makezine.com: The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

Danny and my latest column, for vol. 07 of Make, is about "The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work." While the concept is nothing new to agile developers, we wanted to talk about how it relates to the lives of garden-variety makers and life hackers:

When choosing an approach to building code that will pass their unit test, XP programmers are always encouraged by their beardy masters to "try the simplest thing that could possibly work." Note that this is not the most comprehensive thing that could work, nor the most impressive thing that could work, nor even a particularly enjoyable thing that would just be really fun to build...

[In Danny's Life Hacks research,] geeks weren't developing world-beating frameworks that could "scale across the enterprise" or cook a plate of french toast every morning -- most of the scripts were hastily coded with the single-minded purpose of fixing exactly one problem.

The geeks' consequent leaps in productivity seemed to come not simply from automating repetitive tasks, but, one imagines, from not blowing two weeks engineering a bloaty system meant to solve every conceivable problem in their lives.

Among many other cool things, this issue also has a profile on Mark Pauline, instructions on building a weatherproof wi-fi access point, plus -- my favorite -- three methods for silencing a child's beeping toy.

Vol. 7 of Make is available at your geekier magazine stands, or you can buy it now on Amazon.com.

Splitting your trusted system

What's your GTD weakness?

Software to automatically open a bunch of files...

Application that creates shortcuts to folders

Where do I start? I am interested in learning about programming. I have been told perl, python, and other languages are the "best" places to start. I wonder if learning basics of applescript wouldn't be better. Honestly I don't know if that's the same thing. I just curious to see what someone with little time to devote towards this itch should do. Any suggestions?

3x5 Tickler file (a la S.H.E)

Mac Security Question

Been thinking a bit about getting rid of some old paper files I have and want to get them on a pc for the lowest cost possible.

I wanted to kick this idea around a bit and see if it fights back...

The problem: I have a cheap scanner and my budget doesn't stretch to a nice automated scanner like the ScanSnap.

Solution: My idea is this, scan the pages as images and ocr them. Ocr isn't perfect, as you all know, but as long as it can produce valid search text I don't care too much.