Road Warrior kit v.2018

I’m trying out a new road warrior setup: I’ve got a little Samsung Tab E tablet, with a 4G cell modem, which I paired up with my Logitech K480 Bluetooth keyboard.

The keyboard has a handly little knob that I can use to quickly select up to three different Bluetooth devices. Right now, I’m just using slots 1 and 2 for my iPhone 6S Plus and my Tab E.

I’m using the Tab E instead of my refurbished Lenovo X201, which runs the latest version of Ubuntu. That computer is a favorite, because it’s small and easy to upgrade, compared to (say) a MacBook Pro. But, it doesn’t have a cellular modem built in.

I’m going to see how much productive work I can get done with this setup. Since my main productive activity is writing, and I’m doing that right now on this Logitech ‘board, I’m happy with that.

To publish or edit posts on my WordPress blogs, I can use the WordPress.com app, which is OK. I prefer the desktop browser interface.

I suppose I could use the desktop version of the WordPress admin screens on the tablet, but I don’t have very much screen real estate, even compared to the relatively tiny screen on the Lenovo.

Here are the biggest advantages to this setup:

• Because both the tablet and the iPhone are connected to my cell network, I don’t need WiFi (but I can use it if I want).
• I can power both my devices with my huge external USB battery pack if my device batteries run low, so I don’t need a wall socket if the batteries run down.
• If I do have access to a wall socket, I can charge the battery pack and then use the battery pack to charge my tablet and phone.
• The tablet and the keyboard are lighter than a notebook computer.

Here’s what I can’t do:

• Any kind of WordPress development, including basic CSS work, is really out of the question.
• Photo editing: I can use online tools, Instagram or Skitch to edit photos, but that means simple stuff, like cropping and applying filters, nothing fancy.
• I can’t really do any media editing, like editing video or audio. I’d want to do that stuff with macOS or Ubuntu, with a dual-screen setup back at the office.

But, I can write and listen to music and update my blogs. I can answer emails and check Google Analytics. I can do what I need to do.

I’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’ve been publishing every day. Monday, I posted Publish every day to send a flood of traffic to your site on my company blog. Plus I posted How to write 3,000 words every day here on the Stratopress. And then, yesterday, I posted Bone broth bounty to my new health blog, Bye Bye Blubber. As you can tell, I have a weakness for alliteration. Whatever gets me to 3,000 words!

How to write 3,000 words every day

If you are a writer or a content creator, you need to write. This is the only way to improve, to hone your craft. The more you write, the better you’ll be at writing. It’s like any other skill: you must practice to improve. And the best way to improve your writing? Make it a daily habit.

In his post, Write 3000 words every day, even when you don’t feel like it, Mars Dorian says:

The idea is to purposefully chunk your workload into tiny units which you can easily accomplish every day. So in the beginning, instead of writing 3,000 words a day and then slacking off for days, you only write a few hundred words within 24 hours but make sure it becomes a daily habit.

How did he establish the habit of writing?

1. The amount and quality of what you write every day has nothing to do with talent. Mars started out as “a terrible writer.” But he kept at it, wrote every day, and now he makes most of his income through writing. “And if I can do it, you can do it … and you can do it even better,” he concludes.
2. Use the power of Kaizen, or improvement in tiny steps, to improve your writing (and the amount you write each day). By increasing the amount he wrote every day by 50 – 100 words each month, “I started writing only 200 words a day in 2010 and upgraded to about 3,000 words a day within five years.”
3. Go back to basics to battle inertia. He explains, “falling back to the basics will always ensure you can write on auto-pilot because you OWN the fundamentals.” Read on for the basics of good writing.
4. Gamify your writing: Measure how much you write every day, and keep track of it. I personally use the web-based 750words. com, to track my writing and streaks. Mars prefers Scrivener (Mac, Windows, and iOS).

What are the basics of good writing?

