The Art Of Not Asking Why

Anyone has an idea how to quickly scan something to iCloud as a PDF file? I want an independent PDF, not the Notes version.

Currently I go to Files > menu > scan document. I want something quicker and more intuitive.

I finished reading: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch 📚 last night. I feel the central idea of this book, multiple parallel dimensions, is discussed too often these days. The story takes it a little further and gives it more of a scientific flavor. The plot is interesting, though cliche and somewhat flat.

A good checklist…

1. Breaks down complex known projects (“How do I start this huge task?")¹.
2. Shows a clear start and a clear end (has a known goal)
3. Goes by order (first A, then B, then C. Not A and then D)
4. Contains short steps (the law of three to four words)²
5. is NOT time-based (a time of day, how long to do, etc.)

Here’s a good example, my “Rebound” checklist:

• Check ServiceNow (SNOW) for new Tasks
• Check Outlook for current flags/pins
• Check Outlook for new emails to flag
• Check Teams' activity for chats I’ve missed
• Check Slack

It is a complex project, and I can feel lost starting when I need to catch up with work, and I’m worried I missed something.

It does not show a clear start or end, though those are known: I start not knowing what’s going on, and by the end, I have an idea of what I missed.

Interestingly, order here is not critical, though it is implied by my priorities. Tasks in SNOW are the first to catch up with, then Outlook for flags and pins I tend to use when I can’t digest emails fully and convert them to a doable task.

Then, read emails to search for potential emails that look important and make them into tasks (or respond to emails and ask for more information to determine if there’s a task to do there and what it is.)

Then, Check Teams. People chat me, and I can miss it. Usually, when I receive a chat through Teams directly (someone is giving me a task), I create a task workflow on the spot or create it through our digital form at work (or ask them to do it so I have a record). The case here is not for that; it’s just to catch things I might have missed when I was grabbing lunch or something of the sort.

Lastly, Slack is our announcement medium for outages or similar events, though I usually get the information via Email or Teams first. It’s a good place to check to be aware if something should be made into a website announcement, a mass email, alerts, etc.

With checklists, the longer they are, in a way, the better they justify their use case. The best examples I remember are my checklists for setting up computers manually. Some of those include information that is still relevant today. At the same time though, if a checklist starts to feel tedious and I check certain items off automatically or delete them because they are not applicable, it needs to be adjusted/shortened.

Let’s talk about what checklists are not.

Checklists are not what’s going to make my day a productive one. They are a part of of my toolset, so I have to use them first. Besides, I can’t just make up stuff to use checklists for and hope to feel “productive.”

To reinforce my idea above, Checklists are not a workflow or a knowledge article. Explanations and visual aids do not belong in checklists; they belong in notes associated (and linked) to the list. Why? Because instructions make the checklist long and bloated. It’s also not a good place to find the needed information in the future. Finally, checklists are personal and should be adjusted as such, but information should be basic and accessible to others.

Because checklists are often closely associated with information and remind me of the “whys” of a certain thing, putting them at the head of an information article or a note makes sense, as long as a header or a subtitle separates them.

Footnotes

¹ : This means checklists are used for known procedures. Don’t use checklists for new tasks and projects which require more exploration. The brainstorming at the start of a new project is not a checklist. However, familiar components inside a new project (for example, a packing list as part of a trip which in itself is a project) can be checklists.

² : Checklists sum up information and may follow procedures. If explanations are needed, these should be in the notes below the list. It’s OK to have a whole workflow explained as long as the steps are clear and short in the checklist itself.

So I gave up on Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake 📚 a few weeks back. I found that the more I read, the more I forced myself to keep it up. It’s an OK book, well written, but there isn’t much content, and it seems like the author is repeating the same points over and over. Still, I learned fascinating things about mushrooms (for one, they’re not really plants; for another, they are the most likely to cause a zombie apocalypse), and I have way more respect for them now.

