Category: tech

Remote workers want community too

I've been spending more time with people who do most their work remotely. Since writing about the advantages of distributed/remote teams versus working in person, I've been paying attention to all of the time remote workers spend figuring out how to be around other people in just the right doses. They're looking to be in the same place with some fellow humans who have a common sense of purpose, or who at least share an understanding of the remote work lifestyle, even if just for a little while.

This leads me to wonder if the future of remote work isn't just a bunch of people on their own, working from home offices or coffeeshops, but instead an arrangement of remote workers coming together in person for a sense of shared experience. Ironically, it might even end up looking a lot like traditional notions of where and how people work, but probably with a lot more freedom, flexibility and fun along the way.

Here are some of the signs I see:

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Speaking at WordCamp Dayton

WordCamp-Dayton-2016-LogoI'll be speaking at the upcoming WordCamp Dayton 2016, happening March 4-5, 2016 at Wright State University. I'll be talking about "WordPress as your digital home," a topic I've thought about for a long time and blogged about recently:

There are tons of places to put your content, but not all of them give you the control and ownership you should have. Your WordPress site is still probably the best place to call home for your online creations. In this session I’ll show you why that is, walk through tools and techniques for using WordPress as your digital home while pushing content out to other places, and answer your questions about how to build an online presence that is fully yours.

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Getting started owning your digital home

My recent post about owning our digital homes prompted some good feedback and discussion. When I talk about this topic with the people in my life who don't work daily in the world of websites, domain names and content management, the most common reaction I get is, "that's sounds good in theory, I'm not sure where to start in practice."

So, here are some of the basic things that pretty much anyone can do to get started having and owning your digital home.

Find a domain name

On the Internet, your domain name is the root of your digital existence. It's the address on your home, your entry in the phonebook, the shingle you hang out so that anyone and everyone can find you. While the domain name system (DNS) has changed a lot over the years, it's still the starting point for establishing a long-term presence on the Internet that you control, independent of other tools, services and providers you might use.

My domain name is "chrishardie.com." It's not only the URL/address of my website, but it's the domain where my primary email address lives. Whatever content management tool might power my website at any given time, and whatever server my email might live on or whatever email program I might use to read messages, I will always have my domain name to point me and others to those places.

Having a domain name is relatively inexpensive; in most cases it's $10-15/year, less if you register it for multiple years at a time. When I see people who pick email addresses derived from their Internet Service Provider (e.g. Comcast, Verizon) or from some free online email provider like Gmail, and then see the time it takes them to inform friends, co-workers and family when they change that address to something else, I know it's worth those few dollars to have a consistent address that doesn't change unless I want it to, and that doesn't depend on someone else's business model to exist at all.

In my opinion, your domain name should be something personalized, but not so specific to where you live, how you make a living, or what you find interesting right now that it will become outdated when you move to a new place, change jobs or update your interests. Your domain name doesn't even need to mean anything at all, as long as it's memorable enough for you and the people you share it with. If you're having trouble finding a domain name you like, this generator will help with some ideas.

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Cron rsync with encrypted SSH keys on OS X

There are many online resources about using SSH keys to achieve passwordless, cron-initiated tasks like rsyncing some files around. Most of these assume your SSH key is either not encrypted with a password, or that you're running the related command in an interactive session.

What I couldn't easily find recently was a way to make sure that a script initiated via cron on OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) and that uses an SSH key that is encrypted with a password would have access to that key as managed by the current login session's ssh-agent.

This problem manifested itself with the following kind of output from my rsync command - being used to back up some files from a remote server - when it was executed via cron:

Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic,password).
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-45/rsync/io.c(453) [receiver=2.6.9]

If I ran the same command from the shell prompt it worked fine.

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Cloud email, contacts & calendars without Google

Tricky situationI like Google and a lot of the things it does in the world. When people ask me what free mail, calendaring and contact syncing tools they should use, I usually include Google's services in my answer. But I always explain that they're trading some privacy and ownership of their information for the "free" part of that deal. "You're the product, not the customer" and all that.

For me, I've always tried to avoid having my own data and online activities become the product in someone else's business model. There are plenty of places where I can't or don't do that, and I mostly make those tradeoffs willingly. But so far, I've been able to avoid using Google (and Apple and Microsoft) for managing my personal email, calendaring and contact syncing.

Here's how.

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Chrome extensions to manage online privacy

Privacy

There are a couple of extensions for Chrome that I've been using for a while now to try to maintain or improve my privacy online. Some have been helpful, others haven't. Some mini-reviews:

Terms of Service, Didn't Read

Most every modern website has a "Terms of Service" that governs your interactions with it. The document usually lays out how and when the site will use any data it collects about you - helpful, right? The document is also usually many pages long and would potentially take hours to fully absorb and understand. Terms of Service, Didn't Read is an extension that tries to give you a high-level view of the Terms of Service of the site you're on, based on their team's reading and interpretation of those documents on your behalf. If there are particular concerns related to privacy and personal data use, the extension will flag that when you arrive.

I used this extension for several months, finding it interesting at first to see how the sites I visited regularly measured up to TOSDR's evaluation. But after the initial curiosity wore off, I realized that for the most part, the information here wasn't changing my behavior. If TOSDR flagged something like "The copyright license is broader than necessary" or "This service tracks you on other websites," I'd still have to do some more digging to figure out exactly what that meant, and whether or not I was comfortable with it. So, the information provided by TOSDR is helpful, but not always conveniently actionable when it comes to protecting privacy. (There's a theme in all this: protecting privacy is rarely convenient.)

