[book] How We Learn

Who doesn’t want to be better at learning? Learn faster, more efficiently, with better recall…that’s this book, by Benedict Carey, a journalist who has long been tracking the science of learning. The whole book is worth reading, but here are a few of my takeaways:

• Use the spacing affect, aka “distributed learning”. There is a whole science of how much and how often you should repeat something in order to seal it in memory. Not too often, just enough space between practice, not too seldom. Nowadays you can get software to help with this.  Good idea.
• Testing is another form of learning, so do it on yourself all the time. Spend about 1/3 of your time studying and 2/3rds testing yourself (flashcards, re-writing your thoughts, etc.)
• Distraction can actually be good, but only if: you’ve focused long enough on the task to feel stumped. When that happens, take a break and do something else for a while.
• Systematically alter your practice: change the place where you study, change the background noises or music. If you study the same material in two different places, you’ll learn the material better than if you studied it in the same, familiar location.
• Sleep is free learning: never go to bed without a problem to review in your mind. Think of it as “learning with your eyes closed”.

There is much more to absorb from this book, and I’m sure I’ll continue coming back to the concepts regularly.

 

How I use Evernote

I keep everything in Evernote. Well, not everything — my files and photos are kept mostly on OneDrive — but everything else, anything I might need in a new place, is always in Evernote.

My Evernote store includes the following notebooks:

• Default: where everything goes unless (or until, if I’m in a hurry) I move it elsewhere. 
• Clippings: anything of interest I see on the web. I used to merely post the link, but since living in China — where internet and firewall access can sometimes be iffy — I usually just copy the whole page. 
• Records: a scan/photo of every document that might be useful someday: passport, drivers license, insurance information, Safeway card, etc. Of course, each one is tagged multiple times to ensure I can find them easily.
• HowTo: I like a separate place for notes that explain how to do something. Lots of technical articles go in here.
• Work: My work-related files go here, in a bunch of subfolders. Some are shared with colleagues.
• Archive: old notes, large notes that I don’t need to carry with me. Scanned receipts usually go here.

The best part of Evernote is that all the notes are automatically synched among all my computers and devices. You can synch everything at the notebook level, which is nice because on devices where space or bandwidth are at a premium (e.g. my phone) I only synch the notebooks I think I’ll need on the road.

I also use tags on just about every note, and the search feature is fast and powerful enough that it often doesn’t matter much which notebook I use. I could probably be lazier and it wouldn’t affect my workflow very much.

Note: if you put as much important stuff in Evernote as I do, you absolutely must use their two-factor authentication. It can be annoying if you need to access a note from a new device — you’ll need your phone authentication app — but it’s much more secure. Also, remember you can encrypt notes at the paragraph level. I do this a lot, for things that might be sensitive if somebody happens to look over my shoulder while writing, or as extra protection in case the notebook is somehow broken into.

Much as I like Evernote, I don’t trust that it’ll be around forever. I’ve been burned many times in the past when I adopt some file format only to see it become irrelevant or worse (I’m looking at you, WMV). Fortunately, it’s easy to export everything, and I do that a couple times a year, saving it in PDF and XML so I’ll never lose it.

Evernote is not perfect. The iPhone UI is cumbersome. Rich text and tables are too primitive.  There’s no outline mode to make complicated drafts easier to write. You can’t encrypt individual notebooks. Etc. OneNote is still my overall favorite, but its underpowered cross-platform synch, plus the huge investment I’ve already made in Evernote makes it impractical for me to switch. But Evernote is good enough for what I need, and I expect to be using it for many more years.

How to be mean (or nice)

I don’t believe there are very many truly mean people in the world, certainly not in professional situations where long-term reputations matter. But just because somebody doesn’t have mean intent doesn’t imply they aren’t behaving in a mean way. Consider the following different sentences:

• Did you lose the keys again?
• Did you lose the keys?
• The keys are missing. Any idea where they are?
• I can’t find the keys.

