Back in March I wrote about how I managed my time using the task manager app, ‘Things’. The gist of that post was that rather than struggling to remember or stay on top of all of the various activities you want to complete (no matter how small) – you chuck them all into Things, and free up the mental energy that would otherwise be expended in tracking them.
For a while, this approach worked really well, but over time I found that I was confronted every day with a huge list of tasks that needed completed, and there wasn’t any kind of tangible satisfaction in completing them, as I knew at midnight the next day’s tasks would appear on cue. Rather than helping to alleviate stress, Things began to contribute to the overwhelming pressure of everyday life, which had come sharply into focus thanks to national COVID lockdowns and varying restrictions. Things I was ment to enjoy (like making music) were reduced to yet another tickbox to be churned through.
What made the above worse was that there were recurring tasks that I wanted to complete, but often failed to find time for. I didn’t want to take them off my daily list, but I didn’t want them to have the same mental load as other tasks.
Taking inspiration from this blog post, I followed Andrea’s lead, and changed the way I approach task management with Things. Rather than having one large daily list of jobs to get through, I now have them separated into their respective categories. The tasks that I definitely want to complete that day come in at the top, under ‘Daily Tasks’, and I try to keep this to a manageable load, so that I can always clear them out. Other things that I want to get done, but don’t necessarily have to get done that specific day are then available for me to work through, based on how I feel/what energy I have that day.
How my Things to do list is organised now.
This new approach has made a huge difference to my relationship with the daily to do list. Rather than feeling like I am endlessly fighting a losing battle to keep ticking off checkboxes, I can now see at a glance exactly what tasks need to be done that day. By keeping those separate, deliberately chosen, and manageable, I no longer feel like the other bits and pieces that I want to do are a chore. If something isn’t in the Daily Tasks list – it can be done another day… and ironically, since adopting this method, I’ve gotten even more done than usual, because I don’t feel the same pressure to complete everything.
Pomodoro
One other thing that I have adopted which is worth mentioning is the Pomodoro technique. The general idea here is that you split up your time into chunks of about 20 minutes, and deliberately focus on a particular task for that period of time, before taking a break and either moving on to something else, or committing to another 20 minute period of focus.
This notion isn’t anything new. I am sure I’m not the only one who sat in maths and thought ‘Okay just get through the next five minutes and then it’ll be another five minutes after that’. Plenty of people have written about this extensively elsewhere… but it’s not an approach that I’ve ever really come to use in any disciplined way. Breaking up my tasks at work was always too difficult, and concentrating for 20 minutes to then have a break and return to the same tasks felt too artificially scheduled for my liking.
However… since I switched up my approach in Things, I’ve had success using the Pomodoro model for my own personal projects – particularly those that I want to get done but struggle to get the motivation to start. For example, I am currently learning Japanese, but sometimes (often) the prospect of firing up the flashcard app for an indeterminate amount of time seems like too much of a chore, and I put it off. Before I know it, I haven’t done it in days.
Now, I sit down and say – okay, I’ll just do it for 20 minutes just now, and then go off and do something else. Knowing that it’s such a short amount of time means I can focus much more than I normally would, and I have been rattling through tasks like never before. This also helps me work out just how much time I actually spend or need to spend on certain activities to complete them, and it can be much less than I expected.
We’ll see how this mutates and modifies as time goes on, but for now… this is the approach.
I am a person that needs to have a bunch of different projects going on at any one time. Whether it’s making music, writing blogs, building weird keyboards, or restoring old iPods, if I don’t keep my mind busy, it quickly begins to turn in on itself. At the same time, my work involves managing a variety of disparate projects that can vary from day to day.
All of this has become increasingly difficult to keep track of over the years, and none of the various calendars, diaries or bits of software I tried really helped. However, about six months ago my colleague and friend Bryan convinced me to give an app called ‘Things’ a go, and it has pretty much transformed how I manage my time. As well as becoming far more productive, I have found that I am far less stressed out, and feel more in control. I had never appreciated just how significant the cognitive load of having to juggle so many tasks was, or how much anxiety I had internalised as a result. Now, I no longer worry about forgetting to do something, or lie awake at night unable to sleep while my brain organises the things I have to do the next day.
At the end of the day, Things is just a To Do list app, but it’s an especially pleasant one to use, with a really smart workflow. Rather than wasting what Bryan would call ‘brain cycles’ worrying about er, things, you let Things take care of them. In particular, it wasn’t until I found myself increasingly filled with despair about the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic that I realised just how invaluable Things had become for keeping my mind clear. Rather than allow myself to become consumed with the developing news cycle, I instead chose to rely on Things more, and focus on what I wanted to get done in the following days. While it seems trivial, this helped tremendously. So in this blog I wanted to share a bit about how I make use of Things, and what I’ve learned.
The Basics
Things is a beautifully designed to-do list app from Cultured Code which runs on both Mac and iOS. It doesn’t run on Windows, and (annoyingly) there is no web or Android version (though see this post for my workaround). The current version at the time of writing is Things 3. It is apparently based on the ‘Getting Things Done‘ methodology.
Boiled down, Things essentially just provides a very pleasant way to quickly create and manage tasks – the beauty of it though is the myriad of different ways that you can view and organise these. At its most simple, you have an Inbox where you can dump all sorts of to do items to be organised, and then categorise them into different subject matter areas or projects.
Tasks can be set to only appear on a specific ‘due date’ – presented in the ‘Today’ window. They can also be set to recur upon completion, or at set intervals.
For tasks that absolutely must be completed by a certain date, you can flag them up with a deadline.
Selecting an Area or Project on the left will display only the tasks that are associated with it, if you want to focus on something specifically.
If you have tasks that you want to get to, but they aren’t time specific, you can throw them in the ‘Anytime’ bucket… and for ideas that you want to explore at some point, they can be filed away under ‘Someday’ for when you get time. You can also tag any task to further organise them to whatever level of detail you want.
There are a bunch of other features as well which I won’t go into in any depth just now – such as the Logbook which keeps track of all of your completed tasks, the calendar integration so you see what appointments you have on any particular day, and the ‘Upcoming’ view which provides a longer term perspective of what’s on the horizon.
How I use Things: Workflow, Tips & Tricks
Everybody will use Things slightly differently, and I borrowed a lot of my approach from my sensei Bryan. However, here’s some of what I’ve found works:
Add everything – no matter how small – I literally add everything I need to remember to do as a task into Things. Whether that’s remembering to wash the dishes, or to chop carrots for dinner, I offload everything onto there so that I don’t need to think about it. At first this can seem pretty ridiculous, or like you are outsourcing your faculties to an app, but it frees up your mind to focus on other things that are more important. This also means that you have a mixture of things you enjoy as well as specific obligations – which helps to avoid dreading opening the app in the first place.
Make use of shortcuts – There are a bunch of useful shortcuts, the most important of which lets you very quickly add in To Do list items to your inbox while you are browsing the web, to be categorised later. Learn these, as the less friction you have in adding tasks or managing them, the easier and more natural it becomes – and the more you can focus on what you are doing at the time.
Only add things to your daily pile that you can actually achieve – It took me a while to realise that I would add all sorts of tasks to my daily list that I wanted to do, but which realistically I would never be able to get done. That ended up pretty demoralising, as I saw the same To Do items rolling over day after day, unchecked. Now, I only add things that I either have to get done, or which I have a reasonable shot at completing, and it has been far more effective.
