Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Reading log: “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea”

I turned my iPad Pro 12.9”—the first gen one from 2016—for this first time in maybe a year and thought I’d give the keyboard a bit of a run. Man I always loved the rubber cover that Apple discontinued after the first gen. Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick reading log update.

I started listening to Marc Randolph’s “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea” and am about 25% in. Here are some things I’ve enjoyed so far.

    • It wasn’t all a grand master plan from the start

It was the late 90s and there was no clear indication yet that DVDs would become the clear winner for home videos after VHS tapes. In 8th grade, a 2nd Blockbuster was going to open in our town and the rumor was that it would be all DVDs. It sounded so far fetched at the time.

Part of the reason I enjoy these tech business memoirs is that I have fond memories of the sort-of-early internet. I’m guessing this is similar to how people a decade older than me feel about books about early desktop PCs.

    • The book does a great job setting the stage and painting the picture of what starting a tech company was like back then

I’m currently also (slowly) reading “Rebel Without a Crew”, Robert Rodriguez’s memoir about making El Mariachi as a young filmmaker. It’s in a diary format, and I’m guessing pretty lightly edited from his actual diary. He talks about all the mundane, tedious steps of shooting and editing video on old machines without digital footage or video editing software. There’s so much planning and experimenting and budgeting because of constraints like physical film remaining.

“That Will Never Work” similarly spells out the huge effort and cost required to write and host online software at the time. Then there’s the manual steps of matching orders to physical DVDs and then putting those in physical mailers and shipping them out at the post office.

I’m currently typing this post in the WordPress editor. It’s actually easier at this point to make a video with special effects and text overlays and editing and share it with the world than it is to get a mostly text blog up on a domain.

Everything is amazing right now.

I do like things in 3s, so here’s another quick thing I’ve learned from the “That Will Never Work”:

    • Recommendations were a focus from the start

There’s a story about a home video conference and a person (who I’m guessing will turn out to be someone pretty high up at Netflix) who made video rental inventory software. He was also a huge movie buff and could recommend the right movie to anybody. Another story is about Netflix looking for an existing movie database that they could pay to use. Netflix had organizing and filtering and choosing DVDs based on your interests in mind pretty early on.

That’s that for now. I’ll continue writing these short writing logs about different books I read.

Conan O’Brien: Note to self, tomorrow you’ll eat nothing (Podcast note)

Celebrities… they’re just like us! Always comforting to be reminded that you’re not alone in the world.

At least once a year, I’ll start thinking about journaling regularly again, then I’ll check out some old journals. Year after year—same goals often reflecting the same problems.

Conan talks about this endless cycle:

That’s your true self. Just a piece of shit. I… it’s so funny you bring that up because I have all these journals that I’ve found and they’re all so annoyingly self helpy. It’s all like: tomorrow you’ll eat nothing. And you’ll run on a machine for six hours and you know, you’ll get… and it’s just… what?!

And it and it’s like that’s 1995. Wait 1998. Here’s an entry from 2014. Here’s one from 2019.

Judd Apatow has interviewed comedians all his life. He collected them in Sick in the Head. Some of the interviews are from when he was in high school and he re-interviews them decades later.

(Also check out this post, where I mention a Seinfeld technique from Sick in the Head. I promise it doesn’t have anything to do with marking an X on the calendar.)

Actually, while we’re talking about Sick in the Head and journaling, here’s something he says about reading books and actually doing the things in them:

Judd: I had ignored it because I hated it when a book asked you to do a lot of things—journaling, answering questions, et cetera—but I did it in that book, and it changed my life. That book is trying to inspire people to have the courage to be creative. There was a section that asked, “What would you want to be true or for you to believe about yourself that you are afraid to admit?” And I said, “That I want to be a genius like James Brooks.”

What does it really mean to finish1 a book?

There are certainly levels.

  • Listening at 3x vs. skimming a physical copy for 10 minutes—You’re better off skimming
  • Reading slowly, disconnected over months vs. listening at 2x all at once—I’d bet on listening at 2x all at once being better

It also depends on the book and why you’re reading it in the first place. There are things that will help you really understand the concepts better.

  • Summarizing and sharing thoughts from the book makes it feel more finished.
  • Actually applying practicing steps given in a book makes it feel even more finished.

By the way, ”That book” that Apatow is talking about is, you may have guessed it, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. (Which I need to really someday sooner rather than later.)

iPad Journal: thoughts for the next video

I made a couple iPad Journal videos (here’s January and February) and want to continue making some of these to share how I use the iPad. Usually, I’ll outline things in various notes and mind maps, feel satisfied, and then never doing anything with them after. In my ongoing effort to focus on finishing (read more about that here), I thought I’d jot these ideas down as a post.