Mars lists his basic rules of good writing:

• The rule of one: one page, one call to action; one post, one lesson; one paragraph, one message; one sentence, one idea.
• For marketing, use the AIDA principle: “Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.”
• Make it readable: target a 9th grade reading level (freshman in high school).
• The active voice should be used instead of the passive. Just kidding! Use the active voice over the passive voice.
• Use a few strong nouns and verbs instead of a lot of weak adjective and adverbs.

Good advice! Mars recommends some further reading to learn the fundamentals of effective writing:

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne.

I’d also recommend the slender but essential The Elements of Style (Wikipedia)

Did it work for me?

Mars’ post struck a chord with me. I’ve worked for years on developing the daily habit of writing. The hard part, though, is publishing your writing. Mars doesn’t discuss this in his post, but the principles are the same:

• Practice publishing every day: it’s great to develop the habit of daily writing, but you need to put your writing out there. Find a way to publish every day, and do it. Start with a blogging service like WordPress.com or Medium. Or, you can answer questions on Quora.com. Your writing will improve even faster if other people read what you write, and even better, give you feedback.
• Start small, and increase the amount you publish every month. If you just post one tweet a day, you’re getting your writing out there. After you’ve established the daily habit of tweeting, or publishing a short post to your new blog, keep at it for a month. Then, increase the length of your posts, or the number of posts or tweets you post every day.
• Edit your drafts before you publish to improve: if you are going to build your audience, you need to publish quality material. Make editing part of your publishing process. Develop a checklist to ensure your writing is tight, clear, accessible, and entertaining.
• Gamify your publishing: in addition to tracking the amount of material you publish, track how many views or shares you get over time. Learn how to use Google Analytics or WordPress stats to learn how people find your writing, and what interests them. Learn how to read the stats on your social media posts.

In addition to these principles, follow these tips to make publishing easier and your published work better:

• Own your work: social media sites are a great way to reach your audience, but everything you post on those sites is the property of the company that runs the site. instead of donating your work for free to these hugely profitable companies, start your own blog to store your posts and articles, and use social media to promote and link to your blog, instead of only posting your work to the social media service.
• Get involved in online communities focused on topics that interest you. This is a great way to find an audience, and learn what people are interested in reading. Post on Reddit, answer questions on Quora, or find a specialized website or message board that discusses topics that interest you. When you write about what you’re interested in, your writing will automatically be better. When you can help someone else with your writing, that’s even better. Plus, you can get feedback right away from the other members of your online community.
• Understand that criticism is a form of attention: if someone posts something critical about one of your posts, it means that they took the time to read it and even had an opinion about what your wrote. Maybe their opinion wasn’t nice, or what they wrote was cruel or stupid, but they paid attention to your writing. In fact, if you are writing well, you will certainly upset someone. If your writing is bland and indecisive, you won’t offend anyone, but no one is going to read it, either. Take a stand, express an opinion, articulate your passionate beliefs. Your writing will be much better. But you have to accept that you will never ever please everyone.
• Don’t waste your time on pointless online discussions: instead of spending hours a day replying to tweets or Facebook posts, carve out time to write, without interruption, on the topics that matter to you. This is your body of work: posts, articles and books that you wrote, not a collection of tweets and Facebook rage posts. If someone replies or comments on your post, take your time with your response. Don’t write back angrily or defensively. Remember that they took the time to read what you wrote. Express gratitude to your audience. Or, better yet, start your own blog so you can decide which comments you want to show up under your posts.
• Give yourself credit (and even a reward) for putting yourself out there: most people don’t take the step to click that Publish button. If you did, congratulate yourself. If you do it every day, that’s even better. If you make money from your writing, be sure to buy yourself a treat every now and then, when you reach your goal (book sales, downloads, increased sales, whatever you use to measure your success).

I’m still learning how to be a better writer, and how to publish more, better work. What have you learned as you write and publish online? Post your comments below!

