DevonThink Resurgent

There has never been a better time to get into DevonThink and Tinderbox. Winterfest 2016 is on, and you can get 25% reductions on both those apps, as well as a number of other really useful pieces of software like Scrivener, TaskPaper, Bookends, Scapple and PDFPen.

If you’re unsure if DevonThink is something you’d be interested in, they have a 150-hours-of-use free trial for all their different apps. MacPowerUsers podcast just released a useful overview of the current state of the app — an interview with Stuart Ingram. ScreenCastsOnline also published the first part of a trilogy of video learning materials on DevonThink.

If you’re a Mac user who is perhaps uncomfortable with Evernote’s privacy policies or just seeking to get more out of the data you’ve stored on your hard drive, give DevonThink a try.

Seeking Python Code Mentor

My initial foray into the world of coding began earlier this year. I’m now at the point where I am at the least cognisant of the major structures and features of this language. If you give me some Python (or Javascript) code I can most likely start to figure out what’s going on.

I’ve wanted to make progress on a small Python side-project involving a front-facing website, a Python application hooked up to a database (most likely PostgresQL since that’s what I know).

I have been stuck for a few weeks, not knowing how to move forward and unwilling to commit to any one of several options in case it turns out to be a dead end. I want to keep learning, and not keep getting stuck so that long time periods pass between attempts to tackle this (very small) project.

So I’m looking for someone who has made web apps and is familiar with Python and very simple databases with whom I can talk my project through. I’d still like to code it all myself, but I need someone who might have thirty to sixty minutes every now and then to point me in the direction of tools or libraries that I might not have heard of. I’m aware that a lot is discoverable via Google and StackOverflow, but nothing beats not having to explain myself and my project from scratch every time I ask a question.

I know there are a lot of developers with experience and an eagerness to give back to the community by helping beginners, so consider this my call for your help. My project is a tool to help language learners, moreover, so your help will have an effect beyond just me improving in my coding skills.

If that's you, and you're willing to spend up to an hour per week helping me improve, please contact me on Twitter or via email. If you know someone who might be interested, please share this blog post with them. Location doesn't matter if you're comfortable sharing code during a video call.

Thank you!

P.S. You can read some blogposts where I discuss my coding progress, and you can also find me on Github.

Knot 3: Encryption, Race and Tunnels

More focus this week on finishing a big project, so less time for books or outside reading, but nevertheless some articles to recommend.

Articles

• Ursula Lindsey - “Funds Cut for Prominent Arabic Language Program” (Al-Fanar Media)

An extremely short-sighted decision. The CASA programme has been a really important source of support over its forty-nine years. This is a decision that affects American students of Arabic, but we shouldn’t forget that it’s symptomatic of how language studies are treated elsewhere.

• Rosalind Adams - “Intake: Locked On The Psych Ward” (Buzzfeed)

Anyone who still says Buzzfeed doesn’t do important reporting just isn’t reading. This piece looks at the way a for-profit system works to the disadvantage of patients’ welfare and the healthcare system in general. A must-read for an American audience, and for Europeans / Brits as a portent of what probably is headed our way.

• Bron Gondwana - “Why we don't offer PGP” (Fastmail Blog)

PGP has been much discussed (more than usual, at any rate) this past week. This post offers a useful overview of some of the things that PGP can help protect against, versus some of the places where trust in what it can do are misplaced. Pair this article with Bjarni Rúnar’s “Too Cool for PGP” to cover your bases.

• Annalee Newitz - “Evernote apologizes for its new privacy policy” (Ars Technica)

A useful corrective from Ars Technica (one of the best places to go for informed reporting on science and technology) about Evernote’s recent policy changes relating to privacy. The important point to take away from all this is that Evernote probably isn’t where you want to be storing your notes if you care about your privacy. Try DevonThink instead for a far saner approach to encryption and storage.

