Nat Friedman

There are a few new mobile apps that scan the barcodes on food products and automatically tally calories and nutrients and make pretty little graphs.

Which sounds amazing and convenient and health-conscious, until you realize that for this to be useful, you have to eat food with barcodes.

If what you’re eating has a barcode, it’s not food. It’s a food product.

So, yes, you registered for a website and installed an app on your iPhone, but you’re still eating processed crap. The only difference is, now you think it’s ok. Now you think you’ve finally started to get that whole nutrition thing under control.

Jamie Oliver gave a talk at TED that’s been going around recently. He showed a clip from his TV show when he brought various vegetables around an elementary school classroom, and the little kids couldn’t recognize tomatoes, potatoes, beets, etc.

Humans have cultivated food and changed food for thousands of years. And that’s ok. But we have to distinguish between the good food inventions and the bad ones. They’re not all good.

Domesticated corn: good.

South Beach Living Chocolate Meal Replacement Bars: not so much.

You know what’s a nutritious way to satisfy hunger? Food!

As a little reminder, here is what food looks like:

And for the meat eaters (not me but I don’t hold it against you):

Alex and I released the third episode of our podcast, Hacker Medley, a couple days ago. This one covers node.js, tornado and WebSockets. Check it out!

I’m really enjoying making a podcast so far. It’s nice to be at the very beginning of a totally new learning curve. Our model is Planet Money from NPR; a short, explanatory podcast that’s edifying and hopefully not too boring but also not packed with stupid in-jokes and gossip.

When I was a kid my dad always listened to All Things Considered in the car when he drove us to school. When I was commuting from Munich to Nuremberg every day on the train, I really started to appreciate podcasts and now I have a few favorites. I think podcasts are a commute-centered medium. Most people listen to the radio in the car, and I think with podcasts you can extend that to other forms of commuting like the subway and walking.  Those lucky people who don’t have a commute probably don’t listen to them very much.

Hacker Medley is just a start, and we have a lot of ways to improve, but that’s part of what makes it so much fun. There’s a great video from Ira Glass about the gap between your taste and your abilities that you should watch.

We have a few cool episodes in the pipeline. We hope they’ll be worth your time. Feedback welcome!

We’re in San Francisco for a month so that my wife Stephanie can get knee surgery from a really, really good surgeon.

Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.

While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”

“It’s a clunk.”

He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)

And then he pulled out his medical recorder and started dictating. “Thirty-two year old male presenting with medial pain and clunk in left knee.”

I thought it was pretty funny, the way he kept saying “clunk,” but when I got home I googled and it turns out that patellar clunk syndrome is an actual medical term.

So then we go to see the physical therapist, and the surgeon tells him what’s up with my knees, and I lie on the table and wait for the therapist to get some supplies.

And after a few minutes he walks into the room with a plunger. Like this:

Which he situates over my knee so as to form a seal, and starts pumping up and down, as if to clear an American toilet (German toilets never clog. Seriously, I have never seen a plunger in a German bathroom).

So this whole knee-plunging frenzy, right on the heels of all that talk about clunking, was in my view pretty comical and I was enjoying it all as a piece of art well worth the physical therapy fee, as long as it didn’t do any actual damage.

That is, until the plunger succeeded in detaching the fat pad from underneath my patella and my knees suddenly felt better than they had felt in years.

The clunk is still there, but I’m looking forward to my next therapy session with these crazy knee geniuses.

I took a plunger home with me, too.

A few recent toys.

Panasonic GF1. This is my new camera and it’s rekindled my love of photography. It’s small enough to fit in a jacket pocket but it takes phenomenal photos and HD video. Because it’s so portable, I carry it around almost all the time. So I’m actually using it, unlike my big SLR, which sits on a shelf most of the time. And since I’m planning to spend a lot of time traveling in 2010, this is feeling like a brilliant purchase.

Here are a few pictures I took with it. I can’t do it justice so you should check out this great review of using it in the Himalayas.

Big thanks to Garrett for recommending this one.

Pinboard. This is an online bookmarking service. It has a pretty basic design but it’s easy and simple and it works. Their tagline is “antisocial bookmarking.” You can share your pinboard bookmarks with other people or you can set them private. I have my bookmarks set to private by default because my bookmark stream is a record of what I’ve been researching lately and I don’t always want to broadcast that to everyone.

Pinboard charges a small one-time fee to join, and I like that too. Paying for a web service that I use makes me feel like they’re not going to sell all my data to some advertising firm when they suddenly realize they don’t have a business model. And they’re not going to put ads in my face while I’m just trying to bookmark things. And I like what they do, so what’s $5, really? The price is based on the number of users they have so it’s gradually increasing. Neat huh?

