Notification Zero

As I reach the final stages of a major project, I’ve been saying ‘no’ more often. I’ve been turning down work, conferences and all the little things that take away from my ability to focus for hours at a stretch.

The other day I realised that my usual clampdown on notifications on my various digital devices wasn’t as tight as I ideally prefer, so I turned them all off. (You can read how to turn off iOS notifications here, and Android notifications here.) I’m writing down the various parts of this in case it’s useful to someone else in the midst of a big project.

In practice, this means the following:

• no badges on apps on my screen. (The software on your phone is designed to be addictive, to make you spend more time using it. I already live my life in black-and-white so that’s a start, but removing app badges is the next step.)
• permanently set to airplane mode. (This is easy for me as my work or life doesn’t ever really involve receiving phone calls, but it removes the chance of business / telemarketing distractions.)
• all other apps’ notification permissions turned off. (If someone messages me on WhatsApp or Signal, I will never ever get a notification about it. My phone won’t make a noise, nor will there be any badge showing that there are people who tried to get in touch with me. The only way I’ll ever see if anyone wrote to me on a messaging app is to open up that app. I do this perhaps once a day, sometimes only a couple of times a week, but I’ve conditioned myself to this level of withdrawal over the past year or two).
• Email permanently disabled on my phone. (Email is the big focus killer. If I generalise, it amounts to a box of other people’s requests on my time. So I have no way to receive email on my phone. I have things set up that I can send email (i.e. I’ve installed the SMTP login details but not enabled IMAP), but no way to receive it.)

I have a fixed schedule for things like checking email: two windows from 12-1pm and 5-6pm. Outside those windows, my email is disabled (using Freedom) so there’s no way for me to access it. On my laptop, a whole bunch of other sites whose addresses are easy to type and get lost on, I pre-empt my worst self by just disabling them during the day. Problem solved.

Whenever I write a post on this blog, it auto-posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Tumblr. While the temptation might be to check to see who has commented on it and so on, by locking myself out on a specific schedule, this means I can choose to look at these things at the end of the day, if I really need/want to.

Daddybot

I just finished listening to a fascinating episode of Nerds on Draft podcast. Gabe and Jeff, the usual cohosts, spoke with Erik Hess about how he set up a telepresence robot (as pictured) in his house while he was deployed halfway around the world.

It’s worth listening to the whole podcast to get a sense of how this worked out. Erik talks of the initial weirdness of being present in his house in the US while actually being in Qatar. It was fascinating to learn how quickly that turned into the new baseline — i.e. to his children, it became as if he was actually there.

For families or situations where parents have to be away from children on any kind of regular basis — or whatever particular configuration your life takes — it seems that this is a really intriguing idea. It certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s also impossible to get back that time with your children either.

Highlights + DevonThink = Pretty Great

I’m late to the Highlights party, but I’m glad I got here.

Like many readers of this blog, I get sent (and occasionally read) a lot of PDFs. In fact, I did a quick search in DevonThink, and I am informed that I have 52,244 PDFs in my library. These are a mix of reports, archived copies of websites, scanned-and-OCRed photos and a thousand-and-one things in between.

Thus far, my workflow has been to read PDFs on my Mac. Any notes I took while reading the file were written up manually in separate files. I would laboriously copy and paste whatever text snippet or quotation I wanted to preserve along with its page reference. These would be fed into DevonThink’s AI engine and magic would happen.

Now, post-Highlights-installation, my workflow is much less laborious. I can take highlights in-app, export all the quotations as separate text or HTML files and have have DevonThink go do its thing without all the intermediary hassle. If you’re  a professional researcher or writer using DevonThink as your notes database — and quite frankly, if not, why not? — the Highlights app will probably please you.

Knot 1: Solitary Confinement & Digital Security

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature on this blog. Knot will link to recent things that I’ve been reading. It will include short articles as well as books and other things on the internet.

