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Cleaning out your digital gutters !

Before I left on holiday (a blissful week in the North of France where sunshine is plenty and data coverage is poor) I set out on my little quest to gather all the stuff I wanted to read, listen to and watch during my few days away from civilisation. (Civilisation being the triple screen uber-workstation I call “my office”). It was a nice exercise picking out books I want to read, downloading Youtube video’s I want to watch and some podcasts I wanted to catch up on. Of course I will never have the time to consume all of that content (Unless we get snowed in for 3 weeks straight) but it was a fun exercise in “Curating” my own digital library.

“Curating the library of your mind”

“Curating the library of your mind” had been a topic for a show many moons ago where I talked about ways to “slipstream” the information overload a geek has to live with into something that adds to the quality of your life. Mainstream media (Both online and offline) are filled with 80% sludge and 20% valuable content. Before you know it you spend hours on Facebook, browse endlessly through 9gag or Instagram while you COULD be listening to a lecture from Harvard University or teaching yourself how to program. I try to think about these things whenever I use my computer. Am I using my time in a valuable manner or am I just watching cat video’s ?

To help me in this I’ve started to build a sort of library of content on my Linux machine that I synchronise with my mobile devices where I have divided up this library in “To Watch, To Listen, To Read”. It features download Ted talks, PDF’s of articles online, Books, Courses I found somewhere etc. Because I always have them handy I always have an excuse NOT to surf Facebook for hours because, I have alternative (and higher quality) content.

As a geek it’s important to clean out your “digital gutters” from time to time,

As a geek it’s important to clean out your “digital gutters” from time to time, taking stock of what you are spending (or waisting) your time on and, if it is getting you anywhere. My personal career as a IT professional has been fundamentally altered for the better because I spent 3 hours a day listening to podcasts instead of listening to stupid breakfast-radioshows. There is a lot of information out there that you can get into. You are responsible for the quality of the content you consume.

A couple of days ago I was cleaning out the gutters of our new house (you know, the ones so clogged up your drainpipe has nothing to do when it’s raining). I pinned on my Mike and started a recording for HPR about “Cleaning our your digital gutters”. Hope you enjoy.

Link: http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2587

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KW1101 The Knightwise Identities

We’re Back!

After a long winter’s nap the Knightwise.com podcast is back for another season of cross-platform goodness. Season 11 kicks off this week with Knightwise doing something he hasn’t done in a few years. Come along for the ride as our intrepid host talks about managing work, life and your multiple selves in the digital age.

Links

Music

Credits

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kw908 : Getting Things Done, the cross platform way.

Is your mailbox overflowing ? Is your to-do list getting out of control ? Have you forgotten to pick up your significant other from the airport 3 times in a row ? Sounds to me you need a system to organise the myriad of things you have to do. Good thing there is KW908 : Getting things done the Cross platform way. We talk about the system I use to organise my tasks and my life .. the cross platform way.

Shownotes

Music provided by Daniel Mesner

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Find Your Work Style

This is another guest blogger post on Knghtwise.com, this time from Keith Murray (@kdmurray) who brings us some thoughts on work styles.

We’re all different. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to most of you, and for the rest… surprise!

When you spend a lot of time dealing with people who share a lot of our thoughts, beliefs hopes, dreams and who generally think like we do it can become easy to forget that as individuals we’re all different. Therefore when it comes to finding ways to work and be productive we all need to figure out what works best for us.

I’m not going to lead you on some lifehackeresque productivity porn rant for the next 12 pages. I’m going to try to leave you with a couple of techniques you can try to see just what works best for you when it comes to delivering your peak performance. These are techniques I’ve used to get myself out of both productivity and creativity slumps, so hopefully they will be of some value to you.

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

— William Penn

Time can be a powerful ally or a challenging nemesis. Most of us understand that having more time would generally allow us to produce more things. But what about better things? Adjusting the time of day that you do different tasks can help to put you in a different headspace.

