Co-working is that nexus for independent workers that’s between working at home and a cafe. The concept originated a few years ago at The Hat Factory in San Francisco. It’s spread to the point where you can find a co-working space in nearly every major city worldwide.
Pictured Co-Working Spaces
Music - The Coconut Monkeyrocket and Martinibomb
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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(Please vote for it on Current TV to get it on the air!)
I’m very excited about this episode. In the past few months Twitter seems to have exploded. You’ve got twittering in space, on Everest, and Twitter races to a million followers.
Back when I interviewed Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder) in August, I’ll admit some motivation was out of personal joy to visit Twitter than something that directly related to life hacking. However I think the conversation proved to be very insightful, going beyond what Twitter is and moving to how it relates to society as a communication tool.
This episode is a good chunk of the interview. Time was short. We had actually arrived earlier in the day but Biz had to leave to go on Fox News because Obama was about to announce Biden as his VP through Twitter. Yes, we were Outfoxed.
Again keep in mind that this was shot back in August, so the earthquake he’s referring to was one from July 29, not the two that have happened in the past few days.
And also to give a point of reference on how popular Twitter was when we shot this, Biz made a comment that 50% of Twitter users follow 10 people and are followed by 10. I’m sure that’s no longer the case.
I hope you enjoy and find it insightful, and let me know what you think.
Credits:
Music - The Coconut Monkeyrocket and Martinibomb
Video – A Communications Primer 1958 (Easter Egg during the credits)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Writing on a manual [typewriter] makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don’t revise as much, you just think more, because you know you’re going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.
- Will Self
Reading the title you can probably guess what this program can do, or more what it can’t do. The above quote got me thinking about the process of writing on a typewriter and I was surprised to not be able to find any program that could mimic that interaction.
So on a whim I ran with this weird idea and turned to Elance, where I found Denis Sokol in Russia and he created this program.
It’s super, super simple and basic. All you can do is type in one direction. You can’t delete, you can’t copy, you can’t paste. You can save and print. And you can switch between black text on white and green on black; full screen and window.
The program runs through Java, so it should work on any operating system, but make sure you have the latest version of Java here. Feel free to share, modify, and post the program however you like. All I ask is that you please reference this site with a link either directly to this post or the site (http://www.lifehackingmovie.com).
Hope you enjoy and let me know what are you thoughts are on using it.
This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.
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Things are wrapping up on the post-production end, which will give me more time to post more podcast episodes. To make up for the hiatus, next Monday I’ll be launching a free lifehack inspired piece of software.
I’ll also be posting a new podcast episode later on the week featuring Biz Stone, one of the co-creators of Twitter.
Hurry up and pre-order your DVD for less than $10. Once all the DVDs are manufactured that price will be history.
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Over the past few days I’ve been going through lots of archival footage for the documentary. The best and easiest place is the Prelinger Archives on the Internet Archive. They have over 2000 films from the 20s-80s, all available to watch, download, and use however you like.
I found a few clips, which I posted below, that I thought were kind of funny and appropriate given the whole economic situation we’re in.
The first is on Banks and Credit. I think all bankers should have watched this so, you know, they’d actually know how a bank works.
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I have Crohn’s Disease. I’ve been hospitalized twice in two different cities that are not where I’m living, so tracking down my medical records has always been an issue.
I’m on the right medication now, and I haven’t had any issues for over a year, but the lack of warning symptoms always worries me that I could have a flare up any time, any place.
So far Haiti I made a digital dog tag. Basically it’s a USB drive with emergency information, medical records, and other important data.
Here’s what’s on it:
I like to play worst case scenarios in my mind, and of course the obvious one is what happens if I lose the drive or it gets stolen. Identity security versus medical safety.
I decided to take the risk and not password protect my records because I’d rather be a healthy victim of identity theft than something worse.
I’ve put the drive on a metal chain which I’ll wear around my neck, so it should be very secure.
Any ideas for anything else that should go on the drive?
I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. Follow me to see how things go.
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Since I found out I’m going to Haiti this Saturday about a week ago, I’ve had to fast track learning everything I need to know for traveling to a third world country.
Here are some resources I found ranging from travel sites to recommended vaccines to common phrases.
The US Department of State has an international travel section with information on every country, as well as travel advisories. There’s also a section to register your trip.
I have no idea what the internet situation will be where I’m staying, so it would be nice if they had an SMS alert option. But this is still a good place to start and get a basic rundown of what you need to do when traveling.
Since I’m not going with a group, I had to find out what vaccines I needed myself. These two sites had a great rundown on what diseases I might encounter and what I should be vaccinated against, as well as health precautions while I’m there (don’t drink the water).
This was actually pretty tricky and really depends on each county. The best thing to do would be to ask your doctor where you can get vaccinated. I don’t have a primary care doctor, but I had heard the Department of Health in my county administered travel vaccines for free. However, when I called them they said that was one of the first things to get cut this year.
I eventually found a travel clinic that had everything in stock. I already had about half the vaccines needed due to all the college requirements, so I only needed Hepatitis A and Typhoid. Insurance usually doesn’t cover this, so they don’t bother checking, so I had to pay in full ($266) and try to get reimbursed later. They also gave me a prescription for anti-malaria drugs.
