Living in the Future

Tag: Recommendation

  • Carbs are getting in the way of healthy eating

    Canadians heeded the exhortation to reduce fat and reduced their fat intake to 31 per cent by 2004. But during this time, obesity rates spiked, which suggests that dietary fat is not a “primary contributing factor” in obesity, said the report.

    I got healthy (and lost 45 pounds in the last 8 months) but not by focusing on eating healthier foods (like salads) at restaurants and at home. But my main focus was on the AMOUNT I ate, not on the types of foods as much. I didn’t count a single calorie, and though I started my diet exercising by biking to work every day, for the last few months I’ve only really been moderately active, but haven’t gained any weight back.

    The demonization of fat (and subsequent need for people to eat lots of carbs at the grocery store, or restaurants, has meant that people have to eat a lot MORE food to feel full. Letting yourself eat fat, and trying to limit the amount of carbs you eat, is probably going to become increasingly important to the North American diet, whether these guidelines officially change or not.

    > The Canada Food Guide is killing you: ‘The obesity epidemic… really began with our dietary guidelines’

  • Looking into Ottawa’s past

    Looking into Ottawa’s past

    I’m not exactly sure how I came across this (I think I was seeing how streets lined up and wondering how Ottawa’s streets might have changed), but this morning I discovered a really neat repository of old aerial maps of Ottawa, going back all the way to the 1920s. It’s cool to see how cities change, and what Downtown, the Transitway, LeBreton Flats, City Hall, or Lansdowne all looked like over the years.

    The maps allow you to overlap a modern street map over the old pictures, so you can clearly see how things have changed. The whole thing is viewable at maps.ottawa.ca/geoottawa!

    > geoOttawa

  • A Diminishing Willingness to Do or Try New Things

    The technological inertia of adulthood, signified by a diminishing willingness to do or try new things.

    I have been trying, without a great deal of success, to get my friends interested in using Slack to communicate with one another. Slack is a great service with mobile apps, desktop apps, and a really slick web interface that makes communicating with bigger groups of people really simple and easy.

    However, I’ve been trying to get people jazzed about better communication services for the better part of 10 years now, and I’m mostly thwarted at every turn. I honestly feel, deep in my heart, that this failing isn’t because the services I’m advocating for (Google Wave, Facebook Messenger, Google+, Twitter, Google Hangouts, Slack) are objectively bad.

    That being said, I also don’t think my friends, the people I want to keep in touch with the most, are idiots for not being as excited in the next big thing as I am. I am always on the lookout for new technology, but I know I’m rare in being that way. But I also know that there is value in what I’m trying to do.

    When I first got a cell phone, SMS was the only method of communication I used (aside from the very occasional phone call). When I first got an email address, I would occasionally use it to email friends, but its much more vital use was to get me logged in to MSN Messenger.

    I’ve always subscribed to a vast number of different communications services (as I broke down in my last post about this stuff), and I use many of them to keep in touch with just a handful of people. The people I talk to on a regular basis interact with me in a startling number of ways:

    • Some people I know I can reach most easily with SMS
    • Some I know will only check Facebook sporadically
    • Some who keep data turned off unless it’s an emergency
    • Some people I will only message through Google Hangouts
    • Some people answer messages during the day through one chat platform, but use another platform the rest of the time (even though both are available to them at all times).
    In trying to make Slack a thing with my closest friends, what I’m really trying to do is make it really easy for those people to know exactly where and how they can reach me and each other, all the time. Maybe, for some people, that’s actually a failed premise. It’s just something that’s never going to happen.
    It might be that no matter how hard I try, some people are just going to send me a text message when they want to reach me. And perhaps, that won’t change.
    Liberal youth grow older and more conservative, even if their values never actually change in the process. I’m going to do my best to be adaptable, while advocating for new and better at every turn. We don’t have to define ourselves by who we are now, we can choose to present ourselves as the best we can be in the future.
    Communication is a social contract we all enter into, and having it formalized might be scary or uncomfortable to some people. I don’t think it’s too lofty a goal to aim for better than a 14 person group thread in Facebook Messenger as a way for people from all walks of life to interact and figure their lives out. We can do better, and while I’m suggesting one specific option, I’m just trying to do the best I can today.
  • Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a Gentleman

    Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a Gentleman

    When you used to post Instagram photos to Twitter, it would automatically expand the photo in Twitter, to show your beautiful shot in all its glory. However, when Twitter launched its own photo sharing natively, it started blocking the auto-expanding of photos from Instagram, so pictures looked ugly as heck when shared from Instagram to Twitter. Here’s what I mean:

    Sharing images the regular way (like I did above) leaves this text-based tweet, leaving users to guess what the picture is of, because neither Instagram nor Twitter wants to cede ground on letting users of both platforms see pictures from the others’ social network.