For years I felt that I did my best creative work, including programming, late at night. Once everything was quiet and there were no interruptions I could focus on my task and get lost in a project. I was able to complete an untold number of school assignments this way as well as personal projects. As I’ve gotten older and other circumstances in my life have changed, this late-night time slot has become less and less effective. For a while I ignored the problem and told myself I just wasn’t as creative or as productive a programmer as I used to be (or as prolific a blogger for that matter.)

I eventually realized that the problem wasn’t the number of hours I had available, but how they were arranged. By moving some of that creative work to the early morning (immediately after having slept) I was fresh and awake, and the house was still quiet enough for me to be mostly undisturbed. Ultimately it wasn’t the late hour that I needed, but a quiet time where I could focus on my tasks uninterrupted.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

— T. S. Eliot

As important as the time of day you feel most productive or creative is the place you choose to expend that energy. If you find that you’re low on energy trying to blog from your dark windowless office, try a new locale. If you have a laptop take it out to your kitchen or your patio where you can have more light or heaven forbid: fresh air.

If you can, try taking your work to a space outside your home or office. A park bench or a coffee shop may be the change of scenery you need to stop worrying about the 42 kilos of unshredded tax documents in the corner of your office or the pile of undone dishes in the sink. If you’re not at home you can’t do them anyway so you might as well get something productive done.

I have found that different locales work better for different types of tasks. If I’m processing photos, for example, I need to be sitting at my desk with my full-size monitor and no interruptions. It’s something that takes a lot of concentration for me, so that environment works best. However when I’m writing I need to be pretty much anywhere but my office. A couple of local coffee shops have proven very effective writing spots, along with my kitchen table. For writing I also find that changing venues regularly (daily) helps as well.

“Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.”
— Jacques Barzun

Once you know when and where you need to be to do your best work there’s one other thing that you can do to customize the ambiance to your needs: create a soundscape. This does not have to be complicated and it does not have to be fussy.

Some combination of silence, the ambient noise of your space and some added audio content like music or podcasts will undoubtedly help you to focus better. I include all of these things because you may find yourself in a busy coffee shop where the soft voices in all corners of the room coupled with the sounds of the espresso machine provides you all the ambient noise you need to get down to the task at hand. Perhaps your task requires a soundtrack of old favourites to counter the sound of your kids playing in the next room. Or you may be working on something that you feel needs complete silence. Each of us is unique and you may need to experiment a few times to figure out what works best for you.

When I’m working on tasks which don’t require much brain power (filing, paperwork etc.) I generally put on a podcast to help keep my brain occupied during the drudgery. Conversely if I’m working on something that requires a great deal of focus, I will either opt for silence, or some soft music without a catchy vocal line so I’m less tempted to sing along.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement and success have no meaning.”
— Benjamin Franklin

This is not an instruction manual on how to be productive. It is merely a guide toward some strategies which may help you out of a slump with your creative or other endeavours. Try these tips out and see which ones might work for you. If you have other tips or hacks you use to get stuff done let us know!

Keith Murray is a software architect and developer can be found on twitter as kdmurray. He also blogs about technology and science at kdmurray.net.

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Why turning off your notifications is better for you then you think.

As I stack away the last empty suitcase its official : Our annual summer holiday is officially over. A two week road trip through the south of France with just me and my family has left me relaxed and revitalised for the coming months amidst the busy mayhem of my modern day over connected life. The great thing about going abroad are the insane roaming charges for data communications. at 1.5 euro for every 10 measly megabytes you do the right thing and turn the data reception on your smartphone OFF.  The result ? A notification free zen zone that lets you rediscover what it’s like NOT to be bossed around by technology.

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“Notifications, alerts, pop ups, dings and dooh-dah’s : The over connected mother-in-law that will never leave you in peace”.

There used to be a time when people were “unreachable” They would be away from their home phone and nowhere near a pay phone. There was just no way in hell you could get in touch with them, even if it was urgent. All you could do is wait. Back then we did not wonder if said person might have been abducted by aliens or stepped into a transdimensional rift, there was no cause for alarm or general panic .. they were just “unreachable”   

The very notion of this “unreachable” concept is of course absurd today. Now we do not only have to be “available and connected” every second of the day, we also need those connections to be so instantaneously, so direct, that the notifications of their arrival have become a priority to whatever activity our human lives behold at that very moment. Vibrations, pop-ups, Notification balloons, unread counters, flashing LED’s … Short of setting our pants on fire whenever a new email arrives, our computers and smartphones seem to think that the digital flow of communications should take precedence on whatever activity we are performing at that specific time.

