• 4 books read: Ocean at the End of the Lane, Tenth of December, The Golem and the Jinn, Ubiq
• 2 books re-read: Getting Things Done, Mindfulness in Plain English
• 1 book half-way through: Embassytown
• 2 computer games completed: To the Moon, Bastion
• 3 tabletop games played: Dixit (3 sessions), Pandemic (2), Eldritch Horror (4)
• 1 used minivan purchased
• 1 article, 1 abstract submitted
• 61 km ran
• 1000+ toddler photos taken
• 0 tedious field trips made

NIH orientation started today. My commute is 90-plus minutes each way, and the first four months are mostly inpatient. I will have to wait until retirement for another run like this.

In the olden days, back when I could keep all my photos on Facebook, photo management was simple. I didn’t have that many to begin with; the ones I did have were grouped around events—birthdays, vacations, etc—and easily organized into albums. I also didn’t care much for privacy, or backups.

Then two things happened: iPhone 4S, and Dora. Every day became a photo-op, with two cameras in our pockets ready to shoot. The DSLR was still there for big trips and Dora’s modeling yet another outrageously expensive dress. This gave us:

• hundred of new photos and hours of video each month coming from four different sources (our two iPhones, a Nikon DSLR, and friends with their own cameras);
• no time to sort them;
• more respect for privacy, but at the same time a need to share baby photos with everyone;
• panic attacks whenever I thought about having to organize the mess of file names, formats, storage, and backup solutions.

We needed a good method to collect all the photos, organize them for easy access, retrieve them quickly for show-off purposes, and back them up both locally and in the cloud.

Having children usually comes at a point in your life when you care less about money and more about your time—though your progeny will do their best to relinquish you of both. The willpower-depleting effects of a toddler’s tantrum are also well-documented. No surprise then that many of the tools listed below have at some point sponsored a certain Mac-centric podcast that has destroyed many family budgets³. No regrets, though—it all works.

Collecting, with Transporter Sync

For simplicity’s sake, I like systems with multiple inputs to have one central gathering node. Unfortunately, our only desktop computer is a ridiculously noisy four-year-old Windows PC which sits in a usually occupied guest bedroom. The fans that buzz with the sound of a thousand bumblebees instantly disqualify it from a job as a media server, so I had to use my Macbook Pro. Thanks to Transporter Sync, that was easier than I thought possible for an SSD-only machine.

Transporter, similarly to Dropbox, has an iOS app that automatically uploads new photos to a predetermined folder. Unlike Dropbox, there is no monthly subscription—you pay once for the device, and keep using it as long as the hard drive is working. It can also act as a NAS-lite—having access to the folders kept only on the remote hard drive without them occupying the limited space of an SSD, through a Transporter Library folder.

Organizing, with Hazel

A folder full of unsorted cryptically named JPEGs and RAWs is less than useful when your parents want to see all the photos from that trip to Naples back in January.

Enter Hazel, the Swiss army knife of file automation. With the rules I’ve set up, it renames photos based on the date and time taken, tags them according to the device that took them, and moves them to the proper Year/Month subfolder. It does the same with our DSLR’s RAW files, placing them in a separate folder. Since the laptop only has 256 Gb, it moves any files older that three months to Transporter Library, the “special” folder kept only on the external hard drive.

We therefore have the last three months’ worth of photos and videos organized by year and month on the laptop, and our entire collection on the external Transporter hard drive.

Access, with Picturelife

In theory, we could get to all those photos using the Transporter iOS app, but we’re not a masochists. It’s slow, ugly, and not meant for browsing media.

Thank FSM for Picturelife! It sucks up all our new photos and videos from the Transporter—though we’ve excluded RAW files since we do have to pay for all that data²—presents them in a nice web and mobile app interface whenever we want it, and can pass them on to Facebook, Shutterfly, Flickr, or wherever else we choose. It will also, from time to time, send you a “this day in the past” email, with photos taken years ago. When you have as many unprocessed photos as we do, it is a great discovery mechanism.

Did I mention it can send photos to Shutterfly with just a couple of clicks? I still have flashbacks of the last holiday season, progress bar dragging glacially, the upload finishing just in time for me to miss the shipping deadline. Good times.

Backup, with Backblaze and SuperDuper!

Keeping everything on the Transporter and Picturelife as on-site/off-site backups would probably be enough for some. Unfortunately, counting on a VC-backed company that might at any point pull an Everpix to hold all our photos does not seem optimal⁴.

Which is way Backblaze and SuperDuper! keep copies of all those photos as a part of my general backup system¹. If you have a Mac and an extra external hard drive, you should also turn on Time Machine. This way, there are three local copies of all the photos, RAWs, and videos (Transporter, SuperDuper! image, Time Machine), a cloud backup of the same (Backblaze), and an easily-accessible collection of JPGs and videos (Picturelife).

