A bunch of new books

published on Jul 02, 2009 by Paolo Dona

Given I’ve chosen to have no TV set at home, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I finished a couple of great inspirational books that I really suggest you to read:

1. 4 hour work week (the best book I’ve read in years!)
2. The magic of thinking big (and why being a positive person is actually a good thing)

And here a bunch more I just ordered on Amazon:

1. The E-myth revisited
2. The 22 Immutable laws of marketing
3. The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less
4. Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium

These should fill my free time in the next weeks.
I love inspirational books, and enterpreneurship-oriented ones.

Have you guys got any ideas for my next order? Anything interesting you’ve recently read?

Back to a proper Blog

published on Jun 30, 2009 by Paolo Dona

As my readers surely noticed, in the past 10 months I run a micro blog consisting of a subset of my Twitter updates.

I found the experiment interesting, and it’s amazing how much information you can put in 140 characters. At the same time I find it a bit limiting, for the following reasons:

1. I can’t use twitter for ‘real’ twitter updates, as it pollutes the blog
2. I couldn’t find a straightforward way to filter replies
3. I’d love to write some more, some times
4. The blog doesn’t get indexed correctly, as the twitter integration is done via Javascript

That’s why I’m switching back to a normal blog. There are a bunch of things I’ll post about in the forthcoming weeks:

• My entrepreneurial experiments
• My career development
• The life of “the Italian guy”, in London

Hope you enjoy the change and keep the conversation open with your comments!
You can still follow me on Twitter, and subscribe to my feed.

—Paolo

File Encoding Conversion

published on Feb 27, 2008 by Paolo Dona

This morning I struggled a bit to find a decent encoding converter for osx… from time to time I get stuck on encoding issues so I wanted to have something ‘friendly’ to handle this kind of problems…

I found Cyclone based on Apple Text Encoding Converter (look for TEC) but it kept failing in some strange ways (It gave me weird messages about converters creation). After googling for a while I gave up. It seems there are no good-free-GUI alternatives on the net…

Sometimes the solution is closer than you think and the good old iconv rescued me in a snap:

[paolofingus]$ iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 utf16_file.txt > utf8_file.txt@

you can list the available encodings with:

[paolofingus]$ iconv -l@

The cool part is you can use it in conjunction with TextMate’s Filter Through Command feature thus enabling in-editor lightning-fast conversions.

The only missing part was discovering the original file’s encoding, in order to pass iconv the correct -f option. The not-so-reliable way I used was to open the file with Firefox and inspect the encoding using the View → Character Encoding menu item.

That’s it, problem solved.
If you know better ways to do this… let me know!

To my email driven friends

published on Jan 10, 2008 by Paolo Dona

I wanted to report a great video I discovered trough www.presentationzen.com. I hearthly share its content so… keep reading!

I have a bad relationship with email. It’s not that I don’t like them but I think that checking the inbox too often is a compulsive action, not a necessity.
I hate those email clients which notify me when a new mail arrives. It’s distracting… it’s totally unproductive… I mean, the power of the email is that you can receive messages while offline or busy and you can read them when you want to.
Whenever I find myself repeatedly checking my inbox I feel like a dog waiting for a cookie. And even when people are not compulsively checking their inboxes… they’re probably scanning their past messages in order to organize their days.
Scanning messages over and over again. Not a good practice if you want to get things done.
Checking emails every couple of hours is more than enough.

Are email clients becoming our new to-do lists? Should we spend so much time on our email inbox? Should our lives be email driven?

On this subject Merlin Mann gave us a great presentation inlined here:

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.