Pascal Finette, one of my Mozilla colleagues, just blogged about how he’s using Things with an Autofocus-inspired approach to getting stuff done (as opposed to Getting Things Done(tm)). Pascal also discovered Autofocus via the recent Lifehacker article. As an also recovering GTDer and former Things user, I was interested to read about Pascal’s approach.

Before diving into Autofocus, I should talk about a high-level of what I’m looking for and why I stopped using Things. Paper doesn’t work well for me, because I don’t want to carry around a notebook. I always have my phone, so some way to access the data from my iPhone is important. Finally, I also have an iPad which is why I gave up on Things: the “cloud sync” never materialized, so synchronization is a hassle. I also thought that the total cost for Things (Mac+iPhone+iPad) is a bit out of line for a todo list ($80!).

One of the things that I like about Autofocus is that you review tasks on a page-by-page basis. This makes the notion of reviewing things less daunting and also aids the culling of the list to remove things that are never likely to actual feel like the most important thing to do. That’s an important aspect of Autofocus: doing what feels like it needs to be done and lightweight review is part of that.

I’ve been giving FocusPad a try. It’s available as a webapp (free!) and an iPhone app ($2) which automatically syncs with the web. FocusPad is designed specifically to support Autofocus. Your task list is separated into pages. When you finish a page, you can mark it so that it doesn’t show up any more when you navigate. You can cross an item off and re-add it to the last page (a common part of Autofocus). FocusPad also has a nice feature where you can move a task from one page to another on a given date, which means that you could create a “tickler” pad that will remind you of something you need to look at later.

On the whole, FocusPad looks like the most faithful, syncs-with-my-mobile implementation of Autofocus that I’ve seen. I wish it had keyboard shortcuts in the webapp and iPad support, but it certainly reaches the “good enough” level and I’ve enjoyed working with it so far.

We’ve been using Google Voice as our primary incoming phone number for some time now. Lately, we’ve had a lot of calls (incoming in particular) where the caller is told, sometime into the call, that “this call is being recorded”. Apparently, we’re not alone in this.

Recently, we got an Ooma Telo for our home phone service. So far, the call quality has seemed very good (when Google Voice is not in front of it), the price is reasonable and the multi-ring feature comes close to our favorite feature of Google Voice, namely the ability to ring more than one phone when someone calls. The only problem with multi-ring is that it can only ring a single other phone.

I experimented with using Daring Fireball’s “Linked List” style where the blog post link (in RSS) points not to the blog but to the site being talked about. In the end, I decided that this is annoying. If I’m posting something to my blog, I will generally have at least some comment about it. Rather than just passing the reader along to the original site without my comment, I’d rather have them come to my site and see the comment and then head over to the site I’m linking to.

This is particularly true since my blog posts automatically appear on Twitter and they would have been linking from Twitter to the original site and not to my site. It’s not a matter of wanting traffic to my site. It’s a matter of not wanting to link to the sites without comment. (I use delicious for that sometimes…)

Edito is a new markdown editor for the iPad.

For those of us who spend most of their time in Markdown, this tool allows to simply type a document using the Markdown syntax, and visualize its HTML equivalent immediately in a web-powered window, without leaving the app. In other words, it does the Markdown to HTML conversion in a breeze, and lets you email the resulting files.

The on-screen keyboard has a row of useful keys for Markdown. It also includes a web browser. No Dropbox integration (yet!), but I think they’re on the right track here and this could become a great way to write blog posts on the iPad.

I’ve been hoping that someone would make an iPad case that could hold my Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, because typing on screen can be a drag. It’s not quite the same, but Kensington seems to have the next best thing:

Unlike the ClamCase, this one looks like a product that will be shipping soon.

Right now, Amazon is listing this at retail price ($100). I have a feeling that will drop by the time they ship. Meanwhile, MacMall is listing the item at $75.

Americans hire a lobbyist:

“The goal is to make it seem politically advantageous for legislators to keep the American people in mind when making laws,” Weldon said. “Lawmakers are going to ask me, ‘Why should I care about the American people? What’s in it for me?’ And it will be up to me and my team to find some reason why they should consider putting poverty and medical care for children on the legislative docket.”

The Onion proves once again why it’s America’s Finest News Source. I wish that an article like this wasn’t so spot on.

There’s a new school opening in Ann Arbor in the fall: Little Lake Free School. As far as I know, this is the only “democratic free school” in Ann Arbor, and I think it’s great that they’re getting this going.

I’ve seen how much my daughter has learned, through her own volition but with guidance and assistance from us. That’s what a “free school” is all about… it provides an environment for children to do that style of learning in an environment with other kids.

