I screamed during “E.T.” I was 6 and a family friend sat with me in the very front row. Needless to say, that movie blew my little mind. One of the things that stood out for me was the contraption Elliott helped E.T. build so that he could “phone home.” Remember? It had a Speak & Spell and an umbrella. Pretty cool stuff. It makes me wonder what they’ll use if they ever do a reboot. They’re welcome to my old iPhone 4S; it would run a Speak & Spell app, and maybe it could do everything else, too. If space doesn’t have wi-fi, I don’t want to go. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much having a smartphone has aided my transition to minimalism. Much of this is due to the fact that it basically serves as a spare brain – a smarter, better organized spare brain. It turns out that more and more of my “stuff” exists only virtually. Most of what I use and most of the work I do lives on this little screen in my pocket. The best part is that if I break it or it gets stolen, the important parts can be quickly cloned and loaded onto a new one. The new one might even be a better model. Ten years ago, I went everywhere with a huge bag I referred to as my “filing cabinet.” It probably weighed 15 pounds. I would have textbooks, library books, a cookbook, a day planner, my mail, a journal, a bunch of pens, old receipts, a wad of paper napkins, my lunch, gloves, an umbrella, a hat, lip balm, and who knows what else. Now I don’t carry most of those things. Almost all of them are represented digitally. I don’t need to carry as much outerwear because Dark Sky tells me whether it’s likely to rain later. I don’t need to go to the chiropractor anymore, either. One of the most significant innovations for me has been the advent of the e-reader. Many book lovers are stuck in the 18th century, and they like it that way. I love books at least as much as anyone else, but I’m firmly in the digital camp. I can read in line at the post office. I can listen to an audio book while I fold laundry. No more discovering that my library book has a page torn out. No more food stains or smashed bugs. No more 15-pound carry-on bags just for my vacation reading. No more melted book lights. Even if digital books were the only feature on my phone, it would still have changed my life. The best part is that every year, there will be thousands more e-books available. In my lifetime, essentially every book ever printed will be there at my fingertips. Why, then, would I need to keep hundreds of pounds of printed books in my house, only to relocate them over and over again? Frequent relocation has been a catalyst for me. It’s helped put my possessions in perspective. Even professional movers will only pack the stuff and move it. They don’t unpack it for you. I’ve realized that everything on my phone is available whether everything else I own is taped inside a box or not. I traded in all my DVDs and CDs two years ago, and I haven’t missed them. The books, including cookbooks, are steadily getting culled. What’s left is furniture, workout equipment, kitchenware, linens, clothes, tools, cleaners, and food. The handmade items I still have cause a certain amount of stress, because it’s so sad when something like that gets ruined during a move. Virtually all of our stuff is functional, rather than emotionally relevant. Meanwhile, my phone is full of emotional relevance. Any given day, I’m texting my husband, my parents, or a friend, and usually I wind up laughing until I cry over something. I’m playing games with my brothers, both of whom win 99% of the time. I’m skimming Facebook and finding out who’s engaged, who’s pregnant, who’s moving, who got a new job, and who adopted a puppy. I’m obsessively reading the news, playing podcasts, and looking at dazzling nature photography. I’m checking stats on my website, looking at my bank balance, or replying to e-mail. My life is conducted on my phone. It does everything but cook dinner, and I’m probably looking up a recipe for that, too. This makes it sound like I’m looking at my phone every 5 minutes, which I’m not, but only because my schedule is managed by a digital brain. I set up reminders for everything I need to do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. I don’t think about those things anymore; I just follow the instructions from Past Self as a favor to Future Self. I can focus on writing and know that no matter where I am, I can drop everything and take notes, research something, take a picture, or email or text someone. My house is my base of operations, unless it’s temporarily a tent or hotel room. My home is this magical device of portable work, instant information, entertainment on demand, and emotional connection on impulse. Today is October 21, 2015, the date Marty McFly visits in Back to the Future