Organise your tasks for the following day – Every night I look over the tasks I have for the next day, and organise them roughly by when I want to complete them, and ask myself what seems reasonable to do in one day. If it seems like there’s too much, I punt it to the following day. This ritual helps me organise my thoughts and get to sleep faster.
Set smaller goals, and be judicious with repeating tasks – It can be tempting to set a goal like ‘I will do one hour of Japanese study every day!’ and to add it in as a repeating task that appears on your list on the stroke of midnight. However, I found that this was actually counter-productive, as I began to just ignore these broad repeating tasks. Instead, I would manually set much more specific, one off tasks, like ‘Do 2 lessons on DuoLingo’ – which made them far easier to complete.
Use tags creatively – There are all sorts of cool ways you can make use of tags. For a practical example… I save lots of news articles to Pocket, but never actually get around to reading them. The same applies to YouTube videos. Now what I do is chuck them into Things, and tag them with the time they will take to complete – ’10m’ for example. Then, whenever I have a spare ten minutes and I’m not sure what to do – I can dip in and quickly find something to fill that time.
Separate out evening tasks – There’s no point having stuff you have to do after dinner wrapped up in the same list as everything else, and Things lets you specifically ring-fence tasks for the evening within a specific day. Make use of this!
Projects are useful! – I didn’t really utilise the Projects feature for ages, relying instead on individual tasks within Areas, but then I realised you could put Projects under Areas. Game changer. Now I use Projects a lot to manage groups of different tasks that add up to a larger goal, which is really useful.
Summary
…and that’s it. At first I didn’t really get what the big deal with Things was, and thought some of the practices were a bit bizarre and redundant, but I genuinely think that organising things in this way has made a huge difference to both my productivity, sense of achievement, and overall zen. It ain’t cheap, and they need to hurry up and just make an Android app already damnit, but I’m not sure what I would do without it at this point.
A few years ago, I realised that I no longer had a good portable music player. Sure, there was my mobile – but I was still using an iPhone at the time, which could store about 10 songs before its pitiful internal, non-expandable memory got filled up. I longed for the golden days of iPods… back when they were cutting edge and had nice glowy buttons and scroll wheels and that nostalgic clicky sound. After a bit of Googling it seemed like it would be easy enough to pick up an old iPod and stick a new hard-drive and battery in – so that’s what I decided to do. However, things didn’t go especially smoothly. Below is my overly long account of my journey to repair the damn thing which nobody needs or wants, but since we are all currently locked inside thanks to the Coronavirus, it seems like as good a time as any.
The Restoration Journey
I didn’t want just any old iPod. I wanted the 3rd Generation iPod specifically. Why? Because that was arguably the best design – with a nice, smooth scrollwheel, and separate touch sensitive buttons. Looking around eBay, there were a few that were listed as ‘just needing a new hard drive’ for under twenty quid, but I decided to play it safe and get one that was fully working in the first place, to avoid other unseen problems cropping up. In the end, I went for a 20GB model for about £40 which seemed in decent enough nick. I picked up a battery with much larger capacity than the original (£9), and an 80GB hard drive (£28) – supposedly the maximum size that would work with this model. Along with the special tools to open the iPod without breaking it, the total cost so far is at: £90.
When the iPod arrived, everything worked as expected, but it was a lot more beaten up than I had expected. I always took really good care of my old one, so was a bit miffed that this one was rough. I hummed and hawwed for a while, before deciding to buy a whole new front plate, as I knew I wouldn’t be happy having upgraded all the other bits and then having a scratched up screen. I managed to track one down at a spare parts site, which cost about £20. It turned out I also needed a very particular size of Torx screw to get the logic board off and transferred over, so that brings the total cost at this point to £115.
The front plate and screwdriver finally arrived, and I was pretty pleased. It was brand new and shiny. The battery and hard drive were a breeze to install, and things seemed to be going well… though not for long. It turns out the front plate also has a whole set of electronics attached, which did not come included. That meant I had to transfer them from the old case into the new one, and there were no instructions online for how to do this. Luckily, I managed to slowly pry them off with a spudger (what a great word) without destroying anything. I left the iPod case open, so if anything went wrong restoring things, I could easily get back into the innards.
The next big issue that became apparent pretty quickly was that this particular model of iPod was originally designed only to work with Macs, and so requires a FireWire connection to restore. I had vague memories of this changing with later revisions, so didn’t think much of it – and assumed there must be some workaround – but after some further research online, that turned out not to be the case. If I wanted to restore the iPod, I was going to have to get a special Y cable that had both a FireWire and USB connection. What’s more, it would apparently not even charge over USB – which meant that not only were the cables I had bought already useless, but I needed to get a hold of an old FireWire mains adaptor as well. Since they are so hard to find, I decided to pick up a couple so I had a spare for the future. Total cost so far including the cables (£21) and chargers (£18): £154.
The dual headed cable arrived, and I thought I was in the final stretch. Apparently you should be able to plug in the USB cable into the laptop on one end, and the FireWire cable into an AC adaptor on the other, and then the iPod will restore just fine. That turned out not to be the case, with iTunes point blank refusing to restore the iPod without it being connected over FireWire. Pish. I thought it must be the third party cable that I had bought, so I hunted down an official Apple cable, in the hope that it might make a difference. Total cost: £164. At this point I was getting pretty despondent about the whole thing. Why did I have to drag up this antiquated piece of junk that was crippled by ties to obsolete technology when I could have gotten an iPod classic for less money? Either way, I was determined to get the damn thing to work.
Remember these?
Luckily, I realised that my Apple Cinema Display screen had a FireWire port – since Apple ditched the connection from its laptops years ago. Of course, the connection I needed was a FireWire 400 port, and this was FireWire 800. I ordered a convertor, which brings the running total spent on this miserable project to £168.
The FireWire adaptor arrived, and I was convinced that this would do the trick. Wrong. When I hooked the iPod up to the Mac with USB, the hard drive purred nicely and was recognised fine – it just wouldn’t restore. When I tried FireWire, the drive just clicked and clicked – refusing to spin up properly. I let it charge up for a bit, but no dice. I tried a different Y cable – but that didn’t work either. I tried a dedicated FireWire cable – but nope. I thought maybe it was some USB-C weirdness with my laptop, so I used my wife’s connected up to the Display Screen to see if that made a difference. After about ten minutes the hard drive seemed to mount, and it got halfway through the restore process before returning an obscure error that just said the iPod could not be restored. Great.
I spun up a Windows 7 Virtual Machine in the hopes that I might have better luck that way – but no dice. The iPod wasn’t recognised at all. I did all sorts of troubleshooting to correct the drivers, but nothing helped. Getting desperate, I spent hours researching online to see if there was some way to restore the iPod without using iTunes, but most of them involved flashing the firmware on Windows – which already wasn’t working. I was beginning to think that I might be stuck with a very expensive paper weight, since nobody was going to want to buy the damn thing when it was in bits. Why did I insist on pursuing these insane projects that cost so much money for so little reward?!
Finally, in one last hail mary, I fired up a Windows XP virtual machine – battling with the weird config to get it working. When I finally had iTunes installed, I connected the iPod up using USB only, and lo and behold – it actually restored. I let it complete the setup, switched back to OSX, and there it was in all of its vintage glory. I loaded it up with 40GB odd of music to test it out, and everything seemed to be coming up roses.
