Treated myself over Christmas and switched from a Macbook Pro 15″ to a Macbook Air 13″.

The Air is incredible; ridiculously more travel friendly, super speedy, and absolutely beautiful. Thanks to the Black Friday discount and a VAT rebate, the final price came in less than the second hand resale value of the Pro – so it feels more like a free upgrade than an indulgent new purchase.

I did make one rather small blunder when I made the order and that was to take the default British-English keyboard layout. Most American things irritate me, but their keyboard layout is most definitely superior. Let’s play spot the difference:

Yep, it’s not wildly different at all. Just the shift and return keys are different sizes, but boy do I miss them. I’ve been using the American layout for the last ~6-years or so, so it’s going to take some time for my pinky to get used to the change.

A few other minor gripes:

• I miss the black glass border that goes around the screen of the MacBook Pro. The aluminium frame of the Air provides too much coloured contrast to the screen.
• The Pro has a little button on the side which shows the approximate remaining battery life. You have to open up the Air to find out the same information.
• I opted for the 128Gb. It’s workable, for sure, but you have to compromise and make decisions on what to store. Hard drive capacity has generally been growing at the rate where our total consumption is still a good bit below the limit – but we’re going a bit backwards with solid state drives. Loving the speed though.

There’s tons of great content video content online and it’s also a big time-sucker; it’s extraordinarily easy to start watching watching one video on YouTube and find yourself still on the site an hour later.

I recently got introduced (thanks Tom!) to the wonders of double-speed and it’s proving to make a big difference to how I consume video content.

YouTube natively supports double-speed, providing you opt into their HTML5 trial. Once that’s done, you’ll see a new speed selection option on the video player controller:

For other video content, you can use the ‘Inspect Element’ feature commonly found in modern browsers, or use a browser extension, to fetch the .flv or .swf file. Save it to your disk and then open it up in VLC where you’ll be able to increase the speed up to 31x (although anything beyond 3x becomes incomprehensible).

You can use the same method to speed up podcasts and other audio files (using something like Audacity). It’s especially nice for listening to someone who’s sharing some great information but has a very boring and slow speech. Enjoy!

My precious Nexus One lost another life, suffering from a common known issue with a withering power switch. Whilst I wait to receive a replacement part to make the fix, I was in the need for a new phone to tie me over. Nokia still rules the market in developing countries, and I picked up a new Nokia 1280 for just £14 here in Bali.

It feels torturous to be go back to a world of predictive texting, no email or maps, and small screens. Don’t get me wrong – I can’t wait to return to smartphone bliss. That said, it’s been incredible to reminisce in all the wonders of this old technology and contemplate both how far we’ve progressed with modern phones, yet have also taken steps backwards in so many ways.

Let’s review some of these benefits (using the classic Nokia 3210 as a benchmark):

Long lasting battery life. The most obvious, yet the most remarkable point to make. Most smartphones are known for not seeing through more than a day and I’d completely forgotten what it’s like to be able to charge a phone and forget about it for a week. It’s quite profound.

Instant UI. Forget about the latest OS release being a notch quicker than before. The phones of yesterday have a near instant responsiveness. Circling through menu options slows down the overall experience, but it’s amazingly refreshing to not have to wait a millisecond to progress through anything.

Sexiness. Certainly for its time and I think it’s still true today. The phone is light, curvy and just feels right in your hand. You can greatly customise the exterior aesthetics. The clip-on cover market was enormous and no doubt had a big influence in what we see today with iPhone accessories.

Light or dark agnostic. I always find myself ducking into the shade to avoid the sun’s glare on the smartphone screen. No such problem with the Nokia – it’s easy to read in the full glare of the Sun (ala Kindle) or in pitch black.

Smudge free screen.Touch-sensitive screens are amazing, don’t get my wrong, but it’s nice to see a screen that’s pretty much free of any fingerprints.

Bug free. The ultra simplistic UI and lack of upgrade ability means that real care was made to make it essentially error free. Usability is really well thought out.

Resilience to splashes. Getting even just a droplet of water on an iPhone can send you into a frenzy. Yet, many folk can tell of stories where their 3210 has survived rather perilous accidents eg. plucked out of sinks, toilets, pools: a pat down with a towel, maybe a blast of a hairdryer, and it’s as good as new. Extraordinary.

