Category Archives: Hacks

Whiteboard Alternatives: Magic-Chart and IdeaPaint

Best blackboards: At Fermilab, every office has at least one that stretches from the floor to the ceiling.
“Studmuffins of Science” Calendar

I love whiteboards — they are great to sketch out ideas, plan projects, leave notes on them for longer timeframes, look at them occasionally, and add to them whenever you have an idea. Besides the normal whiteboard, there are other very interesting alternatives:

Magic-Chart

Thin plastic foils sold by Legamaster (amazon.de, similar products available on amazon.com) that stick to nearly any smooth surface due to static electricity. They can transform a plain wall into one large Whiteboard (erasing is possible). They can also easily be taken down, rolled up and stored, or hung up somewhere else. You can also put them over each other, although you might see the one below the top foil. Perhaps not very ecologically friendly, but a very powerful way to use your walls. If you cover a wall with them and overlap the pages about a centimeter like scales facing away from the direction of the wind, they are less likely to be torn down by the wind. Of course, they can be enhanced with print-outs, post-its, etc. to have the information ready while you are standing in front of the wall.

IdeaPaint

Special wall paint that allows you to write on it by turning the wall into a dry-erase surface. The more permanent version of a Whiteboard or Magic-Charts. Ever dream of drawing on walls (or allowing your children to draw on walls)? This is your chance (http://www.ideapaint.com).

Using Microsoft Word

Lord grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change.
The courage to change the things I can.
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people
I had to kill because they pissed me off.
J.G. Bullers

The pretty much only software I have to use that I hate with visceral dread is Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, it is still the de facto standard for file exchange in large projects (I still have hopes for GoogleDocs). I have avoided giving tips for Word here and strongly recommend Scrivener for writing, but a short time ago I stumbled upon Arno’s Tech Tools page, who has a lot of information about using Word without going insane (and a lot of other useful links).

So if you want to use Word without it driving you insane, it’s well worth a look. :-)

Tagging in DEVONthink

It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.
Unknown

DEVONthink has a lot of useful features, one of them is tagging. Whereas it does not support hierarchical tags (like Sente or Aperture does), it is useful nonetheless. Great for literature (to_read, read, topics, articles_for_paper_x, etc.), images (subjects, quality, etc., see Aperture for some ideas), video, and much more.

DEVONthink itself has one huge disadvantage regarding tagging — when you want to tag multiples files that already have tags, DEVONthink does not allow you to assign tags (instead you get the message “Multiple Selection” in the tag field). Might be useful for some purposes, but in many cases (especially if you tag the files later) it is very inconvenient. However, John Sidiropoulos from A Digital Workflow for Academic Research has written a great AppleScript that easily allows you to add tags to multiple files even if these files already have tags that are not the same: Add tags to many DEVONthink items at the same time.

You simply copy the script into a text file, save it, open the Scripts folder in DEVONthink (there is a Scroll Icon between “Window” and “Help”, select “Open Scripts Folder”, go into the “Scripts” folder in the Finder window, create a subdirectory (e.g., “Tagging”), copy the file there, then you only need to select “Update the Scripts Menu” in DEVONthink again.

Afterwards, you can select multiple files, go to the Scroll Icon again, select your script, and enter it. The tag will be assigned to these files.

Super-useful and a great idea by John. :-)

Update

Read the comment by Paul on how to do it within DEVONthink.

Time to Improve the Infrastructure

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels.
The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.
Woodrow Wilson

It the time between the years — a time when things cool down, usually. It’s a time of remembering and looking in the future — and a good time to put an end to the tiny things that bugged you this year and that you do not want to carry into the next. The tiny annoyances, the small things that bug you enough to notice yet are below the threshold to actually do something about them.

If you think back at the past year, which things did bug you? Think on all the times it did bug you, tiny bites each, but taken together … now is the time to change it.

So, time to take out the trash, fix that leaking faucet, quit the subscription to that newsletter and to sort some newspaper clippings (and much much more).

Have fun & happy holidays :-)

 

Remembering Presentations

“Do you know what these are?” [Vorna] asked him.
“No.”
“They are from the foxglove flower. A tiny amount of them can give a dying heart fresh life. Like a miracle. But just a pinch too much and they become the deadliest poison. Pride is like that. Too little and a man has no sense of self-worth. The world would wear him down to dust. Too much and he becomes arrogant, vain and boastful. But just enough and he is a man to walk the mountains with.”
“Sword in the Storm” by David Gemmell

Every now and then there’s a presentation you did that you want to remember, because it went really well, because it brings to the point what you want to achieve (e.g., research) and who you are (e.g., how you ask the questions, try to answer them, and present the results). For me, it was a presentation on how to organize a scientific work (dissertation, but also applicable to almost any other type of scientific work), the original German version is here and the English translation is here.

