Category Archives: LifeHacking

Wanted: Aggregated Group Playlist

I love music, but I am really bad about keeping up with new stuff.  My iTunes library is only so-so, so I spend most of my time listening to playlists on 8tracks.  This is good for variety, and great for finding the right background music for a BBQ or party, but there’s something missing: my friends.

I have a few friends who have great taste in music, and who are totally on top of what’s new and good.  As it works now, every once in a while I’ll get a recommendation from one of them, I’ll buy the album on Amazon, and then I’ll listen to it non-stop for a few weeks.  It’s great when it happens, but it doesn’t happen that often.  I want something more automated and frequent.

A few of these friends publish their music on the web (see Piecemaker and My Brooklyn is Better).  Problem is, they each use different platforms to publish, and as far as I can tell, there’s not a great way to combine these into one stream.  Piecemaker uses WordPress and outputs a standard podcast feed, and My Brooklyn is Better uses Tumblr, which embeds a flash player and forbids linking directly to the audio file.  I’m sure I have other friends who are publishing on platforms (Last.fm, 8tracks, Facebook?) that I don’t know about yet).

So, what I want is a way to take these streams, regardless of platform or format, and create a mixed feed or webpage.  I don’t care about actually downloading the music; I just want to be able to listen on the web, keep track of the ones I like, and have the option to buy the albums later.

I’m sure this is possible using some combination of tools that are already out there.  For starters, I’m playing around with Yahoo Pipes to see if I can mash something up to my liking, with an eye towards playing it on the web using StreamPad.  We’ll see if that works.  But is there something out there that I’m missing that already does this in a more straightforward way?  Seems like there must be, but I haven’t found it yet.

July 17th, 2010

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LifeHacking, Music

Unplugging (sort of)

This week, we’re on vacation in Cape Cod with my wife’s family.  They’ve been renting the same tiny cabin by the beach for the past 35 years, and coming here is pretty much the highlight of our summer each year.  Last summer, we brought Theo here when he was just three weeks old.  This morning, he and I took a walk along the harbor in Provincetown at low tide — he thinks of each beached boat as a giant bucket, just waiting to be filled with sand.

The problem is, whenever we’re on vacation, I have a hard time finding the right balance between “unplugging” and staying engaged with the real world.  One the one hand, I want to remain connected with work and friends, on the other, I just want to tune out, relax, and be with the people I’m with.  Inevitably, I end up fighting the struggle each day, carving out some time for the important stuff at work, and forcing myself (with limited success) not to stress about it too much the rest of the time.  It’s tough, and to some extent I feel like I achieve the worst of both worlds: neither able to fully enjoy my break, nor be fully present for important happenings at the office.

This has become more of an issue as technology has evolved.  Here at the cabin there’s never been any phone or TV.  Then there were cell phones.  Next, internet down the road at the town library. Then, iPhone and blackberries.  Now, this year we have a mobile broadband connection for our laptops, so we’re as connected as we can be.  For certain things, it’s great: we watched the World Cup final online last weekend, and yesterday my father-in-law did an interview via Skype, which saved him a day-long trip up to Maine.  But, work email and things to do are now within arms reach at all times.

I suppose the vacation case is just a microcosm of the larger question of how to balance real-world face time with online time.  Fred Wilson, one of my favorite bloggers, covers this topic frequently, and I’m really amazed the extent to which he’s able to stay engaged with the networked world without driving his family crazy.  In our case, the family is only semi-digitally integrated; it’s just not part of our culture to always be connected.  Maybe getting an iPad would push that culture change in a good way.

Lastly, I think it also comes back to information fitness — using online (all?) time to do the most important and productive things, and not just consume endlessly as you might in a less online constrained environment.  And of course, one of these days I’ll be able to plan ahead enough so that everything is under control at the office and I don’t have to worry about anything.  But I’m sure if I did that, I’d find reasons to plug back in…

July 14th, 2010

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Constraints, LifeHacking

Fitness

I’ve been thinking a lot about fitness lately, mostly spurred on by the great stuff coming out of Clay Johnson’s new blog, InfoVegan. Clay has been drawing a parallel between physical obesity and information obesity, and has been diving deep on what it means to have a “healthy information diet.”  It’s inspiring stuff, and definitely worth keeping up on.

The takeaway for me is that fitness (of any type) is largely about producing, not just consuming.  You need to write to properly digest what you’ve read, and you need to exercise to properly digest what you’ve eaten.  My favorite characterization of this is David Eaves’ “if writing is a muscle, this is my gym” tagline on his blog.

So in the spirit of fitness, yesterday I went for a run and today I wrote this post :)

July 9th, 2010

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LifeHacking

LifePruning

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about LifeHacking.  Getting my inbox filters just right so I can get to “inbox double-zero,” syncing my iPhone and my Google Calendar, setting up ssh keys in all the right places, etc.

But something I’m still not that good at is “LifePruning,” that is, the continual process of getting rid of all the old / no longer relevant shit in my life, the stuff that, if left untended, will crowd out all the good stuff.  It’s kind of hard for me, as I have natural hoarding tendencies, but I’m trying to live by a new code: prune first, ask questions later.

This weekend, with an impending move from NYC -> Boston, I’ve been doing some pruning, and boy does it feel good.  Huge bang for the buck.  I’m going to try and make this more of a regular routine.

Here’s the quick rundown of the LifePruning I’ve done, this week alone:

  • Cleaned out my clothes closet and donated all the things I never wear anymore / don’t fit.  Amazingly, getting rid of those uncovered some real gems that I had forgotten about.
  • Got a new computer and transferred my data and applications.  Not all of them, mind you; just the ones I really need.  The result is a leaner, meaner, faster machine.  (Note: getting a new computer is not required to do this, but it helps)
  • Went through my Google Reader and deleted all the feeds I no longer read, or are just less into these days.  That means less distraction from the awesome ones I want to make sure I actually read every day.

I know that good things will come of this pruning, and I’ll try and keep track as they do.  For example, I’m sure I’ll read a great post I would have otherwise missed thanks to my RSS pruning, and I’ll look sweet at the office in that shirt I found in my closet (not sure of the practical usefulness of that), and so on.

This is just a start.  I’m going to keep an eye out for more LifePruning opportunities, and I’ll post them here as I do.  If you have a good life pruning suggestion, let me know.

Update: SVN has a post today on this topic: The Art of Taking Things Away.

// Pruning grahpic via Agriculture Guide

May 15th, 2010

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LifeHacking, LifePruning