ADD-OCD and You! Going on the Low-Information Diet

Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Danny F. Santos

photo credit: vramak

Yesterday was a wake-up call for me.  I did absolutely nothing but surf the internet.  I have several projects I could have been working on or gone to see friends or done something productive but instead, 10am to 1am was spent almost entirely infront of the computer.  There was only 1 productive thing I did:

The dishes.

I’ll backtrack for a second to explain the title, I have what my friends jokingly call ADD-OCD.  Basically, what interests me jumps all over the place but once I clamp onto the next thing I get obsessive about it to the exclusion of all else… including eating.  Yesterday I barely bothered to eat aside from breakfast and some tortilla chips and sunflower seeds and that kind of scared me this morning.

So, effective immediately, I’m going on Timothy Ferris‘ Low-Information diet from The 4-Hour Work Week.  What is the low-info diet?  You basically cut out as many sources of information as possible for one week.  No news, no tv, no fiction books, no internet, no rss, no excessive email but you are allowed 1 hour of this stuff per day but that’s it.

It may seem excessive but I never seem to have time for anything really of my own.

Adventures in Dvorak

Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Danny F. Santos

photo credit: zappowbang

The Dvorak keyboard, one of those weird ideas that makes sense but no one in their right mind would learn. It’s a layout specifically designed to reduce errors, encourage faster typing and even reduce injuries such as carpal tunnel. The downside is that it looks like this:

Yet, that weird layout is what I happily type in. In fact, I not only type faster in Dvorak than in Qwerty but I find it a lot more comfortable as well.

Why Dvorak?
I’m lazy. I really don’t like doing something the “right” way if I can do it faster the wrong way. Qwerty is what I learned in school but they layout never quite worked for me so I looked into what people were using as an alternative and found Dvorak.

There’s a history behind the Qwerty layout and Dvorak layout that I really don’t want to go into too much, so I’ll sum it up: Qwerty’s layout is somewhat random to avoid typewriters from jamming and Dvorak is based on which letters are used most and places them on the home row. The semi-colon on the home row in Qwerty never did make much sense to me.

How to start using Dvorak
Just start using it! Every source I’ve read says you can pick it up in a few weeks but it took me a couple of months. So either the proponents are being optimistic or I’m just a slow learner. I’d vote for the latter if I were you.

I started with handmade stickers on my keys but that didn’t work too well, the stickers had a habit of coming off. I tried popping out the the keys on my keyboard to match the layout but I found that the keys on different rows had different shapes. It was like typing on a keyboard that had bad teeth.

After fighting with the stickers until I had a quasi-reasonable grasp of where the keys are, I then kept an image of the layout as a desktop background. If I ever forgot where a key was, I’d check the desktop. Throughout this, I kept doing typing exercises until I just remembered where all the keys were.

Problems with Dvorak
There are several problems I have. I learned Dvorak on a PC and then later switched to a Mac so I know there are several problems. Firstly, the login pages on both Mac and PC are always Qwerty and I haven’t the slightest clue how to switch them to Dvorak. Ironically, Ubuntu gives you the ability to switch layouts at the login screen.

Also, on a PC, hitting ctrl+shift will switch your keyboard layout so sometimes when I’m switching through tabs (ctrl+shift+tab) in my browser I accidentally change my layout back to Qwerty. Another annoying thing that catches me is “W” is next to “V” so sometimes when I’m trying to paste, I accidentally close windows. Also, Final Cut does not recognize Dvorak at all so none of the short cut keys will work at all unless you switch back to Qwerty.

Despite some of the drawbacks, I highly recommend switching to Dvorak, especially if your wrists hurt.

Tags: Dvorak, hack, keyboard, writing

How to organize your USB Thumbdrive

Posted on March 23rd, 2009 by Danny F. Santos

photo credit: lrargerich

Thumb-drives kick ass. Seriously. I always carry around my key no matter what, you never know when it’ll come in handy. 2, 4 or 8 gigabytes may not seem like that much these days but it’s still quite a bit of space. So, what do you put on it? I’ve experimented with a bunch of different ways of storing my information, applications and encryption and have come up with a system that works for me. What works for me may not work exactly for you but it’s a great place to start.

Encryption

While there are many great ways of encrypting your thumbdrive, I really don’t like the hassle. I keep my drive on me as a way of carrying or transferring files that I want access to as efficiently as possible without having to sign in. Of course, there’s always data I do want to keep encrypted, and for those files I use 7-zip.

Basically, I make one non-encrypted zip file in 7-zip (with a .zip extension) and this is where I want to keep my data safe. This zip file is located inside of a second zip file which is encrypted. The reason for having one inside the other is that winRAR allows you to see what kind of files and the names of those files are encrypted even if they can’t open those files. This way, all a prospective evildoer can see is the zip file locked behind a password.

Content

The main folder structure is broken down into 4 kinds of content: Data, Temporary, Transfer and Apps. This gives you a basic idea what my main folder structure is like. It’s a very simple structure but it works really well.

Data is where I keep my permanent data that I’d like to keep on my drive. Stuff like my portfolios and demo reels as well as some music. While I do carry my resume on me, I keep that with my encrypted files because it has my address. And my USB thumbdrive is on my keychain, not the best idea giving your address with your house key.

