dorkbot12: Last dorkbot of the 2007 season + Arduino SIG:
NOTE THAT THERE IS A DATE CHANGE

Thursday, November 15, 7PM
Cafe Mundi
1704 E 5th St. (a few blocks east of I-35)
(512) 236-8634
Yummy food and beverages to accompany your dork euphoria.
FREE EVENT

photo (CC) Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

My Robot Marionette at Maker Faire was awarded 3 Editor’s Choice Ribbons!

This was a big surprise; this, plus the feedback I was receiving from passerby who stopped dead in their tracks with gaping maws really made it all worthwhile. I had a lot of “fun” building him, lost enormous amounts of sleep, growled a lot, and gained some really valuable personal insight… probably worth a blog post, actually.

I’ll be showing him off again with some enhancements in December at the Indie Fest at Red Scoot in Austin. Stay tuned.

I think I have finally nailed down a reasonable email handling / spam fighting strategy after about a year of tweaking.

I’m going to slowly describe my system over a series of posts. It’s pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Here are a couple of ranty things I’d like to just put out on the table, first.

I wish I had a quarter for whenever somebody says, “Oh, man, I get SOOO many email messages every day that I don’t have time to read them all, much less respond.”

It’s usually followed by some quantification, “I get over 1000 messages everyday” and always includes some corollary about, “I subscribe to 100 mailing lists” and “I have 20 email addresses I check” and “that doesn’t even include SPAM!”

I’m going to carry around blue ribbons and certificates for whenever somebody says this.

What they are trying to explain to you is that they are important. And important people get lots of email. And since they are more important than you, they mask their immense fear of being discovered as disorganized or type-B or luddites with a cloud of digital detritus that enables them to defraud their families and employers by engaging ineffectively with pointless busywork rather than actually contributing to society.

Here’s the reality check:

1. Human beings can’t process thousands of messages a day.
2. Good news. Most email does not deserve your attention.
3. You will not have to act on all of the messages you receive each day.
4. Saying “I have too many pieces of email” is admitting you have poor skills at prioritizing.
5. Shut up and deal… we’re all faced with the same (or worse) email and spam barrage.
6. If you can’t deal with your avalanche of email, then you and your system are outdated and broken. Upgrade, dinosaur.
7. Will the world end or will people suffer and die if you don’t handle all your email? If so, why the hell are you talking to me instead of clearing your inbox?
8. Coping mechanisms: Hire assistants. Hit the delete key. Go read Lifehacker. Streamline your system. Get in touch with yourself. Climb a mountain and meditate on what’s truly important.

So here’s me: 4000 messages daily (including SPAM, including mailing lists, including automated notices) that pass through my multiple servers hosting multiple email addresses.

The system I use filters that down to roughly 20 per day that MAY require a response or action. They all come to the one inbox.

Using some Mail.app plugins to triage, route, and deal, I can handle these in under 30 minutes.

The rest are handled by autoresponders or are filed away through a set of rules. I’ve recently implemented some steps that automagically archive older stuff into a MySQL database in the most absurdly remote, almost impossible chance I’d need to refer back to those posts some years down the line.

That beats Pareto 20/80 easily, and I’m going to share how I do it.

Pre-requisites: Go read Merlin Mann’s inbox zero series for some theory. Implement and live with his system for a while. Only then should you consider my tweaks. You’ll need a computer running OS X using Mail.app as your primary client. You’ll have to purchase roughly $100 worth software. (ask yourself how much your time is worth before balking at that).

One other pet peeve: It’s “email messages” or “email posts” or “pieces of email” or sometimes just “email.” It is NEVER CORRECT to say “emails.” This is the same as never saying, “I’m going to the post office to drop off mails.”

And yes… with my backlog of owed responses, I’m self-aware enough to recognize “Pot. Kettle. Black.” That’s why I’m projecting so strongly.

Upcoming: Mail.app baseline setup. IMAP, Inbox, Archives, and Smart Folders I Use

I just posted the dorkbot6 wrapup.

Today I modified this script which facilitates Yojimbo importing from NetNewsWire

I’ve set up a smart folder in NetNewsWire that grabs the latest 50 flagged headlines from any feed.

I needed this script because I had a technorati watch feed for dorkbot and I wanted to collect blog mentions to send around. I was just flagging articles that mentioned dorkbot-austin and wanted to export a list of bookmarks.

With this, the workflow is now:

1. Quickly scan headlines in NetNewsWire and do CMD-Shift-L to flag interesting content.
2. Run this script on the smart folder (this creates a web archive in Yojimbo of each of these articles and removes the flag on the headline in NetNewsWire)
3. Over time, spend a few minutes working down the list of archived articles in Yojimbo and tag/delete them further as necessary.

Potential problem: This makes it really easy to procrastinate making decisions on what to read and what to do with what I read. Following this strategy will lead to a large pile of unsorted links which I’ll very likely will never find the time to sort through.

I think DEVONThink does a better job of scanning and grouping incoming pieces of text.