Well, almost. I went to close up the iPod for good, and realised that it didn’t seem to want to. I compared the sizes of the hard-drives, and realised that the 80GB drive was considerably thicker than the 20GB one that I had pulled from the original one. I was sure this model should work though, and that I had confirmed it online – but after angrily Googling, I realised that the 30GB and 40GB models had a slightly thicker backplate in order to allow for the bigger sized disks, and that was the kind I should have gotten in the first place. I begrudgingly found a broken 40GB model on eBay from Sweden for £17.50, which brings us to the grand total of £185.5 – just under double what an iPod Classic 160GB is going for second hand.
Despite installing everything on the old hard drive fine, I then had to go through the whole process to try and get it to work again. For some reason, the process kept failing. At this stage, I gave up documenting everything that had gone wrong, and my mind has clouded over on exactly what I had to do to get it to work – probably out of some kind of self protection mechanism. However, finally… I got everything to fall into place.
Behold, my beautiful, revamped 3rd Gen iPod:
I was so pleased with the outcome and the throwback to my youth that I bought a nice leather case, and a charging dock (unfortunately I couldn’t find a silicone green case like I had as a teenager).
However, the iPod had one last trick up its sleeve… for when I had finally gotten it all together and working successfully, I realised that the nice clean new front plate I had bought actually had a plastic screen protector sheet on the inside, which had a mark on it.
To remove this, I would have to take the whole thing apart again, which I can’t really face doing – especially since knowing me I would end up breaking the damn thing somehow. Of course, when the backlight is on you can’t really see it, but I know it’s there. Watching. Taunting me.
Maybe one day I’ll fix it.
Build Notes
This ended up being a far fiddlier and more expensive project than I expected it to be initially. In hindsight, I could have saved money by not buying as many cables; buying a 40GB model in the first place; and getting a model that was more bashed up from the get-go since I ended up replacing the front plate anyway. If I had known the FireWire connection was never going to work, that would have saved me another tenner. In total, I could probably have done this for about £70 cheaper.
It is ludicrous that I had to rely on Windows XP to restore an iPod. I had read that the reason these couldn’t be restored over USB on OSX was down to some architectural limitations – but if that was the case, why did it work on Windows?
Practicalities
Having owned the restored iPod for a few years now, here’s some of my thoughts and observations:
I hadn’t quite appreciated just how much of a pain it would be to charge the iPod. You can’t just plug it in to a regular USB port, as it needs the dedicated Firewire charger. This means it’s not especially practical for travelling, but at some point the chargers are going to fail and become impossible to replace – which is a bit of a concern.
Similarly, putting new music on to the device is a bit of a pain. For that to work (at least on the Mac), you need to use the Firewire/USB/power Y Cable plugged into both the wall outlet and the computer at once. There’s also no real guarantee that iTunes will continue to recognise the iPod, and at some point I suspect I’ll end up having to use a Virtual Machine to get software old enough to be compatible.
There is no reliable way to scrobble the tunes you listen to on the iPod to Last.fm. This seems like a fairly minor and inconsequential detail, but I use Last.fm fairly religiously – and I can even track what vinyl I listen to – so it’s a bit of a bummer that the iPod support no longer functions.
Not the most practical of travel charging arrangements.
When all is said and done, was it worth it, and would I do it all over again?
Hell no.
I’m pleased that I managed to get the iPod up and working, and recapture a bit of my youth through nostalgia – but in practical terms it was a fairly expensive experiment, for a device that has a bunch of real impracticalities. Since restoring it, I have switched to Android, and can store as much music on my phone as I want… and I’ve finally moved into the modern world of bluetooth noise cancelling headphones – both of which means the iPod’s usefulness has ended up reduced.
It does get use though. I have the iPod loaded up with my favourite bands, and it is connected up to my hifi for whenever I just want to whack on a bunch of great music and not think much about it.
I have had this project in the works for a while now, but only just got around to finishing it when I realised that all of my other mechanical keyboards had the loud-as-hell clicky style key switches. This was always fine when I worked from home in a tiny cupboard and could disturb nobody, but lately I’ve been sharing an office with my wife who is on video calls pretty constantly, and my delightfully clickety clackety Ergodox keyboard with Cherry MX Blues suddenly weren’t as charming as they once were (Well, they were for me, but probably nobody else.
Rather than bore you with all the geeky build details, here are the salient points:
1. What are the colours all about?
I had originally wanted to do one of these cool blue to pink gradients for the keycaps… but realised that the set I ordered didn’t have enough single squares to cover the full grid required – and I didn’t fancy having to get a full new set just for a few extra keys. The other problem is that while gradients look cool, they also make it a bit of a nightmare to find specific keys that you need at a glance. In the end, I decided to go with something a bit more practical. The yellow keys are modifiers like Escape, Enter, space, etc. The pink and blue rows are the letters, and the green keys are reminders of where specific keys I need for work shortcuts are.
2. Wait, why are all the keys square?
Aesthetic, innit.
This kind of grid layout is known as an ‘ortho-linear’ keyboard. There are a bunch of reasons people like this system… with the theory being that it keeps your fingers in a more natural typing position than the standard setup. To be honest though, I just think they look cool, and wanted to try out something a bit different (though this isn’t my first grid rodeo…)
3. But there’s only four rows! How does that work?
Err, yes. There is. In the mechanical keyboard world there is often a bit of an obsession to see how many keys you can strip out and still type just as fast as you would on a full size board. The Planck is the smallest board I have tried so far, with just 48 keys in total. The sharp eyed amongst you will probably have worked out that this means there isn’t enough room for a number row… and there isn’t. So how do you get access to all those keys that are missing?
The idea is pretty straightforward: Rather than have just one ‘shift’ layer which gives you capital letters and exclamation marks and all that good stuff, you have multiple ones. The blue keys to either side of the yellow space bar(s) on the bottom row let you ‘shift’ into completely different layers which have all the other keys – which you can program however you want.
For reference, here is my top layer, and then a couple of my additional ‘shifted’ layers.
So if I want to get to the number row, I press and hold down the blue key to the right of the space bar. Simple.
I am still figuring out what the perfect layout for me is (ignore that rogue right arrow on the top layer… I’m not sure what is going to end up in that space just yet) – but I already really like this board. It’s neat, and I have space for all of my weird custom modifier shortcut keys I have set up for work. The keys I use most are on the top layer, and anything I use less is just an extra press away. Of course it takes a bit of getting used to, but then all keyboard changes do – and I’ve adapted to the Planck far quicker than I have others in the past.
4. What kind of switches are in that bad boy?
Those would be the Outemu Sky 68g switches. They are ultra-tactile without being too loud to use around other folks.
5. What’s with this obsession with weird keyboards?
When you spend most of your life using one specific device, it’s good to explore different ways of interacting with it. Plus, the MacBook Pro keyboards are now so shockingly bad, that I will do almost anything to avoid having to use one. If you know, you know.
6. Nice USB cable.
Why thanks for asking. It’s a custom made one from CoolCable.co.uk.
My colleague Bryan is a productivity whizz. So much so that we often question whether he is actually human, and whether or not he would pass a Turing Test. I too am partial to finding ways to improve things that I have to do every day, and so when he gave a passionate recommendation for the To Do list app ‘Things’ from Cultured Code, I wanted to dive in headfirst, and I loved it straightaway.
