Category Archives: Lifehacking

DIY, Lifehacking

Why Is Sharpening a Knife So Hard for Me?

I’m having a really hard time learning how to sharpen our kitchen knives.

As all the videos on YouTube will tell you, this is not rocket science. It’s a matter of patience and consistency and a few elements of attention.

But month after month passes, I keep trying, but I’m unable to get our knives sharp.

I went so far as to send them out once (by mail) to a professional knife sharpener. (I think I got the name from Lifehacker.) The knives came back very sharp.

So:

  1. It can be done
  2. It’s not my knives

Slowly, however, they became un-sharp, and, when they did, I was unable to get them sharp or keep them sharp myself.

I’m embarrassed to say how many different sets of gear I’ve bought to do this. Each of them has a video or two on YouTube showing how easy it is to use this system.

And I use the system, and I can’t get the knives sharp.

Latest iteration, I’m using a Norton Waterstone “Starter Kit” I got on Amazon. Not cheap. I’ve tried to get two knives — my favorite, and my wife’s favorite — sharp.

After two weeks, no luck yet.

I whale away at the coarse grit for a while on one side. No evidence of a burr. Then I whale away at the other side. Ditto. I do the same with the 1000 grit stone. Both sides. Then I try to cut a piece of paper with the knife. It looks like I sort of can. I declare victory. But it’s not really sharp.

I am training myself to see it through, to be more patient, to keep at it until it works. It’s uphill work.

Developer stuff, Lifehacking

Hack of the Week: Rebooting Your Router, 3 Ways

An article this week in How To Geek on “10 Annoying Problems You Can Solve with Smarthome Devices” has this to say about resetting your router:


You can spend a lot of time troubleshooting a router. But you probably should just reboot the thing. This is, amazingly to this day, still a valid solution that is most likely going to solve the problem.

They go on to suggest two ways to do so: the eas(ier) way and the hard(er) way:

https://www.howtogeek.com/367785/use-a-smart-plug-to-power-cycle-your-router-without-getting-off-the-couch/

https://www.howtogeek.com/206620/how-to-automatically-reboot-your-router-the-geeky-way/

And for the ultimate in geekery, you can build your own router-resetting circuit from Hackaday.

Happy hacking!

Lifehacking, Tradecraft

How I Gave Up Smoking

I gave up smoking thirty years ago, when my son was born.  It was easy.

I tried to give up smoking for the fifteen years before that.  It was impossible.

OK, you might say.  Birth of your son.  Who wouldn’t be ready to give it all for their child?

Except that my daughter had been  born three-and-a-half years before my son, and I wasn’t able to give up smoking then, even though I wanted to.

What changed?  How did it work?

Well, first of all, all of the things I tried when I succeeded were things I had tried when I failed.  As I recall, I used nicotine gum.  And I put a pack of cigarettes out on the mantle of the fireplace so it was crystal clear that I was giving it up, foregoing this vice.

But I think there were two key things, one of them slow and gradual and one of them sudden.

The gradual thing was that my opportunities to smoke were diminishing.  We lived in California then, which had a pretty staunch anti-smoking portfolio.  You couldn’t smoke in bars.  You couldn’t smoke in workplaces, unless you went outside.  So my smoking habit was experiencing habitat destruction.

The sudden thing was that all of a sudden I was ready to quit.  And I don’t know much more about it than that.  Maybe it was the accumulation of the various restrictions.  Maybe it was thinking of my son becoming a smoker. 

Some switch inside me had flipped, and I was ready.

I won’t say that quitting was easy, but it was a no-brainer in a sense because I was determined.  More than that: going back to smoking was unthinkable.

I’ve tried to use this two-part formula for other vice removal — habitat destruction and recognizing when I’m ready.  I’ve had some luck lately with weight loss.

But I’m still puzzling over what happened with smoking… and how I could bottle it.

Cabinet of Curiosities, Lifehacking, Workhacking

Cabinet of Curiosities: Tim Ferriss’ Hack for Learning Anything Quickly

Do you know Tim Ferriss?  No?  A pity.  You should.  As Han Solo said about Lando Calrissian: “He’s a scoundrel.  You’d like him.”

I’m not sure how he describes what he does nowadays, but at some point he said he “deconstructed world-class performance.”  In other words, he figures out how outliers do the things they do.

If you know anything about outliers, you know it takes 10,000 of deliberate practice to become world-class at anything.

