I migrated to Reader from Instapaper, which was crashing all the time, so I had little to lose. Before that, my company used Diigo, which felt clunky and unloved. Reader is incredibly polished. I absolutely love it, and I’m delighted when they add new features. I’ve been on the beta for 11 months, and am genuinely excited to read the updates. They launched YouTube support a few days ago, and already it’s great (on desktop). I also love being able to add tweet threads (effectively turning them into articles I can highlight). Reader has a feature that automatically subscribes to RSS feeds you like (based on your reading and highlighting history) and, for me, it was at least as surprisingly effective as the recommendation engines in Spotify and Amazon.
Even though I imagine it’s hard to create software like this, I don’t believe it’s beyond one company to make a do-everything app. Already, it’s do-enough-for-my-needs, and their velocity is impressive. (I want them to add podcasts next, with highlightable transcripts. That sounds easy to me, but every podcast-workflow app I’ve tried has been buggy/crashy/awful.)
I found it particularly useful to start with games that are good for two players. That way, you need to find only one other person who can be bothered to learn the rules.
In answer to your question, “Handbook of Technical Writing” by Alred et al is good, but I'd start with the first half of “Keys to Great Writing” by Stephen Wilbers, which deserves its Amazon rating of 4.8/5.0.
So am I right in understanding that…
(i) When my new MacBook Pro arrives, I need to learn which is the Thunderbolt port.
(ii) I can simplify matters by always buying the top-spec leads. If so, how do I know which to buy?
Many musicians much better than me are surprised at how I can play a song just by hearing it on the radio. My breakthrough came from understanding music was realizing that the real “meaning” of a note lies in its position relative to the tonic note (e,g, I-II-II, etc, also written do-re-mi). Suddenly, almost all of the clutter was removed, and the problem became manageable.
Let's consider the three-note tune “do, re, mi”. If that tune were played in the key of C, it would become C-D-E. If it were played in G, it would become G-A-B. But in either case, it's the same tune but with each frequency increased by the same percentage.
Trying to understand music by understanding the letters is like trying to read in a world where every article has been enciphered into a different “key”: e.g., the word "cab" in “the key of A” (the alphabet we normally use) would be written as "dbc" if the article were written in “the key of B”. In the latter case, you could discern meaning only once you realised that the letter “d” represented the third letter of the alphabet. There's nothing meaningful about a “d” but there is something meaningful about a “4th letter of the alphabet”.
Once you start to “decipher” all music into I, II, III, IV, V, etc., the complexity becomes manageable. You can start to learn to recognize the sound of a III note, or of a VI minor chord. After all, there are only eight notes in the major scale.
Side projects tend to not have the traffic for this. If in doubt, use a calculator to calculate how long it would take to statistically detect a given uplift.
Instead, user-test everything. User-tests give feedback that's rich, nuanced, instant, qualitative and granular. And each one needn't take more than five minutes.
And just because two words sound similar doesn't mean they have similar roots. The word for “dog” in the Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram happens to be “dog,” not because they have the same root but by coincidence.
In his book, “Playing to the Gallery,” the artist Grayson Perry attempts to answer this question. I'll summarize his definition because I found it interesting and challenging:
He begins by stating that it's now widely accepted that anything can be viewed as art. Seeing as that's an infinitely broad definition, he goes on to describe the following “scorecard” for what counts as art. A “yes” means it's more likely to be art:
* Is it in a gallery or an art context?
* Is it a boring version of something else? Does it lack entertainment value?
* Is it made by an artist?
* Is it limited edition?
* Is it admired by hipsters?
* If you put it in a dumpster, would a passer-by wonder why an artwork had been thrown away?
* Does it detain and suspend us in a state of frustration and ambivalence, making us pause and think rather than simply react?
* If it's a photograph that's smaller than 2m and costs less than five-figures, then it scores negatively.
He says that the above tests aren't watertight, but if you put them together in a Venn diagram, the bit in the middle (the bit to which all the answers are yes) is pretty well guaranteed to be contemporary art.
I dislike the definition, but I wonder if it might be accurate. When I try to come up with a better definition, I wonder if the concept I'm trying to describe is something else—what art _should be_—not what art is.
Jeff Atwood: “the best code is no code at all. Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options.”
Robert Galanakis: “The fastest code is the code which does not run. The code easiest to maintain is the code that was never written.”