No Android App
The problem with Things 3 however, is that it runs entirely within the Apple ecosystem. That means there’s no web interface, and crucially… no Android application. Having ditched the iPhone a while ago, I was left with no easy way to quickly add items to my To Do list while out and about. There is a way to send tasks via e-mail, but having to open up my mailbox, find the contact etc felt like too much friction for what should be much simpler.
Telegram and ifttt
What I do use all the time is the secure messaging app Telegram, and my dream was that I could just fire off a quick message and somehow have that shoot off an e-mail which would add the task to the Things inbox. It seemed like ifttt.com would make this simple, but it was actually much harder than expected. GMail’s ‘send’ integration no longer seems to work, and the built in ‘e-mail’ service only allows you to have one address associated with your ifttt account at any one time – restricting my workflow options as a result. This really should not be that complicated!
Integromat
I came across Integromat, which is essentially a much more powerful version of ifttt. The premise is the same though: You connect up a bunch of services, and tell them to do various tasks based on different circumstances. Unlike ifttt though, you can delve pretty deeply into the automations. It’s a bit trickier to pick up at first – especially if you aren’t familiar with programming, but gives a far greater degree of customisation.
To get my messages from Telegram into Things, I created the following ‘scenario’:
The way it works is by having a dedicated Telegram bot watch out for messages and send them via my GMail account to the special e-mail address for the Things inbox.
I decided that I might want to use this virtual helper for other things though, and didn’t want every single command I sent it to end up in Things as a To Do list item. To avoid that, I set up a filter on the scenario so that it would only send e-mails if the message began with ‘todo’ or ‘/todo’. Additionally, I used a text parser to take out those trigger words, and to add in a prefix of ‘via Telegram:’, so that when I look back on my outstanding tasks later, I have a bit of context about where they came from. In other words, if I add some bizarre things to my To Do list when intoxicated, at least I’ll know that it was down to Telegram.
For the final bit of the puzzle, I added in a step for the bot to reply when the workflow was processed successfully – including a copy of what was sent to Things:
In Telegram, that looks like this:
Finally, here it is, magically appearing in my Things inbox for parsing later:
p.s. You might be wondering what that reference to ‘operations’ at the end is all about. With Integromat, you get a certain number of resources allocated per month, depending on what kind of account you have. A free user gets about 1,000 operations per month, and each time I add a To Do list item, it takes up about 5 operations. With my awful maths that works out at about 200 To Do list items per month… which should be way more than I ever need, but I wanted to have some kind of visual indicator, just incase things started re-routing to a digital black hole somewhere.
The End?
So there you have it: How I got around the problem of adding tasks to my Things 3 To Do list when I’m not near my computer. Integromat looks very cool, and I’m going to have to think up some other commands for my bot to respond to… but really, this would be much simpler if Cultured Code would release an Android app.
There has been a recent trend of seemingly well-intentioned musicians taking to Twitter to engage with critics of the seriously flawed Copyright Directive, and in particular Article 13. Whatever the content of their arguments, it almost inevitably boils down to some kind of accusation that whoever disagrees with them is ‘just an academic’, a ‘big tech apologist’, or someone that doesn’t understand or appreciate what it’s like to be an independent musician.
I’ve been on the receiving end of these kind of claims, to the point that engaging any further became fruitless. Simply by dint of my position as a legal academic/employee of a tech company, the claim is that I must have an inherent bias that clouds my ability to critically analyse how copyright law will impact artists, because I am not a musician.
My Credentials
The thing is, I am a musician, and have been for almost 20 years. I sing and play guitar in a grunge band called Closet Organ, who successfully crowdfunded our last album, which included a vinyl LP release. I make chip-music and have played live as unexpected bowtie in places as far flung as London and Osaka. There’s also the innumerable other projects including the ‘bizarre and disturbing’ electronica of cup fungus, the scuzzy pop of Hog Wild, and the chilled out samplewave of ease and desist. I’ve personally put on a pile of gigs, been on tour as a music photographer more than a few times, was Review Editor of a fairly significant indie zine, and currently run my own underground tape label Cow Tongue Taco Records. I loved and played music long before I ever took a law class, or was employed by… well, anybody.
Safe to say, I have some investment in independent music.
Me, playing to a rapt audience
Why ContentID doesn’t work for independent artists
For those not familiar with Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive, the long and short is that it will effectively require service providers such as Facebook to implement content filtering systems to detect and remove/prevent the upload of material that belongs to another party. YouTube already has a similar system in place – by far the largest and most complicated of its kind in the world – but the Directive would massively extend its reach.
There are numerous and detailed criticisms of Article 13, but all of them seem to fall on deaf ears as they come from the perceived position of a ‘corporate shill’, so here I want to briefly outline just one major issue that independent artists experience with the current ContentID system – and why any kind of expansion will inevitably be damaging rather than of benefit.
If an independent artist wants to get their music out there into the world, to the most popular music sharing sites, they need to use some kind of recognised distributor – as direct submissions are either impossible, or extremely restricted. A pile of these have sprung up, including Amuse, RouteNote, DistroKid, etc. Some charge a subscription fee per year, some take a cut of any revenue generated, and some of them don’t even have a website – operating just from an app. The concept is simple: You send your music to them, and they distribute it digitally to the various partners. One of these partners is YouTube.
What isn’t made clear by these distribution networks is that by submitting your music to YouTube, you essentially give the distributor a licence to enforce your copyright on the platform using the ContentID system. This automatically detects any music uploaded along with a YouTube video (including short clips), and flags it up as unauthorised. To many this might sound great. Stop people stealing your stuff!
The problem of course is that there is very often no way to denote authorised uses or channels with these common distribution services. Let’s consider the following two scenarios:
Scenario A: a young singer songwriter starts to build up a decent following online, by sharing clips on SoundCloud and YouTube. With the money they’ve made from the ads on their DIY videos, they put together a full-length album and use one of the most popular distribution services to make it available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube etc. As they get more and more well known, they dig deep and fund a really flashy music video to promote the album. After teasing it on Facebook and Twitter, they upload it only to find that it has immediately been flagged for a copyright violation – on behalf of the distributor. The video won’t necessarily come down, but it does mean that they won’t be able to monetise it – and will lose out on the ad revenue they were expecting to recoup the cost of the production. Panicked, they dispute the claim using YouTube’s resolution procedure, but there’s no indication of how long that might take, and it has thrown off all of the promotions they were planning. There’s no explanation of this anywhere in the distributor’s app that they used, and they can’t get a hold of anybody who understands the issue and has access to release the video for commercial use.
Scenario B: An artist (A) is asked by a fellow musician (B) if they would be interested in a collaboration. The process is simple: B will supply A with some vocal samples that A can then chop up and use however they wish. A gladly accepts, and comes up with a whole electronic composition that brings the vocals to life. B loves the track, and asks if they can use it on their upcoming DIY release. A agrees. B’s friend runs a small label who agrees to put out the album, and they use a distribution service which sends the album to all the major partners automatically – including YouTube’s ContentID system. A few years later, A is producing short video blogs and decides to use one of their old tracks as background music. It gets flagged up as a copyright violation automatically, which A disputes – but the appeal is rejected by the distributor, who has no knowledge of how the track came about in the first place.
