Bvalmont's comments

"there is a very strong capitalist-critical argument to be made about buying in more intentional and ethical ways, but color me shocked that very few of these minimalist troubadours ever really take things to an economic or class-based argument."

As long as they look critically at their consumerism and are voting with their wallet for ethical consumer goods, let them have their Instagram pictures. Even if they don't care about consumerism and are doing it for aesthetics, it shows people that you can think different about your consumption habits.

- SelfControl app, you can change the timer to 1 month instead of 24 hours, so you are not forced to click it every morning.

- Simple Pomodoro timer, which honestly I use more as a signal for me to get up and stretch my legs a bit.

- Disabled all notifications on phone, macs.

- Things as my todo list, simple and tells me what to focus on every day with recurring todo's.

- Only really visit 3 websites: HN, Designer News & Stack overflow, tagging the interesting posts in the morning, then reading them on Kindle in the evening. Or sometimes between Pomodoro breaks, like now.

- I block all the news websites and other useless information with Opendns.

- Bought a Wacom pen and a mac so I can't play videogames.

- Podcasts for when I'm doing the dishes, Spotify for when I'm doing work.

- No mail, slack before 1pm, I'm most productive in the mornings.

I read in Do The Work that the best thing is to not think, but just start. So I meditate in the morning and try to be completely free of thoughts when I arrive at work, sit down and just start. That was the single thing that made the biggest difference for me. Don't give The Resistance a chance.

There are some interesting lessons to be learned on how Apple employees communicate. The use of hyperboles, the emphasis on positive words or how every sentence works as a one liner.

I liked the moment when the interviewer is trying to steer the conversation and Tim Cook firmly responds by mentioning the interviewer's name which promptly gave Tim Cook the upper hand in the rest of the interview.

Anyone reading some good books about this? I could surely use some of these techniques in meeting rooms or at client presentations.

Been on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move, the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is unsupported.

It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !

It's a good thing they are looking into this.

I always figured that these are not "official" stores thus having limited stock and resupply makes them willing to fight consumers over every small repair, replacement and warranty issue.

When these Apple Stores are charging money for repairs that should have been under warranty or pushing their Apple Care products by stating you only have 1 year warranty they are basically taking advantage of uneducated consumers.

Apple stores in Belgium are an extremely negative experience to say the least, I hope this will change eventually.

Until then you should buy your Apple products through the online apple store, no problems there. ( if you happen to be Belgian )

The next step is realizing that Hacker News is the same thing.

This looks great.

I always wondered why they never seem to highlight their best feature, which is the ability to search text in images or scanned documents. That has been a huge timesaver in the past. One day I'll put all my important documents in there.

forums.somethingawful.com follows this model and it works incredibly well, I recommend you check it out.

I sent them an e-mail when I was looking into dropbox and they offered me 10G, 20G or 25G for a slightly smaller price.

I'm not sure if the offer still stands, though. I got into it when they just launched.

Edit: Looking at the e-mail they stated this is a one-time limited offer. But still worth a try.

Read the comments on the Facebook blog, people are just as stupid under their real name. I frankly don't think it'll change anything.

Daily : Somethingawful Forum, my Tumblr feed, Newspaper on iPad.

Weekly : A bunch of design feeds : Abduzeedo, Minimalmac, Bornrich, Joshspear.com, We Make Money Not Art, Changethethought, Yummy fresh grain feed!

Monthly: Zen habits, Stepcase lifehack, Freelanceswitch, Lost Garden, Wired iPad app.

This needs a lot more polish. Why not contact some (student) animators or illustrators who are willing to work for a small percentage of the profit ?

I should stay in bed with my 3,5k a month it seems

It's a good income for 24 year olds in Belgium, though. Most everyone I graduated with has 2k/month. I wouldn't know what to do with 2k a day like JM.

If this handheld works offline the battle is already lost. Same goes for the PS3 and the wii, if you disable the system from calling home you can easily open it and do whatever you want with it.

These companies should instead focus on creating enough value and reason for gamers to be online. Like Steam, introduce social incentives to create a game collection and interact with your friends and half the battle against piracy is won.

There will always be piracy, these companies don't seem to understand that most pirates wouldn't even buy your console if they wouldn't be able to hack it.

Facebook actually handles this pretty well, I have different groups of people and I can cater my status message carefully to each and every one of them.

This problem happens more to me when I'm on twitter however, as I'd like to tweet about how crazy my weekends were, but my entire network is reading along so I really couldn't.

Or: just go for the skinny pale look. Really works thanks to those twilight and social network movies.

How is this going to affect search results when someone googles my name ? This could be very useful because I have a very common name and it would be nice to get bumped up a bit because I have a google profile.

Think people getting monster sued only to be made an example of.

Everyone is copying media. _EVERYONE_. How can it NOT be socially acceptable ?

The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an internet pirate is doing.

Pretty much the same benefits when you're a guy working in a company filled with women. I just take the extra drama with the infinite supply of brownies every day.