Setting this up is neither cheap nor simple⁵, but it gives you quick and easy access to all your photos, has several levels of backup, and—most importantly—requires little effort to maintain.

Fun fact: The average Maryland to DC commute is the second longest in the US, right after New York. I should know. Mine will be 90+ minutes, come July 1st. Last week, while I was finishing paperwork at my new employer’s Bethesda offices, the looks people gave me went from incredulity to pity on seeing the Baltimore address on my driver’s license and hearing my explanation that no, since my wife is still at Sinai and usually just walks to work, we won’t move. It’s better for me to take one for the team, I’d say, than have both of us suffer hellish beltway traffic from some midway point.

I could write an essay on how taking one for the team is not entirely true, but the title of this post says “podcast”, and it’s already the second paragraph, so here is my point: My commute will be long. I will need to fill that time with something. Sometimes, that will be strangers talking into my ear about things I don’t understand. Here is my list of strangers, carefully curated after ten years of listening.

Monday: Mac Power Users

Comes out every Monday morning, like clockwork. Great for learning about new hardware, productivity apps, etc. but podcasts are not the best medium for going into the minutia of somebody’s workflow.

Tuesday: Back to Work

Go read this. Having Merlin Mann talk for an hour all by himself would be good enough, but Dan Benjamin—the other half of BTW—is the best podcast host in the business. By using a simple formula, it is easy to mathematically prove that their show is the best podcast ever created.

The first 30 or so minutes are laden with inside jokes and obscure references, but even that is fun after you are several episodes in.

Wednesday: Wait, wait…

It airs each Saturday, but I like alliteration, and there is nothing else good on Wednesdays. I was in Chicago once while it was being taped, but was too late to get a ticket. Now that Carl Kasell is retiring, it’s unlikely I’ll ever be at a live show. So it goes…

Thursday: The Talk Show

Daring Fireball is a better blog than TTS is a podcast—John Gruber and some of his guests tend to ramble—but you can get good insights on baseball and bourbon.

Friday: ATP

One word: Siracusa. There are two other co-hosts, whose main job is not to screw up too badly. They do it well.

Saturday: The Alton Browncast

The John Siracusa-slash-Bret Terpstra of food. Yes, Alton Brown is a national treasure.

The Sunday potpourri

This is the time for irregular shows, or ones that don’t always have something of interest. In order of preference:

• Radiolab • Fact: this is the best radio show ever created, and an even better podcast.
• The Incomparable • For geeks, by geeks. Or is it nerds?
• This American Life • Any co-production with Planet Money is a must-listen. Otherwise formulaic.
• Systematic • Hit-and-miss, though usually a hit.
• Technical Difficulties • A tech DYI show with show notes better than some books.
• CMD+Space • I only listen to it when an interesting guest is on, which is once every couple of months.
• The Pen Addict • A podcast about pens.
• JOP podcast • The only oncology podcast worth listening to; the medical podcast landscape is dreary.

In the last two months, two of my must-listen podcasts, Systematic and Mac Power User, have had medical professionals on as guests. I don’t usually listen to medical podcasts—Twitter and saved PubMed searches are big enough firehoses—so I thought it would be interesting to hear how my more experienced colleagues use technology. Two of the three episodes were underwhelming, one was stellar.

It started with Brett Terprstra and Dr. Pamela Peeke on Systematic. She has several books targeted towards lay public, and the episode went in the same vein—broad advice on nutrition, well-being, etc. I cringed more than once, but that was to be expected—public health information relies on overplaying the risks and simplifying facts to the point of absurdity¹. The one thing I could agree with was how important meditation can be, as mindful meditation might decrease physician burnout. Negative points for not mentioning Mindfulness in Plain English as essential reading, though I haven’t read Dr. Peeke’s own recommendation, The Miracle of Mindfulness.

I had higher hopes for Episode 169 of MPU, since Katie Floyd’s and David Sparks’s guest, Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, has an excellent productivity blog. Alas, McSparky spent more than half of the show being fascinated by the minutiae of what doctors do. Which is better than what followed—long periods of uncomfortable silence while the unprepared guest clicked through every app in his menu bar to see if there is anything worth mentioning². There wasn’t.

Then another episode of Systematic came on, with Dr. Don Schaffner, a microbiologist³. It was outstanding. Brett was a better interviewer than David, and avoided getting too side-tracked by his guest’s interesting work. But ultimately, the show was good because Dr. Schaffner had useful tips and app recommendations that did not simply regurgitate the latest round of MPU/Mactories/Macdrifter/etc. sponsors. His paper review workflow gave me several ideas I will work on during the holiday downtime. He also suggested a promising contender in my quest to find headphones that will survive more than 8-12 months of intensive use.

