Believe

“Believe. If you believe in ___________, it will come true.” / SML.20121225.PHIL

The human mind is capable of a lot. If you believe that something will happen, you can will it to happen. It does not actually matter what you believe in (aka through which). Some people rely on a philosophy, a religion, a chant, an object.

Although I am not religious, my parents are and so I grew up going to church every sunday. As such I am familiar with the various forms of religious doctrines in Christianity. Different religions in the world consider their god as the “one true god”. It is somewhat true—because whether you see energy as a thing or god, the result is the same. In my opinion, it is not necessarily that a being is allowing you to reach the result—it is the focused act of belief (or faith as Christians like to call it.)

We are all connected through energy. Energy which binds us altogether, and I believe that the mind is capable of manipulating such energy. Scientists suggest that we only use 10% of our brains. So I research ways to use my brain which are not practiced by others.

When I was young, I use this same methodology to develop something I coined “modeling” which I now realize is something very similar used in the Buddhist visualization meditation technique.

The way I see it, if life doesn't go the way you wish it, hack it. Hack your brain. Model your outcome. You will get everything that you wish for if you are willing to believe.

/ #life #belief #believe #energy #religion #science #christianity #buddhism #philosophy #opinions #smlopinions #method #hacks #lifehacks #mindhacks #visualization #modeling #meditation #humans #mind #brain

/ #中國 #中国 #China #香港 #HongKong

Do it

Do it.
Do it for you.
Do it for your own happiness.
Do it so your life has meaning.
Do it so you can be.

“Do it. Do it for you. Do it for your own happiness. Do it so your life has meaning. Do it so you can be.” / SML Philosophy / SML.20121212.PHIL.Life.Do.It

Countless humans I have interfaced with in the past have mentioned to me that they want to do something but they don't because they don't know what other people would think about them when they do it.

In his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” author Stephen R. Covey suggests that moving from dependence to independence (i.e. self-mastery) is key to one’s happiness and sanity. In other words, caring about what other people think is a self-destruction act.

The happiness of others is not your concern—especially if you have not yet mastered self-happiness. You are however responsible for your own happiness. Everything that I do, I do it for myself. I don’t do anything because it makes other people happy. I do it because it makes me happy. The same philosophy applies for what I do for work. Work should be 100% fun. Work should be play and play only.

Once you learn to let go and not mind about other people‘s business, you can move on with your life. Opinionated people who “thoughtfully” offer suggestions to others are everywhere. They will continue to “care” about you and proceed to drive you nuts. In these scenarios, I find it best to initiate a dialog with them. Make sure that they understand that what they are suggesting is not helpful. Ask them to stop. Have the ability to “agree to disagree.”

Unfortunately some of these “caring people” will not stop even after prolonged discussions. In my experience, some humans—for reasons which escapes me—simply do not have a logic unit in their CPUs. These types of humans will continue to send negative waves in the form of opinions and comments as “suggestions” about what you do. When these are constantly present and leeching into your sanity, terminate relationships with them right away. If you can't cut them loose then just move as far away as possible.

Remember: be independent. Be yourself. Be happy. Be responsible for you and yourself only.

Disclaimer: Brainhacking results vary. What works for SML might not work for you.

/ SML Philosophy / SML.20121212.PHIL.Life.Do.It / #smlphil #ccby #smluniverse / #生 #life #思想 #philosophy #opinions #mind #brain #做 #do #人 #people #humans #開心 #happiness #hacks #brainhacks #lifehacks #mindhacks

Delete Perfection + Zero expectations / Happiness Life Hacks

Perfection does not exist. You might as well remove the word from your dictionary right now before it turns you into absolute demise. If perfection existed, I certainly have never seen it, nor have I ever experienced it.

The beauty of imperfection. Abstract in C minor / 20090825.10D.51822 / SML

For a large part of my life, I had been a perfectionist, and I expected perfection from others. Since perfection does not exist, you can imagine how unhappy I used to be. I put in 200% of my effort to the point of exhaustion and all I was left with was depression of failing to reach the impossible goal of being perfect. All I was able to see was flaws in myself, and flaws in others. I got upset when things were not perfect, and it drove me nuts.

