Apps I’m Still Enjoying

I’m pretty tired and it has been a long day. Therefore, just a quick post of a few things that I’ve mentioned before but still am finding delightful.

  • Path— Still using Path to log many of my daily travels and life moments and share them with a small group of my close friends. It is the one place I feel safe posting almost anything.

  • 1Password — Specifically, the built in web browser in the iPad version of the app has been really helpful in a iety of ways. If I know I’m going to visit a website on the iPad mini and it will require I enter a password, credit card, or fill out some personal details, I don’t launch Mobile Safari. I go straight to 1Password.

  • Poster for iOS — I would not have been able to keep up this daily posting routine without it. Still a wonderful app for blog posting from an iOS device.

  • Day One — Been using this a lot more lately for capturing ideas as I’ve begun work on my next book. Especially love the quick capture menu bar widget in the desktop version. Been really handy. I also use Slogger to capture all my blog posts, social network updates, Pinboard links and Instapaper favorites. So, it is basically keeping an Internet travel log of sorts for me too. Really like this app.

  • Drafts — It’s like a Swiss Army knife for text. I’m a writer. Of course I love the hell out of it. And, like a Swiss Army knife, it is not my primary weapon. But it is the one I always I turn to in a pinch and it never fails to rise to the task with yet another obscure, yet useful, thing it can do.

You Are A Hero

We all have our personal struggles in this life. Our shit to shoulder. A monkey on our back. The things we keep mostly hidden from the world, yet still remain with us.

Perhaps it was a childhood that was less than ideal.
Perhaps it is a marriage that is slowly falling apart.
Perhaps it is a less than ideal relationship with your kids.
Perhaps it is a bad habit or addiction you wish you could shake.
A secret, silent, shame.

You are a hero. We all are. I may not know what you are victorious over but I know that each one of us has a huge amount of baggage to carry and, to get through this life with it, it takes heroic courage. That making it to the end of each day, is a small (and, some days, large) but not insignificant victory.

So many problems would be overcome in this life if we recognized each victory in what we have come to know as routine. If we all simply recognized the hero in ourselves and each other.

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Danny Hillis: The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B

Danny Hillis: The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B | Video on TED.com

We have so many problems to solve. Some are challenging, Some are easy. Not all of them are sexy. Some are just-in-case type things that may never even be needed. Yet, often, those are the most interesting to solve.

For what does it feel like to build something that you hope you will never have to use yet you build and test it relentlessly just in case you do?

This is one of those and I find it particularly fascinating.