sacha chua living an awesome life

I occasionally use Artrage Studio Pro for tracing images or animating sketchnotes. The interface doesn’t lend itself as well to real-time sketchnoting, although the natural media support might be interesting to play with if I want to play around with watercolours.

The latest version (Artrage 4) introduces some interesting features that might help me with drawing. The Workbench and Toolbox combination will let me choose just the tools and colour samples I want to use, hiding the rest behind menus in a streamlined interface. I like the ability to save and load toolbox configurations. That will make it easier for me to save colour sets for recurring events or clients. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save the Transform tool as a preset, though, so selecting and moving things will take more clicks. (More on this later.)

I’ve also been looking for a way to project the drawing as a whole while I’m zoomed in and working on part of it. This will let people see the context without getting dizzy or distracted by the way I zoom in and out. Views allow you to “pin” a view of your canvas while you’re working on a different part. I tested it with an external monitor and confirmed that you can drag the view pin off your main Artrage window and onto the second screen, and that you can resize it to almost fill the screen. If I ever need to do projected sketchnotes (the request has come up once or twice, but in the end people opt to focus on the speaker), this might be a possibility.

It will take a lot more practice before I feel comfortable using this for real-time sketchnoting. There seems to be a little bit of lag at the beginning of strokes drawn in quick succession, even if I’ve turned smoothing off. Here’s a sample in Artrage 4:

and the same thing in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro:

Selecting and moving regions doesn’t feel as natural as it does in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, and that’s something I find myself doing often when I’m drawing a sketchnote. Artrage 4 seems more responsive than Artrage Studio Pro when it comes to moving things around, but the process of selecting, moving, and deselecting takes too much work. As far as I understand it, the steps in Artrage 4 Workbench mode are:

1. Click on the hard freehand lasso preset I’ve saved to my toolbox.
2. Select the section to move.
3. Click on the large tool icon and choose Transform.
4. Drag the image. Be sure to start dragging within the bounding box of the part of the image that has data, because it won’t detect it if you’re dragging from empty space that you’ve already highlighted.
   
   (outside the rectangle = won’t actually move things)
5. Click on Menu > Edit > Deselect all, or you won’t be able to draw outside the selected region.

In Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, I would:

1. Click on the lasso tool.
2. Select the area I want to move.
3. Move it or resize it using the puck that appears when I hover inside the selection.
4. Switch back to a drawing tool to start drawing anywhere in the screen.

There are keyboard shortcuts for Transform and Deselect all, but I usually don’t have keyboard access while I’m in tablet mode.

So Artrage 4 is probably good for me to use if:

• I’m drawing/painting for fun, because then I can slow down and I’m not worried about losing anything,
• I have a keyboard handy so that I can use the keyboard shortcuts to change tools,
• I need to project a separate view of my drawing, or
• I want to record a zoomed-out animation of my drawing over a guide drawing. (I suppose I could learn how to green-screen videos… =) )

I might revisit this for sketchnoting if I can stitch together some keyboard macros (maybe using a foot pedal or the Twiddler), but in the meantime, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro will be my workhorse. I’ll play around with Artrage’s drawing and painting support to see if I can build other non-sketchnoting artistic skills/techniques using that. Anyway, it’s good to see progress in applications!

Thanks to Luc Taesch for the nudge to check out Artrage 4!

I’ve been thinking about how to make it easier for people who want to keep in touch but who don’t want to be overwhelmed by my daily posting schedule. Instead of trying to come up with the Best Way on my own, I asked what people wanted. Out of 26 votes (as of the time I wrote this), ten people wanted weekly newsletters and three people wanted monthly newsletters. That probably means that even more people would like those less frequent update options, so I decided to spend some time figuring out a good way to offer that.

Since I already do weekly and monthly reviews, the easiest way would be to make those reviews available in a separate feed that people can subscribe to over RSS or e-mail. I’ve been using Feedburner as a way of making my feeds more browser-friendly and as a way to handle e-mail subscriptions. Although I’d been concerned about the long-term longevity of my feeds in case Feedburner shuts down, it turns out that you can set up your own domain name by following the instructions under My Account > MyBrand.

