8 ms·

The Setup: Mike Fogus

59 points by lispython 14y ago

fogus 14y ago
The Mont Blanc pen "hack" mentioned in the interview is from http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-$200-in-2-minutes-and-have-the-worlds-best-wr/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-$200-in-2-minutes-and-h...
- calibraxis 14y ago
  There's a video where fine sandpaper's used. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHj_AH1Fp5A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHj_AH1Fp5A) Said that the Mont Blanc cartridge even wiggles less than Pilot's own cartridge. What is the advantage of Mont Blanc? G2 ink smears easily on the Moleskine, so I found them unusable together. (Not that I can justify to myself the premium for Moleskine, but I did buy one once. :) How does Mont Blanc ink fare?
  - fogus 14y ago
    The Mont Blanc ink seems to dry very quickly. I've never had an issue with smearing, but then again I use a larger notebook and am right-handed.
  - hboon 14y ago
    It still smears a little sometimes (finger swiping off some lint, etc), but hardly when you are writing.
telemachos 14y ago
I love that he talks about writing with pens and paper. Too many people overlook how useful this can be, I think. When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle: + Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing. + Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head) + Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books. Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought. Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.
- fogus 14y ago
  In my career I've often found that during "brainstorming" meetings the highly technical attendees very often use paper and pen while the more managerial always have various different high-tech devices. just an observation from my own career and not meant as indicative of anything in reality
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    As mentioned above, I use artists sketchbooks (A5 or A4). I have found by accident that opening a hard-backed notebook in a meeting and taking notes induces mild paranoia in manager types. Managers I have worked for have used: Psion organisers, palm pilots, various laptops including the old style Thinkpad tablets, various smart phones from Blackberry to iPhone, and, latterly, iPads. I just have a shelf of sketchbooks.
- mwcampbell 14y ago
  To counterbalance this budding glorification of handwriting, I'll reiterate here the drawbacks of handwritten text which have more to do with the results than the process: 1. It inevitably occupies physical space for as long as it exists. 2. It is trapped in a format that cannot be (reliably) converted to electronic text. 3. As a corollary, it is not searchable by machine, so I'd argue it's not quickly searchable on any large scale. 4. As another corollary, it cannot be made accessible to people who can't read written text (e.g. visually impaired people), at least not without the manual effort of retyping it. If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you, and you have the space for it, I suppose I can't object to it without getting into a discussion about individualism versus collectivism. But handwriting has absolutely no attractions for me.
  - fogus 14y ago
    If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you Isn't that what we're talking about here? I don't write notes to put on display. I write notes to help in my personal understanding. The very act of writing some things down helps to crystallize them in my own mind. I rarely go back and look over what I've written. However, in the rare case that I do I've devised an indexing system that allows me to find a given note on a given topic fairly quickly. The whole process of writing, indexing and occasional look up is a process meant (and effective for me) in gaining understanding. I work best with handwritten notes, you do not. There is no glorification happening here.
Kototama 14y ago
So the M-keyboard does not rust? I like the dishwasher idea but I have neither a M-keyboard nor a dishwasher ;-)
- fogus 14y ago