Read more of my writing on my company’s blog at Cadent.com, for more on getting the most out of WordPress and your online marketing efforts. If you liked this post, you might also enjoy my recent post on Cadent.com, Publish every day to send a flood of traffic to your site.

Publish or perish, part 2

Last November, I posted Publish or Perish, where I promised to try to write and share, or publish, new blog posts more consistently. It seemed like this experiment was an abject failure.

I updated Publish or Perish this March when I learned how to increase my publishing rate by writing on Quora.com. But I still wasn’t publishing new material nearly as often as I hoped.

Even though I consistently write every day, at least 750 words or more, I was having trouble publishing posts with any kind of consistency. Now, finally, I’m publishing something almost every day.

What’s the difference?

I think the biggest change is adding a focused project that I’m really excited about — this makes writing easy.

I want to share what I’ve learned. I want to share my successes, and also my failures. This approach I stumbled on demonstrates a great way to start a blog: pick a topic that interests you, and then learn everything you can about that topic.

As part of the learning process, write about what you’ve learned. This approach has a number of benefits:

• Your writing is better because you’re writing about a topic that interests you.
• Writing about something you’ve learned is an excellent way to consolidate your newly acquired knowledge.
• If you write about something that you’ve just learned, in a way that other people can understand, it will increase your retention and overall understanding.
• You might help other people out.
• You’ll build a blog with lots of content.
• You may even attract an audience.

You can’t capture an audience’s attention unless you have something to share with them.

That’s why writing deeply about something you care about and enjoy learning more about is such a rich and rewarding source of new ideas and strong writing.

Right now, no one is visiting my new blog, because it just went live this week. I’ve got about 16 posts and a few pages up already. I’m still tweaking it, but I’m pleased with how it turned out. You can check it out here: Bye Bye Blubber – First, focus on health. Then burning blubber is easy.

How did I launch my new blog?

I built my new blog in WordPress with the TwentySeventeen theme. I found a lot of great photos on Unsplash and by using CC Search.

I’m pleased with the way it turned out. Take a look and let me know what you think!

I haven’t done anything to drive traffic yet, but I’ll start working on that soon. In the meantime, I can publish stuff to my new blog and not get too fussy about it, because honestly no one is going to read it right now. I’ve got time to review and edit my work.

Although, I did get my first spam comment today. That’s a milestone!

Why publishing every day is hard

Not having to worry about actual readers makes it easier to publish.

I also found the exact opposite. In the update I added to Publish or perish, I talked about how answering questions on Quora helped me get over my reluctance to publish.

The reason was simple: I was answering specific questions for real people. I then figured out that I could collect these answers and publish them on my blog.

The main reason that publishing on the regular is so hard is because I find writing easy, but editing hard.

I don’t worry too much about my edits now, though. I read through to make sure I don’t have any major grammatical errors, I’ll break up run-on sentences (a major issue for me) and keep my grafs short.

I’ve also gotten better at accepting that my posts aren’t going to be perfect, not ever. The only way to get better at publishing posts is to publish posts.

This means I’m going to publish some stuff that isn’t that amazing. But it’s the only way to improve: practice and more practice. Plus, when I publish what I write, I open the possibility that I might get some feedback from real people.

In addition to edits, good blog posts have photos and graphics. I’m getting better at finding Creative Commons licensed photos with CC Search or Unsplash. I always, always credit the artist. But it takes time, even though it improves readership.

It’s really that second (and maybe third or fourth pass) at a post that makes publishing so difficult. But, I’m building the habit, learning to get it done. The more I publish, the easier it gets. Let’s see if that turns into traffic and readers.

Coffee induces autophagy in vivo

Coffee induces autophagy in vivo
— Read on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4111762/

Publish or perish

An experiment in establishing the habit of publishing regularly (5 days / week)

I’m writing plenty of words every day, at least 750 to be precise, at 750words.com. You can see from my stats page that I’m cranking it out: 418 days in a row, as of today, and over a million words since I started. But, I wasn’t really publishing very much, since everything on 750words.com is private. I did write some stuff for my company blog at Cadent.com, but that wasn’t happening with any consistency either. I wrote a few odds and ends here and there that went up on my other blogs.