I guess it’s my turn to test Scribe from @amit. I’m especially interested in it because I tend to use the micro.blog web interface often. My tool of choice when writing long-form is Emacs. This post is in Scribe, and I closed the tab by mistake. Good test because when I re-opened Scribe, what I wrote was right there. It’s very clean, and I like the font of choice. It doesn’t look like it works with Grammarly (which I use in my browser), but that might be because of my own configuration on this Mac.

Another good design call is Markdown formatting when highlighting text. Some options are missing (like strikethrough, which I’m trying out above, and links), but most writing functions are there.

Somewhat better now… Added a bunch of my old posts with photos to the photos category, so they now show on the photos page. Photos, just to say the word one more time.

Meh. A second morning of poor sleep. The humid grey depressing weather outside doesn’t help much. I need the energy to work on several projects, but I’m all out. A stamina potion would be nice.

This weekend, I wiped my Windows partition and managed to delete my local Linux backup & games with it. Reinstalled Windows. Windows was happy to kill Grub. Fixed Grub. Found out I can’t boot into my Linux Mint partition. On the other hand, Windows can now finally handle VMware, so I’m setting up a virtual Linux machine for my Linux needs. Windows runs smoothly like it hasn’t for more than a year, making it a good gaming experience.

A new S3 Video..! About time.

In this video:

1. Arc browser
2. My new Photos page, why, and what it shows
3. How to talk to people - a podcast
4. Using the iPhone (or just using a "normal" smartphone again)
5. How much should we blog? (inspired by Jack's blog)
6. A couple of updates

Today we ran out of almond milk, so I tried flax milk. Bleeeh 🤢. Not a fan. I will need to make myself a regular latte later. Almond and sometimes oat milk with 0g sugar please, That’s how I roll.

Jack is taking down his RSS feeds for his detailed “vents” and going back to the regular RSS posting. This had me thinking.

How much of what goes on our minds should we put on our blog? Should we include random details throughout the day? A summary at the end of the day? Maybe a more thorough post every week?

When I switched over to Micro.blog, I started to post more often. This blog is very easy to interact with, so posting several times a day comes as second nature. As a matter of fact, I’m sitting at the park right now dictating this post into my iPhone. I might look at it later and edit some of the text, but I don’t feel I have to. This is a stream of thought, and I believe people who read this post feel the same way.

If you take a look at my old blog, you’ll see that most of my posts there tend to be longer, with more information and links. I still write down information like this, but not in this blog - at least, not often.

That leads me to another question: how much should we reveal about ourselves? Where is the line beyond which things become too personal or too private? There are a couple of things I said on this blog I wouldn’t have thought of saying a couple of years ago. Times change, life changes, and with those, our confidence and ability to express ourselves.

There are only two kinds of readers of this blog: those that are interested and those who are not interested. Interested readers will stick around and may leave a comment; those who don’t will skip this post. This is an oversimplification to a degree, but I do think this includes roughly 80% of the people who come here.

There’s nothing here I wouldn’t tell my grandma, as the saying goes. Likewise, I try not to be negative in general, and if I talk about someone specifically, I won’t use their name. That’s just common courtesy. As long as I do that, I think I’m in the clear.

With all that said, writing opinions in the open and understanding what goes and what we’re comfortable with takes time and practice. It’s easy for me to say the things I said above after more than a decade of writing different blogs.

What about you? Do you have a line of how much you share and to what degree? How did you decide, or maybe you haven’t, maybe you’re stuck?

Time to wake up and smell the coffee ☕. Ethiopian French roast 📷.

Guuhhhhh, I’m getting desperate here.

Does anyone know of a way to export an Excel sheet to a clean table in HTML? Saving a sheet to htm (it’s not HTML in Excel) file shoves all kinds of style elements into the code that ruins it.

Pre-coffee.

About a week ago, I wrote I miss the nice things about having a “real” smartphone. Since then, I started using my iPhone almost for everything besides the most private and some communications on Signal. I found out a couple of surprising things!

