About a year ago, my pal Myke and I decided to start a podcast together called Cooking with Brett and Myke. We weren’t sure we’d have enough chemistry or potential topics to last us very long, but we went for it.

Yesterday, almost 50 episodes later, Myke and I recorded and published the final episode of Cooking with…. It’s something that I absolutely loved doing and, now that it’s over, I’m more than a little sad about it.

But it had to be done.

For various reasons, I recently decided that I needed fewer obligations. My family, my job and my little side business were all immovable and weren’t candidates for the chopping block. That left only a small number of things, including the podcast. So, it got the axe. And it sucks.

It’s super easy to speak hypothetically about killing ones darlings in the name of the greater good. And I know it was the right decision here. But, I still had to kill one of my darlings.

I’m not happy it’s over, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit glad to have regained a few of my internal cycles.

Anyway, to everybody who listened and was in on all of the stupid jokes and tolerated my abominable accents, you have my sincere thanks. I don’t doubt that Myke and I will be clogging up the Internet tubes again someday.

For now, I’m comforted by an old proverb:

Don’t cry because its over, smile because it happened.

Oh, and if you enjoyed our show, do check out some of the other 70Decibels offerings. And tell Myke what a bang-up job he’s doing (because he really is).

I’ve built yet another Text Expander snippet that will probably be useful to almost nobody, but I find both useful and entertaining.

People ask lots of dumb questions (myself included). In many cases, such dumb questions could be answered with a quick Google search. Hell, the information you want might be in the search result description so you don’t even have to click through! Criminy!

When I am lucky enough to get one of these head-scratchers, I personally love to employ a site called lmgtfy.com, which stands for “Let Me Google that For You”. If you asked me how many US pints were in a US quart, I might send you this link. It’s hilarious and is also a fun way to tell your friends and loved ones to maybe take three seconds and search for the answer before bothering other people.

Before, I’d visit lmgtfy.com, type in the phrase I knew would produce the answer to the question I was being asked, and click the big button to generate the unique URL that I could send to my friend. Lots of steps, methinks. Not anymore!

I give you my Text Expander snippet to create a lmgtfy.com URL using whatever is in your clipboard:

And here it is as a Gist:

[gist id=3783860]

Yeah, yeah, looks great. How does it work, freak show?

Practical example: if I copied “proper cooked chicken temperature” to my clipboard and typed ;;lmg, it would print the following:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=proper+cooked+chicken+temperature

Totally nifty, right?

Remember:

• If you’re going to use this, make sure you choose “Shell Script” at the top of the Text Expander composer area. Otherwise, it won’t work.
• (This software might cause your house to explode, hair to fall out or shirts to wrinkle as if for no reason at all. No warrantees, blah blah blah.)

At the Evernote Trunk Conference in San Francisco (where I'll be sitting awkwardly when this post is published), our intrepid CEO Phil Libin announced the launch of the next generation of the Evernote Trunk. I played a small role in helping get this thing off the ground and I'm super proud of all of my coworkers who did most of the work.

And, as it happens, my 34th birthday is this Monday, August 27.

In celebration of these momentous occasions, I'm stoked to offer a special deal on my best-selling ebook, Evernote Essentials. From now until midnight (PST) on August 29 2012, you can get 20% off of my ebook with the coupon code OLDFART.

More than 15,000 smart, attractive people have used Evernote Essentials to jumpstart their journey to Evernote masterhood. Grab your copy now — I think you'll dig it.

Oh, and just as a reminder, everybody who buys Evernote Essentials gets all future updates for free. I'm almost done with version 3.0 and let's just say that, if you have any interest in it, buying soon would be a very good idea. Ahem.

Thanks for reading, friends. ¡Viva la Evernote!

If you write things, then write everything with care and attention.

Everything.

If you spend two hours meticulously crafting a blog post or six months editing your manuscript, don’t even think it’s alright to clumsily shit out a three-sentence email full of mechanical errors, typos and poorly-worded sentences just because your Mom is the only person who will ever read it.