I want to get in the habit of publishing on a regular basis. What does that mean? “Publish” can mean a lot. What counts as publishing? How many words? How often? Where do I publish? Does social media count?

So I answered the question like this:

• I’m going to publish at least 100 words at least five days per week.
• I’m going to publish on Cadent.com at least three of those days each week.
• Published material is available to the public (no limits to access, so Facebook updates just my friends doesn’t count, for example).
• Articles and posts are fully edited, and incorporate all required graphics and media. Drafts don’t count either.
• I can schedule publication dates in the future if I have a backlog of articles ready to go.

Those are the rules. I’m also going to set up automatic notifications for each of my publishing platforms so updates and links go out to all my followers, as appropriate. So far I’ve linked my LinkedIn and Twitter account to Cadent.com via Jetpack.

I started doing this on Sunday, November 12, so today is the fourth day in a row. I’ll check in regularly with any news and at the end of the month I’m going to look at my traffic, compared to right now. I’ll post the results mid-December and then decide if I’m going to change the rules or stop doing this.

This post here fulfills today’s requirement, although I worked on a number of other posts today as well. I wasn’t able to get any of them ready for publication, though, so I just banged this out.

Here’s what I think will happen (these are my hypotheses):

• I’ll get more traffic to at least some of my sites, ideally Cadent.com.
• I’ll get much better at publishing things on the Internet.
• I’ll learn how to publicize what I publish and how to automate that process.
• I’ll get better at writing.
• I’ll clarify some other goals I have for my online businesses.
• I’ll learn which publishing tools work best. Right now I’m focused on using WordPress, but I’ll use other tools, like Blogger.com, if needed.

So, those are my six hypotheses. I’ll see what happens after 30 days, and post the results by December 15th, 2017. Stay tuned, and your comments are always appreciated!

Update: March 21, 2018

Well, I didn’t update this after 30 days had passed, as I hoped. It turns out that publishing stuff is hard. I still write every day: as of today, I’ve written at least 750 words for 544 days in a row, or 126 days since I first posted this article. So that doesn’t suck.

I’ve also published quite a bit, just not as much as I planned. I’ve posted a number of long-ish articles (eight articles since I first posted this) to Quora.com — view all of my answers here. As a result, I’ve become one of the Most Viewed Writers in Learning to Play Musical Instruments — I’m number 7 today, and interestingly enough, I have the highest views to answers ratio. I’ve only posted 8 answers, and I’ve got over 6,000 views, while the others in the top 10 have posted more articles (almost 100, for some) for roughly the same number of views. I don’t know what that means, but it’s interesting. My answers tend to run long, maybe that has something to do with it. I’ve also made the top 10 for:

• Learning to Play Guitar — #2
• Guitar Lessons – #6

My Quora Readership stats for the last 3 months shows the results of publishing at a ridiculously minimal rate

So that’s cool! People are reading my stuff. Another interesting tidbit: one of my best performing Quora answers is something I posted almost 3 years ago (What are the human benefits of learning to play guitar?), with almost 18,000 views and 62 upvotes. I know this is small change for Quora, but the point is this: by posting consistently on topics I enjoy and know well, I get recommendations from Quora for readers to read my back catalog, a virtuous circle of publishing and reading.

I like how Quora has a built-in audience. It’s not like my various web sites and blogs that get a fraction of the views that my better Quora answers get. I also like that I’m responding to specific questions, and sometimes I even get some feedback (often positive) from the people who posted the questions or read my answers. I find that’s really motivating!

I’ve been saving up all my Quora answers in a Google Doc and by now I’ve got enough material to launch a website devoted to learning guitar, a topic I enjoy. I’ve also demonstrated that I can write about it in a way that other people at least find useful, and may even enjoy.