They have an extra service where they save a snapshot of all your bookmarks (all the HTML, CSS, js, images) at the time you bookmark them so that you never have stale bookmarks. I haven’t signed up for that yet.

Sleep Cycles. This is an iPhone app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to track your sleep. You put it near your pillow and when you toss and turn at night it knows. You set a wake-up time and it rings an alarm to wake you up before your deadline when you’re in a period of light sleep, and will wake up more easily.

It also gives you a little graph in the morning, based on your movements. Here’s my graph from last night:

It’s a cute app and what’s funny is that it’s made me excited about going to sleep at night. Thanks to Mat Wiemann for the recommendation.

Remember the Milk. Ok I’m late to the game on this one. RTM is the biggest todo list tool on the web. For a long time I’ve used a local text file to keep track of my TODOs. But with multiple computers and not carrying a laptop so often and wanting to be able to mark TODOs from my phone, I needed something new.

The great thing about using RTM has been making a completely comprehensive TODO list. Every time I think of something I should do, I put it in RTM, even if I’m not sure what the priority or deadline should be. This is really calming. On some level, I’ve already taken care of the thing, and I can relax about it.

I set RTM as the home page in my browser and whenever I open a new tab I see my TODO list. It’s a lot better than checking twitter all the time. I’ve already got a bunch of stuff done that was lingering for a while.

Today was my last day at Novell.

I joined in 2003 when Novell bought Ximian, the Linux startup I founded with my dear friend Miguel de Icaza ten years ago.

Novell gave me some incredible opportunities and the freedom to work on exciting projects, for which I am very grateful. I learned a lot, and had the chance to work with some wonderful people. It was a great ride.

Now, having just gotten married, and with my latest project, SUSE Studio, out the door, it feels like a natural breaking point and time for something new.

So my freshly-minted wife Stephanie and I are seizing this chance to travel around the world in 2010. We don’t have a fixed itinerary or return date and we want to keep it that way as much as possible.

There’s a lot we want to see and we don’t know what we’ll be able to fit in. So we’re going to see where the wind takes us.

Along the way I hope to find some useful volunteer opportunities, and maybe hack on some just-for-fun projects on the side.

I’ve been working professionally with computers since I was 15 and I love being engrossed in work. But this trip can only really be described as a lifelong dream which we are incredibly grateful to have a chance to do.

We’ll stick around in Munich for a few months first, to deal with some administrivia, and to enjoy the mountains in the winter. After that, there’s no real plan.

It’s likely that when we’re done traveling my next move will be to start a company in the US. It’s hard to imagine myself doing something other than founding a startup. But you never know. I’m open to anything.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to a break and to waking up tomorrow morning to a new adventure.

Also, I just started a podcast, Hacker Medley, which is pretty fun so far. Check it out .

Yesterday I decided to take 24 hours off from the Internet (and the phone).

The fact that this was a significant event that I am now blogging about pretty much says it all.

I’m an Internet addict. I check email, IRC, Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News throughout the day. A lot of my friends do too.

So yesterday on a whim I decided to try a one-day pause and see what would happen.

After just a few minutes, it felt like a vacation.

Stephanie and I were in the Alps over Christmas, so we were, in fact, on vacation. But this was something else — being out of touch was a mental vacation. It felt exciting and remote. What a great feeling! Which I immediately felt like sharing on Twitter. Doh!

I have to admit that I didn’t pick a particularly difficult day to go Internet-free. We were skiing in beautiful mountains. But still, several times I had to suppress the urge to pull out my phone and see what was going on.

It was a little bit hard, but it was mostly great. Relieved of the moment-to-moment choice of being here or on the Internet, I never had to worry about whether I was making the right decision. When we got home, I enjoyed doing my laundry and cleaning the kitchen. What else was I going to do?

Aaron Swartz’s much more interesting and better-written post about taking a month offline came to mind. One lovely detail I remember from that is that he spent a lot more time grooming, cleaning his nails.

The general idea that time offline is good for your mental health is not new or controversial. In fact, it’s amazing how uncontroversial it is, even among the Internet elite. Larry Lessig’s much-admired habit of taking a month offline every year is an extreme example, but I don’t know anyone in the software world who doesn’t admire or even envy a week or weekend spent offline. It’s universally recognized as a healthy thing to do.

We work so hard to build these always-on webs of interconnectivity, and then we sigh with relief when we manage to disengage from them.

The last time I was Internet-free for longer than 24 hours was in 2005 when I stayed in a Buddhist monastery in California for a week. That was a life-changing event for me. But not something you can do all the time.

Now I’m wondering about including a regular “Internet Sabbath” in my life. Maybe one day a week. Or on weekends, no Internet until evening.