I should probably rewrite this to send flagged content directly to DEVONThink. Then, instead of queueing up a long list of articles to read, I’ll let DEVONThink suggest articles for me to read as I do research. Anything that I think I’d want to read immediately I could tag with “@Read” or something similar.

    tell application "NetNewsWire"
        try
            set userInput to text returned of (display dialog "Enter Tag:" default answer "untagged")
            set oldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {", ", ","}
            set h_tags to text items of userInput
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldDelims
            if (index of selected tab is not 0) then
                set tabnum to index of selected tab + 1
                set taburls to URLs of tabs
                set h_URL to (get item tabnum of taburls)
                set tabtitles to titles of tabs
                set newItemTitle to (get item tabnum of tabtitles)
                tell application "Yojimbo"
                    --set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:newItemTitle, location:h_URL}
                    set newItem to make new web archive item with contents h_URL
                    add tags h_tags to newItem
                    set flagged of newItem to true
                    set isFlagged of h to false
                end tell
            else if exists selectedSubscription then
                repeat with h in headlines of selectedSubscription
                    set h_URL to URL of h
                    set h_title to title of h
                    set isFlagged of h to false
                    tell application "Yojimbo"
                        --set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:h_title, location:h_URL}
                        set newItem to make new web archive item with contents h_URL
                        add tags h_tags to newItem
                        set flagged of newItem to true
                    end tell
                end repeat
            else
                error "No headline is selected."
            end if
        on error error_message number error_number
            if the error_number is not -128 then
                try
                    display alert "NetNewsWire" message error_message as warning
                on error number error_number
                    if error_number is -1708 then display dialog error_message buttons {"OK"} default button 1
                end try
            end if
        end try
    end tell

This is going to be one of those things that seems all grand (and grandiose) today, and it only gains power and momentum if I actually go through with it. This is dangerously close to reinforcing negative behavior since in a month this may all be a massive failure — negative self-talk cycle.

So, I’ve often pointed to Mark’s stretch daily as a source of inspiration — he documents one creative act per day. The last few months have been spotty, but in general he’s amassed a nice portfolio of work simply by doing one small thing every day that stretches his creative mind.

Ira Glass talks about the importance of just making large volumes of creative work. And pretty much EVERY missive on creativity insists that you have to just fail often and fail quickly to get to the good stuff. (see War of Art and Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit).

Ergo, “to make creative stuff, you just have to make creative stuff.”

SxSW (despite all its problems this year), never fails to inspire me in some way. A lot of it is simply, “Oh my, these people are not doing anything interesting and yet they are seeing successes” followed by the dreaded “Oh no, I’M doing even less interesting things.”

The truth is, I’m not devoid of fascinating projects. I talk to people about dorkbot or other things I care about and I get reactions like, “Your face lights up when you talk about that!” What’s clicking now are the many events and evangelical promotion of geeks and other cool things I’ve done and have in the works.

My anxiety right now is that I don’t actually want to just be a vehicle for other peoples’ interesting work, but I also want to be a source of interesting work. Being the huxster and promotions guy is a powerful and fun rush, but really, doing those things AND having established credibility as a maker of interesting work is a one-two punch, I hope. Somewhere I can envision myself having a wonderfully fulfilling life.

I’ve done little projects in my garage, but an in act of hypocritical omission, I’ve not been very good at showing these things to the world (fear of failure, fear of critique, etc.)

I’ve pontificated on the creative process (i.e. living leads to observations leads to wondering leads to tinkering leads to building).

But it’s all just been a whole lot of talk.

Because I do have a bit of a need for structure, however artificial, I need to create for myself a framework — a set of rules around work — that I can choose to abide by.

So here it is:

1. For the next 365 days, once a day, I will complete a creative act that requires less than one day of effort to bring through the creative process.
2. For the next 52 weeks, I will complete a creative act per week that requires a weeks’ worth of effort.
3. For the next 12 months, I will complete a creative act that requires a months’ worth of effort.
4. This entire experiment will last one year and will represent a year’s worth of creative effort.
5. Everything I do, I will share online and/or offline.
6. This is not just computers, robot-building, or programming — it can and should cover lots of different creative media.
7. creativity is not just about art. creative experiments can happen in business, volunteering, etc.
8. The rules are to be followed in spirit with good faith effort.

Why do this? Why set myself up for failure?

Because right now I have no idea how I can do this, but I know with certainty that it’s something I want to do.

For the past couple of years, I wrote The Unofficial Geek Guide to Getting Over Yourself at SxSW Interactive.

This is the new version for 2007. It’s mostly the same. I’m kinda the same. My relentless friendliness is the same.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to meeting you.

(Unashamed plug: check out dorkbot on Saturday evening, 6:00PM right across the street from the convention center - free beer, robots, and tesla coils!))

The Unofficial Geek Guide to SxSW-I 2007

So what is this guide all about?

Soon, you will be at SxSWi in Austin, Texas; I call Austin home and I welcome you with wide open arms. I hope you hug me back.

I’m posting this tip because it took me a course of a week to enter the right combination of search terms to get an answer.

Symptom: On OS X, your voicemail stops working. They are listed in your history, but when you click to play, the playback window pops up for a brief second and then vanishes, never playing the message.

Cause: For some reason, Skype relies on your having a microphone attached before it allows you to play back messages.

Solution: Plug in a microphone or audio in device or run skype off a machine that already has a microphone built-in (like a MacBook).

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Technorati Tags: osx, skype

Austinist: Robots Run Amuck at dorkbot-austin’s Final (Free) Event of the Year:
“Those lovable geeks, mad scientists, rogue artists, and insane inventors are at again, and this time they’re closing out the year with one of their most amazing shows yet, at Cafe Mundi this Thursday.

What is Dorkbot?

• It’s a science fair with beer.
• It’s a geek talent show.
• It’s people doing strange things with electricity.
• Best of all, it’s fun, free, kid-friendly and hands-on.

We think dorkbot is exactly what Austin is all about. Nerds, artists, musicians all come together to show off their work in a casual environment. Previous dorkbot events have included singing robots, lightning bolt generators, hacked nintendos, and somebody crazy enough to electrocute a pickle. dorkbot was most recently featured on Austin Technology Matters, a new show on Austin cable access.”

I built the meat cart bed from Readymade Issue 1. I altered the dimensions to better fit a full-sized mattress for a smaller space.

Flickr photo set

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Technorati Tags: bed, cart, meat, readymade