    However, I’ve come up with a fix, and it involves a great service called IFTTT. If you’re not using it already, do yourself a favour and go sign up. Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is go to this link, and you’ll be able to post directly from Instagram to Twitter, with a full resolution version of the photo, while still maintaining a link back to Instagram in case people want to go check out your other photos. That looks like this:

    As you can see, that’s way better, but you still get the link back to Instagram.

    PS. If you’re using this recipe from IFTTT, you shouldn’t select the native Twitter sharing when posting in Instagram, or you’ll end up with a double post, one with the image, and one without. And nobody wants that.

    Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a gentleman. by robattrell – IFTTT

  • Communication is Broken

    Communication is Broken

    Communication is unbelievably important for a properly functioning society. And after ranting a little on Twitter this morning, now seems like as good a time as any to break down the best communication tools, why they’re good, and what they’re good for.

    Today’s communication is broken, we can’t talk effectively with the people we’re closest to, and the very services that aim to bring us closer together are keeping us further apart than they need to. We can do better!

    Let’s keep it really simple to start: 1-on-1 communication. It’s really hard to get this wrong, because it’s fundamentally the easiest thing to do. Effectively, communication between two people can be public, or private. There’s a continuum of more vs. less private, but almost every platform has options for private individual communication. Believe it or not, some people ONLY use these kinds of communication. Here are a few examples (they’re all really old school):

    • Phone Call (voice; tied to a phone number)
    • Email (text, with attachments; tied to an email address)
    • SMS (text, maybe photos; tied to a phone number)

    Like I mentioned, some platforms advertise themselves as much more than private 1 on 1 communication, but they do still have that aspect available. These aren’t as limited, but can function in such a narrow way:

    • Snapchat (ephemeral photos/video and text; tied to an account on one phone at a time)
    • Skype (text, media attachments and video/audio calls; tied to an account with possibility of phone number)
    • iMessage (Text, photo/video, audio message; tied to an Apple ID, but can add phone numbers or email addresses)

    Now, the services covered so far have mostly been private (Snapchat now has *public* Stories), but there are also communication methods that let you communicate with one person, but in public.

    • Facebook Wall Post (text, photos/video; tied to Facebook accounts)
    • Twitter Mention (text, photos/video; tied to Twitter accounts)
    • Google Hangout on Air (audio/video; tied to Google accounts)

    These companies all have their respective private messaging platforms as well (Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, and Google Hangouts), which are useful for both individual and group messaging, but they all have their limits, and are easy to use inefficiently.

    Now, instead of getting to the best services that offer the most diverse communication right away, let’s go through an exercise first.

    I’m going to attempt to make a list of all of the communication platforms I make use of in the average week. This is a combination of mobile/desktop, 1-way or 2-way communication, personal/business…this is as exhaustive as I can be on the matter (in no particular order, I’m just going through my phone and computer):

    Google Calendar
    Phone
    FaceTime
    Google Drive
    Nuzzel
    Flipboard
    SoundCloud
    Periscope
    Podcasts
    Reddit
    Google+
    Facebook
    Trello
    IFTTT
    Google Photos
    Facebook Messenger
    Snapchat
    Twitter
    Google Keep
    LinkedIn
    Hangouts
    Email
    Kijiji
    Blogging
    Television
    YouTube
    Slack
    Instagram
    SMS
    iMessage
    Peach
    RSS
    Blogs
    News Sites
    Customer Service Live Chat
    Talking in Person

    I’m sure, even given this exhausting list, that I’ve missed a couple of really obvious communication methods. That being said, they all have various reasons why I use them. I use some more than others, and for a variety of reasons some get used very little (sorry, Peach).

    Having said all of that, The best communication methods I have at my disposal are easy to understand, but have diverse uses. I’m sure I could get by with any of these methods of communication on their own, but it would be difficult. Each has its limitations, and strengths.

    In a perfect world, we would all agree to have accounts for all of these services, and all use whichever one we feel like at a given time. However, for me, the following is (in my mind), a perfect set of tools to satisfy all communications needs. Order in this list is VERY important, and changes/improvements to any of these services could change the order.

