Tag: personal productivity

State of my toolchain 2022

Posted on by KathyReid

Welcome to my now-nearly-yearly State of my Toolchain report (you can see previous editions for 2021, 2019, 2018 and 2016). I began these posts as a way to document the tools, applications and hardware that were useful to me in the work that I did, but also to help observe how they shifted over time – as technology evolved, my tasks changed, and as the underpinning assumptions of usage shifted. In this year’s post, I’m still going to cover my toolchain at a glance, and report on what’s changed, and what gaps I still have in my workflow – and importantly – reflect on the shifts that have occurred over 5 years.

At a glance

Hardware, wearables and accessories

Software

  • Atom with a range of plugins for writing code, thesis notes (no change since last report)
  • Pandoc for document generation from MarkDown (no change since last report)
  • Zotero for referencing (using Better BibTeX extension) (no change since last report)
  • OneNote for Linux by @patrikx3 (no change since last report)
  • Nightly edition of Firefox (no change since last report)
  • Zoom (no change since last report)
  • Microsoft Teams for Linux (no change since last report)
  • Gogh for Linux terminal preferences (no change since last report)
  • Super productivity (instead of Task Warrior) (changed since last report)
  • Cuckoo Timer for Pomodoro sessions (changed since last report)
  • RescueTime for time tracking (no change since last report)
  • BeeMindr for commitment based goals (no change since last report)
  • Mycroft as my Linux-based voice assistant (no change since last report)
  • Okular as my preferred PDF reader (instead of Evince on Linux and Adobe Acrobat on Windows) (changed since last report)
  • NocoDB for visual database work (changed this report)
  • ObservableHQ for data visualistion (changed this report)

Techniques

  • Pomodoro (no change since last report)
  • Passion Planner for planning (no change since last report)
  • Time blocking (used on and off, but a lot more recently)

What’s changed since the last report?

There’s very little that’s changed since my last State of My Toolchain report in 2021: I’m still doing a PhD at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics, and the majority of my work is researching, writing, interviewing, and working with data.

Tools for PhD work

My key tools are MaxQDA for qualitative data analysis – Windows only, unfortunately, and prone to being buggy with OneDrive. My writing workflow is done using Atom. One particularly useful tool I’ve adopted in the last year has been NocoDB – it’s an opensource alternative to visual database interfaces like Notion and AirTable, and I found it very useful – even if the front end was a little clunky. Working across Windows and Linux, I’ve settled on Okular as my preferred PDF reader and annotator – I read on average about 300-400 pages of PDF content a week, and Adobe Acrobat was buggy as hell. Okular has fine-grained annotating tools, and the interface is the same across Windows and Linux. Another tool I’ve started to use a lot this year is ObservableHQ – it’s like Jupyter notebook, but for d3.js data visualisations. Unfortunately, they’ve recently brought in a change to their pricing structure, and it’s going to cost me $USD15 a month for private notebooks – and I don’t think the price point is worth it.

Hardware and wearables

The key changes this year are a phone upgrade – my Pixel 3 screen died, and the cost to replace the screen was exorbitant – a classic example of planned obsolescence. I’ve been happy with Google’s phones – as long as I disable all the spyware voice enabled features, and settled on the Pixel 4a 5G. It’s been a great choice – clear, crisp photos, snappy processor, and excellent battery life.

After nearly four years, my Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro started suffering the “ghost touch” problem, where the touch interface started picking up non-existent taps. A factory restart didn’t solve the problem, so I got the next model up – the Ticwatch Pro 2020 – at 50% off. This wearable has been one of my favourite pieces of hardware – fast, responsive, durable – and I can’t imagine not having a smartwatch now. I’ve settled on the Flower watch face after using Pujie Black for a long time – both heavily customisable. The love Google is giving to Wear OS is telling – I have much smoother integration between phone apps and Wear OS apps than even 1-2 years ago.

