We launched Kit a little over two years ago with a simple idea: help people discover the products worth getting — and create a new kind of experience where your creativity and knowledge actually earn you money. We were excited to see the idea take off as YouTubers, Twitch streamers, bloggers, and creators of all types used Kit to share their favorite products with their fans and followers.

Today, we announced that Kit will be joining up with Patreon.

At Patreon, team Kit will continue the commitment to connecting creators and fans, by building tools to enable creators to share their life’s work and making it easier to reward creativity and expertise.

It got me thinking back to the early days of Kit.

Like many other communities before it, Kit was inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog and by the counterculture movement and thinking started by Stewart Brand in 1968.

The Whole Earth Catalog was sort of a Google before Google and online review sites were around: people coming together to create a publication to help one another with tips and products to make life easier. “Things worth getting”, Kit’s tagline, was inspired by lines from the opening page of the 1969 Catalog:

Function

The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.

An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:

1. Useful as a tool,
2. Relevant to independent education,
3. High quality or low cost,
4. Not already common knowledge,
5. Easily available by mail.

CATALOG listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff.

Purpose
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

We found ourselves aligning with these original ideas and purpose. One of the first things we did at Kit, almost before we wrote the first line of code and did the first user study, was to write down our purpose and our values and how we wanted to treat one another and to treat creators (and how we saw ourselves as creators too — photographers, writers, designers). We set out not only to build a successful product and team, but a long-lasting community as well.

We started thinking of Kit as a modern-day Catalog: what the catalog was in the late sixties in the medium that was possible then (a magazine put together by hand), we were doing in 2018 with tools and community and technology that we have access to now.

The strange magazine — part tools catalog and part how-to book — was re-imagined as an online community in Kit where creators and experts could share their learnings about photography, arts & crafts, DIY, health, music and so many more topics. People came to help people: creators and experts helped amateurs and those that wanted to know more. Build tools for the individual, share that knowledge with whomever is interested and allow people to find inspiration and conduct their own education.

The Whole Earth Catalog turned fifty this year.

In a bit of coincidence, later this week, there will be an event in San Francisco with Stewart where he will look back on the impact and long legacy of the Catalog. (I wish I could be there!) It is wonderful to pause and think of how many ideas his movement touched: the early internet, the maker movement, health and wellness, online communities and, of course, Kit.com itself.

Thank you to all who helped work on Kit over the years: Camille, Will, Grant, Armand, Tom, John, Miles, Aloke, Jen, Jico, Eli, Kevin, Mia, Tim, Leslie and Julia.

In the words of the Catalog: Stay hungry, stay foolish.

FYI: There’s a new tool I’ve been using for the past few weeks and that I have been absolutely loving. It happens to be called FYI.

As someone that has to navigate documents across a few different Google domains (personal ones, side projects, companies) and probably as many Slacks, it’s always been frustrating to find the right document at the right time. It never seems to be there where you are.

I’ve seen coworkers come up with unique solutions, from bookmarking frequently-used ones to saving links on their Desktop, as well as my all-time favorite hack: leaving all the docs open all the time in all the browser tabs.

For all of Google Search’s power searching the web, something big is missing in experience when it comes to searching Google docs and spreadsheets. Nothing is intuitive.

Navigating to docs.google shows you docs — but not sheets. Strangely, the search feature in docs attempts to autocomplete results for sheets too. Of course, it will only show you five randomly-sorted results with no other context within. Navigating to sheets.google shows you sheets, but not docs. And at least it is consistent: you can search and have it autocomplete results for docs in this view. Going to drive.google is cool, sort of, because you finally have the concept of folders, but still have no idea how to look for them or use them. Which ones are private to me alone and which ones are folders that we’re sharing with specific teammates? If a file is shared with me, why do I have to “Add it to My Drive” to find it later?

Add to this that we’re all increasingly sharing Google docs links and PDFs in Slack — yet one more application and interface to search for the thing you wanted.

Enter FYI, a tool designed as a Chrome extension that allows you to search for documents across Drive, Slack, Dropbox, tabs and others.

Looking for a document for one of your weekly 1:1s? Find it from within Chrome, either through the Previous 7 days list or by quickly searching for it. Looking for a document you’re all working on because it has had updates since the last time you saw it? There it is: top of the list view. Sent out a Google Form and people have filled it in since last night? Same: under Today, first in view so you can catch up on all the new data collected.