• Amal el-Mohtar - “'Iraq + 100' Is Painful, But Don't Look Away” (NPR)

This review of a new collection of stories seems (from the review, at any rate) like it is worth reading. Imaginative and creative responses to events on this scale are, I think, the kinds of things that will ultimately survive far longer than the political analysis and commentary that so far has dominated the discussion of what happened in Iraq. I look forward to reading this book.

• Ryan Holliday - “Want to Really Make America Great Again? Stop Reading the News.” (Observer)

You can ignore the focus on US politics and still take away the broader argument, that following the day-to-day news cycle is (for the broad majority of us) unnecessary and probably actually detrimental to our health and ability to do work that really matters (to us or others). A useful reminder.

• Laura Reiley - “Farm to Table: At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction” (Tampa Bay Times)

A great piece of investigative work, Reiley shows how a lot of the promises of the farm-to-table movement in California are false claims. This piece is the first in a series that is worth reading in its entirety.

• Roger Cohen - “Broken Men in Paradise” (New York Times)

This is an important reminder of the realities of life for those refugees refused entry to Australia following harrowing journeys across the seas. Authorities in the places they are sent to operate with seemingly little restraint or care for their wellbeing.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates — “My President Was Black: A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next” (The Atlantic)

This piece seems to capture a moment. Based on several interviews with Obama as well as his usual command of the context that explains this moment, this is a (long) must-read.

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus - “The Great A.I. Awakening” (New York Times)

Important from perhaps a different angle, this is a long overview of the ways so-called artificial intelligence is poised to change our world. It views the transformation through the lens of developments in Google’s online translation service. It offers context and explanation to two different approaches to machine intelligence and the different algorithmic decisions being made. If you’re interested in technology and the ways that computers will continue to be embedded in our daily lives, you won’t want to miss this one.

Books

This week I read Lynne Kelly’s “The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments” in preparation for an upcoming podcast episode interview. Dr Kelly makes a convincing case for how old archeological sites (like Stonehenge) were probably used as forms of memory aids to recall information important for local communities. The book is best accompanied by a glance at a truly fascinating series of memory experiments that she’s been working on. I also read Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me”, a very useful and sobering reminder of the ways that society works against women, whether directly through violence or other perhaps less visible means.

Films / TV

I wrote yesterday about “Into Eternity” (trailer here), one of my favourite documentaries of the past year. It’s filmed with an idiosyncratic approach to detail and atmosphere. I am ignorant about where Finnish director Michael Madsen gets his influences from, but I certainly look forward to seeing more. Just today I saw another documentary, “13th”, which focuses on the ways that racial inequality has manifested itself in the United States, specifically in the prison system. This is a powerful statement, particularly for American viewers, I imagine, and it made me think about the ways that similar trends are to be found back in Europe.

Into Eternity: the construction of Onkalo's tunnels

I watched a gripping documentary this evening on the construction of a tunnel / radioactive waste burial facility. Onkalo is located on the west coast of Finland and is designed to store the country’s national nuclear waste until it is no longer harmful to life. This amounts to around 100,000 years.

If you think that human life has been around for a very small fraction of that (see the images above for a sense of the scale), and most of the designed ‘things’ have never lasted that long, this makes the design and implementation of such a storage facility a really huge proposition.

The tunnel and related storage areas will only be completed post-2100, but the design team take into account things like their assumption that there Earth will be due another ice age in around 60,000 years from now. They consider the various possibilities of new or different civilisations coming and going.

Into Eternity is a fascinating documentary. Find it online if you get the chance.

Broken Pots

Kintsugi or kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of rebuilding a broken pot or other ceramic in a way so as to make it more beautiful than it was before. This is sometimes done with gold or silver, or other materials to join the broken pieces together.

There are some great images of this if you search Google Images.

Anab Jan also has written something on the way that repairing bikes with a kintsugi approach means the history of repair remains visible in the bike even after the repair is finished.