After having two Plantronics Backbeat Pro headphones – one from around 2017 and the other circa 2021, both still going, but the first with a very poor battery life and battered earpads, I invested in my first pair of reasonable headphones – the Sennheiser Momentum Pro 3. The sound quality is incredible – I got them for $AUD 300 which I thought was a lot to pay for headphones, but they’ve been worth every penny – particularly when listening to speech recognition data.

With so much PhD research and typing, I found my Logitech MK240 just wasn’t what I needed – it’s a great little unit if you don’t have anything else, but it was time for a mechanical keyboard because I love expensive hobbies. After some research, and a mis-step with the far too small HuoJi Z-88, (the keypresses for linux command line tasks were horrendous) I settled on the Keychron K8 and haven’t looked back. Solid, sturdy, blue Gateron switches – it’s a dream to type on, and works well across Windows and Linux. However, on Linux it is using a Mac keyboard layout and I had to do some tweaking with a keymapper – and used keyd. My only disappointment with Keychron is the hackyness needed to get it working properly on Linux.

Productivity

My Passion Planner is still going strong, but I haven’t been as diligent as using it as a second brain as I have been in the past, and the price changes this year meant that shipping one to Australia cost me nearly $AUD 120 in total – and that’s unaffordable in the longer term – so I’m actively looking at alternatives as as Bullet Journalling. The Passion Planner is great – it’s just expensive.

I’ve also dropped Task Warrior in favour of Super Productivity this year. Task Warrior isn’t cross-platform – I can’t use it on Android, or on Windows, and thanks to MaxQDA software, I’m spending a lot more of my time in Windows. The Gothenberg Bit Factory are actively developing Task Warrior – full transparency, I’m a GitHub sponsor of theirs – but the cloud-based and cross-platform features seem to be taking a while to come to fruition.

I’m also using time-blocking a lot more, and am regularly using Cuckoo as a pomodoro timer with a PhD cohort colleague, T. We have an idea for a web app that optimises the timing of Pomodoros based on a feedback loop – but more on that next year.

Current gaps in my toolchain

Visual Git editor

In my last State of My Toolchain report, I lamented having a good Visual Git Editor. That’s been solved in Windows with GitHub’s desktop application, but as of writing the Linux variant appears to be permanently mothballed. I’m sure this has nothing to do with Microsoft buying GitHub. So I am still on the lookout for a good Linux desktop Git GUI. On the other hand, doing everything by CLI is always good practice.

Second Brain

In my last report I also mentioned having taken Huginn for a spin, and being let down at its immaturity. It doesn’t seem to have come very far. So I’m still on the lookout for “Second Brain” software – this is more than the knowledge management software in the space that tools like Roam and Obsidian occupy, but much more an organise-your-life tool. The Microsoft suite – Office, Teams, and their stablemates – are trying to fill this niche, but I want something that’s not dependent on an enterprise login. But I’ve decided to reframe this gap as a “Second Brain” gap – after reading Tiago Forte’s book on the topic.

The Fediverse

Triggered by Elon Musk’s purchase, and subsequent transformation of Twitter into a flaming dumpster fire, I’ve become re-acquainted with the Fediverse – you can find me on Mastodon here, on Pixelfed.au here, and on Bookwyrm here. However, the tooling infrastructure around the Fediverse isn’t as mature – understandably – as commercial platforms. I’m using Tusky as my Android app, and the advanced web interface. But there are a lack of hosting options for the Fediverse – I can’t find a pre-configured Digital Ocean Droplet for Mastodon, for example – and I think the next year will see some development in this space. If you’re not across Mastodon, I wrote a piece that uses cybernetic principles to compare and contrast it with Twitter.

5 years of toolchain trends

After five years of the State of My Toolchain report, I want to share some reflections on the longer-term trends that have been influential in my choice of tools.

Cross-platform availability and dropping support for Linux

I work across three main operating systems – Linux, Windows (because I have to for certain applications) and Android. The tools I use need to work seamlessly across all three. There’s been a distinct trend over the last five years for applications to start providing Linux support but then move to a “community” model or drop support altogether. Two cases in point were Pomodone – which I dropped because of its lack of Linux support, and RescueTime – which still works on Linux for me, albeit with some quirks (such as not restarting properly when the machine awakes from suspend). This is counter-intuitive given the increasing usage of Linux on the desktop. The aspiration of many Linux aficionados that the current year will be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” is not close to fruition – but the statistics show a continued, steady rise – if small – in the number of Linux desktop users. This is understandable though – startups and small SaaS providers cannot justify supporting such a small user base. That said, they shouldn’t claim to support the operating system then drop support – as both Pomodone and RescueTime have done.

