So, layoffs are weird

This past week my previous employer laid off roughly 3% of its staff. A lot of people lost jobs, and I personally worked with about two dozen of them and knew those folks pretty well.

😞

I’m not going to pretend that this was a massively unexpected surprise; this is absolutely something that happens with over-hiring and mismanagement of performance for large groups of skilled employees. I’m surprised it hadn’t happened already, to be completely honest. But I can’t ignore the fact that layoffs are a really weird thing and I’ve been thinking about it more than I care to in the past few days.

Layoffs are especially weird in 21st-century society, in that we’re able to easily rally for each other on a social network and get out of laid-off status in a matter of hours. I posted twice on LinkedIn offering to help or talk to anyone affected by the layoffs, and these were by far the most popular posts I’ve ever made on a social network, ever. Not only did laid-off folks appreciate it (I spend much of yesterday afternoon responding to folks looking for tips on remote work), but dozens of former colleagues, current colleagues and people I’ve never met liked and commented on what I had to say. Most of those people also had their thing to say, and most of the thoughts were exactly the same: offers to help or talk, the processing of “many feelings” with ultimate optimism and gratitude.

It almost feels compulsory, that you must post about one of these things because everyone else in your circle is already doing it: if you’re not grateful to the employer that laid you off, you’re an ass. That compulsory feeling leads it the emotions feeling fake. I genuinely do want to help because I think a lot of highly-skilled and intelligent people aren’t aware of the possibilities out there beyond open office environments at well-intentioned-but-sometimes-overzealous e-commerce companies. I also want to make sure folks are okay with expressing frustration or constructive criticism at their previous employers, because without that it’s hard to imagine companies getting smarter about how they hire and evaluate the need for teams & individuals if everyone’s grateful for the company that took away their lifeline on a moment’s notice.

At least people come together to help each other in the face of a bad situation.

I saw some recruiter posting about a job fair for the folks affected, and his post mentioned layoffs at another company. I then started digging and realized just how many companies — large, highly-reputed, tech companies — are growing too quickly or cannot meet the demand of the market in which they compete. Tripadvisor had layoffs last month, AthenaHealth did last year, so did State Street, and there are rumors flying around that LogMeIn also did recently. Turns out dozens of Boston-based companies have had pretty major layoffs in the past decade.

Another friendly reminder that the primary goal of these businesses is to grow and profit, and the care of its employees is predominantly secondary. If you can find a place where you’re felt taken care of well enough, then good on you.

It’s hard to be helpful in a way that doesn’t feel alienating to someone. Here’s an attempt.

Some advice to anyone who was surprised by it: pay more attention to your employer’s hiring goals, earnings calls, performance review process and the perceived performance of those around you. You’ll quickly realize that there’s plenty of places from which to trim fat in a pinch.

Or here’s some other advice that I’m working on myself: make it so that a layoff doesn’t affect you. This can be done in multiple ways, but here are two I’ve really focused on:

• Pay very close attention to how your current or next employer runs things: how it spends money, its hiring goals, how it runs performance evaluations, where its profits come from. Ask questions if you don’t understand things or don’t find the information you’re looking for. If you can’t get answers, think about why you’re not getting answers. Ideally, you’ll find a company that is clear with how it runs things and that aligns with your values.
  
• Don’t be confined by where you live. Yes, relocation can be hard, but also, remote work is very much a thing that you should not ignore. A quick search with the right keywords (think “remote position jobs”) will net you some interesting stuff to consider. If you like being in an office, coworking spaces do exist, and some companies will even cover this expense if you play your cards right.
  
• Build up safety nets in other work, and, if you can, find a job that will enable you the time to do this. This is the classic side hustle argument. Most people I know who work in tech are so consumed by their work that it feels impossible to make time to do things on the side. My advice? Unless you truly love your work, don’t work for companies that consume you. My previous employer was one of those, and while I loved the work for a long time, once I stopped loving it I needed to get out.

I’ll stop talking now.

Everyone’s a workaholic

There were multiple nights in January during which I wanted to work on one of those things I resolved to start doing this year, but sometimes one just wants to watch a wonderful television show or spin a record. But there persists a nagging feeling. An itch not being scratched.

I have a lot of itches. One involves forming chords on a piano keyboard, another involves what you’re reading right now, another involves automating my house, another involves just building something cool. I’m not a skilled coder, but I’ve wanted to become good at it so I could eventually make an app on my own. And then I realized that nocode is a thing: No-code development, the idea (or now a movement, I guess) that there are dozens of cheap, scalable services out there on the Internet now which can be strung together to form a meaningfully viable business operation.

I could spin up an idea of my own in a weekend.

I assumed correctly that I’m incredibly late to the party: Personalities on Twitter spinning out consulting services to help fellow no-coders, whole premium communities where indie hackers bounce ideas and team up. But virtually everyone I see on the internet talking about something they love is talking about their paid vocation.

