Posts

Although I use a lot of tech, I’m becoming increasingly concerned about how much of my data is stored in the cloud and how it’s used. Sometimes I’m prepared to make a trade-off because an app is especially convenient. AudioPen, for example, is brilliant at capturing thoughts very quickly on my phone before they pop out of my head. But when I’m sat at my desk, I don’t need to use the cloud at all. I was very excited to hear about a new app called Ratschn. This is a local speech-to-text app for Mac and Windows. You configure and press a hotkey, speak, and then Ratschn transcribes the audio recording and pastes it wherever you’re working, whether that’s an email client or a note-taking app. ...

As researchers, we usually have far too much going on in our heads. What should I be working on today? Where did I get to with that paper? What shall I have for lunch? 🤯 Although writing it all down definitely helps, some of us need a more visual system. In my workshops, we often have a good rant about terrible software. But there’s one app that’s almost universally loved: Trello. ...

As someone who has around 500 ideas a day, I needed a way of assessing those ideas more systematically. Most of them seem exciting, but pursing dozens of projects is a shortcut to burnout. How on earth do I choose one? Well, the answer turned out to be “sequential elimination”. Best known as a voting system, the sequential elimination method works by repeatedly eliminating the losing candidate until a single winner remains. Instead of asking myself, “Am I excited by this idea?” I subject the potential project to rigorous questioning, rating my responses on a scale of 1-10. ...

On my other website, I frequently download photos from Unsplash for the header images. As the originals are enormous and high resolution, I needed a way to easily convert them to the correct format. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create an automated workflow with Hazel and ImageMagick that monitors a folder for images from Unsplash, optimises and resizes them, then archives the original file. If you’re unfamiliar with ImageMagick, you might find my previous blog post useful. ...

As you’ve no doubt discovered, writing is much easier when you have all your notes and research material to hand. This is one of the many reasons I love Scrivener, as the Research folder helps me keep everything together and display it alongside my writing. The split screen feature means I can easily refer to a journal article as I work, and also quickly copy across the quotes that I’m discussing. ...

Music 🎵 It was a quiet month music-wise. Partly because there are fewer concerts, but mostly because it was too hot to be beetling about in the afternoons. I gave up on Pride: too hot, too busy, too commercial. I did enjoy the concert from the comfort of my armchair, though. Thanks to their mighty sound system, I could hear most of the Saturday line up, including Raye and Holly Johnson. I was amused by the irony that Self-Esteem appeared third on the billing. ...

Now that software has become so bloated, it can take 20 minutes just to resize an image. Most of that time is spent rebuffing pointless AI features that are also bumping up the subscription 😩 Increasingly, I’m using ImageMagick for my image manipulation. ImageMagick is a free, open-source CLI tool for creating, editing and converting bitmap images. As it only runs on the command line, it takes some geting used to. But once you’ve grasped a few techniques, it’ll save you heaps of time. You can also combine it with other tools to automate routine tasks. ...

Writing a book or a thesis involves seemingly endless revisions and it can be very difficult to keep track of them. Also, constant tinkering doesn’t always improve matters. With Scrivener you can take a Snapshot of your current document before editing and then revert or roll back to the original version if it ends up looking worse. I really struggled with the word count in my thesis (it was around 20,000 too many), so Snapshots helped me experiment with removing quotes and peripheral arguments. Sometimes the impact was too great in later chapters, so I was able to roll back to the original version. ...

One of my favourite TV lines ever comes from Tig Notaro in Transparent: “Look, I’m sorry if my boundary is your trigger.” Therein lies an essential truth: boundaries are unlikely to make you popular. But they’ll almost certainly make you healthier. I often ask coaching clients whether they’d rather be liked or be respected. Understandably, they usually reply, “Both!” When I can’t get them to choose, I ask about colleagues and friends. Which of them are the happiest or the most successful? What are those people doing differently? The answer is always that they’re willing to set boundaries. ...

After launching myself into piano playing with characteristic zeal, I suffered a hiatus for almost six months. I had became frustrated with Simply Piano and exchanged it for Piano Marvel. Although Piano Marvel was much better, I found many of the songs unappetising. I was still playing most days, but never stretching myself or learning anything new. I went slinking back to Simply Piano, then got annoyed with it all over again. Finally, I realised the problem: I wanted to hear classical piano, rather than play it. Although I love the idea of playing a Chopin piece, I don’t love the idea of the practising involved to make it sound even mediocre. For me, it’s much better to go and see Isata Kanneh-Mason. Indeed, seeing Kanneh-Mason perform probably contributed to this feeling. ...