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452
It had some issues that I couldn't figure out so we went out and bought Parallels for Macs and the problems ended.

What were the issues?
453
Iphone Playing Cards - Just kidding



Actually this is the one: E-mail game (Inbox Zero Read or Die type game)

454
Living Room / Re: What are some of the best e-book lay-outs you've seen?
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 05, 2011, 04:13 AM »
Don't worry about style for now, just try to write something that you like and then think about editing/proof reading stuff.

I don't mean to be arrogant but see there it is again: Think about editing.

...as if on average I don't proof read or meticulously consider my posts.

If I really want to think about editing then I have to include style.

No...I have to include everything. Beyond the "everything" that I know, consider or care on my current post per post basis.

...and for that, a book demands more from anyone than any blog or forum post.

Even if someone accuses a book author of not putting effort in editing, setting aside ghost writers, chances are few people would equate the lack of thought to be on par with a poorly edited blog or forum post.

You just need to make your points in simple possible ways (not too short or too long type of stuff like seth godin).

No offense to you or Seth Godin but I often found Seth's concepts to be... complicated and under-explained.

Take the bootstrapper's bible, based off of a quick skim, it's built on two things. Obvious (to the reader) outlines + anecdotes and references to stories to serve as the meat for concepts that can stand on their own as single sentences.

There's nothing wrong with doing it that way and in fact, it's how many successful marketers produce their most praised articles but there's two weakness that's lacking from that method.

1) When I sweep away at all the references, it becomes nothing more than a glorified motivational blog post. Inspiring but it's certainly not an attempt to make an actual useful guide more understandable. (This is based on my skimming.)

2) It's not simple. It's over-simplified. Everything written is almost to get the reader to nod their head and reduce their need to think. (again, my own conclusion although I've read other book reviewers of other books who have described certain books this way) I'm the farthest from someone who cherishes the elite feeling of figuring out a difficult book but the reality is I am not an expert. I don't write to provide the answers. I write to share my vulnerabilities, in the hopes that I might help others and others might help me. Most importantly, I've always tried to target my writing to someone who is as desperate as me.

For me simplicity is not about shortness. It's about a text that is as lengthy as necessary but not longer than that.

It's just one of the conundrums I have to face with my writing style. I hope this is clear enough but if it isn't, let's just say if I don't worry about a style (particularly the personality of a lay-out), I'll have to worry about something else like pictures, lack of sentences, over-use of sentences and forced number of sentences and other elements of style that technically isn't style.

Here: this is something I just finished writing while trying to do a Seth Godin-like post sans heavy addition of anecdotes.

I'm not saying it's a good copy of his style but just that mere attempt to mimic made me feel like I wrote one of the most unhelpful and useless blog post I've written.

This is not to discredit Seth or anyone else. It's not like I had a month of editing and proof-reading to squeeze the best example out of my own two fingers.

However, this is often how my simple articles turn out. Just as long. Maybe short. (Who knows anymore - I've heard it explained both ways) but ultimately something that feels hollow to write.

By the way even mark foster suffers from this problem which you can see in his freely released book "how to make your dreams come true". I think his writing style in that book was very cryptic and it took me some time to understand his thoughts behind it.

Forster and I are incomparable. He has a working system already. (setting aside a fanbase)

It's the difference between someone who has already coded a software and someone who hasn't.

Just the title alone would make people pick up and skim the book.

This may seem irrelevant to the actual confusion behind his writings but IMHO no one is going to write a forum post stating, by the way even Paul Keith suffers from this problem.

Just that alone means Forster can just lurk and he'll have a free reference to the different wants and needs of his audience. Even better, since he's trying to write "to them" and not with them - as most experts (and fake experts) tend to do, he doesn't really need to focus on a lay-out as much as he needs to focus on raising the acceptability and credibility of what he's saying. (and only if the lay-out is the problem does he need to change the lay-out)

There's a reason almost no writer uses e-books as a replacement for blogging and forum posting. If I was better or more intelligent, I wouldn't head down this route either. I'm not though.

I sincerely thank you and the others for at least having liked some of my posts here but to make up for my shortcomings, I need to raise the bar and be a better communicator and the deeper I considered all the advises that has been shared with me (along with those that I have read), the more I realize my blogging efforts just weren't enough and that if I put more effort into this, I have to settle on a single medium of publishing. If I blog, I have to know things like CSS and the correct placing of images as well as where to acquire them. I may even have to consider purchasing Premium Blogging Frameworks.