The Unexpected

As an advocate of smaller phones (I have an iPhone mini, which I think is the perfect size. My Android is a regular Pixel 6) turns out I actually prefer the bigger screen size for reading. The smaller screen has even less room when I need to increase the font size, especially if I don’t have my glasses on. Reading a book on the bigger Pixel is better.

Then there are the photos and videos. Both phones take excellent photos with the stock camera apps, but in my opinion, Google’s camera software¹ is slightly better than Apple’s. That’s because of its additional smart editing and integration with Google Photos and its AI. The iPhone insists on taking videos in MOV format instead of MP4, which adds another layer of complexity when I want to upload and store my videos. I don’t see the advantage to Apple’s native videos/photos format, especially since my photos often go into Photoshop and my videos to Camtasia for editing. So, as far as taking photos and videos - I find my Pixel to be better for my use case.

Annoying ads are yet another thing that I found the iPhone handles worse than the Pixel. Pop-ups, in-your-face flashy animation, and other ads with a tiny “X” you easily miss and tap your webpage away are everywhere on the iPhone. The smaller screen makes those even more annoying, so much so that I avoid clicking links to articles altogether. My Android seems to filter much more of these annoyances, partly because of the browser (Firefox Focus at the moment, which has a good reading mode) and partly because of components integrated into GrapheneOS. Those of you who use iPhones: how do you deal with this?? It’s so infuriating and frustrating! Is there a way you avoid those?

The Expected and Exceeding it

Some things the iPhone does better, and some it does much better. Here are a few things that I found refreshing as an Android user.

First, Apple Maps has come a long way since I used it years ago. In my opinion, Apple Maps is now even better than Google Maps. That’s because it has just enough information to make things useful, especially in NYC. Google Maps is causing me information overload. While I find that I miss the location reviews and charts of when a place is busy and not, these are mostly just perks.

Speaking of getting around, the iPhone has an “express” option to pay for NYC Subway without even using face recognition. This is fast. You’d think that waving your credit card at the turnstile is just as fast. Well, it isn’t. By the time you take out your wallet, pull out your credit card from its tight pocket, and then wait for the thing to register against the reader, you’ve lost 10-15 seconds. In a busy NYC subway system, that’s the difference between missing your train or getting someplace on time.

Scanning and recording notes is another thing the iPhone is better at. Google has Keep and Google Drive, but the integration and elegance are not there. Notes is much more polished and seems more mature, even though I think Google Keep has been around for longer. Scanning is a pleasure to use, and the fact that I can scan PDFs directly into my Synology (where I keep my documents) without going through a cloud (Google’s or Apple’s) is huge. The fact that I can sign and annotate those on my iPhone while they are open on the Mac for highlights and comments is mind-blowing. This is the kind of magic Apple is known for.

Speaking of magic: I found myself using the iPhone’s measurement tool just for fun. The thing is phenomenal. Meanwhile, my mom was blown away by the magnifier tool, which also comes with an option to brighten the screen app. No more camera flashes in dark bars and restaurants…! It’s these small things that make the iPhone surprisingly useful when you don’t think about it.

A Disclaimer…

It’s not possible to write an Android/iPhone post these days without annoying someone about their favorite tech. I’m aware that writing a disclaimer won’t help much either, but I’ll try.

First, again, I’m using GrapheneOS, which is aimed at privacy geeks. As a result, many features of the Pixel phone are not there. That said, I’ve used Google Pixels since they started (and before that, with the Nexus phones.)

Then, of course, these are my opinion. I used to wave away many of the iPhone benefits I listed above until I started using them. I understand you can get by with app X and write a script to get around option Y, which is what I’ve been doing myself for years. The point is that with the iPhone, I don’t need to.

Footnotes

¹ - My Android has GrapheneOS now, which means Google’s camera and photos are not present without an additional installation. I installed Google Camera almost immediately, as taking photos is important to me, and GrapheneOS’s camera is basic at best. I’m trying to hold back on Google Photos, but I think it’s a losing battle.