Homemade Breast Pump

Lisa and I are expecting our third boy in October.  Five years ago we were expecting our first child, and I was getting a sticker shock as we were buying all of our baby supplies.  I kept joking that I could save a little money on a breast pump by making one myself - all I'd need would be a little tubing, which I could get from our fish tank, and some sort of pump.  

I eventually decided this would make a good practical joke, and shot this video.  Can you tell I had more time on my hands back then?

When Workflow Automation Goes Bad

I've posted a few times regarding how I enjoy finding ways to automate little tasks. However, this can have a downside. David Sparks recently relayed an example of this on his MacSparky blog.

I have a similar story. A long while back I decided to divert all the email from my EyeDock website into my Gmail account. I liked the idea of only opening one email account, and I liked Gmail's tools much better than the web panel my hosting site gave me for managing email. I simply grab the email via POP3 and filter it to skip the inbox and apply an "EyeDock" label.

However, I initially got a little label crazy and created about 6 different EyeDock labels (EyeDock, EyeDock:subscriptions, EyeDock:companies, etc.). I decided I was making making my life more complicated than it had to be. After all, when I want to find an email I rarely use the labels anyway because Gmail is just so searchable. So, I eliminated some of my extraneous labels and simplified my life.

As the next month went by something seemed a little off, but I couldn't figure out what. And it seemed different in a good way: I had more time in my evenings to work on the things I wanted to. However, I eventually received a couple messages from people stating that I hadn't responded to their emails (which is odd because I've prided myself on making great efforts to reply to my EyeDock users). When I searched Gmail for their previous emails I found them, but they were not in my inbox and they didn't have any labels.

I realized that I'd made a mistake. I originally was filtering all emails that were originally directed a specific EyeDock address into a specific Gmail label. It was working well ... until I deleted that label. I guess I assumed that, if the label didn't exist, the emails would show up in a parent folder or at least in the inbox. Nope. Instead they were just sent to the magical land of "archive".

So, I searched for all the messages that were sent to that email address and found about 60 of them. These were questions and concerns that were directed to my business and I'd never replied = really horrible customer service.

I went through the missed emails, one by one, tried to address their concerns, and profusely apologized (I made a TextExpander snippet to help with that).

I learned my lesson: Automation is great, but you really need to be careful. It always does what it's told, but you need to make sure it's doing what you intended. If not, you might negate all the time you saved - and then some.

Wedding Anniversary: Now For Something Sappy

Just to show I can be a little romantic, or perhaps painfully sappy, here's another animation I made prior to our wedding. You're forewarned: it's kinda long.

I was going to put it on this page, but then I realized it would start up automatically and play loud wedding music, even for people who were trying to look at other posts on the same page.

I'll just link to it intead:

Here it is

Wedding Anniversary: Sneak Preview

My wedding anniversary is today. In celebration, I decided to get something I created prior to my wedding out of the attic (actually, I found it on an external hard drive in a box in the basement).

This is a "sneak preview" of Lisa's wedding dress.  To be fair, I ultimately decided to include a glimpse of my tux too.  It w​as put on a little website I created for our guests prior to our wedding in 2006.

You may need to click the picture first, then move your mouse around to for your sneak peak.​

If This, Then That: Rethinking the Email Journal

A while back I wrote a post about how I was using email, AppleScript, and Dropbox to keep a journal about my kids. Overall this has been working well, and I feel it is helping me to write more entries than I otherwise would. However, there's one thing that bothers me: It depends on Apple's native Mail application. In short, the rules I set up in Mail.app trigger an Applescript that appends the message to a text file.

Unfortunately, as hard as I try, I just can't seem to get comfortable with the Apple Mail app. I know this is may be considered blasphemy to the Apple faithful, but I just feel more comfortable using the Gmail web client. I like the keyboard shortcuts that let me fly through my inbox, and I have a workflow for using labels that I just can't seem to replicate in Mail.app.

So, my solution has been this - I manage my email in Gmail (or in Mailplane, which is pretty much the same thing). But, to catch my journal entries, I also open Mail.app at startup and keep it running on my desktop. This works, but it's not a perfect solution for multiple reasons:

1. My MacBook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth, and running a largely unneeded program bogs it down a little.
2. My laptop needs to be running for this to work. I'd like to be able to write an email from anywhere, hit send, and have it processed be my filter and added to my journal immediately. If my laptop is packed away, well, my email just stagnates in my inbox.
3. Having an extra app running in my dock insults my minimalist sensibilities.

Because of these issues I thought I'd try another tack. I decided to try If This Then That, or IFTTT. I'd looked at IFTTT a while back, and while it looked powerful and interesting, I wasn't sure what to do with it. I thought this was the perfect time to give it a try.

First, a little info about IFTTT. The name really says it all: If this, then that. As in, if something happens, do something. IFTTT uses the public APIs of a whole slew of services, including Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook, Instapaper, PinBoard, and about 40 more. So, you can essentially connect these APIs together like little building blocks. An example would go something like this: "Watch my Twitter account - when I 'favorite' a tweet, save the tweet in Evernote." There's a ton of other examples available at the IFTTT recipes page.

For my email needs, it would go something like: "If an email comes into my Gmail account with the subject "kid1.txt", Then append the content of that message to a specified text file in Dropbox."

