I considered letting Google Reader's end be the end of RSS for me. My relationship with RSS has been mixed over the years. There have certainly been tender, loving, "I can never be without you" moments. But there've also been bouts of abuse on my daily attention budget. Through all that, however, I stayed.

And rather than divorcing myself from RSS completely now, I'm taking a more constructive approach. I'm in the process of reimagining the role RSS should play in my life. More on that later—someday/maybe.

If you're looking for help, Mac Power Users episode 143, "RSS and Replacing Google Reader" is a great resource. My good friend Gabe Weatherhead is also in the middle of a series on Google Reader successors.

Right now I'm using Feed Wrangler. There are things I really like about it and things that I don't. But it's causing me to use RSS very differently than before, and that alone is enough for now.

Speaking of that last Mac Power Users episode, my favorite podcasting pair, David and Katie, mentioned a great Mac app called Clarify.

Clarify is the kind of software I would selfishly create for myself if I were a developer. It makes organizing and sharing screenshots so easy I laugh a little bit at my pre-Clarify life each time I use it.

If you routinely send people screenshots—especially multiple screenshots—to show them how to do things, you should buy Clarify. This post should really end here, but for you not-too-busy folks, there's more. . .

Before Clarify, I would take several screenshots, then label the file names sequentially like step 1, step 2, etc., then open each one in Preview or some other annotation program and put circles, boxes, and text on the images. Then I'd attach them all to an email.

Now that workflow seems akin to clubbing a cow when I want a hamburger.

With Clarify, I just take the screenshots and drag them in. It automatically sorts them by time so they're already in the right order. After that, I can label/annotate each. When I'm done, I can PDF it, send it to Evernote, or copy the whole "document" to my clipboard.

The end product looks ridiculously professional, too.

Google on its new inbox design for Gmail:

On the desktop, the new inbox groups your mail into categories which appear as different tabs. You simply choose which categories you want and voilà!

Also coming soon in Gmail Labs: A cure for cancer that involves giving each existing form of cancer three new names.

In a typical day, I use Preview and PDFpenPro multiple times per hour. Since I use Preview more than half the time to simply look at PDFs, I have my Mac set up to open PDFs in Preview by default.

But I need PDFpenPro a lot, too, and I've been sick of going through the cluttered Open With contextual menu with my mouse/trackpad.

So I made a simple OS X service in Automator that opens any PDF I've selected in Finder (or Path Finder) with PDFpenPro 6. The service is triggered by a keyboard shortcut to make it even faster.

Sometimes I forget how much time I can save by spending a few seconds to make simple Automator services.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="620.0"]<img src="/img/pdfpen6-automator-pe.png" alt="The Automator Service"/> The Automator Service[/caption] 
  


  
   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="418.0"]<img src="/img/pdfpen-shortcut-pe.png" alt="The Keyboard Shortcut"/> The Keyboard Shortcut[/caption]

I don't often dive into topical Apple news on this site, but I can't help but comment on the Congressional inquiry into Apple's corporate taxes. The typical headline reads "Apple avoids billions in US taxes."

And the typical response from the mostly uninformed, emotional public is "how can Apple get away with paying a lower average tax rate than me?"

And that's a good question to ask. Just not to Apple.

Apple isn't doing anything that the rest of the Fortune 500 hasn't been doing the last few years (though I'll concede that Apple appears to be doing it better).

Washington Post writer Jia Lynn Yang back in March of this year:

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that from 2009 to 2011, Microsoft was able to shift offshore almost half its net revenue from U.S. retail sales, or roughly $21 billion, by transferring intellectual-property rights to a Puerto Rican subsidiary.

As a result, the subcommittee found Microsoft saved as much as $4.5 billion in taxes on products sold in this country. [source]

There's that "b" word again. Boeing, Proctor & Gamble, and other major companies that do significant business abroad all play by the same rules:

Any dollar earned abroad does not get taxed by the U.S. government until it flows back to the parent company. A J.P. Morgan report estimates that $1.7 trillion in foreign earnings is being held overseas by more than 1,000 U.S. firms, yet to be taxed by the federal government.