Actually, let me just remove the italics because this whole post is going to just be me blogging about blogging. I finished reading Hatching Twitter this week. One of the things that stood out early in reading the book is some of Twitter’s founders1 already had major impact in online publishing through Blogger. Another worked for Xanga.

Thinking about these services reminded me of how casual blogging was back then. At some point I remember having either a b2 or greymatter installation and eventually had a WordPress blog in high school. I would just share links and fire off thoughts. No schedule, sometimes multiple short posts a day.

Of course, Twitter and other social networks fill that need now.

Anyway, there does seem to be a growing chorus who miss the lower-dopamine days of personal blogs.

With all that, here are some rambling iPad thoughts.

Or: Writing out different sections of a future iPad Journal video

The iOS shortcut that I just had no idea about — There was a recent post on Daring Fireball where Gruber mentions that he didn’t know that you could look at files in a list view or column view (with sorting options). It was shown on stage but so are a ton of other things at the same time.

Here’s one I didn’t know until a couple weeks ago: if you want a quick PDF (which you probably want pretty often on an iPad with great tools like GoodNotes and Notability) — open the share sheet in Safari (or other app), hit print, then you get that preview.

Actually I’ll just make a quick GIF of this right now.

Site to pdf small

You can then pinch out and get a PDF quick look that you can save or share to whatever app you want.

I use this for reading material later when I just want basically a hard copy of what I was looking at on my phone to read on my iPad. I could share the link, of course, but I don’t know, it’s nice to read with a Pencil to scribble things down.

My setup for getting in flow in Procreate — Basically how I have my radial menu setup so that I can go without the menu for long stretches. I have these actions set up on it:

  • Brush that’s like a brush
  • Brush that’s like a pen
  • Brush that’s like a marker
  • New layer
  • Previous color

My writing setup — I can show things like:

  • My Topcis notebook in Evernote
  • The setup I have for blogging for 25 minutes
  • That can transition into the other things I’ve made in Shortcuts to make writing a daily practice

(Okay making that GIF took way longer than I planned. I’ll just post this now.)

Read, Listen, Watch: Rebel Without a Crew, Hatching Twitter, The Joy of Movement

Rebel-Without-A-Crew

A book to remind you how amazing it is today

I’m continuing reading Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew. It’s written as a date stamped journal and the combination of casualness and specificity makes me think it really was pretty much his journal with some very editing. It’s great in that it really captures the other work involved in making a film. There’s things like casting tiny roles and getting in touch with musicians for background music. But he goes even more into the details of the work with explaining the plan he has to make it easier to sync the separate audio and video tracks with lower end equipment that doesn’t do it automatically.

Adam Carolla was on Bill Simmons’s podcast recently (today, actually, as I write this) and they talked about Carolla’s rich man, poor man bit. The first example being, “Building a podcast studio.”

Anyway, I’m enjoying parts of Rebel Without a Crew the way that I enjoyed reading in-depth posts about how people set up their podcast studios.

Oh yeah, and on it being amazing today—I mean just the fact that you can record video (with audio synced automatically), slap a filter and some animated text on it, and broadcast it to the world in less than a minute. It’s amazing. Especially contrasted against all the hoops Robert Rodriguez describes in this book.

A book about building one technology crucial to the amazing things described above

If only there was some place online where I could share my status with other people. Close friends. Actually, maybe I’d broadcast it to the world. I’d let them know I went for a run this morning. Actually at this point (3 days of running in a row), I’d update my profile to add that I’m a runner now. If I could tag it with a location, I’d add Central Park in there. And if I could add a photo, I might throw this in there:

Central park

Depending on how many characters I had left, I’d mention that I finished Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter this morning.

Instead I’ll just blog about it.

(Great book that I’ll “definitely” write a separate post about. Meaning hopefully I’ll write a separate post about it, because there really is so much in here to talk about. But I want to do more posts that are a bit more about getting my thoughts down, throwing some links together, and <navel-gazing/>)

A podcast about movement and happiness

Oh yeah I forgot I have these cards for things like this. Here’s what I listened to this morning:

I read her book The Joy of Movement to start the year. Actually, I updated my 2020 Reading List last night so I’m just going to go ahead and block quote myself.

… Anyway, The Joy of Movement convinced me to do more cardio this year. (As I’m writing this, I’m 2 days into running the reservoir at Central Park in the morning. Let’s call that a streak.) I even tried a spin class for the first time this year. I see why she says that group cardio classes are one of the things she finds the most joy in.

It appears I already made the bad joke about being overly proud of my running streak. Anyway.

