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The phrase "game changer" is no doubt cliché and overused, but every now and again it just fits.
I had heard about Notational Velocity when Merlin Mann posted about it on 43Folders. It changed how I use my iMac, MacBookPro, and iPhone, bringing them all together in a very cool way.
The app has been around for awhile (we talked about it five years ago!) but some new features and new technologies make it well worth another look. It took me a minute to understand why I'd want Notational Velocity, it because it sounded like yet another "everything box" like Yojimbo, which I was already using.
Notational Velocity does save notes, either in ASCII, RTF, or HTML, but with the latest version, Notational Velocity syncs with Simplenote or WriteRoom for iPhone. It also easily syncs via Dropbox if you follow the important configuration notes here.
Imagine if Apple had created an over-the-air method of syncing Notes and it all Just Worked. That's what Notational Velocity has achieved. Notes on my iPhone, my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Edit a note anywhere, and the changes are synced nearly instantly and appear everywhere. It's fast, it's seamless. Thinking about getting an iPad? That's only going to make this setup even sweeter.
Once you have set Notational Velocity to store your notes in individual files, you can edit them with any text editor, or within Notational Velocity itself. You can edit them on Windows or Linux machines synced to your Dropbox. Spotlight can search them. Notational Velocity will search incrementally as you type in the main box, and if it doesn't find a matching note, it will let you create one.
It would be unfair and inaccurate to call Notational Velocity a replacement for Yojimbo. Notational Velocity has basic tagging features, but it doesn't store images or PDFs or web pages. However, during the many, many months when I couldn't get Yojimbo to sync over .Mac/Mobile Me, I fell out of the habit of using Yojimbo. Syncing Yojimbo via Dropbox is dangerous because it stores all the information in one large database. My new habit involves storing individual files in Dropbox: images in ~/Dropbox/Photos, PDFs in their own folders, and so on. Web pages, which I used to store in Yojimbo, I now put into Instapaper. While it is possible to use Yojimbo and Simplenote together, I haven't done it, so I'm not sure how well it works.
After a few days of using Notational Velocity, I exported my entire Yojimbo database to a folder in my Dropbox. An app that used to sit in my dock and auto-launch when I logged in now sits empty. Notational Velocity changed the game, dramatically and quickly.
Notational Velocity is open source, and hosted on GitHub which means that anyone can access the source code and modify it for their own use. Steven Frank from Panic forked his own version of Notational Velocity that includes a third pane to display the note in Markdown format.
Of course you don't have to use Dropbox, or Simplenote, to use and enjoy Notational Velocity. They just work really well together. If you love text files, and especially if you're already using Simplenote, checkout Notational Velocity. It has brought together several bits of technology that I love into a big hot fudge sundae with cookie dough ice cream combination of nerdy yumminess.
TUAWNotational Velocity, Simplenote, and Dropbox bring child-like wonder originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Current fair use law is hazy by design; instead of laying out specific use cases, the law relies on the famous "four factors" about the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount borrowed, and the effect on the value of the original work. This can be maddening in many situations, because it is impossible to know in advance if a particular use qualifies. On the other hand, it gives a fair use incredible flexibility to adapt to new circumstances like the advent of the VCR.
But in the paragraph that comes just before the four factors, Congress did see fit to lay down a nonexclusive list of fair uses: "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." Is it time for more list items? The new Copyright Reform Act, proposed by Public Knowledge, would make a deceptively simple change to bring fair use into the 21st century—add seven words to this list.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Everett Bogue, author of The Art of Being Minimalist, and blogger at Far Beyond the Stars.
Have you ever had a creative evening when time suddenly flew by? A day when you executed a difficult project at work flawlessly? A brief moment in time when your challenging exercise routine felt effortless?
All of these times you were in a state of flow.
Flow is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago, who has studied the phenomena his whole career. Daniel Pink reintroduces the concept in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Many people flow through their lives in an effortless fashion, while countless others have a difficult time achieving a flow state.
Why flow is hard to achieve
Flow is a moment in time when you’re both challenged at the activity that you’re doing, and when you also have complete autonomy in the task you’re conducting.