Articles

• Martin Garbus — “America’s Invisible Inferno” (NYRB)

This NYRB review of ‘Hell Is A Very Small Place’ covers the use of solitary confinement in the American prison system. It ends with unearned optimism, but nevertheless is a useful reminder of the importance of the issue.

• Mary Catherine O’Connor — “The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence” (The Guardian)

Interesting short piece on the use of machine learning combined with data science competition site, Kaggle, to try to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fishing inspections. Hardly a day passes when a new initiative like this is launched, merging data science and crowdsourced solutions. I look forward to being able to contribute (one day in the hopefully-not-so-distant future).

• Meeri Kim — “How a researcher used big data to beat her own ovarian cancer” (Washington Post)

More data science, though this is more at the N=1 edge of things than the previous fishery data story. The more data we are able to access and generate, the more there will be need for ways of analysing and processing these complex interactions. A lot of money is being invested in finding ways to automate this for non-technical users, though I imagine we’re still a little way away from that utopia.

• Check Point — “More Than 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan” (CheckPoint Blog)

I’m not quite sure why this isn’t a bigger story. I’ve long believed that anything stored by Google (in particular, emails) will at some point be leaked in a hack or by some disgruntled employee. This latest hack is pretty close to that scenario, with the caveat that we don’t know what was taken. Takeaway: move away from the Google ecosystem where possible.

• Scott Gilbertson — “HTTPS is not a magic bullet for Web security” (Ars Technica)

This is a few months old but offers a useful overview on HTTPS technology, what it can help with (and what it is less useful for). The headline is actually a bit deceptive since the article seems to make a strong case for the use of HTTPS.

• Shane Parrish — "The Simple Plan To Read More” (Farnham Street / Personal Growth)

I’ve long ago taken this advice on board, but it’s a useful reminder. I enjoy reading, and I enjoy the diversity that comes from reading widely and broadly, so keeping up the pace and seeing it more as a habit to be done most days is, to my mind, the right way of looking at it.

Books

I read three books this past week. Jim Klopman’s Balance Is Power was my easy introduction to some of the science behind why it is useful to train balance in a focused way as a skill.

I finished the second volume in Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy, The Story of a New Name, though I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first. I suspect I’ll have to return to it in a few weeks after the dust has settled.

Finally, I devoured Paul Kalanathi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a beautifully written exploration of death, medicine, how we go through all these things as people, how illness affects not only the body but the mind and the spirit as well. It reminded me of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which covered similar themes albeit with less of an intimately tragic outcome. I highly recommend giving When Breath Becomes Air a read.

Encrypt Your Dropbox Files

Much has been written about securing your digital life since the conclusion of the US election. (This was one of the better posts, I thought.) It's worth doing this regardless of whatever is going on in the politics of country x or y. If the country is big enough, it's going to want to suck your digital life up into its archives one way or another. So why make it easy for them?

Encrypting your Dropbox is one of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to securing your digital life. Most of us store various files in the Dropbox cloud, and they're just sitting there unencrypted unless you take specific action. Moreover, Dropbox has been hacked before (more than once).

Fortunately, Boxcryptor exists to package everything up in an encrypted form. It's a paid service, and worth every cent. Sign up by clicking here.

Music, Sound & Technology

Steven Johnson, the author of the fantastic book Where Good Ideas Come From, has been releasing podcasts episodes in advance of the publication of a new book. Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World seems to cover the relationship between innovation and 'play', ideas he has worked to explore in previous books. The podcast series offers a preview of these ideas, engagingly produced and narrated through a series of vignettes and smaller stories.

Episode 3 ("Strange Loops and Circuit Benders (Or, How New Music Comes from Broken Machines)") was an exploration of sound, how our sound universe has been changing alongside technological developments and cultural evolution. Johnson talks to Alex Ross (of The Rest is Noise fame) about how new sounds started to enter into the sonic vocabulary of musicians and creators. The other episodes are interesting, too. If you're interested in music and/or technology, you might want to check this one out.

