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“Natural” Mouse Scroll for Windows 10

By Bobby Voicu

After around 10-12 years of using just MacOS and the occasional Linux, I finally got a Windows machine again, to use for some light gaming on Steam.

One of the things you get used from the world of Mac, for good or for bad, is the “natural” scrolling for the mouse. Unfortunately, in Windows 10, if you don’t have a touchpad, you don’t have the option in Settings.

I found this solution, using Windows Registry:

Use the Windows key + R keyboard shortcut to open the Run command.

Type regedit, and click OK to open the Registry.

Browse the following path: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID Quick tip: On Windows 10, you can now copy and paste the path in the Registry’s address bar to quickly jump to the key destination.

Expand the key (folder) that matches the VID ID of your mouse — for example, VID_0E0F&PID_0003&MI_01.

from WindowsCentral.com

There’s a little bit more than the steps above, so go to WindowsCentral for the full list of steps, in case you have this issue.

Install Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi

By Bobby Voicu

Later edit: Now Visual Code is part of Raspberry Pi OS, here is how to install it.

From here:

Open a new terminal. If you need super-user rights (you probably do), then you can enter sudo -s and press return to enter a super-user session. Run the installer for your current distribution:

APT instructions

(including Debian, Raspbian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint)

. <( wget -O - https://code.headmelted.com/installers/apt.sh )

Press the return key. Once the installer has completed, you should have a “Code – OSS” entry in your desktop program list.

Headmelted

If you want to use Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi, this is the easiest solution I’ve found.

Updated: March 11 – The Economic Impact of The COVID-19 (coronavirus) Outbreak

By Bobby Voicu

I’m reading some interesting articles on the potential economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak. Here are some of them (the newest I find are at the top of the list below):

  1. What If We’re at War?
  2. How the coronavirus will shape the future
  3. What to expect next with the coronavirus
  4. Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020
  5. Pandemics Are More Than Just About The CFR
  6. Covid-19 is teaching hard lessons about China-only supply chains
  7. COVID-19 may be the black swan that pushes the global economy into recession

I’m gonna add more articles to this list as I find them, since I’m really interested to understand what can happen.

Also, I just published a new book collection on this subject: Books on Bioengineering, Pandemics and Viruses.

If you have any suggestions for articles on this subject, please comment below or send them via email: community AT this site.

Books to Read in February 2020 [Poll] – The CEO Library Book Club

By Bobby Voicu

Update: Here are the results:

  1. Man’s Search for Meaning – The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust, by Victor E. Frankl
  2. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear
  3. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein
  4. Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell, By Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle
  5. Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen

Here’s the first poll for The CEO Library Book Club:

Stupid ideas: the good, the… good?

By Bobby Voicu

“I just started a gaming company and we make Solitaire games!”
“Well, that’s stupid!”

That was me in 2012, telling a friend about the new project I just started. He still is my friend (I know!) and he is a smart guy. And he genuinely thought it was a stupid idea. And I still remind him of that discussion.

Of course, that’s what started MavenHut. We built that initial Solitaire game (Solitaire Arena) to a company with 35 people and more than 40 millions players.

Do you know there’s a guy that wanted to start a marketplace for people to rent inflatable beds in their apartments? Or a guy that thought internet was good for selling books? Or some guys that thought they could build a site helping you leave it the moment you visited it? Yeap, they’re Airbnb, Amazon, Google. They all seemed really stupid at the moment.

I love stupid ideas. I like talking about them. I know most of them will never become a business, a company or even a side project. But come on, don’t you want to let your mind wander and wonder?

I prefer, as Tynan says here, to see the good in the ideas. That’s why I almost never say “don’t do this“. I just say “what stops you from trying?”

That being said, no matter how much I love talking about stupid ideas, I would not invest in them. I mean, I can’t afford a 1 in 1,000 chance of something working.

I will never put down a stupid sounding idea, though. After all, I’ve founded a company making Solitaire games. “How stupid is that, when you can play it for free on Windows?”

The image above is of the MavenHut offices in 2014. I took it from Radu.

Space for Disorganization: The organized chaos we all need

By Bobby Voicu

There was a joke in communist Romania:

“At an exam for policemen, they are given a ball and a cube and a board with two holes: one round and one square. The task: fit the cube and ball through the board in front.

The conclusion of the exam:
5% of the policemen are quite smart, 95% are really strong.”

