I tried the few sports I found compelling. I know how to ride a bike in some very rough conditions. Maybe it will come in handy some day.

I tried getting interested in cars. I know the systems inside and out, and that’s very useful when communicating with my mechanic, but that’s as far as it goes.

I tried music. I know scales and stuff, and can usually understand why I like or don’t like something. Couldn’t stick with it though.

Art! I like doodling sometimes, but I could never charge though a serious piece.

I thought I was a “gamer” for a while, but I realize I only enjoy a few world-changing franchises and a smattering of indie games. I also actively dislike vast swathes of self-identifying gamers.

I’ve always been surrounded by words. For a time, I thought my hobby was writing. I seem to do well enough when I have something to write about, but that’s where it ends. Not that I mind the small income my few ebooks bring in, but it’s a random collection of things, and I can’t produce worthwhile text on demand, no matter how much I force myself to write regularly. Everything unspontaneous comes out forced and boring. Most spontaneous stuff is best shared on Twitter where I don’t feel compelled to surround the spontaneous bit with hundreds of words worth of filler.

You probably noticed all these pictures. I made an effort to take good pictures. My pictures improve constantly. But I don’t mind if those facts aren’t true in some situations. I don’t mind taking a shameless snapshot, and I don’t mind if a picture is worse than the one before it. I have fun doing it. I can’t say the same for all the other hobbies I tried.

So I’m going to double down on photography. And fortunately for me, flickr just gave me a terabyte of free storage.

1. I’ve had my box of Guild Wars–the original–sitting on my night stand for years. My experience with it back in 2005 helped form my current feelings on mainstream games. It wouldn’t run on my computer. I emailed them to see if I could get a refund so I could go and buy a simpler game.

They said no, citing the policy that said I couldn’t get a refund on an opened package. The policy could only be viewed after opening the package and installing the game. I couldn’t even resell it because I had to use the product key to find out it wouldn’t run. I finally put it in the trash where it belongs, with renewed strength in my conviction that I would never buy another $60 game. Indies get all my game money and have for a long time.

2. I need to get angry more. It’s too easy to fall into a trap of clicking around on social media and forget that I had ideas and ambitions and hobbies. I don’t want to be that cynical guy taking passive-aggressive shots at the ambitions of others just because I never perused my own.

3. The justified and contained rage and cynicism had a tendency of leaking out on to people who didn’t deserve it. #2 is the solution to #3. I will aim it at the proper targets with care and precision in the future.

I know why they do it. Their business models depend on advertising, which depends on page views.

So they try to generate as many page views as possible from each visitor. I don’t know how well it works, or if it’s sustainable. I make most of my money from book sales, not ads, and I don’t see any other way. You either sell books using your blog as lead generation or you send visitors down a dark path of mindless clicking.

That sounds very abusive to me. I don’t want to abuse you.

Let me show you what I’ve done with Digital Scofflaw:

I’ve cut it down to three sections: the colorful header, so it looks good in thumbnails, links to the front page, and gives you a way to search; the body, which is what you came here for; and the footer, which gives you some things to do when you’re done.

Things you might notice:
1. Easy to read. The body of the site is nothing but the things you ultimately came here to see, with lines just the right length to make reading comfortable.

2. No sidebar. People click my ads more than they click things on my sidebar. This is probably a credit to the work of WordAds and their partners to bring high-quality video ads to you, but I did try to fill the sidebar with things you might actually want to see. But few people did, meaning it was nothing but a distraction. Sidebar matter is now on the bottom for when you finish doing what you came here to do.

3. No menu. I didn’t have much here anyway. I condensed it down into a few links in the footer.

After all, what did you come here for? You were enticed to come and read a string of words, and I was trying to send you away before you could even get to the first line. So I’ve done away with that.

Some preliminary tips:

1. Limit mental overhead. I don’t even bother trying to run my own equivalent services for these things. If you’re clever, rich, and/or connected enough to get by with your own designers, A/B test suites, payment processors, and other things these sites do, then you don’t need this guide.

2. Never go exclusive. Ever. Flexibility is your most powerful tool.

Writing

Start a blog. Preferably with WordPress.com and a parked domain. This saves you the mental overhead of managing the technical bits, and you can sign up for WordAds. I get about $1 per 1000 impressions. This builds slowly, but it adds up even early on. I make enough each month from ads to cover the $8 yearly fee to point my domain to WordPress.com. This also means I can easily switch to a WordPress.org blog if I decide to leave the hosted service.