On the opposite end, if I go into e-book writing, I at least have a free desktop software in Scribus.  More importantly though, a book is heavily dependent on content. Even if I'm writing something which has no reference and is purely opinionated - the only reason why someone would add fluff is to make a blog post come away feeling like a book. There's almost no way that the amount of text I've written can be considered a novel. It may not even count as a short booklet.

Therefore, at the heart of e-book publishing is the challenge of content over readability. I have to make it readable, but after that, I have to put my soul even for something like a handbook because most of those who even consider to read it aren't going to care about it's length or it's clarity. It's all going to be about "everything" and the depth of everything I put unto my post.
455
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Browser history as a tree/graph
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 04, 2011, 07:26 PM »
Unless I misunderstand what you're saying, then that feature is very easy to implement with a stack data structure, which doesn't offer the wanted tree view.

Oh then I must be mistaken. From an ignorant's perspective. the tree view seems to be the easiest to implement. After all it's just sorting.

Take Opera's history for example. View by Site without the Date, isn't this what the TS is pretty much looking for except it's not limited to links organized by home urls?

456
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Browser history as a tree/graph
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 04, 2011, 01:33 PM »
There are tons of extensions like these but most of them are considered spyware and don't get off much traction.

The one off the top of my head is an extension that used to be Flock's top extension but I can't find it now.

Anyway, Google got me here: http://publicmind.in...prove-history-tools/



Link no longer works though.

That's an interesting idea - I wonder if, say, the FireFox history database has enough information to construct that, hmm...

I assume all major browsers do otherwise when you hold unto the back button, you won't have a drop down set of links to go back to the very beginning.
457
Living Room / Re: What are some of the best e-book lay-outs you've seen?
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 04, 2011, 11:11 AM »
"You would not want to use the same dimensions/fonts/layouts for everything."

This is true and it is the reason why I made this thread.

Although...

I'm such a bad communicator that it is irrelevant what specific form I am writing in.

As long as a poster adds a "for poems" or "for technical handbooks" - it should be alright. I can't guarantee that I can replicate most of the lay-outs posted here anyway.

Nor can I agree with everything that's shared:

One challenge will be to anticipate which hardware platform the e-book will be read on. Because hardware will not only have a huge impact on the aesthetics of the design - it will also, to a large degree, dictate what's possible. An e-book that looks good (and is doable) on an iPad won't be the same as one destined for a Kindle or standard computer monitor. Especially when it comes to font metrics, geometry, and the treatment of whitespace.

I think the bigger dilemma is to have a unifying style across all platforms.

It's why, despite my being thankful to erikts for the changethis.com link, I really don't like the lay-out in the Seth Godin book he refers to: it looks pretty but it often forces the fonts to be smaller, it's a lay-out that breaks zooming on the desktop and finally it's a format whose intention is to have the outline headings be the focus rather than the meat of the content. A good lay-out for books that cross the line between blogs and books but not something that challenges both the writer and the reader to think thoroughly on the text or drop it entirely.

[...]Despite arguments (and wishful thinking) to the contrary - one size does not fit all when it comes to e-books.

I lean towards considering this a myth. For a book that should sell, yes. For text that can be read, an e-book is just a fancy .txt file. (barring color blindness and other special circumstances)

As you concluded, it's just a presentation format. If someone is truly charismatically skilled or truly knowledgeable about what they are writing about, the presentation format could simply be nil.

This is not me though. I need help.

A blog is a non-restrictions entrypoint for any reader :ath

It's only non-restrictive in the same way a forum post is non-restrictive: if it's a post that can be clarified, communicated and desired without adding images/tables/hooks, it's an entry. Especially if it doesn't need paragraphs or sentences or is purely a technical manual.

By the way why not try smashwords ebook publisher if you're feeling like publishing ebook? :mahesh2k

It's the style restrictions. I don't have a better style in mind but I don't feel like adopting any style either.

It's not purely from a desire to recreate the wheel. I'm sick at myself feeling like I didn't do my best when I edit something I write extensively only to give the appearance that I put no thought in my post or I was only writing for myself.

I want to merge and lose myself in a style where I added/inserted all the images at the right places. Added/inserted all the right hooks at the right places. Edited and scraped off all the wordiness at the right places.

Am I just isolating myself. No, I've already isolated myself with the way I communicate: be it text, speech or formatting.

If anything I want to shrug off this isolation. I want to lose myself writing for others and leaving little to no doubt that I did. I want something that comes off as longer than an average blog post but sharper, wittier and full of design qualities that would solidify to myself that I'm just not ranting. I want to concentrate on cutting my sentences as short as possible. My content as full as possible. My anecdotes only as minimally as necessary. My images only to optimize screen/web readability. I no longer want any chance of a short entry to be seen as thoughtless. I no longer want any chance of a long entry to be seen as rambling. Most importantly, I don't want a single hint of doubt creeping in my mind of me not writing for a reader; of me not trying to engage a reader that is smarter than me; of me not willing to consider readers that are dumber than me.