I particularly love that it is designed as an extension and that it just takes up your ‘New Tab‘ view. When you’re about to open up a new document, you start by opening a new tab anyway, so this is a perfect way for a product to intersect behavior.

It’s the best use of ‘New Tab‘ action since…well, ever. I’ve tried various Chrome extensions over the years, but always seem to uninstall them after a week: they don’t provide enough value, and they take up too much memory and slow things down. FYI was the first one I immediately understood and wanted to keep.

By bundling the first version of the product as a Chrome extension, it plays nicely with where I spend most of my time and where I go first to look for documents. Each new Chrome profile I spin up (I have one for each domain) has the extension loaded locally within the profile. By having authentication at the Chrome-level instead of on a website somewhere, FYI keeps things cleaner and more efficient.

When it comes to document search now, I no longer have to keep switching between different apps to figure out where a thing was. It got me thinking that perhaps this is the start of an interesting trend in unbundling. Take a common feature from apps that hasn’t been doing the job (in this case, the search box and, in this case, for years) and pull it out to make it more useful.

I only occasionally write about new tools that I love, and this is one of those times. I’m not at all surprised it was created by friend Hiten and his colleague Marie at Product Habits. The care taken to understand the user, the problem and the experience that one would want shows immediately. It hooks you in from the first-time experience by clearly laying out what it is solving, and by showing the solution and document search results on first try. It’s a product where your first go-around is likely to be the same as your one-hundredth go-around, so once you see it that first time, you’re hooked forever.

One sign of how much you accomplished in life is how many people from all different walks of life remember you when you’re gone. Of many aspects, that’s my most favorite about John Perry Barlow’s life: he’s touched so many people in so many spaces from music, to politics, to technology.

Another is one’s ability to blend two different concepts from two different fields together — that’s how we create new ideas after all. And last is the ability to know things well enough to be able to explain it plainly to others and to use your words to lead. For instance, even though he may not have had a background in engineering, he understood enough to be able to explain it well and in simple terms to others. What a beautiful gift.

I believe Barlow did all three really well. This weekend, in remembrance, I went back to find a few good essays by Barlow (and one podcast h/t @msg).

• Crime and Puzzlement, 1990.
• The economy of ideas, 1994.
• A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996, “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.”
• When Worlds Collide, 1997.
• Virtual reality and the pioneers of cyberspace, 2015.

My favorite is the passage where I believe he was the first to connect the Gibson term cyberspace with what we now know as our present-day global telecommunications network. From Crime and Puzzlement:

Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all connected to one another. Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the Net. It extends across that immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer William Gibson named Cyberspace.

Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the 19th Century West. It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse (unless you happen to be a court stenographer), hard to get around in, and up for grabs. Large institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to the point of sociopathy. It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty.

The words ring just as true now as when they were written in 1990. Large institutions still claim to own the place, just as in the 90s and as with the old Wild West. But there are still natives out there on the edges, working to get out their ideas of freedom.

In 2015, exploring Teshima, I came across Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives du Cœur. Inside a small beautiful cabin overlooking the bay, you’ll find a work of art that permanently houses recordings of heartbeats of people throughout the world. Boltanski has been recording these heartbeats since 2008; you can record your own heartbeat here and you can listen to the beats of other visitors who’ve visited this place in Teshima. Boltanski’s primary purpose in art has been to remind us of our own mortality. When measured like this, our heartbeats represent not only the passing of time, but our past and our experiences as they become coded into the pace of the rhythms. We like to think our own beats carry a code that’s unique in the world, shaped by our experiences. When we leave our heartbeats behind in Teshima, an island in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea, we’d like to think it’s left behind forever. It’s the first time you think of leaving your heartbeats behind in the world, independent of any agency or hospital that’s recorded yours before, and has owned yours before.

I’ve been leaving my heartbeats behind on the web too. And for the past few years, I’ve been working to archive the heartbeats I’ve posted on various online services. It took me a little bit of trial-and-error to figure out which service to host these on. I eventually just picked Github, because 1) git respects all your original file formats; 2) you can keep a revision history of your data as it grows and becomes richer over time; 3) you can easily push to multiple remote locations to distribute your data and keep it in sync, meaning if Github ever were to go away, you’d have your data in other places too.

Usually, I back up my data privately, because in a few cases, they reveal private information like the email addresses of my connections. Whenever possible, like with del.icio.us (archive-del.icio.us) and my Twitter history (archive-twitter), I’ve been putting them up openly. They were open to begin with, so why not keep it that way?