But it’s hard to remember such a presentation — unlike a poster you cannot print it out and hang it into your office. Well, you can’t, can you? Actually, it’s quite easy to export the slides as graphics or PDF files and create a poster from the slides (here: made with InDesign, you can import a PDF and if you check the import options, you can say that each page of the PDF should be imported — if you have already drawn the placeholders for the images, it’s just a click per slide, some resizing (with select all done in 3 seconds) and that’s it):

poster_vortrag

It’s a bit vain, but on the other side, I want to remember it, especially in an environment where the pressure goes in a rather … different direction. And yes, the slides look better with the original graphics (which I had to gray out due to lack of copyright).

Writing Articles with a Mind Map

“I have plotted it out — now I only need to write it.”
Some New Yorker Comic

A colleague of mine writes the papers for his dissertation at the moment — using mind maps. While I prefer Circus Ponies Notebook and Outlines, I think his approach has a lot of merit for the more visually minded.

The uses the nodes of the mind map to create a structure he can easily grasp and the commentary fields to the nodes to write the text. The mind map structure gives him a hierarchical order (indispensable if you want to make a text out of it) and the ability to quickly reorder elements of the text. If the work is finished, he exports the mind map as text, which gives him a good first draft of the final text.

According to my colleague, a lot of people work this way and use the platform-independent and OpenSource program Freeplane.

Perhaps this approach is something for you.

mind-map-writing-1

mind-map-writing-2

Images Copyright by Christian W. Michel

Poster: How to Organize Your Creativity?

I have translated the poster I did for the MinD-Akademie 2011 in English. I love it — it shows on one (very large) page the whole concept that I try to convey with “Organizing Creativity”. If you prefer it in German find the German version here.

I will probably do a similar version for the second version of the Organizing Creativity Book (still working on it) and use it as navigation help for the Organizing Creativity Wiki (likewise still working on it). But until both are ready, have fun with this poster (note: due to the size — DIN A0 — it is about 7 MB).

oc-poster-englishThe poster shows the different steps that are necessary in organizing creativity. While the process goes top down (yellow arrow in the horizontal center), each step is also another occupation with the topic (yellow arrows upwards to occupation with the topic), which leads to further ideas. I have left the footer for the moment — in case you are wondering it translates as “MinD-Academy 2011 — Future and Research”.

Sketching at Work

design_for_a_flying_machine

Leonardo da Vinci [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (cut)

I’m currently listening to a presentation by Prof. Martin Eppler about “Sketching at Work” — showing the power of sketches in business contexts. Sketching is a very powerful tool in creativity and as far as I can see, his book (look into it) or here (order) offers a lot of ideas how you can use sketching to solve and discuss your problems.

Very interesting book and I agree, now that we have tools like the iPad that allow sketching (esp. if you use pens like the Pogo sketch pen) sketching is back.

Very interesting :-)

P.S.: If you like to look at presentations which work heavily with sketches, look at the presentations at Khan Academy or (more professionally) the RSA Animate videos.

Preventing Duplicate Input in DEVONthink

“It’s like deja vu all over again.”
Unknown

Something that can happen very easily regarding the references you store in your idea collection are duplicate entries: the same image, document, etc. is inserted twice (or multiple times). And easy way to prevent this in DEVONthink is by using a smart group looking for duplicates in the Inbox only (Note the “Search in: References Inbox”).

preventing-duplicatesI use a database named references and limit the scope of the smart group to its inbox. Whenever I put something in the inbox (new images, files, etc.) DEVONthink compares it to the content of the database and if it finds a file with the same content, it makes the filename bold and blue — and it appears in the smart group.

duplicates

This way I can simply select and delete the duplicate entries in the smart group and remove the newly copied files, without touching the files that are sorted in my collection.

The simple app at the end of the photography process

Trust that little voice in your head that says “Wouldn’t it be interesting if …”
And then do it.
“More Joy of Photography” by Duane Michals

Some time ago, I wrote a posting about Apps that use effects to make even a random photo look like “art”. Yesterday I tried out some effects of Camera+ with a few of my photos. Some of the photos were okay, others were so-so — you wouldn’t look twice. But using the Clarity scene mode (boosts contrast and saturation to insane levels) together with effects like Nostalgia, Ansel, Hipster, Lomographic, etc. and a nice frame produced … interesting results.

As the images are probably at least somewhat NSFW, the image containing a few results is only liked here (sorry about the quality, it’s scaled down to fit into a blog posting and the photos look better by themselves on an iPhone).

It’s strange — you use a semi-professional DSLR and Aperture, and at the end a “simple” app on a mobile phone produces the most interesting results …