Notification Zero

As I reach the final stages of a major project, I’ve been saying ‘no’ more often. I’ve been turning down work, conferences and all the little things that take away from my ability to focus for hours at a stretch.

The other day I realised that my usual clampdown on notifications on my various digital devices wasn’t as tight as I ideally prefer, so I turned them all off. (You can read how to turn off iOS notifications here, and Android notifications here.) I’m writing down the various parts of this in case it’s useful to someone else in the midst of a big project.

In practice, this means the following:

• no badges on apps on my screen. (The software on your phone is designed to be addictive, to make you spend more time using it. I already live my life in black-and-white so that’s a start, but removing app badges is the next step.)
• permanently set to airplane mode. (This is easy for me as my work or life doesn’t ever really involve receiving phone calls, but it removes the chance of business / telemarketing distractions.)
• all other apps’ notification permissions turned off. (If someone messages me on WhatsApp or Signal, I will never ever get a notification about it. My phone won’t make a noise, nor will there be any badge showing that there are people who tried to get in touch with me. The only way I’ll ever see if anyone wrote to me on a messaging app is to open up that app. I do this perhaps once a day, sometimes only a couple of times a week, but I’ve conditioned myself to this level of withdrawal over the past year or two).
• Email permanently disabled on my phone. (Email is the big focus killer. If I generalise, it amounts to a box of other people’s requests on my time. So I have no way to receive email on my phone. I have things set up that I can send email (i.e. I’ve installed the SMTP login details but not enabled IMAP), but no way to receive it.)

I have a fixed schedule for things like checking email: two windows from 12-1pm and 5-6pm. Outside those windows, my email is disabled (using Freedom) so there’s no way for me to access it. On my laptop, a whole bunch of other sites whose addresses are easy to type and get lost on, I pre-empt my worst self by just disabling them during the day. Problem solved.

Whenever I write a post on this blog, it auto-posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Tumblr. While the temptation might be to check to see who has commented on it and so on, by locking myself out on a specific schedule, this means I can choose to look at these things at the end of the day, if I really need/want to.

Daddybot

I just finished listening to a fascinating episode of Nerds on Draft podcast. Gabe and Jeff, the usual cohosts, spoke with Erik Hess about how he set up a telepresence robot (as pictured) in his house while he was deployed halfway around the world.

It’s worth listening to the whole podcast to get a sense of how this worked out. Erik talks of the initial weirdness of being present in his house in the US while actually being in Qatar. It was fascinating to learn how quickly that turned into the new baseline — i.e. to his children, it became as if he was actually there.

For families or situations where parents have to be away from children on any kind of regular basis — or whatever particular configuration your life takes — it seems that this is a really intriguing idea. It certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s also impossible to get back that time with your children either.

The Two Books Every Intermediate Arabic Student Needs to Read

In the beginning, the study of Arabic is about coming to terms with how the language works. You start to grapple with the diglossia, with the verb system (roots everywhere!) and start working your way through one of the big textbooks that most programmes prescribe.

After a few months, you want to start communicating with people, but every attempt is met with some kind of difficulty or failure. Either you’re not speaking the right dialect, or you’re not attempting to speak using dialect at all. You study a bit more, and you’re finally able to communicate with your Lebanese or Tunisian friend, but the moment you come across someone speaking a different dialect variant you’re back at square one.

What’s the solution to this problem? Do students of Arabic have to learn every dialect? Thankfully, no, though you’ll want to get a basic familiarity in some of the main broad patterns that different dialect groups employ.

This is where the good people at Lingualism come in, and their two-volume Arabic Voices series. (Get Volume 1 and Volume 2 from Amazon here, or order direct from Lingualism).

These two books contain 57 monologues covering the whole Arab world and North Africa. You can learn about Qat from a Yemeni, identity from a Lebanese man, or what it’s like to date as a young Tunisian woman. To get a taste for the content of the material, everything is available for free on Lingualism’s YouTube channel. Here’s Wasem, for example, talking about the life of Arabs living in Israel:

The great thing about this book is that every monologue comes with a wide variety of exercises and supporting materials to help you get the most out of the language used.