Resilience to drops & knocks. Similarly, a Nokia can survive being thrown to the floor a dozen times, whilst you roll the dice if the iPhone is knocked off a table. You’re going to drop or bash your phone, it’s inevitable, the phone should be able to handle it.

Battery replacement. Of course you can replace your battery, it goes without saying. And they’re two a penny.

Snake. Nah, I seriously don’t know how this was once popular – it’s not survived the test of time at all! 

It reminds me of a story someone once shared with us at Google; if you stick an old Wintel 3.1 box next to something pretty modern, you’d find the task of opening up a spreadsheet, creating a pie chart and printing it off to be a simpler, and often a faster endeavor on the older machine. Probably absolute nonsense in reality, but it’s certainly true technology is progressing at such a rapid rate, but we’re still not always making better products.

This post has been sitting in my draft list for quite some time, as you might imagine. Better to post rather than delete, I think.

I set the goal at the beginning of 2009 to read 12-books across the year. As previously noted, I came in quite a few books short – but it’s still progress. Here’s a quick review of the books that I read (my memory is foggy in places):

Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill)
The title is a giveaway on the topic. Despite it being a highly-rated book, I can’t say it was a particularly rememberable read. Will have to try again.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Robert Kiyosaki)
Another “get rich” self-help classic. The premise can be boiled down to a couple of sentences. Obtain income generating assets, build up a passive income streams and become incorporated to be tax efficient. The only solid example provided was real estate and  buy-to-let, which doesn’t play too nicely with current times, you could argue. I could firmly relate the content with the ‘virtual real estate‘ model that I’m familiar with. He rambles on about how a house should be regarded as a liability than an asset which gives interesting food for thought, although my father would certainly disagree.

Trick of the Mind (Derren Brown)
I’ve been a long-time fan of Derren and have seen him live on several occasions – so I was eager to get ahold of his first book. It’s not so much about his magical trickery, but rather how feeble our minds are. As a fellow atheist, I enjoyed some of his thoughts on religions and their survival.

The 4-hour Work Week (Timothy Ferriss)
Has become something of a bible for the digital nomad crowd. I was already on the path to become location independent (I naturally stumbled into using AdSense and other online income streams) but it was amazing to read something that resonating so much with my own views. The book contained a healthy dose of information on productivity and lifestyle design – something I should certainly read again. Not quite about how realistic some of his recommendations are for those in full-time occupations and I think he lacks some thought on the merits of building assets that could be passed down the family. Overall; a gem.

Lucid Dreaming (Stephen LaBerge)
LaBerge is the preeminent authority on the subject of lucid dreaming (the practice of being aware of dreaming during a dream). Part academic, part fruitloop, LaBergre provides all the practical theory with suggestions of the cool things you could achieve. The second half of the book takes a bit of a nose dive and reminds me of my university papers; sprinklings of semi-relevant quotes from a myryiad of sources just to pad out more content. There’s a lighter, less acedmic version of the book now available and provides a more well suited introduction to to the subject.

Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
We collectively read this in our AdSense book club. A thick read, which I found largely overly descriptive. It was almost poetic with similes galore – it felt like the author/editor (who is still a relatively junior) has gone through the text with a fine tooth comb and sexed up anything and everything. The three chapters have conjoined stories, that come together – a concept perhaps pinched from films like Babel and Crash. There are many positive reviews, but it’s almost something you should like – a bit of intelectual snobbery. All in all, not that bad – interesting, but not a page turner.

The Official Driver Theory Test 4th Edition (DTT)
Okay, okay… I’m clutching at straws. It’s still a book, no? Hardly a cracker of a read, but it got the job done.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
It’s downright shameful that it’s taken me 25-years to read this book. Adams is a genius. The original TV and radio series are quite brilliant also, and certainly much better than the recent movie incarnation.

That’s all I can remember from 2009, but I believe there might have been 1 or 2 more additions. 2011 has involved a lot of articles (the Instapaper-to-Kindle link is incredible) which has put me behind schedule for this year. Time to catch up.