So...

What sort of subject matter will you be e-authoring?

Mostly the same/same I've been writing about: unproductivity, fiction and more polished version of these. (Although I can no longer call myself a hikikomori)

458
Living Room / What are some of the best e-book lay-outs you've seen?
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 03, 2011, 09:15 AM »
I'm thinking of quitting blog and forum posting and just isolating myself to e-books (free amateur written ones) and I was wondering since many of you here read e-books beyond the desktop, maybe you could share some of the best lay-outs you've seen when reading through your collection.

Something that can be done through free software like Scribus and exported to pdf and hopefully nothing involving new fonts because I really don't understand typography and I also have a hard time backing up and re-adding fonts to an operating system.
459
They will/should sync up with LastPass. Sometimes it takes a while but it kind of defeats the point of Lastpass if they don't.
460
Here are some tips from a 5 year Opera user :)

  • Ctrl+click on an image to save it. Nice and quick.
  • On search engine results page, press <spacebar> at the bottom of the page to automatically load the next page. It also works on other websites and blogs that has pagination, although on blogs the behavior is erratic.
  • SHIFT+Spacebar scrolls page up
  • Ctrl+click opens link in new tab
  • Ctrl+shift+click opens link in background tab, i.e. the new tab does not steal focus
  • CTRL+Mouse Wheel to Zoom in and out
  • CTRL+Spacebar to open homepage
  • Hold down the right mouse button and roll the mouse wheel to cycle through the open tabs
  • To add a new search engine, just place your mouse pointer on the search box, right click and from the menu click Create search
  • Install Opera widgets and use them as standalone programs. No opera needed.
  • And yeah, do checkout the extensions.
-InstantFundas (March 02, 2011, 10:52 AM)

You forgot the rarest feature that even extensions rarely implement in other browsers: 1 and 2 for switching between left and right tabs as well as customizable keyboard shortcuts, ones that allow things such as ctrl+shift+w to close the tab and instead of switching to the right, it switches to the left.

Sigh...too bad Opera keeps hiding and switching these around now. Unless you saved your keyboard shortcuts file, expect a lot of these hotkeys to disappear or change on a whim. I'm not even sure they even have a hotkey for saving sessions with the active window checked. Opera's features are getting a re-haul and I apologize for sounding like a hater, I just wanted to warn users who might think to switch to Opera specifically for those features.
461
The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009 / Vision Box
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 02, 2011, 09:35 AM »
"Responding to change over following a plan does not mean going into chaos. The following a plan refers to follow a line without looking at changes in time. That is flawed thinking, the plan may perfectly be to respond to change in an organized way, validating each time to improve the next one. The plan is simple: we decide as we go, following these principles."

Quote from the Article by William Martinez Pomares

I don't really know agile programming but as obvious as this may seem, I think it should be a stated prerequisite nonetheless for any organizational system to have a "table of contents" overview in order to separate and not allow any productivity method to be mis-categorized as a system. (Sort of how a "deep" novel or movie will eventually resort to a storyboard or software editor even if the core process remains simple and traditional to natural organization.)

Source

The Vision Box

A Vision Box presents the features and benefits of the project as a box of cereal – the front has a name and branding, along with a list of the key benefits the product will convey to its buyers (the customers who will eventually use the product, be they internal to the organisation or real paying customers). The back of the box contains operating instructions (high level design decisions) and a list of the key features the product will have.

Building a vision box is a creative activity that helps the team articulate what they are thinking about. It can be useful to break into smaller groups and have the groups each build a vision box that they then “sell” to the remainder of the team. After the separate presentations a shared vision box should be produced that conveys the ideas of the whole team.

Some examples of this for productivity are:

  • Corkboards
  • Kanban Boards
  • Index Card Systems
  • Software Sticky Notes

However, I firmly believe that Vision Boxes shouldn't be part of a productivity system in the same way you don't turn the table of contents of a book into a cliff notes version of the book.

The risk of doing so might turn the box into nothing more than an enlarged notebook with columns or worse, a calendar/goal system that works if you know what you are doing but falls apart once something (like a task) starts falling apart and getting in the way.