One more thing for me to do during the downtime: promote Zotero. Between the developers fumbling Papers 3 and Mendeley being taken over by an evil corporation, Zotero coupled with a few extensions is the best reference manager on any platform. Coming in 2014.

After 18 months of intensive use, here are some of the apps left standing on my iPad 3, sorted by category. I like to think I’m a semi-advanced user, so for some of them I have also listed simpler alternatives. It goes without saying that you should download all the free iWork and iLife apps.

Medicine

MKSAP 16

• For: all medicine residents
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free (if you bought online MKSAP access)

MKSAP question bank. No-brainer if you are studying for your internal medicine board or MOC exam. Less page-flipping and instant gratification. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow you to highlighting or annotate the explanations. Also, it can’t make custom quizzes, can’t review unanswered/wrong questions, and doesn’t allow you to copy any of the text to your notes. Lot’s of cants, but it’s the only MKSAP app available. Free if you purchase the electronic version of MKSAP 16.

Download MKSAP 16 from the app store here.

ACP Guidelines

• For: all interns
• Recommendation: ok, sort of
• Price: free

It seems like a good idea, and the content is great, but it is more of a branded PDF reader than anything else. Doesn’t have search or favorites, and you have to download each recommendation one by one. The download is fast, but good luck getting what you need without internet access. So, good for night-time reading, particularly if you’re an intern, but not a good POC tool.

Download ACP Guidelines from the app store here.

Stanford 25

• For: everyone
• Recommendation: just OK
• Price: free

If you haven’t heard of Stanford 25 before, see this TED talk and see the blog. It’s another good, if ugly, night table app.

Download Stanford 25 from the app store here.

Productivity

Things for iPad (or Omnifocus)

• For: everyone
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $19.99 for Things, $39.99 for OmniFocus

Whether you’re a GTD fan or not, this or it’s more powerful and more expensive sibling OmniFocus are a must-have for anyone shuffling between more than two areas of responsibility. It still hasn’t been updated for iOS 7, but is very functional. Only two missing features for me, really: there are no nested tasks/dependencies, and you can’t filter by more than one tag.

I’ve been thinking about switching to OmniFocus, but this works well enough for me that the hassle of complete overhauling my system wouldn’t be worth it. Not to mention the >100$ price tag.

Download Things for iPad from the app store here. You can find OmniFocus for iPad here.

Boxer

• For: everyone who gets more than 5 emails/day
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $0.99

The best mail client on the iPad. Apple’s Mail.app was OK until I realized I spent way too much time scrolling through my list of 20 IMAP folders whenever I wanted to move an email. Boxer works with Gmail, IMAP and Exchange accounts, has smart email sorting, and integrates with Sanebox.

Download Boxer here

Dropbox

• For: everyone
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free

If you use Dropbox on your PC—and you must—then this is a no-brainer.

Download Dropbox for iOS from the app store here

iThoughts HD

• For: nerds
• Recommendation: OK
• Price: $9.99 for either

I found Tony Buzan’s book on mind mapping as a first-year medical student and used the hell out of it for my biophysics, chemistry and genetics coursers. As the material got more complicated, shuffling huge stacks of A3 paper became unwieldy, so I went back to plain old Cornell notes for biochemistry et al. This app is what got me back to making maps, this time when writing review articles and planning out other research. Also good when contemplating the GTD 50,000 ft view.

Download iThoughts HD for iPad from the app store here. It’s prettier new cousin Mindnode 3 is available here

Calendars 5

• For: all busy overachievers
• Recommendation: ok
• Price: $6.99

The default calendar used to be ugly and impractical. With iOS 7 it’s just the latter. This is a good replacement. Fantastical for iPad would be nice, though.

Download Calendars 5 from the app store here.

Drafts

• For: advanced users
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $3.99

Quick note-taking and automation rolled into one. I use it as the default inbox for anything and everything, mainly by appending a dump.txt file in my Dropbox. There is a separate iPhone version that is just as useful.

Download Drafts for iPad from the app store here.

Pinner

• For: pack-rats
• Recommendation: ok
• Price: $1.99

Pinboard is an excellent almost-free bookmarking and discovery service. There are plenty of iPad clients available, but Pinner seemed to be the most cost-effective. I haven’t regretted the purchase.

Download Pinner from the app store here.

GW Mail

• For: anyone who is forced to use GroupWise
• Recommendation: meh
• Price: $9.99

I have to use GroupWise email for work. This is the only decent client I found for iOS. Stopped looking for a replacement since my last day of residency is less than six months away.

Download GW Mail here

Reading

Reeder 2

• For: serious feed readers
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $4.99

I’ve been using RSS feeds since the days of Bloglines (circa 2001) and switched to Google reader after the first big redesign. It’s sad that Google decided to murder it instead developing its potential as a social service. Feed wrangler is a good replacement, Feedly is a free one. Reeder 2 is the best iPad feed reader there is, and works well with both.

