Jim Willis

• Desktop-Class Productivity for iPad – Things Blog – Cultured Code – Release notes with cool tips.
• Individual vs collective climate action – Those who are concerned about the climate crisis need to do a better job at highlighting that more than 70% of the climate problem is caused by just 100 corporations
• Not a ‘math person’? You may be better at learning to code than you think – New research from the University of Washington finds that a natural aptitude for learning languages is a stronger predictor of learning to program than basic math knowledge, or numeracy.

My day job is Business Systems Architect at Princeton University Press. As a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, all staff in the Princeton office have been asked to work from home for the next month.

The team I work with at the Press consists of programers, analysts and project managers. The Press has a robust infrastructure built up around Zoom to support remote meetings and many of us regularly work from home. That said, a month away from face-to-face interaction with my colleagues is going to be a different kind of experience, for sure. As such I’m documenting here the friction points, possible solutions, tips/hacks, etc. that we discover during this month-long exercise.

User Presence

I believe that once you get the various communication infrastructure established for remote meetings, remote file access, etc (of which I’ll write more as the days go on here), one of the challenges of working remotely is conveying presence/availability while working at home.

It is easy to walk by a colleague’s desk at work and get a sense if you can comfortably interrupt with a question or comment, much harder to do so when working remotely. There are many tools that could be used for this. Many programming shops use Slack, others Skype. At the Press, all staff are on Zoom and some are regular users of Microsoft Teams.

So I am looking here primarily at conveying user presence in Zoom vs Teams:

Both Teams and Zoom offer a “chat” section in their applications where you can set your availability and view whether or not your co-workers are available, away, busy, etc.

Zoom Status Guide

Zoom’s status options don’t synchronize well across devices. Meaning, if you set your Desktop Zoom application to “away” and then close Zoom on your desktop because you are expecting to use your mobile device, co-workers will continue to see you as “away” until you re-open your desktop Zoom app and change your status to “available.”

Meaning, your availability on your mobile device is not conveyed to your other co-workers.

The best way to think about Zoom status is: whatever your Desktop status is set to (or was last set to when you closed the app) is how your co-workers will likely see your status appear in the Chat section of Zoom.

Teams Status Documentation

Team’s status is the hands-down winner here. It almost-instantly synchronizes across all devices (mobile/desktop) when you change it (using the Desktop app you change your status by clicking your initials in the upper right corner of the application).

Also, the Teams iPhone application seems to be much better at providing chat notifications when the app is in the background then Zoom. Zoom chat alerts on the iPhone are pretty inconsistent in my experience.

Likewise Teams offers a very handy “Set status message” that you can fill out so that if someone messages you in the Teams chat area, they will get an auto-response to their message.  Meaning you could set your status message to “letting the dog out, back at 1:55pm” and if someone chats with you they’ll get that message as a reply automatically. Much more useful than a generic away/available status icon.

I have spent an equal amount of time using the chat function on Teams as I have on Zoom. They both have their benefits but clearly when it comes to conveying user-presence, Teams is superior. This opens up questions such as:

• Do we standardize on one tool for chat even though multiple staff regularly use Zoom for chat?
• Or, do we maintain user-presence/status in two apps and hope that we remember to set them both correctly?

We’re only on Day 1 here, so I don’t have a clear answer yet but, stay tuned.

Disclaimer: I’m writing about my experience of mandatory remote work at Princeton University Press during the COVID-19 pandemic, any comments and opinions here are entirely my own.

• A High-Resolution Audio Primer – a report on a scientific article presented at last year’s AES meeting, in which the authors used test tones and a modest audio system (albeit in an anechoic chamber) to prove that listeners can discriminate between high-rez and CD-rez audio.
• Don’t think twice – Billy Strings – I recently learned how to play this. But not like Billy does. 
• My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s – Gwern.net – Worth a scroll through
• A Text Renaissance – “Text though, is definitely going through a renaissance, and as primarily a producer of text, that’s what interests me the most. What comes out the other end may or may not look anything like blogging. It might be a case of a New Blogging as an Elder Medium in an explosion of new textual media.”
• Overview of how ONIX handles various rights attributes – Some work-related research. 

• Opinion | Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills? – Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills? The same people who should be fixing them.
• Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be? – Alberto Acerbi & Charlotte Brand | Aeon Ideas – Are popular songs today happier or sadder than they were 50 years…
• How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables – The tech giant is engineering a way to encourage its employees to eat healthier — and it might just help the rest of…
• Mac Open Web, by Brian Warren – Good collection of apps, all of which are useful in a variety of ways for independent web writers/coders.
• Publish To Apple News – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org – Started pushing out my RSS feed to Apple News this week, here’s how.
• 100 greatest bootlegs: #127 BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS – Paul’s Mall, Boston 1975 (Flac) – Building up my collection of lossless live show recordings.
• Pollstar | Hotstar: Billy Strings Goes Beyond Bluegrass – Good read on a great guitar player. Billy’s origin story gets richer every time it’s told.

