This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Aaron Brady.
Original Post: Collecting for the Apocalypse that will Never Happen
Feed Title: insom.me.uk
Feed URL: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/insommeuk
Feed Description: Posts related to using Python. Some tricks and tips, observations, hacks, and the Brand New Things.
I recently sorted through 5 years of Twitter favourites
(alongside quite a few App.net stars). I knew that I was building a
debt up, but hadn’t realised that I’d gone past the 500-tweet mark.
That’s really the point where extreme measures are required- that or
declaring tweet bankruptcy.
I love Twitter. I used to have an addiction; I’d start to feel
squirrelly if I hadn’t checked it in a while, and I was following many
more people, and those people were more prolific. Now it’s just a
vice.
My usual flow is to wake up, and check my tweets (around 30 will have
come in over night)- read maybe one medium length article linked to,
and favourite anything larger than that that I’d like to come back to
(promising open-source software, long-read I’d prefer to use the
bookmarklet to capture, embedded video).
Then I’d check around lunch time at work, but I’d already have checked
Hacker News and have a few tabs open, and I’d read those over
food, and in any breaks that I got (if I wasn’t playing games or
indulging in a lunch-time-project). So, I’d star a few more things for
later, and munch my way through the tabs I had open.
I might not check again that evening, unless there’s a lull in the day
(like waiting outside the Scout hut for Cubs to finish), and catch up
just before sleep.
(I can quit any time that I want, okay?)
Despite regular “runs” at my favourites (which I would literally put
on my to-do list, along with things like repair bikes, mow lawn) I
didn’t really make much of a dent.
I went out and bought a Nexus tablet specifically to help me consume
more- a laptop makes it too easy to flutter off to the next thing to
read, or to code, or even log into Steam and play some games.
My bare-bones Android tablet is there specifically for “catching up”
with Netflix, YouTube and Twitter.
Unsurprisingly, I am no longer interested in a very large portion of
the things that I thought I would be interested in at the time. Some
things only took one click to see that I’d already read them, or
my interests have changed (who cares about Puppet any more?) or they
were short or irrelevant and clearly didn’t even warrant further
attention.
For the rest, there were four routes:
If it’s an article: Instapaper it. I love Instapaper. Don’t have
Instapaper? Get Instapaper.
If it’s a video, it’s almost always a YouTube video. Now that I’m
signed into Google, I use the ‘Watch Later’ feature, which
integrates with the Xbox, Android and iOS YouTube apps. If I have
a few minutes spare and don’t want to read, it’s very easy to dip
into this list.
If it’s an open source project, it’s almost always on GitHub, so
star it on there. Yes: this is only moving the ‘star-debt’
from one place to another, but we’re all about clearing
Twitter at this point.
For everything else, either consume it there and then, or
decide if I’m likely to consume it later. Soon? Open a browser tab
(I sync these across all my browsers). Later? Add to Delicious
(This is basically modelled on the “processing” step of David Allen’s
Getting Things Done- a book I know only from reputation, but
lots of people find the process useful, so maybe I should add that to
the reading queue …)
Almost nothing gets added to Delicious because (and this is really
the meat of the idea I am trying to write about)- if I really
want to know about something, then it will probably still be there for
me to search out.
Less than one tenth of that 500 tweets resulted in something that I
still cared enough about, and thought was good enough, to save for
later.
When I had dial-up Internet, I kept my downloads in a folder on my PC.
Disk space was expensive back then, but things were smaller, and
bandwidth was really expensive. Not only that, but with the way
that search worked, you needed to keep things that you
were interested in around, because you may never find them again.
This is a habit I’ve kept, even though the whole geography
of the Internet has changed- it’s not really made up of deep
nooks of hidden information, it’s a giant morass of brightly
coloured distractions, heavily indexed with complete sets of
meta-data.
Sidebar:
This works in the real world too. When I recently moved
house I was forced to sift through a lot of spare electronics parts
that I had accumulated over the years.
This was all badly organised to
the point that I didn’t always even know what I had. Even more
annoyingly, I frequently knew I had something but didn’t know where-
it was hidden in with a bunch of crap I didn’t need at all
I have moved to a Just in Time model: except for things
that were very expensive to obtain and that I will clearly need
exactly that part in the future- I donated it all.
Need a really really long HDMI lead? An IDC10 lead that’s just the
right length? Super-bright LEDs to finish off your project? That one
obscure adaptor to go from iPod headset headphones to a separate mic
and headphone plug? The Internet has you covered: you can have it next
day for very little money, and in a few weeks from Shenzhen for even
less.
Thanks for your attention.
The right four word phrase is almost guaranteed to being up any
article I might want to reference later. I’ve had bookmarks
for resources on learning foreign languages: these only
serve to make me feel guilty about the languages that
I can’t yet speak, and to make using the Internet feel like
a giant sisyphean task- to get to the end of my bookmarks.
I don’t want to learn a language right now. When I do, I
don’t think I will have a lot of trouble finding a resource
to help. How about that really great looking resource from
the BBC?- I didn’t need a bookmark, a search for
“BBC language resource” brought it up as the first hit.
What if I can’t remember that it was by the BBC when I
come to need it? Well, if it’s good then other people
will point to it when I’m searching, or, I’ll end up
with some other, probably perfectly acceptable resource.
The world will not end if I learn a language a different
way, using a different website, or if I just don’t ever
do it at all.
As should be obvious from the above- Delicious, YouTube and
Instapaper are now my new pits to dump things in. I
fully intend to apply the same process to those remaining
silos- summarise, decide, reject or begrudgingly keep.