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Interesting. Is that doing a direct comparison between Leeds and London?

Also - if you don't mind me asking - why did you prefer your life in Leeds? I do really like it in Leeds, but the lack of meetups and networking opportunities are quite disappointing, so I was contemplating a move to London for a year or two. I'd love to hear about your experiences.

I'm living in Leeds at the moment and I'm working as a technical marketer at a technology driven small business. We've had little difficulty finding quality developers. While wages are 10-15%~ lower here than in London, the low cost of living more than makes up for it.

I had something similar happen myself, albeit not as bad your experience.

While doing a warm up set of deadlifts (I think it was 120kg x 5 - I was working up to 180kg x 5, iirc), I lost my concentration for just a second on the third rep and my form broke down, leading to a pulled muscle in my back. It took me three or four months of stretching and rehab to fix it.

Squats and deadlifts are awesome exercises, but they need to be done with 100% concentration. A single second of lapsed concentration can, potentially, lead to a lifetime of problems.

I still squat and deadlift today, but I'm super careful when I do so. If things don't feel right (e.g., my concentration is slipping, the bar feels heavier than normal), I walk away and go home. I'd rather play it safe than hurt myself badly.

'The quality is also higher than pirated content because they have a fantastic encoding off of source material.'

This couldn't be further from the truth. x264 .mkv encodes look significantly better than the iTunes versions.

For example, from Pacific Rim;

x264 - http://imgbox.com/abwySllC iTunes - http://imgbox.com/adgle3KK

x264 - http://imgbox.com/abm2Jr9l iTunes - http://imgbox.com/acpmeiCt

The difference is night and day, in my opinion. The homebrew encodes usually come with higher quality audio, too.

Funnily enough, I have a Netflix account, an Amazon Prime account, and a Lovefilm account (UK based DVD/Blu-Ray rental service). Despite having all these services, I still prefer to pirate movies because it's simply more convenient and the quality is better.

I did ring technical support to get the issues fixed last Thursday -- apparently a higher level technician will call me back within '10 working days'. Hmm.

I'm not trapped by a 12 month contract, which is why I'm not too annoyed about the situation. My cabinet will get fibre fitted early next month, so I should only have to endure Sky for another month or two thankfully, which is ok by me.

I wish I was having as good a time as you are.

I was on o2 for 3-4 years before being transferred over to Sky last month. Since transferring, I've had nothing but problems. Online gaming pings have gone from 20 -> 50, download speeds have fallen 20-30%, my connection frequently hangs (Youtube is near unusable), and I now have issues loading websites from time to time (I had to refresh Google 3 times before it loaded earlier). To make things worse, Sky is charging me £15.50 a month while o2 was only charging £7.50.

Thankfully, BT is installing fibre in my area so I should be able to jump over to plus.net sometime soon. I can't wait.

Good article. I've always wondered how many more calories are burned while sitting versus standing. I'm quite surprised by how much of a difference standing makes, to be honest.

Unfortunately, for the moment, I simply cannot use a stand up desk full time. I spend around 8 months out of the year travelling. At home, I have a stand up desk, and I really love it. When I'm travelling, though, I spend most of my time sitting while working at a desk, which isn't too good.

One thing I've found useful is to stretch for 5 minutes for every hour of sitting. People look at me like I'm crazy, but it makes a demonstrable difference. Kelly Starrett goes into great detail about the effects of sitting and how stretching can help in his book 'Supple Leopard'; it's worth picking up, in my opinion. (http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Supple-Leopard-Preventing-Per...).

The couch stretch is particularly good at counteracting tight hips caused by sitting. (http://fitnerdz.com/2013/05/31/fitnerdz-couch-stretch/). Get into position, hold it for 100s, swap legs, hold it for another 100s, and repeat for every hour of sitting. It makes a huge difference to the legs, hips, and back.

Oh, thank you, sir! Didn't expect to get a reply from the cofounder of Beeminder.