I believe that there are certain things in life which you cannot learn no matter how intelligent you are. There are things which you can only learn only when you have lived long enough. Older people have the leg up here. I often tell people that I aspire to attain things which could only be gained through time, and this is one of those things. It took me more than three decades to realize that perfection does not exist. I now embrace imperfection fully. I embrace it through these methods:

1. Zero expectations. I have found that expecting nothing from others is a good way to maintain happiness. When someone promise me that they would complete a task by a certain date, I expect that they would complete nothing. When they do, I get happy. When I order food from a restaurant, I expect them to never show up. So when they do, I get happy. When I decided to meet someone I found on an online personal, I expect that they will look nothing like what they describe to be. When they in fact are somewhat decent, I am happy. It may sound absolutely crazy to live life this way, but I have found this to be a very good life hack to maintain happiness. In the worst case scenario I will just be indifferent. Indifferent is ok because I will at least not feel upset about it. Feeling upset is hazardous to the soul.
2. Ensure that people know that I am imperfect. After I was diagnosed with ADHD + Bipolar, I made sure that everyone knows about it. I identify what I am not good at: time management, organization of physical space, “people skills,” etc, and I make sure that when I do anything which require those specific skill sets that I work with someone who can cover those. I will not work on any project which does not have a good project manager. I am thankful that I have worked with many excellent project managers / personal assistants who know how to work with crazy people like me while not trying to micro-manage everything. I report progress through daily and if necessarily through hourly reports because I cannot estimate time it takes to complete anything. Though I've also wised up somewhat—by following the principle of “under promise, over deliver”, when I think that things will take 1 week to do, I tell them that it would take 4 weeks to complete. Usually it works out to be around 3 weeks. Knowing this is helpful. By working in an agile fashion, it is good for me and it is good for others. This is also my preference when working in teams.
3. Say no to things which are unrealistic. I have a tendency to over-commit. When clients ask me if I can do something within an unrealistically short period of time, I used to agree to them and as a result also drove myself to death—literally. The stress was so high that I had contemplated killing myself. The crazy thing was that since I was a perfectionist then, I decided to postpone suicide because I could not see myself having a tomb with something like “SML, the one who did not finish an XYZ project.” I also considered the possibility that no one would show up to my funeral because I somehow messed up their project. Yes I know that this is all very funny but somehow crazies have their crazy ways to cope with life. These days I just say no. I tell people to go find someone else for things which I think will kill me. Interestingly they usually stay with me because usually when I was given unrealistic requests like that it was because they could not find any humans to do it and I am usually their last hope. Wishful thinking is a common attribute among humans. Humans are just weird.
4. Be thankful. A lot of people that I have met feel “entitled” to things because they have done something else. I promote the idea of “zero expectations” and so I am thankful to those who have done anything—no matter how small—for me. A lot of people have the philosophy that just because someone work at their company, they can slave-drive their employees as bots. Don't do that. Humans are not capable of sustaining high levels of pressure. Since I maintain zero-expectations from others, I am thankful when people have completed the tasks as requested and as promised. It works out ok.
5. Be independent. Zero expectations require that I be independent, so I utilize every opportunity to learn new things and skills. I also spend much time researching productivity tools which would help me cope with my deficiencies better. I utilize hashtags e.g. #sml2do for things I need to do. Using unique but consistent hashtags allow me to then use Google to then track things which are not yet completed. I make sure that there are always multiple point of entries of the same todo lists.
6. Be forgiving. Mastership of zero expectations remove the need to forgive because I will never be upset. But although I don't seem human to most, I am in fact human. Attaining zero expectations has been a difficult journey, and I suspect that it will be a life long journey. So until I am able to reach my goal (which is probably never because perfection does not exist), I remind myself to be forgiving. If I wish that others be more understanding to my own imperfection then I need to be forgiving.

I am writing these thoughts down because Mr James Reeves suggested to me that I should write more. SML Thank You for the suggestion. It does seem that writing it out eases the pain somewhat.

How to use Gmail filters to maintain sanity with social media

One of the unfortunate side-effects when you belong to many social networks and subscribe to many listserv is the insane amount of emails you get on a daily basis. In this tutorial, I will illustrate how you can track these activities at your own pace and keeping your inbox tidy and maintaining an overall sanity in your very active technologically sound life.

Gmail Filters, in conjunction with Gmail Labels is all you need to achieve this. And is very simple to use as illustrated below:

How to maintain a clutter free Gmail Inbox

This example illustrate how to take out those Twitter follow invites from your Inbox while allowing you to review them at your own pace.