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Pet Adoption, Debt Clock WordPress Plugins

I recently released two simple WordPress plugins:

This creates a simple pet adoption search form in a widget on your WordPress site. Once you enter a postal/zip code, you're taken to results on Adopt-a-Pet.com where you can look for a homeless dog, cat or other animal waiting for your love. (Yes, I've worked a lot in the past with Adopt-a-Pet.com, but this plugin is not affiliated with or endorsed by them, I just created it for fun and to promote pet adoption.) Pull requests welcome.

This creates a simple widget display of the current U.S. national debt, based on the latest data available from the U.S. Treasury. If you want you can animate the number so that it is increasing/decreasing on the page according to recent changes in the actual debt. Pull requests welcome.

 

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Two-factor authentication

UCSF bicycle security failYou need to be using two-factor authentication (2FA) for your online accounts that matter.

Right now.

Do it.

Please.

In the past 2FA was a kind of geeky thing that only the most security-conscious would bother with. Today, it's essential that anyone storing sensitive information online or using online services for anything remotely important employs the use of 2FA.

It's an imperfect security mechanism and there things about it that are inconvenient, but for now it's the best intermediate option for protecting against unauthorized access to your accounts and your information. Using it is much less inconvenient than trying to recover from having someone take your money, abuse your identity, or access your private data.

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Perl script and Alfred workflow for quick call notes

As a part of trying to live a more paperless life, I'm determined to take notes electronically when I'm sitting at my computer, instead of jotting them down on scraps of paper and then putting them into a document later.

When a phone call comes in, I want to be able to start typing my notes about the call right away so that I'm not distracted as I'm switching over to my text editor, opening a new document, saving the document someplace to make sure I don't lose what I'm typing, and THEN being ready to actually take notes.

I've been using the OS X productivity app Alfred more and more lately, and so I decided to create a simple Alfred workflow that would let me get a phone call notes file up in front of me, ready to edit, with minimal typing.

I wanted to make sure that the resulting notes file was named in some reasonable way that I could find again later, and so part of creating the workflow was figuring out how to take a free-form description of the call that I'd be typing in as it started, and turn that into a filesystem-friendly name (sometimes known as a slug). I ended up using a simple Perl script to do that for me.

The Alfred workflow, then, is just a keyword and a script run:

Screen Shot 2014-10-11 at 2.06.56 PM

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Paperless

Updesk SetupI'm trying to live a paperless lifestyle as much as possible. A few things I'm doing to that end:

  • I try to avoid printing anything that I can view on a mobile device or computer instead.
  • I ask vendors and financial institutions to avoid sending me paper documents when they can send me electronic versions instead. When they don't offer that option, I search for comparable alternative vendors/institutions I can use.
  • When I'm at conferences, festivals or other events, I try to avoid taking little bits of paper that I'll just have to deal with later - flyers, stickers, postcards, business cards, etc. If I really want to remember something I'll get a hi-res photo of it with my mobile phone and then extract the useful information later.
  • I cleared all sticky note pads and scrap paper off of my work spaces so I could force myself to use digital tools.
  • When I do receive paper documents I want to maintain access to but don't need physical versions of, I scan them with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner. It does really fast double-sided scanning of lots of documents at once, directly into PDF files on my computer, and comes with some great software tools for organizing and searching the scans. Its output is also recognized by the IRS and similar entities as valid for purposes of legal document retention requirements. A newer version of the scanner offers even more options.
  • When a document requires my signature, I try to have it emailed to me instead of postal mailed or printed. I use Adobe's electronic signature tools to place a verifiable and legally binding (in most places) digital signature on the document and then send it back to the other party.
  • I use a tablet and Dropbox to bring relevant electronic documents to meetings with me instead of printing them off or asking for a copy when I get there. If I need to annotate a document or take notes, I either type those in during the meeting or use a small notebook I carry to write them out, and then immediately type them in after the meeting.
  • I have a system of paper folders in my home office for filing documents immediately as the mail comes in or as I clean out my pockets for the day - "to scan," "to file," "to shred" and so on. I find organizing paper documents as soon as they get to me shortens the time they stay in my life.
  • I regularly organize and purge the paper files I do keep, and I try to reuse paper a few times before finally putting it in the recycle bin or my diamond cross-cut shredder.
  • I make sure I name my digital documents consistently so that I'll be able to find them later with simple searching (usually "YYYMMDD-name-tags.pdf").
  • If a printed thing is sentimental in nature but I can't imagine myself pulling it out in a few years to caress it, smell it, re-read it, etc. I'll just take a picture of it instead and revisit it visually as needed.
  • I make sure my digital documents are backed up to multiple places in multiple ways.

Some aspects of going paperless that I'd like to see improve:

  • I still get receipts for gas pump activity and various credit card and cash retail transactions (unless they're using Square or something similar that will email me my receipt). I don't want to not have these at all because I'd like a way to verify the amount I was charged is correct (I've seen errors before), but I don't necessarily want to scan each one in or have to deal with filing or trashing them later. It would be nice if there were a global standard for having receipts transmitted electronically - not just emailed to me, but stored in some place of my choosing like a private Dropbox folder.
  • I wish important paper documents like vehicle titles, real estate transaction documents, passports, etc. had some easily accessible and widely accepted digital alternative so that we didn't have to place so much emphasis on storing and protecting these things carefully.
  • When I go to performances, lectures or religious services, some way to give people a program or bulletin they can view without disruptive mobile device screen activity. Surely with e-paper technology and related tools we could create this - and just think, no need to print separate LARGE PRINT VERSIONS when you could just scale up the font size!
  • The one place I would like to see paper used more? Electronic voting.

Have you gone or are you going paperless? What tools and techniques do you use?