Takeaway: products I use need to work cross-platform, anywhere, anytime – and especially on Linux.

Please don’t make me change my infrastructure to work with your product

A key reason for choosing the Ticwatch Pro 2020 over other Mobvoi offerings was that the watch’s charger was the same between hardware models. I’d bought a couple of extra chargers to have handy, and didn’t want to have to buy more “spares”. This mirrors a broader issue with hardware – it has a secondary ecosystem. I don’t just need a mobile phone, I need a charger, a case, and glass screen protectors – a bunch of accessories. These are all different – they exhibit variety – a deliberate reduction in re-usability and a buffer against commodification. But in choosing hardware, one of my selection criteria is now re-usability or upgradeability – how can I re-use this hardware’s supporting infrastructure. The recent decision by Europe to standardise on USB-C is the right one.

Takeaway: don’t make me buy a second infrastructure to use your product.

I’m happy to pay for your product, but it has to represent value for money, or it’s gone

Several of my tools are open source – Super Productivity, NocoDB, Atom, Pandoc – and where I can, I GitHub sponsor them or provide a monetary contribution.On the whole, these pieces of software are often worth a lot more too me than the paid proprietary software I used – for example, MaxQDA is over $AUD 300 a year – predominantly because it only has one main competitor, NVIVO. I have no issue paying for software, but it has to represent value for money. If I can get the same value – or nearly equivalent – from an open source product, then I’m choosing open source. Taguette wasn’t there over MaxQDA, but Super Productivity has equivalent functionality to Pomodone. Open source products keep proprietary products competitive – and this is a great reason to invest in open source where you are able.

That’s it! Are there any products or platforms you’ve found particularly helpful? Let me know in the comments.

State of my toolchain 2021

Posted on by KathyReid

I’ve been doing a summary of the state of my toolchain now for around five years (2019, 2018, 2016). Tools, platforms and techniques evolve over time; the type of work that I do has shifted; and the environment in which that work is done has changed due to the global pandemic. Documenting my toolchain has been a useful exercise on a number of fronts; it’s made explicit what I actually use day-to-day, and, equally – what I don’t. In an era of subscription-based software, this has allowed me to make informed decisions about what to drop – such as Pomodone. It’s also helped me to identify niggles or gaps with my existing toolchain, and to deliberately search for better alternatives.

At a glance

Hardware, wearables and accessories

Software

Techniques

  • Pomodoro (no change since last report)
  • Passion Planner for planning (no change since last report)

What’s changed since the last report?

Writing workflow

Since the last report in 2019, I’ve graduated from a Masters in Applied Cybernetics at the School of Cybernetics at Australian National University. I was accepted into the first cohort of their PhD program. This shift has meant an increased focus on in-depth, academic-style writing. To help with this, I’ve moved to a Pandoc, Atom, Zotero and LaTeX-based workflow, which has been documented separately. This workflow is working solidly for me after about a year. Although it took about a weekend worth of setup time, it’s definitely saving me a lot of time.

Atom in particularly is my predominant IDE, and also my key writing tool. I use it with a swathe of plugins for LaTeX, document structure, and Zotero-based academic citations. It took me a while to settle on a UI and syntax theme for Atom, but in the end I went with Atom Solarized. My strong preference is to write in MarkDown, and then export to a target format such as PDF or LaTeX. Pandoc handles this beautifully, but I do have to keep a file of command line snippets handy for advanced functionality.

Primary machine

I had an ASUS Zenbook UX533FD – small, portable and great battery life, even with an MX150 GPU running. Unfortunately, the keyboard started to malfunction just after a year after purchase (I know, right). I gave up trying to get it repaired because I had to chase my local repair shop for updates on getting a replacement. I lodged a repair request in October, and it’s now May, so I’m not holding out hope… That necessitated me getting a new machine – and it was a case of getting whatever was available with the Coronavirus pandemic.