1. Start by selecting Create a filter next to the search box.

2. In the Subject: field, enter "is now following you on Twitter!" and press Next Step > to continue.

3. Now choose the action you want to apply. You can do anything you want to it, but this is the common things that I do:

3A. Check Skip the Inbox (Archive it). This ensures that it will not show up in your inbox when it arrives.

3B. Create a new label in the Apply the label dropdown, or select an existing label that you would like to apply.

3C. If you are creating a new label, you might want to Also apply filter to conversations below. I guess I had 5000 follows on Twitter since I started using Gmail. Now *that* would be insane if I didn't use Gmail filters!

Don't be alarm if you think that you will never see them again since you have skip the inbox, they still show up in your filter list, and unread items still show up as bold.

I use Gmail filters for pretty much everything, and auto-archive most of the stuff that goes into my inbox, leaving it clutter-free only with important stuff that I need to get to. Here's a list of examples of where you would want to auto-filter:

Gmail filters examples

1. Social network activites. I label all of these with a prefix soc: so they are grouped together nicely in the filter list. Aardvark, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, or whatever. All gone. Best of all and especially for Facebook activities, I usually can just take a quick glance at the list titles to note the things that require actions, then select all and Mark as Read.

2. Listserv. Do you subscribe to a lot of listserv? Anyone of those IxDA list will turn your inbox into a nightmare!

3. Magazine subscription. I enjoy some of the publication alerts like MKQ and WSJ but they get scary very soon. I like keeping these as email items instead of just reading them in list readers so I can search for them later.

4. Google Alerts. Comes in thousands. Good to know when your stuff get blogged etc. This is especially useful if you license your content via Creative Commons.

5. Keywords. Some times come through in multiple places and does not have a particular subject / email address. Use keywords to bundle them up together.

6. Email addresses. Gmail support retrieving other external accounts. So you can use the same strategy to check your other mails, and also apply labels where necessary.

Yahoo Pipes: Meta Search Alerts Digest

Since publishing Meta Search Alerts (Yahoo Pipes) (Flickr screenshot / SML Pro Blog / SML Wiki) back in 2007, it has become to most popular pipe ever created. It even popped onto ReadWriteWeb's The Ultimate Yahoo Pipes List in 2008. And perhaps even more bizarre was discovering that somehow CNet had stuck a software publisher profile for me on Download.com earlier this year! SML Thank You!!!

Meta Search Alerts was originally created for my own vanity searches, but then I started using it on SML Wiki so I can track people and things more easily.

This is great until I started writing very long description of photos on Flickr after realising that photos are often referenced as a singular entity — that while you would prefer that people check out the entire set to see the description of the info, most simply don't have the time and patience to do look at them.

For the sake of human browsing, including long description (for example, full bio about an artist that I photographed) in everyone of my photographs about them is useful when items are referenced singularly, but then if you know what you are looking for and wish to cluster them in a single place, the content become repetitive and tired after a very brief instant.

Meta Search Alerts Digest

Screenshot: http://pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/metasearchalertsdigest



This is why I created a baby version called Meta Search Alerts Digest. In essense, this pipe uses Meta Search Alerts as a subpipe, then loop through both the item.description and the item.media:description and limit them to 1000 characters.

A sample of this pipe in action can be seen at
http://wiki.seeminglee.com/people:agata-olek

And you can compare the difference between its grand daddy and itself here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/metasearchalerts/agataolek
http://feeds.feedburner.com/metasearchalertsdigest/agataolek

Note: The reason why I use Feedburner to subscribe to feed is because that for whatever reasons, Yahoo Pipes RSS tends to generate errors when subscribed via normal means. Many feed reader would complain that it's not a valid feed. By using FeedBurner to burn the feed, that problem goes away. An additionally good aspect about using FeedBurner is that you also get analytics data that comes with it, which is useful - particularly if you wish to use it to feed TwitterFeed etc.

Meta Search Alerts (grand daddy version)

Screenshot: http://pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/metasearchalerts



For folks who are not familiar with my original pipe, this is what it does:
1. Aggregates these search results simultaneously:
+ del.icio.us
+ Findory
+ Flickr
+ Google Blog Search
+ Google News
+ Google Search
+ Icerocket
+ Live News Search
+ Live Search
+ Technorati
+ Yahoo News
+ Yahoo Search

2. Filters the results and ensures that the links are unique.

3. Sorts the results by date such that the latest addition onto the pool will appear at the top of the list.

In other words, it acts as an RSS feed alerts for all these search engines.

