Episode 101: The Sounds of Silence

Thomas and Sam discuss the persistence of memories, Evernote, device agnosticism, web automation services and whether the Karl Barth Chatbot will take off in the near-future.

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Links:

• Simon & Garfunkel – The Sounds of Silence (Audio) – YouTube — People talking without speaking,
  People hearing without listening,
  People writing songs that voices never share
  And no one dared
  Disturb the sound of silence.
• Tech Dopp Kit 2 – thisisground — The Tech Dopp Kit 2 is a premium leather travel zip-up organizer with designated spots for all of your tech/technical gear. Its inspiration is half bento box, half traditional dopp kit—a 20th century-style travel bag with neatly arranged compartments for the modern pro’s tools.
• Apple has acquired Workflow, a powerful automation tool for iPad and iPhone | TechCrunch — Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.
• Why I finally replaced Evernote with Bear – The Verge — I found one in Bear, a year-old app for Mac and iOS by a three-person Italian design firm named Shiny Frog. Bear plays the sleek TextEdit to Evernote’s monstrous Microsoft Word: what you lose in absolute number of features you more than make up for in speed and ease of use. As a writer, I work in text, and text ought to be simple. Simplicity is Bear’s starting point — and, in my experience over the past few months, accounts for much of its success.
• Donald Trump: TIME Interview on Truth and Falsehoods | Time.com — Yeah, it’s been good though. It’s been good.
• Learn how IFTTT works – IFTTT — Do more with the services you love
• The best apps. Better together. – Zapier – Zapier — Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work.
• Why I Switched To Todoist – Productivityist
• Now we’re talking: How voice technology is transforming computing | The Economist — This is a huge shift. Simple though it may seem, voice has the power to transform computing, by providing a natural means of interaction. Windows, icons and menus, and then touchscreens, were welcomed as more intuitive ways to deal with computers than entering complex keyboard commands. But being able to talk to computers abolishes the need for the abstraction of a “user interface” at all.
• The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel – The Atlantic — Why did it take so long to invent the wheelbarrow? Have we hit peak innovation? What our list reveals about imagination, optimism, and the nature of progress.
• Pro Rata – Axios — Mnuchin breezily dismissed the notion that AI and machine learning will soon replace wide swaths of workers, saying that “it’s not even on our radar screen” because it’s an issue that is “50 or 100 years” away.