How to Teach a Child to Argue -
Here’s an interesting article I just found at the bottom of my Instapaper list on the benefits of teaching children the art of rhetoric. I think it could be valuable to try this with my own little darlings.
A computer is the ideal place to store recipes.
Over the last 4 years or so I have spent time tinkering with various digital recipe options. Initially I just held text files in my documents folder and bookmarks in Safari. Then I discovered there were dedicated recipe management applications. Two that I tried were MacGourmet and Yummy Soup. Unfortunately I didn’t find either particularly easy to use. Importing online recipes or typing them in by hand took quite some time and was rather fiddly. Generally I love working with my computer but I found importing recipes to be tedious and took up more time than I was willing to devote. I didn’t get beyond the free trial period with either application.
About two years ago started using Evernote as a general information manager. I used it extensively for a good year or so and put everything into it (not just recipes). It is extremely easy to add notes and my number of stored recipes soared. I added them as text notes, web archives and web pages printed to PDF. I also bookmarked and archived websites on more general food information (such as pages on frugal salads or cooking oils) - something not possible with a dedicated recipe manager.
Tagging was especially useful for recipes. Each recipe had multiple tags depending on the type of meal (main course, pudding) and ingredients (beef, chicken, vegetarian). By selecting multiple tags I could quickly drill down into my recipes to find something suitable. However, as the number of notes grew (and they grew pretty quickly as I was using Evernote for a number of things, not just recipes) so did the number of tags and I found them increasingly awkward to use. I had a huge long list of tags to navigate up and down.
A year ago I got SousChef as part of MacHeist. As I was becoming increasingly frustrated with Evernote I thought I would give it a try. I put a few of my recipes in it but found it as fiddly as the dedicated recipe applications I had used in the past. There was one really useful feature though - a fantastic full screen view. Large white text on a black screen that can be read at a distance. My MacBook Pro could sit safe on the other side of the kitchen away from the mess and I could still read the recipe. But I only used SousChef occasionally for the few recipes I had added as I found I couldn’t really be bothered to import any more. Most of my recipes remained in Evernote.
A few weeks ago I decided to try out Yojimbo as an all purpose information manager again. I’d tried it two years ago but at that time Evernote suited me better. But now the tag situation with Evernote was bothering me and there was a new version of Yojimbo that dealt with some of the issues I’d had with it before. So for the last few weeks I have been running Evernote and Yojimbo side by side.
Once thing I was particularly interested in was how Yojimbo would deal with my recipes. It seems to be as easy to add recipes to Yojimbo as to Evernote, whether web archives, text notes or PDFs.
Yojimbo is much much better at dealing with tags. It has what it calls a “tag explorer”.You have your long list of tags and if you click on one you are shown only those notes with that selected tag. Just the same as Evenote. But the difference with Yojimbo is that the tag list then shrinks to only show those used by the displayed notes. For example, if I click the tag “recipe” I no longer see my “holiday” or “dogtraining” tags as none of my recipe notes share them. So I can quickly narrow down which notes have all the tags recipe, chicken and soup. Brilliant.
Within a week Evernote was abandoned in favour of Yojimbo for recipes.
But I was still using two applications: Yojimbo and SousChef. It would seem to make more sense to consolidate everything into one for ease of finding recipes. I decided that since SousChef was designed for the job I would try and use it exclusively. But I had forgotten what a pain it is to import recipes into. Most of my online recipes come from BBC Good Food. The layout of the recipes on this particular site means they can’t be imported easily. Also has a tendency to crash when importing. And of course none of my PDF recipes or more general web archives within Yojimbo can be brought in.
Searching for recipes within SousChef isn’t great. It does not use tags. Instead it has a search box. It will search within ingredients, cuisine, recipe name or category. If you want it to search within more than one of these groups at a time, they need individually added (in a similar way to adding multiple rules when creating a smart playlist in iTunes).
This is really quite a problem. Say I want to find my fish lasagne recipe and so search for “fish”. Ingredient search is the default but that won’t find my recipe as the ingredient is listed as “smoked haddock” rather than “fish”. I have to remember to change the search group to “recipe name” for it to find the recipe I want.
I made collections or folders of recipes akin to tags but it is not as useful. I can create a chicken collection and a soup collection but how can I quickly find a recipe that is within both?
I have realised that a dedicated recipe management application really isn’t for me. It’s too restrictive in that I am unable to add PDFs and web archives. And despite the fact Yojimbo doesn’t have an easy to read full screen view, its search feature using the tag explorer is outstanding and ultimately of more value to me.
Unclutterer: Stuff won’t make you happy, experiences will -
Interesting article from Unclutterer discussing how experiences create happiness, not objects.
I recently read 59 Seconds by Professor Richard Wiseman. He describes similar studies which found that buying objects created only short term happiness whilst spending money on experiences gave long term happiness. It seems we tire of objects after a while but memories continue to give long term joy.
My own experiences confirm this. We took a family holiday to Walt Disney World in Florida last year. I know this sound a bit cheesy but it was the best holiday we have ever had, and six months later we still talk about it all the time. The holiday itself (flights, hotel, tickets) was expensive but we spent hardly anything on actual items. (The children all wanted a Goofy hat and a T shirt as souvenirs but that was about as far as it went.) It was a lot of money to spend but we concluded in the end it was worth it as we have never had such a good happiness:cost ratio.
Two years ago I started a WordPress blog. Its aim was to document my experiences of getting my life in order with Getting Things Done but it gradually turned into a blog on productivity miscellany and Mac software reviews. For the first year I updated it fairly regularly but it has now lain dormant for over a year. I regularly feel guilty for letting it languish and not adding updates when so many posts are now out of date.
One reason I haven’t written any blog updates is lack of time. Quite a number of the posts took many hours to write. It’s hard to find the time to sit down and write for three hours on why these days I’m tending to use Yojimbo more than Evernote.
Another reason is that I found Twitter often sated my appetite for discussion on topics I might have blogged about. But there can be a limit on how much you can express in 140 characters.
I see Tumblr as being somewhere between Twitter and WordPress. I can post on whatever takes my fancy, as I already do on Twitter, but with the ability to flesh things out. And I won’t feel obliged to write long detailed posts like I have done in the past.
Here goes…
Here’s me.