    1. Slack
    If I have you on my Slack team, and I know you actually have the app on your phone/computer or visit the website from time to time, this is by far the way I’m going to contact you. The way Slack integrates with the rest of the items on this list makes its prime spot a no-brainer.

    2. Twitter
    I love Twitter (and would only be able to love it more if they got rid of the 140 character limit, though there are plenty of reasons why that’s challenging). Twitter integrates well with Slack, and lets me follow cool people to keep up with the world better than any service I know how to. It’s also a semi-public conversation, and so you can kind of see what everybody is up to.


    3. Hangouts
    Having Hangouts on this list is a no-brainer, simply because of the video chat capability. Hangouts also integrates well with Slack, although I don’t use that feature much, but Slack’s link control is so good that it’s plenty for my needs.

    4. Email
    You always need a fall-back. Sometimes, you’re talking with a stranger, or a distant acquaintance. Sometimes, you just want to be notified of something that pertains to just you. In many cases, email is a good way for people you don’t have on Slack or Hangouts to get in touch with you privately (although Twitter is really fine for that too).

    I’ve extolled the virtues of Slack before, and maybe it’s a failing on my part that so few of the people I’m closest to really get its appeal (since the people I do use it with really seem to get a lot out of it, and I use it extensively even just for my own personal non-communication needs).

    I love Facebook Messenger, but really only because many people have Facebook accounts. If the people I talk to most on Messenger were on my Slack team and actually used the service, I wouldn’t use Messenger nearly as much. And having said that, though Messenger has taken great strides to make messaging fun, fast, and beautiful, it’s INCREDIBLY difficult to keep track of multiple threads, and for groups of close friends who talk about lots of different things, it’s a nightmare. Seriously, use a Slack team for your group of close friends.

    I’m going to keep advocating for Slack and Twitter, because they have been essential to my modern life and I love communicating with them so much. I’m interested to see how communication changes as the online world creeps more and more into our every interaction, and what the next generation of communication services look like.

  • What’s the best way to communicate effectively? (January 10)

    What’s the best way to communicate effectively? (January 10)

    I’ve talked a LOT about messaging services. I’ve had conversations about them with various people for years, and in person or on a variety of those messaging services themselves.

    I take communication very seriously, so when a new application comes out that purports to change the world by making it easier to keep in touch with important people, I take note. It was clear to me from the moment I first got a cell phone that SMS (text messages) wasn’t the future of anything.

    When I first got online in a real way, the people I needed to keep in touch with were all using MSN Messenger. It was a chat application that, considering the era, was pretty advanced and had a lot of users. In fact, there are probably many people who never stopped using that, then Windows Live Messenger, and then its modern equivalent, Skype (after Microsoft bought Skype).

    I’ve moved through many chat platforms claiming to be the best new thing, and several of them were. Facebook Messenger started off very slowly, but is now used by around a billion people on a regular basis. I used Google Talk through a lot of my university career, and it was really great when all my friends were on our work computers using Gmail all day every day.

    Google Hangouts was my go-to chat platform from its inception until the middle of last year, and I still use that application for video calls and keeping in touch with family. I also keep in contact with many people, including some I’ve never met in person, through Twitter.

    I think the fundamental issue with keeping up to date on what the best communication platform is, is simple. I think that there actually is no BEST communications platform for all uses. Each one has unique features that set it apart from the others, and the success of all of them for you depend heavily on whether you know people that also use them.

    I have been proselytizing Slack for a little over a year now as my favourite communication tool, and it’s an incredibly popular tool for keeping in contact with small to medium pockets of people, because it mimics the way groups actually communicate in the real world. You can centre conversations around topics, or include only subsets of users in a given Slack team, and I think compartmentalizing like that makes communication in Slack really efficient compared to other platforms.

    I’m not saying Slack is the objective best communication platform for everybody to keep in touch with everybody else, because it isn’t. But for me, for most of the people I keep in touch with on a very regular basis, I can’t get over its incredible usefulness. Below are just a few of the ways I prefer Slack to many other messaging platforms.

    1. You have a personal chat room. You can send messages to a helpful AI powered robot called Slackbot, or just use this chat thread to leave yourself messages or remind yourself of things. I use it all the time to keep track of things, and I find it incredibly useful to have one place I can throw text or ideas or links when I need to.