Now .. if we go back to the days of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in “You’ve got mail” and you only GET an email once or twice a day .. its quite nice to have your computer blab out that AOL jingle whenever a new piece of electronic correspondence arrives in your mailbox… but these days that’s just not the case anymore. We get boatloads of emails, notifications, instant messages, tweets, tags and more .. but it seems like every single event still gets the same popup or sound that sent Meg Ryan on her way to a fake orgasm in an overcrowded diner (Sorry , wrong movie).

The paradox lies in the fact that as the quantity of these “informational events” rises, their quality diminishes. The messages are higher in frequency but shorter in content. What used to be a 150 line email (with one “You’ve got mail” jingle) now consists of 150 instant messages (each with their own separate ding).  And if we draw that analogy up a level : Imagine your mailman ringing your doorbell EVERY SINGLE TIME  he drops a flyer or a piece of spam into your mailbox. I think by day three you would be ready to shoot the poor man … and yet we “accept” this level of interruptions from our technological devices every single day.

The result : ‘Fragmented reality’.

With your ‘Virtual world” constantly interrupting your “Realspace” your attention span gets shattered and you experience the world around you in a distracted and shallow way. I’ve called this symptom “diminished presence” because even when you are in a “real” conversation with somebody you are not really “There”… The actual moment (and connection) you have with this other person gets interrupted by dozens of other fragmented interactions from cyberspace who in turn fragment your interaction (and attention span) in real space .. The result :  Reality confetti : The way you experience your day / your life .. cut up in small incoherent pieces leaving you with a feeling of confusion : What did I actually talk about over dinner last night.

Retake your life, Remaster your tech.

So what to do  ? Throw away your digital devices, Buy a Chuck Wagon and hide up somewhere in the mountains ? .. No, don’t worry I’m not going to go that far .. You can still be the hyperconnected supernerd who is the closest thing to Tony Stark your friends will ever know .. but your interactions with technology need to be on YOUR terms. How ? Here are some pointers.

This is a notification to turn of your notifications.

The first thing you need to start doing is turning off your notifications. Whether those are email, facebook, tweets, rss feeds, Voxer messages, dirty pics via Snapchat or what have you : Make sure they no longer have any AUDIO or HAPTIC (vibrational) notifications on your mobile device. In other words : If you are not actually LOOKING at the device you won’t know they are there.  Yeah .. it will be hard at first .. you will suffer from withdrawal and constantly check your phone to see if there is something there .. but that will pass … At least this way you won’t be interrupted by a random spam mail from Runkeeper at the very second you want to kiss the girl/boy/anime-drawing of your dreams. The point is that the interactions with your information streams are going to be ON YOUR TERMS. Just turning of the sounds/vibrations on my phone have given me more focus on my moments in reality when I need/want them. I still check my phone when I’m bored .. but I’m not Pavlovs dog that starts to slobber for new info whenever the bell rings.

Disengage the creational from the communicational.

For you creative types out there. Try writing/composing/drawing/singing/creating something while you need to keep track of 5 Facebook chats. The chance is the end product of this labour of constant interruption and attention diversification will look like some piece of homework your dog ate, pooped out, ate again and then threw up.  And still you THOUGHT it was going to look great but the constant interruptions completely fragged (and fracked) it up for you.  The answer here is to split the devices you use for CREATING (and consuming) content and those that you use to “communicate”. I read and watch movies on my iPad .. Facebook, Email, Twitter and all ther rest of my social media tools are on my “Communicator” (an iPod touch thats lying around the house) There is no shame in having multiple devices if they each serve a specific purpose.

Let technology work for you.