You start off with some basic comprehension questions alongside some of the key vocabulary, then you dive into some of the specifics that are unique to that particular dialect. Here’s one of the exercises where you’re supposed to draw lines connecting the English to the Egyptian and to the Fusha / ‘Modern Standard’ translations.

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I’m not super keen on textbooks that deal too much in translations, but if you know how to use them, this is a real goldmine. I’ll usually put one or two of what seem like key phrases or expressions into Anki to memorise. The exercises are followed by a full transcript in Arabic and English translation. Here’s one example:

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Some of the monologues also include grammar notes at the end if something particularly interesting is worth noting. Here’s an example of that ‘focus’ material.

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Once you’ve gone through all the exercises, listened to the video to figure out what the various new phrases might mean, you can start covering up the Arabic part of the transcript to see if you can reproduce parts of what was said on the basis of the English translation. This is hard work, but incredibly rewarding.

If you want to get a full overview for how the language that Arabs speak day-to-day, these two books are the resource for you. What’s more, the monologues are short enough that you can probably blaze through the content of both books in two to four months. I don’t know of any other one-stop-shop where you can gain familiarity with the linguistic variety of the Arab-speaking world, plus learn a thing or two about people’s lives and culture(s).

[Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about the different resources available to intermediate-level Arabic students. I’ve just finished writing an eBook and electronic resource for people at that stage in their learning. For more information and discount offers, sign up to the mailing list here. To enquire about one-on-one language coaching sessions, click here.]

Highlights + DevonThink = Pretty Great

I’m late to the Highlights party, but I’m glad I got here.

Like many readers of this blog, I get sent (and occasionally read) a lot of PDFs. In fact, I did a quick search in DevonThink, and I am informed that I have 52,244 PDFs in my library. These are a mix of reports, archived copies of websites, scanned-and-OCRed photos and a thousand-and-one things in between.

Thus far, my workflow has been to read PDFs on my Mac. Any notes I took while reading the file were written up manually in separate files. I would laboriously copy and paste whatever text snippet or quotation I wanted to preserve along with its page reference. These would be fed into DevonThink’s AI engine and magic would happen.

Now, post-Highlights-installation, my workflow is much less laborious. I can take highlights in-app, export all the quotations as separate text or HTML files and have have DevonThink go do its thing without all the intermediary hassle. If you’re  a professional researcher or writer using DevonThink as your notes database — and quite frankly, if not, why not? — the Highlights app will probably please you.

Knot 2: Translation as Trauma, Taxis and Artificial Intelligence

This week I fell back in love with a piece of software (DevonThink Pro Office) while reorganising and refreshing two dozen archival databases. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on The Taliban Reader and I’ve made new strides of progress on the slackline.

Articles

• Lina Mounzer - “War in Translation: Giving Voice to
  the Women of Syria” (Lithub)

A deeply affecting account of the author’s work as a translator of stories from Syria, how language mediates and obfuscates the terrifying realities of daily life, and how even translation and re-communication gives rise to secondary trauma of a kind. If you read nothing else this week, make it this article.

• Hamzah Nassif - “Understanding Amman’s Yellow Taxi Dilemma: a Different Take on the Government’s Ongoing Battle With Ride-Hailing Apps” (The Black Iris)

I wrote about Amman’s taxis in my Arabic-language newsletter, and this (slightly old) piece helps answer some of my questions as to why taxi drivers in Jordan’s capital behave as they do. It also makes a strong case for changing the status quo. Taxi drivers seem barely able to make a living under current circumstances, and passengers aren’t getting much of a service.

• David Meyer - “The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal” (Gigaom)

As someone who has just bought a couple of new .io domains, I was unsettled to learn the backstory, how something dating back to the early nineteenth century’s colonial expansion (in this case, to the Chagos islands) has a direct descendent in the modern age. I’m most likely not going to return the domains I bought, but I probably won’t buy anything new from the .io set.