Finally, my daily writing habit sure makes it easy to bang out a Quora answer. Writing every day makes my writing better, and it also flows more easily. So maybe for most of those 126 days I’ve written since I first posted this, I’ve written disorganized garbage, but every now and then I’ll nail it and crank out a good article in short order.

What I Learned

So, here’s what I’ve learned from my experiment in regular writing and posting:

• If you want to get better at something, practice, ideally every day.
• Build on your good habits. I may write every day, but I don’t publish every day, because that involves editing and finding graphics and other things besides writing. But, I have to write before I can publish! So I’ve got the first step nailed. Now I just have to maintain that first habit, and then add another habit of publishing on the regular on top of the writing.
• If you want to do something every day, set a daily goal that’s relatively easy. I can bang out 750 words in less than 20 minutes, especially if I don’t have to worry about the quality! My publishing goals (above, 5x/week) were just too ambitious for me, although they might work just fine for you. Now that I’ve tried this, I’ve decided to publish just once a week, instead of five times a week. I can do that!
• Put yourself out there. By publishing on Quora, I’m getting lots of feedback and encouragement, even though I don’t publish very frequently. Also, once something is out there, you never know when it might go viral. None of that happens unless I hit that [Publish] button.
• Write about what you know and what you love. This is almost a cliché, but it certainly makes writing more enjoyable. I think it improves the quality of my writing too. The articles that perform the best for me are on topics that really excite or interest me. Coincidence?  I think not.
• Measure what you do and reflect on it. Even though my experiment “failed,” because I didn’t publish as much as I hoped, I learned so much. Writing this update is part of that process. I didn’t realize how well I was doing on Quora until I looked at my stats for this article.
• Publishing is harder than writing, but it’s a habit that you can cultivate. It’s easy for me to write every day. But to put my work out into the world where people can criticize it, that’s hard. Also, I need to take time to edit, which is harder than just writing. But, like the writing itself, publishing regularly is a habit I can build and develop.
• Something is better than nothing. If I hadn’t set this ambitious goal for publishing five times a week, I probably wouldn’t have published as much as I did. I wouldn’t have learned so much about Quora, and I wouldn’t have published this either. Now I’m going to pursue an easier habit, just publish once a week, and see how that goes. Even publishing something to Quora every 2-3 weeks, instead of every 5 days, as I planned, had a huge effect: I’m a better writer and I’ve got literally thousands of readers who never would have read a single word if I hadn’t published anything.

Post a comment below if you have any questions or if you’ve tried something similar. Thanks for reading!

My Ambivalence Towards the Digital Age

If you know me well, you know I’m one of those early adopter types, who likes the shiny new digital gadgets. I grew up in a house with a Commodore 64, one of the first commercially viable personal computers, and I’ve been using computers since then, as an integral part of my personal, business, and creative life. I was a true believer in the promise of the personal computer, now fully realized in the form of the pocket super computer, commonly known as the smart phone.

The hippie ethos of Silicon Valley was very appealing to me. First, to give everyone the computing power to make art (word processing, photo, video, and audio editing), to build businesses (spreadsheets, databases), this would liberate an incredible amount of creativity and entrepreneurship. Then, to use these personal computers to connect everyone together with email, web sites, and now social media, that would take us to the next level. A sort of hive mind nirvana, dreamed of by the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Stewart Brand. This ethos of individual expression and empowerment fueled the dreams of Mark Zuckerberg, as well as countless other tech entrepreneurs.

My disillusionment, which is not yet complete, has been a long time in the making. When one of the heroes of my early adulthood, Steve Jobs, was revealed (to me) to be so selfish, ruthless, and possibly bipolar, I had to re-evaluate my views on the kind of people who led the revolution. I still use Apple products every day, actually I don’t really go very long without an Apple product on my person. I admire how they still push the envelope, innovate, and emphasize design to empower their users. I wasn’t a big fan of Bill Gate’s Microsoft, but the truth is that there would be no World Wide Web without first a Graphical User Interface (GUI) on pretty much every computer on the planet.