I settled on a ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 GA502IV. I was a little cautious, having never had an AMD Ryzen-based machine before, but I haven’t looked back. It has 16 Ryzen 4900 cores, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with 6GB of RAM. It’s a powerful workhorse and is reasonably portable, if a little noisy. It get about 3 hours’ battery life in class. Getting NVIDIA dependencies installed under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was a little tricky – especially cudnn, but that seems to be normal for anything NVIDIA under Linux. Because the hardware was so new, it lacked support in the 20.04 kernel, so I had to pull in experimental Wi-Fi drivers (it uses Realtek).

To be honest I was somewhat smug that my hardware was ahead of the kernel. One little niggle I still have is that the machine occasionally green screens. This has been reported with other ROG models and I suspect it’s an HDMI-under-Linux driver issue, but haven’t gone digging too far into driver diagnostics. Yet.

One idiosyncrasy of the Zephyrus G15 is that it doesn’t have built-in web camera; for me that was a feature. I get to choose when I do and don’t connect the web camera. And yes – I’m firmly in the web-cameras-shouldn’t-have-to-be-on by default camp.

Machine learning work, NVIDIA dependencies and utilities

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been doing a lot more work with machine learning, specifically in building the DeepSpeech PlayBook. Creating the PlayBook has meant training a lot of speech recognition models in order to document hyperparameters and tacit knowledge around DeepSpeech.

In particular, the DeepSpeech PlayBook uses a Docker image to abstract away Python, TensorFlow and other dependencies. However, this still requires all NVIDIA dependencies such as drivers and cudnn to be installed beforehand. NVIDIA has made this somewhat easier with the Linux CUDA installation guide, which advises on which version to install with other dependencies, but it’s still tough to get all the dependencies installed correctly. In particular, the nvtop utility, which is super handy for monitoring GPU operations (such as identifying blocking I/O or other bottlenecks) had to be compiled from source. As an aside, the developer experience for getting NVIDIA dependencies installed under Linux is a major hurdle for developers. It’s something I want NVIDIA to put some effort into going forward.

Colour customisation of the terminal with Gogh

I use Ubuntu Linux for 99% of my work now – and rarely boot into Windows. A lot of that work is based in the Linux terminal; from spinning up Docker containers for machine learning training, running Python scripts or even pandoc builds. At any given time I might have 5-6 open terminals, and so I needed a way to easily distinguish between them. Enter Gogh – an easy to install set of terminal profiles.

One bugbear that I still have with the Ubuntu 20.04 terminal is that the fonts that can be used with terminal profiles are restricted to only mono-spaced fonts. I haven’t been able to find where to alter this setting – or how the terminal is identifying which fonts are mono-spaced for inclusion. If you know how to alter this, let me know!

Linux variants of Microsoft software intended for Windows

ANU has adopted Microsoft primarily for communications. This means not only Outlook for mail – for which there are no good Linux alternatives (and so I use the web version), but also the use of Teams and OneNote. I managed to find an excellent alternative in OneNote for Linux by @patrikx3, which is much more usable than the web version of OneNote. Teams on Linux is usable for messaging, but for videoconferencing I’ve found that I can’t use USB or Bluetooth headphones or microphones – which essentially renders it useless. Zoom is much better on Linux.

Better microphone for videoconferencing and conference presentations

As we’ve travelled through the pandemic, we’re all using a lot more videoconferencing instead of face to face meetings, and the majority of conferences have gone online. I’ve recently presented at both PyCon AU 2020 and linux.conf.au 2021 around voice and speech recognition. Both conferences used the VenueLess platform. I decided to upgrade my microphone for better audio quality. After all, research has shown that speakers with better audio are perceived as more trustworthy. I’ve been very happy with the Stadium USB microphone.