Which is why it’s surprising, at first, the Tim Ferriss has a hack, sandwiched right in the middle of The Four-Hour Chef, for learning how to get pretty good at anything, quickly.

“Pretty good”?  For Tim Ferriss, that means “top 5% of practitioners”.

“Quickly”?  That means 6 to 12 months or even — if you’re manic like him — 6 to 12 weeks.

So, you can choose: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to get world-class, or 6 months of somewhat deliberate practice to get to top 5%.

What’s the system?  Two acronyms: DiSSS and CaFE.

The main one is DiSSS, which is

  1. Deconstruction.  What are the minimal learnable units, the Lego blocks, to start with?
  2. Selection.  Which 20% of the blocks gives you 80% of the competence?
  3. Sequencing.  In what order should you learn the blocks?
  4. Stakes.  Set things up so you work hard at it.

You need help with this.  Ferriss discusses several cases in Chef, a couple of which spoke to me:

Shinji Takeuchi is an ordinary Japanese gentleman who developed an approach to swimming which emphasized effortless pleasure instead of the usual competitive thing of maximum output.  Terry Laughlin wrote a book about Takeuchi’s method,  Total Immersion, which does you the favor of doing steps 1-3 for you.  He tells you what “alphabet” you have to learn, which are the most important elements, and in what sequence to learn them.  Alas, he doesn’t give you the stakes :-).

Ferriss also does a case study on shooting basketball three-pointers.  What’s interesting here is that, like Tim Ferriss, I have very little interest in basketball, but a strong contributor to my lack of interest is that I’ve always pretty much sucked at it.  So I was interested.

His recipe:

Find a guru.  He suggests finding somebody who is 5-10 years past fame, so that they’re still fantastic but don’t have an ego about it.

Offer them something for their help.  Probably not money, but a mention in your blog?

Ask them about 1, 2, and 3.  1) What is the “alphabet” of basketball shooting. 2) What the the most significant things that bad players do wrong?  What are the most significant things that bad players can to to improve?  3) What does a progression of exercises look like?

There’s a lot more.  And there’s a lot more in the book.  Highly recommended.

Lifehacking, Workhacking

“How to Skip to the Good S**t in a Long YouTube Tutorial”

I dug this up in Lifehacker.  On the off chance you don’t regularly read it, you should!

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-skip-to-the-good-shit-in-a-long-youtube-tutorial-1830466952.

I’m always vexed by video content because you can’t skip ahead.  You’re forced to drink in info at the rate the author wanted you to.  What good is that?

This post has three or four suggestions about how to skip the guff and get to the point.

Have a great weekend!

Lifehacking, Workhacking

Hack of the Week: Evernote to Scrivener

I’ve seen all kinds of allusions to hacks that allow integration between Evernote and Scrivener.

Kind of a specialized hack in some sense, but enough people seem to want the capability that it’s worth reporting a success.

Here’s what I got from a Denise Olson post on Moultrie Creek Gazette about how to send an individual Evernote note to Scrivener.  I’ve gotten it to work on my Mac Scrivener (3.x).

  1. Save the whatever-it-is to Evernote
  2. Make sure your Scrivener is open to a project where you want the note to go
  3. Tell Evernote to Print the note, and then pick the PDF option
  4. You will see an option to “Send PDF to Scrivener”
  5. The note will appear in pdf form in your Scrivener Research section.

OMG

DIY, Lifehacking, Workhacking

Hack of the Week: SawStop saw

I saw this one in a Family Handyman email blast and it was a no-brainer for Hack of the Week.

Nice saw, and all that.  Kind of pricey.

But it’ll stop within five milliseconds of contacting human skin.  That’s fast enough to save your fingers.

When I was in college I worked one summer in a machine shop and came within an ace of losing a couple of fingers in a table saw.  The alert guy in charge of lab batted my hand away.  This saw embodies that alert guy.

As Family Handyman says, “how much are your fingers worth”?

Here it is on Amazon

 

7 Hard Problems, Lifehacking, Tradecraft

Mastering a Subject Quickly, 80/20-style

2 Comments

I’ve gotten pretty good over the last twenty years at mastering a subject quickly.  I want to share some of my tips.

