Why I Make

June 21st, 2016

Adam Savage, one of the hosts of Mythbusters is in Sydney at the moment, so I looked through his tweets and found this video he stared in. Adam starts off by saying that making, is creating something that didn’t exist in this world. That is right, we as humans have an incredible ability to, literally, make anything possible. We can be all artsy and draw a painting, shoot a movie, compose a music piece, or we could be scientific and discover an element, calculate a physical value, compute code, etc…

I would like to say why I make. I make because I want to change the world. As corny as it sounds, I want to leave the world a better place then I found it. I want to use my skills to make peoples lives better. My skills are primarily focused around technology, but I believe that I have the ability to improve on things that most people would not care about, mainly UI and UX. There are designers out there that create great user experiences, but a lot of our interactions with technology are clunky, rough and just annoying at times. So I think it is important for people, that stop and think about the little things to exist, so that the people that don’t, have a much smoother experience and continue doing what they are best at.

As Apple said in their 2013 WWDC video:

If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? We start to confuse convenience with joy, abundance with choice…

I think is where I started to feel like I can make a difference if only I slowed down and looked around at what is around me.

I wish that everyone would continue making, would continue creating, would continue doing what they can to make this world better for everyone.

Spotlight Search

June 19th, 2016

If you use keyboard shortcuts, macros and various other workflow automation techniques, then you might consider yourself a power user. However if you have never used Spotlight on macOS and iOS, you are missing out on a great productivity improvement. So what is Spotlight? It is the universal search implementation on Apple platforms. It can search your folders, files, information from within apps like contacts, mail, and even suggestions from the web. But I guess the most used function of Spotlight is to quickly open the application you need. So instead of looking of looking for that one app in Launchpad on your Mac, or numerous screens of your iPhone/iPad, you can just simply launch Spotlight search (cmd+space on macOS, swipe down on home screen on iOS) and start typing the name of the item you are looking for. This can greatly speed up your workflow and just help you find what you are looking for.

Now that you know the basics of Spotlight, here are some advanced tips and tricks (on macOS), which I learned from this article:

  • Cmd + D:  View search term in the built in dictionary app (opens the app).
  • Cmd + L:   Quickly view the term in the dictionary (via Spotlight UI).
  • Cmd + B:   Do a web search in your default browser (opens browser window).
  • Cmd + R:   Open the highlighted results folder in the app which it is in and reveal it in Preview.
  • Cmd + O:   Open the highlighted result in the default program for that filetype.
  • Cmd + I:     Show information about the highlighted result.
  • Hold Cmd:  Show the full path to the highlighted result at the bottom of the spotlight window.

Hope these shortcuts help you improve your workflow and make your life just a bit more productive.

The Apple vs FBI debate

March 16th, 2016

You have probably heard about this case, but for those that haven’t: the FBI have ordered Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow the FBI to access a terrorists smartphone in hopes of finding some valuable clues to the case and possible links to other terrorists. What they affectively want is for Apple to compromise their own security “for this one case” and then “un-compromise” it again. Let that sink in.

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Das Upgrade

June 28th, 2015

DasKeyboard 4 Mac

Ever since coming back from Japan, I have been upgrading my life. I got a new apartment, a whole lot of great furniture, new job (upgraded version of old job), new clothes, a 5k iMac, and now some more shiny new things. For years now I have been longing for batter typing experience – a mechanical keyboard. But since I was going to Japan and then in Japan, I could never really get one, cause they are heavy and bulky. Fast track to the beginning of the month. My WoW Cataclysm gaming mouse, which served me well for 5 years, has started to show signs of death, it may not be dead yet, but definitely breathing its last breaths, so I started searching for a worthy replacement.

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DuckDuckGo

May 12th, 2015

duckduckgo

A few days ago, my sempai Ruben wrote up this little blog post about DuckDuckGo and it got me wondering wether I should give it another go.

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine similar to Google or Bing, but has one feature that all the others lack – privacy. With Google, Yahoo, Bing and pretty much all the other big name search engines, you get no privacy… at all. Everything you search is saved in some form to either be used for marketing, add targeting, search predictions, etc. But ultimately these companies called data about you, and then sell this data (sell you) to advertisers. Thats how they make money, thats their business model. With DDG, thats not the case, they don’t track you (well at least they say the don’t). But thats not the only good factors about DDG. The site has customisation options, a region switch, ! lookup operators, and other neat features, which I never knew I wanted, but am used to now.