    2. You can share links with people and Slack automatically provides searchable context. In comparison with Facebook Messenger, which will pop up and provide a picture and the title of the link you send, Slack with actually paste in text what is contained in the link, an image for context, and a short description of the page at the end of the link. It’s incredibly useful.

    3. Slack can passively let you keep tabs on a conversation without being notified of every message. You can control which chats will be able to notify you and how the notification comes to you, to your phone, to your computer, etc.

    4. You can tag people and other conversations in channels. I could let Mike know I needed his attention for something just by mentioning his name, and I could refer to the “cooking” channel in a conversation with my friends if I’d posted a recipe in there.

    5. Perhaps the best thing you can do with Slack is integrate other services. You can paste links to a Google Document and it will automatically figure out which document you are referring to, and keep track of all Google Docs that have been posted in one place. You can set it up to forward Tweets from Twitter into a channel to keep tabs on a topic or a Twitter account any group might care about. It’s incredibly versatile and I have about 5-6 different services that all connect with Slack right now.

    I love Slack, and I would use it even if nobody else was around, but if you’re in a team or want to stay in touch with a group of people with more than one simple conversation, this is the way to do it. You’ll never derail a whole group of people with an off-topic remark again (or at least it’s a lot easier to avoid). Go try Slack at Slack.com. They have apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the web!

  • Losing Weight Isn’t Hard

    Losing weight is easy, and let me tell you why (and how!).

    I have something to tell you that could either be unbelievably hard to believe, or possibly instantly understood, depending on your own experiences. I’ve been talking a LOT about my weight and my health in the last 3 months or so, and I’ve started posting my weight on Twitter every day as a way to motivate myself to eat more responsibly.


    This is how I feel now, stepping on the scale.

    The thing that I’ve learned in losing almost 30 pounds in the last 7 months or so (and 25 lbs in the last 2 months) is that starting to eat isn’t the problem. In losing this weight, I really haven’t limited myself in the food that I have been eating. That’s not to say I haven’t changed my habits, but I still eat burgers, and pizza, and nachos, and all kinds of other delicious foods. I can probably even say I basically eat about as much of those things as I always have.

    The MOST important thing I have learned when losing weight is this: stop eating. Don’t let your hunger decide how much you should eat for the first little while. Restaurants are the worst for this. You have no control over the portion of food you get, and it can be difficult to control your intake this way, especially if you despise the inconvenience of doggy bags as much as I do. When I go to a restaurant now, I get the main dish I really want (be it a big, juicy burger, or a pizza, or whatever other thing I might want), and then get a side that has very little food in it. Fries are a terrible example of this, because there is a LOT of food in fries. I’m not trying to survive a year and a half on Mars, so I probably don’t need to eat several hundred grams of potatoes along with my meal.

    Once I accepted that I could eat less than I had been, I was fine missing “meals” and just eating a little bit when I felt like it. It is darn near impossible to gain weight while eating only fat and protein. Carbohydrates (sugars) are the real problem here. And in our modern grocery stores, everything is full of carbs. The simple reason for this is that carbs are incredibly cheap calories. Dipping those carbs in fat and covering them in salt is an easy and cheap way to make them DELICIOUS.

    The other really important part of weight loss is your metabolism (to put it simply, that’s the amount of food energy your body burns when it’s just sitting there doing nothing else). I’ve been biking or walking 1-2 times per day since I really started focusing on my health. Because my bike ride is to work, that means I get 25-30 minutes of pretty intense exercise about 8 hours apart, splitting the day up nicely for my metabolism. It’s a pretty common excuse that around 20-25 years old your metabolism drops off and you stop being able to eat whatever you want and maintain your health, but I really think the “change” isn’t in your metabolism, but in the average adult’s activity level.

    With the activity that I’ve been trying to do every single day regardless of other circumstance, my good metabolism that I had written off as having “lost” in my late teens is back, and I can eat a good amount while still losing or at least maintaining my weight. For a little more background on this, Nick and I discuss active transportation and its impact on healthy weight in last week’s episode of East Meets West (the discussion of health and such starts around 44:15, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing).

