I awoke one morning to discover that the much-more-giant-and-financially-lucrative site, Lifehacker, had suddenly started republishing my entire feed on their ad-crazy home page without even bothering to inform me, let alone ask if I was cool with it. Hey. Wow. Just look at all that honor. Lucky me.

I immediately complained about the nonsense to now-emeritus Lifehacker editor (and long-standing Top 10 human) Gina Trapani, and she was kind enough to remove me from the mix with all haste (thanks, Gina).

But, should I have had to ask? As I said in an email to Gina at the time:

I wonder how [Lifehacker’s hilariously Dickensian publisher, Nick Denton] would feel if a site like Engadget started automatically reposting every article from Gizmodo w/o permission or compensation – but wrapped it in Engadget’s ads. Maybe he’d love it. Who knows?

Personally, I think it’s always nice to be asked about this kind of thing first.

Was it about “the money?” Was it because I think Nick consistently sets, funds, and promotes many of the most execrable examples in the history of publishing? “Not really,” and “kinda,” respectively.

This was about taking something I did and putting it someplace that wasn’t mine, and then acting like we’d both agreed it was a good deal. Like snatching the card off the gift-wrapped toaster I brought, scribbling your name above mine on the card, then handing the whole thing to the bride with a kiss. “Yay! Presents! Thanks, Nick!”

Money is only an issue inasmuch as the prospect of making it without effort or agency governs someone’s decision to stick their dick in my mashed potatoes and call it a birthday cake.

There’s Also No “I” in “We.” Not Until I Say So.

Here’s something like my point: there’s exactly one person on this marble who gets to choose what I give away, to whom I give it away, and under what conditions I give it away. It’s not folks who have decided via tarot or Ouija why I do anything that I do. And it’s damned sure not the esteemed employees of Rupert Murdoch or Nick Denton. It’s me, gang. Merlin is Merlin’s sole free-stuff decider. Full stop. Punto.

If it matters (and it certainly may not), my goal and motivation is to wake up early every day, drink coffee, play with my daughter, kiss my beautiful wife, and then spend double-digit hours trying to create things that will make people happy, productive, entertained, inspired, and even a little more awesome – and, on those rarest and most joyful of days, maybe I’ll even make something that combines all of those qualities.

But, all these ideas start and end with me. All the execution goes through me. If it sucks, it’s because of me. But it always has my name and my dorky icon on it, so you know where to either find more or simply try to steer clear.

And, whether people love, despise, or feel indifferent about things I’ve made, it all comes down to me and my weird independent occupation. This is not simply a job; it’s an anxious daily adventure in fucking reinventing myself. While, I’ll note, paying my own way to keep every dinghy in this little flotilla afloat and barnacle-free. And while it’s undeniably the richest of first-world problems, funding your own independence is the most insanely costly and addictive project you’ll ever love.

Okay, Shakespeare: WHY Do I Care?

What makes all this melodrama so interesting today, is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really “mean.” Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the floor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.

And, even in the face of change that will be gut-wrenching for literally everyone, I pray that for each person whose occupation relied on a 100- to 900-year-old business model, maybe one or two might get to figure out something they can make and vend in a way that does not require the intermediation of the people who are currently steaming their unsinkable vessels into some surprisingly pointy and resolute chunks of ice.

Again: There are Many Like It, But This One is Mine

This is just my opinion and I speak for no one but myself. But, when somebody moves my work onto their shelf without asking me like an adult, one of the last things on my mind is stealing or piracy. Seriously. I know. Crazy.

Steal my stuff? Sure. Go nuts. Grab it. Read it. “Pirate it.” Put it on a Kindle. Put it in a torrent. Make it into LaTeX (whatever that is). But, man. Don’t sell it without asking me. Don’t be a dick about pretending I made it for your project. And, don’t try to shortchange me on copper pipe, then call it a special discount. None of that’s your call, chief.

I can make words and videos and pretty much anything to replace or augment the ones people consume; but I absolutely can’t do it if you rub my name and address off of the label. And, here’s the funny part: when people like me quit making stuff, guess what? Your shovelblog fodder and pigeon pellets start drying up. You’d have nothing left to churn. So, it actually benefits all of us to take this stuff seriously.

The Niche Shall Set You “Free”

And, finally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and fiduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.

The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.

But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.

And, if we do the right thing, we can each merge into an insane new caravan of makers who look out for each other, focus on doing great work, and who try to promote things because it made a connection with us. Not because it benefits someone who pays us by the compliment.

But, the anecdote that’s on my mind today comes straight out of the warm and countless Wednesday night potlucks my family attended in the Fellowship Hall at White Oak Christian Church on Blue Rock Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Where, even if you arrived empty-handed and unable to contribute on a given night, you were welcomed and encouraged to eat all you liked. But, when you finished, you wiped your mouth, straightened your tie, and personally acknowledged every single cook who’d just fed you. Yes. Even all those amateurs who filled your belly for “free.”

SxSW ’09 - Gruber & Mann - HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

My pal, John Gruber (from daringfireball.net), and I presented a talk at South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, March 14th. We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal). Here’s what we had to say:

• Direct MP3 Download
• Subscribe via the iTunes Store
• Subscribe via another podcasting app

N.B.: Awesome drawing by Dave Gray. Here’s more.