Both of these scenarios are common, and a version of B actually happened to me personally. There are plenty of other similar situations, which are easily discoverable with a bit of Googling.
There are a few takeaways here:
Independent musicians are at the mercy of a system which locks them out from negotiating their own contracts without major label backing, and they therefore have to rely on gatekeepers which provide an inadequate level of information and control over their own music.
Artists who are starting out lack the information required in order to make informed decisions about their interaction with such services, and can inadvertently give away their ability to exploit their creations commercially due to how the systems are constructed.
The ContentID approach to copyright enforcement gives huge clout to the first entity to register a piece of work within their system – which is rarely going to be the artist themselves.
This model has no room for the ad-hoc, informal, and varying ways in which independent musicians create and share their works online.
In Summary
The current ContentID system works on a first-come, first-served basis. It puts huge power in the hands of intermediary distribution services which do not provide a service that can ever give artists the amount of control over their licenses they would require to fully exploit their creations. The nature of the beast means that informal collaborations between like-minded folks can unexpectedly tie up their creative expression years down the road. Article 13 will only expand these systems, which will inevitably be less sophisticated on other platforms than ContentID. Independent artists lose the ability to share their work even further.
So… as an academic, a tech employee, but perhaps most importantly a musician: Article 13 is a disastrous piece of law, and should be scrapped.
The Commodore 64 is a classic, and it has played an especially important role for me. It was the first computer I ever owned; given to me by my parents as a fifth birthday president, and my granda used to spend hours showing me how to program it from a big purple book he had gotten from a magazine. I credit this introduction with piquing my interest in technology early on. Staring at the rainbow loading screen, waiting for games to load from the cassette deck is also probably to blame for my terrible eyesight. I rediscovered the C64 as a teenager when I learned of its coveted SID sound chip, and I’ve been making music with it ever since under the guise of unexpected bowtie.
One of the things that always stood out in my mind was the C64’s keyboard, with its thick brown keys and symbols that I never really understood. If I could, I would use it all the time, but that was never really practical. Recently though, I fell down the rabbit hole of ‘mechanical keyboards’ online, where people build and use special keyboards with custom switches, sizes, and layouts. One of the projects I found included a re-working of the C64’s keyboard which brought it into the modern world, and I felt inspired to do something similar.
Sourcing a C64
I originally planned to source a broken Commodore online and use the keys from it, rather than defiling my beloved console. Truth be told though, mine was in a bit of a shabby state, and even broken C64s go for a pretty penny in the UK. I decided to just make use of what I had, with the belief that I could always pop the keycaps back on if I changed my mind later.
Purists, look away now.
Removing the keys
Removing the keys initially proved a bit trickier than I had anticipated… partly because I was trying to get them off while the thing was fully assembled. What you need to do is open up the breadbin itself, and then detach the keyboard from the chassis by taking out some screws. It was pretty easily done once I realised this was what was required – especially since my case had already been taken apart a fair few times to get at the SID.
Popping the keys off can be tricky, as they are far stiffer than one would expect from a more modern device. Keycap removers didn’t really work, and so I resorted to using a set of pliers, being careful to pull straight up to avoid damaging the posts underneath. Each key has a large spring underneath which can ping off easily if you move too quickly, so watch out for that.
Underneath was filthy, and it seemed like a good opportunity to give things a clean even if I didn’t end up building anything. I left both the spacebar and the Shift Lock keys in place, as I suspected they would be a bit more fiddly to deal with, and I wasn’t planning on using them anyway.
Finally, I gave the keycaps a clean with some soapy water and left them to dry.
The new board
There are lots of mechanical keyboard designs to choose from. For this project, I went with the Preonic, and got a partially built kit as part of a group buy from Massdrop, which came with a fetching orange aluminium case. It is a compact, ‘ortho-linear’ keyboard – which means the keys are arranged in a grid like pattern, rather than staggered as you would see more commonly. The idea is that your fingers have to move less, and in a more natural way when typing – which reduces strain. I opted for the Preonic (rather than the Planck, which has less keys), as I wanted to make the most of the C64 keycaps.
The switches
One of the main reasons people like mechanical keyboards is the quality and range of switches available. The switches are the bits underneath the plastic caps with the letters on them (or not, depending on what you prefer). Unlike the squishy keys you find on laptops and other modern computers that are so unsatisfying to use, mechanical keyboards feel great. They can either be smooth (linear), have a bump (tactile), or have a bump and an audible noise (clicky). Most people probably mentally associate typing experiences from yester-year with the clicky type – personified by the Cherry MX Blue switch, though the Commodore 64 actually had smooth keys. For this build I opted for the Cherry MX white (aka milky). They are clicky keys, but with a far less sharp and pronounced click than the Cherry MX blues. This means it’s a bit more socially acceptable when typing around other people (!).
Fitting the keycaps
The biggest issue with this project was that the keycaps from the Commodore 64 aren’t compatible with any of the switches that are commonly used today, and so wouldn’t just snap on. However, some wonderful person has designed a C64 to Cherry MX adaptor that can be 3d printed and shared it for free (open source is wonderful).
Preview of the adaptor showing the Cherry MX side
I don’t have a 3d printer, so obviously had to outsource this. Getting a decent price in the UK was tricky at first, as nobody would take up an order that small, but eventually I got 80 caps for £22.98 including delivery from 3DPrintDirect.co.uk. That would be more than enough to cover the 60 keys on the Preonic. The material was SLS – carbon reinforced plastic.
It took about two weeks for the adaptors to arrive. I had read that some people had trouble with their adaptors, especially if the finish on the 3d printing was rough, but mine worked out pretty well. At first I thought I might have to disassemble the switches to install them as they were very tight, but in the end I could just press them against a flat surface and push hard with the keycaps on. My fingers hurt after doing a bunch, so I did them in batches. When the board arrived, I realised that it actually made much more sense to put the adaptors into the caps first, and hit them gently with a small hammer, before pressing the whole thing onto the switch. Getting them at the right angle could be tricky, but they all turned out fine in the end.
It’s worth noting that I did also discover that removing an adaptor from a keycap isn’t really possible without destroying the soft plastic and leaving the inside of the cap gunked up, so that means that these caps are now committed to the project, and won’t be reusable on the C64 itself like I had hoped.
Building the Preonic
The Preonic kit I got came from Massdrop in a bundle, and it was packed and presented beautifully. The instructions however, weren’t exactly n00b friendly, and it took me a bit to work out exactly where the spacers and screws were meant to go; it seemed like there were extra unnecessary holes in different places, which threw me. Eventually it came together though, and things began to take shape.
I’ve done a fair amount of soldering in my time modifying Game Boys etc, so it wasn’t a difficult task to deal with the through-hole switches. I did discover that one of them was bust after putting it all together though, which meant I had to de-solder and replace it, which was a bit of a pain.
The layout
When I started looking at the actual layout of the board, I ran into a couple of issues with my plan to use the Preonic. Firstly, I had overlooked the fact that the board is built around a grid of single keys, and doesn’t really support anything larger except in the middle of the bottom row. That meant that I didn’t have enough keys from my C64 to cover the full thing, and no perfect option for the space bar.
