Thoughts on Manuel Bernhardt

Hey

Sat, 01 May 2021 14:38:24 +0200

I started using Hey last July as it seemed like a good way to get less noise via e-mail, for my personal e-mails. After about a year of using it, here’s what I can say about it.

What works for me

it is easy to just turn off noise by screening out incoming e-mail adresses
for some things, it is fast

What does not work for me

when I click on an e-mail to read it, it is marked as read. Then, it will be shown at the bottom of the Imbox. There, it tends to disappear. So, if I read an important e-mail that I do not want to forget about but have already left it, I need to scroll back down after reading it and do something with it. Unfortunately, neither the views “Reply later” or “Set aside” help me with the remembering because they tend to stack up. So what I do is to mark the e-mail as “new” so that it keeps on top of the Imbox and I don’t end up forgetting about it. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work and I end up forgetting about important e-mails sometimes.
finding back forgotten e-mail is hard and very time consuming. In Hey it is not possible to archive e-mails so everything ends up at the bottom of the Imbox. Scrolling down the Imbox is slow as it needs to load e-mails quite often and that takes time. So I cannot easily go back through the e-mails to see if I forgot something important, like communications with friends.
the search doesn’t work well (it does not find everything) and is slow. I find myself going to GMail (from where mail is redirected) to search

All in all, I think I will not renew my subscription and go back to using GMail. And perhaps be somewhat more agressive with filtering out e-mails I do not want to see.

Smartphone Detox

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 20:04:41 +0100

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Someone (not Einstein)

Smartphones are addictive and highly distracting. Their mere presence reduces cognitive ability. I tried getting rid of mine - or at least of its intensive usage - many times over and have failed. Here’s my attempt at another shot, inspired by this article.

Day 1 (27.03.21)

Attempting to setup my old Ericsson T28s, which stores all contacts on the SIM card. iOS doesn’t allow to copy contacts to a SIM card anymore, so I found an old Android phone and connected it with my Google account to synchronize contacts. Tried 3 different SIM tooling apps but none of them manages to copy contacts over the SIM card. After a bit of research it turns out that most SIM cards issued by operators these days are read-only.

Disciplines for getting out of the stream

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:38:34 +0100

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – John Lennon

But what if you’re not making plans. Or if all the plans you are making are more reactions to address short-term goals, needs or issues, rather than stepping back and looking at the general direction you’re headed?

I think this easily happens to most of us. When caught up in daily chores without the time to think - really think - it is very difficult to go meta and ask yourself about what it is that you really want. Add to this the plethora of interruptions and distractions we’re subjected to these days thanks to the attention economy and you get yourself a state of “constant drifting in a stream”. If you also have kids, replace “stream” with “torrent”.

When not to save money

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 18:04:50 +0100

Most people like to save money. But in some cases, saving money is counter-productive or will cost you more money, or so much time that you had wished spending a little more money.

Buying low quality items is one of these situations. The old saying too poor to buy cheap captures to essence of it: low quality ends up costing more on the long run than saving some money on the short term.

The Art of Meaningful Programming

Wed, 27 May 2015 23:16:38 +0200

As a child (I think I was around 6 at that time), I wanted to become an inventor, much like Gyro Gearloose. My father wisely pointed out that this wasn’t a job that existed on the job market, but that the closest thing was likely to become an engineer of some kind. And so I ended up becoming a telecommunications engineer with a specialization in the development of distributed systems.

Software is an excellent medium for expressing one’s creativity. It is cheap and malleable, and nowadays it is possible to see the result of what code does almost instantly. I haven’t yet figured out how to build a walking light-bulb with software yet but give it 15 years and we’ll have APIs for this, too. But programming is not easy, which also means that next to actually building things, we software people spend a lot of time learning how to build things and arguing about how things should be built.

New CV

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:00:59 +0200

Have you ever written a CV as part of a lecture at university (yes, in France, there are such lectures), a seminar for young graduates, or have you ever gotten feedback from the professionals in the branch?

I did. It always ended up with some frustration - all the small pieces of creativity would get marked in red as “too unusual”, and in the end my CV (the one through which I got into my current job last year) looked very standard (or as some may say, professional).

The cost of simplicty in technology

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:30:50 +0200

Recently I decided to try out a new kind of computer and bought a MacBook Pro. After many years on PC, which never really satisfied me in matters of simplicity of use, I wanted to give a shot to this kind of computer.

So what to say?

the design is nice, the computer becomes an eye-candy and I don’t spend my time removing dust from the screen or the keyboard (it looks as if the aluminium casing was dust-repelling)
the visual effects and graphics of Mac OS X feel good - and it matters. After all, the computer being my main working tool, it is important for me to have a nice, ergonomic working space (it is not just a tool, but a space full of virtual tools)
there is a lot of free software out there which works for the Mac, and for the moment I did only buy Microsoft Office (at a student price that is)
Mac OS X Leopard comes with Java 6, so it isn’t a problem for development, unless you need something very specific that is OS-dependent (but even then, VirtualBox makes it possible to run Linux or else)

However, I think that one important point with the Mac (or the whole “switching to Mac” thing) is to commit fully, in ways I am going to elaborate about now. Indeed, besides the (obvious) cost of money, there are other costs that come with using a Mac. For example, after you purchase a Mac, you’ll need to keep up with continuous upgrades, and if you’re not too tech-savvy about the whole process, you could continue reading at this website to see how experts can assist you.

The pain of configuration and ideas for making it a bit more bearable

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:15:32 +0100

Three weeks ago, I decided to give up on my Windows operating system and try again using Linux (the Ubuntu release). Windows had been running fine for a while, but it ended up becoming very, very slow, and just too unreliable. I had been using Linux before in order to work on my previous laptop, and I thought I could give it a try again.

Now what happened of course is that I spent a lot of time configuring the OS. I eventually succeeded (though I am not completely sure yet, surprises keep arising as I go). During the process, I also had to send back my laptop to Lenovo (I own a Thinkpad T43) because the computer was overheating (but nevermind, this was another issue that I may be writing about later).

Twitter, geolocalisation and pervasive games – mixing virtual and real life

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:08:52 +0100

Today I created an account on twitter after reading an article at academhack. Apparently there seem to be some interesting usages of this micro-blogging tool, like increasing communication amongst members of a same community. Whilst the article on academhack emphasizes the educational usages of the tool, I wonder if the same thing wouldn’t work in other settings. Then again it may be that belonging to several communities would clash - how to do “directed twittering”, what to prioritise when writing and how to keep up with the additional information flow?