Squarespace Goes SSL

This news is a few days old, but it's worth restating. Squarespace is the name of the comapny that hosts this blog and most of the other websites that I currently manage. A few days ago, they announced that they'd be offering SSL for all Squarespace sites:

Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is a technology that secures the connection between your browser and the website you’re visiting. It allows you and your website visitors to feel confident that their information is secure. And we believe that confidence is an important part of your online identity. So, starting today, we’re proud to offer free SSL on all Squarespace websites. Website owners should not have to pay extra or wrestle with complex technical issues to offer this basic security to their users. Every website can enable SSL, which will automatically direct users and search engines to a secure version of that site. The result is that millions of more domains on the Internet will be secured via SSL, our customers can take advantage of the confidence that secure websites bring users, and we will have helped the Internet take a huge step forward in promoting security by default. As an added benefit, websites hosted on Squarespace may enjoy a boost in search rankings. Squarespace is taking care of almost everything, making this an easy transition for customers. To seamlessly manage SSL certificates for all of our websites, we’ve partnered with Let’s Encrypt, a free and open certificate authority (CA) run for the public’s benefit that provides free SSL certificates.

This is great news, and they deserve some credit for rolling this out. Google is making a push to encourage most websites to be secured in this way -- not doing so may even harm your search rankings -- so it's probably a trend that's coming for most people eventually. In any case, if you're using Squarespace as your host, make sure you turn it on!

Python Side-Project: Approach

Since finishing the Udacity IPND I have been drawing up plans to start practical work on a specific side-project. I won’t go into too many of the details for now — it’ll be more fun to release it as a surprise — but I wanted to take a note of some of my evolving thinking on my approach.

I had wanted a project that combines the various skills I’d learned on the Udacity course. Thus: HTML, CSS, Python, SQL & databases. My idea is a website that will have a python/database back-end. I want to code it all from scratch. Much of my thinking about how to break it down into smaller chunks so far was focused on coming up with some sort of basic prototype that showcased the interactions between these various structures.

I’ve recently realised, however, that it makes a lot more sense to just code the entire project in Python as a standalone programme and to think about linking this functionality into a website once the Python prototype is done.

This simplifies my life a lot. Instead of looking around for frameworks or wrappers (I don’t even know if these are the right words to describe what I’m looking for) like Django and Flask, I can focus on the core functionality of the service / programme.

Once that’s complete, I’ll figure out how to hook it up to a front-facing web interface, and then will work on the presentation as per my specifications.

I’m quite excited about this project. As a final clue I will add that it’s going to be a service that helps people learning languages.

Scratching Below the Surface with David Heinemeier Hansson

I’m part-way through listening to a podcast interview with David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, author of Rework and Remote and co-founder of Basecamp. I wanted to write down some brief notes on what came up so far before I forget. I may return to this thread after I’ve finished listening to the rest. These are just some of the points that stood out for me from the conversation; I’d strongly recommend you give it a listen yourself, especially if you’re interested in coding, systems thinking, improving and learning new skills and so on.

• Curiosity — this is a skill worth cultivating. There are various metaphors often used for curiosity, but in the podcast DHH talks about the need to ‘dig / scratch below the surface’. He talks about how finding the thing in the topic / skill / domain that interests him is often a case of just keeping burrowing down until you find it.
• Learn What You Need — DHH talks about learning to code as a way of solving a particular problem, and about learning only just enough rather than diving into that learning as a pure pursuit needing you to learn everything.
• Systems Improvement — this isn’t explored that deeply in the part I listened, but it was a good reminder that there is a way of thinking about improvement that sees improving the system as the way to improve the skill.
• Time / Flow — DHH talks about driving racing cars and how time really flies when he does this. This is an observation that this, for him, is a skill he is enjoying learning, and one that gives him a great sense of that satisfaction that comes from doing a rewarding activity at just the right level of difficulty.

More on this to follow (maybe).

A Greener Technological Footprint

I’ve been trying to reduce my ecological impact on the planet for several months. Some of this has meant not taking flights, while other parts have involved me re-evaluating more habitual choices I make such as my diet.