This is not just isolated to weird, specialty forums, but has also taken over my Instagram. I have reached the point where Facebook’s own app — yes, the app that my mother and her friends use more than people my own age — is more useful to me than Instagram, because Instagram for me has devolved into nothing more than puppy pics and individuals & corporations trying to convince me to buy things. Facebook is at least where I can talk to extended family or learn about delays in trash pickups & snow emergencies in town. On Instagram, every fourth story is a sponsored ad, and my feed is roughly 75% people promoting their new albums/projects/products/hustles/whatever. My wife’s feed is even worse.

It’s worse now that it’s extending into the real world. My wife and I need to make a conscious effort not to talk shop while eating meals. The most troubling example: We received a Christmas card from some friends (intentionally keeping theme anonymous), and they were promoting a product in. The. Christmas. Card.

Everyone selling all the time can’t be good for us as humans. Talking only about your work all the time inherently adds massive stakes to virtually every conversation you have; your life is centered on your income, your lifeblood. Sure, eventually some of those side hustles could become sustainable, passive income, and that’s the dream. But think about the psychological damage this is probably giving us.

No wonderful mindfulness apps are so popular: it’s not that they’re fashionable, it’s that all of us are regularly on the verge of a psychotic break.

I truly hope my fellow millenials have hobbies they can pour this anxiety into. The beauty of a hobby is that, if I lose interest, or if my interest changes shape, there are no stakes. I can morph that hobby as I please and as my passion for it changes. When I decided to stop exploring music as a profession, it didn’t stop me from playing; when I decided I no longer enjoy live music, I kept recording music and listening to recorded music. I listen to new and old music constantly; I strive to engage in deep conversations around why great music is great. But I gave up on trying to make money on it, and .

But then again, maybe I should be trying to: I could have done this. There’s the fucking itch again, and here comes the psychotic break.

Instead,

I might start buying Lego sets again and writing about that. Would that get attention?

Clarity check-in

And here’s month two. There’s a beautiful partly sunny sky outside but I’m instead staring at an iPad screen. Just kidding, I’m oscillating between the two because the outside is nice.

My theme of the new year was about striving for clarity, and reflecting on the first month of the new decade, forced weekly writing seems to be helping achieve this. I have a bit more clarity around how and why I think about things, what things I want to spend time thinking about, and how I want to convey them.

One thing I’m not thinking about is the Super Bowl, which is a waste of my time.

I have a few larger topics I’m noodling on for future posts, but for now I have some updates on how the year is going so far, and some things I’ve enjoyed along the way.

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Not doing things is doing things

I did write down some resolutions-of-sorts back on New Year’s Day, in the spirit of that theme. A few are progressing fairly well: writing regularly, being more present for my wife, stopping & breathing more.

Others… well, I have enough clarity to know I don’t care to move those forward at the moment. They’re simply not as important to me as the ones in focus right now. These are things I’m not doing:

• Participating in a band/musician/songwriting group. I’ll probably write more about this later, but I’ve been rethinking what kind of music I want to make after becoming inspired more by ambient & solo piano music than recent popular music. This is an area for which I am working toward clarity but haven’t gotten there yet. Once I figure this out, I’ll explore this or whether it’s even going to add value to my music composition.
  
• Finding something with which to spoil myself. I wrote this down at the behest of my wife who suggested I should do more for myself, and I agreed, but this has been difficult to give priority. I honestly feel like getting a puppy was a splurge.
  
• Cultivating an online base/community/whatever. I see this newsletter as something to contribute here, but also I simply don’t care too much to self-promote — I’d rather just write what I feel and see if it sticks.
  
• Reading regularly. I started a fiction book and it’s at my bedside, and every time I go to read it I’m asleep in five minutes. Damn you, comfortable mattress.

One area I’m still working through is more strategically defining my relationship with capital-w Work. Working remotely is wonderful and I’ve even grown comfortable with being a bit scattered about it, but I realized early this year that I was so excited about remote work that I neglected to think about what else I might want out of my job. To me, this is not about leaving my job for something better (because no job is perfect but working for Abstract is quite great), but ensuring that I’m being clear, proactive and assertive about what I expect out of the job and how I want to shape it. I’m circling around this idea now, and not sure how it will work out.

Quick aside: “Stay tuned” is an obsolete phrase and let’s stop saying it

I was about to end that last paragraph with “Stay tuned.” It felt immensely weird to say that, for two reasons:

1. I loathe the idea of demanding my tiny reader base to be attentive to my bullshit
   
2. When I publish my next update, an email will appear in your inbox. You don’t need to stay tuned at all; it will just appear.

“Stay tuned” is no longer a thing we need to do because, other than cable TV, our technology no longer warrants it. From Quora:

Back in the day of radio broadcasting, before the era of automatic frequency control (in the radio tuner) a station would ‘drift’ and the listener would have to move the tuner dial ever so slightly to hear the station loud and clear (remember the strength and clarity call out 5 by 5, in which each was evaluated on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being the best). Atmospheric propagation would also cause the station to surge and fade at times.
…Now enter the role of the sponsors of the radio program. Each sponsor would be billed a certain amount based on the number of “ears” that the program would “deliver”. If the number of listeners dropped, the sponsor would pay less and the radio stations income would also drop. It was certainly in the radio stations best interest for listeners to stay tuned to the program - and it would sometimes take a dedicated effort on the part of the listener to ‘stay tuned’.