• Andrew Ng - “What Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Do Right Now” (Harvard Business Review)

There’s nothing especially new in this overview piece by one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, both in terms of innovation and education. But it’s nevertheless a useful summary of some of the unique features of AI and machine learning, as well as some of the things it is less good at.

• Richard Benton - “Language hacking ≠ language love” (Loving Languages)

Richard’s posts are excellent at returning us to the reasons why it’s worth learning languages — to connect, to be useful perhaps, and not to simply chalk up notches on one’s belt. This recent posts is a challenge to the thankfully-less-omnipresent online polyglot community. Recommended if you’ve ever studied more than one second-language.

Books

This week, I reread Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Looking into my Goodreads list, I noted that I gave it a two-star rating when I first read it a few years back. Now, perhaps I was in a better place to absorb some of the lessons, but I gave it four stars. I’ll be writing a longer review for the blog here of some of the more contrarian or unexpected lessons. I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me alongside Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* (as audiobook).

Films / TV

I’m working my way through Channel 4’s Humans, albeit painfully slowly. It was recommended on a recent podcast as a possible vision for what a future with humanoid AI machines might look like: not as different as we might imagine, but still different enough to provoke some real societal challenges.

Nutritional Density

I wrote a few weeks back about how fundamentals are often superior to hacks. It seems it’s a useful mental model to employ as I’ve encountered various other expressions of more or less the same thing.

In the context of food and nutrition science, the call for nutritional density has become commonplace. This either takes the form of warnings against eating ‘empty’ food — i.e. foods with little broad-spectrum nutritional value even if they pack a caloric punch — or at the other end it is the Kale brigade.

I think there are a lot worse things we could do than strive for nutritional density in dietary choices, and I’ve also been thinking more about how it probably applies to the kinds of information we consume. This could mean choosing books that are perhaps older, but are less ephemeral or have stood the test of time. For language-learning, perhaps it means really diving deep in one text to really suck the marrow from each and every sentence (if you’ll excuse the carnivorous image). I’ve been slowly weaning myself off the output of social and non-social media for this very reason, though perhaps now I’ve only started to gain the vocabulary to describe what I was doing. In any case, food for thought for a Thursday evening.

The Taliban on the Clintons (May 2000)

The US election is over; my work on materials deriving from the Taliban Sources Project continues. As I waded through the archives -- released in book form and online this coming spring -- I found this little gem. Published on May 22, 2000, in Shariat newspaper (the flagship publication that ran throughout the years of Taliban rule), this is a commentary piece on Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It ran with the headline, "Friend" in their op-ed section of the day:

According to reports Mrs Hillary Clinton is the candidate for US senate. 

Since long Hillary has been trying to fulfil this wish. But on one hand the accomplishment of her wish is a success for her, on the other hand it is a lethal blow to Mr. Clinton. As president of the country his days are numbered. After seven months he will no more be the president of the country. 

After the end of his tenure as president he must leave the Whitehouse. After his retirement from the post presidency the Whitehouse will no more be the place of entertainment for him and Monika. But Hillary is also not a weak lady who is totally dependent on Mr. Clinton. During his presidency she was continuously ignored because of Monika. 

Nowadays sometimes Mrs. Clinton is appears in very colourful poses beside vice president Al Gore in the media. One cannot blame her. She suffered a lot because of the Clinton and Monica affair. 

Our topic was her candidature for the senate. Now she spends considerable time in New York in order to increase the number of her voters and supporters. In her absence Mr. Clinton has to live totally alone. 

Their twenty year old daughter, Chelsea, is busy with her studies at the university. In front of the prosecutor he denied any relationship with Monika. That is why she is also no more interested to revive the old friendship with him. 

