"there is a very strong capitalist-critical argument to be made about buying in more intentional and ethical ways, but color me shocked that very few of these minimalist troubadours ever really take things to an economic or class-based argument."
As long as they look critically at their consumerism and are voting with their wallet for ethical consumer goods, let them have their Instagram pictures. Even if they don't care about consumerism and are doing it for aesthetics, it shows people that you can think different about your consumption habits.
- SelfControl app, you can change the timer to 1 month instead of 24 hours, so you are not forced to click it every morning.
- Simple Pomodoro timer, which honestly I use more as a signal for me to get up and stretch my legs a bit.
- Disabled all notifications on phone, macs.
- Things as my todo list, simple and tells me what to focus on every day with recurring todo's.
- Only really visit 3 websites: HN, Designer News & Stack overflow, tagging the interesting posts in the morning, then reading them on Kindle in the evening. Or sometimes between Pomodoro breaks, like now.
- I block all the news websites and other useless information with Opendns.
- Bought a Wacom pen and a mac so I can't play videogames.
- Podcasts for when I'm doing the dishes, Spotify for when I'm doing work.
- No mail, slack before 1pm, I'm most productive in the mornings.
I read in Do The Work that the best thing is to not think, but just start. So I meditate in the morning and try to be completely free of thoughts when I arrive at work, sit down and just start. That was the single thing that made the biggest difference for me. Don't give The Resistance a chance.
There are some interesting lessons to be learned on how Apple employees communicate. The use of hyperboles, the emphasis on positive words or how every sentence works as a one liner.
I liked the moment when the interviewer is trying to steer the conversation and Tim Cook firmly responds by mentioning the interviewer's name which promptly gave Tim Cook the upper hand in the rest of the interview.
Anyone reading some good books about this? I could surely use some of these techniques in meeting rooms or at client presentations.
Been on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move, the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is unsupported.
It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !
You just can't span multiple monitors with a single window. I do like the improvements though. Moving the Dock to a different window by pulling the mouse below the bottom of the screen is taking some getting used to.
If that battery life improvement is representative of general use, it is another indicator that they really are pushing for energy efficiency. The first one, for me, was https://developer.apple.com/osx/whats-new/, where the top item for "develop for OS X Mavericks" is "Energy Saving", not any of the new libraries whose coolness one can demo in a few minutes.
Apple increased the available video memory on the retina machines from 768MB to 1GB. The difference is profound. I was concerned about being stuck with nothing but an HD4000 but I'm very content with everything now.
I always figured that these are not "official" stores thus having limited stock and resupply makes them willing to fight consumers over every small repair, replacement and warranty issue.
When these Apple Stores are charging money for repairs that should have been under warranty or pushing their Apple Care products by stating you only have 1 year warranty they are basically taking advantage of uneducated consumers.
Apple stores in Belgium are an extremely negative experience to say the least, I hope this will change eventually.
Until then you should buy your Apple products through the online apple store, no problems there. ( if you happen to be Belgian )
> Apple stores in Belgium are an extremely negative experience to say the least, I hope this will change eventually.
There are no Apple stores in Belgium yet, only resellers working on scary thin margins. They've been consolidating in preparation for the arrival of Apple's own stores, but I doubt it will be enough for them to last very much longer.
I always wondered why they never seem to highlight their best feature, which is the ability to search text in images or scanned documents. That has been a huge timesaver in the past. One day I'll put all my important documents in there.
As long as they look critically at their consumerism and are voting with their wallet for ethical consumer goods, let them have their Instagram pictures. Even if they don't care about consumerism and are doing it for aesthetics, it shows people that you can think different about your consumption habits.