Internet people: Let’s stop saying this, k? It’s not relevant for our medium. Honestly, it makes us sound desperate for someone’s attention. Might as well say “don’t forget about me.”

Ambient Essentials is the best music for not being distracted

The best thing — no surprise — has been shutting off the TV and instead listening to music. Turns out when something isn’t visually distracting you, you’re less distracted.

I truly madly deeply love music, but sometimes it’s also distracting. The one exception that has one-hundred-percent delivered on not distracting is Apple Music’s Ambient Essentials playlist. This is a wonderful mix of highly repetitive, calming pieces that both engross me and allow time to pass without me even noticing. Case & point: William Basinski’s forty-minute-long “dlp 6” and Ekkehard Ehlers’ heartbreaking “Plays John Cassavetes II.”

Oh, also, sorry — not a Spotify user. There’s a comparable playlist there, though, for all you folks.

BoJack Horseman is over and I’m sad, plus other recent great TV

I’ve started to more deliberately watch TV less and at specific times, which has admittedly been a challenge because there’s so much damn good TV. Just in the past 1-2 weeks, here’s what I’ve enjoyed a lot:

• BoJack Horseman, season 6 part 2. This has been arguably my favorite show of the 2010s, and I’m sad to see it go.
  
• The New Pope. The pace is slow, but the cinematography is beautiful and the premise is incredibly interesting to watch.
  
• Servant. I haven’t enjoyed psychological thrillers much lately, but this one has just enough to keep intrigued, between the creepy nanny and the amazing food/cooking shots.
  
• Broad City. This isn’t new and I loved this show when it was current, but Alicia and I began rewatching it as the show we could use to laugh out loud when no other show would… including The Good Place which ended strong but not hilarious.

I’ve noticed a recurring theme in these shows as being powerful and immersive, but still escapist. Little America on Apple TV+ seemed good, but it’s too real-world (and somehow feels problematic despite the intent) for me to enjoy right now.

The fewer tools, the better

Like Viticci has been touting recently, and Merlin Mann so eloquently put in a recent episode of Back to Work, I’ve felt a higher degree of clarity by resorting to basics instead of elaborate tools when it comes to my devices & apps. I first tackled this for my online presence, which is no longer beholden to unreliable web hosting providers, and simpler too as a result. I already tweeted about this, so in the spirit of not repeating myself:
https://twitter.com/sphmrs/status/1218983110521622529?s=21

The biggest burden w/r/t tools has been how I plan & keep track of what I need to do every day. For a while I used Things to meticulously organize & track those things. It’s a beautiful and quite capable app, but it overwhelmed me constantly. So I pulled everything out of it and moved it all into stock Reminders and Notes. I was already using these to share basic lists with my wife (groceries, shopping, some house project stuff), and when I realized I don’t need to hold myself to arbitrary deadlines for most things in my personal life, I realized the incredibly simple ecosystem I had for myself.

Things that must take place on a day or at a time are in my calendar. I religiously use calendar notifications, even for personal deadlines like posting this newsletter.

Things I need reminders about end up in Reminders (woah). I don’t need a special methodology to organize and categorize those things to do. Notes acts as a reference, a system of record, things I occasionally need to look up: like house utility information, useful shortcuts tips, gift ideas. Sure, I could categorize and tag these things incessantly, but I can also just search for them.

Everything that isn’t obviously a task needing a reminder or a reference note starts in Drafts, which is the one exception to this first-party rule. I like Drafts for a few reasons:

• Capturing an idea reliably from my Apple Watch is the best thing, and it’s the most reliable way to do this.
  
• This thing can format, merge move and prepare text for use literally anywhere, including Substack (on which this newsletter is hosted), which has neither an app or an API.
  
• Virtually everything in this app can be organized as I like and done in one click or keyboard shortcut.

Drafts plays the role of my daily agenda, not unlike the pen-and-paper planners folks used to (and still?) use. I wrote a Shortcut that pulls reminders and events taking place today and organizes it all into a Draft — I run this every morning as part of a larger routine that shuts off the alarm system and turns on a few lights downstairs, so it’s ready for me as I’m starting the day. This prepared draft aggregates everything I need to do, everything that’s going on, into a single sheet. With the Taskpaper format, I can easily cross things off the list or add notes to go through later. For reminders that come up throughout the day, I can also check those off when the notification hits, or I can sync a matching thing on my Agenda back over and kill the reminder if I no longer need it.

This is still evolving — in some ways Reminders feels redundant with Drafts for things that are not time-sensitive, so I might move some of my generic lists over to Drafts, which seems like a common use case for this app. That said, simplifying how I go through my day has helped me take better notes while also feeling less overwhelmed or distracted by apps. It’s also been a fun tinkering exercise.