I set up my feeds to use feeds.sachachua.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com. That means that if Feedburner goes away, I just need to change my DNS record to point to my own server and write my own redirect rules. I wish I’d done this earlier! Anyway, if you subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/sachac , please switch to using http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac instead.

With the new feed URLs in place, I created Feedburner feeds for my weekly and monthly reviews. Category feeds are built-in, so all I needed to do was tell Feedburner to handle http://sachachua.com/blog/category/weekly and http://sachachua.com/blog/category/monthly . I customized each feed to include a short message pointing to the other feeds (Optimize > BrowserFriendly), change the URL, and enable e-mail subscriptions (Publicize > Email Subscriptions).

Then I modified my WordPress theme to include links to the new feeds. To make the feeds available from the feed icon in many browsers’ address bars, I added the following code to my <head>…</head>:

<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Feed (~daily)" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac" />
<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Weekly reviews" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac-weekly" />
<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Monthly reviews" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac-monthly" />

Result:

I also added links to the feeds in my sidebar using the Appearance > Widgets > Text widget.

Now, people should be able to easily subscribe to whichever frequency they want. =)

On another note: I was surprised and delighted to find that many people wanted daily updates. Thank you! I’ll try to make my headlines useful so that you can guess right away if you would be interested in something, and we’ll see if I can write weekly review headlines with keywords as well.

If you blog a lot, I hope you find this tip handy!

In this chat, Bastien tells stories about getting started in Emacs, reading his mail/news/blogs in Gnus, and hacking his life with Org. =) Enjoy!

Want just the audio? You can get MP3s or OGG from archive.org.

It’s a little intimidating doing something that’s very different from what I usually do, but if I focus on small ways to help, it’s easier. =) And then I can build strength and endurance and knowledge gradually, interleaving challenges with things I can do.

I spent four hours on Friday drawing this beginners’ one-page guide to Emacs, and people really liked it. =) It’ll be awesome to make more things like that! Also, amazing amazing amazing comments from people helping me figure out all sorts of stuff. Thanks! =D

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending May 10, 2013
• Cherry blossoms in High Park, and playing with digital watercolour in Artrage 4
• Stepping sideways into Alternate Universe Sacha
• Learning update May 2013
• From cats to keystrokes
• Poll: How often would you like to receive e-mail updates? Also, quantifying my blog posting history
• Thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go with this blog
• How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners

Accomplished this week

• Business
  • Earn
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 –
    • Sketchnote GIST tech conference
  • Build
    • Practise drawing for two hours
    • Set up virtual box
    • Learn about Vagrant, Chef, and Puppet
    • Add polls to my site
    • Add brief bio to my blog sidebar
    • Learn at Toronto Comic Arts Festival
    • Upgrade my Linode
  • Connect
    • Talk to Matt about what he can help me with
    • Talk to Shawn about sketchnoting FITC
    • Talk to ZoomToLearn about illustration
• Relationships
  • Get together with W-’s family
• Life
  • Collect 50 sentences for my Japanese-English deck
  • Set up my Ankidroid
  • Have dental new patient exam
  • Take notes on “Strategies for Reading Japanese”
  • Fix library renew script

Plans for next week

• Business
  • Earn
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  • Build
    • [ ] Sketchnote a book
    • [ ] Choose a topic to package
    • [ ] Set up clean development environment for Quantified Awesome
    • [ ] Build interface for goals
  • Connect
    • [ ] Talk to Bastien Guerry about Emacs
• Relationships
  • [X] Help W- with setting up the post
  • [ ] Help out with Linden visit to Hacklab?
• Life
  • [ ] Play some more FF?
  • [ ] Return books to the Japan Foundation library
  • [ ] Plant zucchini, more bitter melon, bok choi, and lettuce

