Have a coffee grinder that drops the ground coffee into a glass container? Does the ground coffee stick due to static electricity causing it to fly everywhere when you try to dump it into another container?
Grind your beans, then rub the outside of the glass container with a dryer sheet.
BOOM.
“The No. 1 reason for our growth is our people, and I would attribute a lot of that to our hiring. It costs a lot more in work and time to have to replace people,” he says.
Spending an insane amount of time on your hiring process isn’t what makes a hiring decision good; it’s what makes hiring managers feel good about making a decision that involves a lot of unknowns and ambiguity. You can see it in the language used in the quote above. It’s still entirely possible to make someone run the gauntlet and end up with a charlatan.
Also, it borders on cruelty. It furthers the dehumanizing nature of the modern workplace where you’re a resource, not a person. Interviews like this are comparable to stress-testing a new piece of equipment before signing a contract with its manufacturer. If it holds under stress, we’ll buy it.
It.
A thing. Not a person. To be used until it breaks and we have to buy another thing to replace the one that broke.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” – Palm CEO Ed Colligan, commenting on then-rumored Apple iPhone, 16 Nov 2006
“They’d better think carefully if they want to get into the hard-core manufacturing,” he said of Apple. “We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.”
Yup. I’m sure that can’t possibly be harder than building microelectronics.
Someone should show this guy the aluminum carving process used to make the unibody MacBook enclosure.
Hawkeye 16
What does this tell you about Google, Yahoo, and Facebook’s stance on privacy? And what does it say about Apple’s?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that, if you’re a nerd with a smartphone, there are likely a number of apps on your device that are there because they’re more cool or trendy than they are useful. Perhaps they’re purely aspirational–you’ll use them one day when you’re a better person.
I’ve been thinking about this lately while examining a few of my habits and trying out some simplified approaches to how I use my devices. I quickly discovered that I don’t need a complicated text editor, an RSS reader, or a dedicated read-later service on my iPhone.
As part of this self-examination, I’ve started to back away from social services like Twitter, and I’ve cut back on how much news I read. This led me to remove most of my RSS subscriptions from my Feed Wrangler account.
In the end, I had so few subscriptions that keeping my smart streams (which is Feed Wrangler parlance for folders) made no sense. Everything fit into one bucket.
Around this time, my friend Sam mentioned he had been giving Safari’s Shared Links a try. I had forgotten all about this feature. It can pull in links from Twitter and from RSS feeds. I moved my RSS subscriptions into Shared Links, and it’s working fantastically for me as a replacement for Feed Wrangler and Unread.
Score: -1 service, -1 app
Once I started using Shared Links, it made sense to give Reading List a try as a replacement for Instapaper. Having everything in Safari is really pleasant.
I lost some functionality in the switch. I used to have Pinboard auto-bookmark anything I added to Instapaper. I also had IFTTT sending all of the blog posts from a couple of sites I really like directly to Instapaper; I didn’t want to miss any of their posts. These things don’t work with Reading List.
After almost a month, I still don’t care. Haven’t missed it once. If I need to bookmark something, I use the share sheet provided by Pushpin. And now that I’m subscribed to fewer RSS feeds, I no longer accidentally overlook posts from my favorite sites.
Score: -2 services, -2 apps
Editorial, while a stunning achievement in iOS development and a wonderful text editor, is overkill for all but a handful of people. Byword, iA Writer, and Drafts are perfectly serviceable. Actually, most people would find Pages more familiar and comfortable.
I settled on Drafts for writing blog posts because it has a few shortcuts I really like and allows for quick jotting of ephemeral notes. I don’t have to care about syncing or tags or Dropbox or a Mac counterpart with Handoff built in or long-term management of text files. Just write some words and send them somewhere with an action or a share sheet. Very simple. Plus, it just feels lighter and less fiddly than Editorial.
If I need a note back on my Mac, there’s always email. Yes, it’s unsexy and not a nerdy solution, but it works and doesn’t require more software that could break or turn into abandonware.
I’m actually surprised that I don’t miss the functionality from Editorial. I had customized the app to such a degree that I thought I wouldn’t be able to live without it.
I’m planning a follow-up post that details how I use Drafts to write this blog.
Score: -2 services, -3 apps
I’ve been a user and a fan of 1Password for years. It was recently updated with the ability to generate “one-time passwords,” which is what apps like Google Authenticator and Authy do. I had been using Authy, but now 1Password handles all my two-factor auth needs, and I have one less app on my phone.
Score: -2 services, -4 apps
The take-away here is that, despite how you self-identify (prosumer, power user, etc.), you might find that stock apps or simpler solutions can work just as well as (or better than) the fiddly, nerd-friendly alternatives. Choosing the simpler setup usually means introducing fewer potential points of failure in your day to day work. That stability could save you more time than any fancy workflow.
HOT TAKE: Why childrens’ books are awful. When you have read certain books dozens of times you start to project certain kinds of ‘adult’ situations into them. Also, sleep is good, but kids sleep weirdly. Sam and Scott prepare Jeff for some of the sounds they make.
Also, lock your devices down, otherwise your kids will figure out how to make you pay for your mistake.
Recording this show is more fun with each successive episode. Really enjoyed this one.
Since my last post about moving to the iPhone 6 Plus, two major bugs have appeared. One is new, and one is a recurring thorn in my side.
Again.
This problem has been happening off and on (mostly on) for years. After setting up my new phone without restoring from a backup, everything worked perfectly, which was heartening. About two weeks ago, that changed. Shared lists stopped updating between my iPhone, my Mac, and my wife’s phone. I had to log out of iCloud on my phone, log back in, and set everything back up to get Reminders to work right again. I’ve given up using it on my Mac, as it’s simply unreliable.
Terrible? No. But it’s pretty damned annoying.
I’ve tried to use Apple Pay twice over the last two weeks only to end up staring blankly at my phone while holding up the line and frustrating my cashier. Tonight, after it failed again, I checked Passbook out of curiosity. None of my cards are there. I had entered four. Apple Pay was disabled altogether, and I don’t know why.
Again, terrible? No. But also pretty damned annoying.
Regardless of whether Apple gives us nerds the oft-wished-for featureless upgrade that focuses on stability, here are a few things I’d like to see in the next major iteration of iOS:
Conditional read receipts, DND mode, and notifications seem like no-brainers.
I have read receipts switched off because I don’t necessarily want everyone to be aware of whether I’ve seen their messages. I don’t need folks second-guessing why I haven’t replied. However, I wish I could switch them on for just my wife.
Same goes for notifications and DND mode. Being able to override these settings for specific people would add a nice level of flexibility (and I’d stop missing texts from my wife, which would be great).