Here’s a link to the Shortcut, in case it’s helpful to you: Prep Daily Agenda

That’s all I’ve got. Bye!

Thoughts on thoughts on iPads

They say that if you force a regular habit of writing, good things happen. In that sense I should have posted this on Monday; damn you, life and your sudden obstacles.

Last year was the tenth anniversary of the iPad, and a lot of people wrote about it. A lot of it was purely reflective, but some folks evaluated whether the iPad was a success in those ten years. It’s undeniably a success from a sales perspective, but lots of people seem focused on the question of whether it was transformative: to the way we do computing, to the landscape of technology businesses, to the way people live their lives. There are a lot of ways in which a technology can be transformative, but much of the more critical chatter has been on whether it’s been transformative to the way we work.

John Gruber suggests that the iPad has drastically failed to significantly change industries like the Mac did ten years into its existence, largely due to weaknesses in software interaction design, specifically multitasking. This didn’t sit well with me, and it took me a few days sitting with my iPad Pro to figure out why: mainly that comparing the trajectory of iPad in the 2010s to Mac in the 80s/early 90s feels like a fundamentally fraught, apples-to-oranges comparison.

1. There is no mention of the fact that Apple computers in the 80s and 90s had no obvious device competition in the market at the time and thus the 10-year anniversary is an unfair comparison to give to the iPad. Solutions for designers effectively did not exist like they did once Adobe’s products for the Mac started coming out, and the iPad needed to compete with two other major ecosystems made by Apple itself: the Mac and the iPhone. We’re still seeing how the iPad fits into the larger ecosystem, but it’s already clear that it’s part of a larger picture, one where all types of work can be done on a suite of devices, each perfectly suited to the task at hand, rather than on a computing device at all. If anything, the type of transformation the iPad begat is different than that of the Mac: where the Mac redefined industries, the iPad helped to redefine the consumer technology ecosystem as being universal and multi-device.

2. We could talk about work & industry changes, but there is little discussion about the changes iPad is bring to how creators make things and how students learn. I believe that iPad’s contribution in these areas are massive, even if not single-handedly, because they (and netbooks) have made full-on computing affordable to more people. There are countless examples showcasing and communities built around the iPad for photography, music production, live music performance, writing. Sure, these may be more incremental in terms of technological changes, but the iPad has put those capabilities in the hands of more people, without professional training or large budgets, and enabling them to do those things anywhere. Sure, Chromebooks are probably used more widely in schools, but without iPads, would there have been the same competitive push for Google to develop an extremely-low-cost netbook for students?

3. While multi-tasking on iPad does have issues, I disagree that it is fundamentally broken and I consider it a distraction from the main goals the iPad intends to achieve. I personally believe these interactions quite close and the issues I’ve experienced feel more like bugs and solvable with small improvements. I use multi-tasking almost every day on my iPad and, thanks likely to a bit of muscle memory and self-education. Ten years into the Mac, designers were using Macs for work, but it’s 2020 and I know hundreds of people who still struggle with their Macs and PCs but live and die by their iPads because of how much more intuitive it is for them (again, likely due to the learning curve being lessened by iPhones, but that should not diminish the importance of iPads).

4. Not really directly relevant, but something I think about a lot: since social media took over most discourse about technology, it seems that most people’s opinions on virtually anything is perceived as more extreme (especially in the negative) than it was in the 90s. We could very well be dinging the iPad and feeling nostalgic about the impact of previous technological innvations because everyone’s senses are being numbed all the time by vitriol nowadays.

Laying all this out, I still do feel like the iPad has a long way to go. But this feels empirically exciting to me in a way that Macs won’t ever feel anymore. It seems unfair — almost unsafe — to hold technologies created nearly 30 years apart to the same rubric, as it runs the risk of dismissing technologies that could be changing the lives of many.

These days, I use my iPad for virtually every bit of computing in my life with three exceptions:

• Using and testing the product I manage for my job;
  
• Taking music ideas to finished product in Logic Pro X, which might become unnecessary over time; and
  
• Running a Homebridge server

I distinctly use it for the following things:

• Reading
  
• Writing and publishing said writing
  
• Taking unstructured ideas and fleshing them out
  
• Planning my days, nights and weekends
  
• Communication that’s more than 1-2 sentences
  
• Viewing and editing photos
  
• Starting, and sometimes finishing, song productions
  
• All my daily work for my job except for software testing (which, by the way, I can technically do on an iPad via a secure VNC connection to my MacBook Pro for work)

Sure, I could be doing all these things on a Mac (or even an iPhone if I wanted to destroy my hands), but I don’t have to. I can do these things anywhere thanks to a cellular connection, hyperportability, perfectly-tailored apps, and a beautifully designed interface whose quirks are no more problematic than those of any other computing device. And to me, that’s transformative.

See y’all next week!

A bunch of crap duct-taped together

On the partially smart home, and other dependencies in my life

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I have four unused Philips Hue bulbs and I don’t know what to do with them. I bought them for a previous apartment, in which I really wanted to play with Apple’s HomeKit protocol as a means to automatically dim the lights when it’s bed time.

