Libraries and Librarians:

Libraries and education

Between my professional RSS feeds and my personal ones, I read a sort of scary (no, edit that, it’s not ‘sort of’) number of blogs, accounts, and other resources online. To be precise, that’s currently 98 feeds . . . → Read More: Managing links + reading]]> Next installment in the “How I use my technology” series, let’s talk about managing links and reading.

Between my professional RSS feeds and my personal ones, I read a sort of scary (no, edit that, it’s not ‘sort of’) number of blogs, accounts, and other resources online. To be precise, that’s currently 98 feeds in my professional account, 153 in the personal account, and somewhere north of 250 accounts between Dreamwidth and LiveJournal (there’s overlap there, and I’m not going to bother to count exactly how much)

Now many of those don’t necessarily update all that regularly (at least half of the above update somewhere between once every couple of days and every couple of weeks, and very few update multiple times a day.) But that’s still a lot of stuff to sort through.

I read very fast, which is handy. And I skim even faster.

Anyway, as you might guess, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that comes my way, and I use a couple of different tools to manage it. It took me a good while to figure out, though, once I moved from using one computer most of the time to using at least 3 different devices regularly, and sometimes four (my work computer, my home computer, the iPad, and the iPhone. I mostly don’t read webpages/etc. from the phone, but every so often…)

My requirements for workflow:

• Had to be accessible from every device
• Had to make it easy for me to dump info into other resources
• Had to be quick to do – I’m a lot more likely to save something for later if I don’t necessarily have to come up with tags or descriptions or whatever all at once.

My RSS feeds live in Google Reader (the professional ones live in my work email account, the personal ones live in my personal Google account). I use the Mac/iPad app Reeder to read them, often, but I also read directly from Google Reader. (Depends what else I’m doing, where I’m reading, etc.)

I use Instapaper for the next step. I keep the bookmark on the top of every browser I use, and each time I read a page I want to save for later (either in my own bookmarks, or to include in a link roundup), I click the bookmark, the page saves, and I can go back to it later.

Every so often (which ranges from “every month or two” to “every week or so”, depending on what else I’m doing with my life), I go through the Instapaper folders, and sort everything into subfolders. Mine include the following:

• Tech (for anything technology related)
• Alternity (the big hobby project)
• Recipes (food is a good thing)
• Read/Watch/Listen (for stuff I want to do those things with)
• Religious life stuff
• Links (links I want to collect for the links posts here, or drop into my bookmarks for later reference)
• Knitting (like it says on the tin)

I intentionally keep the list relatively short, so it’s easier to navigate. Instapaper doesn’t have the easiest workflow ever for this, but it works well enough. (I really want a checkbox down the side where I could select all and then move, or whatever.) Most of the time I don’t need to reload my page to remind myself which category it goes into, but every so often I reload the page.

Then, periodically (depending on the folder, this is every couple of weeks or every couple of months, or “Didn’t I save something about this knitting thing in there?”) I go and sort through those folders. Links get shifted to a link post or Pinboard or both, depending. And things I want to read/watch/listen to get shifted to Evernote, where I can corral them somewhat more usefully, and tag them in a way that would make my Pinboard tags more annoying to manage.

Pinboard: Way back several years ago when Delicious made a bunch of changes, I shifted over to using Pinboard, which is a very anti-social social bookmarking service. It does cost money (based on total number of accounts: it’s now right around $10, and that account is forever – it’s not an annual fee) but it seems to be working very nicely for the project.

This is where I store anything I want to come back to a substantial time later. Everything gets at least one tag, and my tags are grouped. I should probably come back and talk about tagging in its own post, but I use general.something.something as my format for most tags, with a few exceptions.

For your amusement, some of the more interesting ones include:

• certain.people.are.brilliant – posts made by people being very smart about things, that I want to refer back to.
• all.communities.have.politics – for things about a certain kind of group dynamics issue.
• for.bad.days – we all have bad days. These are links that will reliably make me laugh.
• subjects.[whatever] for everything from folklore to history to science.
• tech.blogging.while.female for discussions of gender and online interaction.