Another (rarer) interesting take in the article is the visual utilization of sliders:


The sliders range from Fully On to Fully Off – if an element is On then it will be the strongest factor that drives the decision making as the project continues. No two sliders can be set at the same level, and the more sliders there are on the “On” side of the grid the higher the risk of catastrophic failure this project accepts. Where there is little leeway in the project sliders then the choice becomes deliver everything or deliver nothing, whereas more leeway allows for partial delivery that contributes to the organisations goals.

Online Tool linked in the article

I don't think the idea works as well as it should but it's another clue towards the different ways a vision box can help in getting organized.

Finally, the most difficult thing about explaining a vision box in my opinion is that it's not a:

  • Corkboards
  • Kanban Boards
  • Index Card Systems
  • Software Sticky Notes

It sounds contradictory but it's like a chart. You get something from a chart but it has to have data in it in order to properly visualize itself.

My interpretation of a vision box is the same except it should already be a workable chart even before the data is calculated or the needs are met.

The article alludes to this by explaining how a product roadmap works:

The product roadmap is a time-based view of the anticipated delivery lifecycle of the product. It is a high-level plan maintained by the product owner and project manager that is expected to change over time.

The product roadmap is regularly validated against the product vision and is used to convey to the team and the outside world the likely release schedule for components of the product.

The product roadmap is at the level of features and epics – user stories are not included.

A product roadmap should be expressed as a big visible chart that shows important milestones, features and target release dates. As changes are made items are added, moved and removed from the roadmap.

The problem with a roadmap though is that, it again asks for a static workable private space, where everything is posted and that space can't be interrupted. Contrast this with a software launcher like RocketDock or CircleDock where if you reformatted your desktop, the program is not dead in the water once re-installed. Sure you have to re-add the icons but the structure itself promotes the addition and you don't have to re-memorize each and every position of a normal icon within the dock.

If all these seems different from how the article explains it, again I just want to emphasize that I am trying to explain the implementation of the Vision Box from my perspective of how it can become part of a productivity system rather than how it is used in agile programming.
462
Living Room / Real Life Pearl Tree Game
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 02, 2011, 06:01 AM »
bud_toy3.jpg

For those who don't know what a pearl tree is.

Source

Players take turns joining one twig to another but the connected ends must be the same color. As the tree gets larger, one must strategically place their twigs to prevent the entire unit from falling over. It’s one of those games that would totally drive me crazy but I would still play it again and again.
463
The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009 / Re: The busy man is never wise
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 01, 2011, 04:48 PM »
It's a bit grammatically "rushed" but I wouldn't say adding "us" is necessarily needed.

After all: "us" often assumes that something is directed at us, when most of the time we're not the target. We're just part of the structure. An employee for example works with what gets him promoted. A blogger gets by what makes him well connected and popular. A sports player gets by with what leads to a championship.

None to few of these are "bullets" or "curses" directed at us individually. Not even the arbitrary idea that this is what everyone in a workplace or in a stadium or a team desires. An employee might just want to have a stable job. A blogger might just want to have readers read their articles. There are tons of veteran quality players in sports that never really won a championship much less reach that elite level of a division.

The link describes how to work more effectively, by not working too long at any one time.
But what does that mean, in the context of what you say, to seperate this ineffectiveness from "our dreams turned goals turned projects" ?
[1] Do you simply mean to seperate it from out productive work?

If I had the solution it would be much easier to explain but the key is here:

Also, sometimes the only way to reach a consensus is for some participants to get so tired they become more willing to give up on their position just to bring things to a close. Thus, it would appear that the larger the organization and the more consensus-based it is, the better the likelihood that really important decisions will be made by tired minds, when they are most likely to make the decision badly.

...and it mostly goes back to the paradigm of goals that are important to us and goals that aren't. There actually has been alot of representations to this idea - so much that I've forgotten the names.

Things like this for example:



Source

The biggest problem though is that it's always prioritization based and the problem with prioritization is that it's a step behind what GTD debunks/goes against already and the idea should be to move ahead rather than return to what has already not worked.

At this point though, I'm really going beyond what my original post contained.

The thing with Lin YuTang's quote of the busy man is never wise is that it is supposed to stand on it's own. It's not about separation or categorization of work but simply acknowledgement, that the more tired you are, the less likely your priorities are in place therefore over-working is not the key.

This supplements the anecdote nicely. Which is this question of Can an over-worked staff function "beyond properly"???

...and what is beyond properly?

In that context, it's not about separating productive work but elevating productive work from good to great or as the saying goes: Good (Not Bad) is the Enemy of Great.

Putting my meaning to it though, goes beyond that. It's about focus, it's about defeating practice and habits by practicing something (this is more Forster's idea here) - and then it's about something further.

