Jazz Friday: The Blue Note Tokyo All-Star Jazz Orchestra

Lately I’ve been on a kick with YouTube watching international jazz. Specifically, how the art form has evolved in other countries. One sub-genre of jazz is the big band. Big-band music was a big deal back in the swing era, but it’s hard to make a big band work these days. It’s usually 17 (or more) players, and there isn’t enough of a market for jazz for a big band to keep its members fed.

There is a Blue Note jazz club in Tokyo, and they have a house big band called the “Blue Note Tokyo All-Star Jazz Orchestra”, which is excellent. Remarkably, they have no albums on Apple Music, but there are several videos on YouTube. One of my favorite things about the band is its director Eric Miyashiro. He clearly loves both his job and jazz music. Part of me thinks Miyashiro must walk around Tokyo and everyone says, “Hey! It’s jazz-guy Eric.” At least that’s my head canon. If I can ever get my way to Tokyo, I fully intend to make my way to the Blue Note and, hopefully, meet Eric Miyashiro.

They have lots of songs on YouTube, but I’ve picked the video below, which isn’t as much straight ahead jazz, but it does a great job of featuring more of the band members with solos. I would also note that one of the nice things about jazz migrating to foreign countries is that they will have their own take on the music, and this is a good example. They have a YouTube channel with a lot more music.

Home Screens — Jake Kahana

This week’s home screen features Jake Kahana (Twitter) (website), one of the founders of Caveday.org and a very intentional guy. So Jake, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

I’ve been getting more and more into Notion. We started using it as a project management and notetaking tool for Caveday. And in the last few months I’ve put my entire personal system on there. Book notes, meeting notes, goal setting, job tracking, etc.

I’m a fan of Superhuman and feel like my relationship to email is a bit healthier since using it.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

NY Times Crossword, maybe?

Or more realistically, based on my usage, Zillow and Redfin.

What app makes you most productive?

And I love Freedom. I love that it syncs across devices. It blocks internet when I need and just minimizes distractions. I love their “Pause” Chrome plugin too. That 5-second delay before I go to a social media or news site is enough friction to usually close the window.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Notion. While I love it and so much of my life is on it, I know there are so many other features (database tools, cross-database features, widgets, and what-not) that could make it more powerful. Part of my goal this year, overall, is to learn more shortcuts and use snippets in email, in my design tools like the Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch, and definitely in Notion.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

I don’t have an iPad, but I try my best to put my iPhone away when I’m working, often in another room or at least across the room, so I’ll check it maybe once an hour or less.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

Airplane Mode! When I really need to do my most focused work, I’ll open a Google Doc, make it available offline, and just get to work.

But maybe more functionally is AirDrop. I’ll send stuff from my phone to my computer and to my wife’s phone all the time. So easy.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I’m really disappointed by the idea of planned obsolescence. When it comes to being the best designed tech out there, I’d say aesthetically that’s true. User experience-wise, it may be true as well. But thinking about environmental impacts and functionality of hardware, there’s a lot of waste that comes from replacing phones and computers every 3-4 years. What might it look like to have devices that had a 100+ year lifespan that just needed a small upgrade here and there to replace certain parts or pieces, or to have upcycled digital hardware?

What’s your wallpaper and why?

My lock screen and home screen (and my computer desktop) are all photos of my daughter. It’s a bit cliché, sure, but it’s a great reminder for me for why I’m doing the work I’m doing (to make her proud, and to make enough money that I can stop working every day and spend time with her, and so she has what she needs). The photos themselves are moments of play and joy and wonder, which is another good reminder for me to stop and try and find joy and wonder in what I’m doing (and think of her).

Anything else you’d like to share?

I try a lot of productivity apps out to write about them and recommend them (or to recommend AGAINST them) for my company, Caveday. We’re all about helping people find focus in a distracting world and so a lot of my favorite apps and features are therefore focus-related. I’ve curated some of my favorite tips, plugins, apps, and books on the subject at caveday.org/tools

AirPods 3 Rumors

There have now been several leaks concerning the AirPods 3. According to the latest leaked photos, like the ones below, the AirPods 3 are getting a new design.