My new house warranted different lights to achieve the same result, and these became redundant. I wanted to use these — the basic white bulbs — for the ceiling fan in our living room. However, the previous owners of the house put in a combination fan/light dimmer switch, and when the dimmer and smart bulbs interact with each other, the bulbs flicker annoyingly. I could replace that switch, but to do so the right way and keep smart bulbs in play, I’d need to convert the one combo switch into two separate switches (one for light, one for fan) because there is no HomeKit-compatible combo switch on the market (or any smart switches of this nature that I’ve been able to find).

There’s no sense using them in the basement. There are already lights down there, and I go down once a week to make sure there are no leaks or ghosts or anything, and then I come right back up.

It’s not worth trying to use them in the garage, where the ceiling nearly twenty feet high and I don’t own a ladder with which I can reach it.

I can’t use them in the office (or rather, the spare bedroom with a desk in it). I don’t have the desk space for a table lamp, and if I put them in the ceiling then they’ll be on the main light switch and I don’t want to deal with HomeKit errors when I accidentally shut the switch off. If I do use them in the ceiling fixture, then I’d need to either have them run on a motion sensor that detects when I’m in the room and train myself to stop using the switch, or replace the switch with a smart one which is more money blown on this stupid pointless really fun experiment.

Should I just buy some floor lamps as an excuse to use the bulbs? This option seems very dumb.

All of these options create more work and don’t solve any additional problems without said work. I could argue that this is a fun, mildly inexpensive hobby, but it’d be an incredibly first-world hobby. It would also be one my wife loathes because of how often I’m tinkering with it, and inadvertently breaking things like our security system or the bedside table lamps.

As mentioned in previous writings of mine, I’ve tried various means to get the things in my life working for me. Instead, they create more dependencies and problems to solve. The house we bought came with Wifi-enabled garage doors, and I bought a SimpliSafe to secure the house. Neither system is HomeKit-compatible, so I jerry-rigged them into the Home app thanks to Homebridge, which required me to first invest in and learn how to run a Raspberry Pi because I didn’t want to have a server running 24/7 on my Mac, and then once I got the Raspberry Pi set up, I needed to figure out how to set up Homebridge, get an externally-accessible IP address, figure out how to do SSH so I can run the robot vacuum since I can’t get that reliably running through Homebridge, maybe set up an optional Plex server now that the Raspberry Pi is actually working, make sure I don’t break Homebridge in the process of setting up Plex, test, test again, test some more, sit down and play with my garage doors.

I think I’ve opened the garage doors twice with my iPhone since setting this up, but when I do, it works great. I do occasionally check the SimpliSafe sensors and set it at night, but a frustrating rate-limit issue on their API causes this to break occasionally and requires me to reset the Homebridge server — which I then built a Shortcut to do in two taps rather than needing to SSH into the aforementioned Raspberry Pi.

(Takes a breath)

I want to believe that this crazy set of dependencies into which I’m throwing myself is unique to the new and exciting Internet of Things. But most of my early adventures in homeownership are proving to require a similar network of dependencies, sometimes optional, mostly required because of reasons I’m not always able to challenge.

Alicia and I wanted to redo the floors in the new house because we had some money left over from our house budget. This was a glorious proposition: we came in way under budget on the purchase and could start turning our moderately-sized house in the sticks into a dream home that would make Pinterest proud. In reality, it’s three months later and the floors are still not completely done, we can’t get them finished until the contractor we hired gets stair parts stained to match the actual flooring, for which he had to sub-contract a different company who effectively gave up on the job, thus requiring us to have to find a second sub-contractor to finish the child task for the parent flooring project which is actually the second phase of an even larger flooring project. All of this because we did not know that flooring manufacturers apparently don’t make stair parts that match their own flooring, despite it likely being a very common use case to install matching stairs and floors. (That seems like bad business. Is that bad business? I don’t even know.)

The adorable little puppy we just got? Even she came with a bunch of things to remember. This isn’t a surprise: dogs are living things. But it’s also basically an entirely new set of commitments and optional-but-strongly-recommended-by-the-rescue-shelter-and-vet activities that somehow also depend on each other. First, these pills, then wait six days then start giving her three pills. Then, another test and maybe she’ll be ready to start training and play school but only if this is all done before she is five months old; if it takes longer, we have to do a different set of things. Day two of owning a dog felt like I just absorbed an entire team at work, and that team was sort of floundering but didn’t really realize they were floundering because they didn’t know any better.

It’s weird: being a guy who helps build products, I thrive on figuring out & squashing dependencies. And I’ve gotten pretty great at doing so in the last few years of my career. It’s incredibly overwhelming, with that in mind, to have introduced so many dependencies into my life all at once with little idea how to tackle them. These things start to feel like a bunch of crap duct-taped together, despite a ton of prep (and money — let’s be honest) to avoid that feeling.

So I’ve started to treat my dependencies like enemies, such that I keep them real close. I actively look for them, I embrace them when I find them. I question why something seems to come together so easily. Sometimes this creates a small anxiety, but I’ve trained my brain to mostly treat these as learning experiences.