My coding skills are practically non-existant, but every once in a while I like to get my hands dirty and try to hack something together.

The blog previously had a Facebook Connect implementation which was a little buggy and limiting, so I cracked away one evening to implement the new’ish Facebook Comments Box. A fairly straightforward task I should imagine, but it still took me several hours to fine tune it.

I first grabbed the XFBML code from Facebook’s developer site and inserted it into my theme. Turns out that it conflicted with the old Connect hack, so I had to remove that to get the Comments Box to show up.

I was keen to retain the historic WordPress comments, so I demoted them further down the page, labelled them as “Archived WordPress Comments” and removed the capacity to leave new comments.

WordPress has a function to show the number of comments for a post:

get_comments_number()

However, I now wanted to show the true total which would aggregate the number archived WordPress comments and also Facebook comments.

The Facebook Open Graph API (my first ever interaction with an API!) allows you to grab the comment count and store it as a variable:

<?php
$source_url = get_permalink($post->ID);
$data = file_get_contents(‘http://graph.facebook.com/?id=’. urlencode($source_url));
$json = $data;
$obj = json_decode($json);
$fbcommentcount = $obj->{‘comments’};
?>

Then this value can simply be added to the WordPress count:

$commentotal = $fbcommentcount + get_comments_number();

To show the comment count below each post, I replaced the existing function with the following:

<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>#comments” class=”commentslink” title=”Comment on <?php echo the_title(); ?>”><?php echo $commentotal . ‘ Comment’ . ($commentotal == 1 ? ” : ‘s’); ?></a>

And that’s it. I suspect the code isn’t at all elegant, but it does the job and I’m kinda proud.

Next up:

• Use the API to fetch the comments and store them behind the JavaScript for SEO.
• Figure out how to calculate the total comment count across all posts.
• Cache the comment count rather than making a call on each page request. 

Some useful posts during the hackathon session:

• How to show number of comments in WordPress
• How to combine and display your Facebook, Twitter and comment counts
• Singular or plural output string 

The plugin is fantastic. Much less friction for users (which should hopefully encourage more commenting), less spam (since people are attaching their real identity), more distribution through Facebook, better moderation tools, and other things.

Why not say hello below?

A few weeks ago, Sophie (a fellow Project Getaway participant) and I both launched a business within just 24-hours (actually, we had both hit out goal after just 18-hours).

We both had come up with ideas for products that we thought could be interesting to sell online, but we didn’t want to stake a large investment in a complex website or sourcing inventory. So we formulated a plan to instead ‘fake it’. We created an online store, showcased some mock products, promoted the site through AdWords, and waited to see the results.

This concept takes ideas from Tim Ferris and the Lean Startup; namely the concept of minimum viable product (TechCrunch has a nice piece on how Dropbox used MVP to create demand without a working product), whereby you launch a business with the very bare bones of a product or service to test the waters before making a larger commitment.

My venture centered around fascinators; those fancy hair broche type of things that have seen a boom in the UK since the Royal Wedding. I figured that they could be sourced cheaply from China, shipped over to the UK in bulk and sold online at a price that reflected good value.

After a quick bit of brainstorming, Sophie & Fox was born. We used the superb Shopify platform to launch our webshop, taking advantage of Paypal for simple payment processing.

Here’s a screenshot of the Sophie & Fox homepage (the site has now been put offline). I made use of a standard template, with a bit of customisation and a custom-made logo. I’m pretty happy with the look; it feels very professional and slick.

I spent most of the day hacking the template to make it more bespoke, working with a graphic designer on some elements (which turned out to be quite painful) and adding some products to the store.

We whacked together a super quick AdWords campaign (featuring the most obvious broad keywords, coupled with a few ad texts and some negative keywords) and set it live immediately with a budget of $30/day. Traffic acquisition through Google might not be commercially viable in the long-term, but it served us perfectly for this experiment - if we can’t convert highly targeted visitors, then it’s unlikely that there’s demand for our product.

This Google results page shows the Sophie & Fox ad on top for the “fascinators” keyword.

After $101 and 262 clicks of ad spend, I had received just 1 order. (Of course, I refunded the payment immediately and apologised for not being able to supply the product at the time).