Nice pic.twitter.com/2PJdCd2hEn

— LeaksApplePro (@LeaksApplePro) March 10, 2021

This makes me nervous. Even though I have some ridiculously fancy headphones, I use the standard AirPods all day long while I’m making calls and meandering about the house. (Power tip: Just wear one at a time.) The existing AirPods fit comfortably in my ears. This new design, if true, looks a lot more like the AirPods Pro, which don’t fit my ears as well.

The AirPods are such a successful product that I expect Apple wouldn’t have changed the design unless they were sure they’d be just as comfortable as the last design. Nevertheless … yikes.

Appointments in the Menu Bar

I routinely keep my appointments listed in my menu bar when working on my Mac. As someone who does a lot of block scheduling, this is just one more reminder of where I should be as I work through the day. I also use Bartender to thin down the menu bar so truly useful data, like this, can be visible.

There are a few ways to pull this off. Fantastical has a setting that lets me put the next appointment in my menu bar with the “Show Upcoming Item in Menu Bar” checkbox in the Appearance settings. Fantastical also gives you a calendar and list of events if you click on the menu bar icon.

There are also some apps to scratch this itch. MeetingBar is my favorite. It gives you plenty of control over exactly what will show up and also a nice scrolling list if you click on the menu bar item. Both MeetingBar and Fantastical work with the meeting services like Teams and Zoom so you can launch meetings from the menu bar. Also, MeetingBar has a cool flip board-inspired icon, and I dig flip boards.

The Never-Ending Inertia of Habits

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about habits. I think most of us have it wrong about habits. We think of habits as these little behaviors we intentionally build into our own selves when the need arises.

While we may think that habits are intentionally formed, habits are more often unintentionally formed. Things like getting french fries on the way home from the office, planting yourself in front of the TV for hours at a time, and hitting the snooze button are all habits unintentionally formed. The unintentional ones are the most insidious because they check all the habit boxes (cue, craving, response, reward) without the human being conscious of them arising.

Then one day, you wake up and realize you can’t stop eating french fries. You waste way too much of your time in front of the television. You can’t get out of bed in the morning. And you don’t know why.

Put simply, habits are always forming. The train never stops. Perhaps even more important than being intentional about forming new habits is being aware of all the habits you have already formed, many of which are self-destructive. I have tried to pull this intentionality to the front by making a list of all habits I’m observing in myself (some good, lots bad) and then trying to rewire myself where appropriate. This will take a while, but awareness is definitely the first step.

Why I’m Leaning Obsidian

Over the past year, I’ve spent way more time than I will ever get back looking at Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) options as they continue to evolve. Three options that have received particular attention from me are Roam Research, Obsidian, and Craft. While I could make a case for any of these three, I’m leaning toward Obsidian.

Why I’m Leaning Obsidian

I continue to be impressed with Obsidian’s feature set and release cycle. We get updates weekly, sometimes multiple times a week. Obsidian’s developers have thus far made a stable, fun-to-use Electron app (I didn’t even know that was possible) that gives you all the expected PKM tools: Wiki-style links, backlinks, and graph view. Just take a look at everything already completed on the Obsidian roadmap. Like all of these apps, Obsidian makes contextual computing so easy. I embed links to OmniFocus task lists, DEVONthink libraries, websites, and anything else I can tie to a URL with no problems. Obsidian also supports creating links to files on your file system or just embedding files right in your Obsidian library.

Moreover, they have added the ability to add third-party plugins, which has spawned a rich assortment of interesting additional features from third parties. Simultaneously, the Obsidian developers plow forward with their app. (They are now close to releasing a mobile app.) Best of all, everything is based on a collection of Markdown files, which means you control your data and can easily get it out of Obsidian if you get drawn to something else new and shiny. Of use to me, but not necessarily everyone else, they have already put together their own end-to-end encryption solution with version history. I’m able to sync my data with my own encryption key.