Evernote is the thing I am currently experimenting with for tracking things I want to read/watch/listen to. Periodically, I pull things out of that folder in Instapaper, and drop them into Evernote, where I tag them very specifically. (Tags there include place where they’re set, time period, all sorts of things.) I intentionally dual-process them (review them) because it helps me go “Yeah, nto that interested in that, actually” in a more useful way than just putting things into Evernote in the first place. Also, it’s much faster to drop it into Instapaper many times – I might come across a web page referencing a book title, but not want to actually go search for the Amazon page or other information right then.

In part, it’s a way for me to stay connected with friends: I’m living up here in Maine, and most of my friends aren’t. Hanging out on IM means I . . . → Read More: IM chat]]> I’m spending a lot more time on instant messenger chat than I used to. And I have to admit, I really enjoy it.

In part, it’s a way for me to stay connected with friends: I’m living up here in Maine, and most of my friends aren’t. Hanging out on IM means I spend a lot of downtime idly chatting with one person or another, and yet, I’m at home, with my cat and my knitting, and often also watching something, and my life is good and contented.

I am more of an introvert than I used to be, so I’ve settled into a rhythm here where I spend most of my life going home after work and doing low-key things with online social content, a couple of times going out to do things locally in a given month (movies, events, whatever), and then every couple of months go somewhere else for the weekend or a longer trip. (I need to figure out my next Boston trip, and in March I’m going to Minnesota, and in April I’m going to DC for a conference and a couple of days of vacation on the end. And then I’ll come back and hermit until June or so.)

Part of it is the Big Project: we do a lot of little behind the scenes IM chats to sort out small bits and pieces. And we do larger group chats for major plotting and planning. And since I’m the main repository of documentation keeper for the project, I often get pinged with “Hey, can you hunt up this bit of data for me?” (Which is awesome. I like that.)

Managing chats:

I do almost all of my chats in Gmail itself: sometimes I’ll pop one out into its own window (especially now I’ve moved to the iMac and have screenspace again) but mostly I just have a little row of chats across the bottom of my screen. I’ve previously experimented with Adium, but mostly, Gmail works. I also just downloaded Atlantis, a MUSH client, for a community I occasionally chat in that uses a MUSH as the base.

(The one place I don’t do a lot of chatting is via the iPad: I have tools set up for it, but because multitasking works differently there, I’m very unlikely to have it open unless there’s a specific need. Well, and the iPhone, but that’s because I hate typing on the iPhone keyboard.)

However, there’s two places where things get tricky. One is that searchability of chats is about as complicated (for the project) as email. Lots of common terms and words, not always a lot of unique stuff unless I have something that can pin down a date. On the other hand, that’s about content, not about the form of the information.

The other is that very long chats sometimes error out in Gmail – I’ll occasionally have 300, 400, 500 line chats (especially larger group ones) where I’ll try and open the transcript, and get an error when I try to click on the ‘click here for the whole thing’. (If you get this, what works for me is clicking out of the chat folder into the inbox, back into the chat folder, and then trying to open it again. usually works.)

I keep thinking about some way to index them (which would probably be a spreadsheet and a quick summary of what we discussed) but that would require more actual effort, and, yeah. Let’s admit that’s probably not happening.

So. I have a bunch of email addresses. And a bunch of email. To be precise, I currently have:

So, the first thing that I do with a new machine is set up all those small things that make life manageable. Plus all the individual little touches. Then setting up . . . → Read More: Background tools and basics]]> I spent the last two days watching my computer be a 45 minute drive away according to FedEx, but it turned up this morning!

So, the first thing that I do with a new machine is set up all those small things that make life manageable. Plus all the individual little touches. Then setting up the basics of the dock, and the apps I use most frequently, and then the bookmarks for the browsers. (You can click through for larger versions, and I’ve got closeups of the dock and menu bar below.

Before:

Before

After:

new computer – after

In the dock, you see, from left to right: the finder, Chrome, iTunes, Firefox (which I use mostly for Netflix these days), Spotify, and Scrivener. I’ve changed all of the icons, obviously. On the right side of the dock, you see a sonic screwdriver (for my ‘other useful apps’ folder), and a Tardis key (for my ‘to sort’ file.) And then of course the trash can. As you can see, I decided to set this all up with blues and blacks and grays

(The sun in the upper right corner is Jing, which I use for screenshots. It’s normally faded out.)