I don't have the end definition though.

Just that we know in terms of ratio, that the most dedicated third world people are not as rewarded as the most dedicated people having modern world opportunities.

If that wasn't bad enough, modern world blue collar dedicated workers don't have as easy a time as white collar uber-rich people.

Then there's also... "the shifts". The sudden dark horses, the technological booms, the gold rushes and the guys taking advantage of those shifts.

In each of those structure lies our dreams and in each of our dreams lies the hope that we can turn them into goals and then into reality.

...In that sequence, productivity (the concept) is the closest thing to a standard that doesn't require a vast difference between the weak from the strong or the poor from the other poor.

It spreads from salt dolls ideas from here though - which is why I didn't really include my meaning in my original post. It's just supposed to stand as is. A few words here and there but sadly I don't have the answers to expand and explain the end.

...although, if you run with these thoughts, it ends up with the position that it doesn't matter whether we separate or include productive work. It's like the same lie the blue collar stereotype endures years upon years upon years only for them to give up on their dreams or for them to luck out or out-dedicate the competition (depending on which rational you value in that stereotype) but nonetheless, as a probability, most of them work themselves to death doing productive work but not being able to escape their productive work in order to convert it into productive work heading towards productive realities. Many may even think their work are the exception, but only a few people like a Gandhi is able to show the walkthrough and power of "hunger strike" for example.

Walkthrough as in you could see as a tool to achieve a means...like quality investigative journalism or doing the right fundamentals (and breaking the right fundamentals) to reach a championship.

All those you could categorize as productivity systems with the exception that they are specifics to those categories.

That's sort of what I mean by "to seperate this ineffectiveness from "our dreams turned goals turned projects" although with one emphasis, it's not ineffectiveness - if it was then things would have fell down much faster. The reality is that it's effective. As effective as eating junk foods or watching propaganda TV ...or being part of a world where we need to do certain things to put food on our tables that we might not be proud of.

To reel it back to clarity though, can it simply be separated from productive work?

Probably, but it's like the excuse of needing to have a private place you can call your own before starting a getting organized experiment. (No personal offense intended towards mouser's assignments)

It sounds good but it's kind of like saying, get a house, get a job, get all that first out of the way and we're going to organize or make your life more productive. At that point, is it even about productivity or is it about creating false realities to hide or reduce the flaws of a productivity system so that more people would "feel good" just applying it until it can no longer work for them? (and then the victims have to contend on their own or even flat-out reject all forms of productivity experiments)
464
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Index Card System Organization
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 01, 2011, 11:48 AM »
Ok then. If that's what you need, here are the scrivener alternatives I know of, in case scrivener doesn't work out.

Btw for those who haven't heard, Scrivener is available in Windows as public beta: http://www.literatur...scrivenerforwindows/

Anyways, the alternatives:

Lyx Outline - urlwolf personally uses this based on what I recall in another topic, might want to ask him about this.

WritingOutliner Add-in for Word

There are others but they often fall more towards storyboards and also, I haven't personally used any of these beyond a cursory glance.

465
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Index Card System Organization
« Last post by Paul Keith on March 01, 2011, 11:27 AM »
It depends on your needs. Also, yes, mouser's specific system is that it can't be software although that can be cheated. All you really need to do is have a peripheral that prints out index cards in a handwritten font but that's easier said than done.

Anyways, to be specific:

If all you really need are index cards then something like:



Scriveners Cork Board can work

or...



app's preferred tool, Notezilla allows you to have an overview.

If you need something much more like a single screenshot, there's



SuperNoteCard.

If it's all input then there are applications like Anuran which functions more like diary and well...it's all too big.

Mouser's system is really something that can be imported in tons of software easily.

The core weakness of software is that you have to have it on-hand and it needs to be as snappy when inputting the entries.

That's just not possible even with tablets. The closest thing to that kind of system is to have index cards and then scan them into Evernote.

Edit:

If you're just looking for a print unto paper system, here's how Goalscape makes it look when you export it into pdf or print it out directly:

Screenshot.png

It's far from perfect but it is customizable and it releases the items in card based size.
466
Shannons Law is about data transmission capacity, binary data being dumped into a noisy channel at one end and yet being able to ensure it can be accurately recovered at the other.

It is not relevant to Wikipedia.

I don't mean this as against you Paul, I know you're only quoting a source, but I really hate it when people subvert very specific science or maths theorem for something utterly unrelated.

Yeah, I'm not knowledgeable about Shannon's Law but the article reads like it's one big metaphor for information evolution or information transmission.