What do you write about? Just be helpful. Document things you’ve learned, like I did with my post on avoiding scams on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That post gets over 1000 pageviews a month. It took 15 minutes to write.

That’s the nice thing about advice writing: you’re writing from hard-earned experience, so it comes easily, and tends to be nearly perfect in the first draft.

Sell your most detailed and helpful posts as eBooks on Smashwords. People don’t seem to mind paying for a blog post in eBook form. They’re buying the format and the content, not just the latter. You can set the price to free if you feel bad about making money from your work.

Smashwords’ owner published three extremely helpful guides for free that you’ll regret not reading: Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, Smashwords Style Guide.

Sell directly on Amazon’s KDP until they stop being a troll and let Smashwords distribute to them for you. Don’t burden yourself with KDP Select. Most people won’t see enough borrows to warrant losing the flexibility.

Music

Here’s my 3 step process for releasing a piece of music:

1. Upload it to Bandcamp and sell it for one dollar.

2. Create a video of it and upload it to YouTube, and link the Bandcamp track in the description. YouTube will helpfully tell you how to upload your audio file as a video when you try.

3.Upload it to SoundCloud and put the Bandcamp track in the field for the Buy link

The idea here is to increase the odds of someone finding your music. Enable monetization for your YouTube account and you can even make a little from ads that pop up in and around the videos.

There are services that will package and upload your music to every music store in existence, but they cost money. Avoid spending money even when you’ve made a name for yourself and can afford to spend $13-$50 on something like CDBaby. Services that work on commission are the friend of all creators. Stick to them for as long as you can.

Photography and Other visual art

Sell prints in a lot of places. I make fractal art. Here’s a list of all the sites I use for selling art: Redbubble, FineArtAmerica, Fotolia, DeviantART.

This list is not exhaustive. Use SimilarSiteSearch to look for others.

Across it all, make sure you’re linking back to your blog in every site you publish on. All of them provide a profile with a website field. Your blog, hosted at a domain you own, is your home base. It’s where you have the greatest control and flexibility, which is why you try to get as many people to follow through to it as possible.

Of course, it’s still hard to actually sell something, but now you know how to make things for sale with minimal headaches. I still recommend my Twitter promotion method for lead generation. It’s less effective than PPC and SEO, but it’s free, easy, and the results of your effort are less ambiguous than with other methods.

How’s that working out for you?

Let’s look at a different approach. I’ve applied for exactly six jobs since finishing college just before the 2008 global economic crisis hit:

1. Target: Interview.

2. Local promotional products company: Personal email from the CEO letting me know exactly why they weren’t hiring.

3. Local self-storage company: Interview.

4. Automattic: Personal response from the team leader with suggestions on how to have a better chance in the next hiring round.

5. Home Depot Personal letter.

6. Library: Volunteer opportunity. I helped the IT guy install wireless network cards on the library computers and gained some valuable experience.

Across all that, I’ve worked on building up a CV doing odd jobs and working on my own publishing business. That business is in the double digits of profit now, and it’s steadily increasing.

For every application, I studied the employer (or at least its industry), crafted my résumé for them, and sent it in. The results speak for themselves. I could be more ambitious and send out a lot more custom applications, but I’m in a life situation where I have the luxury of time and space to build a business for little cost.

And if you don’t have that luxury? All the more reason to take care with each application. You’re not getting a job in this economy if you’re blasting a resume out to 10,000 companies just like the other tens of millions of people who are out of work.

I may never end up with a steady traditional job, but I learn a great deal about myself and the business of potential employers with every application, and those new skills and experiences feed into my growing business and employment prospects.

So replace the Ancient Wisdom with a New Wisdom: spend as much time becoming more employable as you would spend being employed.

I was floored by how much faster it was. And I’ve used it ever since.

So what made me come back to Firefox? Chrome is starting to show its age. It’s from that brief era when software developers were in an arms race of simplification. If less than 99% of users used it, it got cut. And the tools to restore the things you need went into hiding.

But the biggest thing I noticed about the modern Firefox is its performance. Chrome’s resource creep was more of a resource lunge. It’s slow to fully close, slow to become responsive when it’s opened, hangs constantly, and shows ads for new Google products in the new tab screen on a regular basis.

