The site is going to drop a cookie and allow me to bypass the login form the next time I visit the site. Wonderful. The only problem is that the cookie only lasts a very short period of time (24-hours in this case), making it essentially useless. Name and shame: LeadImpact.
You don’t need it, no one is going to fill it in, so why ask? It’s just a waste of space. The perception of the forms length has a bearing on the conversion rate, so there’s a darn good business reason for to get rid of it. Name and shame: GermanWings.
In the now annual tradition (2008, 2009, 2010), I tallied up all the flights taken last year and used the CarbonPlanet.com tool to calculate the carbon footprint. I took a total of 36 flights and that adds up to 17.4 tonnes of CO2-e, whatever that really is.
I’m not much of an environmentalist at all. But I do like the romantic idea that I should leave this Earth in a state no worse off because of my existence. Whilst recycling may make you feel that you’re making a difference, I believe that if I apply the Pareto principle, the overwhelming majority of my impact on the Earth comes through flying (I’m happy to be proven wrong on this). So, if I want to make an impact, that’s where I should concentrate my efforts.
Aside from not flying at all, the next best alternative is to offset the carbon footprint through purchasing carbon credits (which are used by the organisation to plant trees and so on). In previous years, I used ClimateCare.org, a non-profit operated by JPMorgan. They clearly used this as part of their CSR programme, and I felt assured that they were at least not seeking to make a profit from the service.
However, ClimateCare is now independent and for-profit, and I’m left confused how I should proceed. The UK Government list some approved offsets, but only one of these (Pure) is a non-profit charity. Whilst a for-profit may invest less of your Pound into projects, perhaps the money is worked harder by smarter people? Or perhaps I’m looking at this all wrong and I should instead directly invest in specific green projects? Or in companies developing new technologies?
What do you think I should do?
Chiang Mai has gained quite a reputation, especially amongst the ‘digital nomad’ crowd, for being a fantastic location to live and work; with great infrastructure, fast Internet, good food, and friendly folk. Oh, and it’s dirt cheap. Indeed the rumours were true. But I wondered if my impression of the low cost of living might be biased by some exceptional bargains, and in fact, the true cost is marred by over consumption of the good life (ie. massages every day).
So I decided to audit my spending for an entire month (February) by recording every single purchase made and tallying up the numbers at the end.
In total, I spent 36,955฿/£756/$1,200 (or just 25,455฿/£521/$827 if I exclude rent). That’s an average of 878฿/£18/$29 a day. Removing some of the extremes, the more typical average would be around 505฿/£10/$16 a day.
I loosely categorised each transaction so that I could better understand where money was spent. Highlights include 590฿/£12/$19 in coffee shops, 1,400฿/£29/$45 on booze, 272฿/£6/$9 on feeding my sweet tooth, and 4,300฿/£88/$140 in massages/spa-related. The major cost areas were certainly rent and food.
In many ways the month proved to be a little out of the ordinary; it included a visa run (which entailed transport, hotel and visa costs), I had a colonic irrigation (an experience I won’t be forgetting anytime soon), a ~week long trip to Pai (transport, hotel), and I attended a meditation retreat. Then again, these costs reflect what you do when you relocate; you want to visit new places and try new experiences.
Whilst I did have a bunch of street food across the month, I think it’s useful to paint a picture of the high quality of living associated with the low cost. Firstly, our apartment was upmarket; it was newly refurbished and the building featured security and swimming pools. We actually paid a bit of a premium for the short-term contract and that the apartment featured large communal space and a kitchen (quite a rarity). We lived adjacent to a neighbourhood that’s positively hip – where the coffee bar and iPad-ownership per capita is as high as anywhere else I’ve seen in the world. I had great food from both street vendors and fancy restaurants. I ate out every single meal and didn’t cook once in the entire month. And I had massages when I wanted. Sure, the quality of many things isn’t as high as back home, but I continue to be dumbfounded at how high the quality of life can be for the price you pay.
It’s easy to forget the cost of getting myself here (ie. the flight and travel insurance). Whilst £465/return was quite a steal, it actually amounts to a significant part of your living costs if you appropriate it even over a 3-month stretch. Thailand’s double-entry tourist visa makes it straightforward to stay for as long as 6-months which would flatten out those big fixed costs even more.
Some friends had asked me what I would estimate to be an appropriate budget for a life in Chiang Mai. My previous gut feeling was that you could survive quite easily for £315/$500/month with some sound choices, that £472/$750/month would allow you to have a high standard of living where you’re doing what you want when you want, and £630/$1000/month would give you a near rock-star lifestyle. Based on the data I collected, it seems the hypothesis holds true. If you’re looking to escape home, bootstrap your latest venture or take an early retirement, Chiang Mai makes for a sound choice.
Recording all those transactions in itself proved to be a curious activity, filling up a spreadsheet made me relive a bunch of good memories. Give it a try sometime.
Hit me up in the comments if you have any questions.
My Nexus One is dying of old age (it’s 3-years old) and I’m unable to use it as an alarm clock. I needed to make that I woke up on time one morning and figured I’d just use my computer instead. There’s no in-built alarm clock and I didn’t have an internet connection to download a specific App. Thankfully, Automator allows you to create a solution in 30-seconds.
I’m sure you could write a more elegant solution using AppleScript, or PHP/Python (both are built into the OS), but without being able to reference material online I would’ve struggled to have had it working.
Automator is ridiculously intuitive and is worth considering for all kinds of similar problems.
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:
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:
Some useful posts during the hackathon session:
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?