Examples
+ Meta Search Alerts: advertising
+ Meta Search Alerts: art
+ Meta Search Alerts: design
+ Meta Search Alerts: design+technology
+ Meta Search Alerts: design+technology+marketing
+ Meta Search Alerts: gay+men
+ Meta Search Alerts: lgbt
+ Meta Search Alerts: marketing
+ Meta Search Alerts: metasearchalerts (Use the pipe to search for itself!)
+ Meta Search Alerts: see-ming-lee (great for daily vanity searches!)
+ Meta Search Alerts: sml-universe
+ Meta Search Alerts: technology
+ Meta Search Alerts: typography
+ Meta Search Alerts: yale

Related SML Universe
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Pipes
+ SML Pipes

SML Thank You / 2009-09-25 / SML

Today is my birthday so naturally I am getting greetings all over the globe. This is my thank you card to all of you!



I am a believer in thanking people. As an ADHD-afflicted geek, I have often forgotten the kindness and generosity from others, and I make a point of recording them so I can search through them.

I started a blog called SML Thank You (http://thankyou.seeminglee.com) a while back but it was getting a bit challenging to maintain. It also become a bit insane to keep too many blogs so I have since imported them onto SML Pro Blog and labeled those items as SML Thank You.

I do think that thanking people is still an important activity, so I started tweeting with the prefix [SML Thank You] (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22SML%20Thank%20You%22) but then to save space I started using #smlthankyou as a suffix (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23smlthankyou).

But what about all those people I've thanked which did not appear on Twitter. I need to find those thanks, and perhaps in comments area on other places. So I built a Yahoo Pipe to do it:



There is a full description of all the different modules and what it is on SML Wiki: Yahoo Pipes: SML Thank You. In a gist, it does a search on the web and grab data from where I might have thanked folks and put them all in a single RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=a8dc3b5c3847f409e0c1f1d6bee13989&_render=rss.

A sample output looks like this:



and if you go to the Yahoo Pipe page at http://pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/smlthankyou you can also use the image view and the map view (for items with geo-data).

A sample output of the pipe and how it renders can be seen on SML Wiki: SML Thank You (http://wiki.seeminglee.com/sml-thank-you)

Related SML
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Graphic Design
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Pipes
+ SML Pipes
+ SML Pro Blog: SML Graphic Design
+ SML Pro Blog: SML Thank You
+ SML Pro Blog: Yahoo Pipes

Update 01: 2009-09-25
Since posted the design on Flickr, I noted that the 500x500 version does not really work as a comment to thank you, so I created a mini version for 'thumbnail' comment use. Thanks for visiting the blog! Here's my thankyou card just for you!

Flickr Faves Browsing = Best way to discover new talents

If you want to explore good stuff, forget about Explore, just browse your contacts' favorites. Chances are you will like because that's why you added them as contact in the first place. Finding other people's source of inspiration (the process) goes hand-in-hand with looking at their work (the result).

You can also usually get a fairly good read about the person from looking at their favorites: for example, did the guy like my photo because of the composition? Or do they like it because they just like the subject matter?

Dijubos de Molina (Daniel Molina is one of my all-time favorite photographer on Flickr, and I usually find really good stuff on his favorites:



Browsing a single person's favorite is great, but when you wish to track multiple people's favorites, it becomes rather time consuming and annoying. There isn't yet a function on Flickr to allow you to track all your contacts' favorites yet - but FriendFeed does.

FriendFeed tracks a person's individual stream as well as their favorites, which is a very cool feature. If you track your contacts photo by the default Flickr RSS, you will get single image blocks, which is somewhat annoying, so what I do instead is creating two Imaginary Friends on Friendfeed:


Imaginary friends is a great feature on FriendFeed which allows you to track people even if they are not on the FriendFeed network. Feeds from imaginary friends are only viewable to the logged in users (private).

Now each person is individually tracked by the imaginary friends, they will show up as a row in clusters:



Related SML
+ SML Flickr Favorites
+ SML Friendfeed

SML Wiki New Pages Yahoo Pipes

An ultra simple pipe. I think that this will be a very good intro for folks who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes and wish to see how Pipes can help solve their common problems.