Secondly, my choice was further restricted by the design of the C64’s keys, as the caps are ‘sculpted’ depending on where they sit, so I couldn’t just take one from the top row and put it on the bottom, even if it would work better for my purposes.
In the end, I managed to source some extra single keys online, and did the best with what I had. I had feared that it would be wildly off, or that I would need to use really inappropriate keys, but it actually worked out not too bad at all.
Some folks have commented that the layout doesn’t make much sense, and I should say that I am not religiously sticking to what is printed on the keycaps. For example, I am using the ‘Return’ key in the place of a space bar, as that was the only key from the original board which seemed appropriate and fit the slot on the PCB. I’m using an equals key for Enter. The @ key brings up a list of my bookmarks with Shiori; The £ key activates my Alfred snippets; RUN STOP is my Hyper Key; < and > activate the ‘Lower’ and ‘Raise’ layers of the Preonic, and so forth. The beauty of the software which powers these keyboards (QMK) is that you can map and re-map the layout to whatever makes sense for your own needs.
As a finishing touch, I got a special rainbow coloured USB cable made up from coolcable.co.uk as a nod to Commodore. Special thanks to them who put up my last minute changes to the connectors as I ordered the wrong thing.
I still need to set up the Preonic’s layers to suit my own custom layout, but I really like the board. It’s nice, solid and relatively compact, and now I have a personal homage to my granda and first computer. The keys feel pretty great to type on, though they could potentially have done with some heavier switches as the cap and adaptor combo mean that you end up putting more force on the keys than you usually would.
Edit: This was featured on Hackaday, which is awesome.
For the past few months I’ve been bombarded with adverts for some supposedly next generation headphone technology which adapts to your individual hearing, the ‘Nuraphone’. Various industry professionals were shown in the accompanying videos, reacting with apparent amazement at the sound quality. As a bit of an audio geek, I wanted to see for myself whether or not there was anything to the claims, and ended up picking up a pair recently – something that probably also partly confirms that online marketing campaigns really do work.
One thing that’s worth noting is that Nura released a software upgrade for the headphones at the end of July which added a bunch of features, and corrected some issues that people had reported. They even added in active noise cancellation – which wasn’t present before. That is particularly cool, and something that it’s good to see a company do. Newer stock of the Nuraphone come pre-loaded with this update.
The Concept
Custom Hearing Profiles
The main principle behind the Nuraphone is relatively simple, in theory at least. You first connect them to a smartphone app, where some quick tests result in a custom ‘hearing profile’ being created. This profile is then stored in the headphones, and playback is tailored accordingly – theoretically resulting in sound that is far more pleasing to your ears than a generic approach would provide.
Over and In-Ear Design
The other main defining characteristic of the Nuraphone is their unique over/in-ear design. The outer silicone cup encloses your ears (and doesn’t irritate any of my many cartilage piercings), and delivers bass frequencies, whereas the inner ear portion sits just inside your outer ear, delivering the mid and treble frequencies. This helps provide a nice separation, and a much fuller sound. It works very well, though does feel pretty weird at first.
Immersion Mode
Immersion mode uses drivers in the outer cups to provide ‘feeling of a live performance’. This basically makes the bass much fuller and deeper, without compromising on the quality of the mid or treble frequencies.
What Other People Say
I was intrigued by the Nuraphone, but also pretty skeptical. It didn’t help that the reviews online ranged wildly from the bizarrely enthusiastic to the dismissive. There were many puff pieces from sites who were clearly just happy to get a free pair, but there were also users who claimed that they and their friends had the quality was so good that they had actually been moved to tears on their first listen. Others weren’t as enamoured, angrily dismissing the Nuraphone as nothing but marketing spin, or even suggesting that £30 generic earbuds sounded just as good. Ouch.
In general, many of the criticisms seemed to focus on the following:
The design was too heavy and uncomfortable – especially if you have glasses.
The sound wasn’t that impressive.
The setup was complicated and confusing, resulting in different profiles every time.
The ‘generic’ profile that you compare your personalised profile with sounded worse than it should, and that something shady must be going on.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such conflicting experiences with a single product, which only pushed me to try them out for myself.
My Experience
Setup
Setting up the headphones was as simple as downloading the app, connecting via Bluetooth, and following the on-screen instructions. I had no bother getting the cups in the right place, and despite trying the calibration process a few times, my profiles were pretty much the same each time. It couldn’t really have been much easier.
Brand new Nuraphone with the plastic wrap still intact.
The one real annoyance is that once set up is complete, you’re encouraged to switch between a generic ‘flat’ profile and your own personalised one to hear the difference. As many people have commented online, the problem is that the generic profile sounds pretty terrible on its own – far worse than you would expect even as a baseline from far cheaper headphones. It’s as if it has been heavily compressed. As a result it all seems a bit disingenuous, and Nura have probably not done themselves many favours by including this ‘feature’.
Comfort
After reading all of the negative reviews, I expected the Nuraphone to be extremely heavy and uncomfortable, but in actual fact, they slipped on with ease; the silicone of both the ear-cups and headband feeling both soft and comfortable. They weren’t particularly heavy – at least not markedly more so than other cans I’ve worn, and even the in-ear protrusions didn’t feel all that bad – going less deep than I expected. As for my glasses, they didn’t seem to make the slightest bit of difference to proceedings.
I wore the headphones for about seven to eight hours on the first day (with breaks), and my ears definitely got a bit sore by the end, though I knew to expect this from the Nura support team, who claimed that the tips of the in-ear portions would soften up with use. Despite this physical discomfort, my ears didn’t ever get hot or sweaty, which seems to be thanks to the use of the ‘TeslaValve’ air-flow technology. Not just a gimmick after all!
After listening to feedback on the issue of comfort, Nura have started to include different tip sizes with new purchases, including small and medium. There are also some third party options out there that are compatible, though whether they have a significant impact on the sound (negatively) is up for debate.
Controls
Many of the fundamental controls of the Nuraphone are contained within the accompanying smartphone app. Some of these can be mapped to a couple of touch sensitive ‘pads’ on the side of the cans – such as volume up/down, play/pause, etc. Both single and double tap gestures are supported, allowing you to choose four controls to make use of.
I personally have volume up and down configured for the single taps, with social mode and play/pause for the double taps. At first I thought this was a bit awkward, but after a day or so I found it really natural, and have even found myself trying to tap on the side of my other headphones out of a force of habit. After using the Nuraphone controls, the physical buttons on my Sennheisers feel a bit clunky and unintuitive.
Speaking of social mode, this is a nifty feature that turns off the active noise cancellation, and turns on microphones to allow you to hear what’s going on without having to take off the headphones. I’ve found this really useful in practice, though it can be a bit disconcerting to have certain ‘exterior’ sounds suddenly amplified louder than they actually are with the headphones off.
It’s not all great news though. The controls themselves are extremely sensitive, with no adjustment possible. Often I would end up accidentally triggering the pads when adjusting my glasses, or just moving my arms about, and I had to continually turn the headphones back down. There are also some functions that can only be accessed via the app, which is a bit annoying. For example, at the time of writing you can’t adjust the level of Immersion mode without being connected to the phone app – which would be handy for switching between genres. I’ve heard from Nura that they are working on a desktop app which would help alleviate this issue for those of us who regularly listen on our computers.
Finally, the controls don’t work when a cable is connected, which is understandable, but a bit irritating, breaking the continuity of experience.