I used this skill as a VC to rapidly understand a new business sector.  One of the joys and terrors of working in early-stage tech companies is understanding new stuff that comes along:

  1. What It Is: New technologies don’t come with a user manual.  It takes a lot of people experimenting in a lot of different directions to figure out even what a new discovery is.
  2. What It Can Do: Once you figure out what it is, you need to know what it can be used for, which involves trying it out in a bunch of different business areas.  Usually a new technology comes with some assumptions about what it’s good for, but these are often wrong and need to be revisited.  Again, a lot of people do these experiments.
  3. How It Fits In: Last is figuring out how the innovation will become the Next Big Thing in one of the sectors where it’s good for something.  By this time the innovation is usually known to the sector, but it is not (yet) well-known; in particular it is not known what the business of bringing it to market will have to be.

I’m fond of using the PC as an example of these three stages when I teach classes in innovation and entrepreneurship.  In the case of the PC:

  1. Microprocessors arose out of calculator chips
  2. It took a while to figure out that you could make a general-purpose Turing Machine out of a calculator chip because it took a while to figure out why you might want such a thing
  3. The fledgling PC was “unlimited in its uses”, meaning no one had a use for it… Until Dan Bricklin wrote VisiCalc and the spreadsheet was born.
  4. The PC went from “Nice to Have” to “Must Have”.

So, let’s say you come along in Phase 2 or 3 (which is often the case with an innovation) and you want to know, “what’s happening with PCs”?  Here are some steps I’ve found useful:

  1. Find the right search terms to exhaustively trawl the ‘net about the subject.  The right search terms are ideally MECE (a McKinsey-ism: “Mutually Exclusive/Collectively Exhaustive”.  None of the terms describes any of the others, and together they describe all the entities.  What mathematicians would call a “basis,” a linearly-independent spanning set.  Finding these search terms involves a lot of experimentation.  Each experiment yields a broader set of relevant search results until you reach a point of diminishing returns, where additional search terms either don’t add new pages or add “false-positive” results.
  2. Use the search terms to find 3 good reviews of the topic, preferably not by deep technologists but by journalists or other good generalists.  Nothing wrong with technology mavens but journalists are quicker to see connections between the technology and potential business uses.
  3. Talk to one or more of these sources.  Presto, you’re an expert, or at least you can play one on TV.

Some giants have also worked this territory.

I want to particularly call out Tim Ferriss, whose Four Hour Chef book is subtitled “The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything [emphasis added], and Living the Good Life.”  Ferriss discusses some very similar approaches to characterizing the key elements in a subject area.  Read his book.

I’ve also read books by Josh Kaufman (“The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything”) and Joshua Waitzkin (“The Art of Learning”).  Waitzken’s book is much deeper and more inward-looking, but both are of interest.

Enjoy!

Lifehacking, Personal Information Management, Workhacking

Hack of the Week: 5-day Sprints

What I want to do on Friday is kick back a little from the intensity of the Deep Work by finding some cool hack that I think would be of interest to my fellow life- and work- hackers.

I figured we needed some ground rules, so:

  1. The Hack needs to have come to my attention in the previous week, since the previous Friday.  I’m not as au courant as I used to be, but I still see a lot of stuff slosh by.  Requiring any hack I tout to be recent seems like a service to all of you.
  2. I have to be using it, or want to be using it or noodling how to use it.  If it’s of academic interest, let’s leave it to the academics.
  3. Slight prejudice in favor of non-app hacks.  In my entrepreneurship courses almost every student idea takes the form of an app even if the app is somewhat negative for the use case.

We may need more ground rules as we go along.

With that framing, my Hack of the Week this week is 5-day sprints.

I read about 5-day sprints in “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” by Jake Knapp, John Zeransky, and Braden Kowitz from Google Ventures

The basic idea is kind of a mashup of Agile and Lean Startup:

  • Monday through Thursday, devote all the hours between 10-5 100% for working through a structured process for generating a solution to a pressing problem for the team.
  • Friday is then “customer reaction day” (from 9-5).  The day is spent finding out what real “customers” (those who would use the solution) think of the solution generated.
  • So there’s a looming deadline all week supplying urgency.  And there’s a 100% dedication of the team that’s working the problem to… working the problem.  So there’s focus.

What gets my juices going is the idea of applying this to my own weekly “sprints”.  I’m not a team and I differ in many respects from the examples discussed in the book.  But I believe that structure — and specifically some of the structured ideas worked out in the book — are going to make my sprints more productive.

Check out Sprint.  Let me know what you think.  Have a great weekend.