While I’m not a policeman in communist Romania, that’s me. That’s you, I bet, as well: you try to clean and organize your office. Your room. Your email account. Whatever. And you find things you don’t really know what to do with. And you try to push them into a set of categories you already established for your stuff, but it doesn’t really work.

I feel it’s the same thing when you’re trying to organize your life/space in any way. We’re really, really strong: we’re trying to fit stuff in categories it doesn’t fit and it’s never completely as it should be.

The solution: a Space for Disorganization. A space where you dump things you don’t know where to put yet. Or you don’t have the time right then and there. As Janet and Isaac Asimov say:

It also helps to have one – and only one – Space For Disorganization, a shelf or drawer where things can be dumped until you have time to be neat, methodical, and are able to make decisions about where things should go. When you think you’ve lost something, it will probably be in the space for disorganization.

And if you wait long enough you’ll find that more of its contents can be just thrown out, and the process of doing so can serve as a Constructive Activity to Raise Self-esteem.

I found this quote in How to Enjoy Writing by Janet and Isaac Asimov.

And I’m actually doing something akin those lines, even if I never defined it. Especially now, when I’m putting together my home office in the new house.

Here it is, my Box of Disorganization, in the photo below. It’s filled with cables, gadgets, batteries, device manuals, I even see a Halloween decoration piece on top there.

I also have a similar space in Evernote, which is my tool of choice to get things from around the web that I “might” need at some point. Including the links you read in the weekly newsletter I send.

The “Space for Disorganization” in Evernote is a notebook called _Inbox. That’s where I drop everything that’s not specifically targeted for something. And every 2-3 months I go through the notebook and see if what I saved has a more specific place. If not, it just goes to another notebook, called Reference, where I might find it in the future using the search function of the app.

The advantage, for me, for the existance of a “Space for Disorganization”?

It doesn’t generate “paralysis by analysis”.

If I don’t think of a specific place for some thing or for some information, it goes straight to the Space. Also, as you know, small decision sap your energy. Because there’s no effort to think too much about what I need to do with something, I lose less energy on these small decisions, of where to put what. This allows for more energy to organize my space and keep it clean. Physical space or online space.

Keep in mind, though, it needs to be only ONE Space for Disorganization. If you have more than one, you just made a really good system of being disorganized.

Do YOU have a Space for Disorganization? As you can see, even a box from IKEA works.

Best acting I’ve ever seen

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve been watching The Crown in the last week or so. Yesterday I got to episode 9 of the first season, called Assassins (light spoiler ahead).

The context is this: Winston Churchill sits for a portrait with a famous painter – Graham Sutherland. It’s the Prime Minister’s 80th birthday and he was given the opportunity as a present.

There’s a short scene when the character (Churchill, played by John Lithgow)) realizes that he painted a pond 20 times or more because it reminded him of his dead daughter.

The painter says this to him, before the scene (which starts at 35:30 in the episode, by the way):

I was thinking especially of the Goldfish pond here at Chartwell. It’s very much more than that. As borne out by the fact that you’ve returned to it again and again. More than 20 times.
[…]
I think all our work is unintentionally revealing and I find it especially so with your pond.

Beneath the tranquility and the elegance and the light playing on the surface, I saw honesty and pain, terrible pain. The framing itself indicated to me that you wanted us to see something beneath all the muted colors, deep down in the water.

Terrible despair. Hiding like a Leviathan. Like a sea monster.

Then you can see on Churchill’s face the agony, the pain, the longing, the missing. Everything a human being can feel, you could see in those 30-40 seconds. No sounds, no words. Just his face. And you could feel how much pain there was inside him.

It’s the best acting I’ve seen. Ever.

I wish I was able to be that good at something in my life as John Lithgow is good at acting.

Later update: after writing this, I’ve started to read about the portrait. And I’ve found out that John Lithgow won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for this exact episode.

Blogging as a Lean Startup

By Bobby Voicu

I have a good friend that wants to start up a blog. And he has so many interesting things to say, I would read his blog. Well, this brilliant guy started his blog about a year ago. In his head. He knows what kind of articles he’ll write, how long they will be, how great they will be.

The issue? The articles are still there, in his head.

I’ve heard about Lean Startup (and its predecessor, 4 Steps to the Epiphany) about 3-4 years ago.

The basic explanation of the concept is that you create a Minimum Viable Product, you go to market, you learn from the feedback and reiterate. Basically “Build, Test, Learn, Reiterate”. And do this cycle as often as possible.