This brings me to my Tumblr blog, which I used from 2007 to 2017. Tumblr was a beautiful platform for so many reasons. It wasn’t just a blog to me — because there were other blogs and tools out there to host content. At the time, I’d also already had a WordPress blog going. But I used Tumblr for my photos, my early NYC tech scene posts and my foursquare posts. This is largely because Tumblr was New York tech and New York tech was Tumblr.

All the changes at Tumblr the last few years, with Yahoo’s acquisition and with David Karp leaving got me thinking about the great connections and memories Tumblr helped me build, but also once more about the mortality of my work online. I researched a few different backup tools, and eventually found one, tb-ng, that worked well enough to pull the hi-res photos and post content (it won’t pull your likes and reblogs). I pulled all my content out: archive-tumblr. If you don’t want just the archives, but to host them back up on a live blog, you can import your old Tumblr into WordPress like I did.

It was beautiful to take a few minutes to step back through that time.

I started looking around for other tools that could do this for me on other old services, like Flickr, and I came across Archive Team. They’re a group of hackers that, in their words, are:

[…] dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions — and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever. Along the way, we’ve gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we’ve gotten the message out: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

Between efforts like this one and the Internet Archive, it makes me happy to know many other people want to preserve our history like this and to save our creative work from obsolescence and to have us all remembered. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The beauty of the internet is that many different people from all over the world can work together to help you preserve your art and your work. And, depending on the tools used, you can save copies of your data in islands all around the world — resilient to any single node falling over, just as the internet originally intended it to be.

At the turn of every year, I try to do a bit of digital housecleaning. It’s nice to do this every once in a while: get all your files, your backups and other security details in order across all your devices and services.

While going through this most recent sweep, I started wondering how best to organize my photos. I’ve taken about 25,000 photos (and only about 900 videos) on my iPhone since 2012. The ones I took from 2007 to 2012 are all in an iPhoto Library file somewhere in a backup drive. So that’s probably another 20,000 photos, conservatively, taken over those years. Then, I easily have another 25,000+ photos in high-resolution form from the various cameras I have owned over the years.

Reviewing this history, I’m reminded of Cartier-Bresson: “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” In the digital age, I think to myself, should this be 100,000 photographs? I think this not only because I don’t believe I’m a very good photographer yet — but also because it might take me another 25,000 photos before we figure out how to safely and effectively store them forever.

For the photos coming from my cameras, I’ve been using Lightroom to organize and store into my backup drive.

Until now, though, the photos taken on iPhone I’ve just been leaving on my phone. However, I started running out of space on the phone. I was backing them up into Dropbox, but I’m out of space there too (really Dropbox, a 1TB limit for personal use? Why?). So I moved them all into Amazon Drive. If you have Prime, you get free unlimited storage of all photo files in hi-res format. It’s definitely the best deal going. The Amazon Photos user interface needs quite a lot of work, but the syncing is so much faster than the other services. (At least, it feels that way to me; maybe it’s just because I have the upload/download bandwidth and concurrent limits set to max.)

It feels like this is a process once every couple of years: pick a service, move everything over to that service, hope that you don’t lose anything, hope that there are no proprietary file formats or file names or strange organization structures. As a part of this review, though, I realized I prefer to organize them in a certain way “on disk”. Because the file sizes are so big, it makes sense not to have them all in one big “Camera Uploads” folder. I group photos into folders by source, and then by year. For instance, each camera gets its own top-level source folder, underneath which photos from each year are grouped. The individual photo files are named according to the date they were taken. This allows me to manually find photos much more quickly, and it allows me to sync only the subset that I want to across devices. A source isn’t just my camera though, because photos friends send me can get their own top-level grouping. I try to make sure whichever editing or backup tool I choose respects this hierarchy. They can hold whatever other metadata they each want, as long as the basic structure is one and the same across applications.

One side effect of this whole reorg is that it basically means that my workflow for my digital camera is now the same as for my iPhone. The phone has truly turned into one of my cameras. As a photographer, no matter how big the memory card, I take all the photos off after a shoot and then I use the best tool possible to organize them in the way I want to organize them and another tool to post-process them the way I want them to look. Why should the latest camera, iPhone X, be any different?

Another side effect is that my Fuji digital camera and the iPhone X are just two cameras, two devices. In fact, the way I see it now is that they are two sets of lenses: just as in the past, I might have carried a wide and a portrait, I’m carrying two lenses now: whatever is on the Fuji and the wide-angle ƒ/1.8 on the iPhone. They both have great lenses, they both have WiFi, they both take great shots I love (and other people do too, I hope) and they both make me creative.