A small, but not insignificant, service I rely on is web servers, domain hosting and the like. I had been a loyal Dreamhost customer for many years and have had no reason to complain about their services. Cheap, fast, and their web panel does everything you’d want from it.

So why should you care about your internet server’s ecological footprint? Because small things matter and because the internet is no small thing. In fact, some reports project the infrastructure of the internet to be as big a polluter as the airline industry by 2020.

I started looking into Dreamhost’s green credentials and at first glance there’s no real reason to make any changes. From their website:

“When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something to neutralize our emissions. With a bit of research we found the most effective approach begins with resource conservation: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page. Efforts are being ramped up here daily to do what we do with less. The next step is to use clean, renewable energy. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility for us this means investing in renewable energy projects taking place right here in the United States through the purchase of carbon offsets. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions from our day-to-day operations (e.g. purchases of office products, commuting, and planned travel) we’ve invested in carbon offsets from international renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, effectively erasing our remaining greenhouse gas emissions.”

There’s a little more to their pitch, but the bottom-line is that they claim to be carbon neutral.

I won’t go into the various ways in which carbon offsetting schemes are essentially scams, but it’s worth knowing that there seems to be a pretty high risk that things aren’t what they seem.

That’s when I discovered GreenGeeks. There are a bunch of different domain / hosting / server providers that cater to those who want to leave less of a footprint, and GreenGeeks seem to be one of the larger of these. They have a long history, which is useful given that many of the services I visited were already defunct.

Above all, I needed a service that could do pretty much everything that Dreamhost offered. It was a tall order, but GreenGeeks fits the bill.

Moreover, GreekGeeks are a whole lot more environmentally-friendly than Dreamhost, it turns out. For every unit of energy consumed by their servers/customers, they invest in green companies and green energy sources three times over:

”At GreenGeeks we work with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation out of Portland, Oregon. They are an EPA recognized and approved Green Power Partner as is GreenGeeks. Through the Bonneville foundation GreenGeeks purchases energy powered by wind to be put back into the grid and we purchase 3 times the amount of energy we consume to be put back into the grid making GreenGeeks 300%. We do this for all of our servers and all of our employee work spaces and computers.”

In an email from their support team, they explained this further:

“When we say 300% green, we mean that we contribute such a large amount of funding to green energy companies that we are actually 200% carbon negative, and our servers’ carbon emissions are 100% offset.”

So I’ve started work to transfer my domains over from Dreamhost to GreenGeeks. I have only been using them for a few weeks, and while I’ve had no problems so far, it’s too early to offer an unqualified endorsement so I’ll make a note to write more here in six months from now.

If you’re currently using web hosting of some sort, I’d encourage you to check out GreenGeeks or some other eco-friendly option.

Seeing The Forest But For The Trees: On Exist.io

So many services, so much data. How can I make sense of it all? You’ve probably had this thought yourself on occasion. You have your Fitbit data, your calendar data, your email data, your task management system, your last.fm music data and so on. All of these things exist in their own silos.

If you’re halfway intrepid, you’ve maybe even made efforts to liberate your data from these prisons. Best case scenario: you’re left with a half-complete .CSV file that is incompatible with all the other .csv files you’ve downloaded from other services. Now, if you want to hook all these files up together, you’ll have to clean them up, massage the various tables and forms so that they match up. And then you’ll have to perform a whole host of calculations in order to figure out how you’re doing, or what the data has to tell you.

Collating all this data and making sense of it can be a full-time job in and of itself. I admire those who give talks at institutions like the Quantified Self, telling tales derived from the past 20 years of financial tracking or weight data.

Personally, I don’t have time to do all of that. I need a service to help me out, something that will serve up platters of charts and correlations that address the main broad questions that I might address of these various data streams, notably:

• how am I feeling?
• how am I sleeping?
• am I moving enough?
• am I getting enough work done?