My experience suggests that fascinators aren’t a great product to sell online. Of course, perhaps a more conversion-optimised page could have performed better, and building the brand would help enormously, but I was hoping to see a much higher conversion rate which would show a much greater opportunity to work with.

But I wouldn’t consider the test a failure. I had only spent a hundred bucks and a day of my time to turn a seed of an idea into fully fledged proof of concept. I feel confident that I could now go on to test out other products in the same way and I’m sure after a while I’d find something that sticks.

Sophie worked on building Sticky Inspiration; cool little Post-it like notes with inspirational quotes that you can stick anywhere. Her test continues.

I inadvertently acquired some Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones a couple of weeks ago and I’m chuffed to bits with them. More so, I think they now complete a perfect hattrick:

That’s the Bose QuietComfort 15 ($300), Etymotic E6i ($125) and Hama HK-3023 ($10).

It’s quite an investment. An opt choice of word, I feel. I dislike owning anything particularly expensive, but given I spend a good portion of my day in front of a computer listening to music, it makes sense to have decent headphones that allow me to enjoy the music more and keep greater focus whilst I work.

The Bose headphones are incredibly well known. They’ve got their direct marketing campaigns and retail presence (less prominent outside of the US) down to a fine art. You can pick up a pair on a 30-day money back guarantee and I’m sure the return rate is pretty low; and for a good reason – they’re damn good headphones. You pay top dollar for the branding alone, but you’re rewarded with superb comfort and excellent sound quality. The impact of the active noise cancelling is incredible; it completely changes the enjoyment level of long-haul travel especially. Far too bulky and precious to use out and about, but perfect for keeping on the desk for focused work sessions.

On the other hand, Etymotic is probably a company you’ve never heard of. Reasuringly, they specialise in just one product group (headphones, earplugs) and have a record of supplying products to music professionals. Whilst they don’t have any active noise cancelling, shoving the eartips into your ears gives a near identical effect. With the volume cranked up, you’ll be unable to hear anything from the outside world. The compact size makes it perfect for the great outdoors. One problem I find is that you become pretty sensitive to any movements of the cable, with the vibrations sent directly into your ears. This makes them uncomfortable when running or on long walks. You also need to be incredibly careful about anything that could snag onto the cable and rib the earphones out of your ears – it’s really painful and could cause damage to your eardrums.

The particular model I have is now discontinued. This video has a nice overview of the three new products that Etymotic currently produce:

Lastly, I picked up some cheap, generic in-ear earphones by Hama (German). Turns out, they’re pretty good and get great reviews for their price class. I use them exclusively for exercise as they let in a good amount of external noise (think: safety) and the low cost means you don’t tend to worry about the risk of water damage.

Next up: I picked up a custom earplug mould kit and plan on hacking it to create custom fit earphones (here’s a nice guide on how to do it) using the Hama earphones.

I cringe whenever I see someone with a fancy new iPod using the standard Apple earphones. If you listen to music a lot, I really encourage you to go down to your local electronics shop and try out a bunch of options – you won’t regret it.

Understanding social media isn’t about understanding Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare (okay, I’m being a little bit of a devil’s advocate). It’s a realisation that the water cooler is now a digital and highly-networked meeting place. Previously you might discuss your weekend trip to a few colleagues over lunch, but now you’re sharing the details online with all your friends and the wider public through reviews and Tweets. The impact of word of mouth is huge in this new world.

A brand shouldn’t concern themselves with creating a flashy Page or amassing followers, they should first and foremost try to identify where their customers are talking and to join in those conversations. You don’t create social media, it’s already happening. Your task is to encourage, converse and ultimately engage with your customers, using these tools and platforms to make it possible.

Reset buttons are almost always completely unnecessary. They certainly should never be places on the right hand side of the form footer or have the same visual focus.

It’s quite in vogue over here at Project Getaway to compile a list of things you’d like to do before you kick the bucket and stick it somewhere public. So here’s Keith’s Bucket List.

It acts as a nice reminder for some of the quirky and fun things you wish to do with you life and the public sharing helps just a little to push you along. As a few people had commented, there isn’t a really good online tool for creating and sharing a bucket list 43things.com is about as good as it gets. Another day, another opportunity.