Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova] has been on a multi-year kick to make technology more personal by making it herself, and has just now started writing about it. Her main point rings especially true in this day and age, where a lot of the tech devices we could use to help us are instead used to spy on us or are designed to literally make us addicted to their services.
The project is at the same time impossible and simple. Of course, you are not going to be able to build a gadget that will bolster all of your (perceived or otherwise) personal weaknesses in one fell swoop. But what if you start looking at them one at a time? What if you start building up the good habits with the help of a fun DIY project?
That’s where [Arya]’s plan might just be brilliant. Because each project is supposed to be small, it forces you to focus on one specific problem, rather than getting demoralized at the impossibility of becoming “better” in some vague overall sense. Any psychologist would tell you that introspection and dividing up complex problems are the first steps. And what motivates a hacker to take the next steps? You got it, the fun of brainstorming, planning, and building a nice concrete DIY project. It’s like the ultimate motivation, Hackaday style.
And DIY solutions are a perfect match to personal problems. Nothing is so customizable as what you design and build yourself from the ground up. DIY means making exactly what you need, or at least what you think you need. Iteration, improvement, and the usual prototyping cycle applied to personal growth sounds like the ideal combo, because that’s how the tech works, and that’s also how humans work. Of course, even the coolest DIY gadget can’t instantly make you more mindful, for instance, but if it’s a tool that helps you get there, I don’t think you could ask for more.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time tuning my environment and lifestyle to promote creativity and my projects.
The biggest problem I have now is what I call the “one more project” problem. That’s where you can see a solution that would be a perfect tool to make life easier, but making the tool is itself a project and will delay solving the original problem.
For example, for various reasons I get maximum creativity while hiking, and I want something that allows me to type in notes or ideas quickly. Paper/pencil is way too slow, laptops are big heavy and complex (and delicate and expensive if you break them and take a long time to boot up), cell phones don’t have keyboards, and so on. When I get an idea, I just want to sit and start typing.
An Alphasmart Dana is close to ideal, but they’re no longer made (and getting harder to get).
I could design and make an Alphasmart replacement device that lets me sit down and type in notes, it’s not that hard, and I have all the skills, contacts, and even enough money to do that project start-to-finish, but it would take me 6 months of time and that would take me away from solving the original problem that I got the Alphasmart for!
Sometimes even purchasing the tool becomes a drain on your time. Get a cheap laser cutter or 3d printer and you suddenly discover that you don’t have a new tool, you have a new hobby.
I tell people some of my ideas or show them some of the things/hacks I’ve actually made, and they invariably say “oh, you should go online and sell that”.
My response is usually: “would you like to go into business with me to sell this?”, and then “If you like, I’ll give you the rights and you can sell it yourself”.
Their response is invariably “no”.
Time is a resource, and you have to walk the line between spending time creating a life hack and the time saved by using that hack. If you have a goal you really want to spend time on, it’s difficult to put that goal on hold while you’re putting together the right tools.
Changing the subject, a good suggestion for a life hack: Go to Staples and try out every style of pen (or pencil) they offer, find the one you like the best, throw away all the other pens in your house and replace them with the one you like. Do this with pads of paper as well: lined/unlined/graph and paper thickness make a real difference in the quality of your ideas on paper.
Another good hack: I spent a long time finding the perfect pad that fits in a back pocket with microperforated pages that tear out and now carry it around with me at all times (and a pen). The ability to draw diagrams and show someone, scribble down an address of phone number, the ability to write something and hand it to another person… having a pad and pen has been tremendously useful for me.
(WalMart Pen+Gear 7″ microperforated pads for me, but again find the one that you like best.)
2 comments :
1. Some cell phones have a recording feature, just talk and it’ll record your thoughts for later.
2. A lot of woodworking involves making jigs before starting on the project at hand. These jigs make for accurate and easy repetition within the project itself.
Kudos for your comment!
I agree completely with both points.
I tried a digital recorder and found that it doesn’t work very well. The recorder records instantly (instead of booting up your phone, selecting the app, hitting “record”, &c) so that was a plus. Transcribing the information to a computer was problematic. I don’t type as fast as I talk, so the process of entering text was tedious and time consuming. (A similar problem with pen and paper: you have to spend time transcribing your work.)
Speech to text doesn’t work very well at all, most software requires a tuned microphone to get any accuracy, and even then it’s not very accurate. You have to go through and consciously edit all the text and repair the damage. Turn on the “closed caption” option in YouTube sometime and see how accurate it is.
(And with the alphasmart, just place my home computer cursor on any text box in any app and press “send” on the alphasmart and everything gets typed in verbatim.)
The ability to make woodworking jigs, actually any style of jig, is definitely a skill every maker should know.
The flip side of jigs is that frequently you only need to make one of an item. Spending a lot of time making a bespoke jig doesn’t make sense if you can Gerry-rig an ugly setup using clamps and hot glue.
I get into this all the time. Recently I picked up a 14″ metal cutting chop saw at a yard sale for thin money, but the clamping system had been removed and lost. Most of the time I just hold the piece under the saw by hand.
I looked into purchasing a replacement clamp ($75, and would need to be modified to fit), fabb’ing a new clamp system (welding, drilling, and cutting), and ended up just purchasing a new saw to the tune of $300. The extra $225 I spent was worth… how many hours of my time?
I built a jig to make bespoke coils, of any TPI and diameter (and any reasonable length), and then only used it once. I could easily have just made the one coil and not spent so much time thinking through what would make a good coil winding jig.
So my point isn’t that jigs and hacks aren’t valuable (they definitely are), it’s that there’s a tradeoff between time spent addressing the problem versus the time saved by addressing the problem.
But yes, sometimes jigs will save you time and effort.
I’m only now discovering that just throwing money at a problem is sometimes the best answer.
Well said!
Agree with the dedicated audio recorder. Our “Monologue Machine” is always ready to talk to, great while driving or walking.
If your speech is too fast for your typing, just slow it down. I like to use VLC.
“Gerry-rig”
That’s a new one.
For non-sailors a jury-rig is a lashed-up temporary repair:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_rigging
“Speech to text doesn’t work very well at all, most software requires a tuned microphone to get any accuracy, and even then it’s not very accurate. You have to go through and consciously edit all the text and repair the damage. ”
In the past, I bought software on a disk that was meant to do it, and it sucked like you’re describing trying to use it with a basic mic and a 1000MHz cpu. But now? My cell phone’s keyboard software can do voice recognition in a noisy environment offline on a pea-sized processor without breaking a sweat – it isn’t perfect, but I can talk normally or even mumble-whisper into the thing, spelling out any uncommon acronyms if needed, and the errors can sometimes be less than I’d get from bad handwriting if I scribbled something down on a notepad in a hurry. Depends if I’m writing plain english or jargon and numbers and names that aren’t in its dictionary. I like writing things down for the ability to draw arrows and diagrams and scratch things out and such, but for speed versus low effort, the voice recognition is something else nowadays.
Good article and thanks P for the thoughtful comments :-)
Instead of a Alphasmart Dana, get a tablet with touchscreen. If you look online, you can still find many places where you can get these. You can also get these tablets with type covers which serve a double function as both a keyboard and as protection for the vulnerable tablet device. With both the tablet and the keyboard, you can just sit down and start typing while hiking ;-)
And the obligatory XKCD comic:
https://xkcd.com/1205/