So try to be your own little Sarah Connor and pick up the “Fight against the machine” Imagine your Cellphone is that evil Terminator that wants to hunt down any coherent perception of reality and blow your attention span to smithereens with its arsenal of pushy notifications. Take back what’s yours : Mastery of technology. The fact that YOU operate your devices. YOU drive your car when and where YOU want to . You do not eat when the microwave tells you to (if your microwave tells you things you should clean it more often) and YOU use your phone to communicate when YOU want to.  Forget the modern urge to “constantly” be on top of things. If you were a 90’s stockbroker who managed to make the deal of a lifetime because he INSTANTLY got info on his blackberry .. thats just awesome .. But if you read that DM on twitter 20 minutes later than intended  … i’m sure the world is not gonna grind to a halt.

So step back from the churning river of push notifications and retake your position as master of your own technology ..  This is your final notification to turn off your notifications .. Because its good for you.

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What if real life was updated, just like Facebook.

I always feel the need to chuckle when I hear people rave against “Changes” and “Updates” to the interfaces of some of our social media platforms. Like 80 year old women cling to their desperate assumptions that Matlock IS (or was) the most sexy man on television, Facebook users think that “the way things are” are always worse then the way ‘things used to be’. I would call us old before we ever the end of our 20’s, but its just a fact of life. So lets take our little autistic crowd of Facebookians and see what it would be like if your boss would go “all zuck” on you … in your real life.

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Leaving your gadgets in the car ? Don’t forget to “Cloak” them.

Traveling around with a bunch of tech stuff in the car is always a little tricky. You might need that laptop with you on your roadtrip, but you are surely not going to drag that 17 inch Macbook Pro all the way up the 298 stairs to visit that random monument of William Shatner along the way ? So you need to leave stuff in the car. Here are a couple of tips on how to do that … safely.

  • Store them out of sight. : Leaving your Tomtom gps stuck to your windshield as you walk away from your vehicle is just plain dumb. Don’t even leave your gadgets in plain view. 
  • Don’t store them in the “Obvious” locations : Leaving your Cellphone on your passenger seat or in your glovebox is also something thats a little tricky. If anyone pops into your car to grab your gear, these are the first places they are going to check. The trunk is tricky but a little better because its completely out of sight.
  • Park in sight. : Did you see a parking spot in an alley somewhere ? One of those places where nobody walks by and your car is completely out of sight of passers by ? Don’t ! Make sure you park in a place where somebody smashing your windshield might get “noticed” by other people.
  • Take your gadgets “undercover”. : A friend of mine had a greasy pizzabox parked on his passenger seat. When I asked him if he just had dinner, he flipped open the lid and revealed his laptop and smartphone nicely stored inside He had even made nice compartments and had used some Velcro to keep everything in place. With the lid down it was a pizza fest in progress, with the lid UP it was a little datacenter. A cool hack ! 
  • Cloak your gadgets. No matter how hard you hide them .. some of your gadgets might still be detectable… How ? They are actually screaming “I’m RIGHT HERE”. Leaving bluetooth enabled (and having your devices detectable via bluetooth) gives any passer by (with evil intention) a pretty good idea if there is any tech stored nearby. If you leave the “default identification” on , your smartphone might actually be telling them what kind of loot they expect. Its hard to determine where exactly stuff is stored .. But if your car is the only one around … they might have a pretty good chance of scoring if they smash your window.  So : Airplane mode !

These are just a couple of tips to keep your tech safe in the car. Do you have some more ? Or perhaps you want to share YOUR secret hack with us ? Do so in the Comments Section below.

 

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Behold : I have Respawned !

I think its from the bottom of my heart when I say : Boy its good to be back ! After being offline and almost off-planet the last couple of weeks, popping my head back into the realms of cyberspace feels very good indeed. For those of you who don’t know : A couple of weeks ago I ran into some serious health issues. Using her preferred techniques of shock-and-awe, mother nature decided it was time to “tap me on the shoulder” and remind me that I was NOT invincible and my application to join the Avengers was not filed under ‘realistic’. Time for a Kernel Panic !