In the top menu bar, you see f.lux, jiTouch, Bluetooth, volume, Time Machine, search, FuzzyClock (my clock) and the reminders app.

My first steps:

• Download Chrome so I can have notes handy. (Also, email and chat)
• Do my initial run of major bookmarks I use all the time.
• Download Jing so I can take the screenshots for this post the way I want.
• Move the files for the icon and wallpaper and changes I want.

System preferences: Go into system preferences and set various things. These include:

• Energy settings
• Shortcut settings: I turn most of them off unless I’m going to use them. (It helps if the cat and the keyboard meet up.)
• Dock: Display at the bottom. Set stacks to lists.

Necessary extensions: 

• f.lux is a weird little extension that basically helps you have fewer unwanted effects from screen time – it affects the brightness and color of the light from your screen. I keep mine set on “candle” but there are lots of options.
• I use FuzzyClock instead of my default clock. It also has an option so you can set it to say things like “Go to work” or “Go to bed” at specific times.
• I love my MacBook trackpad, and I got the trackpad for the iMac as well. I use an extension called JiTouch, which lets you assign even more gestures.  The ones I use all the time and that are way easier on my hands include: next/previous tab, open link in new tab, close tab, refresh.

If you share your computer, I warn you that this last one will deeply confuse most people, even if they’re used to using a Mac and a trackpad. I also note that the one thing I cannot retrain my automatic response to when swapping between a Windows machine and a Mac is the scroll direction on the trackpad. (I solve this by using a mouse at work.)

Wallpaper: I’m one of those people who is somewhat finicky about my desktop wallpaper and icons. And I go through periods of changing things up. My current go-to for home use are wallpapers from Vladstudio.com. Right now, I’m attracted to deeply saturated colors, relatively simple designs or things that play with texture, and (unsurprising to anyone who knows me) blues and greens and purples over warmer colours.

Particular favorites (not all in current use, but I was checking for new ones anyway) include:

• Space related: Sun. Constellations. Space wind. Milky way. Solar system. Somewhere 2.
• Scenery: Quiet night. Northern lights. Cathedrals: Florence.
• Seasonal: Where snowflakes are born. Christmas lights. Frosted. (And for the friend reading this who adores penguins: A Small Gift For Christmas).
• Nature: Leaf. Old wood. Planet Earth inversed. Trees with labyrinths. Bound 3. After the rain 2.
• Books and text: The Giddyup Tree and the Bickham Script Tree. Music eater. The Tree of Books. Library. Google Library.
• Abstracts: Motion 4.  Motion 5. Duality. Condensed. Primitive. Blue expression. Underwater.
• Other: Patek Phillipe watch. The flow of time.

For other icons: It is sort of not fair to change icons extensively if you share your machine. I don’t, so I do. (And I do not consider myself bound by the icons designed for a particular program: I sometimes mix and match.)

I collect icons and use a mix, including the defaults, the Flurry sets from IconFactory, folder sets and some of the desktop icons from Marmalade Moon, and CandyBar to do some of the editing. (However, due to changes in how Apple handles things, CandyBar is now free but unsupported: read more at the link.)

And then bits and pieces from other places, including the IconFactory Doctor Who sets (one and two) and Indiana Jones (who doesn’t want a Grail diary icon?) Other places worth checking out include Iconpaper, We Love Icons and Deviant Art (look in the Customization -> Icons -> Dock Icons category and then search for things that amuse you.) This Mac.Appstorm.net roundup has some good places to start, too. I often find creators I like, and then browse their other stuff.

I also have a number of things dowloaded from Kate England (especially her folder icons): she is moving on to other projects, but you can (until the end of January) download her archives.

Set up the dock: The Apple default is to put lots and lots of things on your dock. I do not like this default, and remove anything I do not always have open or use daily. Things I use regularly but not all the time get an alias that lives in the Other Apps folder on the dock (so they’re a click or two away) Things I do not use often live in the Applications folder. I have not yet moved all my apps over (just the ones I use all the time), but I’ll go into that once I’ve got everything set up again.