Screenshot: pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/smlwikinewpages

My wiki is hosted on wikidot.com and it has an auto-feed feature which reports recent changes and new pages creation via an RSS feed. I use this feed with my friendfeed account, but when I edit pages heavily via frequent saves, the list of "recent changes" makes the feed very hard to follow. Wikidot does not provide a separate feed for new pages vs source changes, so I created this pipe to output only new pages.

Some feed readers appear to have problems getting feeds from the RSS results generated by Yahoo Pipes, so I take the RSS feed and burn it with FeedBurner. Now add the feedburner feed onto FriendFeed and now there's a less-noisy feed on my FriendFeed.

For comparison
Original feed: feeds.feedburner.com/smlwiki
Feed using the pipe: feeds.feedburner.com/smlwiki/newpages

To do
I do still want to include source changes though. I am working on a pipe which truncates items with the same title that were posted too close to each other.

Related SML
+ SML Flickr Tags: SML Pipes
+ SML Pipes

Flickr Social / 2007-11-11 / SML Pipes

Yahoo Pipes: See-ming Lee: Flickr Social
Updated with additional fields for permission filtering.

See Flickr screenshot for module details:



Here's a screenshot of the additional fields. They are all optional. Again, see Flickr screenshot for notes.



More information available on SML Wiki
SML Wiki: Flickr Social

Related SML Pro Blog
+ SML Pro Blog: Flickr Social / 2007-11-11 / SML Pipes

Related SML Universe
+ SML Flickr Tags: Yahoo Pipes
+ SML Ideas
+ SML Pipes
+ SML Wiki: Yahoo Pipes
+ Yahoo Pipes: See-ming Lee

SML Copyright Notice
© 2007 See-ming Lee (Blog / Facebook / Flickr / Google / LinkedIn / YouTube)

Yahoo Pipes: Flickr Social / 2007-11-10 / SML Pipes

I use Flickr a lot, but I am increasingly finding it frustrating to have to go onto Flickr everyday to track my friends' comments and also comments I have posted on, so I created this pipe to track all the commenting activities such that I can log them somewhere.

One of the problems I have with the way the Comments You've Made page works is that if you commented on some particularly popular images, you ended up having a lot of noise in that feed that is unrelated to you.

Given these two problem at hand, I created this pipe to return an RSS feed of all things happening to my activities without the extra noise:

pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/flickrsocial


This screenshot has notes. Click on the images to get notes on individual modules used on Flickr

What this pipe does

1. Based on a Flickr username (not user id), return a feed of:
   • Recent comments other people have posted about your photographs
   • Recent comments you have made to other people's photographs
2. For your recent comments on other people's photographs, fitler out the result such that the feed contains only comments you have made and exclude other people's comments on the same photograph. This ensures that you don't get too much noise on that particular feed if that photograph become very popular--which appears to happen a lot to photographs which I commented on.
3. Aggregate the results from the two and sort the items based on the published date.

More SML Pipes

• SML Flickr Tags: SML Pipes
• SML Pipes (smlpipes.com)
• Yahoo Pipes: See-ming Lee (pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee)

SML Thank You
I would like to thank Kris J. Clarke from Scotland for helping me out during the process as I develop this. Kris, you rock!

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Bug Labs = Mindstorms for Super-Geeks

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don't define the final products - you do.
—Bug Labs: Products

BugLabs on YouTube
+ YouTube: Bug Labs: Beginnings - Episode A
+ YouTube: Bug Labs: BUG - Episode B

Technical Specifications

• ARM1136JF-S-based microprocessor
• 1 USB 2.0 HS host interface/4 hub port connections
• 1 USB OTG HS interface
• 4 UART serial links
• 4 channel SPI interface
• I2C (400 kbits) interface/4 channels
• I2S interface/2 channels
• Smart LCD interface
• Camera sensor interface
• Micro memory card interface
• MPEG4 hardware encoding/decoding
• Hardware graphic acceleration
• 10/100 Ethernet MAC
• 802.11b/g
• Base unit LCD module interface
• Base unit onboard memory (FLASH/DDR SDRAM)
• JTAG/ICE support
• Serial debug port
• Power system
• AC operation
• Battery operation/up to 4 external batteries
• Fast battery charging/simultaneous of internal and external batteries
• Smart power management support
• Battery-backed real-time clock
• Audio out via onboard piezo speaker

Pretty cool. Check it out!

SML Thank You
I would like to thank Alex Rainert (Google / SML Wiki) for sending this over :)

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.