When you should stop read a book?

I like to read, and from more than year I try to spend daily at least 45 minutes reading some popular science or similar book.

But sometimes I don't like the book.

And I'm looking for some "formula" to decide if I should stop to read or not.

I already spend this time, and I'm not able to recoup it, still I may try to rescue rest of time I would spent reading....

So maybe something like:

expected_value = value_till_now/time_spent

This will let me estimate how much I may gain.
Interesting fact, because at the beginning I have some "value" already at least from this that reading on its own improves vocabulary and so on, at the beginning expected_value is almost infinite ;-)

Now is problem of this what should be expected_value.
I would propose something radical, expected value should be at least equal to average value from previously read books.
Let even be nicer for book, lets say it should be at least half of value of average book.

So formula to make decision should be:

stop_reading = value_till_now/time_spent < 0.5*average_value_of_book

It seems also that using this formula will cause that reading more books will means stoping earlier with bad books ;-)

And thanks to this I avoided in last year or so reading books like:
The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil - topic was interesting, but at least Polish translation of this book was so badly written that I didn't wanted to read it,
Getting Things Done by David Allen - how many times the same may be written? Or maybe this was again Polish translation,
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss - I admire Tim Ferriss for creating really good idea of making business - let others do it - it brillant idea, and books created in such way like Tools of Titans, and Mentors Tribe are quiet interesting, this one is simply boring.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty - main idea of book is worth noting, but it isn't easy read, and one simply don't have way to verify data provided, so instead of reading this one book I would prefer reading some summary of it (from this what I heard the same is true about Marx's Capital ;-))

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Blindfold programming

Some time ago I read this article, and started to play with idea of Blindfold programming.

What this whole Blindfold Programming is about?

It is about trying to write code in your head, without any screen, keyboard, paper or whiteboard. Only in head.

Why?

To exercise :-)
Not used ability usually stops to work...

And in my case I noticed several years ago what becoming more senior in software engineering in my case means writing less code... but still coding is very important part of this job, so it is important to practice :-)

Additionally it seems that it helps with chunking. and naturally leads to dividing problem to smaller subproblems.

This part is important, because human brain doesn't have too much space in short memory. One is able to keep in the same time ~4 things in memory and focus.

So from some time I'm going to LeetCode easy problems and I'm trying to write whole solution in my head. Sometimes I'm touching also medium problems in the same way.

Next, sometimes I'm writing code on whiteboard or with pencile on my iPad Pro, but usually I simply put whole code from my head to LeetCode editor and I'm checking if my solution works ;-)

And after several months of doing it I think I can see some improvements ;-)

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Decluttering of phone :-)

Last Friday or Thursday I looked on my phone and realized that I have too many apps on start screen.
At time it looked somehow like this:

Icons and Folders were set in slightly different way (once o week I'm reorganizing some apps, like WhatsApp, Chrome, Inbox to make it more difficult to start those "on autopilot"), but number was exactly the same.

Now I have still a lot of icons, but number is smaller:

Still I have place to improvement, but I'm moving in right direction ;-)


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My Clipboard says that I'm a programmer ;-)

Interesting...
Several days ago I started to use CopyQ (so Clipboard Manager which lets you return to things earlier in clipboard - works on Linux, macOS/OSX and as I heard also on Windows).

And now I counted how many pieces of code I have in latest 100 positions...

And it seems that it was 40 :-)

So 40% of all things in my clipboard are fragments of code ;-)

Someone may say that this means that I must copy/paste a lot of code ;-)
But no, this was my code :-)

Some of those were tests for DCEVM which I first were putting in other test classes, and latter moved to new one (it was easier to copy them than use move), pieces of code of DCEVM, and some programming tasks I was moving to other project (to have list of solutions for people checking first stage of our interview process)).

So, I must say it - I'm a programmer ;-)

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Biggest problem with WhatsApp, Telegram, Allo, Duo and so on

To be honest I was trying not to use any of "new wave" communicators as long as it was possible.

Main reason why I don't like those is the fact that your account is assigned to phone number.
This is strange, and not cool.

First of all you may use those only on mobile devices which has SIM card and phone number...
So if your tablet don't have such you will not use it...
Second if you change your phone number you have next set of problems...
Especially if you are on trip, and change SIM card to local operator to have Internet in your phone.....

So I still prefer Hangouts over those. I may use Hangouts on phone, tablet and PC without any difficult hassle...

I wonder when those will "invent" accounts instead of phone numbers......


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I'm using my iPad Pro to journaling.
Each day I'm trying to write what I done, what I'm happy for, what I learn and so on...

I like also book The Martian ;-)
And each entry of Mark Watney in The Martian starts from date (in Sols).
It would not work for me, but number of days from my birthday? ;-)

So I wrote small Python script which I run on Pythonista.

import time
import clipboard
import webbrowser
import console
import util

#if you want to use it put below your birthdate :-)
birthday=time.strptime("1900-01-11 7:45","%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
now=time.time()
time_from_birth=now-time.mktime(birthday)
days_from_birth=round(time_from_birth/60/60/24,5)


today=time.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")
clipboard.set(today+"\nDay:"+str(days_from_birth))

print("Done")

util.startBundle("pro.writer")

Which is using next script (util.py):

from objc_util import *
from ctypes import *
import sys


def startBundle(bundleId):
   libobjc=CDLL('/usr/lib/libobjc.dylib')
   LSApplicationWorkspace=ObjCClass('LSApplicationWorkspace')
   workspace=LSApplicationWorkspace.defaultWorkspace()
   workspace.openApplicationWithBundleID(bundleId)

So first script is calculating number of days from my birthday.
For now it is 14531.84021 days ;-)

Next this with some additional text is copied to clipboard.

Next using method startBundle from util module it starts iA Writer :-)

My only job is to do CMD-V (on keyboard of my iPad Pro) and start to write about my day :-)

This startBundle may start any of program on iPad, only thing which we need to know is an id of application (here is instruction how to get this ID for known program).

I would really love to be able to instruct iA Writer to create new file and paste my text at beginning of it... but as for now I'm not able to do so ;-)


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Know country behind apps on your phone....

Smartphone knows a lot about its owner.
Knows where this person is.
Knows with whom this person talk.
Can listen. Can make photos.

So, it is better if you know who can know this stuff about you.

I may be little paranoid, but lets be honest, I don't trust companies from countries like Russia or China...

If I need to choose being tracked by NSA or CIA, or by FSB, I will always choose NSA and CIA.
Of course if I can I would like to be sure that any of those track me ;-)

So I looked on apps on my phone.
Among 94 my results looks like this (yep, I counted Google as country ;-))

Country	count
Google	47
USA	13
Poland	10
UK	5
China	4
my own	4
Netherlands	2
Serbia	2
Australia	1
Czech Republic	1
Germany	1
Japan	1
South Korea	1
unknown	1
was Google	1

Happily nothing from Russia ;-)
Sadly some apps from China.
One is Kasa from TP-Link, second is Motoconnect from Motorola. So I hope that I may trust those.
CamScanner is little bit tricky. I'm not scanning top secret documents, but this makes me little bit worried.
Wifi Analyzer too...
I have one app which I don't know from where it is. This is Barcode scanner, don't know why but name of developer sounds like China. Happily this is open source.

But looking on this list I know almost for sure that I will not install Telegram. Sorry...
Will rather go in direction of WhatsApp... but I'm not happy with that.

To be honest I spend near one hour checking from where is given developer.
And in most cases I was checking both info on Google Play, and for whom domain is registered.


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