Now these companies, with the likes of Facebook, Google, and others, control massive amounts of wealth, concentrated in offshore tax havens in the hands of the very wealthy. These very tools and products that these companies have built are now being used to undermine democracy, to sow chaos and strife. Not exactly the nirvana those techno-hippies envisioned when they were hacking together the first PCs and Bulletin Board Services (BBS).

It’s hard to see a way out of this. Plenty of good things have happened as a result of this digital revolution, but the naive promise of techo-utopia has worn thin. I still see signs of hope. Open source software, Creative Commons licensing, and the plummeting price of computing hardware and connectivity still mean that there’s an opportunity for the little guy to make a difference. But the oligarchs have arrayed a formidable defense of their wealth and power, and co-opted much of the intellectual capital created during the early days of the digital revolution. Most of the Internet runs on open source software, but most people connect online using Facebook, a “walled garden” of privately owned proprietary code.

I’ve watched as being an American went from being a citizen to a consumer to now being the product. Our information, the data we create, is the raw material, the product that is sold to advertisers, credit agencies, and political operatives. We are the product. We’ve traded our privacy and security for convenience and an endless stream of cat videos.

What’s the answer? I don’t know, but I’m trying to find my way through this mess. I’ve cut way down on my use of Facebook, mostly because reading through my feed just makes me feel depressed. I’ve turned off every notification on my phone except for the ones that are generated by real people (texts, voice mails, messages only). I try to use open source software in my personal life and I use it almost exclusively in my business and for my creative endeavors. I’ve tried several times to switch to Firefox, but I still end up back on Google Chrome. But I’m just one out of billions. It’s not easy using open source software. Even Ubuntu, which is the easiest version of Linux I’ve encountered, is a hard slog for anyone who isn’t a digital gear head.

I think the biggest problem is that these digital products that promised freedom and a true meritocracy of equal opportunity are now being used in the service of concentrating political power and wealth. They are being used to turn citizens into products.

But, at the same time, these tools have been used recently to expose sexual predators or the manipulations of the ultra-wealthy — how else could you leak over 13 million documents if they weren’t digital? There are people all over the world who can now take courses from the finest universities, make art, and build businesses in a way that was inconceivable just a few decades ago. Sure, we all live in our filter bubbles, but getting out of our bubbles is only a Google search away.

Maybe what we’ve learned, the most important lesson that’s come out of all this, is that we aren’t the rational and noble thinkers envisioned by the Enlightenment and formalized by the economic theories of the last century. Instead we’re driven by emotion and a bunch of cognitive biases. Maybe what we really need is some humility, to realize that greed and fear and prejudice are more powerful than intellect, no matter how smart or well educated we are. Knowing this, we can guard against our worst impulses, and maybe even make the world a better place. I just don’t think that’s going to happen on Facebook.

What if Mueller proves his case and it doesn’t matter?

Yes, we need this new emoji very much

David Roberts at Vox explains how America is facing an epistemic crisis, meaning that we have lost a basic understanding and agreement about the importance of truth and facts in our public discourse. And by public discourse, I mean people shouting past each other on social media. It’s a disturbing development, and the whole process is accelerated by social media. We thought that giving everyone the tools to publish and reach a huge audience would be a Good Thing, eliminating the middle man, the gatekeepers.

It turns out that those so-called gatekeepers (news media, scientists, the academy) had an important role to play: because their reputation and value depended on how accurate they were, how rigorously and accurately they articulated the truth, or at least the truth as we best understood it, they had every incentive to be accurate and unbiased, as much as that is possible for any human institution. Because these gatekeepers also had some influence over how information spread — especially the news media — they also helped keep the stories we shared and believed in accountable to some standard of accuracy.

