My favourites from The Setup
Very eagerly, I read the interview-series titled The Setup. The men and women interviewed, explain what hard- and software they use. ‘Hardware’ includes things like laptops, but also camera’s, microphones and so on. Mostly, the tools people mention are not new to me but sometimes I discover something very interesting.
John MacFarlane is a professor of philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley. He speaks about his creation, the very powerful converter of text markup formats called pandoc.
I use pandoc’s extended markdown for lecture notes, letters, slide presentations, handouts, and short articles. For books and more complex documents, I use LaTeX.
I intend to explore what the extended markdown of pandoc can do for me. I have installed pandoc on my Windows laptop under Cygwin and on my Linux-hosts.
Derek Sivers a writer and serial enterpreneur, has inspired me to start using Anki, about which Derek says:
For learning anything, I use the awesome Anki, which I love so much I donated $500 to. (The author wrote me back, thinking it must have been a PayPal mistake.)
With Anki, it turns out that memorizing things is very easy. The workings of the program are based on the learning theory called Spaced Repitition. At the moment, I am learning LPI level 2 from this and I am teaching my children multiplication. With Ankidroid you can practise even when you are waiting at the train station. It is very effective.
Amongst the many inspiring interviews, one final:
Steve Coast is an architect @Microsoft and founder of Openstreetmap. Steve Coast uses the library often as a source of reading material.
I use the library a lot. King County in Washington State has the most traffic of any US library, or so they claim. I refuse, typically, to buy Kindle or other books with a zero resale value. I’m keenly aware that the same information can be had in multiple forms. For example a book can be Kindle, Nook, Hardback, HB 2nd hand, Paperback, PB 2nd hand, Library, audio book (audible.com), Library audio book. I don’t care how I get the information, therefore I may as well have the lowest cost access.