All of these statements map onto the same reaction we’d like to get from the listener: a sense that something is wrong with the keys, and a plea for some help rectifying the situation. But it’s the way things are said that makes a difference; the statements at the top of the list are mean ways of saying things that could have been said using a phrase at the lower end of the list.

So I’d like to suggest that people try to say things the nice way. Don’t be mean.

[book] Manage Your Day-to-Day

This is a short, easy-to-read, summary of tips for how to be more productive and more creative. The bottom line: focus.

Here are some of the specific tips worth remembering:

• Do your most creative work first thing in the day, before everything else.
• “Feel the frequency”: set up a routine, doing the same things at the same time.
• Defend your creative time against all interruptions: schedule it on the calendar and treat it seriously.
• It’s harder to see day-to-day progress on long, big (and hence worthwhile) projects, so invent metrics to enable self-tracking.

Two specific ways to break mental blocks:

• [Ray Bradbury]: make a list of random word pairs, then force yourself to piece together a story about them.
• [Edward de Bono] Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take a starting point that has nothing to do with your project and work from there.

Most of these tips are found elsewhere, so I didn’t think this was a breakthrough book, but it’s a readable and inspiring.

Doug Lemov’s Tips for Teachers

A few notes from Econtalk’s interview with Doug Lemov, founder of Uncommon Schools, who gives several practical tips on how to be a better teacher.Since we all find ourselves “teaching” sometimes, I’d like to see these tips applied more to business presentations too:

• "At bats": Like baseball batters, who practice over and over, make sure your audience applies your instructions over and over, not just until they get it correct once or twice.
• How deeply you know something is more important for getting to the next level than whether you “know it” or not. You must review, practice until something becomes intuitive, not just till you pass a test
• e.g. You learn vocabulary words by understanding the distinctions with synonyms, not just the meanings
• "cold calling": the teacher tells everyone in the classroom to prepare the answer, then asks one student at random
• students know they are on call the entire lecture, so they have to pay attention
• If the person called says "I don't know", you follow up with more questions till they get it.
• "Call and response": Turn your questions into a game a al Rock Paper Scissors. Everyone answers the question at once (e.g. by raising a number of fingers signifying their answer to a multiple choice question)
• Now you know how many in your class really understood -- and you can adjust accordingly
• Technology can help too if everyone answers a quiz on their smart phone.

These and dozens of other practical tips are available in Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion. Definitely worth checking out.

[book] Adam Grant’s Give and Take

Seth Roberts blogged that this book is “the best in psychology in many years” and I think I agree. It’s similar to books by Malcolm Gladwell or Daniel Pink, full of easy-to-relate-to anecdotes backed by serious academic research. The claim is that success-minded people are divided into three categories: givers, matchers, and takers. The book presents evidence for why givers are the most successful in the long run – overly represented at the top of most fields – and how to avoid the mistakes that see givers overly represented at the bottom too: as doormats and pushovers.

Besides Seth Roberts’ blog, there is an excellent New York Times Magazine summary of the ideas, so I won’t bother laying out more details, but there was one concept in particular that interested me: the work of Amanatullah and Morris on negotiations. The women they studied weren’t particularly aggressive when negotiating for themselves, but got results as good as their male counterparts when negotiating on behalf of another.

If you’re a natural giver – you see yourself as doing things generally out of generosity or good will toward others – then one way to avoid being used is to imagine you are negotiating for somebody else. When the women studied were asked to negotiate a salary for another person, they ended up with much better results than when they negotiated for themselves.

Besides the obvious implication that I really should have my wife do all the negotiating in my family (which I already know is true), the easy trick is to approach any negotiation with the perspective that you are actually fighting on behalf of all the people in your life. You want a better salary or a good deal on a car, not for your own selfish gain, but because you want something better for your family. This idea of “relational accounting” is the purest form of giving, because you think through all the consequences of your actions, rather than simply demuring to the wishes of your counter-party.

