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Over the last 6 years, since Ireland is an integral part of my life, I learned to love drinking tea. Combined with milk, as it should be. Today, while drinking another tea pot filled to the top, I wondered: do I really like tea or am I just using this as a pretense to drink milk without the social pressure of ordering milk as a drink in a restaurant?

P.S.: if it feels like someone hacked my blog and keeps posting shit, don’t worry, it’s just me. I’m kinda thinking of stuff these days so I find things to keep myself entertained. Among them is using my blog as a Facebook page. This is why I also drew a tea pot and wrote something above it. Looking for my creative side, you know. Stay tuned, who knows what I’ll think about next!

No, it’s not me. I rarely, if ever, drink alcohol. But I just found out the history of the word and it’s quite funny :))

It seems like the word shitfaced, as we know it (meaning drunk off your ass) appeared back in the day, in Scotland. Before they had any toilets, they used to throw their, um, chamber pot contents in the street. Only they wouldn’t do it anytime during the day, they would do it early in the morning, at a special time, when the church bells rang and everybody would open their windows, chamber pots in hand. They would yell “gaurdy loo!” and splash everything into the street. Only this time coincided with the time the bars closed and drunk people would stumble into the street on their way home. When they heard yell “gaurdy loo”, drunk and disoriented they would look up and… that’s how they’d get shitfaced 😁

For the last 6 months or so I found myself developing a new, interesting habit. Whenever I sat on the couch watching a movie, a football match, a tennis match or anything passive enough, I’d want the iPad next to me, as the device to do things on. Until then, the devices I prefered were a 2012 MacBook or my iPhone 7+.

The thing is I felt the iPhone wasn’t big enough when I was writing emails or messages and the MacBook didn’t have a touch screen, which made it more cumbersome to use.

So I found myself using the iPad Pro 9.7 I’ve had for about 2 years. It used to be my girlfriend’s device of choice to use with the Apple pen to do lettering and illustrations, but since she now uses an iPad Pro 12.9 – 2nd gen, the 9.7 was there for me to use.

Another thing I noticed is that while the 2012 MacBook is great to take with you while traveling – and I did travel a lot in the last 3-4 months – I wasn’t happy with what it offered me. I wanted more performance for the common enough tasks and more battery life. So I switched, for a while, just to experiment, to the iPad. After attaching a Smart keybord, I didn’t open the MacBook since.

I have to tell you that I also own a 2015 MacBook Pro which is my main working machine. I hate the “butterfly” keyboard on the newer MacBook Pros, so I won’t switch anytime soon.

Finally, about 2 weeks ago I took the plunge in making this iPad Pro my main computer. I will not quit on the MB Pro, I still use it often enough for some things, like video calls or podcast recording, but I discover more and more ways to not use it. I also can’t use my bank’s website on my iPad because it has JavaScript. Scratch that, I just found out they released a tablet app. What do you know.

Here’s what I use the iPad for, at the moment:

• surfing the web. Most of it it’s from the iPad now. I rarely open Chrome on my MacBook, unless I need a specific extension of the browser.
• reading and replying to emails
• using FB messenger and Slack (I don’t use Whatsapp almost at all, so that’s only used on my phone)
• reading Kindle/iBook books. I still prefer a Kindle Oasis most of the times, but I find myself reading from the iPad more often now.
• writing long form text (I write what started as a longer article on how to keep investors and potential investors updated and it morphed into a longer potential PDF). I use Scrivener and Ulysses – this is the app I’m using right now to write this.
• games (simple ones, I have a Nintendo Switch and a PS4 for more heavy duty gaming)
• browsing Reddit, YouTube;
• listening to music (Spotify) and podcasts (Overcast)
• booking hotels and planes;
• watching Netflix (most of the times in a PIP window, while I do something else)

If I think about it, I do most of the things that I normally would on my laptop. There are still some things I prefer my laptop for, but almost 80% of my day is iPad and iPhone based right now.

It’s true, my speed and efficiency aren’t at the laptop level yet. As an example, I still find using files on iPad frustrating (even with the use of Documents by Readdle, a really good files app the compensates a lot of things lacking from the iPad Files app). I’m looking to use Workflow to automate some tasks, but it’s still early to give you any kind of real examples. I tried adding a specific meal in My Fitness Pal and failed because MFP doesn’t allow Workflow use.

All and all, I’ve found the experience interesting enough to keep me doing it. I’ll keep you updated as new things come to light.

Conclusion

Using the iPad is becoming easier for me, even for work related tasks. The learning curve is there and I think iOS is still far from being a true computer, but for 80-90% of my tasks, it’s more than good. I don’t expect it to complete remove my need for a laptop, but I find myself looking more towards a media server (and, hence, a Mac Mini), rather than a full blown MacBook Pro.

And now I’ve published my first post on the blog using just the iPad. Nice.

Resources

Some more articles to read about iPad as a laptop, articles I’ve found and read in the last 2 weeks:

– Matt Gemmell’s iPad series

– MacStories – A Computer for Everything One Year of iPad Pro

– How to Blog on an iPad

– The Overspill: Life on an iPad

Photos: my “office” while I’m in Greece and my first screen of the iPad.

I just finished watching The Defiant Ones on Netflix. What a great documentary!