I can only imagine how much work they need to do to get their school going, and I know they can use any kind of help they can get. They have a wishlist full of supplies and assistance they can use, plus a kickstarter fundraiser going.

Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote a terrific and detailed look at how to copy McDonald’s french fry goodness. In order to figure out the McD’s secret, he attempted to get some frozen fries from McD’s:

“Listen, the thing is, my wife is pregnant—like really pregnant—and she sent me on a quest for McDonald’s french fries. But she only likes them really fresh, like straight out of the fryer fresh, so I figured I’d just get some frozen, and fry them for her at home. You know how it is. Women—no accounting for’em, right?”

That attempt was met with a dose of McFAIL, so he next resorted to Facebook, where he found an accomplice:

I had pre-printed a list of items for said made up “Scavenger Hunt” (I basically Googled “Scavenger Hunt Lists” and added “Frozen McDonald’s french fries”.)

Kenji’s accomplice succeeded in snagging some frozen fries. He then measured the fries and fried them up in peanut oil and found out that they tasted just as good as they do at the golden arches. But, he hadn’t really figured out the secret, right?

He next resorted to “research”, which I assume means googling. The googling turned up an article that described exactly what McDonald’s does to turn potatoes into frozen fries:

The fries are then flumed out of the A.D.R. room to the “blancher.” The blancher is a large vessel filled with one hundred and seventy degree water. The trip through the blancher takes about fifteen minutes… After the fries leave the blancher, they are dried and then it’s off to the “fryer,” which is filled with one hundred percent vegetable oil. The oil is heated to three hundred and sixty five degrees and the fries take a fifty second dip before being conveyed to the “de-oiler shaker,” where excess oil is “shook off.

It turns out that, in this case, both Google and Facebook came through with their assigned tasks, but Google actually delivered the goods. What struck me about this article, other than the extreme detail about the french fries, is the fact that snagging some frozen fries was entirely irrelevant. Had he and his accomplice not done this at all, the article would have been shortened but had the same conclusion.

Lesson learned: before you hit the street, hit the goog.

Back in January, I posted that I would be blogging more this year. Boy, was I wrong!

The end of 2009 was exceedingly busy for both home and work. I thought that 2010 would get off to a less busy start, but that’s not how it went. Certain things became a bit easier, but work has been very busy for the past month.

The Bespin project “reboot” kicked off in October and has kept us chugging along ever since. I feel a lot of pressure to ship the software when I know there are people out there waiting for updates. I’m happy that we are about to ship the biggest Bespin release since the reboot began, and we’re in a great position for this quarter’s work.

As an experiment, I’m writing this blog post on my new iPad. One of my hopes for the ipad is that, unlike an iPhone, this will make a better blogging and general writing tool than the phone. Not only is it better at consuming content but it is certainly better for producing it. Typing on glass is less than ideal, but the landscape keyboard is definitely better than anything I could do on the iPhone.

Anyhow, that’s enough rambling. My apologies for posting a completely random and useless blog post. More considered writing will come forth another time.

This morning, there was a posting at AnnArbor.com that had the general “we are at war, toughen up” sort of tone that we’ve seen in the years since 9/11. I want to see less of that in the media, because it’s giving the wrong impression about the situation. Rather than going by that feeling that we are less safe, it’s better to turn to statistics and realize that we are, in fact, probably as safe as we want to be. Here is the comment that I posted at AnnArbor.com, reposted here because of the interesting links and what they represent:

I can certainly agree with your call for people to report suspicious activity, though “normal people” have been known to report suspicious activity around completely normal other people, where trained security people would not. Thanks for that video link, because that can help to improve the kinds of things that those of us not trained in security can spot!

I’d like to highlight some alternative views of the overall situation that tend to get ignored in the media around events like this one. For example, air travel in the 2000s is the safest it’s been since the 1960s and is incredibly safe:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/skies-are-as-friendly-as-ever-911-al.html

Put another way, “The chances of being hurt by someone who got past airport security, even without things like the full-body scanners being deployed after this latest panic, are smaller than dying in your dentist’s office from an anaesthesia error.”

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/01/big_numbers_and_air_travel.php

Another way to look at the Christmas Day incident is that security actually worked:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/christmas_bombe.html

Reality is unpredictable and it’s impossible (and undesirable!) to get to 100% secure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?emc=eta1

I think it pays to focus on the things that truly make us more secure, rather than the security theater we are subjected to every time we fly. Bruce Schneier: “Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/separating_expl.html

I sincerely hope we can see more of *that* kind of discussion in the media.