What you write and share all reflects on you. Including emails to friends or coworkers, blog comments, even Tweets and the like. Take the time to do it right.

And it does take more time, certainly. But, so does doing anything the right way instead of the easy way. Funny thing is, you already know what the right way is. You just have to hold yourself to that standard 100% of the time.

Two things to keep in mind:

• You never know when a hero of yours is going to happen upon something you’ve written.
• If you always write to the best of your ability, then you’ll always be improving and you won’t need to decide to do something the right way. You’ll just do it. And, you’ll want to do it better.

If you want what you write to be taken seriously, then give a shit.

Everybody makes mistakes, but carelessness is as obvious as it is difficult to forgive.

I’ll give it to you straight.

As I write this, it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in my friend’s apartment (where there’s air conditioning, which my house lacks, and it’s 95F outside) trying to wrap up the third version of Evernote Essentials. I’ve been here since 8:15 this morning. I spent 8 hours here yesterday doing the same thing: writing, compiling, editing.

Yesterday went well. I wrote a lot of good stuff and I felt like the end was in sight.

Today, not so much.

I’ve read plenty of books on creativity and working and pushing yourself and treating the work like the almost-insurmountable beast that it is. And, man, I felt like I could turn over a Jeep with my bare mitts when I read them.

Right now, though, I’m sitting at this table in front of my computer. I’ve been trying to write for the last 5 hours and I’ve produced a grand total of about 400 usable words. Yesterday, I wrote over 3000 usable words and felt like a machine. For some reason, today, the words aren’t coming.

I could blame any number of possible mitigators for this unfortunate state: the heat, the lack of a break or maybe something to do with sleeping/eating/pooping or whatever. But, according to the books, these are the trials that cripple the “regulars”; the people that rely on inspiration and ideal conditions to create their best work. Not wanting to count myself among the ordinary, I instead sit here and wish and hope and will myself into the mode where I can actually write things that people will find valuable and want to read and that I don’t think is utter shit.

But, I can’t. Not now.

I don’t know if that makes me weak or if I don’t have “what it takes” or some other similar symptom of “ordinary”, but it just ain’t happening.

What it’s Like

When I was a younger kid, a pass through a doorway in my house always meant I would try to jump up and reach the door jamb. I would jump as high and as hard as I could and I longed to feel the tips of my fingers brush up against the wood that held our doors up. Sometimes my Dad would lift me up so I could feel the sensation. And, for much of my life, I couldn’t do it unassisted.

Sure, I could have spent my afternoons conditioning my leg muscles and juicing up and all of that, but as an unmodified 8-year-old, I wasn’t capable of it.

It’s not a problem for me these days. I don’t even need to jump unless I’m in a castle or something.

Right now, I feel like I’m reaching for the door jamb and I can’t quite get to it. And the shit part of it is that I’ve touched this very door jamb before. Lots of times, actually. But not today.

Giving Up

I’m giving up for today. Maybe not even for the whole day. It’s the early afternoon, after all, and perhaps there’s a chance that I’ll find my creativity or muse or whatever goofy name du jour it’s got later today. If I do, it will probably be at the bottom of a modest pour of whisky. Anyway.

I don’t see this as defeat. It’s maddening, certainly, but I’m not going to hang it up forever or anything. I know I have at least a passable talent for this and one off-day isn’t going to derail it.

But, in terms of being a professional (as Steven Pressfield calls it), I believe there are definitely times when creative people bump up against some nameless barrier that stops them from making. Call it what you want (Pressfield’s moniker of choice is “Resistance”, which I actually quite like), but there’s some fat, mostly-immovable thing sitting between me and what I want to do today. And, as I sit here, I don’t have the strength to dislodge it.

And I’m okay with that. Sort of.

Actually, no, I’m not.

