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Cian Mac Mahon is a podcaster, storyteller and student in Multimedia specialising in Film Production. Take a look at some of the stuff he's done recently.

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Day One, A month later

A while ago, I blogged about the new diarying application that I was using – Day One.

A quick refresher – Day One is a suite of apps which works across iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches and Macs. Since my daily computing workflow stretches across an iMac, Macbook Pro, iPad and iPhone, if I didn’t have a way to easily access the journal across these, I’d probably stop using it quite fast. Indeed, any time that I’ve tried to have a journal in the past, either paper or digital, I’ve been stopped by not being able to write an entry at the drop of a hat. My drawers are littered with attempts, from simple notebooks to fantastically ornate hand bound hardbacks.

In that last blog post, I spoke about the features present in the app. Since I’ve posted that, one main new feature has been added – tags. You can now use #hashtags to tag your diary entries on iOS, for easier searching later. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to carry over to the Mac app yet, although I presume that they are working on adding this feature to the Mac.

Over the past month, I’ve been using the app quite a lot. While I haven’t been using it daily, as only really enter something in if I feel it significant enough, I’ve written 20 entries, most of which include location and weather information (automatically created, if you post from an iOS device) and some of which include a photograph. I’ve had the app remind me at 9pm each night that I need to write something in it, and it helpfully provides a little piece of inspiration (“Write a letter to a dead loved one”, “This is not a pen, it is a prayer”) each time you begin writing on the Mac. I generally ignore these.

One thing which I find annoys me is the inability to add location data via the Mac app. So what happens is I write the entry on my Mac, import the photo (generally through Photostream in iPhoto), open the entry on my iPhone, add location data, and am then finished. Surely the Mac should let you add location data, if you want?

So, yes, it seems that over a month later, I’m still using this journal. This means that it has beaten most previous diary attempts I’ve made, bar perhaps the Benrik attempts. Let’s see how well I’m doing, 28 weeks later! I’ve set iCal to remind me, on June 9th 2013.

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Day One: Day Three

Six years ago, I was part of a ‘cult’ by the name of Benrik. It took the form of a yearly diary, entitled This Diary Will Change Your Life. It was a little bit of absurdist fun, an art piece. You didn’t write in this diary what you did each day, but the Diary (always capitalised) told you what to do. The Diary started off with daily challenges, but after two years became weekly.

I followed this guide to “extreme life change” for three years, and I think that it had a serious effect on my sense of humour, now. The instructions were written in a deeply dark, dry and sarcastic manner, often hilariously inappropriate. From “Today, discreetly give people the finger all day” to “Today, burn this book in public”, the Diary supplied me with endless good experiences and blog-fodder, and only resulted in me knocking on the door of a religious cult once.

But the Diary served a bigger purpose then this – it gave me somewhere to speak my mind, before twitter. The space for each day was tiny, but this just made me be short and precise. Unlike twitter, my Diaries were private. If I flicked through them now, I’d see bullet-pointed lists instead of paragraphs, sticky notes for when I needed more room, but above all, somewhere to be confessional.

Then Benrik stopped.

Since then, I’ve tried multiple times to start a journal. I have bought amazing looking notebooks, made out of canvas, handmade paper and leather stitching, and failed after two weeks each time. For some reason, I just forget in a way that I never did, when it came to the Diary. Until, hopefully, now.

I’ve bought the Day One apps for Mac and iOS, and after three days of playing with them, I hope that these are things to finally get me back into journaling again, years after the Diary finished.

Screenshot of the diary app, Day One

Every single day, it sends a notification to my iPad, iPhone and computer, telling each that it is time for me to make an entry. So far, this nagging has worked. I really hope that it continues working, because as this is probably going to be one of the busiest years of my life (and certainly the busiest of my life thus far) I’d like to keep record of the little things, as well as the bigger achievements and failures.

Day One seems to be pretty brilliant at this. As you can see in the screenshot above, on the Mac it just gets out of the way and lets you right. Hit a button on your menu bar, and you get a little textbox that you can confess your hopes and fears into. It reminds me of the tiny Benrik boxes of yester-year. Maybe nostalgia will keep me going.

On the iPhone and iPad, the experience is similar. Except it allows you snap photos, add locations and will even automatically record what the weather was like when you were writing. That’s pretty cool, and might keep me typing on coolness alone!

Oh, and if this doesn’t turn out to be in at least the top 10 busiest years of my life… well, I’m not sure how I’ll survive all that much longer.

We’ll revisit Day One on November the 25th, that’s 25 days from now, or if we count from the day that I began, 28 days later.

I’m setting iCal to nag me right now.

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I just got the coolest thing in the post…

Every year, I take part in a few gift swaps (similar to Kris Kindle or Secret Santa) run by a site set up by the Reddit community, RedditGifts.com. Every year I then do a video unboxing of whatever super awesome thing is sent my way. This year, I didn’t have a video camera in the post, but I did have a lovely Lumix compact SLR to play with, so prepare for some seriously low depth of field.

The thing is, I am consistently blown away with the amazingness and creativity of the things that people send me. When I send gifts, I always try to find the coolest, most out of the way thing that I can, sometimes even personalised, and package it in a cool, unique way.

The guy or girl (it’s all anonymous) who got me this year for the Dorm Decorations Swap completely blew anything I’ve ever attempted to make out of the water. This is insane.

 

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Judging hotels by hair dryers

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, on my tour around the USA, and I’ve noticed one thing: you can accurately judge almost any hotel simply on the hair dryer they provide to their guests.

If you are in a nice hotel, chances are the hair dryer you are given will be a full sized thing, which blows warm-hot air at quite a strong speed. If you are in a terrible hotel, you’ll be given a very compact device which breaths red-hot wafts in your general direction, resulting in your scalp getting burned. Somewhere within these two sections lies each and every hotel, and it is usually quite accurate.

There are one or two other small things you can check to judge the adequacy of your lodgings. Firstly, staying on the hair theme, the shower is a great way of judging an entire hotel without actually staying in it. If the shower looks tall enough for an average person to be able to stand under and wash him or her self, the hotel experience will probably be quite nice. If the showeree has to duck under a badly pressurised stream of water, however, chances are the rest of the establishment will leave something, or some things to be desired.

One final method I will leave you with: weird misspellings found around the room. Take this odd sign I found in a hotel, for instance.

bear basics

The image of a grizzly bursting through the door with a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush is almost too strong to ignore.

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