Or, how to get disconnected for productivity.
I'm not the first person to ever say this, but it needs to be said aloud in this house occasionally. We're all online too much (me included), looking at what's there: Youtube, news sites, social media, forums. Games, in some cases (games are a waste of processor cycles but that’s just me). Our computers are mostly for consumption or play. They're something we watch. TV with a billion channels.
And here's a heresy: this isn't what computers were for. Computers were creativity tools. Obviously, they still can be. Ads for phones, tablets and computers all show what you can do with your device: photography, video, writing, music, coding. Nobody ever advertises a tablet as something to curl up with to catch up on Instagram for three hours. But increasingly, that's what they're being used for.
I started writing this post on a pretty elderly Mac - a 2002 iBook. In between, I’ve updated it on an iPhone, a 2003 PowerBook and I'm writing these very words on an iPad 3.
Writing on the iBook and the PowerBook felt more like getting back to what computers were for originally. Doing disconnected, "distraction-free" stuff on computers can be liberating. Like writing. Watching a favourite DVD with a mug of tea and a slice of cake - and nothing else. no second screening. Listening to music while writing. I really like hanging out with myself on the computer, if you know what I mean, without needing to go online to catch up with the rest of the world. Sitting in front of a disconnected computer is like sitting in front of a sheet of blank paper with a pen. There are no real distractions. I can write something or I don't. I can play a bit of music in the background if I want. Keep looking at the screen. Say something. Write something. Do something.
That's how computers used to be, before the internet boom. It was just you and the cursor. Almost everything you did on a computer was creative in some way.
It was also often a single-tasking experience. For one, because your consumer-level computer possibly only ran one program at a time (on operating systems like CP/M and DOS) or didn't cope well with too many programs at a time (1990s versions of Windows and MacOS). If you wanted reliability, you ran 2-3 programs, max, because that was most of what you needed. You had a wordprocessing package, a spreadsheet and a few games. This was true of everything from the slowest computer you could buy to some of the fastest. People didn't know you needed twenty browser tabs. Or what browser tabs were. And software was expensive then, so you thought carefully about what you bought.
And this is an interesting thing about vintage computers. If you have one that you use regularly, say a 15-20 year old one, it's probably used for creative work of some sort, unless you're a gamer. Because they aren't up to what the web needs today. In my way, I'm often at my most reflective when I'm playing around on a vintage computer. There are few distractions (partly because I'm not a gamer, like I said).
I wouldn't go back to those days. Online tools are just too useful for everyone. Just having Wikipedia alone... But once I'm on the web, time leaches away.
So what am I saying? Don't use the web? No. But if you're not doing anything in particular on your computer (tablet, phone....), switch off the wifi. It's that icon there, look. Switch it off, now, just for a moment.
Well done. Now, prepare to close your browser. Read to the end of this page first and follow the instructions.
When you have, open a new text editor document or a photo editor. Or an art package. A spreadsheet, even, if you're that way inclined.
You're now facing a creativity tool. Staff offline. No quick reseaching "ten top places to visit in Peru" or "How to cure writer's block". Not allowed.
Sit there.
Make something. Draw something. Design something. Stay offline.
Create.
Write a blog entry or make some notes for a script or a novel or a new business or where you want to travel to next. Review your CV/resume. Make some music. Edit some photos. Try black and white or an xpro filter. Edit that family camcorder footage and make something with it that you can show your kids' friends or partners when they come over.
Hang out with yourself for a while.
See what you're capable of, creatively.
Offline.
Okay. NOW, CLOSE ALL YOUR PROGRAMS... And create.
Bye.
Monday 8 October 2018
Chrome OS: the new mainframe
It's funny how a thing you've never really thought about can change the way you see a lot of things when you do.
Let's talk about the cloud.
I'm not much of a cloud user. However, something has happened which is making me think about the way I manage my files. That's making me think about what I might eventually buy to replace my 2012 MacBook.
Up until now, a new computer would probably have been another Mac, although I'm not happy about the way that most new Macs can no longer be upgraded or even easily fixed when things go wrong. But given a choice of PC or Mac, I'll choose Macs. Generally.
Last Christmas, though, on impulse I bought a small Chromebook at the John Lewis Christmas sale. It's nothing special: a basic, blue, Asus C201P with an 11.6" screen, the usual 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, etc, etc. Very standard Chromebook. Lightweight and cheap.
You probably know enough about Chromebooks. They run ChromeOS which uses Google's Chrome browser and depends heavily on cloud-based storage, either on Google Drive or elsewhere. Chromebooks are effectively terminals into the great cloud-based mainframe of apps and data that's grown up around us.
Despite my long attachment to Mac hardware and locally installed apps like iTunes, Photos, iMovie, Pages, Numbers, MS Office and others, I've really taken to ChromeOS and this little laptop. It's simple and it's been bulletproof. It just works. And it's made me reconsider my whole locally-installed apps and data storage ecosystem.
Could I just move everything to the cloud?
It turns out that I have three kinds of data. Some of this data is cloud-friendly; some isn't.
Music first. I tend to play music on my iPhone, sometimes from iTunes on my MacBook and occasionally on a stereo. I still have a lot of CDs. I'll need a way to transfer music from my CDs to my phone and computer for the foreseeable future. My MacBook can do that. A MacMini just for home use could also do that. An old Mac could work as a music jukebox. A G3 could do that. The Chromebook can't. You're probably saying Spotify and iTunes Music and so on. I don't need Spotify to give me what I already own, although it's a great app and I use it occasionally. And I don't trust the iTunes Store. I've bought music there and it doesn't show up everywhere. CDs are real and they're platform independent. They are compatible with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Linux, the stereo in the kitchen. You can also play them on any computer with a CD drive and speakers (that excludes Chromebooks, by the way, even on external drives). Once you've bought CDs, you own them. Think what you like; CDs work for me. :-)
Photos/video: this is probably the sticking point. I'm deeply uncomfortable about putting family and personal photos of my life online and my wife is just as uncomfortable. I've photos going back years. Before I was married. Childhood photos. Photos from my twenties. Grandparents' photos. I've thousands of photos and while about half of them are rubbish, some I really don't want to lose.
