C.R.A.W.LAB Etouffee

Delicious Bytes of Information

Living with It

From an article on the Economist titled In praise of laziness:

Creative people's most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time—and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their ...

Speak to Proof Service

This is an extension to this earlier post to allow Speak to Text inside PDFs and other places where the built-in speech service might not work. To do so, you need to create a Service using Automator. First, when you open Automator, it will ask to "Choose a type for ...

Accidentally Learn Stuff

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Instead, I strive to have my students accidentally learn stuff. Your lessons or lectures or articles should omit the bits that aren’t of immediate importance, but leave a little trail of breadcrumbs in the process. Drop little clues about those tangential topics you want your students ...

Success and Good People

One of my favorite questions to ask people, particularly those that I consider successful, is what makes them so. The answer to this question almost invariably points to the ideals that they work towards, to what they value.1 To some it's old-fashioned hard work, to others it's ...

Robot Systems

The article linked below makes a convincing1 argument for building not just robots, but robot systems. This change will never happen under the current funding structure, which only rewards work that can be sold as revolutionary.2 Robot systems don't meet this criteria.

Don’t build robots, build ...

Perspective

One of the main benefits of travel is the perspective that it can offer. Seeing places different than your own can shed light on what's great, and what's not so great, about where you call home. Even beyond that, travel can provide perspective on your life, both personal ...

Grinding

Related to the last post: loving the process helps a lot when you're pushing through the "This is terrible" and "I'm terrible" phases.

The Process

I think this is the process for just about anything worth doing. Working through that middle part can be tough, particularly if you haven't done it before or it has been a while since you last did. That last phase does feel great though. Great enough to start it ...