This sounds quite scary to me. I would think that exercise is not something that goes at the expense of working, it might even increase productivity. Even if it's long walks outside. However, I don't have any references on this except for my very limited personal experience.
Read a little further. He has a special needs kid. I don't know how demanding that is for him but I do know that getting the worklife/homelife balance right and finding time to exercise can be quite a challenge even with regular kids.
And btw, I've read his blog for some time now. While I don't make all the same personal choices as he does when it comes to getting things done, I've found his reasoning-from-principles approach to it very helpful.
i thought the exercise bike he bought looked excellent, though. i'm tempted to get one so that instead of lying on the couch reading i can sit on the bike and get some exercise without having to devote singletasked time to it.
I agree about the point regarding tile based window managers. Few others come close to maximizing productivity of windowed apps; but OSX's various other productivity enhancing features make it not worthwhile to switch back.
Of course tools (hardware and software) can only take you so far. I find that most productivity comes from being surrounded by sharp hard-working people trying to push the envelope. Working with hard-working people creates a cyclic motivational cycle, all pushing each other to be more productive.
I think you can get XMonad working on OS x; I know a couple of people who were using it. I also think the "productivity enhancing features" broadly overrated and better in Linux, but that's neither here nor there.
Again and again when I visit linked product sites I'm greeted with pages like this[1]. Even though the link in the article has a country specified in the URL. After selecting the location I'm not forwarded to the requested product page. In this example I got redirected to some ad with Jennifer Lopez[2].
I can't even select US as region, it just sends me back to the localeselector.
Edit: This is hilarious. The Kensington remote link opens the product page and then overlays a country selection. Selecting my country redirects me to the homepage in my language. At least I can close the selection window and stay on the product page.
Thank you for mentioning this,it really drove me mad after a couple of tries; I swear that I'll never return to harman kardon website, and won't buy their products, ever. May their webmasters die a slow, painful death. So much anti-usability deserves it.
> To make up some more, I pin applications to one of six desktops: (1) terminal and text-editing; (2) real-time communication; (3) browsing; (4) organization and planning; (5) reading; and (6) media and games. Each desktop captures one frame of mind.
I think it's interesting to see that so many uses application-specific desktops. I've always used project-specific desktops: one desktop for random stuff (Twitter, browsing, terminal for quick stuff), one for communication (because no IM app is fine-grained enough for my case) and the rest for projects. Nearly all of the project desktops have a terminal and a separate Chrome window.
i've settled on a two-monitor, three desktop setup. one monitor has a maximised terminator window, which i use to manage my xterms (i find it handier than letting xmonad handle individual xterms, because terminator allows for both splits and tabs). the other monitor alternates between office browser and personal browser. i would normally have had an im window too, but i decided to give not signing into personal im at work a try when i started my new job (july), and so far it's actually worked out very well. my friends know that i check email constantly, so if they need to get my attention they can do that, or sms if its urgent.
temporary things (like launching openoffice or reading a pdf in fullscreen) happen in a fourth desktop, and get closed when i'm done with them.
I use activity based workspaces as well. My density of activities is quite low, so the applications that tend to be on more than one workspace are LibreOffice, Gimp and Firefox (Ubuntu).
You will find 85 Watt MagSafe laptop power adapters (sometime two) pre-installed everywhere we frequent in my house: the couch (x 2), the kitchen desk, the home office (x 2), the rocking chair and the bed.
How are current power adapters in terms of energy wasted when not being used, but connected to the plug? I use to keep them all unplugged because I remember they used to waste a lot of watt-hours doing nothing.
Matt, for irc you should check out Limechat. I just switched from Colloquy and am loving to so far. I set it up with the three panel view, and was at first confused about the lower window (which is like a "everything you can't see in the main room window" view), but i've found myself using it a lot just to glance at conversations in other rooms.
One thing that I'm trying to figure out: if you block all potential "timewasting sites" and only get your information from 1-2 hard news sources, where do you learn about the existence of the tools listed? If you rely on being around "sharp colleagues" don't you have a tragedy of the commons problem when everyone starts doing this?
Yes, but not everyone will do this. I hardly read any newspapers and try to avoid news sites, but if something's really interesting my friends will bring it up. For now, this strategy works just fine.
Price, maybe? He had a 2TB Time Capsule; the same storage space on S3 would cost $265/month, excluding traffic (that's $.12 more per GB downloaded). Not to mention that restores would be much slower.
I don't know about you, but I know I'd rather use those $3200/year on other stuff and just get a decent NAS.
Crashplan and backblaze both offer unlimited storage for way cheaper (roughly $260 dollars a month cheaper). Don't get me wrong - I'm all for onsite backups, especially for speed of recovery, but there are realistic & affordable options for cloud-based storage.
I see now that technology can only nip at the margins of happiness (...) </pre>
love his conclusion