II. I’m sure most of you were already aware of this. I spend a lot of time living in the future, so I wanted to make the most of this opportunity to write about it. One of the few nostalgic feelings I have toward the 1980s is that science fiction was cuter and more optimistic in those days. At some point, probably right around 9/11, our attitude took a distinctly darker turn, and we’re hopefully nearly through the doldrums of endless dystopias. Dystopian visions are lazy. Imagining different ways to ruin the world is about as difficult as stomping through a sand castle. Imagining a compellingly optimistic future is one of the few truly worthy challenges, particularly because it doesn’t take long before that future becomes the present day. I’m not going to write a point by point comparison of the technological innovations from BTTFII, because it’s already been done, but also because the stuff we actually have in our current reality is much cooler and more impressive. We’ve eradicated guinea worm, for one thing. I mean, that’s such a big deal that we can basically take a year off and just stand in a line waiting to group-hug Jimmy Carter, because do you know about guinea worm?? Nearly as impressive is the fact that the rate of extreme poverty has dropped, even as the world population has increased by a couple billion since the 80s. In our lifetimes, we’re going to continue to see the standard of living raised for the world’s poorest, and that will include eradication of other parasites and endemic diseases. We’re also starting to see extremely rapid progress with medical innovations, making improvements in treatment for blindness, deafness, paralysis, missing limbs, and even color blindness. Next I’m hoping for something for tinnitus. Whenever I hear people complaining about the news, I know for a fact that they haven’t chosen to follow medical or tech news in their aggregators. There was no internet in BTTFII. No smartphones, either. Just fax machines everywhere, which, of all the silly things… Complain all you want about how smartphones are turning people into zombies. I talk more to my friends and extended family now than I ever did at any earlier part of my life. Do you remember how expensive long distance phone calls used to be? Remember setting a timer to avoid running the bill too high? Do you remember how we used to drop off rolls of 12 (or 24 if you were lucky) photographs at a time, and pay through the nose for double prints? Now I can look at pictures of the people I love doing the daily whenever I want. If we knew this was coming back in the 80s, we would have cried. I live hundreds of miles away from almost everyone in my life, and it’s social networking, smartphones, Skype, and photo sharing that make this even remotely tolerable. Other people have used social media to reunite with family years after being adopted, and that’s remarkable, isn’t it? We’ve adjusted and learned to take these things for granted very quickly. Another thing I’ve seen in my lifetime is an astounding drop in the price of airfare. I’ve hopped on a plane three times this year, for my parents’ wedding anniversary, my nephew’s high school graduation ceremony, and a hiking trip with friends 1100 miles away. Flying is so cheap now that people treat it like a bus ride, wearing tank tops, shorts, and flip flops. (Cover your feet and armpits, people, at least… ) As a brief aside, one of the other weird things about our future compared to the fictional future is how extremely casually we dress. We were supposed to be in all this tinfoil couture by now. Back to my main thread, not only can we fly cheaply and easily (and SAFELY), but we can take commercial flights into space, and we’re seriously planning a manned mission to Mars. We put clutter on Mars, yo! Take that, McFly. Probably one of the best perks of living in the future is the quality and variety of food that is available. Do you remember the orange, flavorless tomatoes we used to get? My pantry is currently full of more things I never knew existed in the 80s than things I did. I routinely cook with curry, pesto, Japanese pickles, seaweed, chard, kale, edamame, quinoa, and all sorts of things I couldn’t pronounce back in the day. Coconut water! Pomegranate everything! Every now and then, I go into a small-town grocery store, and it feels exactly like traveling back in time. The paucity of awesome things I would actually want to cook makes 1980s nostalgia a little mildewed and musty for me. Another thing we may not be thinking about much is the astounding improvements in the arena of athletic performance. New world records are being set, and almost instantly broken, all the time. Pick a sport, and high school kids are routinely busting what would have been world records in the 80s. This is due to a