Connectivity
I’ve been dubious of wireless technology for a long time, given the pretty crappy historic quality of even higher end headphones. As a result, I only recently bought into the whole arena and was pleasantly surprised. Still clinging to this, I was put off at first by the prospect of having to buy a separate, expensive analogue cable, but realised that I don’t actually need one for everyday listening.
In terms of the quality of the bluetooth connection itself, it was generally pretty good. For some reason my first pair worked fine with my laptop, but dropped out constantly when connected to my phone when I put it in my pocket. That meant they were totally useless for walking about, and I was restricted to using them when stationary at a desk, or on the couch till they got replaced. Generally though, once this was resolved, the connectivity was good, and I only had the odd blip here and there. Definitely not something that would be irritating or especially notable.
This all leads nicely to my biggest issue with the design of the Nuraphone: the proprietary nature of the cable connection. Apparently in order to allow compatibility with a bunch of separate devices, they had to create a new single port that is used for everything, including charging. I’’m not really convinced by this argument, and it means that it’s yet another cable to carry when travelling, which isn much harder and pricier to replace. The nightmare scenario would be misplacing one while on a trip.
Sound
In the past I have played with various special music EQ apps that provide extra stereo spacing and increased ‘ambience’, but always returned to listening flat, as they never did a great job of applying equally the quality across genres. In other words, what sounded good with electronica would make grunge sound utter garbage. I suspected that this would be much the same with the Nuraphone, and I was pretty disappointed when it seemed to be the case upon first listening. Techno sounded pretty good, but generally the sound was too coloured, with vocals often lost in the mix. It wasn’t until I realised that I had an additional EQ set on my Mac already that was interfering with things that I actually heard what the Nuraphone could do, and my perception completely changed. Why bother even bringing this up? To highlight that it’s important to start with a flat EQ, or you’re going to get a distorted perception of the sound – which is easily done.
While I wasn’t exactly reduced to tears, the sound from the Nuraphone really was pretty impressive, bringing a whole new feeling of dynamism to music that I knew well. It was as if my favourite tracks had been given a personal re-mastering, and it was amazing. I scoured my library to find old songs and re-discover them in a different light. Despite an overall perceivable increase in quality, a lot of this seemed to come down to the ‘Immersion’ mode. When I first read about it, I was dubious. Cranking up the bass so it rattles against your ears doesn’t really ‘capture the feeling of being at a live performance’. However, I have to honestly say that there is something in that claim. With the slider at 75% I could feel every kick of the bass drum in early Green Day albums as if Tre Cool himself was in the same room, and there were times during some songs that genuinely reminded of being at a music festival due to the interaction of instrumentation.
There have been some comments that the Immersion mode is too heavy handed, such as:
The Immersion effect might suit bassheads or movie-watchers, but you’ll get the most balanced sound with it on very low – or turned off.
That hasn’t really been my experience (though maybe I’m a basshead?). Even at a fairly high level (70%), the Immersion mode only serves to add a bit of greater depth to the tracks, and doesn’t result in distorted or farty bass – though there is a definite cut off where this changes. To be honest though, if I wanted a flatter, more ‘balanced’ sound, these are not the headphones I personally would be using in the first place.
How do they compare to my other headphones though? I don’t really have technical details here, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they offer a much more dynamic and engaging sound. My other headphones still sound and feel great, but if I want to really get lost in the music, I’ll go with the Nuraphone every time.
Other Stuff
Portability: Unfortunately, despite having pretty great passive and active noise cancellation, the Nuraphone don’t seem especially great for travelling. They don’t fold down, and the protective case is pretty chunky. I still need to decide whether or not they are worth sacrificing precious space for in my carry on.
Audio fade in: The Nuraphone have a built in ‘fade in’ to the audio when they start playing back from silence. That means that if you fire up Spotify, stick on the headphones, and start playing a track with a banging intro, it ends up lacking punch. I can see the benefit of this feature when you put the headphones back on – to avoid getting blasted mid-song at full volume, but this should 100% be an optional feature, not something that can’t be turned off.
Noise cancellation: The passive noise cancellation of these headphones is pretty decent already, but the active noise cancellation is especially good. The combination seems to block out more ambient noise than my Sennheiser HD 4.50 BTNC cans, and it’s pretty amazing to hear the difference toggling ‘social mode’ on and off makes.
Battery life: The Nuraphone boast an impressive 20 hour battery life. I haven’t tested them continuously, but what I do know is that the headphones arrived on a Monday; I used them heavily, and by Friday morning they were only down to 40%. In practice this means I’d only really need to charge them about once a week, which is pretty great.
Conclusion
I really didn’t want to like these. Despite having a glimmer of hope that they might be decent, I planned to try them out for a few weeks then send them back after discovering that they were mostly just marketing puff after all. However, that isn’t how things worked out.
The truth is that I really like the Nuraphone. The sound is different to anything I’ve heard before in a set of headphones, and the Immersion mode really helps bring certain kinds of music alive. I’m excited about listening to music again, and for that reason alone they are well worth the money for me. If they only took standard cables, and folded down to be a bit more portable, it’d be tough to find any big flaws.
They retail for £349, but you can often find 20% off discount codes on Reddit.
I’ve had this article on the back burner for almost three years now, but for the next thrilling instalment of my productivity app blogs, I’ll be turning to look at Keyboard Maestro.
Don’t let the somewhat dated website put you off, the app itself is unbelievably powerful. I have to admit to being wary when I first tried it out. The learning curve is steep, and the documentation pretty unclear – especially when compared to the other productivity apps that are available. However, after months years of sustained use, my feelings towards Keyboard Maestro have completely changed. It’s tough to get into, but so worth it. I honestly don’t know what I would do without it at this point.
So if Keyboard Maestro is so great, why did it take me so long to publish this? Well, there’s a few reasons. Firstly, there aren’t so many general use cases for Keyboard Maestro – at least not for me. Instead, it’s an app that’s best for repetitive tasks that are very specific to each user’s needs, which makes it difficult to give good examples. Secondly, it’s an app that you tend to set up and forget… before rediscovering it later on when your needs have changed, and you realise: “Oh! Keyboard Maestro could make this way easier!”. I’ve gone through that cycle a number of times, and after rediscovering just how awesome it is, I decided to finally complete this post.
What does it do?
Okay okay so Keyboard Maestro is great, but what does it actually do?. This is a good question, as it isn’t immediately obvious. Essentially, Keyboard Maestro allows you to take any task that you have to repeat, and automates it. If you’re familiar with Alfred, think of Alfred workflows, but on steroids. The key difference is that instead of having to write Applescript for every action you want to complete (which is still an option, by the way), there are a whole bunch of options baked in. Whether that’s telling the mouse to move and click on a certain point, displaying a popup message, getting an image size, filling in a field on a website, or whatever. You get a lot of control from the get go.
Some of the ‘actions’ available.
The sheer power of Keyboard Maestro is also its undoing in a way. It’s easy to look at the list of actions and wonder when you will ever use any of them. The UI is not the most intuitive, and you’d be forgiven for giving up at the beginning purely on that basis alone.
If you want to carry out simple, general tasks, then there may well be a nicer app that lets you do those things. However, that isn’t the point of Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro is there to help you automate pretty much any task that you can think of.