Put the CEO of any of these companies in front of Congress, and they'll probably all say the same thing: "We're playing by the rules you wrote into law."

If these hearings cause the American public to reverse the hearings and ask Congress why the tax code has lagged so far behind the realities of modern big business, the hearings will be a good thing.

I recommend benchmarking the average tax rates paid by Fortune 500 multinationals with the average tax rates paid by small domestic businesses and self employed individuals.

Something about our way of life is broken if an American entrepreneur or small business pays 20% or more in average taxes while billion-dollar multinationals pay far less than that. In some cases, they pay negative taxes.

ZDNet:

On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for [Lotus] 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done.

A significant milestone in the history of the spreadsheet, and more broadly, the PC.

The modern work of many professionals, including my fellow actuaries, runs through webs of spreadsheets. Though Microsoft Excel has been the undisputed king of desktop spreadsheets, I feel like it's been up against an innovation wall. The interface and its basic uses have been largely unchanged in more than a decade (despite a significant visual makeover in 2007.)

I think mobile represents the innovation frontier for spreadsheets. Microsoft has done essentially nothing in that space, and while the Google Drive app is pretty good in terms of accessibility and collaboration, it lacks many features that Excel powerusers rely on.

Apple's Numbers looks good visually and has more features, but it falls drastically short on file sharing and collaboration.

Whoever can come up with a truly mobile-user-friendly system for working with tabular data that has the same degree of buy-in that Excel has enjoyed since the late 1990s, will become very rich.

On the other hand, maybe the concept of the spreadsheet will itself run its course in the next decade or two. It wouldn't be a terrible thing. I've seen the wounds inflicted by both sides of Excel's blade. Replacing spreadsheets created by armchair programmers with more robust software applications is probably better long-term.

To avoid inbox shock when returning from vacation, a lot of us check email constantly while on vacation. It's a pretty awful way to live if you think about it.

Around the 10:30 mark of his TEDxNashville talk, "My Digital Stamp," Erik Qualman solves this problem:

1. When your vacation starts, set your email's vacation auto-responder to say:

   Thank you for your email. This mailbox is temporarily full. If your email is important please resend it on [Return Date].

2. When you return, select all the emails you received while on vacation.

3. Delete.

Yuvi Zalkow:

I’ve always wanted to know how he evolved into the great comedian that he became. So I asked him…

James Shelley on theatrical theory:

Aristotle pointed out that we only know a character’s true character through the choices that they make. If a character delivers a monologue but doesn’t decide or do something, the audience has been given no reason to believe them. Actions alone demonstrate character. . .

Imagine if life were more theatrical.

There are lots of places where you can pick up a tip or two on writing Markdown. There are also a ton of apps, services, and utilities for making it easier to write Markdown.

But they're not all in one place. In fact, they're very much in the opposite of one place—spread out across countless dot-coms, dot-nets, and even dot-me's. No one has ever written a book on Markdown.

So David Sparks and I decided to write one.

Markdown, the third book in David's fantastic MacSparky Field Guide series, is 130 pages and 27 screencasts long. There's over an hour and a half of video. We cover Markdown instruction, application recommendations, and offer advice. We also threw in another hour of audio interviews with a few of our Markdown-loving pals: Merlin Mann, Fletcher Penney, Brett Terpstra, Federico Viticci, and Gabe Weatherhead.

Being a multi-media work, filled with audio and video, Markdown is best viewed on an iPad (iBookstore), but we also made a PDF version bundled with all the same audio and video files—if that's your thing.