confluence of training lore, big data, more knowledge about recovery and nutrition, gear, and probably other stuff, such as relative absence of childhood illness. Something that is a big deal in my awareness is how common it is for middle-aged and senior people to compete seriously in sports like ultramarathon. You don’t have to look far to find people in their 80s kicking major butt. Marathons and other distances of foot race tend to sell out, sometimes within hours, and it’s hard to find enough venues for all the people who want to race. In my time, I’ve seen the advent or dissemination of cool fitness trends like adventure racing, CrossFit, Pilates, Zumba, Ultimate Frisbee, and even Quidditch. The future is going to hold a great deal more interesting options for team sports and solo training. The future is a really excellent place. I could go on and on. Like how nobody smokes indoors anymore. Or how I have a Roomba, a Braava, a laptop, a smart TV, an iPhone 6, an Apple Watch, a 2.5x capacity washer and dryer, a solar powered backup battery and lantern, and a bunch of other things that would have boggled my 1989 mind. I often look at the world around me in 1987 terms (my year of choice, when I was 12) and take it all in for a moment. CGI! YouTube! Wikipedia! Google! Cloud storage! Panorama photos! Any single one of these things would have amazed me for an entire summer. Now I use them all on a daily basis. It’s up to you whether you let yourself take things for granted, or pause and feel true awe and astonishment. Personally, I’m stuck in the middle, between being thrilled by the impossibly fantastic future in which we live, or poleaxed by the possibilities of the unimaginably rad future we’ll be living in another 26 years. When I was 7, I tried to teach myself to read two books at once, one for each eye. After about an hour of experimentation, I decided it was too hard for little kids and that I’d have to try again when I was an adult. It took a university course in neurolinguistics before I fully let go of that dream. Speed reading apps are a reasonable facsimile. Note: This review was inspired by my indignation toward the ReadQuick app, toward which I feel the gamut of emotions of a jilted lover. I had a crush on you from afar, I fell in love with you the moment we met, we spent all that time together… and now you want to limit my access behind a pay wall? I paid $10 for you! (Okay, the emotions of a jilted lover plus those of a thwarted skinflint). Let’s start with ReadQuick as the baseline for speed reading apps. Basically, the app allows you to load news articles and read them more quickly by showing only one word at a time. The technical term for how many words appear on-screen at a time is ‘fixations.’ (Seems legit… ) ReadQuick can bookmark articles, and it can also draw from other bookmarking services such as Pocket and Instapaper. I use it with Pocket. I’ve found that certain articles in my Pocket Queue will not appear in my ReadQuick queue, generally if they start with a large illustration. Some articles would begin at a random place in the middle, or stop at the first page, due to either illustrations or formatting. At least 90% of my reading material was unaffected by these problems. I liked that each article in the queue showed a reading time based on my current reading speed. It’s currently set at 610 words per minute, triple the average unassisted reading pace. I was able to train upward by 10-wpm increments. It would sometimes crash after I had finished a long article, but the new revision seems to have fixed that. The new revision appears to allow increased fixations, but I’m still having a fit of pique about having to pay another $10 for a $10 app, so I can’t confirm it. When I first got the app, I was frustrated that it would not accommodate books due to DRM issues. Now that I’ve read a few thousand news articles on it, I no longer think it would suit my style to read fiction on it. There are a lot of typographic conventions, such conversational formatting and mid-chapter section breaks, that would seem to affect comprehension. I like speed-reading best for keeping up on the news. I prefer to have the gist of many stories so that I have time to delve into a greater proportion of long-form reportage. Accelerator (formerly known as Velocity) is the next app I tried. At $2.99, it’s a lot cheaper than ReadQuick. The reading experience is virtually indistinguishable if the two are set on the same speed and background. They each have features that the other doesn’t, so I’ll compare them. · Same: Black/white, white/black, and sepia themes, just like iBooks and Kindle. Set speed up to 1000 words per minute. Read from Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability. Archive articles after reading. Both apps are