We engage in flow under your own volition, with a skill which we’ve had some amount of experience.
If you’re not flowing, it’s probably because you aren’t allowing yourself to be challenged, you’re completely overwhelmed, or someone else is holding you back.
The majority of my experience with flow has been with dance and writing. I’ve studied dance for many years, and one of the technical skills that dancers work on is called improvisation. Improv is very tricky in dance. You have to turn off your mind and simply dance with your instincts.
When you’ve mastered improv dance, you’ve reached the sweet spot between your brain transferring commands to your nervous system. There is no longer any thinking involved, as thinking in improv dance will make everything stop. There just isn’t any time for brainwork when you are constantly moving.
Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that these moments of flow occur because we’re simply activating too many neurological functions. Because of this we no longer have capacity to be aware of what functions we’re engaging in. So the ‘conscious of me’ part of the mind switches off, your awareness of yourself slips away, and you just do.
You’re simply flowing in the the present moment
I have also experienced flow in writing. I think it’s very important for writers to engage in flow. A lot of writers stop and meticulously edit their work after every sentence, but writing this way (for most people) is counterproductive.
Why? I believe it’s because of the same reason that dancers can’t stop dancing in improvisation. If you just keep writing for 30 minutes without stopping, you give your mind a chance to turn off the ‘conscious of me’ brain functions. This in turn grants more brain power to challenging the boundaries of your writing ability.
You cannot edit while you’re producing work. If you do, you’ll be constantly switching between your right brain and your left brain. Your creative center will be switching off and on and it will be harder to produce anything meaningful.
A classic example of real world flow
Ray Bradbury was a freelance writer who was trying to support his family. However, he was working at home with his cute little children. This proved to be incredibly distracting, so he had to find somewhere else to write. So, he headed over to UCLA’s Lawrence Clark Powell Library.
In the basement of the library there was a number of typewriters that gave 30 minutes of writing time for a dime.
Ray was very poor at the time, and needed all the money he could to support his family. Whenever he popped in the dime, he wanted to get his month’s worth. This forced him to write at a frantic pace until his time was up. The most frustrating element of writing the novel was when the typewriter keys tangled, because it meant that he was wasting valuable time.
In between these 30 minute typewriter banging sessions, he would wander the halls of the library studying books and contemplating what he would write for the next 30 minutes.
The novel Ray finished was classic sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451. He created this novel in record amount of time, and recalled feeling as if the flow of time had accelerated. The novel wrote itself, effortlessly.
Think about how important it is to flow
I really believe many people miss this aspect of engaging in their work. If you aren’t flowing, you’re not reaching the peak of your ability. There is so much untapped hidden potential in flow, just waiting to be retrieved.
People who have learned flow are challenging themselves and creating work at their best.
We no longer have dime typewriters at the library, but there are a number of ways to practice flow without them.
9 simple ways you can bring yourself into flow
- Pick a enjoyable, challenging activity. The easiest way to enter flow is by doing something you love. The activity also needs to challenge you, one you are extremely passionate about, that you enjoy doing, and that causes you to grow. If the activity is boring to tedious you won’t enjoy it, and so there is no way you can engage in flow.
- Eliminate distractions. Turn off your phone, log out of twitter, switch off gmail. If you’re constantly flipping back and forth between different tasks you’ll never be able to achieve flow. A foreign distraction will quickly bring you out of the flow mindset.
- Think before you do. Do any research or preparation before you engage in the activity you wish to flow in. If you stop and do research while writing, or have to grab a bite to eat in the middle of a run, you’ll throw yourself out of the grove. Preparation is the only way to avoid that.
- Isolate yourself. The best way to achieve flow is alone. If you’re in a room full of people, your mind will constantly be drawn away from what you’re doing. Shut the door, put on headphones, or find another way to isolate yourself.
- Let go. Give up any expectations that you have for yourself. If you enter a flow situation with preconceptions about the results that you’ll get from the practice, you’ll inevitably disappoint yourself. You also run the risk of narrowing your focus to a point where you can’t change coarse naturally if your flow takes you down a road less traveled.