Taskwarrior over Pomodone for tasks

I tried Pomodone for about 6 months – and it was great for integrating tasks from multiple sources such as Trello, GitHub and GitLab. However, I found it very expensive (around $AUD 80 per year) and the Linux version suddenly stopped working. The scripting options also only support Windows and Apple, not Linux. So I didn’t renew my subscription.

Instead, I’ve moved to Taskwarrior via Paul Fenwick‘s recommendation. This has some downsides – it’s a command line utility rather than a graphical interface, and it only works on a single machine. But it’s free, and it does what I need – prioritises the tasks that I need to complete.

What hasn’t changed

Wearables and hearables

My Mobvoi TicWatch Pro is still going strong, and Google appears to be giving Wear OS some love. It’s the longest I’ve had a smart watch, and given how rugged and hardy the TicWatch has been, it will definitely be my first choice when this one reaches end of life. My Plantronics BB Pro 2 are still going strong, and I got another pair on sale as my first pair are now four years old and the battery is starting to degrade.

Quantified self

I’ve started using Sleep as Android for sleep tracking, which uses data from the TicWatch. This has been super handy for assessing the quality of sleep, and making changes such as adjusting going-to-bed times. Sleep as Android exports data to Google Drive. BeeMinder ingests that data into a goal, and keeps me accountable for getting enough sleep.

RescueTime, BeeMinder and Passion Planner are still going strong, and I don’t think I’ll be moving away from them anytime soon.

Assistant services

I still refuse to use Amazon Alexa or Google Home – and they wouldn’t work with the 5GHz-band WiFi where I am living on campus. Mycroft.AI is still my go-to for a voice assistant, but I rarely use it now because the the Spotify app support for Mycroft doesn’t work anymore after Spotify blocked Mycroft from using the Spotify API.

One desktop utility that fits into the “assistant” space that I’ve found super helpful has been GNOME extensions. I use extensions for weather, peripheral selection and random desktop background selection. Being able to see easily during Australian summer how hot it is outside has been super handy.

Current gaps in my toolchain

I don’t really have any major gaps in my toolchain at the moment, but there are some things that could be better.

  • Visual Git Editor – I’ve been using command line Git for years now, but having a visual indicator of branches and merges is useful. I tried GitKraken, but I don’t use Git enough to justify the monthly-in-$USD price tag. The Git plugin for Atom is good enough for now.
  • Managing everything for me – I looked a Huginn a while back and it sounds really promising as a “second brain” – for monitoring news sites, Twitter etc – but I haven’t had time to have a good play with it yet.

State of my toolchain 2019

Posted on by KathyReid

What’s changed in the last year?

As you might be aware, I’ve been doing a writeup of my toolchain every year or so for the last couple of years (2016, 2018). There are a couple of reasons for this:

  • The type of work that I do has changed in that time, necessitating exploring different tools, and different equipment
  • And the technology that I work with continues to evolve – new models, new ways of working, and new mindsets – and our toolchains need to evolve to

This year, I’m studying a Master of Applied Cybernetics at the 3A Institute in Canberra – back to being a student; which I haven’t done for five years. Interestingly, my tools of choice 5 years ago have remained steady – Zotero for referencing, LibreOffice for writing essay type work, and Atom as my IDE of choice.

The key changes are;

  • A change in the main laptops I use
  • I’ve adopted Trello / Pomodone / RescueTime as a combination for personal productivity, with Passion Planner as a written diary / visual planner
  • My Fitbit Ionic died an inelegant death and has been replaced by the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro

Main laptop

My Asus N76 finally gave up the ghost and had unrecoverable hardware failure, including failure of the Bluray/DVD-rom drive that was built in – it’s not worth repairing and I think I’ll send it to disposal / recycling after taking 7 years’ worth of stickers off the front.

You were a Good Computer, N76. You were a Very Good Computer.

In my previous Toolchain tear-down, you would have read about my interest in System 76‘s Oryx Pro 3. One of my friends was selling hers (huge thanks, Pia!), and I immediately fell in love with this hard working, nerd-first beast of a laptop. I chose to flash it with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than System 76’s POP OS, basically because I’m so familiar with Ubuntu and I didn’t want any additional learning curve. This machine continues to be my desk-based workhorse of choice. It’s a beautiful, solid, high-performance machine, but it’s not a good mobile choice.