In that sense, it's relevant to Wikipedia in a stretch. Data as well as clarity of data transmission after all is not really limited to math theorem.

If memetics could be compared to diseases and genes could be given virtues of selfishness, then the theory of Math is in my opinion just as open to metaphors on other issues. This doesn't mean I'm defending the author because certainly I don't really understand what this is all specficially about but it doesn't read as irrelevant to me when it's really portrayed as a big picture thing. Wrong? Sure and I would hope you would explain it further to me but irrelevant...not so much except you're right maybe it is subversive...but can it really be subversive?

After all, who exactly is the audience of the author? He's not selling or making it clearer for bored ADD science interested readers. If anything it reads like a food for thought attempt at a metaphor and thus maybe the author over-stretched his metaphor but I doubt he aims to subvert when the end result is still a confusing mish mash of ideas and analogies and not really an article with a clear cut conclusion.
467
Link to Full Article

Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it. Distrust and productive use are not incompatible. Wikipedia is the ultimate open source repository of information. Everyone is free to read it and everyone is free to write it. It contains articles in 262 languages written by several million authors. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors.

Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon’s law of reliable communication. Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The rapid growth of the flood of information in the last ten years made Wikipedia possible, and the same flood made twenty-first-century science possible. Twenty-first-century science is dominated by huge stores of information that we call databases. The information flood has made it easy and cheap to build databases. One example of a twenty-first-century database is the collection of genome sequences of living creatures belonging to various species from microbes to humans. Each genome contains the complete genetic information that shaped the creature to which it belongs. The genome data-base is rapidly growing and is available for scientists all over the world to explore. Its origin can be traced to the year 1939, when Shannon wrote his Ph.D. thesis with the title “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.”

Shannon was then a graduate student in the mathematics department at MIT. He was only dimly aware of the possible physical embodiment of genetic information. The true physical embodiment of the genome is the double helix structure of DNA molecules, discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson fourteen years later. In 1939 Shannon understood that the basis of genetics must be information, and that the information must be coded in some abstract algebra independent of its physical embodiment. Without any knowledge of the double helix, he could not hope to guess the detailed structure of the genetic code. He could only imagine that in some distant future the genetic information would be decoded and collected in a giant database that would define the total diversity of living creatures. It took only sixty years for his dream to come true.

Pasting it here because I feel it correlates with some flaws in productivity systems. Most notable though is the ultimate idea that clarity can and even must be achieved in noisier settings in order to be honed rather than secluded.
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[attachthumb=#1][/attachthumb]

Link to Full Article

The challenge before us was complex. The 49er was a new class of boat that hardly anybody could handle and we had very little experience to build upon. We also knew we would have to take our racing skills and our physical fitness to completely new levels, as well as learning to sail the boat. And on top of all that we had organize everything ourselves and raise the money for what to many seemed like a 4-year holiday. Of course the reality was a lot of hard work with long days and plenty of ups and downs. It was intense, but very rewarding because we were really focused on our shared dream goal – and we loved to sail the boat for hours at a time, day after day.

We had incredibly long to-do lists, so it was frustrating and stressful trying to fit in everything we had to do each day. I knew that if we were to reach our goal, we had to approach this challenge in a better way. Setting the right priorities is easier said then done when entering uncharted territory: there always seemed too much to do and resources were scarce. But the clock was ticking, so we had to prioritize if we were to achieve anything at all.

What I needed was a visual map to show the entire structure of the challenge: every goal and subgoal. I wanted to fly over the landscape of goals and get the view from 30,000 feet: seeing all the goals at once and the connections between them. What’s more I had to track our progress in every area so I could always see exactly where we were in order to decide what to do next.

So I came up with the Goalscape goal map. A multi-level pie chart seemed to be the best way to break down the huge challenge into specific goals and subgoals in every area. The circle represented the fact that our resources were limited: when we spent time, money and energy in one area, we could not spend it anywhere else.

Well... at the risk of looking like I'm just link pasting, I'll try sharing my perspective for why this is notable but I apologize if the below only further confuses the issue. (un-click spoiler for long version)

Spoiler
Why is this notable?

In an ideal world, it would be why isn't this notable? Why is it that we have to make make-shift confusing arbitrary pie in the sky numbers such as 30,000 feet?

...but that's the sad thing about modern popular productivity.

It not only needs a competitor (like say someone who participates in sports) to reveal something such as:

Setting the right priorities is easier said then done when entering uncharted territory: there always seemed too much to do and resources were scarce. But the clock was ticking, so we had to prioritize if we were to achieve anything at all.

...but it takes him representing a computer application before we even hear or see or discuss it publicly in productivity articles.