Now you might say that it’s easy to look at each of the services individually and you’d be right. I can look at a chart over at Fitbit.com and I’ll see something that shows me all the data for the past 12 months:

This is nice, but it doesn’t tell me a great deal, aside from the fact that I seem to be walking less in Amman than when I lived next to a huge forest in a provincial part of Holland. No surprises there. Also, a whole year is a bit too much for me to process. It doesn’t really help me calibrate my current actions and my plan going forward.

Enter, Exist. I’ve been using Exist for a little over a year now, checking in on the site pretty much every day. Their own explanation for what they do is:

“We turn numbers into insights. We collect data from the services you already use and find trends and correlations in the results.”

You hook up all your web services, and your Exist dashboard will be populated with pretty graphs, useful correlations and various other goodies. These are the services currently supported:

Your dashboard page has a bunch of different panels which aggregate data from different parts of your life. For instance, my activity panel for today looks like this:

I usually go for a walk in the evenings, so I’ll most likely end today with a higher count, but you get the idea. There are panels for activity, productivity, sleep, mood, workouts, health, location, social media, music and weather.

So the dashboard is where you can come to get a snapshot of the reality of your current short-term. Exist also offers correlations and suggestions based on its combination and number-crunching of all the various parts of your data stream. This is often most interesting when it comes to your mood data. Check out these recent correlations that Exist crunched from my self-reported mood data alongside the other automated streams:

There are so many different types of charts and graphs; it’s difficult to pick my favourite ones. Here you can see my slow but steady battle to increase the amount of time I sleep every day, for example:

The mood data is self-reported. Exist sends you an email every day at a time of your choosing and you respond with a number from 1–5 alongside some comments about your subjective experience of the day. These comments are also then processed into useful charts and prompts. Weird things I’ve learned from Exist’s number crunching:

• the less I sleep, the more likely I am to have a ‘perfect’ day (i.e. 5 on the 1–5 mood scale)
• the more it rains or snows, the happier I am

You can use Exist in a bunch of different ways, depending on what you hope to get out of it. For my own situation, I love how it encourages awareness of my current patterns on the short- to medium-term timescale (i.e. one week to three months). For things like sleep, where it’s easy to forget whether you’re managing to do what you seek to do (i.e. sleep more, or get up earlier etc), Exist is really excellent.

There's a sizeable userbase who actively contribute to shaping the future of the company / service through feedback. There are a bunch of things I'd love to see happen with Exist -- changing the 1-5 scale for mood feedback to 1-10 as a start -- but the site is actively developed, and I'm really happy with all the new features that have been added in the year or so since I signed up.

You can find out the future / expansion plans that Belle and Josh have for Exist here. There’ll be more services and correlations and integrations will be more usefully presented. All of this is as you’d expect. Belle and Josh are good people (together, they make up HelloCode which is the Australia-based parent entity that produces Exist, among other things). I spoke to Belle for a Sources and Methods podcast episode; that’ll be out soon, I hope, so keep your eyes out for that.

In my interactions with Belle / Josh I’ve been really impressed with the service that they offer through Exist and their other products. I put them in my personal category of ‘nice, kind people seeking to do good things in the world through offering really useful services’. Like the team who run Beeminder and GMB Fitness, Belle and Josh offer something that saves me time and adds meaning on a daily basis to my life. Exist is a paid service. If you already run a bunch of the services listed above in the diagram, you’ll probably benefit from Exist’s charts and correlations. I hope you’ll consider signing up for their free one-month trial.

Coding Chronicles: Failure

A true journal of my progress in learning data analysis skills must include notes about failure. Nothing is purely sunshine and achievement milestones, so this is a short write-up of a recent (ongoing) problem I’m having with my data analysis / coding nanodegree.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working my way through Udacity’s Intro to Programming nanodegree. The course is split up into stages, and I’m currently working on the final one. You get to choose an area of specialism, and I picked data analysis. The work you do as this final stage actually counts towards the subsequent full-blown data analysis nanodegree.

I managed to get through the first four (actually five, since there’s a “stage 0”) stages in a month or two. It went extremely quickly and while there were challenges, I never felt completely overwhelmed. This final stage, though, is sapping my very life spirit. I work on the lessons for an hour or two, six days a week. While previously I was getting through perhaps half a dozen lessons each day, now I’m lucky if I manage to get through a single one.