- Give yourself a time limit. Like Bradbury, set a timer on your activity. Give yourself 30 minutes of uninterrupted flow time and just go at it with everything you’ve got. Forget about how much time you’ve been doing the activity, and how much time you have left, just flow. You may just find that you lose track of time completely.
- Keep moving. Continuous motion is key to flow, don’t give your mind a chance to start second guessing what you’re doing. Keep moving with the activity you’re flowing in. Go at a pace that’s challenging for you, but not overwhelming. You want to be calm and collected, but also have forward momentum.
- Don’t think. Switch off the part of your brain that observes what you’re doing. This is your self-consciousness, your ego, your sabotage. Why flow is so important is that it circumvents the necessity to constantly critique yourself. This can be hard, if you’re used to constantly second-guessing everything you do, but it is so important to successfully entering flow.
- Practice. Like any useful skill, flow takes time to master. Don’t stress if you can’t do it right away. If you’re interested in achieving a state of flow, you need to practice regularly. Set a time every day that will be dedicated flow time. Eventually you’ll start to recognize when you’re flowing, and when you’re not. After many hours of practice, you’ll eventually become a flow master.
Everett Bogue is the author of The Art of Being Minimalist, and writes about living a simple minimalist life at Far Beyond The Stars.
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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.
Posted by Hartmut Neven
Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.
The beauty of an empty inbox is a thing to behold. It is calming, peaceful and wonderful.
An inbox that is overflowing with actions, urgent calls for responses, stuff to read … it’s chaos, it’s stressful, it’s overwhelming.
A friend recently posted:
“Help! I’m drowning in email!”
Let’s look at how to get your head above water first, and then how to get safely to dry land.
Head Above Water
You need to give yourself some breathing room. A flooded inbox is overwhelming, and you don’t know where to start. So here’s where we’re going to start:
1. Create an “actions” folder or label in your email. This is where you’re going to store any emails that you need to take action on (other than just replying or filing or whatever).
2. Pick the most important. Go through your inbox and check off 10-15 that are the most urgent action emails, and file them in this new folder. If you don’t get to the sections below right away, you can at least work from this folder for now.
3. Temporarily archive. Now create a “temp” folder. File everything that’s still in your inbox into this temp folder. Everything. You’re going to get these out of the way and not worry about them at the moment. We’ll get to these, but it gives you a little breathing room.
4. Set a new policy. Every new email that comes in will follow the rules in the next section. No more allowing your inbox to pile up.
New Emails
So what to do with new emails that come in? Set some rules, and commit right this minute to ruthlessly sticking to them:
1. Process from the top down. When you open up your email, process the inbox completely. Start with the top email in your inbox, and open it. Take one of the following actions, in this preferred order: (1) delete (use this liberally), (2) archive (in case you want to look it up later), (3) quick reply (four sentences or less) and then archive, (4) put on your to-do list for action (if you don’t have a list, start one now) and then file in your “action” folder. This last item includes long replies (which should be as rare as possible). If you take one of these four actions, you should dispose of every email.
2. Go to the next email and take quick action, and so forth. Don’t spend longer than 20 seconds on any one email, and even then you should only do that if you’re doing a quick reply or adding the item to your to-do list. If you process this quickly, you’ll be done with your inbox in minutes.
3. Only when you’ve processed should you start worrying about the to-do items. You can choose to do those now, or later. Don’t start doing the to-do items when you’re processing.
4. Newsletters, etc. You’re never going to read all those newsletters, notices from services, catalogs from companies, and so on that regularly get delivered from your inbox. So go into your “temp” folder and delete all of them right now. All of them. And whenever new ones come in — emails that are not from real people directed just for you — you’re going to go to the bottom of the email and click on the “unsubscribe” link. Every single one of them should have an “unsubscribe” link — if not, mark as spam. It only takes 10 seconds to click on the unsubscribe link and then go to the new page and hit the unsubscribe button. And if you do this for every single one, you’ll soon get a lot less email.
Follow these four rules and you’ll never have a full inbox again.
Stop the Flood
OK, things should feel a bit more manageable now. Now we want to set some long-term policies so that you get fewer emails from now on.
Here’s what to do:
1. Unsubscribe from everything. This was talked about in the section above, but just in case you missed that, go back and read the newsletters item. You don’t need newsletters flooding your inbox.