Download Reeder for iPad from the app store here.

Instapaper

• For: everyone who reads
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $3.99

If you read any text that’s longer than 500 words with any regularity, you need a service that will keep track of the articles and remove all the annoying cruft surrounding the text. Instapaper is the first one of its kind, and the best way to read articles on it is on an iPad.

Download Instapaper for iOS from the app store here.

NextDraft

• For: everyone
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free

Ten good articles hand-picked by an expert hand-picker and delivered (almost) every weekday. My only source of news for the past six months.

Download NextDraft from the app store here

ReadQuick

• For: dabblers
• Recommendation: ok
• Price: $4.99

The second book from Tony Buzan that I read was on speed reading. This app will flash words from any article you find online or in your Instapaper/Pocket queue one-by-one at a set rate. Good for those who are too lazy to swipe.

Download ReadQuick from the app store here

Writing

Day One

• For: everyone
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $4.99

A journaling app. I don’t use it for the Dear-Diary types of texts—though I have no doubt it would be perfect for that. Instead, I use it to keep an archive of meeting and lecture notes (usually started in Drafts and sent to Day One), with an occasional milestone in between. Feature request: multiple journals.

Download Day One for iOS from the app store here

Byword

• For: beginner iPad writers
• Recommendation: ok
• Price: $4.99

If you want to write a long text on an iPad and don’t need automation, text expansion et al. then this is the app for you.

Download Byword for iOS from the app store here

Editorial

• For: advanced users
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $4.99

If you want to write a long text on an iPad and like mucking about with workflows, text snippets and Python scripts—which I most certainly do—this is your only choice on any platform. This will become essential next July when I start my long commute.

Download Editorial from the app store here

Social

Twitterific 5 or Tweetbot

• For: everyone
• Recommendation: meh… you might want to wait for the newest version of Tweetbot to come out
• Price: $2.99 for Twitterrific, $2.99 for Tweetbot

If you are on Twitter—and if you are a physician you really should be—please get a decent iOS client. The official one is definitely not it. Tweetbot used to be until iOS 7 came and made it look and feel ancient. Twitterrific is a good—if slightly annoying—substitute, with the added benefit of being universal (i.e. iPhone and iPad with the same purchase). I’m using the old version of Tweetbot and waiting for the new one, since Twitterific tended to make a mess of my position in the stream.

Download Twitterrific 5 here and Tweetbot for iPad here

Facebook

• For: everyone who uses Facebook (why?)
• Recommendation: my wife likes it
• Price: free

OK, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Download Facebook for iOS here

Skype

• For: everyone away from family
• Recommendation: OK
• Price: free

This is the international default for long-distance communication, I guess. It gets choppy and drains the battery, but it’s the only thing my mom knows how to use so I’m stuck with it.

Download Skype for iPad here

Games

Letterpress

• For: everyone who can spell
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free (with in-app purchase)

An excellent turn-based word game. The only multiplayer game I play with any regularity. You need an in-app purchase if you want to play more than two games at the same time, but it’s well worth it. I have five going on right now.

Download Letterpress here

10000000

• For: nerds
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $1.99

Bejeweled meets a 2D RPG. Hours of fun, even when you get to 100000000000 or however many points.

Download 100000000 here

Aquaria

• For: adventure gamers
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $4.99

A 2D side-scrolling action-adventure game set under the sea. At my pace I will finish it in about two years, but it’s great even in 15-minute increments.

Download Aquaria for iOS here

Shopping

Deliveries

• For: serious shoppers
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: $4.99

Forward an email containing a tracking number to a special email address. Boom, you can now track your package through this app, with push notifications if you’re into being interrupted whenever a case of -diapers- Wild Turkey is delivered to your front door.

Download Deliveries for iOS here

Eat24

• For: serious eaters
• Recommendation: OK
• Price: free

Good app for ordering food in the Baltimore area. Don’t know about rest of the country.

Download Eat24 for iPad here

Hipmunk

• For: world travelers
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free (you pay for the plane ticket, though)

The best flight comparison engine there is. Find the most affordable and least annoying plane route. Also does hotel rooms, which I haven’t tried.

Download Hipmunk for iOS here

Entertainment

Netflix

• For: everyone with a Netflix subscription
• Recommendation: OK
• Price: free

I have used this app exactly once, to watch a couple of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while waiting for an Amtrak train. Well worth it, though.

Download Netflix for iOS here

AppleTV Remote

• For: everyone with an Apple TV
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free

I don’t have my original remote any more. We assume Dora ate it. This app is even better, since you don’t have to muck around with the tiny remote buttons when entering your wifi password or searching Netflix.

Download AppleTV Remote here

comiXology

• For: everyone who reads comics
• Recommendation: strong
• Price: free (the app, not the comics)

The only way to read comics on an iPad.

Download comiXology here