Now we have Facebook, Twitter, and other social media monstrosities, who are incentivized to capture our attention. If an article gets lots of clicks and shares on Facebook, Facebook doesn’t care that the article is utter bullshit. They are happy that we are paying so much attention to Facebook.

If the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, publishes an article that is riddled with errors or is completely untrue, they will publish a retraction and maybe even fire the reporter(s) and editor(s) who didn’t do their job and published such a piece of crap.

And it’s not just the social media companies that are making money by spreading lies. It’s media companies like Fox News that can run propaganda instead of news. They’ve been working on this formula for decades, but they’ve been helped along by the rise of social media. They benefit from the clicks and views just as much as Facebook and Twitter, and they’ve also learned that the best way to capture people’s attention is to appeal to their emotions, especially fear and anger. The more provocative the story, the better.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to the point where it just doesn’t matter if something is true or not. If something seems to be true, if it confirms our previously held beliefs, we don’t question it. Since the right-wing media have constructed this crazy echo chamber, these false beliefs just end up reinforcing each other.

How do we break out of this cycle? I don’t know. Many people on the right have gotten rich and powerful using this machine to their advantage. And I think the left would do it too if they could. It’s just that the right got a head start on this. Fox News was peddling this bullshit for years, all the way back to the George W. Bush administration. John Stewart on the Daily Show practically made his career just calling out their bullshit every night. Bullshit Mountain, he called it. What’s bigger than a mountain of bullshit? I don’t know but we are buried under it right now.

How Much RAM do my favorite browsers use?

November 3, 2017

How much RAM does Firefox use compared to Google Chrome?

The thing about RAM is that you have than enough exactly until you run out. In other words, you only notice a shortage of RAM when you are doing stuff with your computer that uses more RAM than you have. Then, you’ll see all kinds of slow downs because your computer has to swap data out of RAM to your disk. Since many computers use SSD storage now, swapping is faster, but it’s still overhead and it will slow you down, especially if you are switching between windows and apps.

One of the most common examples of this is the modern web browser. Because I work with all three of the most common desktop operating systems, I took a close look at how Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome worked on my old MacBook Pro.

Testing RAM Use

12:27 PM

I’m using my MacBook Pro for these tests.

First, I look at RAM usage when I’m logged into my account.

Load only default Mozilla Firefox Start Page

Let’s take a look at how the latest Mozilla Firefox behaves when I’m logged into my Mac desktop account, and Firefox is loaded with my extensions and set up to sync.

RAM Use:

295.9 MB; 20 K Compressed. RAM then blasts up to a GB. Firefox is active, but eventually CPU settles down to 0 – 0.1 % Ram settles to about 657.4 MB.

No window: 614.6 MB, CPU is at 0.2 – and higher, 0.6, but less than 1%.

Perhaps it’s shedding RAM use. Now RAM is down to 569.3 Seems stable.

CPU is again back to 0 – 0.1% & RAM is at 569 MB. 51.9 MB compressed.

Click on Dock icon to open window: RAM goes to 595.5 MB, 39.5 MB compressed. CPU at 0.2 or lower.

1:10 PM

At this point, I’ve realized that all the personalization I’m doing (loading extensions, themes, and syncing my Firefox account) can have a huge effect on RAM use. Fortunately, there’s a way to get around this: the Mac Guest account. This account doesn’t save any settings from one session to another (all files are deleted, in fact) so it’s a perfect way to remove all variables and compare apples to apples, as it were.

I did a whole bunch of screen captures in the Guest account to measure RAM usage for Firefox and Google Chrome. The results are interesting: Chrome is very modular and may use less RAM when it first opens, although it appears as several different processes.

New Neuroscience Reveals 3 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent

The latest research turns everything we know about feelings upside down. Here’s what you need to know to become more emotionally intelligent.