This past week, I’ve been stuck on a single lesson for the past three or four days. I’ve written queries on the Udacity forum, where more experienced coders and alumni of the nanodegrees offer support and advice. You usually get an answer within two or three hours, which is excellent. The only thing this time is that I’m finding I don’t understand the answers to my questions.

There seems to be a layer of misunderstanding or some fundamental skill or piece to the puzzle that I’m missing, that means I’m unable to progress through the course. The difficulty level seems to have jumped substantially from one course to the next.

The specifics of the problem are as follows. We’re using Jupyter Notebook to work through a series of problems and questions we have around a data set supplied in the form of several .csv files. At first, we did some formatting changes and converted the data into mutually recognisable formats. Then we’ve slowly been isolating parts of the data so as to answer specific questions. The data set itself relates to the Udacity course’s students – how long people stay enrolled, when people quit, that sort of thing – so for the current question/class I’m supposed to make a list of students who have completed at least one week of the course.

Day one of my struggle: I just got stuck in. Tried extremely hard. Failed extremely hard. This was more of a brute force approach. It had worked on some previous occasions, but after two hours I was still nowhere. I wasn’t entirely sure I even understood the question.

Day two: I wrote up a question on the forum and decided to go back to basics. I had noted that there seemed to be some layer, some skill or fundamental principle that I wasn’t understanding. Given that the class required a good grasp of lists and dictionaries (both Python programming language concepts), I thought I’d go outside the Udacity course and take a few lessons elsewhere. Of course, we’d covered lists and dictionaries in previous lessons, but apparently not enough for me to be confident in their use. I spent a few hours working my way through various courses and their practice examples: CodeAcademy has a useful series of lessons, as does CodeSchool; chapter 5 of “Automate the Boring Stuff” also has a useful section on lists and dictionaries. So I’d worked my way through all this and I felt like I was in a much better place when it came to the fundamentals.

But on day 3: more failure and a lack of comprehension. My frustration was compounded when the response to my query on the Udacity forum made me even more confused than when I started. I feel like I have a somewhat solid idea about what I have to do to solve the problem, but all my implementations of code don’t take me where I expected, and nothing has brought me to the answer to the test problem.

So that’s where I am right now. Stagnation and failure. I’m booked in to chat with one of the Udacity team on a Skype call tomorrow, and hopefully that will set me straight. I’m pretty sure that all of this is something that time and patience will solve, or at least ameliorate, but for now it’s frustrating not to know which pieces of the puzzle I’m missing.

PhD Tools: Freewriting and Journalling to Think Through your Work

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

A few years back, I read a book with the (intentionally) provocative title, Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes A Day. I was travelling back to Afghanistan from a short stay in Europe, and I was sat in Istanbul airport, waiting for my connecting flight. I remember the moment quite clearly, because a long wait time plus a delay didn't phase me. I was sucked into the book and the idea that the author presented. (There's also another good one along a similar theme: How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul Silvia.

Basically, she explained how writing for a very short amount of time each day, taking the time to think through whatever was going on with your research, but on paper instead of your head -- was a trick that would really help your work. It's not a new idea, this technique of freewriting. When you take this time, these 15 or 20 minutes, you aren't writing a section of your thesis itself, you're writing almost a note to yourself about how it is going, what you think are important things you  need to consider, whether this is a useful line of inquiry and so on.

Since that day, I've incorporated this kind of writing much more often as a general practice. There's a great service run by all-round make-useful-things-for-everyone-to-benefit-from person Buster Benson called 750Words. It sends you a friendly reminder every day to write 750 words on its site. There's all sorts of gamification and encouragement of writing streaks etc, and while writing the middle sections of my PhD, I would check in to 750words.com every day at the start of the morning to journal out my current research position and think through whatever problems I was about to face in my work that coming day.

It may feel a bit redundant at times, but I've found the practice really useful. Give it a try. You might find that it works for you.