So, in addition to the storage, why shouldn’t the workflow for both be the same? Onto the next 25,000 photos we go.

How do you keep your ever-increasing set of photos organized?

Here’s a #kit of some of my reads in 2016:

Of these, my most favorite reads of last year were Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Jerry Neumann’s Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 80s. Even though the latter is not a book, it was so good that I made an exception and added it to my book list.

Outside of books, I read a lot online. You can also follow my other reads on Pocket – https://getpocket.com/@naveenreads

I spent a lot of time in 2013–2014 exploring ideas at the intersection of data and health. I sketched out a few ideas, and built a few different prototypes, some of which I told people about — like my personal API, api.naveen — and some of which never left my local development environment and test iPhone. I wanted to see through a few themes: make it easier to capture data, make sense of the data, and lastly, see if by bringing together data, I could learn something about myself.

My deepest explorations were around tracking and capturing data — that’s always the hardest step, it’s always the one that is hard to do authentically (without adding gamification, without sucking in data form other sources, without cheating by attempting to make sense of signals when none exist). So I coded up what I thought was a better journal. “What are the things Google can’t see about me?” was a question I often asked myself. My smart journal was designed not only to take input from various means — via API, via photo upload, via voice and via free-form text input which it would then later make sense of — but to do it in a seamless, non-intrusive way.

I also believed in the idea that we should build better software around things we already do: not necessarily wear a new device around our hips, but to build a better weight scale, a better monitor for medicine, a better journal.

I hacked away at a few concepts around the journal — and I became convinced that my ‘Journal’ would have the simplest of views possible: a Twitter-like free-form input box where you could type whatever you wanted and it would log your entry smartly and add appropriate sensor metadata it knew about. (Enter “70 bpm” at the end of your run home, and it would automatically tack on all the other signals it knew: timestamp, location, weather, if other audio was playing on your phone, shown on a timeline alongside a photo you took then, &c.)

But, I don’t always run, and I don’t always think to enter things like heart rate and when I took some medicine. So, convinced I needed a more specialized journal that I would deliberately touch at least once a day, I built an alarm clock.

Why an alarm clock? For me, it satisfied a few things:

• Everyone sleeps (total addressable market = everyone. HA!)
• It passes Larry Page’s toothbrush test (a service that you use at least twice a day)
• It’s the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you touch at night — imagine that as an entry point for everything else you might want to do as a service: “Hey, how was your day? Hit me with a mood and a journal entry. Tap in emoji.” “Hello, tomorrow morning is going to be packed for you. Mind if i tell you to go to bed at 10:30pm tonight and set your alarm for the morning? You’ll need at least 6.5 hours if you’re going to make the gym and then your first meeting.”
• The alarm clock — right alongside the weight scale — are the two things most people have and need no additional training on. They are perfect examples of devices already in the room, and that you don’t have to get into the habit of wearing and recharging. (See “Thereables”).
• It also allowed me to explore other features: wake up to music instead of a random horn; get rid of snooze.

I moved on from exploring these ideas for a while — to come back to some other time perhaps. Around the time I got going with our company Expa, I came across Sense by Hello. It perfectly captured the problems I was trying to solve: easy to log your sleeps, and something that you could interact with daily. I love that the device has been in the same form nearly all that time, too: packed with the right sensors to help you sleep and to keep track of how well you did that. I am particularly a fan of the softly rising music to wake you up (you’re never “afraid to wake up” with music as opposed to a blaring horn).

A Sense device has the kind of Apple-like big company magic that makes you wonder how a startup did it — soft glows, hover gestures to wave it to silence in the morning, packed with sensors like air quality and temperature.

Their latest addition — Sense with Voice — is something I am looking forward to really getting into. Voice is a natural evolution of the product — you tell the computer what you want, and the computer gives you what you want. The key benefit of voice the team’s talked about quite a bit is that a mobile phone’s screen (and any distracting notifications) will no longer be the last thing you stare at before sleep. I am also hoping that voice-as-interface is one of the stepping stones to bring them out of the sleep-at-first focus and into other aspects of our health.

[Reposted from ∞: Making sense of sleep]

From the island of Naoshima, a day trip to Teshima to see more art.

In all the trips I took to Japan, I never got a chance to take a trip to Naoshima until just this past year. I only stayed one evening on the island, but it was made that much more memorable because I got to stay in the Oval.