Tag: automation

  • Almost half of U.S. jobs could be replaced by the computer in 20 years

    Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization

    A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.

    Our incoming kindergarteners will be facing this world by the time they are 25.

  • Drafts for iPhone and iPad is the app you never knew you needed

    On its surface, Drafts appears to be yet another note taking app for iOS. Once you dig into it, you begin to realize the power that it yields. After your start it (which is relatively quick even on my aging iPhone 4) you are greeted with a new note or your previous note.

    http://dl.ryancollins.org/blog/draftsnew-m.jpg

    Once you’ve finished typing your note is when the magic begins.

    Drafts has a bunch of built in actions, which allow you to process your note in various ways. The simplest actions do things like save your note to Evernote, or use your note as an email. You can also Tweet your note. I’ve found the Dropbox actions to be very powerful. You can apply templates to your note. For example, my blog posts while I’m working on them have a distinct format:

    Title: This is the title of the post
    Date: 2013-08-01 08:00:00
    Author: mr.rcollins
    Category: Software
    Tags: some,great,tags
    
    This is the body of the blog post
    

    To create a new post in Drafts, I start a new note:

    This is the title of the post
    Category: Software
    Tags: some,great,tags
    
    This is the body of the blog post
    

    When I am finished with the note, I use a Drafts Action to save to my drafts folder in Dropbox. The action names the file by the first line in the note, appending a .markdown extension. It then creates the rest of the formatting through the following template before saving it to Dropbox:

    Title: [[title]]
    Date: [[date|%F %T]]
    Author: mr.rcollins
    [[body]]
    

    http://dl.ryancollins.org/blog/draftssavedraft-m.jpg

    And now I have the blog post formatted correctly. I do have two complaints with the program. The first is that it uses it’s own sync service instead of Dropbox or iCloud. The second is more of a pet peeve, the app isn’t universal, so I ended up paying for the iPad and iPhone version.

    It’s now such an integral part of how I work that I put it in my dock, alone, not in a folder of apps. I use it to send tweets, create emails, start blog posts, and append to notes in Dropbox. The price ($2.99 for iPhone, $3.99 for iPad) was worth it to me.