Here’s an example: I replaced a dumb light switch with a HomeKit-compatible dimmer switch for the first time last week. The next morning, we had a weird series of brownouts in the house. I immediately thought I caused it with my hackery, until twenty minutes later when I decided to check the electric company’s website which confirmed a regional outage. Power returned fifteen minutes after that. Sigh of relief: it wasn’t my fault, and now I know that my electricity provider can sometimes screw up the voltage in my house.

Time to figure out what the hell it’s going to take to put in a backup power generator.

Of course, some of these things are worth the trouble.

Of course I’m rambling about smart home stuff on an actually important holiday like Martin Luther King Jr. Day. If you read through this whole thing, do yourself a favor and do something nice in the name of universal civil rights, like a donation to the ACLU. Or subscribe to this, because it’s another newsletter to entertain you!

See you next time!

Secret weird things I do

One of my favorite podcasts is Reconcilable Differences, which is a biweekly conversation between two parents in tech/podcasting about their lives. It’s a huge inspiration for this blog.

There is a recurring segment the two hosts (John Siracusa and Merlin Mann) talk about called “Secret Weird Things People Do,” in which they talk about just that — not just confessing to the things they do, but also dig into where the weird thing came from, why they do those things, whether it’s actually weird or pretty normal, and the like. I find these discussions incredibly interesting and compelling and humbling.

In that spirit, here is a list of some secret weird things I do:

• I cannot let my kitchen get messy, and if I do, it viscerally bugs me to the point of a near-anxiety attack. This is especially problematic since my wife is an Italian who loves cooking and has a horrible habit of leaving a huge mess in her wake. Typically at meal time, I am cleaning up as she is making messes — much to her frustration, since sometimes I inadvertently wash dishes she is still using.
  
• If I need a reminder to do something (say, in an app), I can’t just add it to a list. I need to pick a time and appropriate category/list for that thing, even if it’s neither easily categorizable nor time-sensitive. Sometimes this bites me when I get a reminder at a horribly inopportune time, but it’s the only way I know how to keep track of things.
  
• If you ask me to do something, I can’t listen to the next thing you have to say until I write that ask down. Due to the previous weird thing, this might take me an extra second and I’m sorry.
  
• I compulsively look for things to automate, organize or optimize in my home, even if it’s a negative return on investment. (Merlin talked about this in a recent episode.) I spent an absurd amount of time trying to correctly place speakers around our house for audio playback. I rearrange my iOS device home screens almost daily — not for fun, but because I think I’m missing something by how they’re arranged. I track my dog’s bowel movements in a Numbers spreadsheet. I’ve set up part of my home to be smart and I’m not sure it was worth it, but it keeps feeling like something I must do. Sometimes this extends into my wife’s stuff, and she usually gets frustrated with me. I’ll probably write more about each of these weird things later.
  
• I compulsively use GPS in my car even when I three-hundred-percent know where I am going and there is no possibility of traffic.
  
• I don’t bite my nails, but I pick at them compulsively. Alicia loathes it and slaps/pinches me to get me to stop. I think this used to be a nervous tick, but now it just happens constantly.
  
• If there is a stack of books (or book-shaped things like laptops/iPads), I must have them perfectly aligned in the stack. If there is a book in the pile that is slightly rotated, I must rotate it so all the edges are aligned.
  
• Despite a lot of my cleanliness-related weird things, I don’t seem to be bothered by objects covered in dust.

Running a dumb robot vacuum with Shortcuts

I love the idea of a totally self-sufficient robotic vacuum to keep my floors clean. However, I am also cheap: [a $1000 Roomba that empties its own waste] is amazing, but not something I’m willing to chalk up for at this point in my life.

So, I got an [Ecovacs Deebot N79] for sale on Amazon a few months ago. It’s great, but it’s also pretty dumb. Alicia and I call it DJ Roomba ([obviously]), and it’s very cute but kind of dumb.

It can schedule itself to run daily at a certain time, but no more granularly than that — I don’t want to hear a vacuum at 11am when I’m at home, but I do appreciate coming home to a clean house when I’m out and about. It does have Wifi capability and a companion iPhone app, but the app sucks: it requires 2 taps and several seconds of delay just to find DJ Roomba, and then I have to tell it what to do, and every time I want it to do something different I need to repeat this entire process.

It’s not great. I’d rather just build a scheme that DJ Roomba can follow automatically, whenever I want it to.

Homebridge and its flaws

I naturally Google’d the crap out of this problem. I quickly found [sucks], a Python interface that connects to Ecovacs’ server and then enables one to issue commands to any robovacuums tied to your Ecovacs account. This was easy enough to set up. I then found a way to [connect sucks to Homebridge via a plugin called CmdSwitch2].

I had never used [Homebridge] before, but I love the potential of HomeKit. I already have a moderately robust HomeKit setup in my apartment: some smart bulbs, a couple of switches (including a critically placed one controlling my modem) and a HomePod to yell at, so installing Homebridge on my Mac seemed like a fun little project.