  It appears not too, but I've not opened it up. In any case the keys function as well as the day I got it (and it was probably 10 years old then).
  - agscala 14y ago
    Cool advice, I'm gonna try tossing my Model M in the dishwasher this weekend. Also I totally get your Model M love, I think it'll always be my preferred keyboard. What a great piece of hardware.
    - wiredfool 14y ago
      I've opened mine up, (M13s) and there's enough electronics in it that I didn't want to put in the dishwasher. I need to debug the trackpoint on one of them (it's simply not working, might be the cable, might be the driver circuit) and the ujm keys on the other one. I found washing the switches with alcohol worked for a while, but I'm still getting miskeys on m j and u, where m -> m, u->ui, and j->jk.
- gtani 14y ago
  There's other keyboards that have (similar, I think) mechanical switches http://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards http://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards
- larrywright 14y ago
  I don't have a Model M, but I've hand washed a pair of Apple Extended Keyboard IIs that I bought off of eBay (even used a scrub brush), and they've worked well for years. I shook as much water as I could out of them, and let them dry outside before plugging them in.
boothead 14y ago
Org mode for writing books... I've started writing a book in org-mode. The writing is all fine, but the exporting is a bit of a pain! Anyone else doing this and have any tips on pdf export from org? edit grammar
- lukev 14y ago
  I've done it with Stuart Sierra for ClojureScript: Up and Running (O'Reilly 2012). To get high quality results, go through an intermediate format that's designed for publishing. Org mode can export to DocBook XML, then run an XLST on to make any tweaks in the elements used. Then either use your publisher's tools or XSL:FO to typeset it. Using this technique it's possible to get extremely high quality results.
- jfb 14y ago
  org -> LaTeX? That's how I generate docs at work.
  - boothead 14y ago
    Yeah I am doing it with LaTeX, but it was a shock to the system how much actual LaTeX I had to mess with to make it work (and not look butt ugly) and I wondered if anyone had a more streamlined workflow (or better tools.)
    - tincholio 14y ago
      I made a simple elisp snippet to insert a bunch of LaTeX headers for the stuff I use (including my own LaTeX packages), and found that it simplifies the work quite a bit.
      - boothead 14y ago
        I ended up making my own package (which I stole from sphinx) and including it so I can keep all of my style separate and pick and choose what other stuff I use - like minted for example. I've found it a bit of a mixed bag though - setting up minted in one of me .el files and some of it's styling in my .sty file. Not sure if I'm really doing it right, but the output looks OK for now and I assume it will be much easier to tweak it in future.
jgrahamc 14y ago
Whenever I read one of these I keep wanting them to do Patrick Bateman. These descriptions of products that people use give me the creeps (on occasion).
- fogus 14y ago
  So are you saying that I sound like a serial killer? Oh my. :p
  - jgrahamc 14y ago
    Not you in particular. It's the whole genre.
    - runjake 14y ago
      Gear fetishism. Don't get me wrong, I read nearly every technical interview on The Setup, but some of it is creepy or bad. Especially the people who claim they are minimalists and then rattle off a long list of expensive, high-end gear.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    "My dream system would be a modular CPU slightly bigger than my iPhone with a display that I could use as a tablet while mobile and plug into a docking station when I’m at my desk" Ubuntu-phone man, simples. Investigating org-mode babel as a consequence of your page.
- konstruktor 14y ago
  I never realised how accustomed I have become to the very same language I found quite odd when reading American Psycho. Very insightful posting, thanks!
- mhd 14y ago