• Getting the iPad to Pro – excellent review of the iPad usability issues by Craig Mod.
• Pollstar | Hotstar: Billy Strings Goes Beyond Bluegrass – more backstory than I’ve ever seen before on Billy.
• 5 Cheap(ish) Things to Make the Perfect Cup of Coffee – The New York Times – I switched to black coffee, looking for tips on making a better cup of coffee.
• Auction Sniper: eBay Sniper and eBay Bidding snipe, bid sniping for eBay – Notes
• Welcome to Offi | Embrace Media Storage or Tables – cool coffee table
• A Year in Health and Fitness: 2019 – More quantified self stuff, around fitness. This guy has done a great job of using python to report on this data.
• Portal app mixes sights, sounds & Hue lighting to relax you – 9to5Mac – “The app is a simple one: it displays slow-moving video clips of nature scenes on the iPhone or iPad screen while playing real-life sounds from the same location through any AirPlay speakers.”
• World Cafe Nashville: Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studios : World Cafe : NPR – been doing a deep dive on Auerback’s recordings/studio. My heart loves the sound by my head knows it’s just the audio equivalent of an instagram filter trying to make digital feel like analog.
• The Black Keys – EMusician – see above
• Studio spotlight: Easy Eye Sound | Watch Listen Show | telluridenews.com – see above.

Other stuff? My dog ate my Kindle. I had the base model and upgraded to the fancier Paperwhite. Since I use the JUMBO FONT to read without my glasses on, that extra 300dpi really looks nice! Highly recommend paying the extra $30.

Also, been doing a lot of work building out my HiFi setup with an Intel NUC running Roon/Qobuz and loving it. Will do a writeup next week when I’m not so busy. 

• Dark Mode for Web – Some css tips for making a dark mode version of a website. Putting this on my list of things to tackle.
• You Are A Strange Loop – YouTube – Was speaking with some friends about Doug Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach the other day and then serendipitously came across this great, short video explainer of the strange loop, key to understanding what he’s getting at in his book. So worth the viewing time.

Other things from this week? I’ve been doing a deep dive on Roon’s audio player as a way to unify my local music catalog with my Qobuz account. Very good so far but I think I need to buy a Mac mini or something to run it as my old MacBook Air isn’t working out so well.

This is somewhat unnecessary right now as I just got in the mail the vinyl LP of Yola’s Walk Through Fire and that has been in heavy rotation on my turntable. Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys plays on/produced this masterpiece. Dude has an incredible ear. Such great stuff.

Scouring the web for new/interesting stuff to read is one of the best things about the Internet for me. My workflow for this foraging has been pretty similar for a very long time: browse RSS feeds of interesting people, read short interesting stuff immediately, save the longer stuff in a “read it later” tool.

For the past 10 years, my “read it later” tool of choice has been Instapaper.

To celebrate 10 years of using Instapaper, I went through and cleaned out my “unread” folder and archived the stuff from the past 10 years that I will probably never read completely. Now I’ve got 9 unread articles and 996 articles in my archives as read/mostly read.

I also ran some analysis on my 10 years of reading history using python and the Instapaper API. I repurposed a bunch of code from this project  and that gave me a real head start on putting together some python code to analyze my Instapaper usage.

Unfortunately the Instapaper API is limited to 500 bookmarks so my time analysis below only represents the last 500 articles I read, so I am not sure how accurate/valuable it is.

That said, if you visit the “settings” page of your Instapaper account you can download a .csv file with your complete list of bookmark titles and URLs. Having a complete list of all article titles allowed me to do some cool word cloud analysis of the titles of the articles I’ve saved for the past 10 years:

Funny how just about right that word cloud is in capturing my reading habits/interests! I love that Jim Harrison gets his own little line in the upper left.

Anyway, suggestion to the guys who are currently keeping Instapaper alive: make it possible to include the date, progress and bookmark_id in the .csv that is downloadable through the settings page. Including in the .csv those attributes that are available via the API’s bookmarks/list method would allow the ability to do a full analysis on how many articles I saved/read per month over the past 10 years.

Instapaper is a joy to use and is very tightly integrated into my reading life and how I use the internet. I thought it was surprising/cool/interesting to realize that I have been using it for 10 years now. Thanks @MarcoArment for writing it and @bthdonohue for keeping it alive!

Sometimes you need to go nuclear and get back to baseline on all of those Finder window customizations that you make over time and start afresh. This will get rid of all the .DS_Store files that hold those customizations. I save it as a bash script, chmod it 775 and keep it in my ~/bin/ directory as reset_finder_windows.sh

#!/bin/bash
sudo find / -name .DS_Store -delete; killall Finder