Truthfully, I’m brimming over with frustration and anger and self-doubt. This shit needs to get done for a variety of reasons and I don’t have oodles of discretionary time to do it. I borrowed heavily from my “time away from the family” account to get this done and now I’m sitting here having produced what somebody from southern Italy would call “Jack Shit” and I’m ready to snap this computer in half because I can’t make myself do what needs to be done.

Standing Up

Tomorrow will be better. Maybe the temperature will drop a few degrees and maybe I won’t feel like such a f*cking dunce and maybe it will be better. The words may come and the work may get done. Or maybe not.

Either way, I decided a long time ago to not stop trying. Acquiescence in the face of difficulty is a hallmark of “regular” and like hell I’m going to go out like that.

Sorry for the self-indulgent pity party. I love you all. See you tomorrow.

I’m not shy about my drooling love for Instapaper. If you’ve not heard of it, the one-sentence description: it lets you easily save web pages to read later, online or offline, and gets rid of all of the cruft (ads, navigation, etc.) and just shows you the text. It’s awesome.

“But”, you may have asked yourself, “why don’t you use Evernote for this function? It seems like such a logical choice given your loud affection for and dedication to Evernote! Guh!”

Unsurprisingly, I’m glad you asked.

Thing is, I get this question somewhat regularly via email from nice people who read this stuff I write, so I thought I’d spell it out for y’all. Y’all? Boom.

Essentially, it comes down to five big reasons why I use Instapaper for reading Internet stuff on [our favorite Internet devices]:

1. Position — I’m not a super heady guy, but I do occasionally like to read really long articles published by various magazines like The New Yorker, The Economist and Vanity Fair. Sometimes I get partway through one such article and I won’t have the time to finish reading it in one sitting. With Instapaper, I can stop reading an article somewhere in the middle and the app will sync the position of where I stopped reading back to Le Cloud. So, the next time I pick up my iPhone or iPad and open a partly-read article, I’m jumped right back to where I left off. Spiffy.
2. Singularity of Focus — Evernote serves myriad functions for me in terms of storing information: bank statements, my kids drawings, meeting notes, etc. Instapaper serves exactly one function and it’s wicked fast in doing so. When I want something to read something, I can fire up Instapaper and immediately have a big list of options. I could do the same with Evernote, but it would take more time since the data isn’t automatically synced and just finding it (even using a saved search) wouldn’t be as fast.
3. Sharing and Archiving — I don’t often do it, but I can easily share articles I read in Instapaper with a couple of taps. Evernote offers some sharing capabilities, but not as many as Instapaper. As far as archiving, it’s kinda funny: all of the articles that I “like” (or “tap the little heart while reading”) are automatically saved to my Evernote account. With Instapaper, I just tap the little trash icon (which should probably be something less like “trash”, but that’s a niggle) and I can send it to the archive with one more tap. In Evernote, I’d almost certainly have to remove a tag (like “to read” or “read later”) to achieve the same effect of getting it off of my pending list.
4. Easy Addition — If I want to save a page into Instapaper, it takes exactly one click of the “Read Later” bookmarklet in my browser (either on my Mac or iOS). Evernote would require more interaction: fire up the web clipper, select a notebook, add tags, click Save, etc. Instapaper also removes all of the cruft from around the article I want to read (ads, navigation, comments) so all I get is the text. Evernote can do the same via Evernote Clearly, but it’s still several more clicks/taps to get the job done. And let’s not forget the metric buttload of iOS apps that allow me to save stuff to Instapaper quickly and easily (like Tweetbot and many other iOS Twitter clients). These two, low-friction methods of adding stuff to Instapaper make it the easier choice for me.
5. Offline Reading — On iOS (and other mobile operating systems), Evernote doesn’t automatically download all of your notes because it’s a good citizen that doesn’t want to chew up all of the storage space on your device. This is a good thing. Instapaper, on the other hand, always downloads all of the content that’s waiting for me. This means that I can fire up Instapaper on my iPhone or iPad before hopping on an airplane and I’ll have bunches of articles to read without needing an Internet connection. And because Instapaper’s data is fairly lightweight—it’s mostly text, after all—the amount of space occupied on my devices by Instapaper data is pretty stinkin’ little.

