Vinh on Email

“Email is not broken, if you ask me. It could be better, for sure, but I don’t think it requires the drastic changes that so many other people seem to believe are necessary. And I certainly don’t need messaging intermediaries entering the picture. These alternatives just fracture what is for me a pretty well consolidated experience — if you want to reach me, my email address is pretty easy to find” – Khoi Vinh

For some reason, this reminds me of a line from my favorite movie about work and business:

“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. “

Unsupportive

Earlier this spring, I picked up a used electric lawn mower. After performing marvelously for most of the summer – it died.

Batteries no longer held a charge. Dead.

Not that unusual in this household.

The batteries in the 2 Dell Mini laptops in the house also, after 2 years, can’t hold a charge. Which, if memory serves, is about when the batteries in my Apple laptops also went out. Maybe sooner.

I called up the manufacturer – who said the batteries could only be purchased through them or Home Depot. Only Home Depot.

The Home Depot down the street from me had no lawnmower batteries on the shelf. Not even for this year’s mowers. Nothing. HomeDepot.com had something they said would work – but it nothing like the dead batteries.

I called up Batteries Plus – and they were more than happy to help. It was pretty remarkable to see how effortlessly they found and installed the replacement batteries.

We finished mowing the lawn. Yet today – the new batteries were dead – despite being charged over night.

I opened up the hood to find a wire dangling disconnected.

After a quick search online – I found the wiring diagram for this specific mower and it’s now charging in the garage.

So, no, I’m not worried about HP no longer making hardware devices. The TouchPad is the best tablet I’ve worked with in 10 years. And there’s a thriving internet community around it.

Plus, at least HP is saying upfront they’re divesting themselves from hardware. Unlike many other manufacturers and retailers that just act like their products don’t exist once they leave the shelves.

The Focused MacBook Air

Knowing that the hard drive in my MacBook Pro will go at moment, I picked up a MacBook Air this week (13″, 1.8GHz, 256MB, 4GB).

In the process of setting it up – I’ve decided to make this new machine a focused, minimal, work, machine. Despite Migration Assistant – I want to start some new habits, not repeat old, bad ones.

So far this means:

  • Changing ‘Desktop’ color to ‘Sold Gray Medium’ (something I’ve done since 1997)
  • Changing ‘Appearance’ from ‘Blue’ to ‘Graphite’
  • Removing everything possible from the top menu bar (so far, only Spotlight & Flux remain – they won’t be removed)
  • Leaving only the Spotlight search and ‘arrange’ icons in the Finder window toolbar
  • Removing any casual app (iMovie, FaceTime, etc) from the dock
  • Auto hiding the dock
  • Installing Flux.app (does a great job of discouraging writing too late into the night)
  • Installing Quicksilver (Macs w/o Quicksilver are unusable – try it)
  • Installing Isolator.app (on by default, hide other applications by default)
  • Installing MenuBarFilter.app to make the menu bar much less prominent.
  • Not setting up email, IM, Skype, or any sort of communications app. Nothing. This is a creation machine – not a communication machine.
  • Not migrating over bookmarks or browser histories.

How to Automagically Sync Directories Across Multiple Macs with Git & Launchd

In an effort to minimize my downtime when the funny noises this MacBook Pro is making finally amount to something – I’ve wired up a git repository to OS X’s native launchd service. The git repository hold all of my active projects – whether development projects with their own repos, research projects, consulting project. Everything.

Right now, there’s a Mac mini holding the shared repo with a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air pushing and pulling to it.

  1. Set up SSH keys the laptops and server (I like GitHub’s instructions)
  2. Set up the repo on the server
    mkdir active-projects.git
    cd active-projects.git
    git --bare init
  3. set up a repo on both client macs
    cd ~/Documents/Projects
    git init
    git add .
    git commit -a -m "initial commit"
  4. create the active-projects.sh backup script in your ~/Documents directory #!/bin/sh
    DATE=`date -u`
    cd /Users/YOUR-USER-NAME/Documents/Projects
    git pull origin master
    git add .
    git commit -a -m "Active Project Sync - $DATE"
    git push origin master
  5. make active-projects.sh executable chmod +x project-backup.sh
  6. Make the active-projects-backup.plist file for launchd

    < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    < !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
    "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>YOURNAME.rsync.backup</string>
    <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
    <true />
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/Users/YOUR-USER-NAME/Documents/active-projects.sh</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
    <string>active-projects.sh</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true />
    <key>QueueDirectories</key>
    <array>
    <string>/Users/YOUR-USER-NAME/Documents/Projects</string>
    </array>
    <key>WorkingDirectory</key>
    <array>
    <string>/Users/YOUR-USER-NAME/Documents/Projects</string>
    </array>
    </dict>
  7. save the active-projects-backup.plist file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and load it up launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/active-projects-backup.plist
  8. Now, whenever a change is made in your ~/Documents/Projects – it will be automatically committed to the git repo and propagated to all computers connected to that repo. Like magic.

Thanks to culturedcode’s instructions for syncing Things with git & Launchd.