stumped by slide shows. Neither app allows sorting the queue with oldest first. · Different: ReadQuick reads from Feedly and Evernote; Accelerator reads from the web. ReadQuick queue shows reading time and whether article is finished; Accelerator only shows this from reading view. ReadQuick allows deletion as well as archiving. ReadQuick allows web view; Accelerator allows plain text view. Accelerator is my new default news reader. I do miss a few features from ReadQuick. My favorite feature was the icon that shows how long each article will take to read. Accelerator also neglects to show the source of the original article. The best of both worlds would be an app that combined everything from both apps. It would allow a web view as well as a plain text view; it would show the source of each article and how long it would take to read. Maybe it would also cost $12.98. Eh, no app is perfect. The reading experience itself is the key feature, and that is fully optimized in my opinion. Acceleread is a different sort of enterprise altogether. It’s designed to train people to read faster and with better comprehension. I took a reading speed test of traditionally formatted text, and it gave me 400 words per minute with 100% comprehension. It comes with some pre-copyright novels, of which I had already read 17 out of 20. As far as I can tell, Acceleread is designed to read DRM-free books, not news articles, so it is a different use case. I tested it out, though. It wants to orient sideways. It allows multiple lines as well as multiple fixations per line. This does seem to be the best way to train for comprehension as well as speed, and it also seems to be a better transition to traditional text on paper. I’m talking myself into giving it a try for fiction, but I’ll have to find something DRM-free that I really want to read. Sprint is a free iOS app based on Spritz. There are several iterations, including one for PDFs and one for ePub books, called ReadMe!. I about fainted when I saw that. It’s great, but as far as I can tell it does not support my library’s ePub catalog. The Spritz-based style is distinctive, with a logo, user name, reading speed, and playback buttons prominently displayed at all times. Speed tops out at 1000 wpm and can be adjusted in 25-wpm increments. Back to the Sprint app. It can read websites, which is a different use case from Accelerator or ReadQuick. Sprint does not work on everything. I logged into my Pocket account and was not able to Sprint anything. I couldn’t speed-read my own website, though that is probably a good thing, as you really need to pontificate on my magisterial writing skills to get the most out of my scintillating wit and iconoclastic observations. Sprint would be a good supplement for Accelerator, as their draw may be mutually exclusive for a lot of web content. What I really want is a configurable auto-scroll setting on e-book readers that support DRM content. Kindle and iBooks, I am looking at you. When I buy a book, I should be able to read it in any format I like. I want auto-scroll and I want a ceiling projection display. My old Palm PDA from the year 2000 had an app with auto-scroll, and I could buy e-books from Barnes & Noble with it. Why can’t I have this on my phone? WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!
Should we speed-read, though? A million new books were published in English last year. The average dedicated reader can enjoy 3000 books in a lifetime. It would be magnificent if we could somehow double this, or triple it, and still get the same comprehension and leisure value, in the same way that we can double the number of cats in a lap. I speed-read, and I also read e-books and print at normal speed. I listen to audio books, sometimes at 1.5 or 2x speed. I listen to podcasts as well. Like most people, when introduced to a new medium of information processing, I add it to my repertoire and continue using all the same formats I used before. Speed-reading is fantastic for skimming through a large volume of ephemera, like the news, though perhaps less so for assessing whether something is suitable for a research project. It would be pointless for poetry or plays or children’s literature or graphic novels. Woe betide anyone who tries to speed-read while learning a foreign language. In short, I adore it, because it suits my temperament, but I don’t think it’s for everyone and I definitely don’t think it’s for everything. Mr. Awesome Pants bought me an Apple Watch for my 40th birthday. Major milestone and all that. The impressive thing about this is that it’s the second time in our relationship that he’s managed to trick me. The first was the day he proposed, although that might count as two because he also had to trick me in order to go out and buy the ring. Anyway, he made