It's a frustrating story. Why do we need to be productive? Why do we need to have reached something...before people notice? Before we let people notice?

FUCK! Productivity...getting organized...this is supposed to be about solutions. About project solving. About addressing little tidbits.

But we treat it like a fucking toy. Like once we're consumed with long to-do lists, there's only often us or consultants. Fucking open sourced code is alot more useful at revealling unproductivity than our own systems and worse, "we" is not you and I, it's often just "us and us and us" holed up within our world until something works. Until something clicks.

So why is this notable again?

Because it's rare for productivity articles to be written like this. It's rare for productivity systems' true origins to be shared in a free article where it's not about making the system look good or sound simple...it's about what happened. What made this system work for you not for something that you can't do, but something you would give all your heart and soul to do better but you just couldn't make happen...until a system or shape or result formed.


That's why this is notable, because I could not write an article like this yet. Because I have not read many free productivity articles written like this yet. So I just wanted to share this in a place where people would desire to get organized irregardless whether people care or comment. I just want more things like this in the hopes that one day, it would not take someone reaching the finish line before it makes me pay attention because as the article says, the clock is ticking.
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Longer article for urlfilter.ini:

http://my.opera.com/...ml/tag/urlfilter.ini

Sadly Opera 11 is unstable to me so I'm not sure if I would suggest such extensions as this:

https://addons.opera...ds/1.0.8/?display=en

My main problem is that I cannot find anything to bring my Firefox passwords into Opera

This is one reason why I use LastPass but assuming you really don't want to re-type it all in one go, you could type it as you need it. The big difference about Opera's Wand and Firefox/Chrome's default password manager is the Wand is not really a password manager.

It's a type -> it saves -> then you no longer need to type your password or even know which places you have a password for mechanic and so things like typing it all in isn't as useful as you may think in practice.

HTTPS everywhere

https://addons.opera...tps/1.96/?display=en

Was using Opera for years and I can only say that its passwords management always sucked. No import, no export, just pray

Export is copy pasting it from the Applications Data directory if I'm not mistaken.

http://my.opera.com/...ed-passwords-in-wand
http://www.opera.com...support/kb/view/313/

Exporting out of browsers though is a manual type and re-type.
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Living Room / Re: Gmail accidentally resets some accounts
« Last post by Paul Keith on February 28, 2011, 01:47 PM »
Failures and security breaks are the cloud's 800-lb. gorilla if you ask me, on top of privacy issues.

I disagree. Profitability remains the cloud's biggest issue. It's the start-up mentality and it works for many things but these issues of lost data can somewhat easily be secured by more legit cloud services with applications that actually keep your data on your PC if the cloud fails.

Even Google understands that the cloud is more of a bridge than a storage container: http://googleenterpr...e-cloud-connect.html

The biggest problem here is that most cloud applications understand they aren't going to have a premium userbase and even if they do, you're never really sure whether it could scale especially when something goes wrong.

Then on the flip side, just because your service has a desktop client, doesn't mean people will flock to it unless you have a strong customer base combined with a strong marketing team combined with something that people are willing to shell money out of combined with loyal customers that are willing to stick to your application even if it breaks down.

It's important to emphasize this because even a desktop OS like Microsoft can break down A LOT and this is a huge company with long years of expertise as far as polishing their operating systems and are used by tons of people in corporations. Every cloud service basically has to contend with this natural eventuality of failure and security breaks and still have customers.

...and seriously privacy? We live in a Facebook age now. People who value privacy will go to lengths to defend themselves against that and certain cloud services will use that as incentive to be extra careful with their data. Ditto for the other casual users in endangering their privacy. They won't really pay for a secure private service, they'll just pay for what they want to pay.

On the one hand, the providers of cloud services want you to trust them.  On the other hand, they don't want to accept liability.  Those two incompatible approaches have never been truly tested IMO.

Again see Microsoft Windows. These services do accept liability when they can't get away with it but users do let them get away with it by often just demanding their data back.
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Living Room / Re: Gmail accidentally resets some accounts
« Last post by Paul Keith on February 28, 2011, 07:01 AM »
This is nothing new. Check out old articles like these:

http://www.jonasblog...unt-got-deleted.html
http://www.jonasblog...d-gmail-account.html

The simplest way is to really have multiple points of failure. I'm really lazy and ignorant at setting up things like Gmail backups or Outlook/Thunderbird sync so often times I just rely on copy pasting everything or exporting the e-mail as a doc. The most important thing I try to have is the address book. Messages I feel aren't that important. You can always ask your acquaintance to resend you most of those e-mails.

