Clay Shirky: If you want to cry in your beer about the good old days, go ahead. Just stay the hell away from the kids while you’re reminiscing; pretending that dumb business models might suddenly start working has crossed over from sentimentality to child abuse. Whatever. I just wanted to comment on the nostalgia I feel every time I notice that Shirky still uses the Kubrik WordPress theme.

I’ve been addicted to fancy versions of to-do lists ever since I first read David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” several years ago. The ideas behind GTD are powerful and can be very effective when applied consistently. I drift in and out of using a full-on GTD workflow and am constantly tweaking my “system”. In fact, I spend so much time trying to get things perfect that I stop actually getting work done.

I’ve been asked many times over recent months, “Have you seen ‘Silicon Valley'? No?! Well you best get on that!” So I watched the first episode, and as I watched, I wondered if I was seeing the same show everyone was raving about. I found the jokes to be the same tired versions of the same nerdy in-jokes from every show about geeks ever. An “I know H.T.M.L.” T-shirt? Really. The whole thing played like a mediocre SNL

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the

In the late 90s the fusionary.com website was built and rendered using Userland’s Frontier. [This post from Brent Simmons]3 is a fascinating look back at what was happening during those heady times. I loved Frontier and still miss using it. Here’s what I wrote about it back in 1999. Managing our web site with Frontier allows us to experiment with the look and feel of the entire site at the same time.

Taskwarrior is a darn nice terminal-based task manager, but I sometimes tire of having to scan the list of tasks, find the task ID, then type t 13 mod due:fri or t 13 done every time. Enter vim-taskwarrior… vim-taskwarrior is a vim plugin that extends taskwarrior with an interactive interface. It features a rich set of mappings and commands, is easy to customize, and makes adding, modifying, sorting, reporting and marking done, fast, easy and fun!

Some of the smartest people I know swear by a terminal-based, text-only workflow. They tell me that Vim and tmux and Markdown and a terminal are all anyone ever needs. I love the idea, but it never works. I’m comfortable in Vim and I’m learning to utilize tmux and I write most everything in Markdown. I can fly around in files and panes using only the keyboard and I find there’s nothing like Vim for the sheer pleasure of editing text.

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I’m experiencing my annual urge to return to using Vim full-time. Even though it usually only lasts a week or two, I always have a lot of fun and learn all sorts of new tricks. For example, I watched David Gamba’s More Instantly Better Vim talk and discovered his vmath plugin which turns a Vim session into a lightweight spreadsheet ala Soulver. Put your cursor into a column of numbers, hit “++” and it displays the sum, avg, mean, etc and puts the results in registers so it can easily be put into other areas of the document.

For some reason, I can never completely give up Evernote, so I’m always looking for ways to improve the experience. While browsing around the Packal site looking for Alfred workflows, I spotted the Evernote Workflow, which does a pretty good job of letting me search and create notes in Evernote right from Alfred. From the workflow description: Keywords available ens to search in every note field ens @ to search in a selected notebook ens # to search notes with a selected tags You can use ent (search in titles only) or enr (search in reminders) or entodo (search to-do notes) or enrec (search notes updated within a week) or enu (search notes with a source URL) instead of ens.

If you’re an Alfred user and frequently need to rename files in the Finder, you should take a look at RegEx Renamer I use this all the time for things like changing case, removing spaces, adding dates, and so on. It’s also helping with my recent decision to consistently name files. I use the following format… YYYY-MM-DD_NNN_descriptive name here.md That’s basically a date, topic, and name, separated by underscores. The Topic, “NNN”, can be anything.

I’m doing it again. This time because Octopress 3 is almost ready. I didn’t love my experience with Jekyll last time so I’m not sure why I’m doing it again.