TL;DR:

1. Increase your “emotional granularity” by learning to recognize a wider range of subtle emotions.
2. Improve your vocabulary: the more words you know for different emotional states, the healthier you’ll be.
3. Create your own emotions: make your own labels for emotions that don’t fall into existing categories.

Source: New Neuroscience Reveals 3 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent – Barking Up The Wrong Tree

The Virtual Hunter Gatherer

What is it about Fallout 4 that has put such a hammerlock on my brain? That game has the same effect on me as Far Cry 4. Is it the stealth oriented game play? Is it the natural setting, in the great outdoors? That’s part of it, but not the whole thing. I have a similar reaction to No Man’s Sky, and that takes place in the exact opposite of a natural environment.

All of these games are built on a similar central role for the main character: you are a hunter / gatherer, thrust into a hostile and mysterious world, full of dangers, with very little to help you survive, especially in the early stages of the game.

In all of these games, through your efforts, cunning, and bravery, you also build a safe and prosperous community: people (or aliens, in the case of No Man’s Sky) who owe their very existence and livelihood to you. You’ve tamed the wild, carved out a safe refuge in a hostile universe.

This is most explicit in Fallout 4, where the game guides you step-by-step through the process of setting up a thriving community, called Sanctuary, no less, in the very neighborhood you called home before the apocalypse. Once you’ve established your post apocalyptic homestead, it’s your job to venture out into the hostile world around you, hunt and gather for food and other resources, and then craft these into useful or dangerous technologies that will help you further overcome the dangers that await.

This is the life of a hunter gatherer, in any era. The world is unknown, unmapped, full of goodies but also dangers. To survive and flourish, you must use your senses to the fullest. I’ve spent hours in Fallout 4 or No Man’s Sky staring intently at the screen, trying to spot a little treasure trove or whatever dangerous monster or hostile environment might spell my doom.

I play these games on the maximum difficulty, not because I’m some kind of super gamer, but because the most gratifying thing for me in these games is knowing I overcame the hardest challenge this nasty and brutish world can throw at me. It’s even more gratifying to use my smarts to overcome impossible odds.

Fallout 4 takes this to a new level with the idea of a companion. You travel through this world with a companion, starting with the brave, loyal and completely non-judgemental German Shepherd, Dogmeat. I first was just glad of the virtual company: Dogmeat was by my side, there to fight with me if I was attacked, occasionally directing me to some goodies I might have missed. But as I became more sophisticated, I’d direct Dogmeat to go out ahead of me to see if there were any bad guys up ahead, or to draw them out of hiding. Then I started working with Dogmeat to help me hunt: I’ll send him off to flank my prey, to drive the creature toward the river or a fence and cut off its escape.

The emotional effects of my virtual companion would last even beyond when I turned the PS4 off and got back to my real life. Accustomed to the clatter of Dogmeat’s claws, or his occasional barks, I’d look around the house, thinking “where’s the dog? He was just here a moment ago.” That damn game had tricked my brain into thinking I had a dog.

I never for once thought that I actually lived in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, or that I was a well-armed hunter gatherer, rebuilding civilization on the fringes of a Hobbesian dystopia, fully capable of extreme violence if that’s what I needed to do to protect myself or my tiny community. That’s all part of the fantasy of the game. But part of my brain thought I had a dog, IRL. It would take a few minutes for the effect to wear off after I stopped playing, and maybe that only happened because I didn’t hear the subtle audio cues to remind me of Dogmeat’s presence at my side when I was in-game. Because that’s what it’s really like: I’m in the game, fully inhabiting this world, tuning all of my attention to the sounds and sights that could mean the difference between life and death.

I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen when we get really good VR. It’s going to be hard to separate the real from the imaginary worlds we’ve created. Some have argued, pretty convincingly, that we already live in a virtual reality. In fact, it’s our ability to create these imaginary worlds (like religion or economics) that really separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. So maybe it’s already too late.

Oh well. At least I’ll never be bored.