Links

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his books. Currently, I’m reading his latest one: “A World Without Email”

Every email comes at a small cognitive cost to the sender, and a small cognitive cost to the recipient. It has become easier than ever to “just send an email”, instead of diving deeper, solving the issue, or using a more appropriate, more efficient, or less stressful way of communication. Multiplied by the amount of companies, employees, emails per employee, the wasted time and cognitive cost of (over)using email for everything has become enormous. And instant messaging only amplifies the problem again.

I’ve become very good at filtering and processing email over the last years. But this is just trying to solve the receiving end of the problem. Now I’m curious about learning ways to fix the problem at the source. Not just for me, but for my colleagues, too.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder and executive editor of Wired magazine, recently turned 70. Happy Birthday!

His birthday gift to us all is “103 bits of unsolicited advice”. Each one brilliant and full of wisdom. And all are free.

The paradox of “free” is that people tend to not value the “free” things, exactly because it’s free: If it didn’t cost much, it’s probably not worth much.

If somebody took these and added an anecdote or two to each one, plus some background, they could turn this into a bestseller. Probably a series of bestsellers, too.

But here they are, hard-earned lessons for all of us. Free for those who care, and who recognize the value of great advice.

Don’t underestimate “free”. Free can be valuable.

When writing my post on renovations, while mentioning automatic link checking and automatic HTML checking, I thought to myself: “Hey, how about automatic spell-checking?”. After all, OSes, word processors, etc. come with some built in spell checking.

Some research pointed me at LanguageTool. It’s free for basic use, open source, built in Europe, and has credible customers. It also supports multiple languages. And Markdown. What’s not to love?

(BTW, this is my first post in the “link post” format, popularized by John Gruber and others. These are short posts about cool, useful, or otherwise interesting links I found on the web. Just click on the post title to check it out.)