  I generally like to hear how people work, but it gets a bit boring if it's all web developers & TED circuit guys, where it all comes down to "list of apple devices + GTD apps". I would love to see the setup of some people. A few screenshots would be nice, but a short screencast would be even better. Even if it's all pretty standard (e.g. Eclipse + Chrome, Sublime + Safari, Blender + XCode), I think one could learn a few things here and then how other people hop around between applications and accomplish tasks. At least I think it would be interesting, it might also just lead to me freaking about because someone is doing it wrong (As Sartre said, hell is seeing other people google).
dreen 14y ago
It would be cool too see some pictures of this "20 computer lab". Its rather dry to read the post with just links to things I could Google if I wanted to find out what they are. Otherwise it was an interesting read.
pqs 14y ago
Fogus, you say that you use an iPad when you are on the move. Do you edit your .org files with the iPad? If yes, how do you do it? On a virtual server with a ssh client? I organize my whole life with Org-mode. I use it as a todo list, project management tool and agenda. I also use it to write documents and scientific papers and presentations, which I export to .tex. Not being able to edit my agenda from an iPad is really what prevents me to buy one (I would probably also buy a bluetooth keyboard). There is mobileorg, but I think it is not maintained any more, at least the iOS version. I could also ssh to a virtual server, but I'm not comfortable having all my agenda files on such a machine, because of security and privacy concerns.
- fredsted 14y ago
  >I could also ssh to a virtual server, but I'm not comfortable having all my agenda files on such a machine, because of security and privacy concerns. You could encrypt it or SSH into your own machine.
  - pqs 14y ago
    Encrypting the files is not an optin, as I would run them on the virtual server. SSH-ing my own machine could be an option, but I don't like the idea of exposing my own machine to the net this way. Maybe I'm paranoid.
- fogus 14y ago
  I could never get mobileorg to work. In any case I use SimpleNote (http://simplenote.com/ http://simplenote.com/). Sorry that I didn't mention that.
- boothead 14y ago
  I used iwriter (which is lovely) to bang out some text on my iPad and save it to .txt files on Dropbox. I post processed into org-mode in emacs afterwards. iWriter won't recognise the .org suffix by default, but that didn't matter to me because the iPad keyboard is useless for writing #* and other characters - WMMV if you have an external keyboard I guess. The nice thing is that all of my book related .org files also live in Dropbox as does the output pdf so I can read the output on the train too.
lucb1e 14y ago
His hardware needs are pretty spartan, but he needs: an iphone, PDA, laptop with an ssd, computer, usbsticks, a kindle and an ipad. I guess I don't want to know what non-spartan is. Or was this some obscure form of sarcasm?
- fogus 14y ago
  It was wry I suppose, but I think I didn't explain myself very well in the interview. I tried to convey that I'm trying to move towards a more Spartan arrangement. I don't think I mentioned USB sticks, but in any case I no longer use them because of Dropbox. Likewise, I no longer need a PDA because my iPhone/iPad cover the old tasks. Also, I no longer need a computer because Laptop, etc. The point is that I'm less reliant on multiple devices and changing my habits to need even less.
  - lucb1e 14y ago
    I misremembered, I meant: > various portable drives
    - fogus 14y ago
      The operative word in that quote is "had". As I mentioned, I'm trying to slim down so to speak.
buzzkillr2 14y ago
Fantastic read fogus! I love discovering gems thru reading The Setup
- waferbaby 14y ago
  Yay! That's awesome.
gyepi 14y ago
I always enjoy finding out how others work. Mostly for curiosity, but also to glean new methods and habits I could adapt for myself. I particularly enjoyed this one because fogus seems to share my habits of using a pen/pencil as a thinking tool, thinking hard before jumping into a problem and using a Model M keyboard.