The book is full of similar observations that make it well worth reading and I highly recommend it.

Calibre for books

Amazon Kindle has become my main way to buy books, which of course is incredibly liberating because nowwith the Kindle app I can put every book on every device, including my iPhone. Imagine: I carry with me, on my phone, a copy of nearly every book I’ve purchased for the past three years.

 

Unfortunately, Amazon’s not the perfect solution. For one thing, I’d prefer not to be so dependent on a single company for so much of my reading. I trust Amazon today, but how do I know that these e-books will still be readable in 20 years?

 

I’m also limited by the Kindle software and whatever features Amazon gives me for searching/annotating and otherwise enjoying my books. For example, sharing a section of a book: Amazon limits me to short snippets, and those must point back to an Amazon-operated site.

 

Happily, there is a wonderful way around these limitations. The wonderful people of Calibre have created a wonderful free and open-source ebook management system that lets me do whatever I like with ebooks.

 

To answer an obvious question, yes there are plug-ins for Calibre that break the Kindle rights management system, and yes that means that you can probably steal tons of books just as easily as you can steal music or movies. But before you ask any further, let me state up front that I don’t feel right about it, and I won’t “share” any books (either giving or receiving) from you, so don’t ask.

 

But the “fair use” terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act means I’m allowed to use these books on other devices and in other formats, such as if I want to use the much prettier book reader on Apple’s iBook.

 

Today I also discovered another advantage of Calibre. By putting all my Kindle books in a fair use format, my books don’t need to be re-downloaded from Amazon servers when I load a new device. If I want one of my already-purchased books to show up on a new iPad, I just synch with the local copies on my computer. No internet required.

 

I like trucks

Steve Jobs is right:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people

But after living with an iPad since it was available last year, I'm thinking I still like trucks.  Most mornings I've been using Flipboard or Reeder to watch my various RSS feeds. But while the iPad is nice for lying in bed, or for spontaneous and quick reads when I have a minute to myself, it just can't beat the power of a truck, er, laptop.

I just outfitted myself with the updated NetNewsWire 3.2.8, the one with the new Instapaper button. I need Instapaper so badly that I considered switching  (to Shrook, the only interesting-looking one in the Mac App Store, but I gave up when I found it doesn't sync to Google Reader), but now that I have it, I'm wondering why I don't stick to Mac for all my serious RSS reading. I also added the NetNewsWire to Evernote Applescript on the Veritrope site; that plus the FastScript utility from Red Sweater Software, and I'm just a command-E away from sending all my interesting clippings immediately to Evernote for safe-keeping.  Try that on your iPad.

Sometimes a truck really is better.

 

 

How to use an iPhone over Ethernet

Okay, you're not really doing iPhone directly over Ethernet, and you'll need a Mac close by to do it, but this is a trick I find handy in hotels that offer wired ethernet for free, but where they charge for WiFi (like Marriott Changfeng Park in Shanghai).

Set up your Mac (I use a MacBook Pro) to do internet sharing over Airport, and you can become your own WiFi hotspot, easily connected to from your iPhone or iPad.

Under System Preferences (available under the apple menu), under "Internet and Wireless", select Sharing, and do this:

Note: I have file sharing turned on as well, but that's not necessary (and normally it's a good idea to keep it turned off).

Also, remember that you'll have to uncheck the Internet Sharing box before you can select different ways of sharing your connection.  You'll want to select "AirPort" to create the WiFi hotspot.

 

The Cloakbox Catch

The verdict is in: I’m pretty happy with my Cloakbox VPN router.  I love being able to surf as though I’m on a computer in San Francisco or the UK.  I’ve used it in two places, a temporary residential hotel and now (finally) in my permanent apartment. In both cases I literally just plugged it into the internet tap and it worked.  I love to tinker with settings, so later I adjusted things for higher security (e.g. WPA Personal) and a fixed location (rather than letting Witopia decide).  I also fiddled with the built-in WDS settings to get it to work with another Linksys router.  Everything was easy.