Turns out I suck at and don’t enjoy the command line. The process of setting up Homebridge, connecting all the dots between Python, sucks, cmdswitch2 as a trigger that exists inside Homebridge’s config, and Homebridge itself, was a tedious process that quickly lost my interest. I kept having to kill and restart Homebridge to make sure everything was playing nice. I must have scanned the Homebridge QR code into my iPhone’s Home app twenty times to get it registered as an accessory.

The other major challenge: I didn’t want my wife to have to deal with this either, but we share an iMac. She uses it regularly for work, and often has to kill processes in order for Adobe apps to run optimally, or restart the computer if things go wrong — which also killed my Homebridge server. I found some options to automatically restart the server, and I could have kept trying those things, but my fun little hobby project of automating control of my dumb vacuum was increasingly frustrating me. I’d go to start the vacuum and constantly see the damn “No Response” in red.

So I gave up and dismantled the entire thing.

A few weeks later I realized that I don’t actually need Homebridge or cmdswitch2 at all. I really just wanted to run sucks on command: ideally a specific times of day or when I’m home, but just being able to trigger it from any of my devices (or my voice) would suffice.

Enter crazy and powerful Shortcuts.

Shortcuts and a simple AppleScript

Nobody I know personally really uses Shortcuts, but it’s sort of my lifeblood for controlling things around my home and work. I use it to set reminders without thinking, do a whole host of chores every morning & weekend, and generate canned email templates that I shouldn’t have to send as often as I do.

[Viticci] opened my eyes to the idea of [Shortcuts triggering actions on a remote Mac via SSH], including waking it from sleep. I figured out that I could also run AppleScripts using the an SSH command — osascript.

I realize that most tech people probably know this already, but bear with me.

I then did the following:

1. On my shared iMac, opened up Script Editor and created an AppleScript (.scpt) file that run a basic sucks command: sucks edge 15 clean 30 charge. This script, when run, tells Ecovacs to run the “edge” function on my vacuum for 15 minutes, then general cleaning for a half hour, then send the vacuum back to its charger.
   
2. Saved that .scpt file my parent user directory on the iMac.
   
3. In Shortcuts, wrote a very simple (1-step) Shortcut that triggers script via SSH. Rather than SSH-ing into the iMac locally, I enable SSH access and file sharing on the iMac, then connect to its IP address so I can run the command from anywhere.
   
4. Repeated steps 1, but with a different script that simply tells DJ Roomba to go home, it’s drunk: sucks charge

Now I have two Shortcuts: Run Vacuum and Stop Vacuum. I can yell out to my HomePod, tap a button on my iPhone or iPad, to kick either process off. As long as my iMac is on, this will always work.

I can run this as part of another shortcut, such as my Bedtime Ritual one which darkens some lights around the home and reminds me to floss, clean out Roomba’s dustpan and a few other things. I can even have Reminders remind me to run the Run Vacuum shortcut at specific times or locations — for example, anytime I leave my house. Then, in one tap, DJ Roomba is up to his antics.

The possibility in iOS 13

This works really nicely, but it’s not perfect. I’d love to customize even further when and how DJ Roomba can run. It sounds like this all gets unlocked in iOS 13 via Shortcuts Automations. I’ll be able to, for example, run the vacuum on Saturdays as long as nobody is home, something I can do currently but only with HomeKit accessories.

This is really dumb and nerdy, but I find it satisfying and fun.

Impostor snowflake

It’s been a while since I finished writing and publishing something. I would love for this to be because I have an exciting thing to announce that I’ve been painstakingly working on for the last however many months.

But I don’t (at this point at least). I have personally nothing to add to the cesspool. (My wife does, though, and you should go to her new website, yay!)

It’s not like I’ve felt no emotions or accomplished nothing in the past year. I’ve gone through a lot — my family has gone through a lot. I moved twice, settled twice, changed roles at my job, put out an album of music. I’ve felt anxiety, rage, excitement and joy through all of it. But none of it seems worth sharing.

Why is that?

I’ve also noticed my unwillingness to share things on social media platforms. I even had to set up a daily habit reminder (in an app called Streaks) to remind me to post a photo at least a few times a week.

Am I depressed? Maybe I’m depressed. Maybe I’m the old soul my wife keeps telling me I am. Mostly it never feels genuine. Except it is — I have real joy that I feel, but usually it’s in small quirks that my wife and I share. The occasional lyrical idea that comes to mind and gets written down but never gets seen by anyone but myself and Apple’s servers. The most public things I do currently are this obscure blog and my day job work, which is conventionally sexy but often feels like something everyone in e-commerce is already doing.

I don’t get off on winning. I get off on originality. Why is it so hard to find that? Am I just too risk-averse to go look for it?

Do people who actually share also exhibit these same feelings? What is the hurdle one must jump over to get past this feeling?

Do I just feel a need to individualize myself? I hate the idea of thinking that I’m a snowflake, but I think I feel awful and not worthy of anyone’s attention because I’m not a snowflake.