For a long time the American journalist were wondering how Mr. Clinton would manage to deal the days and nights of total loneliness. According to Reuter’s news agency finally these questions were also heard by Mr. Clinton himself. When he was departing in a helicopter from New York to Washington, Hillary demonstrated a very cold behaviour towards him. She left him alone. When the journalists asked Mr. Clinton about his loneliness, he replied that he would no more miss his wife Hilary, because he found a new very loyal friend who stays and sleeps all the time with him. He told that his new friend was his dog who was called Buddy. He further explained that he enjoys every moment of his life in the company of Buddy. 

The journalist fully believed what Mr. Clinton told them. However, for further validity he quoted the former US president Henry Truman who once said “if a person wants to have a loyal friend in Washington he must find a dog, which remains loyal in all circumstances and never leave his owner alone”. 

Mr. Clinton prefers his dog, Buddy, over his wife, Hilary. Because his dog is an animal which is free of all human characterises but always remain fully loyal to his owner. It does not matter for the dog whether his owner the US president or the Whitehouse gatekeeper. He fulfils his loyalty to the extreme end. This kind of loyalty is neither in the capacity of Hilary, Monica nor any other western lady.

This piece didn't make the cut for the print anthology / reader, so I am publishing the translation here in full.

Knot 1: Solitary Confinement & Digital Security

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature on this blog. Knot will link to recent things that I’ve been reading. It will include short articles as well as books and other things on the internet.

Articles

• Martin Garbus — “America’s Invisible Inferno” (NYRB)

This NYRB review of ‘Hell Is A Very Small Place’ covers the use of solitary confinement in the American prison system. It ends with unearned optimism, but nevertheless is a useful reminder of the importance of the issue.

• Mary Catherine O’Connor — “The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence” (The Guardian)

Interesting short piece on the use of machine learning combined with data science competition site, Kaggle, to try to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fishing inspections. Hardly a day passes when a new initiative like this is launched, merging data science and crowdsourced solutions. I look forward to being able to contribute (one day in the hopefully-not-so-distant future).

• Meeri Kim — “How a researcher used big data to beat her own ovarian cancer” (Washington Post)

More data science, though this is more at the N=1 edge of things than the previous fishery data story. The more data we are able to access and generate, the more there will be need for ways of analysing and processing these complex interactions. A lot of money is being invested in finding ways to automate this for non-technical users, though I imagine we’re still a little way away from that utopia.

• Check Point — “More Than 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan” (CheckPoint Blog)

I’m not quite sure why this isn’t a bigger story. I’ve long believed that anything stored by Google (in particular, emails) will at some point be leaked in a hack or by some disgruntled employee. This latest hack is pretty close to that scenario, with the caveat that we don’t know what was taken. Takeaway: move away from the Google ecosystem where possible.

• Scott Gilbertson — “HTTPS is not a magic bullet for Web security” (Ars Technica)

This is a few months old but offers a useful overview on HTTPS technology, what it can help with (and what it is less useful for). The headline is actually a bit deceptive since the article seems to make a strong case for the use of HTTPS.

• Shane Parrish — "The Simple Plan To Read More” (Farnham Street / Personal Growth)

I’ve long ago taken this advice on board, but it’s a useful reminder. I enjoy reading, and I enjoy the diversity that comes from reading widely and broadly, so keeping up the pace and seeing it more as a habit to be done most days is, to my mind, the right way of looking at it.

Books

I read three books this past week. Jim Klopman’s Balance Is Power was my easy introduction to some of the science behind why it is useful to train balance in a focused way as a skill.

I finished the second volume in Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy, The Story of a New Name, though I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first. I suspect I’ll have to return to it in a few weeks after the dust has settled.

Finally, I devoured Paul Kalanathi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a beautifully written exploration of death, medicine, how we go through all these things as people, how illness affects not only the body but the mind and the spirit as well. It reminded me of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which covered similar themes albeit with less of an intimately tragic outcome. I highly recommend giving When Breath Becomes Air a read.