Selected Notes

• #SXSW Merlin Mann & John Gruber | Tony Steward:. Blog
• HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog with Credibility at Notes from SXSW Interactive 2009
• Roo Reynolds - SXSW panel snippets - ‘HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!’

Related

• Essay: Better
• Video: kung fu grippe - How to Blog
• Audio: Full Merlin Mann Series: How To Blog | Spark | CBC Radio
• Video: John Gruber - Auteur Theory of Design - Macworld Pulse
• Video: Merlin Mann - “Toward Patterns for Creativity” - Macworld
• Video: Fireball - The John Gruber Story

Don’t keep calm and carry on. by moleitau

Apart from noting that I adore Matt and want to acknowledge his inspiration for this, I have nothing to add.

This, my friends, is the thing.

So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?

That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.

Here’s Kutiman’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (link includes credits for each video):

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.

Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary files. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.

In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical benefits that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and flexibility? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.

And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.

Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.

Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.

iTunes: “Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks”

Learn how ganging and constraints can help you create the blocks of time you need to devote 100% of your attention to making your best work. (10:32)

• Direct MP3 Download
• Subscribe via the iTunes Store
• Subscribe via another podcasting app

Thanks for your patience, everybody. Nice to be back.

celtx - Integrated Media Pre-Production

QPR - CryingStore - “Cold Tulips” by merlinmann (Celtx - Project Central)

I’ve recently returned to using the Open Source (MPL-based CePL license) Celtx app for all the script-ish stuff I write. But it does a lot more than just collect and format drafts (which, unlike a text file or MS Word, Celtx does in a way that lets you focus solely on writing, rather than fiddly formatting). It’s also an amazingly flexible and robust app for managing all the pre-production materials for screenplays, comics, audio plays, or what have you. And, again: it’s totally free.

Celtx reminds me favorably of Scrivener, in that it takes into account that there may be much more to a very large writing project than just typing; that your final draft only serves as the jumping-off point for another, more giant thing that you will need to make out of all your words.

To this end, you can choose to let Celtx handle as little or as much of the process as you need — anything from storyboarding and conceptualization through shooting schedules, prop management – even animal handling! (Memo to self: write more things that require animal handling.)

One neat feature I’ve just barely started playing with is the app’s ability to seamlessly share versioned drafts of your script via Celtx’s web-based Project Central. Looks like you can flip a bit to make it public v. private v. members-only. And, I still haven’t touched the coolest online feature of all, which allows you to solicit criticism and notes from other users and even collaborate with colleagues, co-writers, and production staff – kinda like “SVN for Screenplays,” I’ll dub it, in a way that will probably infuriate everyone who uses either of those.

Anyhow, here’s the script for my recent public radio “CryingStore” parody as an example. Powerful app, and very flexible and fun to use. And at $200+ less than the commercial gorilla, FinalDraft, it’s most definitely worth the free-as-in-everything download.

Celtx - FREE - Open Source - Application for Script Writing and “Integrated Media Pre-Production”

Celtx Links:

• celtx - #1 choice for media pre-production. (Overview/Intro)
• celtx - Screen Shots
• Celtx Features: The Feature Tour
• celtx - FAQ
• Main Page - CeltxWiki
• celtx - Download Version 1.0 (Dang, man: 4 platforms and up to 23 languages. Nice)

Design Observer: 26 Years, 85 Notebooks

Why a notebook link from the guy who’s supposedly over notebook pr0n? Easy. This is all about how Michael Bierut has used his 85 notebooks over the past 26 years.

The notebooks function like a security blanket for me. I can’t go into a meeting unless I have my current notebook in my hand, even if I never open it. Because I carry one everywhere, I tend to misplace them a lot. Losing one makes me frantic.

It’s a fascinating mini-memoir, told through almost three decades of lines in a go-to capture tool. To me, this is much more about habits, cognition, and memory than paper and cardboard.

Like most designers, I get asked a lot about my process. A lot of my ideas are so simple and dumb that a simple dumb drawing is all it takes to describe it. I probably did the drawing for the cover of Tibor Kalman’s monograph in a meeting. Picture on the front, stacked type on the spine: what if we did something like this? That’s how it came out. If a process is supposed to have steps, to reflect a method, that isn’t much of a process.

I disagree. Any process that stops feeling like a process has become an ideal process.

[via: Kottke: 26 years of notes]

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

Robert Christgau: CG 70s: The Grades

I love Christgau’s original (pre-1990) explanation of how he grades the records that he reviews.

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.

An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.

An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.

[… further explanations, then …]

A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.

E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.

An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

If every critic — ala Ebert, in his way — would disclose the yardstick by which he generates the “stars,” “thumbs,” or “Little Man” of his reviews, it would go a long way toward educating readers; as well as, I’d argue, potentially helping revive the increasingly one-star interest in professional arts criticism.

It’s not that people aren’t interested in hearing what anointed “experts” have to say about a given movie, CD, book, or what have you. And, it’s not even that the lumpenconsumertariat requires that everything be reduced to a pre-chewed paste about buying decisions.

But, disclosing the fahrenheit, celsius, or kelvin of a given reviewer’s mercury would make it much easier for readers to understand how closely a critic’s cognition maps to their own.

Because, by itself, a thumb is really just a decisive finger. And, by itself, a finger almost always benefits from a little extra context.

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]