When I started watching it, I didn’t expect to be so drawn in. But it’s wonderfully filmed and the story of the business of gansgsta rap and Beats headphones is mesmerizing. I always knew of Dre as a rapper, but now I found out even more about what being a producer meant. Also, Jimmy Iovine. Going from producing for John Lennon in the 70s to building Beats and what would eventually become Apple Music, now that’s a story.

If you have the time, see it. You won’t regret it. Even if you’re not into gangsta rap or anything like that.

Scott Adams once wrote: “One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.”

Good quote. From The Psychology of Money.

Cristina, my co-founder at The CEO Library, always praised sleeping. Well, not always, but in the last few years. She used to be a night owl that despised sleep, so it is a relatively recent change in her life, as well.

While I agreed with her on the surface (I mean, yeah, it’s true, more sleep is better, right?), I never actually felt it. I never slept a lot to begin with and I can wake up at any hour, after almost any time sleeping and I can function quite well after several minutes. I don’t need a “wake up”/morning ritual to start the day, I just go to the bathroom, wash myself and that’s it.

Recently, though, I started to feel that even when I sleep enough in terms of hours, if it’s not during the “correct” hours, it’s not good.

When I sleep from around 11pm-12am I always wake up around 7 and I’m really productive. When I sleep the same amount of hours (or even more), but I go to sleep at around 1-2am, the next day is a lot worse. It’s not that I don’t put in the work, but I have problems focusing on the task at hand, it takes longer to start tasks and, worse, I feel sleepy all day.

So, starting next week, I will go to sleep in the coveted 11pm-12am interval. And it’s next week because I’m traveling this one, on a short seaside vacation here, in Portugal, and not because of the “I’m starting on Monday” syndrome. Or maybe it’s the same, who knows.

In case you want to find out more about sleep as a productivity tool, you should read Why We Sleep.

I was reading recently some article or book about getting off your ass and doing shit. And I remember thinking this: Reward each action you take. Or, better said, reward behaviour.

It basically means that whenever you choose a target or a goal, you define the actions you need to take to get you there and, instead of celebrating hitting specific milestones, you celebrate the consistency of doing those actions over and over again, until you achieve what you set your mind to achieve.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. Don’t celebrate losing 1kg, 5kgs or even 10kgs. Celebrate, instead, the fact that you got to the gym 3 times a week, as planned. Celebrate you had 1 day, 3 days, a week, a month, a year of eating well. As Cristina does, when she celebrates being consistent with logging the meals she eats in MyFitnessPal for 800 days. Not an easy feat, I tell you, as I only kept at it about 40 days, the most, without a break in habit.

When you celebrate milestones and targets you risk being demotivated when it takes longer than you planned initially. When you celebrate and reward your own behaviour you allow yourself to fail from time to time. You just need to get back in the saddle.

It worked for me for the last 6-7 years, since I first started to pay more attention to my actions and I kept my focus on a goal at a minimum. It actually made it easier for me to achieve what I wanted. But it took me several years to get there and I’m still a work in progress.

One final thought: you still need targets, because they help you establish the actions you want to take and they can also be tracked more easily. But focus on the consistency of actions initially and, once you get those working, go back to your goals.

The photo is just some really tasty ice cream I chose to reward my behaviour. You should try it, too

I was thinking of ways to generate revenues for content sites the other day. My focus is on interview based sites (for obvious reasons) and I remembered Indie Hackers doing a really good job about it. I thought I read a sort of income report on their site, but I couldn’t find them anymore, since the /blog section redirects now to the home page. I initially thought that since their acquisition by Stripe, they removed it. A “site:indiehackers.com/blog” search later, though, the articles were still available.

What is interesting for me in these blog posts is the fact that Indie Hackers started in August 2016, it was acquired by Stripe in April 2017 for un undisclosed amount, but by that time they were making around $5,000/month with not so much traffic on the website to speak of. They had a combination of revenue sources, from ads on the site to site sponsors and podcast/newsletter sponsors as well.

In case you want to read them, here they are, in chronological order:

• Launching to 300,000 Pageviews
• October 2016 Month in Review
• November 2016 Month in Review
• December 2016 Month in Review
• January 2017 Month in Review
• February 2017 Month in Review

Here’s also 2 answers from the founder on Hacker News and on the Indie Hacker Forum:

• I make a decent amount of money from ad revenue for Indie Hackers every month
• Ask CSALLEN: How do you find sponsors?

I hope they don’t remove the articles (they can still be found on archive.org, in case the links aren’t working anymore).

One thing that annoys me on my Mac is the fact that apps from the Virtual Machines I use appear in Spotlight search. The issue appears when I have the same app on multiple operating systems: MacOS and Windows, let’s say. You search for Chrome, hit enter aaaaand… you start opening the Windows 7 virtual machine, instead of the MacOS Chrome app. I’ve found the solution today:

2. If you want keep Windows apps integrated but removed from Spotlight only. This changes from version to version of Parallels, but for version 7 do this. System Preferences –> Spotlight –> Privacy tab. Hit the + sign. Add the folder “Applications (Parallels).”

From here.

And yes, I’ve created this post just so I have the information at hand when, without a doubt, I forget how to do it again.

Safari 12 just introduced favicons in tabs. I know, I know :)

I’ve been using Safari more and more in the last year and I hated the hacks necessary to get the favicons to show. Finally, Apple added them.

Here’s how to get them: Safari -> Preferences -> Tabs and check “Show website icons in tabs”.