Why I’m Not Leaning Toward Roam

Roam Research is a web-based linked-text system that lets you link ideas between each other with ridiculous simplicity. Roam, of all the options, is the most granular. For Roam, every carriage return represents another block and linkable entity. Obsidian and (to a lesser extent) Craft are more engineered around the document model. That makes Roam perhaps the easiest solution to laser focus on linking one bit of data to another (which is good) and less useful for writing (which is bad). Along that theme, Roam also uses a weird variant of Markdown that makes writing in Roam even harder.

My biggest gripe with Roam is the data model. With Roam, all of your data goes into their cloud. They don’t have end-to-end encryption. They don’t even have two-factor authentication. If you get a user’s login email and password, you get everything.

Craft

Craft is the newest entry and, to me, more attractive than Roam. It’s the only native Mac/iOS app in play. It also has a very responsive developer that seems to be iterating fast. Craft is the clear winner if you are primarily working on iPhone and iPad. Roam is a lousy experience on mobile, and Obsidian has yet to release their mobile app. In the end, however, it was the idea of local Markdown files, end-to-end encryption, and the lightning-fast development that pulled me toward Obsidian.

These aren’t the only three apps in this space. I’m getting emails from other developers nearly weekly now that are building similar tools. The PKM gold rush is on.

Packal Alfred OmniFocus Scripts

OmniFocus is an amazing productivity tool, but getting access to your data could be easier. The Packal Alfred Scripts can really help. These scripts let you search and jump around your OmniFocus projects with just a few keystrokes. They’re fast, they work great, and they’ll save you tons of time.

Once installed, you access your OmniFocus data via Alfred with (dot) codes. For example, “.f” gets you searching your OmniFocus folders. Since I have a separate folder for each client, this makes things really easy. There are a lot more though:

.i – inbox
.p – projects
.c – contexts

There are more commands but the above are the ones I use most. You can download the scripts and get the details here.

Mac Power Users 578: Notion, with August Bradley

Stephen and I are joined by August Bradley, an expert in Notion. We discuss the features of the app, as well as its pros and cons. Bradley then explains Systems Thinking and runs through some favorite apps and services.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
The Intrazone, by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast about SharePoint, OneDrive and related tech within Microsoft 365.
Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post.

In Praise of the Soon-To-Be Retired iMac Pro

Apple has announced it is only continuing to sell the iMac Pro “while supplies last” and only at a base configuration. It looks as if the iMac Pro is about to go the way of the Dodo.

This is interesting. Originally, the iMac Pro appears to have been Apple’s answer to the Mac Pro’s expected demise. They then shifted gears, getting back into the Mac Pro business and leaving the iMac Pro in that weird space between the iMac and the Mac Pro.

I used one for years and loved it. On the outside, it looked just like an iMac (except for the space gray aluminum). On the inside, it had a new design with a much improved thermal system, faster internal bus speeds, and better security. It was fast and whisper quiet. Up until now, it was the pinnacle of the iMac design and implementation.

Things, however, are changing. My entry-level M1 Mac, which was one-sixth the cost of my iMac Pro, can render screencasts just as fast and more quietly as the iMac Pro. The big jump in technology with Apple Silicon has caught up with the iMac Pro. I sold mine a few months ago, hoping to get the best value for it. Since selling it, I’ve missed it and its presence on my desk. This is the first time that’s ever happened to me when selling a piece of hardware. But I expect that whatever Apple has in store for the new iMac with Apple Silicon inside will run circles around the iMac Pro and still be whisper quiet. With Apple Silicon’s arrival, a higher-end iMac will be, effectively, an iMac Pro (though I expect Apple will not call it that). There will no longer be space between a high-end iMac and a Mac Pro for the iMac Pro to exist. Thus, its demise.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but want to pour one out for the iMac Pro. It was the best desktop computer I’ve ever owned.