The new Firefox is snappy and smooth, and closes and opens in seconds. It starts out minimal and lets you move things around with ease. Chrome feels even slower and less responsive now that I’ve seen the 2013 edition of Firefox. That, combined with the performance issues, sent me away from Chrome.

I’m not saying you have to make the switch back, and I won’t suggest that you’re a bad person for using Chrome. Maybe it still works for you.

But you should take another look at Firefox. Chrome appeared back when Blackberry was still the leader in smartphones and the iPhone was still an impractical gadget only a hipster could pretend to love.

The world has changed. This is the perfect time to take a look at what you’re using and see if something better is available.

Still using Google? Check out Bing and DuckDuckGo. Still using an iPhone or Apple PC? See what Microsoft is up to. Still on a Windows PC? Ubuntu showed up around when Firefox did, and has changed at least as much. Kubuntu is a great option if Ubuntu’s changes are too bizarre for you. They were for me.

We’re in a new era where operating systems are secure, browsers are powerful, worlds fit in your pocket, and everyone can publish whatever they want and find an audience.

It’s time to get out and explore the new world.

It’s a common story.

I’m going to give you a foolproof way to get attention without spam, scams, ad buys, or anything annoying. It won’t cost you anything but an hour or three a day, and the results of your effort compound.

1. Make a new Twitter account for your project. This is why I made @DigitalScofflaw. You should keep your main account to a minimal following so you can keep in touch with people you’re close to. Your new project account is where you’ll peek at the growing stream from time to time looking for interesting tweets. This is one hell of a muse when you’re short on ideas.

2. Identify yourself. This is important. Follow the new account from your main account, and include your main account name in the bio with a note that it’s run by the person behind it. The “Followed by” in the profile popup and the explicit identification on the new account lets old friends know the new follower is you.

3. Set up your profile, header image, and icon. Make sure everyone who looks at it knows what it’s about. @DigitalScofflaw is just a doppelganger that follows a lot more people than the main account, so the profile information is more or less duplicated.

4. Be interesting. For every tweet about your project, post a few interesting tweets. There’s no Grand Ratio. A lot of Twitter accounts only post content from the owner’s site and seem to get plenty of retweets, favorites, and followers.

5. Use the new account to follow some people who follow your main account. Keep it under 100 a day. Follow slowly and intentfully, focusing on people you know will be interested in your project. A lot of them will follow back.

5. Trawl. Find the people who followed back. Go to their followers and find people who you think might be interested. Please do keep the rate tame. Don’t break 100 a day. Twitter will ding you if you go too far, and people will report you if your follower/follow ratio starts to look spammy. This is a marathon, not a race. When someone follows you, slowly work through their followers looking for interesting people. You’ll learn to spot the worthless spam accounts from the bio, so this will get easier.

Tools. I use Buffer with bit.ly set up as my link shortener, along with Buffer’s Chrome extension. This combo makes sharing links seamless.

Digital Scofflaw’s account has reached a tipping point where it gets a handful of new followers a day without me doing anything. I still work to grow it manually, but it won’t be long before manual growth becomes pointless.

Spammers who use this method will get what they deserve thanks to Twitter’s amazing anti-spam team. Real people with something worth sharing will get the audience they deserve.

Push your mouse wheel down over this link and come right back: http://mkronline.com/feed/

Welcome back!

One of two things happened:
1. A bunch of text showed up, probably with a line at the top that babbled on about XML.
2. Your were offered a way to subscribe

#1 is kind of a problem, and you shouldn’t have encountered it. Most browsers pick up RSS feeds and make them useful to humans. #2 is great. You can add it to your favorite feed reader–and you’ll want one after you finish this article–and get updates from all your favorite personalities.

Let’s try this on a different site. Push your mouse wheel down on this link and come right back: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/movies/feed

At this point, you might be catching on. If you follow the movies feed of your favorite site for keeping up on movies, you don’t miss a thing, and you don’t have to check the site all the time. Posts on a blog linked on something like Twitter or Facebook get lost in the stream, but this is delivered straight to you.

You might recall this from several paragraphs up:

Pretty much every site has an RSS feed. For now–we’ll get to that later.