Is this ridiculous? Do people feel this?

Gear / Hyperportability

Moving out of the US has forced me to evaluate the gear I use to optimize for portability - but I am still an unabashed fan of the gear I own. Here is the gear I’m currently using to make things.

Hardware

Most of the time I’m doing things on an iPad Pro 10.5” (256GB) or an iPhone 7 Plus in Slate Black (also 256GB).

Heavy music production, code tinkering and design gets done on a late 2013 MacBook Pro with retina display, which I share with my wife. I also wear an Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS only, suckers).

I listen to audio with Apple AirPods or a pair of Sony MDR-7506s. I sometimes still play piano, and when I do it’s on a Korg nanoKEY 61 MIDI controller; on the go, I might bring along a Novation Launchkey 25.

Vocals used to be recorded in a padded closet with a Shure SM-58 fed into an Apogee Duet v3. But now, since my best-available recording space is a closet on the opposite side of my apartment from any reasonable workspace, I opt for a Samson Meteor USB mic, fed directly into my iPad Pro for tracking in GarageBand.

Software

Virtually everything that involves text starts in [Drafts 5], and then usually ends up in either [Things 3], [MindNode 5], Apple Notes, [Google Docs] or a text file edited in [Pretext]. I publish to the web using Wordpress, and sometimes tinker with my websites using Transmit (RIP), Coda or Kodex.

Most of my music is recorded using Logic Pro X or (when mobile, [GarageBand for iOS]). It’s all then backed up via Splice. Occasionally I’ll pull some samples or soft synths from Reason 9. My favorite piano sound is the SONiVOX Eighty Eight, and my vocals sound much better thanks to iZotope Nectar 2 and Stereo Imager.

When on the go or too lazy to sit at a desk, I compose or tinker with song ideas using [iGrand Piano for iPad], the Moog [Model 15], the fantastic drum machine DM-1 or [Novation Launchpad].

32 places to put stuff

I have a lot of places in which I put things I care about.

I use Reminders to store…well, reminders of things I need to do. Basic lists.
I have a wish list of stuff I want to buy on Amazon, but then I have another list of other non-Amazon stuff to buy in Reminders.
I also have a few lists and notes for things in Apple Notes.
I keep my passwords securely in 1Password.
I use Trello to manage projects, but not all projects because not everyone uses that.
For some things, I need to make a Google Doc or Sheet. (Somehow, I’ve literally never had a need for a Google Slides presentation.)
Sometimes those projects have other materials. If I’m collaborating, they get shoved into Google Drive or (occasionally) Dropbox.
If it’s a personal project, it’s most likely iCloud Drive.
If it’s something in Adobe’s ecosystem, it might end up in Adobe Creative Cloud - I barely ever use it, but sometimes things occasionally end up in there.
I use Scanbot to scan papers, receipts and stuff for storage in one of these places
If it’s a work thing, it goes to Sharepoint which also includes a hook into OneDrive.
Sometimes it’s a manual or guide book for something, in which case it goes to iBooks, which is basically iCloud but also sort of not. Speaking of iCloud services and reading, Safari Reading List also houses some reading materials that I care about.

Photos can of course be stored in many places - it doesn’t really matter where they go as long as they’re everywhere all the time. In case they aren’t, well, they start in iCloud Photo Library, then go to Google Photos and Amazon Prime Photos.

All this stuff backs up to one of two external hard drives, and an Amazon S3 bucket.

Sometimes I write. I like Markdown for my own personal writing, so I write lyrics, creative ideas and blog posts like this one in Ulysses.
I can’t use that for my day job, though, so for that I use OneNote to write & share notes & documentation with my team.
We use a proprietary solution for managing technical projects.
Roadmap documents? Excel and Word. Not Trello, at least yet, because I need to get people to adopt it and we’re a pretty tight Microsoft shop. Speaking of which, Powerpoint.
We still use Slack to communicate, and I use it for some other things. Sometimes I save notes and to-dos as starred Slack messages.
Of course, there’s always stuff in one of 3 Gmail inboxes, my work email via Microsoft Exchange.

This is a list of apps in which I can put things I care about. They all have incredibly discrete functions in which they’re invaluable to me, but they all each have storage capabilities too. There’s also all the physical papers and forms and stuff filed away in a bookcase.

Thank goodness cross-platform search technologies these days aren’t awful, because if I had to remember in which place I stored something, I would be lost pretty much constantly. As much as the app economy and tech startups fascinate me, it’s almost too easy to lose track of everything. If productivity tools like Workflow and IFTTT make it so much easier to keep things in sync, and there’s backup solutions galore, why does the digital side of my world still feel so fragmented?

As much as Apple’s plan to store users’ entire Desktops and Documents folders within iCloud for syncing purposes is slightly nerve-wracking, I appreciate the effort to help consumers keep their shit in one place. I realize this anxiety is partly my own neuroses and my being raised on a file system paradigm, but I also have to imagine that the fragmentation of the cloud storage (and general digital storage) markets are part of why tech is so overwhelming for some.