DVDs. I have some. Not a lot. I've the same reservations about iTunes (will it always remember what I've bought?).
If my obsession with backups sounds odd, consider that I've had a major house fire in my life and I lost a decade's worth of photos from the 1990s as well as everything else I owned. Never again. So where do I put photos and family videos for safety? And that's before I start editing photos, tweaking them and sometimes publishing to Flickr.
Add that to the fact that much of my photography is from cameras, not the phone. I scan old stuff occasionally. That might change, but it's also an issue.
Once I set music and photos/video aside, though, the Chromebook can access everything else on the cloud: email, contacts, calendar, docs, notes, etc.
So my next Mac might be a MacMini that's mostly for photo/video editing, (category 3) with a Chromebook for writing stuff (category 2) when I'm out and about or sitting in bed.
The Mac's key selling point is becoming its media editing ability. Everything else I do, though, can be done on any hardware using web apps. And if it can be done on any hardware, why do I still need a Mac? Only data category 3 is really keeping me here now.
And I didn't see that coming.
Let's talk about the cloud.
I'm not much of a cloud user. However, something has happened which is making me think about the way I manage my files. That's making me think about what I might eventually buy to replace my 2012 MacBook.
Up until now, a new computer would probably have been another Mac, although I'm not happy about the way that most new Macs can no longer be upgraded or even easily fixed when things go wrong. But given a choice of PC or Mac, I'll choose Macs. Generally.
Last Christmas, though, on impulse I bought a small Chromebook at the John Lewis Christmas sale. It's nothing special: a basic, blue, Asus C201P with an 11.6" screen, the usual 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, etc, etc. Very standard Chromebook. Lightweight and cheap.
You probably know enough about Chromebooks. They run ChromeOS which uses Google's Chrome browser and depends heavily on cloud-based storage, either on Google Drive or elsewhere. Chromebooks are effectively terminals into the great cloud-based mainframe of apps and data that's grown up around us.
Despite my long attachment to Mac hardware and locally installed apps like iTunes, Photos, iMovie, Pages, Numbers, MS Office and others, I've really taken to ChromeOS and this little laptop. It's simple and it's been bulletproof. It just works. And it's made me reconsider my whole locally-installed apps and data storage ecosystem.
Could I just move everything to the cloud?
It turns out that I have three kinds of data. Some of this data is cloud-friendly; some isn't.
- Personal information and data: email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes (on iPhone Notes). This is already accessible via the cloud. Mostly it's in iCloud. And much of it is generated on my iPhone.
- Documents and spreadsheets - created locally on Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers and a small few created online on Google Drive, Office365 and Simplenote (which I also use on the iPhone). This could all go in the cloud and some is there already. I use Dropbox for storing documents, mostly as a way to write something on one machine and pick it up on another. Some of the documents go back years - I still have files in Apple Works format. There might even be some files in WordStar format. With Dropbox, though, you still have local files.
- And then there's "multimedia", which comprises photos, family videos, books and music. Some of the photos are scans of 35mm or medium format prints. Most of the music is on CD. The books are on Kindle. The videos are all family video shot on various camcorders, digital cameras, phones.
Music first. I tend to play music on my iPhone, sometimes from iTunes on my MacBook and occasionally on a stereo. I still have a lot of CDs. I'll need a way to transfer music from my CDs to my phone and computer for the foreseeable future. My MacBook can do that. A MacMini just for home use could also do that. An old Mac could work as a music jukebox. A G3 could do that. The Chromebook can't. You're probably saying Spotify and iTunes Music and so on. I don't need Spotify to give me what I already own, although it's a great app and I use it occasionally. And I don't trust the iTunes Store. I've bought music there and it doesn't show up everywhere. CDs are real and they're platform independent. They are compatible with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Linux, the stereo in the kitchen. You can also play them on any computer with a CD drive and speakers (that excludes Chromebooks, by the way, even on external drives). Once you've bought CDs, you own them. Think what you like; CDs work for me. :-)
Photos/video: this is probably the sticking point. I'm deeply uncomfortable about putting family and personal photos of my life online and my wife is just as uncomfortable. I've photos going back years. Before I was married. Childhood photos. Photos from my twenties. Grandparents' photos. I've thousands of photos and while about half of them are rubbish, some I really don't want to lose.
DVDs. I have some. Not a lot. I've the same reservations about iTunes (will it always remember what I've bought?).
If my obsession with backups sounds odd, consider that I've had a major house fire in my life and I lost a decade's worth of photos from the 1990s as well as everything else I owned. Never again. So where do I put photos and family videos for safety? And that's before I start editing photos, tweaking them and sometimes publishing to Flickr.
Add that to the fact that much of my photography is from cameras, not the phone. I scan old stuff occasionally. That might change, but it's also an issue.
Once I set music and photos/video aside, though, the Chromebook can access everything else on the cloud: email, contacts, calendar, docs, notes, etc.
So my next Mac might be a MacMini that's mostly for photo/video editing, (category 3) with a Chromebook for writing stuff (category 2) when I'm out and about or sitting in bed.
The Mac's key selling point is becoming its media editing ability. Everything else I do, though, can be done on any hardware using web apps. And if it can be done on any hardware, why do I still need a Mac? Only data category 3 is really keeping me here now.
And I didn't see that coming.
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