So, I signed up for a IFTTT account and clicked the "Create" link. First you need to select the "This" part of If This, Then That. In my case, the This is "watch my Gmail". So, I clicked the Gmail icon and, on the next screen, selected the "New email from search" option. Then, I specified the phrase that I wanted IFTTT to watch for:

Next, we need to specify the "That". My That is "append the text to a file in Dropbox". So, I clicked the Dropbox icon and chose "Append to a text file" on the ensuing page. I specified the file I wanted to append to (kid1) and the path inside my Dropbox folder (Family/). I set up the Content field to format the text to include the date that it was sent and the message body.

After saving this 'recipe', I'm ready to go. I can still follow these steps: Write an email to myself, set the subject to "kid1.txt", write my "journal" entry in the content, and hit send.

IFTTT sees it, grabs it, and appends the text to my journal file in Dropbox.

So, how is this method better? Well,

• I don't have to have Mail.app running - or even have my computer running, for that matter…
• No need for complicated scripting
• Multiplatform - all I need is IFTTT, Gmail, and Dropbox. If I switched to a PC tomorrow, or decided my only computer was going to be my phone, this would still work.
• IFTTT checks checks my Gmail account every 15 minutes, so I know my journal entry will be added to my text file in a timely manner.

Any concerns about this method? Yes:

• I'm giving a third party access to my Gmail and Dropbox accounts.
• I'm relying on a third party for this workflow. However, I'm not too worried about that: If IFTTT goes under, I'll still have my email archive and the redundancy of my Dropbox content. IFTTT is not hosting any content, so they're not going to lose my priceless journal.
• IFTTT doesn't perform any actions on my email. It does what it's supposed to but it would be great if, when it's done its job, it could mark the email as read and archive it for me. I'll probably just do these things manually, but I think I'll have this lingering fear that I'm doing it too soon and not giving IFTTT a chance to add the content to my journal. I'm going to have to give some thought to how I want to handle that.

Alternate Optometry Definitions

While in optometry school I designed a t-shirt to be sold as a fundraiser for my graduating class. I made a list of about 15 "alternate definitions" of eye terminologies and asked my classmates to vote on their favorites. My friend Marc Fredrickson made some cartoons to go along with the definitions, and this was the end result:

Paperless E-Book

As you may have seen by my previous posts, I'm really into finding ways to work more efficiently on my Mac. One of my greatest sources of ideas and inspiration related to this topic is The Mac Power Users podcast. I was really excited to see that one of the co-hosts of this show (David Sparks) had written a "book" called Paperless which, as you might expect, is about going paperless.

I found this "book" really interesting on several levels. I'll expand on this:

I like the topic. I've also been intrigued by the idea of eliminating paper in my life, but my past attempts have all been abandoned due to the amount of work I've had to put into it. With the improvement in scanners, PDF software, and other utility software it's much easier than it used to be. This "book" had a lot of great tips to minimize the effort and maximize the results. I'm tempted to go into more detail, but really, you should just read the book.

I like the "book". I've been writing the word "book" in quotes because a product like this is so much more than just a book. Sparks used Apple's iBooks Author to create this book (I'll stop using the quotes now) and the end result is beautiful. The typography and layout is extremely visually appealing and it's chock-full of interactive features like picture galleries and video screencasts. The funny thing is, I'm not sure how I feel about these features in general. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, said this in reference to the Kindle and how it relates to the iPad:

For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.

And, as much as I like reading on my iPad, I totally agree with him. When I'm reading, I like to read. Videos, and even pictures, are a distraction and tend to interrupt my flow. Multimedia features can't hold a candle to what's happening in my head while engrossed in a book. However, maybe this is just the perspective of a 40 year-old who grew to love reading before the Internet existed. Kids today spend a lot more time multitasking than I did, and growing up with e-books might find the experience less distracting than I do. I think it'll take me some time to sort through my feelings on this.

All that being said, I think this was the perfect format for this kind of book. I've read a lot of technical books, and it's a huge pain to try to follow pages of convoluted instructions while learning to use a new software program. In this case, a picture truly is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth about a thousand pictures. I found it very useful, and it makes me very curious to see if Apple can make this work for textbooks as they so obviously hope to.

I like what this means for publishing. The fact that a guy with a full time job (he's an attorney) can self-publish such a beautiful book blows my mind. Not long ago ago a new writer was lucky if they received 10% of the profits of their books, but by far the biggest obstacle was finding a publisher that was willing to work with you. After all, they needed to edit, format, print, promote, and distribute an author's creation. Now the biggest obstacle is what it should be: Having a good idea and a putting forth a lot of hard work bring it to fruition. Editing is still an important step, but printing is unnecessary and distribution is relatively easy. Davis Sparks was able to do write Paperless in his free time, asked some friends to edit it, and publish it to iTunes. Because he did most of this himself, he could price it at a very reasonable $4.99 and will enjoy 70% of the proceeds. That's a win for him and a win for consumers like me.

This is what I love about technology. A regular person, just like me, can create something cool and share it with the world in a way that is unprecedented.

Why Does My Neck Hurt?

 A little comic about the hazards of being an optometrist...