Time review

• Business: 53.3 hours (Earn: 18.6, E1: 15.6, Connect: 5.9, Build: 28.7)
• Discretionary: 30.7 hours (Social: 0.7, Productive: 14.6, Writing: 5.7, Emacs: 4.1)
• Personal: 20.6 hours (Routines: 8.4)
• Sleep: 54.0 hours – average of 7.7 hours per day
• Unpaid work: 9.5 hours (Cook: 5.1, Tidy: 0.5)

I thought I’d draw some of the things that people often ask me about or that would help people learn Emacs (and enjoy it). You can click on the image for a larger version that you can scroll through or download. It should print all right on 8.5×11″ paper (landscape) if you want to keep it around as a reminder. Might even work at 11×17″. =)

You can find the image on Imgur and Flickr too.

Feel free to share, reuse, or modify this under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!

Possibly counterintuitive point: It’s good to learn at least the basics of Vim. Despite the perception of a “Emacs vs. Vi” holy war (one of the classic battles in computer science), it makes sense to know both editors especially if you work with people who use Vi a lot. Know enough Vi to find your way around, and then learn how to customize Emacs to fit you to a tee. That way, you’ll avoid the pressure of not being able to work well with your team or your infrastructure, and you’ll have the space to explore Emacs. =) Emacs is totally awesome.

Need help with Emacs? Feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me. I’m often in the #emacs channel on irc.freenode.net , and I also occasionally schedule time to help people one-on-one. Also, the Emacs community (mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC channel) can be wonderful, so definitely reach out to them too. =)

Meta discussion: How can I make this even better? What else would you like me to draw a guide for? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Also, thanks to dash, nicferrier, fledermaus, ijp, hypnocat, Fuco, macrobat, taylanub, axrfnu, Sebboh, thorkill, jave_, jrm, and the rest of #emacs for suggestions and feedback!

Update 2013-05-18: Check out the conversations on Hacker News and Reddit!

A friend of mine is a big fan of Firepole Marketing and other blog-related marketing sites, so a lot of his advice for me has been focused on building audiences and information products. It’s been quite useful—look, I finally got around to all these little design tweaks!—but there’s something niggling at the edges of my brain, and that’s usually a sign I should slow down and reflect on it. I notice that I hesitate.

I need to sort out what I’m hesitant about just because it’s unknown or something I’m shy about, and what I’m hesitant about because I want something different.

The things I love the most about this blog are:

• Sharing all these small, varied things I’m learning about, and not worrying about sticking to one topic, making sense, or writing too often
• Having these amazing conversations spanning miles and years (Raymond Zeitler, Clair Ching, Chris League, and a few other people have been commenting for more than five years – I’m so lucky!)
• Bumping into all sorts of amazing people through chance conversations and connections
• Following the thread of our shared curiosity into new questions
• Answering people’s questions with blog posts from when I was trying to figure things out too
• Knowing that no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s something I can learn from and possibly share

There’s a lot of good advice out there for people who want to “monetize their audience” or build a business around blogging, but… maybe I have the space to explore something different. What would this blog look and feel like in another ten years? More of this, I hope, and better. Better at learning, better at sharing, better at organizing, better at connecting.

Sometimes people pay more attention to what they pay for. Hmm, maybe optional payment, or saving payment for individual help? I don’t have a mental hangup about being paid for consulting, because that’s stuff that clearly creates a lot of value for my clients and doesn’t really give me things I can widely share as a way of helping others. I don’t have a hangup about earning a little bit from affiliate sales (since it’s entirely optional, and only the stuff that I like, and I point out non-affiliate links or alternative ways to get things like borrowing books from the library). I’m sort of okay with the idea of making collections of blog posts and sketches and selling them for a nominal fee as an experiment, although I’m tempted to just make them all freely available and then perhaps add a pay-what-you-can system or a donation button.

Anyway, we’re doing well, so I have some space to focus on learning and sharing. =) I want to make the most of that opportunity. Can you help me figure out what would make this better while keeping it real?