    Anyhow, to simplify things, or if you’re looking for an easy set of guidelines that have been working for me so far, here are the easiest things I can recommend:

    • Have a food around that you can sustainably eat every day, and can prepare in a few minutes (no more, and no less; that is Soylent for me). Any more prep and you will do something easier. Any less prep and you will already be eating before you’re hungry enough.
    • Exercise at least a half hour every day, twice throughout the day if you can, to keep your body burning energy.
    • Try not to order fries at a restaurant, unless that’s all you’re having (soup, salad, etc. is much easier to control the total amount you eat).
    • Stop thinking that fat will make you fat. Carbs will make you fat, but don’t necessarily avoid them completely (you will need quick energy sometimes). Keep in mind that not all sugars are created equal, and simple sugars (like in candy) will spike your blood sugar and make you crash.
    • Stop using dinner plates (and stop eating “dinner” at all at home, if possible). The modern meal, and the size of dinner plates, means that on average we tend to eat way more than we need. Eat when you are hungry, and give it 15 minutes before deciding you need more.
    • Eat eggs. However you like them cooked, they are a great source of life stuff (vitamins, minerals, fats, protein, etc.). There’s a reason you can grow a whole chick from an egg. It has everything you need for life. And stop thinking that eating cholesterol will make you have high cholesterol (it won’t).
    • Last, I forgot one of the very important things, drink water! Not lots of water, but definitely some water. It keeps you from feeling hungry when you’re not actually hungry.

    It honestly wasn’t that hard for me to lose a lot of weight just keeping these simple principles in mind, but if you have had trouble on “diets”, I’d recommend keeping track of your weight every day. It will give you a good sense of how your habits are affecting your weight (and overall health, in general) and you will be able to stay ahead of bad habits (like eating too much on weekends). You can follow the steps here and download a useful spreadsheet to track your weight (ask me about it if you’re interested in the modifications I’ve made to my version). And you can follow along with my weight loss journey here.

  • Things to look for when buying a laptop

    I’ve bought many computers, and I’ve helped friends shop for many more. They don’t always take my advice, but when I do, they’re generally happiest with the following things:

    Must Haves

    • 8GB+ of RAM
    • Newest or 2nd newest generation Intel processor
    • More than 1366×768 px display
    • Battery life rated for more than 4 hours (preferably much more)

    Important but I guess not critical for all people

    • 256-512 GB SSD (So worth the slight extra money)
    • 1080p or better display
    • Backlit keyboard (this is such a crucial feature more laptops should have these)
    • HDMI port is really convenient unless you’re all about the wireless
    • Get a light computer, weight is pretty important unless you plan to just plunk it on a desk
    • Touch screens are pretty affordable and they will be nice to have in the future

    Other Tips

    • Spend $100-200 more than you think you should (you’ll thank me in 4 years when you’ve spent $50 a year on a better computer)
    • Buy from a place that will accept returns, and preferably a place that will service the computer in their store (man the Apple Store is great for this)
    • Don’t be afraid to return a computer if you don’t like the way it feels
    • Start a backup plan for your important files today. If you computer falls in a lake, you should be sad/angry, but you don’t need to lose anything
    • Talk to your friendly neighbourhood tech guy. Odds are he’s bored of his computer and will have fun looking at what’s new and talking to you about it.
  • Listening Party Volume #6 – Kal Penn on the Nerdist Podcast

    Listening Party Volume #6 – Kal Penn on the Nerdist Podcast

    The Nerdist Podcast

    For the last year or so, I’ve had the Nerdist Podcast in my player. They do 2-3 podcasts a week with comedians, entertainers and cool Bills like Bill Nye and Bill Gates. If I know the person they’re talking to, I’ll listen to the show.

    This week, Kal Penn (of Harold and Kumar and House M.D. fame) was on the show. He’s an incredible guy and he left House in its heyday to go work for the Obama campaign. They talk about a lot of cool stuff and I found the whole thing very interesting, including a conversation about old-school, racist aspects of Hollywood that genuinely shocked me. You should listen!

    The episode in question is currently the 3rd newest, from March 27th: Kal Penn on the Nerdist Podcast.

    The Nerdist Podcast on iTunes

  • Listening Party Volume 5 – *NEW* Fall Out Boy

    Listening Party Volume 5 – *NEW* Fall Out Boy

    I’ve been a big fan of Fall Out Boy for quite some time now, and I really don’t think they’ve had much (if any) drop in quality from their old, popular stuff, like Sugar, We’re Going Down, and even earlier albums. Listening to this album makes me feel like a teenager again, but the band is growing up along with me.

    American Beauty/American Psycho – Listen on Google Play
    Find it on iTunes