2. Stop sending so many emails. The more emails you send, the more you’ll get. Use email as little as you possibly can. Call people if you can, or walk over and talk to them. If those aren’t possible, see if you can figure it out for yourself. If you send an email that doesn’t require a response, say so.
3. Send shorter emails. They’re more likely to get read and acted on, and it’ll take less of your time to write them. Try sticking to 4 sentences or fewer.
4. Check email less often. Set times each day, and only check email on those times. When you do, process your inbox to empty using the rules above.
5. Filter out notifications. If there are notifications you do want to see, create a folder or label for them, and create a filter (Gmail is great for this) so that the notifications go straight to that label/folder and skip the inbox.
6. Set policies. Put up policies on your website or send the policies out to the people you work with. These policies should be aimed at reducing the number of requests you get. For example, if requests are coming to you that should be going somewhere else, put that in your policies. If people should deal with things through a different channel than email, say it in the policies. Try to figure out your most common types of emails, and find solutions so you don’t have to respond to all of them.
7. Post FAQs. Similarly, if you get a bunch of questions regularly, post the answers publicly so that you don’t have to repeatedly answer them by email. It’ll save you a lot of time.
Processing the Old Emails
You’re going to want to return to your “temp” folder, when you have the time, and start processing it. Some steps:
1. Process it in chunks if there are too many to do now. Just do it for 5 minutes and then come back later.
2. When you process, follow the rules for processing your inbox above (under the “New Emails” section). Start at the top, take quick action on each email, moving it out of the temp folder as fast as you can.
3. Feel free to mass delete emails. If you know you’ll never reply or act on emails, just check a bunch of them off and delete or archive. You can get big chunks done at once this way. Give yourself the freedom to let these go — and just worry about what you need to do from this point on.
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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.
Developed in a joint effort by Israeli and Chinese universities, a new piece of technology that algorithmically makes photos more aesthetic might soon find its way to desktop products like iPhoto or Photoshop.The software works by applying 'standard' rules of 'good' photography, such as the rule of thirds. By dividing the image into nine segments, the software moves prominent objects -- trees, people, etc. -- onto the intersections or 'power points'. It apparently tweaks the position of 'prominent diagonal lines', and moves objects so that they're more uniformly arranged around the center of the image.
All in all, it's the beginnings of a very neat tool that I'm sure many people would love to have in their photo editing suite! There's a brief video of the technology in action after the break.
[via NewScientist]
New software that can automatically make photos more aesthetic is being developed originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Last year I took a look at a number of Subversion clients for OS X, finally settling on Versions as my client of choice for my personal coding needs. At the time, I was running a Linux server on some old generic hardware from the days before I drank the Apple Koolaid. After deciding to upgrade my wife’s 17″ iMac with the new i5 27″ model, I realized I could ditch the old Linux hardware and get some great power savings (and hence reduced electricity bill) in the process. The first task I had was moving my SVN repository over from the Linux machine (Ubuntu 9.10) to the iMac running OS X 10.6…and this is how I did it.
All of the SVN application binaries, including the server, already come pre-installed with OS X 10.6, located in the /usr/bin/ directory, so we just have a few steps to get that running.
- Create a system user for SVN.
- Create a new repository to store your code in.
- Optionally create specific SVN users for submission tracking.
- Configure the server to run automatically at system startup.
Creating an SVN user
While you could easily run the SVN sever with the root user account, for better system security it’s always best to have a dedicated user to run a specific service such as SVN. This limits any possible vulnerabilities in the SVN software from harming the rest of your system; if an exploit is used to end up with a command line ability, the attacker can only damage files belonging to the SVN user.
- Open System Preferences and go the Accounts page.
- Add a new standard user named
svnwith a suitable password.
This user will be included in the OS X login screen when you start your computer. Since there is usually no reason for somebody to log onto the desktop with this user, it can be hidden from the login screen. You can do so by opening the Terminal application and running the following command:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add svn
If you ever do want to login as the svn user to the desktop, you can click the new ‘Other’ option that appears in the login screen and manually enter the username. On the other hand, if you don’t want the ‘Other’ option at all you can also disable this by entering the following in a terminal window:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow SHOWOTHERUSERS_MANAGED -bool FALSE
You can also delete all the default directories created under the /Users/svn/ directory if you prefer a neat and tidy file system.