Back when Apple released OSX10.10 Yosemite and iOS8, they added an option to make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Safari. Thats when I tried it for the first time. It was a good experience I might say, but ultimately I ended up going back to Google as my primary search engine, when DDG failed to find results for relatively simple searches.

Now though after a good year, I think I will give it another shot. I have moved everything of my Gmail, I have pretty much cleared my Google+ and the only things left in GDrive is collaboration folders for uni group work. I am not quite sure wether I am ready to give up Google Search, but I will definitely give DDG a go for the next few weeks, and if it grows on me, I’ll stick to it.

Of course I don’t recommend that you all go out there and change your search engines to DDG and change your habits, but as an innovative and forward thinking person as I believe myself to be, I will seek the new solutions to the problems that we have been facing for years; the alternatives to established concepts; I will rebel against the norm and embrace that which is new and (arguably) superior. Long live the startups, long live the community.

Photos

April 9th, 2015

Today Apple released updates for both their desktop and mobile operating systems. Please welcome OSX 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3. These new updates bring a lot of bug fixes, new emoji and most importantly the new Photos app for OS X and iCloud Photo Library. Now all my photos will be in synch, but I will still keep Lightroom for all the DSLR pics that I snap.

To celebrate, here is a photo of the sunset over Rhodes from a day ago. I’m of to bed, as tomorrow the iWatch is up for display at the Apple stores around Sydney and I must take a look at this new piece of technology!

Red Sunset at Rhodes

This is an unedited photo captured on my iPhone 5s at 6pm on the 8th of April.

iPhone 6 and the Watch

September 10th, 2014

iPhone6

Yesterday Apple announced the new generation iPhone and they had one more thing to say. The new iPhone comes in 2 models the iPhone6 and the 6+ with 4.7′ and 5.5′ screens respectively. They got a spec bump over the previous generation and a new slimmer design. Thats pretty much it. For features Apple introduced Pay, a service which will replace all your credit cards and allow you to pay with your iPhone using NFC. That’s awesome, but only available in the US for now.

Then came the big news, Apple announced their first wearable – the Watch. The smart watch field is something new to Apple and they decided that now would be the perfect time to try to make one. And they did, and its pretty. Read all about it on their website, they can describe it much better then I can.

Watch

Though I would like to say, I would like to buy both the phone and the watch, the iPhone 6 is not worth it without Pay and Australia doesn’t have it yet. And the watch is still in its first generation, coming out in Jan or Feb next year. Maybe its worth waiting for the iWatch 2, which will be thinner and better.

The hype for September 9th

September 5th, 2014

AppleCountdown

We all knew it was coming, but we probably have no idea how little know, and what to expect. I am of course talking about the September 9th Apple Keynote. Every year Apple has held a Keynote around this time in September to introduce their new hardware, more specifically new iPhones. We (by we I mean all the denizens of the internet and beyond) were all guessing that this year won’t be different. Oh boy, were we wrong. Well I can’t say for a fact yet, but come September 10th 2-4am Japan time, and I will be able to say that we were.

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The notebook people love.

July 23rd, 2014

MacBookAirSticker

Apple just released a new ad showing their MacBook lineup. But not like other tech companies, they did not focus on the tech specs, or trying to explain how why their computer is superior to the competition, no. They just showed up how people, most likely young people, decorate their laptops with decals (vinyls, stickers). Simple message: our laptop is hip, our laptop is popular with teenagers and students, cause they can be creative.

And thats exactly why I love Apple.

Here is the video: Stickers

Numbers and Budgets

March 18th, 2014

Numbers

My new years resolution was to be more organised and get more control over my money. And the one thing that helped me achieve this goal was the App – Numbers.

Even though I masterly avoided using any Microsoft software throughout university so far, ever since I started working, I was required to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Mainly when dealing with numbers and calculations, I was told to use Excel, even though I have never used it in my life (never had the need so to say). Well That help me get an understanding of how spreadsheets work, but to be honest, it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Of course many people will argue that the functionality of Excel is all that matters, but alas no, if the design is bad, then I don’t feel I want to use the application any more then I have to.

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