59 points by lispython 14y ago

fogus 14y ago

The Mont Blanc pen "hack" mentioned in the interview is from http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-$200-in-2-minutes-and-have-the-worlds-best-wr/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-$200-in-2-minutes-and-h...

calibraxis 14y ago
There's a video where fine sandpaper's used. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHj_AH1Fp5A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHj_AH1Fp5A) Said that the Mont Blanc cartridge even wiggles less than Pilot's own cartridge. What is the advantage of Mont Blanc? G2 ink smears easily on the Moleskine, so I found them unusable together. (Not that I can justify to myself the premium for Moleskine, but I did buy one once. :) How does Mont Blanc ink fare?
- fogus 14y ago
  The Mont Blanc ink seems to dry very quickly. I've never had an issue with smearing, but then again I use a larger notebook and am right-handed.
- hboon 14y ago
  It still smears a little sometimes (finger swiping off some lint, etc), but hardly when you are writing.

telemachos 14y ago

I love that he talks about writing with pens and paper. Too many people overlook how useful this can be, I think. When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle: + Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing. + Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head) + Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books. Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought. Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.

fogus 14y ago
In my career I've often found that during "brainstorming" meetings the highly technical attendees very often use paper and pen while the more managerial always have various different high-tech devices. just an observation from my own career and not meant as indicative of anything in reality
- keithpeter 14y ago
  As mentioned above, I use artists sketchbooks (A5 or A4). I have found by accident that opening a hard-backed notebook in a meeting and taking notes induces mild paranoia in manager types. Managers I have worked for have used: Psion organisers, palm pilots, various laptops including the old style Thinkpad tablets, various smart phones from Blackberry to iPhone, and, latterly, iPads. I just have a shelf of sketchbooks.
mwcampbell 14y ago
To counterbalance this budding glorification of handwriting, I'll reiterate here the drawbacks of handwritten text which have more to do with the results than the process: 1. It inevitably occupies physical space for as long as it exists. 2. It is trapped in a format that cannot be (reliably) converted to electronic text. 3. As a corollary, it is not searchable by machine, so I'd argue it's not quickly searchable on any large scale. 4. As another corollary, it cannot be made accessible to people who can't read written text (e.g. visually impaired people), at least not without the manual effort of retyping it. If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you, and you have the space for it, I suppose I can't object to it without getting into a discussion about individualism versus collectivism. But handwriting has absolutely no attractions for me.
- fogus 14y ago
  If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you Isn't that what we're talking about here? I don't write notes to put on display. I write notes to help in my personal understanding. The very act of writing some things down helps to crystallize them in my own mind. I rarely go back and look over what I've written. However, in the rare case that I do I've devised an indexing system that allows me to find a given note on a given topic fairly quickly. The whole process of writing, indexing and occasional look up is a process meant (and effective for me) in gaining understanding. I work best with handwritten notes, you do not. There is no glorification happening here.

Kototama 14y ago

So the M-keyboard does not rust? I like the dishwasher idea but I have neither a M-keyboard nor a dishwasher ;-)

fogus 14y ago
It appears not too, but I've not opened it up. In any case the keys function as well as the day I got it (and it was probably 10 years old then).
- agscala 14y ago
  Cool advice, I'm gonna try tossing my Model M in the dishwasher this weekend. Also I totally get your Model M love, I think it'll always be my preferred keyboard. What a great piece of hardware.
  - wiredfool 14y ago
    I've opened mine up, (M13s) and there's enough electronics in it that I didn't want to put in the dishwasher. I need to debug the trackpoint on one of them (it's simply not working, might be the cable, might be the driver circuit) and the ujm keys on the other one. I found washing the switches with alcohol worked for a while, but I'm still getting miskeys on m j and u, where m -> m, u->ui, and j->jk.
gtani 14y ago
There's other keyboards that have (similar, I think) mechanical switches http://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards http://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards
larrywright 14y ago
I don't have a Model M, but I've hand washed a pair of Apple Extended Keyboard IIs that I bought off of eBay (even used a scrub brush), and they've worked well for years. I shook as much water as I could out of them, and let them dry outside before plugging them in.

boothead 14y ago

Org mode for writing books... I've started writing a book in org-mode. The writing is all fine, but the exporting is a bit of a pain! Anyone else doing this and have any tips on pdf export from org? edit grammar

lukev 14y ago
I've done it with Stuart Sierra for ClojureScript: Up and Running (O'Reilly 2012). To get high quality results, go through an intermediate format that's designed for publishing. Org mode can export to DocBook XML, then run an XLST on to make any tweaks in the elements used. Then either use your publisher's tools or XSL:FO to typeset it. Using this technique it's possible to get extremely high quality results.
jfb 14y ago
org -> LaTeX? That's how I generate docs at work.
- boothead 14y ago
  Yeah I am doing it with LaTeX, but it was a shock to the system how much actual LaTeX I had to mess with to make it work (and not look butt ugly) and I wondered if anyone had a more streamlined workflow (or better tools.)
  - tincholio 14y ago
    I made a simple elisp snippet to insert a bunch of LaTeX headers for the stuff I use (including my own LaTeX packages), and found that it simplifies the work quite a bit.
    - boothead 14y ago
      I ended up making my own package (which I stole from sphinx) and including it so I can keep all of my style separate and pick and choose what other stuff I use - like minted for example. I've found it a bit of a mixed bag though - setting up minted in one of me .el files and some of it's styling in my .sty file. Not sure if I'm really doing it right, but the output looks OK for now and I assume it will be much easier to tweak it in future.

jgrahamc 14y ago

Whenever I read one of these I keep wanting them to do Patrick Bateman. These descriptions of products that people use give me the creeps (on occasion).

fogus 14y ago
So are you saying that I sound like a serial killer? Oh my. :p
- jgrahamc 14y ago
  Not you in particular. It's the whole genre.
  - runjake 14y ago
    Gear fetishism. Don't get me wrong, I read nearly every technical interview on The Setup, but some of it is creepy or bad. Especially the people who claim they are minimalists and then rattle off a long list of expensive, high-end gear.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "My dream system would be a modular CPU slightly bigger than my iPhone with a display that I could use as a tablet while mobile and plug into a docking station when I’m at my desk" Ubuntu-phone man, simples. Investigating org-mode babel as a consequence of your page.
konstruktor 14y ago
I never realised how accustomed I have become to the very same language I found quite odd when reading American Psycho. Very insightful posting, thanks!
mhd 14y ago
I generally like to hear how people work, but it gets a bit boring if it's all web developers & TED circuit guys, where it all comes down to "list of apple devices + GTD apps". I would love to see the setup of some people. A few screenshots would be nice, but a short screencast would be even better. Even if it's all pretty standard (e.g. Eclipse + Chrome, Sublime + Safari, Blender + XCode), I think one could learn a few things here and then how other people hop around between applications and accomplish tasks. At least I think it would be interesting, it might also just lead to me freaking about because someone is doing it wrong (As Sartre said, hell is seeing other people google).

dreen 14y ago

It would be cool too see some pictures of this "20 computer lab". Its rather dry to read the post with just links to things I could Google if I wanted to find out what they are. Otherwise it was an interesting read.

pqs 14y ago

Fogus, you say that you use an iPad when you are on the move. Do you edit your .org files with the iPad? If yes, how do you do it? On a virtual server with a ssh client? I organize my whole life with Org-mode. I use it as a todo list, project management tool and agenda. I also use it to write documents and scientific papers and presentations, which I export to .tex. Not being able to edit my agenda from an iPad is really what prevents me to buy one (I would probably also buy a bluetooth keyboard). There is mobileorg, but I think it is not maintained any more, at least the iOS version. I could also ssh to a virtual server, but I'm not comfortable having all my agenda files on such a machine, because of security and privacy concerns.

fredsted 14y ago
>I could also ssh to a virtual server, but I'm not comfortable having all my agenda files on such a machine, because of security and privacy concerns. You could encrypt it or SSH into your own machine.
- pqs 14y ago
  Encrypting the files is not an optin, as I would run them on the virtual server. SSH-ing my own machine could be an option, but I don't like the idea of exposing my own machine to the net this way. Maybe I'm paranoid.
fogus 14y ago
I could never get mobileorg to work. In any case I use SimpleNote (http://simplenote.com/ http://simplenote.com/). Sorry that I didn't mention that.
boothead 14y ago
I used iwriter (which is lovely) to bang out some text on my iPad and save it to .txt files on Dropbox. I post processed into org-mode in emacs afterwards. iWriter won't recognise the .org suffix by default, but that didn't matter to me because the iPad keyboard is useless for writing #* and other characters - WMMV if you have an external keyboard I guess. The nice thing is that all of my book related .org files also live in Dropbox as does the output pdf so I can read the output on the train too.

lucb1e 14y ago

His hardware needs are pretty spartan, but he needs: an iphone, PDA, laptop with an ssd, computer, usbsticks, a kindle and an ipad. I guess I don't want to know what non-spartan is. Or was this some obscure form of sarcasm?

fogus 14y ago
It was wry I suppose, but I think I didn't explain myself very well in the interview. I tried to convey that I'm trying to move towards a more Spartan arrangement. I don't think I mentioned USB sticks, but in any case I no longer use them because of Dropbox. Likewise, I no longer need a PDA because my iPhone/iPad cover the old tasks. Also, I no longer need a computer because Laptop, etc. The point is that I'm less reliant on multiple devices and changing my habits to need even less.
- lucb1e 14y ago
  I misremembered, I meant: > various portable drives
  - fogus 14y ago
    The operative word in that quote is "had". As I mentioned, I'm trying to slim down so to speak.

buzzkillr2 14y ago

Fantastic read fogus! I love discovering gems thru reading The Setup

waferbaby 14y ago
Yay! That's awesome.

gyepi 14y ago

I always enjoy finding out how others work. Mostly for curiosity, but also to glean new methods and habits I could adapt for myself. I particularly enjoyed this one because fogus seems to share my habits of using a pen/pencil as a thinking tool, thinking hard before jumping into a problem and using a Model M keyboard.