I don't think it's possible for to fully explain how big of a difference Beeminder has made in my life. I was much like some of the folks in this thread (as in, starting projects but not finishing them; struggling to get stuff done), but since implementing Beeminder in my life, my productivity has gone through the roof. It's also given me a lot of self confidence in my abilities, which is pushing me to take on more ambitious projects and ambitious tasks.

The focus on averages is definitely what I like most about Beeminder.

On more than one occasion, I've fallen asleep without writing my daily 750 words, only to wake up 20 minutes later in a cold sweat, rushing to my laptop so that I can quickly write my words so I can get back to bed.

With Beeminder, that's not a problem. I usually have reserves built up, or, alternatively, I can simply put in some extra time the next day.

Case in point, last Friday, I went to the doctors for a routine asthma checkup and they gave me a flu shot that completely knocked me out. It effectively ruined my plans for the day. Instead of worrying, I went home, rested, and put in some extra time on Saturday instead. It's simply not possible to do this with the Seinfeld method.

One thing I forgot to mention in my earlier post is that I heard about Beeminder through Nick Winter's book 'The Motivation Hacker'. http://www.amazon.com/The-Motivation-Hacker-Nick-Winter-eboo...

It's cheap, it's a quick read, and it's got some great information inside. I made some notes while I was reading the book - I've uploaded them here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9f6xofet38ka1x2/Nick%20Winter%20-%...

If anyone's on the fence about buying it, it's definitely worth picking up, in my opinion. There's a lot of great stuff in there that I didn't cover in the notes.

Cheers again, man.

If they do misinterpret my data, I'll simply go elsewhere. If there isn't an alternative, I'll try to build my own.

I haven't had to input my credit card details into Beeminder yet, so I don't see how they'd be able to take money from me, anyway. I don't use the pledge feature, and I've yet to fail any of my goals, so I've not had any problems on that front.

I really like the Seinfeld method. It works surprisingly well for me.

I first came across it when I started using 750words.com, a journaling website. The website prominently displays your streak at the top of every page, and there are achievements and rewards for building up longer and longer streaks. At the moment my streak is at 572 days, which is testament to the effectiveness of the method.

Unfortunately, the Seinfeld method, in my experience, isn’t perfect.

For me, it’s only really good for small activities that can be done daily for small amounts of time. I’ve tried using it for work projects on several occasions (for example, doing 2 hours of extra work a day) and I’ve failed every time.

I recently came across a fix, though - http://beeminder.com

Beeminder is essentially a more configurable version of the Seinfeld method. I first tested it on a goal that I’ve tried (and failed) to do several times before - ‘read and make notes on business books for one hour a day, six days a week’. Not that hard, but for some reason, I’ve always fallen off the wagon with this particular goal.

With Beeminder, I found it effortless. There’s something strangely satisfying about adding data onto the website. I ended up completing 30 days without much difficulty.

Since then, I’ve added a ton of extra goals with Beeminder, and I’ve been accomplishing them surprisingly easily. I’ve been gradually ratcheting up the difficulty on each goal (for example: I recently started with the goal of ‘spend 3 hours working on own projects every week’, and I slowly increased the goal requirements at a rate of 3 hours extra per week; currently, I’m doing an extra 24 hours a week without much difficulty on my part), which I find works really well.

I’ve also started using Beeminder for other goals like ‘meditate for 5 minutes every morning’, ‘go to the gym 3 times a week’, ‘cook at least 5 new recipes every week’, 'spend 30 minutes cleaning the apartment 3 times a week', and it’s worked incredibly well for each of them.

Beeminder has inspired a massive change in me in a surprisingly short amount of time. I’ve always thought I had a procrastination problem, or that I’m simply lazy, but Beeminder is showing me that this isn’t the case. I recommend giving it a go.

You can get it here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.pooley.beta....

You'll also need to install the 'Ultimate Clock Widget' app from here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.vineetsiroh....