In addition to the automation, there is a whole host of other cool features that you can do a deep dive into – such as an extensive multi clipboard manager, application switcher, and others – but for me the real glory lies in the macros.
What can it do for me?
One of the biggest hurdles to starting off with Keyboard Maestro is working out exactly what you’ll use it for. It takes a conscious effort to work out what tasks you could automate – which isn’t necessarily something you thought was possible beforehand. Once you do sit down and give it some attention though, you’ll soon come up with plenty. Do you have to fill out specific fields on a website more than once? Use a macro. Do you need to convert HTML to markdown? Use a macro. Need to extract URLs from a big block of text? Macro. The possibilities are endless.
As part of my job, I regularly have to review and respond to reports about different websites using a helpdesk system. Each one (generally) requires me to:
Find the website URL in the e-mail and open it.
Decide what to do.
Note down the action taken in certain circumstances.
Reply by copying a specific part of the original message, and quoting it back in a certain format before providing an appropriate response.
Select a certain option to mark the issue as ‘Resolved’ or ‘On Hold’.
All of these steps are fairly straightforward, but a lot of time is taken up by clicking through the same tasks for each – even when I use a textexpander or snippet manager like Alfred. Sometimes the URLs are jumbled up and I need to fix them before opening or responding, or they are buried in huge blocks of text… etc. However, with Keyboard Maestro, I can reduce this all to a couple of key presses, with a couple of macros doing all of the following:
Extracting all of the URLs from the messages, and opening them in new windows.
Pasting the URLs in the correct quoted format at the top of the reply, along with the appropriate response.
Adding whatever notes needed to track the action taken in a specific field.
Marking the issue Resolved or On Hold as appropriate.
The only thing Keyboard Maestro doesn’t do is decide what action to take – which is just as well really, for a variety of reasons!
Like many of the examples, that one is very specific, but it demonstrates a bit of how granular and useful Keyboard Maestro macros can be – and will hopefully get you thinking about your own use cases. Here are some other more general tasks I regularly deploy macros for:
Inserting a URL wrapped in a href tags.
Pasting text with different styles of quotes depending on the situation.
Parsing blocks of text to extract URLs and/or e-mail addresses.
Getting ID numbers from long URLs.
Pasting items in a bulleted or numbered list automatically.
Filling out forms online.
Copying the current URL from my browser window (and doing stuff with it).
The most powerful and useful ones are those that have very specific, work related use cases. With a bit of imagination, you’ll come up with your own, so I’d encourage you to give it a bash.
Triggers
To wrap this up, I wanted to highlight one more feature of Keyboard Maestro that makes it stand out from other productivity apps. For those veterans amongst us who regularly make use of workflow improvements, it’s easy to run out of hotkey assignments, and Keyboard Maestro has a bunch of different ways to solve that problem. First off is the use of ‘palettes’, which lets you assign the same hotkey to different macros – and then select them from a menu – or to activate different hotkey sets depending on what you’re working on that day.
If you already use Alfred, Keyboard Maestro is a brilliant complement, rather than a replacement in this way too. There is a specific Alfred workflow that lets you search and trigger Keyboard Maestro macros from the Alfred search bar, which is incredibly useful for those that you may use occasionally, but don’t want to dedicate a precious hotkey to: Alfred Maestro.
Finally, triggers aren’t just confined to mere hotkeys. Oh no. Pretty much any event you can think of can kick off a macro. If you want certain changes to happen when you connect to a particular WiFi, you can make that happen. Execute commands remotely by running Keyboard Maestro on a server? Why not. Run certain checks when a USB device is plugged in? Easy. You can even have Keyboard Maestro react to MIDI notes and values, which opens up a whole world of interesting hardware controllers aside from the keyboard… something I’ll be exploring in the next post.
Tonight I came across an article on TechCrunch in response to an open letter from Tobias Lütke, CEO of e-commerce platform Shopify, in which he defends the company’s decision to continue hosting Breitbart’s online shop. Breitbart being the infamous far right publication of which Steve Bannon was heavily involved with.
After sustained criticism, Lütke explains in the post entitled ‘In Support of Free Speech’ that based upon a belief that ‘commerce is a powerful, underestimated form of expression’, it would be wrong to effectively censor merchants by shutting down their shops as the result of differing political views.
Reporting on the letter, TechCrunch shared their post to Facebook with the text: ‘Shopify’s CEO thinks his platform has a responsibility to continue hosting Breitbart’s store – here’s why he’s wrong.’
I was curious to see the arguments that would be proffered as to why the decision was wrong, but was ultimately left wanting. Here are the reasons given, as far as I could make out:
Lütke is grossly overestimating the role of a private e-commerce platform in providing and protecting freedom of expression.
Shopify cannot ‘censor’ anybody, as they are not an emanation of the State.
Justifying the continued hosting of merchants who have extreme views for freedom of speech reasons is wrong, as freedom of speech does not apply to private organisations.
As a private company, Shopify are not legally required to provide a platform to anybody.
Shopify’s Terms of Service allow them to terminate the account of any user at any time.
In response, here’s why TechCrunch are wrong:
None of the reasons given actually explain why Shopify shouldn’t continue to host Breitbart.
Read over them again, then check out the full article here. Despite heavily criticising Shopify, and stating that Lütke is ‘wrong’, TechCrunch don’t engage at all with the heart of the issue. No, Shopify are not legally required to host the Breitbart shop, and yes, quite obviously their Terms of Service are quite obviously worded in such a way to give them that discretion in the event of any legal challenge, but that’s hardly a surprise.
Here’s the big question that went unanswered: why should Shopify not host Breitbart?Lütke hits the nail on the head with the following challenge, which the TechCrunch article completely fails to even acknowledge:
When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code? Where would it begin and end? Who gets to decide what can be sold and what can’t?
Rather than attempt to address this fundamental issue, TechCrunch essentially just argue that Shopify should kick Breitbart off of their platform because, er, well, legally there’s nothing to stop them. A pretty poor argument at best.
Protecting freedom of speech isn’t just down to the State.
Firstly, I’m not sure where this idea that censorship is only something that the State can give effect to comes from. It means to forbid or to ban something; to suppress speech. The source doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Secondly, there is a lot of confusion surrounding freedom of speech and the relation to the State, even from those who purport to understand the dynamic. To clear some things up, the following are true:
Freedom of speech law (generally) only protects citizens from the acts of State actors.
Private online service providers (generally) have no obligation to protect the freedom of speech rights of their users, or to give them a platform for expression.
However, to assert that a platform cannot justify their actions based on freedom of speech considerations, or to willingly strive to uphold those principles on the basis of the above is a non sequitur. Additionally, just because you can’t threaten legal action on a freeedom of speech argument against Facebook if they take down your status update, that doesn’t mean it is wrong to argue that Facebook should be doing more to consider and protect those values.
Just as we would not expect a hotel owner to be able to refuse to allow a same sex couple to share a bed, or a pub to knock back someone based purely on the colour of their skin, it is nonsense to pretend that we have no expectations of private organisations to abide by certain shared societal values.
Without touching on the claims around the importance of e-commerce as a vehicle for expression, it seems that in a world where we are increasingly reliant on private entities to provide our virtual town square equivalents, and where we expect certain values to be upheld, arguably platforms such as Shopify have an increasing moral obligation to protect (as far as is possible) the principles that are the cornerstone of our Democracies.