I say it lightly , but it was pretty serious. In all fairness both myself and my family got a big scare as we were reminded what a delicate an precious thing our “health” is. One moment I was having dinner with the lovely Niejana, an hour later I was in hospital hooked up to heart monitors and with doctors wanting to shove me into MRI’s and bombard me with X-rays to find out just what went wrong. I won’t go into details but let just say that I had some acute bad clusters on my harddrive and those did not only endanger my OS but also threatened to corrupt all user data. The probable cause of this : Trying to fit to many hours in a day, never settling down, never taking time to relax .. trying to ramp up the RPM’s on life’s little treadmill and ignoring the “Overdrive” warnings that both my body and the people around me flagged weeks ago.

So for the last couple of weeks I had to (and still have to) take it slow. Have enough rest, don’t try to overreach and in honesty : Stop and smell the roses sometimes. Its been a scary couple of weeks but things are looking up. After three weeks i’m back to work and tentatively (and with moderation) pick up my hobbies and my online life. I have encountered my limitations and got a peek at how precious (and fleeting) life can be. I hope it changed me for the better.

The people responsible for you being able to read this post are of course the doctors and nurses at both the Vesalius hospital in Tongeren and the UZ Gasthuisberg in Leuven who took excellent medical care of me..

But most of the praise goes towards my beloved wife Niejana. She saw something was wrong, got me to hospital and along with her family took care of me these last couple of weeks. She makes sure that I don’t fall back into the rush and kinda protects me from the ADD-overdrive-Gnome that lives inside me. She had red-flagged my lifestyle weeks before the event and the last couple of weeks have been very stressful for her. But thanks to her love and devotion, I can still roam cyberspace, instead of roaming the big beyond.

I also want to thank you guys and girls for the countless emails, posts, comments and postcards wishing me a speedy recovery. Both Niejana and myself were touched by your kind thoughts and it was a big motivator in getting well. So as we turn a dark page and begin an empty slate …. Lets get this show back on the road.

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Time for a reboot.

“A Reboot” The term has been used many times of the last couple of years whenever it was time to “reinvent” an older concept or tv show into a new fresh format. Take “Battlestar Galactica”, “The A-Team”, “Star Trek”. Many of these old but gold cultural icons have been re-invented into a fresh and novel skin pleasing new crowds with old content.

In many ways THIS is a reboot too. A long overdue overhaul of not only the Knightwise.Com website, but also of the whole Knightwise.com idea that is now finally coming together. For those of you who are new I’ll try to shed some light on the history of the website, for those of you who have been around since the dawn of time, its a little bit of a rehash , but here it goes. Many moons ago I started blogging about my everyday life. Back in 2004 that was “the thing to do” and wether you had something interesting to tell or not did not really matter. More and more those everyday stories got permeated with the use of technology and so this everyday “blog” turned into the story of life on the edge of real and cyberspace.  As the audience grew so did the technology and aside from writing up posts everyday, I dove into the adventure of podcasting and later screen casting, bringing all of you the content you’ve come to know and love as the creamy goodness called “Knightwise.com”.

But when comparing the recent material on the website with the original material (that all got migrated over) from 2004 , I started to notice how much content is devoted to technology and “production of sheer content” and how the “backstory” (the “Life” side of the edge of real and cyberspace) has been pushed back. I have evolved from a blogger to a content producer in all those years. A good thing ? Maybe. Not all of you are interested about stories about our hamster, but do perk up when I talk about wiring its little wheel to a usb adapter for hamster powered tweeting. However .. the tech story would not be as interesting if you didn’t know the ‘life’ story behind it .. or would it ?

A major reason for this “shift” can be blamed on social media. I tweet, Facebook and instagram quite a bit, spinning out the yarn that is my everyday life onto the digital frontier, but lately have written almost nothing about it on the blog here.  Now lets face it. You guys are not fans of long articles , its a miracle you’ve gotten this far, but I DO want to reach back to the old roots of Knightwise.com a little in this reboot, giving you some more insights on the ‘real life’ behind cyberspace.

So strap in for the ‘reboot’ of Knightwise.com as both the podcast, the screencast and the blog get ready for season three. And you might want to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed just to say in touch with what is going on.

So whats your take on this story ? You want just the tech stories ? Or does the “life” part we tell make the difference for you ? Give us your comments while we do our reboot.

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