“But sir!”, you may be saying to yourself, “how could you speak ill of your beloved Evernote!? Let us burn thee as an heretic! Guh! GUUH!”

Don’t misunderstand me, folks.

I love Evernote. Obviously. My point here is not to disparage my beloved Evernote, but rather to highlight an app that, if you ask me, has solved a real problem for me in a most excellent fashion.

Could you do accomplish the same objective with Evernote? Absolutely. And I did use it for such a purpose, once upon a time. I just found Instapaper to be a superior solution to a specific problem I had.

If you read stuff on the Internet and haven’t tried Instapaper (for the Web, as well as both iOS and Android), I’d highly recommend doing so. I’m a fan and you probably will be, too.

Photo by CrazyUncleJoe

Many years ago, I was fired from a (seriously crappy) job. As I drove home from what was my office with my proverbial box of desk crap sitting on the seat next to me, I was scared. My wife and I were young and didn’t have much money and I assumed the worst: we’d be living in our car and showering in gas station bathrooms and our whole lives would be in the (figurative) toilet.

When I got home, my wife assured me that this wouldn’t be the case; we were surrounded by people who love us and we’d have help if we ever found ourselves in a position where we couldn’t help ourselves. We’d get back on our feet and everything would be fine. We wouldn’t die.

An Internet acquaintance of mine is currently living my nightmare. Through a series of unfortunate (ok, worse than that) circumstances, he’s literally on the street. He’s getting access to the Internet sporadically, but the guy is effectively homeless.

(You can read the story here)

I know that if that ever happened to me, I’d get help. Probably from many of you.

And now, I’m asking you to help him.

Yes, I realize that you probably don’t know him. Hell, I barely know him, but I can see the desperation in his words and after seeing pictures of him with his boy, I’d feel like a huge a-hole if I didn’t do what I could to help the guy out.

A buddy of his has set up a web page where you can donate money to help this guy get back on his feet. I’ve donated and you should, too. We’re talking about a man who needs a roof over his head and only wants to get back to his son. And, as a father, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be separated from my kids. Seriously, I’m almost losing my shit just thinking about it.

Go here right now and give whatever you can.

Make your lunch at home for the next few days, skip the afternoon latte, whatever. If you’re reading this, you have a few bucks to spare. Give it and don’t make excuses because excuses are for jerkoffs.

This isn’t a faceless charity full of bureaucrats. You give money and he gets it, plain and simple.

I’ve done it. Your turn. This is important.

Thanks.

And please spread the word.

Last year when Ars Technica published the behemoth review of OS X Lion by John Siracusa, I wanted to read it on my iPad without having to visit 20-something different pages on the Ars site. So, I paid $5 for the Ars Premier membership (which, among other things, lets you download the Siracusa reviews as single PDFs). I downloaded the PDF of the review and promptly canceled my subscription. They got my $5 and I got to not be annoyed by the pagination on Ars’ site.

This year, it’s a little different. I use Instapaper for most of my longer-form article consumption and, as of recently, this service is able to figure out if an article has been spread across multiple pages. If it is, each page is captured and the article is rebuilt into a single document, suitable for viewing in the Instapaper app (or on the Web site).

I can’t help but think that Ars (and sites like Ars) must be a little miffed at Instapaper (and services like Instapaper). Naturally, the reason Ars spreads the article out over so many pages is so they can get 20-something ad impressions per reader of the article. Or, as described earlier, you can pay some dough and get a PDF without ads. Instapaper (and services like it) effectively sidestep both monetization efforts by offering the equivalent of the paid option for free.

I’m not singling out Instapaper here as there are many competing services that perform similar functions (though, to be fair, Instapaper created this class of application). I guess I just find it curious and wonder if sites like Ars are doing anything to impede services like Instapaper.