Enjoy!

"Oh and of course you can 'customize everything' and here you have 4 examples of the most ugly homescreens I have ever seen on a mobile phone."

Agreed. I really don't like the look of most Android customisations. I think default Android is pretty gorgeous, though.

My homescreen currently looks like this - http://i1.minus.com/iidfIgCTZsXEX.png

The only thing I've added is the widget: everything else is stock. I'm very happy with the way it looks.

Fuck off? There's no need to be so rude.

In the future, use ihackernews.com. It provides a mobile friendly link to stories using viewtext.org. The viewtext.org link for this story (http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.cockeyed.com/pers...) works perfectly on my phone.

Google hasn't stated how many units they have sold, unfortunately.

There was a post on XDA developers from a guy claiming to work at the US UPS shipping centers that stated that Google shipped out 17,000 units for the US launch (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=34430979&...). Whether that figure is accurate or not is anyone's guess.

Ah, apologies. For some reason my brain isn't working too well tonight.

I had it in my head that my contract was costing me £9.60 per month while it's actually costing me £12.90 per month. Doh.

Personally, I don't find the lack of LTE to be a problem at all.

Three's DC-HSDPA network has been excellent with my Nexus 4. I've done a few speed tests and I regularly get between 10-18Mbps down and 2-3Mbps up. It feels really snappy and, at £9.60 a month for a rolling 30 day sim only contract with unlimited data, it's cheap as hell.

I love Hipmunks interface, but it usually fails at finding the cheapest available price.

I've used flightfox.com, a crowd sourced flight finding service, a few times and I've been surprisingly impressed each time. The guys on that site have found me some incredibly cheap flights that I have no idea at all how they found. I've saved a ton of money using it.

It's great to pay someone a small amount of money to handle the pain in the ass that searching for flights is.

This has been known about for a long time; ugly sells.

People are more likely to trust something that looks amateur since it feels more like a recommendation than an advert.

Mr.Green, a well renowned CPA Marketer/Blogger, wrote a brilliant article about this. You can find it here - http://www.mrgreen.am/affiliate-marketing/the-ugly-truth/

As someone who has spent $100,000 on advertising over the last few years, at least $10,000 of which was on the Plenty of Fish platform, you're very wrong.

You only need about 1,000-10,000 impressions to get an idea of how a creative performs. Often less. As you get more and more used to each particular advertising platform, you also get a feel for how an ad is performing.

In my business, a difference of 0.02% CTR could mean the difference between earning 30% ROI and 50% ROI - the words "test everything!" mean everything to me and my results.

By all accounts, Foxconn factories seem to treat their workers significantly better than other Chinese factory owners. Several reports have shown this.

The reason why the media chooses to focus on Foxconn, and Apple in particular, is for the easy clicks.

I'm not saying that conditions in Foxconn factories are ideal - they're not - but they're much better than some of the truly awful factories that can be found in various developing countries. It's a real shame that the media chooses to ignore them.

Heh, yup. It's funny how the media neglects to mention how quickly wages have risen over the past few years WITHOUT any pressure being put on the companies by the media. These pay rises were scheduled a long time ago - they were only just put into action because of Chinese New Year a few weeks back.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens once the Chinese workers have to go back to their farms. The average Chinese farm earns about 300-500RMB per month (http://seeingredinchina.com/2011/04/27/how-poor-are-chinese-...); will the NYTimes write about that, too?

Foxconn have raised their wages significantly over the last decade and a half; This is hardly unexpected.

This is how Foxconn's wages have looked since 2004 --

2004: 380 RMB

2006: 400 RMB

2007: 600 RMB

2008: 700 RMB

2009-July 2010: 900 RMB

July 2010: 1200 RMB

Oct 2010: 2000 RMB after 6 month probationary period at 1200 RMB

April 2011: 2390 RMB after 6 month probation period at 1590 RMB

2012: 2590 after 6 month probation period at 2190 RMB