Temporary storage is where I keep, well, my temporary files. Files I may be working on that aren’t finished, files I want to show to clients or anything that really just has to come with me for the day or week (or sometimes, the month).

Transfer files are usually files that I’ve saved onto my drive to transport to another computer or for someone else. While very similar to the temp folder, I like to keep my files and the files for anyone else separate.

Apps is where I keep my portable applications. There are a ton of these now available and I used to carry a gargantuan amount, I’ve scaled quite a bit back to as bare bones as I can get. More on this in the next section.

I also have an “If Lost.txt” file with my email address and phone number plus a reward for a USB key that’s has twice the space. And I don’t put my address on it because, again, I hand my thumbdrive on my keys.

Applications

There is a whole suite of portable applications. Bringing around your own Firefox app with your preferences and bookmarks sounds awesome in theory but the reality of running it off of a USB is that it’s really slow. I’ve never actually needed to use any of the portable apps I’ve put on my drive so I’ve scaled back to what I perceive to be the most useful. OpenOffice, a portable ftp client, VLC for video and portable 7-zip. I carry two versions of each, one for PC and one for Mac (with the exception of portable 7-zip).

So there you have it. This system may not work exactly for you, the same as what I’ve seen on the net hasn’t worked exactly for me, but this is a really good place to start! Change it up and make it work for your own unique needs.

The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your DVDs

Posted on March 18th, 2009 by Danny F. Santos

If you’re like me, you own a few DVDs. Actually, you own enough to finance the founding of a small country for the betterment of humankind. So how do you organize all these DVDs? Sure you can download a database organizer like DVD Profiler or just use a text document, but what about your physical shelf?

Most people have either the random shelf where you browse through titles which have no order whatsoever or the shot gun shelf where the DVD cases look like they’ve been shot out of, well, a shot gun. Can you live with your DVDs this way? Sure you can, but don’t come crying to me when you can’t find your copy of Willow under that pile of last week’s laundry. It becomes even harder as your collection grows and you have to look through a hundred titles or more.

Dedicate a Shelf

Clear a shelf (or two… or five…) of things you either don’t need or you can move somewhere else. Having one place to hold all of your DVDs will help more than anything else. Even if you have all of your discs piled randomly, it’ll be a lot quicker to scan all the titles to find the one you want.

Separate Your DVDs

To limit the amount of search time for a specific title, separate your discs into two categories or more. I collect films and TV shows so I separate those into two categories. If I collected a bunch of Yoga and home improvement DVDs, I’d create a third category for instructionals.

At this point, your probably raring to break your collection down to different genres. Don’t. Why not? Well, the problem becomes where to put a few of your films. For example, where would you put Kill Bill? Martial Arts? Western? Or where does Bad Taste go, Sci-Fi? Horror? Comedy? One solution would be to create sub-genres to accommodate these cross-genre films but then you run the risk of making so many that your shelf becomes random again. Not cool.

Alphabetize

That’s right, good old fashioned A-Z listings, nothing simpler than that. Sure you can go chronologically if your a date freak, or autobiographically if your just insane, but my memory is terrible and I have trouble remembering my own birthday. Besides, you might miss out on some of my favorite tweaks.

Tricking Out Your Collection

Yes, I geeked out my DVD collection. Nothing too fancy really, but come on, organizing alphabetically is boring! So why not spruce it up a bit? For example, does 2001: A Space Odyssey go under the letter “T” or the number “2”? Neither, it goes under “K”. Clerks under “S” and Desperado under “R”.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. I remember (and if you’re reading this, you probably do as well) lots of films by the director so I generally alphabetize by the director’s last name chronologically unless they directed a series of films. Like Clerks and Clerks 2 are side by side even though there’s a few films between them chronologically speaking.

This may annoy your significant other who can’t understand why Aliens and Titanic are next to each other under “C” but it will make you feel like you’re Lord of the Discs.

Breaking the Rules

Now that I’ve laid down all the rules I use, you can break them. If 2001 was the only Kubrick film I owned, I would file it under the number “2” because it’s visually easier to see. I also organize film series by title if there are more than one director. Star Trek is filed under “S”, the Alien films are filed under “A” and so on. I also place 2010: The Year We Make Contact in the Kubrick section right after 2001 because you can’t think of 2001 without Kubrick, but I don’t want to separate those films.

One final weird thing I do with my collection is that you will find War Games, Sneakers and Hackers next to each other under “H” (for Hackers triple feature) and Willow, The Princess Bride, Stardust under “F” (for Fantasy Triple Feature). There are some films that are so similar in tone and concept that when I think of one film, I think of another film or two so I just pack them together into double and triple features.

The Future

I’m hoping to eventually rip my DVD collection to my computer and build a media server. I don’t really believe Blu-Ray has won the format war as I think physical media is dying in its current form. So replacing my collection with a better format that isn’t going to be around long just doesn’t make sense to me. And with Apple leading what looks like the digital media business, I’ll be hoping my investments in DVDs pays for a long time after.

Tags: clutter, DVDs, hack, organization