When I found out I was going to Haiti the first thing I did was turn to Wikipedia. The great thing about country profiles is you can get a good gist of everything quickly and then have the option to read further into the more detailed articles about the country.
I’ve also been reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder and watched The Agronomist, both good primers to the history of Haiti. Look for recommended books and movies in articles or blog posts.
I’ve traveled to other countries before and always managed to get by with English, but I always wished I knew at least a little bit of the native language to make things easier and not be the lame American.
So this time I’m trying to learn as many Creole phrases as I can in a week. Since Creole is not the most popular of languages, there aren’t that many resources for it.
I’m a big fan of Pimsleur, so I got the basic Creole course which I’ll listen to on my 7 hour drive to the airport. If you happen to be interested in Creole specific sites with phrases, the best ones I found is this PDF from Hands on Disaster Response and Traveling Haiti.
I’ve converted the phrases to flash cards to memorize. I’ve also researched phrases specific to what I’m doing and most likely need, such as, “Can I take your picture?”
Remember to follow me as I go around Haiti.
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Photo by MARK EDWARDS
Yep, this Saturday I’m flying from Ft. Lauderdale to Port-au-Prince, and I’ll be there for about 5 days.
I only found out about this last week. I was at a meeting for a service group I’m in, when someone I’ve talked to maybe once before started telling me about how he wants to build a clinic in Haiti and film a documentary about it, but doesn’t know the first thing about filmmaking. So he was wondering if I could go with him on this preliminary trip to help him set up the documentary for the summer.
Enjoying an adventure, I of course said yes (to my family’s dismay). And yes, I’m going to Haiti with an acquaintance. Just goes to prove Malcolm Gladwell and the power of weak ties.
So I’m going to do some filmming, get this documentary set up, and of course (and the biggest personal draw) take lots of pictures. I know this will be an eye opening experience.
I’ll be posting more on preparing for the trip, but all I can say now is my shoulder is pretty sore from the vaccines I got today. And of course I’ll be tweeting while there, so follow me.
Let me know if you have any Haiti/remote traveling tips.
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I was at one of the nearby cafes last Friday where I noticed this sign. “Internet-Free Zone on Weekends.” I wonder if this is to encourage people to read or socialize on the weekends. Or maybe something more practical, such as not having students hog a table for the whole day. Either way I thought it was interesting and I haven’t seen it anywhere else.
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Last week I was back home in Miami Beach. The original intent of the trip was to bring some big things down from my home in Tallahassee to store in Miami so I wouldn’t have to move it when I finally go off to bigger and better things. Because I was bringing stuff down, I needed somewhere to store it.
So I had a new goal: declutter my room.
This is what my room looked like when I got to Miami, and what it’s roughly looked like for years.
This is what it looked like 24 hours later.
Now for some back story. I’m a reformed clutterholic, or at least on the path. I know my OCD roommate would disagree with that, but compared to even a year ago I’ve come a long way. I’ve become pretty ruthless with what stays and goes, mainly due to space. I just don’t have the space for crap anymore. But it isn’t easy. I come from a lineage of clutterholics. My mom’s bedroom is filled with boxes (sorry mom), which spread out to the living room all the way to the balcony.
My grandfather has (no lie) three houses throughout Florida. One of these homes, a vacation home in Orlando, has been so overrun with clutter my grandmother refuses to go there, and because of that the clutter just grows. Last time I was there it looked like a warehouse for QVC. It had everything from a tabletop steam press to The Perfect Push-Up (though thankfully no Snuggies).
So it’s no exaggeration that clutter is in my genes.
4 donation boxes, 3 bags of paper to recycle, 1 box of plastic to recycle, and 1 garbage bag later, Zen has arrived to my old room. If I had gotten up earlier and not putzed on the computer I could have done this in one day.
So obviously the biggest cheat which I think would be hard to replicate is I haven’t lived in this room for 3 years, so clearly I don’t need any of this stuff. But more importantly, and something I think is key to making any change, is I had a desire to get rid of everything.
I’ve stopped attaching sentimental value to things. My room is full of years of build-up of childhood and teenage artifacts. But I realized it’s the events and memories that are meaningful, not a ticket stub or token trophy.
In the next few days I’ll share some tips I discovered to power busting through a disaster area of clutter, but my main strategy was to just keep only what I want with me in the future.
That would be my enlarger and photo equipment – the original Photoshop:
The rest of my books:
And the rest of my vinyl albums:
It is my vision to one day live in a place that has a darkroom (Not to be confused with the Lego room. Those are in storage, awaiting their return.) and giant study.
The abundant amount of counter space was for Legos, but now it’s a bit too much. So I used it for book storage.
This is actually the preferred way for long term book storage, according to roommate Librarian Lyssa. By laying them sideways it doesn’t put strain on the binding.
What you don’t see is I cleared out all of the drawers and cabinets as well, to make room for the stuff in the center that I wanted to keep. When I clean a large area like this I hit it full on and move around to different spots. At some points the room looked worse than when I started, but I feel that’s good motivation to keep going, because you need to clean up everything in order to have a place to sleep and live.
At some point everything will be cleared out. But for a first step a lot was accomplished (and FYI, a clean room is a much nicer place to be in).
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