As far as trusting the cloud, Google is not among the most reliable. They are just the most used. I'm not saying I know of a better alternative but after what Google did to Google Notebook, you have to understand their policy will always be "treat us like a hot girlfriend dating your ugly you for the kicks".

If you're in, you're in. Google knows Gmail is one of the most convenient and most used services out there. Google also knows that if they screw something up, there's barely any other competition out there that offers nearly the same service and they know tons of users would go to the end of the world to find ways to recover their accounts. It sort of holds true for all software but Google isn't in a position to need to improve their services unless there's a major risk to their business.
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MSE vulnerability

Lastpass Vulnerability

XSS flaw explanation (don't really understand this)

Yep... I'd have left LastPass immediately if they'd revealed passwords. I'm not that bothered about someone potentially knowing the sites I got to. Most of them are stuff like forums (where you can see my username anyway) and Facebook (which are obvious sites for just about everyone).
What you said about password variations is fine, but it doesn't take into account this wouldn't work in practice. Most, if not all, sites I go to will lock you out for 10 to 30 minutes after 3 to 5 password fails. The only way any type of brute force (even a variation guessing) attack would work is if they had access to the database itself, which would be extremely rare and while possible (Gawker!) is very unlikely. Also, my example of adding "123" was just an example, and would probably be very early in any list of variations. You could use something better which would be harder to guess as a variation.
(A) is true, but there are also risks with not using such a service that you have to weigh up. For example, password re-use, tending to use predictable passwords versus random passwords, risk of phishing (LP would only enter the pw on the real site), keyloggers, being watched/recorded typing pw in, etc.
(B) + (C) exactly what I do. I can't (I don't think anyway) use LP for my bank as it asks for random characters from two passphrases. I don't use it for Gmail or PayPal (I use 2-factor though for both). I already use Facebooks login from new computer notification. All good advice.

Source

Open source desktop password manager vs. Proprietary Cloud-based password manager food for thought discussion:

Why would anyone trust a proprietary security tool? Have we learned nothing?

Essential parts of their code can be reviewed.
Incentives matter. LastPass has every incentive to keep their system secure -- one serious breach and their business is dead.
While open source has advantages, it doesn't help if there are not enough people maintaining it, and if security patches are not pushed to you automatically. Peer review is not the only factor in the game.

Source
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The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009 / The busy man is never wise
« Last post by Paul Keith on February 27, 2011, 02:18 PM »
Nice anecdote representing that quote.

Snippet:

I’m afraid we typically do not. Most often (not just at UT but at any large institution) the decision gets made at the end of a long meeting. The less important decisions can get made more quickly and so often are addressed first, and the very importance of the decision tends to cause it to be put off until the end. Also, sometimes the only way to reach a consensus is for some participants to get so tired they become more willing to give up on their position just to bring things to a close. Thus, it would appear that the larger the organization and the more consensus-based it is, the better the likelihood that really important decisions will be made by tired minds, when they are most likely to make the decision badly.

This pretty much explains my reason for why I don't consider many systems "legit" systems even if they can work for someone.

The real stress test of productivity is to unlock more productivity and until we separate our pseudo-work productivity from our dreams turned goals turned projects - productivity is just us hiding behind our own little delusions that what we do is on par with what the rulers of our society has social engineered to achieve. 
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Living Room / Re: DC Front Page
« Last post by Paul Keith on February 26, 2011, 01:53 PM »
All of this may be obvious but either way, hopefully this helps:

Forms:



Source of Image

Updates:



Unnecessary Texts:

Yeah I know hypocritical coming from me...







Donate:







Free Catalog:



Source of Image

Horizontal Single Entry Input Sign-up without Clicking Anything:



Source of Image

Add Search to Browser Search Engine/Search Box:



Celebrity Endorsements:

No, Cody eating up a potential member's donationcredit does not count. Don't really know who the other three people are.



Source of Image

Free Advise



Time of Day matters:

I'd use a custom Gmail or IGoogle theme but I don't know how to make animations where a refresh shows the evening or afternoon color theme of certain themes without cheating the clock.



Source of Image

Future:



Send/Request/Get Started/Sell - Marketplace Terms



Emotional Branding



Source of image

Single point

Although it didn't work out for my forum posts when I tried experimenting with font color changes and bolding a single sentence to summarize my posts, I firmly believe in this concept especially for links that require posting/uploading or summarizing and conveying an idea that might make readers feel they need to do too much.

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Bookmark Docs - MiniReview
« Last post by Paul Keith on February 26, 2011, 03:32 AM »
Do they plan to have a LInux version in the future?
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