it look like we were going into the Apple Store to waste time while waiting for a movie to start. Even when he had me try one on, I thought it was just for fun. Pretty funny when it finally sunk in. I tend to hyperventilate a little when I so much as hear about cool new tech. I may have cried a bit. So now I have this totally bitchin’ space watch that brings me information via satellite. We call it The Overlord. I’ve had fitness trackers before. In fact, I pinned a pedometer to my garter on our wedding day. That should tell you quite a bit about my level of interest in performance metrics. (Wait… that sounds a bit different than I intended. Let’s just say I danced a lot). My first pedometer clipped onto my waistband. It was constantly popping off, hitting the floor, and resetting. I remember how excited I was when I reached 1000 steps for the first time. It had taken weeks. Then I was sadly informed that the goal was TEN thousand steps, not ONE thousand. “That’s like not even a quarter mile.” Oh. So that was the first two pedometers. Then I got a Fitbit. It was cool, except that it wanted to track steps, and most of my bipedal activities were bicycling, running, or using the elliptical machine. It never added up right. I used it to make an annual mileage goal and then sold it within 20 minutes of posting it to eBay. Then I got an iPhone and tried various fitness apps, one of which kept telling me I ran 55 MPH. Um, no. I’d be thrilled if I could run 5 MPH! What’s different about The Overlord? It really is useful as a productivity tool. Most of the stuff I tend to check compulsively on my phone is now on my wrist: my blog stats, the temperature, my daily habit checklist and top three goals, and notifications. The basic info is there, but that’s it, so I don’t tend to get sucked in. I use it to check off my grocery list. Sometimes I use Apple Pay, GPS, or Shazam, which completely trips me out. “My watch just told me what song is playing!” My 1987-era brain does not think this makes any sense. I knew I would be an ideal target user. In spite of everything I had read about the Apple Watch, I am so out of the game this year that I forgot its initial attraction for me was as a fitness tracker. It taps my wrist to tell me to stand up once an hour, 12 times a day. Okay. I probably get up about that often anyway. Oh. Actually I don’t. So I start planning to get up once an hour. That’s not quite good enough for The Overlord. It wants at least a minute. Okay, that seems reasonable. What is that (dorkily checking 21st-century calculator watch), 1.6% of my time? Oh, but standing up for a minute isn’t enough either. I’ve tried to impress it by doing tree pose or arm circles, only to wind up walking circles around the house until the counter rolls over. The neighbors probably think I’m insane. That is actually a total non sequitur. Then there’s the exercise quota. (Just interrupted by notification that my bigger half is leaving work). Half an hour a day. Seriously, when I was training for my marathon it would take me that long, at jogging pace, to finish adjusting the straps to my Camelbak and get my audio book started. I’ve spent half an hour running and trying to eat a Nutter Butter without getting it down my bra. Half an hour is nothing. Oh. Or actually it isn’t. It turns out that what I have been considering exercise this year does not impress The Overlord. It won’t register a single minute of my 45-minute yoga routine. On my typical walk to the library or the coffee shop, it gives me about 16 minutes out of 42. We did 45 minutes walking the dog at the duck pond, and The Overlord recorded it as 11. Turns out it measures my heart rate, not the clock. There is no cheating this thing! I just noticed today that a green light shines from one of its sensors when I’m walking fast enough to swing my arms, presumably when my heart rate is up. Unless it’s sweat-activated. It won’t count my walking on the treadmill unless I set it to at least 3.5 MPH. So, while I don’t have any real trouble reaching the daily calorie burn goal, the exercise quota has finally gotten me off my coffin, I mean couch, and starting to do some real cardio again. The great thing about The Overlord is that it’s a completely impersonal nag. Well, not completely impersonal – it figured out all on its own to address me as “Your Excellency.” I can’t resent it because it’s just a technological embodiment of my own goals and plans. I can’t lie to it and I can’t make it promises because it doesn’t care. All it does is faithfully present me to myself. Now I have to go. The Overlord says it’s time to stand up. And by stand up, I mean briskly walk a few laps up and down the hallway… |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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