Toward the end, she mentions her book tour. A pattern she noticed is that people have this relationship with exercise where the ultimate goal is finding out how little you can do of it. I’m all for the minimum effective dose, but that’s better for something like changing your body composition. If it’s for joy, you might want the maximum effective time without diminishing returns. (Or something.)

My example is always basketball. I always look forward to basketball. It’s not going to help me build muscle or anything. I’m not very good, either. Still, I find so much joy playing it.

It’s worth finding out what type of movement brings you joy.

(And this reminds me of David Epstein’s Range, which is about generalism and one of the strategies for a career is to sample and then specialize. For joy in movement, the sampling tactic seems like a good one to apply.)

Now I’m forgetting where I heard this, but someone said we shouldn’t invent a pill that captures the end result of exercise. We should invent a pill that makes you want to exercise in the first place. Because the joy of it can really be in the activity itself.

Like yesterday, but on an iPad

Yesterday I wrote about creating a digital environment on my MacBook that reminds me to finish. I want to focus on finishing things. There’s a chapter in Work Clean about finishing actions that chefs take. A dish that’s 90% done may as well be 0% done.

I can get things from 0% to 30% consistently. Then I start something else. And another thing. Just a ton of outlines. So I’m going to practice those finishing moves. One element of that is having environments that encourage finishing.

Here’s the current view on my iPad:

Which I’ll try to get into more with the following workflow in Shortcuts.

Here’s the iPad Shortcut I’m using right now. Turns on some noise, turns on some music, and gets me writing in the editor.

I use a few shortcuts just about daily.

I’ve been reading High Output Management by Andy Grove. He opens with a description of making breakfast then expands it to making many of the same breakfast and automating different parts of it. Now you have a system. Things go in. An edible meal comes out. It can be looked at as a black box.

In general, we can represent any activity that resembles a production process in a simple fashion as a black box.

Over the past couple weeks, it could look like I get stuck on the couch, tap twice, and then get unstuck.

Let’s cut a hole in the black box and peek inside.

I initially tried this as a goof in Shortcuts to see if a daily automation would run automatically. (You need to confirm. I think this is because it involves payment. Which is good.) Then I found myself actually just using the shortcut. And now, as a black box, it’s been a way to get unstuck.

It might take a few minutes, but at some point I’ll usually be aware that I’m stuck on the couch in the morning. (The couch’s magnetism is so high first thing in the morning.) With the shortcut, I can get unstuck in about as many taps as it takes to find the next interesting video. (Similar to One-click ordering make it as easy to buy something as it is to leave the product page.)

Anyway, I’ve been looking for more places where I can use Shortcuts. Right now I have three that have been really useful.

Get unstuck — Actually just ordering coffee.

Generate ideas — Opens a series of prompts to create an outline

Start finishing — Music, a timer, and a nudge to write directly in the editor.

Those things together have, at the very least, helped me get off the couch and finish this post.

Writing about finishing (again) (again)

When it matters and when it doesn't

Blogging about blogging warning.

Most mornings, I write a little bit and have a couple iOS shortcuts that make it easy for me to outline topics for different things.

At this point, the following seems to be true.

Things I can do quickly

  • Outline a topic
  • Make a connection between sources (something in one book relating to another, or something in a podcast relating to another thing)
  • Read things, listen to things (not particularly fast at these, but I just do it a lot because I’m a robot and I don’t listen to music much)
  • Record audio

Things I do (very very very) slowly

  • Actually write the thing / make the video
  • Edit the audio

I was giving Work Clean another listen this week, and there’s a chapter on finishing actions that reallly struck me.

Brainstorming some examples:

  • If you’re a sculptor and you’re in a room full of pencils and paper, you’ll sketch a bunch of stuff out and plan your next sculpture. If you never actually get into a room with tools to sculpt, you won’t finish, no matter how much you plan.
  • If you’re an actor and you’re in a room with the script then you can rehearse all you want. If you never get to a movie set then you’ll never finish, no matter how much you rehearse.
  • If you’re a writer and you’re in a room full of books, you can read all you want and plan your writing and keep it in your head. If you never actually get in a room with tools to write and share your ideas, you won’t finish.

I’ve caught myself in this over and over and over, and am always reminded of some of Seth Godins wisdom: Write in the Editor. (Which I mentioned here, here, here, here, and here.)

While writing this post, I’ve found something that’s seeming to work well. (Until it doesn’t, then I’ll be on the lookout for the next perfect solution.)

marsedit-setup

This helped me focus on finishing this post. If I sit in here for 30 minutes a day then I’m confident I’ll be able to publish… something.

It constantly reminds me to focus on finishing.

—

And as I was titling, categorizing, and tagging (all finishing actions) this post, I was further reminded that I’ve come to this same situation with the same conclusion in the past:

write in the editor tag