But it’s not entirely free.

Here’s my internet speed without the Cloakbox:

Here’s my speed with the Cloakbox:

My internet connection is much slower.  I assume some of this is due to the overhead of VPN, with extra encryption information being sent with packet. But the biggest problem is that every single communication gets sent across the ocean and back (sometimes multiple times), producing a much higher latency (upwards of 400+ ms).  That’s painful, although I find communication services like Skype are still completely usable.  But still, that’s quite a speed and latency drop.

Fortunately, you can turn off the VPN functionality at any time, and I do, so on longer uploads/downloads when I don’t need to get around any firewalls or when security is less of a concern, I switch it off.  Unfortunately you need to reboot the router each time, which can take a minute or two.

Bottom line: Cloakbox does what I need it to do and I have been recommending it to all my friends. For $199, it’s an easy way to eliminate one of the biggest hassles of living in a regulated internet.

Fix your windshield for cheap

Several months ago I found myself behind a gravel truck on the freeway, and before I could maneuver out of the way a tiny pebble flipped onto my windshield and gave me a tiny crack.  It was just big enough to be annoying, but not big enough to justify replacing the entire windshield.  For several months I just lived with it, but it bothered me because I’ve heard that it weakens the glass and can cause more serious problems later if you don’t take care of it.

Fortunately I discovered that there are several cheap solutions, all covered by my auto insurance.  Windshields.com will give you a summary of the options in your area, customized to your car make and model.  In my case, there weren’t any locations close enough to bother, but I found that my local Jiffy Lube will do it too, while I wait.

Although the cost is covered by insurance, I was apprehensive about fixing it. Wouldn’t they raise my rates? My insurance company (Amica) said they don’t.  Leaving it unrepaired exposes me to potentially more serious damage later, and besides, the cost to fix it is pretty minimal.

A professional auto glass place will charge everything to insurance, so it’s actually cheaper than Jiffy Lube, which makes me pay $5 as a convenience fee.  But finding an auto glass place and scheduling an appointment is too much hassle, so Jiffy Lube it was.  And it really was fast: they had the glass repaired and I was out of there in 15 minutes.

They don’t actually replace the windshield.  They basically just squirt some special glue into the crack to seal it and prevent further damage.  Although supposedly this makes the glass about as safe as a full replacement, you can still see evidence of a crack, so it’s not a perfect solution.

Here’s how it works: the technician first cleans the hole, by drilling it carefully.  Then he uses a special vise to “pull” the windshield glass in such a way that the crack opens enough to fill it thoroughly with the glue.

 

The glue is essentially a special transparent resin that seals the glass and prevents further damage.

You can’t use this process for cracks longer than 6 inches, but for marks like mine it seems just perfect.

Sharpen your lawnmower blade

You’re supposed to do it once a season, but Consumer Reports says that 25% of owners never sharpen their lawnmower blades. I’m happy to report that I no longer fit in that lazy category, and found to my delight that it was easier than I thought.

First step was to pin the blade down in such a way that it wouldn’t harm me while taking it off the mower.  The directions say use a 2x4 board, but I didn’t have one handy, and I found that a brick works just fine.  In my case, a quick counter-clockwise turn of the main bolt was enough to remove the blade safely.

 

How to sharpen the blade: I suppose I could have found my own sharpener (I hear you can buy a small $4 blade sharepner that works with any power drill for example) but that was too much hassle.  People say that local plant nurseries, or hardware stores will sharpen the blade (for free?) but after some calls to Lowes and Home Depot, I came up with nothing.  Eventually I discovered that our local equipment rental place (Eastside Rental, in Bellevue) would do it while I wait.  They charged an exorbitant $11, but it was worth it.

You should see how much better my lawn looks now!