Right now, you see my basic dock, which is: Finder, Chrome, Spotify, Firefox, iTunes, Scrivener, the holding folder for my ‘other apps’ (currently just includes Jing, which is my go-to for screenshots), and my ‘to sort’ folder where I stick anything that’s cluttering up other folders (downloads, the desktop, etc.) until I get around to sorting through it. I pick icons that go with my

Set up the immediate bookmarks: The places I go all the time, basically. Gmail. (Actually, this was very easy: Chrome was set up to sync)

I am the Information Technology librarian at a small liberal-arts-college-model campus of the University of Maine system. Part of my job is “Make the technology in the library work”, but part of it is “Be aware of tech things, so we can do awesome stuff with them eventually.” This means that being familiar . . . → Read More: My geeky life : the tasks]]> Professionally speaking: 

I am the Information Technology librarian at a small liberal-arts-college-model campus of the University of Maine system. Part of my job is “Make the technology in the library work”, but part of it is “Be aware of tech things, so we can do awesome stuff with them eventually.” This means that being familiar with a bunch of random things, various ways to do stuff, big topics of various kinds is to my benefit. (Even if I weren’t interested, which I am.) We use GoogleApps, Microsoft, and I’ve got the full Adobe Suite on my computer. Plus a wide range of other bits and pieces.

My home tech life involves a lot of the following: (I will come back and talk about all of these in detail later, promise.)

• Email. Individual emails. Discussion list emails. The many and varied reminders and “someone left a comment on your post” and so on emails that fill our lives these days. I have 7 different email addresses that pour into a single Gmail account, because I regularly access my email from 3 different devices, and it’s not uncommon for there to be about 100 threads in email in a given day for me (many of which are skim + delete)
• Reading stuff on the Web: I use Chrome for most things these days, along with Instapaper, Pinboard, and a few other things to help me manage it. I’m active on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, and one web forum these days, with periodic pokes at other things. (I have a Facebook account, but spend very little time on there, and I keep wishing I could make Twitter work with my brain.)
• The massive online collaborative project previously mentioned (we do most stuff via email, Gdocs, and chat, plus the actual posts that make it up, which are on Dreamwidth.)
• IM chat (which I do through Gmail, though I’m contemplating a different client now I’ll have more screen space.) I usually have a couple open with various friends throughout the evening.
• Writing: currently a bunch of non-public stuff, but I am about to dive into the long-term non-fiction project again, really. I use Scrivener, which I adore and will talk about at length later. Also SimpleNote
• Watching streaming media – Netflix, Hulu, etc. – generally while knitting. (Depending on my other plans for the evening, this is usually 1-3 hours most nights, with other online stuff, IMing, chatting, etc. interspersed. Because I like making progress on my knitting.) While on the topic, I use the iPad for patterns and the iPhone for row counting. (We’re just going to admit there’s going to be a “tech I use for knitting” post in here, right?)
• Music: both my iTunes library (for permanent stuff) and Spotify (which I use primarily for playlists at work, trying things out that I might like, and for topic-specific playlists where I don’t want to invest tons of money in the subject yet. I listen to podcasts via the iPhone and headphones while doing household cleaning and related chores.

I am much more on the ‘using tech to do other things’ side of the line rather than ‘play with the tech for the tech’s sake’, but I have periodic splurges of doing bits of graphic design work, CSS and various web design work, playing with audio files, and very occasionally dipping my toe into learning to code.

Things I’m mulling over in particular:

• a suitable non-Cloud backup of essential email (there’s a bunch of stuff that if I lost it, meh. There’s a bunch of stuff I’d actually love to archive just in case I ever need it, but get it out of my Gmail so my searches are more manageable. Finding a low-demand method of the above is tricky. Since any practical step on this first involves sorting through about 1o,000 email messages in archive, I keep putting it off. Since it only gets worse the more I do that, I should stop doing that.)
• backing up things currently living on GDocs more seamlessly.
• continuing to improve my workflow for ‘here is interesting link’ -> ‘let me put that somewhere I can find it’
• a better workflow for reading sheet music on the iPad (and playing from it!)
• some general usability tools
• better recipe management
• doing more with Evernote (in particular for ‘books I want to read’ type stuff.)
• a better schedule for doing app updates, podcast/etc. updates, etc. on the iDevices. (The current one is “whenever I vaguely remember”, which can be annoying.

Seasonal: