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We will make Vesper for iOS, Vesper for Mac, and Vesper’s JavaScript sync service open source on my personal GitHub account. This code will also be provided as historical artifacts: they’re not intended as active projects. They’re also not intended as examples of how to write apps these days.

I applaud the team’s decisions to open source the Vesper code base, especially the syncing component that Brent put so much work into. Perhaps, like the ill-fated Letters.app, Vesper’s demise will give way to new applications that may fare better.

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I don’t know how the executives at Mylan sleep at night.

I do. On gigantic mattresses stuffed with money. This is why the Libertarian ideal of a society free from government interference won’t work. The corporation will take ever advantage they legally can to gain as much profit as possible.

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On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.

Incredible work by Scott Anderson at the New York Times. Take a day or two and read the entire thing. For those of us living in peace and prosperity, where the biggest problem we have to face is paying an extra dollar for a cappuccino, we need to remember that evil is always waiting at the gates. There are always those who would throw the world into chaos. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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Being an athlete is simple – all you have to do is strive.

I enjoyed this set of videos from Strava.

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And yet, the Americans were . . . wow. They were amazing. What else could you say? Part of the pleasure was appreciating the team’s depth. Yes, Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history—she was even before she won her first Olympic gold last night—but she has astonishingly talented teammates. Laurie Hernandez doesn’t just look like she was drawn by a cartoonist; every leap seemed accompanied by a thought bubble filled with exclamation points. Aly Raisman tumbled with a regal quality that was absent even four years ago, when she won gold in the floor exercise. She seemed to stick her landings by fiat.

Dominating.

She’s focussing on the two-hundred-metre freestyle to qualify for the Olympics, but she admitted a soft spot for the butterfly. “It’s really hard,” she said. “This is why I love it.”

An amazing and inspirational story. It is far too easy to forget the human stories of the refugee crisis stemming from the Syrian civil war. These are real people with lives and dreams that were thrown into disarray when their country was torn apart.

I started writing this post talking about how I was using DEVONthink, and, as often happens when you write things down, I started thinking critically about how I interacted with the application. I took a folder full of screenshots, walked through some usage scenarios, and checked and double-checked what I was actually doing with the application. Then I exported everything to the Finder.

As of right now, I’m not using DEVONthink. I’ve gone back and forth over this for literally years. I get enthralled with the idea of building this perfect database, where every bit of information I need is at my fingertips, organized and indexed exactly as I want it. Then after a week or two of day to day use I realize that I’ve duplicated everything that I do with the Finder and a handful of other apps in DEVONthink, and decide to simplify.

One of the best things about DEVONthink is that it doesn’t modify your data, it simply organizes it and adds a layer of intelligence to help you manage it. The main selling point is it’s integrated “AI”, a parsing engine that looks for similarities between documents and can present you with connections between topics you may have missed. In this way, DEVONthink is more of an intelligent research assistant than a document management application like the Finder. Unfortunately, over the past several years of going back and forth, using it and not using it, I’ve never found a practical use for the AI.

I wrote earlier this week about how if you want to remember something you should write it down. Personally, I’ve found that I’m not good at this. I’m far more likely to find a way to record information using my Mac of iPhone than I am a notebook, simply because I’ve always got one of the two with me. I am however making a deliberate effort to give myself time to think clearly, stepping away from the computer and staring out the window for a while.

Computers excel at storing and searching information. Humans excel at making abstract connections between disparate bits of information. The best AI in the world can’t help me if I either don’t trust it, or if I don’t understand the connections it’s trying to make. My own brain is far better at making connections if I only give it the materials it needs. In other words, if I actually read and make notes on the information I’m saving. Using several “anything buckets” over the years I developed a bad habit of saving things after skimming through their contents, thinking that I would have it if I ever needed it. In practice though, instead of searching my own personal archive, I would almost always just search DuckDuckGo or Google again. My perfect database becomes a crypt of partially read web archives.

My entire job is managing information. What commands to type in where to get the desired result. Which buttons to click and what code to push to enable my team to get their work done. Every day the Internet is building and rebuilding itself, and my team does their part to help make information available. I even went to grad school for Human Computer Interaction, and learned only that the best way to manage information is “whatever works for you”. Sure enough, what worked for me in grad school was to have a top level folder named “ISU”, and a sub-folder underneath for every class I was in, and then a folder under each class for each assignment, as well as a folder for the videos of all the lectures. The organization was simple and easy to understand.

Again, when I looked through my DEVONthink system, I found that I had recreated everything that the Finder did. I had a database for each major topic or area of life, and folders and subfolders that further refined the topic till I reached the files. For example, my “Research” database contained an “Operating Systems” folder, that contained folders for “Linux”, “BSD”, “OS X”, and “Windows”. My Linux folder contained a folder named “Shared Internals”, and underneath that a folder named “Kernel”. Inside the Kernel folder were documents pertaining to the internals of the Linux kernel.

While I’ve read most of the documents in my database, too many of them I’ve only skimmed. What would be much more useful is a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten can be thought of as a Wiki with short articles. The point being that while I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing files, what I really want out of my computer is knowledge.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m still working through all of this. I haven’t found the one true way to organize your data that I can recommend to everyone. What I learned in school still stands, how you organize your data remains up to you. Whatever works best for you is what you should do.

I think it’s good to have original source material on hand, but that source material is only useful if the information it contains is extracted and incorporated into a personal knowledge base. This has been my mistake for too long, to think that simply by saving and skimming over original source material I can increase my knowledge and effectiveness. Tools like Evernote and DEVONthink encourage this kind of digital hoarding by making it easy to save data, but the truth is that there is still no substitute for doing the hard work required to learn. You have to read, reflect, think it through, and write it down. Maybe on paper, maybe not, but without the intermediary step of synthesizing the information you’ve collected into your own personal system, it’s just more junk that needs to be cleaned up.

If you really want to remember something, write it down. By hand.

There is a growing body of knowledge that shows the benefits of writing things down, and how handwriting is better for learning than typing on a keyboard. It’s unfortunate that these studies come after years of schools pushing to get a computer in the hands of every student, moving quickly to replace pen and paper with bits and bytes.

A 2014 article in the New York Times draws a connection between increased brain activity and handwriting.

When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect.

Another article in Science Daily from 2011 reports similar results in a separate study:

Mangen refers to an experiment involving two groups of adults, in which the participants were assigned the task of having to learn to write in an unknown alphabet, consisting of approximately twenty letters. One group was taught to write by hand, while the other was using a keyboard. Three and six weeks into the experiment, the participants’ recollection of these letters, as well as their rapidity in distinguishing right and reversed letters, were tested. Those who had learned the letters by handwriting came out best in all tests. Furthermore, fMRI brain scans indicated an activation of the Broca’s area within this group. Among those who had learned by typing on keyboards, there was little or no activation of this area.

This article in Psychology Today references several studies, focusing mainly on the benefits of cursive writing.

Much of the benefit of handwriting in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters. In one Indiana University study, researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during hand writing, but not during typing.

One of the focuses of my writing here is about the appropriate use of technology to enhance our lives. There are so many things that a computer can do, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line on what we should do. Can we give kids computers and have them type notes in class instead of writing them down? Sure. Should we? It’s looking like the increasingly obvious answer from the scientific community is no. Just because it’s faster doesn’t mean it’s more efficient.

There continues to be no shortcut to deep learning. To know a subject, you must study it closely. To learn math, you must practice, especially the fundamentals. The best way to take notes during a lecture is by hand, forcing yourself to synthesize the information you are absorbing into a compressed form that captures the essential ideas, pushing your mind to concentrate intently. Then, at night, when it’s time to study the information further, transcribe the notes into your computer, rewording and exploring the topic as you go. Maybe even speak your notes out loud to yourself, engaging more of your senses.

My favorite quote I’ve read in the past few days is from the Science Daily article, where associate professor Anne Mangen says:

“Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects – be it a book, a keyboard or a pen – to perform certain tasks,”

We don’t fully understand the effect widespread use of computers from an early age is going to have on us. It’s important not to lose sight of the real world as we continue to explore the virtual one we’ve created.

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I’ve been working the last few months on an update to the OmniFocus Video Field Guide. I’ve updated it for several new features and gone deep on the iOS Automation and URL linking. I’m making final edits and additions over the next few days and intend to publish it sometime Sunday (probably late).

OmniFocus is where my stress goes to die. It’s where I regain control of my life. My system for making sure that things that need done aren’t forgotten. Bills are paid, calls are made, and projects move forward. It’s also where ideas go for evaluation. If I have an idea for a new project I’ll drop it in OmniFocus and let it sit there for a while. I might file it away in it’s own project folder, put a “Defer Until” date on it for the weekend, and let the idea sit and stew for a bit.

If the idea has merit, if I keep coming back to it and deferring it more than once or twice, then I focus more on it and start to eck out next actions to start making it a reality. I know there are a lot of task management apps out there, and even a few analog systems like the Bullet Journal, but I’m so invested, and so used to how OmniFocus works that I have zero motivation to move to anything else. By this point, OmniFocus works the way my brain works, it is my trusted system.

That’s all thanks to David Spark’s OmniFocus guides. I adopted his system years ago, modified it slightly and made it my own. I’m looking forward to seeing where he’s taking the guides next.

President Barack Obama used his Democratic National Convention speech to make the case that Hillary Clinton is the best person to be president and that she will build on his time in office.

I’d like to vote for Obama for a third term.