The pride I have in creating this book is matched only by the gratitude I feel toward:

• John Gruber, the creator of Markdown,
• Fletcher Penney, the force behind MultiMarkdown,
• Brett Terpstra, a guy whose energy for making Markdown utilities knows no bounds, and
• Everyone else who's ever supported Markdown by talking about it or writing up a tip

This book is our attempt to build on all the great work and enthusiasm for Markdown, but more importantly, extend it to new audiences. We want to help people discover the power of plain text writing in the post-word-processor era.

I hope you enjoy this book. David and I certainly enjoyed writing it—in Markdown of course.

Get it in the iBookstore, or read more about it on my Markdown page.

Marco Arment on the perils of using an LTE connection on a MacBook:

With LTE, you can burn through a 5 GB data cap in an hour if you’re downloading big video files, and it would be easy to burn through the cap in just a few days if you’re streaming HD video — which, in 2013, is commonplace. And most people’s data plans have far less than 5 GB/month today. (At least they’re cheaper.)

I was hoping Mountain Lion would add some APIs suggesting cellular data considerations, but it didn’t happen. Maybe 10.9 will.

This is really just one example of why OS X needs to become more connection-type-aware. I create a lot of video data in ScreenFlow. Every ounce of data on my computer either flows through Dropbox or Backblaze. With increasingly regularity, I'll head off to the coffee shop not thinking about the fact that, say, Backblaze, is in the middle of a 500 MB upload—or the possibility that someone I'm collaborating with just put 1 GB of video data in a shared Dropbox folder.

"In the old days" when I tethered to a 3G connection, it didn't matter as much. 3G's slowness—not to mention its unlimitedness—prevented me from eating my monthly data allowance in the time it takes to enjoy a cup of cappuccino. My Verizon LTE upload speeds are routinely faster than my home Wi-Fi upload speeds. The damage is usually done before I even think to manually pause syncing.

Not only would I like to see LTE antennas soon included in MacBooks, I'd like to see either Apple or third party developers begin to address this problem by allowing me to prohibit services like Dropbox and Backblaze from running unless I'm on specific networks.

From a recent memo to Yahoo employees announcing CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban all remote work:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Steve Wozniak in iWoz:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me— they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

And finally, Susan Cain in Chapter 3, "When Collaboration Kills Creativity", arguably the most powerful chapter in her entire book, Quiet:

Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.

Susan Cain's book is easily one of the best pieces of non-fiction I've read in the last five years. If you manage people or simply value personal productivity, consider yourself at a competitive disadvantage if you don't at least consider the arguments she presents.

It's where I go through the harsh, but short-lasting process of deleting projects and actions—and the even more stinging process of emailing associated people to tell them I can't do things I previously promised.

It's not a fun review. But if you don't do a prescribed burn every so often, you end up growing really shitty trees.

Man up.

Silicon Valley is a fantastic documentary covering the birth of American technology entrepreneurialism. Watching the entire thing for free on my iPad seemed especially fitting.

I can't recommend this film enough. It's a look into one of the most important tipping points in American history and the lives of men who sowed virtually all of the seeds that would grow into the technological standard of living we have today.

For me, one of the obvious sub-themes was how critical government spending was to the creation of technologies that would have otherwise had no market because they were unaffordable to 20th century consumers.

I think the defining distinction between the last twenty years of government military spending and the spending that took place in the 20th century is that this recent round seems to have produced no technological side benefits for society.

World War II, the space race, and even the Cold War of the 20th century were all boons for the American economy—intentional or not. Post-1980s military spending has only served to buy a nice, heavy yoke that will likely adorn the middle class's neck for the rest of my working lifetime.

This century, the consumer has clearly replaced the government as the primary client of new technology. The most successful companies seem to be those that cater to the consumer rather than the bureaucracy. I just hope the consumer can keep up.

via Justin Blanton

I have an uncommon-to-most but highly frequent-for-me workflow where I convert PDF slides created from the LaTeX Beamer package to Keynote presentations, which I use in my actuarial education work.

The PDF to Keynote step happens very quickly thanks to an app of the same name: PDF to Keynote.app. I created a short video illustrating how I use this app with LaunchBar.