Enter the ASUS Vivobook (my model is the X510UQ). I bought one of these devices for Mum, as she needed a new machine, and was so impressed with it – it has 16GB of RAM and a reasonable NVIDIA GPU (!) that I went back to the shop and got one for myself. The mobility is so-so – with a battery of about 4 hours if the screen is reasonably dim, but then I tend to run a lot of CPU- and battery-hungry apps. It’s lightweight, has HDMI out and 3 USB ports and the small bevel means plenty of screen space. I’ve set it up to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, and if I’m honest it could use a much bigger SSD. That will be a holiday job.

Mobile phone

My Pixel died a couple of months ago after the battery life suddenly dropped to less and 30 minutes after the update to Android 9 – a problem that seems to be quite widespread. I’ve been on a Pixel 3 since; primarily because it’s what JB Hi-Fi in Geelong had in stock. The camera is amazing, and I’ve finally ditched my 3.5mm audio jack headphones for Bluetooth headphones.

Wearables

My Fitbit Ionic was a beautiful device until a release of Android in around November last year; after which I could no longer pair the Ionic with the Pixel phone. Getting support for this was incredibly problematic; it was difficult, time-consuming and very poor after-sales support from Fitbit. As a result, I ditched Fitbit and made the switch to WearOS, and have been on the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro ever since. The device is too chunky for most women, but well, I’m not most women, and it fits on my giant fat wrist just fine. The battery life isn’t great, but I’ve found that the heart rate monitor is the largest drain on battery.

One gotcha with the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro is the charger. I bought two chargers with the device, and managed to “fry” – short circuit – them both by running higher than 1 Amp current through them (with a high current charger). This is well documented on Reddit. This was pretty poor poor IMHO for a high-end smartwatch.

WearOS has been an unexpectedly smooth experience; it doesn’t have the ecosystem or the integration that FitBit has, but that’s also a positive. I can choose the apps and watch faces that best suit me, from multiple different vendors. I’ve settled on the Venom watch face in neutral colours.

A smartwatch remains a key part of my toolchain – moreso than ever.

Quantified Self

I continue to use and be very happy with RescueTime and BeeMindr. I’ve been through a myriad of to-do tools in the past few years and seem to have settled on a combination of both Trello and Pomodone this year. Pomodone is beautiful; it’s an electron-based app that’s available for Linux (Woot!). Seriously considering upgrading to the paid version in a couple of months if it continues to prove its value.

For visual planning and diarising, I went to Passion Planner, driven by being a full time student again. I’ve been very happy with the model it uses – iterative goal setting and pattern-forming, and have already bought in my 2020 diary. As a visual person, it gives me plenty of space to visualise, to draw and to map out plans, goals and actions. I used the medium size this year, and found it marginally too small; so have upgraded to the large size for 2020.

Headphones

No change, the Plantronics Backbeat Pro bluetooth headphones are still fantastically awesome.

Streaming Media

No change, still Spotify premium.

Input devices

No change.

Voice Assistant

No change, still the awesome Mycroft.AI

Internet of Things and Home Automation

I’m on residential college this year at Burgmann College at ANU. Their Wifi network is a 5Ghz spectrum, PEAP/MSCHAPv2 authenticated beastie, and nothing much in the IoT space speaks to it, because IoT standards and security, what are they even? 🙁

It feels really weird to have to physically turn my light off now – my default behaviours have been changed by home automation.

Gaps in my toolchain and how they’ve been plugged

In the last edition of State of the Toolchain, these were my key bugbears:

  • Visual Git Editor – I’ve given up on this and learned to love the command line. In hindsight it’s been a great learning experience, and my git fluency has improved out of sight (hah!).
  • Better internet – ANU is on gig internet. *laughs in TCP/IP* I’m going to be in dire straights though if/when I have to go back to a copper-based NBN FttN service *cries in copper*.

Have I missed anything? What do you use?