This is later. RSS, this great way to keep up, is slowly slipping away as fewer people use it. You probably didn’t even know it was an option. And as fewer people use it, web designers are less likely to keep it in updates.

So how can you keep it alive? Use it! Google’s own RSS reader is going away as the company refocuses on other products, but there are plenty of good alternatives. I personally use Feedly, but Newsblur gets a lot of praise.

This is a good site that popped up after Google announced the impending shutdown of Google Reader: http://www.replacereader.com/

It’s a list of Google Reader alternatives ranked by votes. You can usually find the RSS feeds for a site by looking for an orange icon, or by pressing Control and F at the same time to bring up a search box, which you can use to search for RSS. A lot of sites put it at the bottom of the page.

Build quality

The first thing I noticed was the lack of a grip, but I didn’t feel like the camera would fall out of my hands. A close inspection of the Canon logo reveals a textured surface, which functions well enough as a grip for such a small and light camera.

It’s hard to believe the body is plastic since it has that cold metal feel when you pick it up that you don’t usually get with plastic. It’s well-balanced and feels sturdy, so it seems to vanish once you start using it. Use the wrist strap, or it’ll vanish for real.

Low light performance

There’s a common thread in reviews I’ve seen that it takes poor shots in low light. I haven’t experienced this in real world usage. It won’t automatically go all the way to 3200 ISO, but it still takes good (if noisy) photos at that high sensitivity. You’re exchanging picture detail for exposure, and it’s worth it in cases where you need it. The backlit CMOS almost makes up for the sensor’s tiny size.

Video performance

I made two test videos. The first was from just before the supposed Mayan apocalypse. I took a video of the moon in heavy wind at full zoom.

Image quality is what counts

I found a review that went to great lengths to examine the technical precision of the produced images. I don’t think that’s particularly useful.

Here’s a sampling of the pictures I’ve taken. You can click through to see the full pictures on flickr.

Conclusion

The Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS outperforms its price tag, but it’s still a low-end point and shoot camera. The shots are a bit noisy at 100% zoom, but are still perfectly usable even at the highest ISO setting. The image stabilization works well, and it can shoot sharp pictures without a tripod if you squeeze the shutter button gently to take shots.

This camera takes good pictures in a wide range of situations with minimal fuss, and fits comfortably in a pocket. This is what you buy a point and shoot camera for, and it fills that role admirably. You can get a bridge camera or entry level DSLR if you need an inexpensive camera that does more than a pocket camera will ever be capable of.

It’s good enough to where I feel comfortable with making it my main camera. I’ll sell my old point and shoot after I get my DSLR, and after CHDK is ported to this one.

Update May 9, 2013: CHDK is now available, and it works perfectly.

The trouble, unfortunately, is that you’ll hear every opinion from “it’s horrible” to “it’s perfect” no matter what combination of cameras and lenses you think about. The “Nifty Fifty,” or the legendary cheap fixed focal length lens, is a perfect example.

“It fell apart on me” vs. “I’ve had it for years”

“It takes better pictures than expensive L glass” vs. “you have to stop it way down to get a good picture.”

If I consider a zoom, half the people you see think everything cheaper than $2000 is garbage, while the people using the sub-$2000 lenses seem quite happy. Looking at more expensive lenses doesn’t help either. You’ll see everything from rabid complaints to happy users whether the lens is $1,000 or $10,000.

No amount of looking at charts and figures helps, because the results for lenses in the lab sporadically appear in field shots found on flickr.

I’ve spent hours looking at lenses and cameras, and I still have no clue.

All that said, I did manage to extract two possibilities:

1. A Canon t4i with the 18-55mm kit lens
2. A Nikon D5100 with the 18-55mm kit lens

Going by the reviews, the Nikon D5100 edges out the Canon 60D and Canon T4i in image quality. And I’ve also gotten the impression Nikon has a wider range of good cheap lenses, compared to Canon’s range of passable cheap lenses. The kit 18-55mm lens, Nikon’s cheap 35mm prime lens, and the cheap 70-300mm zoom lens will cover most of my needs for the price of the T4i and the 18-135mm kit lens, or the 60D with any kit lens.

I’m probably going to go with the Nikon and lenses, just as soon as I save enough for it. But it would be nice if it were easier to find information that reflected the needs of the person looking, as opposed to reflecting the biases of the person offering advice.