Creating your SVN repository
We now need to create the specific root directory for our repository and create it using the svnadmin command by launching the OS X Terminal application and entering the following commands.
sudo -u svn mkdir /Users/svn/svnroot sudo -u svn svnadmin create /Users/svn/svnroot
You can now view the /Users/svn/svnroot directory and see that new files have been created to form the base of your new repository.
Creating SVN users (optional)
If you are working on your own code and you know without a doubt that nobody else will be accessing your repository, you can skip this step. However it doesn’t hurt to configure a dedicated user now even if it’s just for your sole use, so that code check-ins are properly attributed. To do this we first need to edit the svnserve.conf file and enable the passwd file for user authentication. An easy way from the terminal to edit a file is by using the nano text editor:
sudo -u svn nano /Users/svn/svnroot/conf/svnserve.conf
Remove the # from line 20 so it looks like this:
### Uncomment the line below to use the default password file. password-db = passwd
If using nano, press Control+X and save your changes. Next edit the passwd file:
sudo -u svn nano /Users/svn/svnroot/conf/passwd
Then add the desired usernames and passwords, in my case I’m adding the user ‘bed’ for myself:
### This file is an example password file for svnserve. ### Its format is similar to that of svnserve.conf. As shown in the ### example below it contains one section labelled [users]. ### The name and password for each user follow, one account per line. [users] bed = beds_secret_svn_password
Scheduling the server to start automatically
OS X uses the launchd subsystem for automatically starting background services. The easiest way to configure svnserve to run automatically via launchd is by using Lingon. You can grab the latest version from Sourceforge. For more details on using Lingon see this previous article I put together, but for this task we just need to add a new User Daemon:
- Run Lingon, click the New button and select User Daemons.
- Fill out the dialog as follows:
Name:org.subversion.svnserve
What:/usr/bin/svnserve --inetd --root=/Users/svn/svnroot/
We now need to click the “Expert” button at the bottom and add the following text under the <dict> section:
<key>Sockets</key>
<dict>
<key>Listeners</key>
<dict>
<key>SockFamily</key>
<string>IPv4</string>
<key>SockServiceName</key>
<string>svn</string>
<key>SockType</key>
<string>stream</string>
</dict>
</dict>
<key>inetdCompatibility</key>
<dict>
<key>Wait</key>
<false/>
</dict>
<key>Umask</key>
<integer>2</integer>
<key>UserName</key>
<string>svn</string>
<key>GroupName</key>
<string>staff</string>
So that it looks like this:
Click the save button again and then reboot your computer to give it a test by connecting to localhost or your IP address with your favorite SVN client, ie: svn://bed@localhost. Your SVN server is now ready to be used! The SVN server will only be launched when you first try and use it, so it won’t be taking up any unnecessary resources.
Migrating an existing repository
If you’re like me, and want to migrate an existing repository from another system you can do so easily by skipping the svnadmin command in step two, and just copy the repository directory from the old system to the new system. I would advise to upgrade your existing repository first to ensure that it is compatible with the version of SVN that comes with OS X (SVN version 1.6.x). Also you’ll want to ensure that the copied file’s owner becomes the new SVN user created in step one.
We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:
- Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
- New deployment techniques: We'll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we'll share key lessons learned with the world.
- Openness and choice: We'll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we'll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.
As a first step, today we're putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public. If you'd like to respond, visit this page to learn more, or check out our video:
We'll collect responses until March 26, and will announce our target communities later this year. Stay tuned.
Posted by Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, Product Managers
Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve. We've recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we're taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.
We're rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don't see it in your account yet, check back soon. We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.
On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.
We've relied on other services' openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We're building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.
We really hope you enjoy the experiences we've built within Gmail and for mobile phones. If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com. We look forward to continuing to evolve and improve Google Buzz based on your feedback.
Posted by Todd Jackson, Product Manager, Gmail and Google Buzz