The shorter the cycle it is, the better you chance of succeeding in your startup (because it creates more chances of getting the things right). A lean startup sees its runaway (the time until it runs out of money) not in months or years, but in the number of cycles it has. MavenHut was a lean startup.

Now, blogging is by no means a startup, most of the time. It can be see as one, though. If we keep comparing, my friend is actually in the startup stage where you want to create the next big thing, the thing that you know will change humanity. You want to create the iPhone. You have everything in place, you just don’t have the time to create… well, perfection.

All he needs to do to reach perfection is to start the Minimum Viable Product for his blog: the first, simple, small, 200 words article. Then the second. Then the third. He will get feedback for all of them (from me, from his other friends, from people on Facebook or Twitter). And the 10th article will be a 2000 words article about something great. But the form will not be the best. Still, he will understand how to space paragraphs, ideas, use headlines and so on. And his 30th article will be a lot better. And so on and so forth.

By the time his blog is 9 months old he will write his first great article. The one that hits Hacker News and Reddit and that gets 1000 likes on Facebook and 150 RTs on Twitter. And then he will start again. Until, 2 years from the start, he will be a household name in his chosen field.

This is a good story, right? On the other hand, you might not be the household name you wanted, but writing helps a lot in other ways, ways you didn’t really think about:

I recommend daily writing for anyone, not just writers. Here’s what I’ve found from my daily habit:

  • Writing helps you reflect on your life and changes you’re making. This is incredibly valuable, as often we do things without realizing why, or what effects these things are having on us.
  • Writing clarifies your thinking. Thoughts and feelings are nebulous happenings in our mind holes, but writing forces us to crystalize those thoughts and put them in a logical order.
  • Writing regularly makes you better at writing. And writing is a powerful skill to be good at in our digital age.
  • Writing for an audience (even if the audience is just one person) helps you to think from the perspective of the audience. That’s when the magic starts, because once you get into the reader’s mindset, you begin to understand readers and customers and colleagues and friends better. You have empathy and a wider understanding of the world.
  • Writing persuasively — to convince others of your point of view — helps you to get better at persuading people to change their minds. Many people don’t want to change their minds when they feel someone is attacking their position, so they get defensive and dig into their position.
  • Writing daily forces you to come up with new ideas regularly, and so that forces you to solve the very important problem of where to get ideas. What’s the answer to that problem? Ideas are everywhere! In the people you talk to, in your life experiments, in things you read online, in new ventures and magazines and films and music and novels. But when you write regularly, your eyes are open to these ideas.
  • Writing regularly online helps you to build an audience who is interested in what you have to share, and how you can help them. This is good for any business, anyone who is building a career, anyone who loves to socialize with others who are interested in similar things as them.

The quote above is from Zen Habits, an article called Why You Should Write Daily.

The Decade in Review cornucopia of links

By Bobby Voicu

Here are all the “Decade in review” articles I’ve found interesting, without a specific focus or order. The titles are pretty self explanatory, so I will not add my commentaries this time.

Books related decade reviews:

1. The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s (Time)
2. The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade (LitHub)
3. The 20 Best Books of a Decade That Unmade Genre Fiction (Wired)
4. The 20 Best Novels of the Decade (LitHub)
5. The CEO Library’s Best Books of 2019

Business & Tech related decade reviews:

1. I’m a 36-year-old CEO who sold my first startup for $1 billion. Here’s what I’ve learned this past decade (Business Insider)
2. Decade in review: Reflections on the last 10 years in the tech industry (Tech Republic)
3. The Top 20 Business Transformations of the Last Decade (Harvard Business Review)
4. Emoji, Uber and selfie: These 25 words describe the decade in tech (CNet)
5. From AirPower to Zune, a decade of tech and companies that died (CNet)
6. The attention economy is in hyperdrive’: how tech shaped the 2010s (The Guardian)
7. Selfies, influencers and a Twitter president: the decade of the social media celebrity

Other interesting lists:

Living in Portugal: Lost in Translation or Cultural Differences?

By Bobby Voicu

You can also find book recommendations on migration at the end of this blog post.

At the end of 2018 I moved from Romania, where I lived pretty much my whole life, to Portugal. They’re pretty similar cultures:

  • Both generally European (Portugal “more European” than Romania)
  • Both had a dictatorship that finished in the last 50 years
  • Both have problems with corruption (less in Portugal)
  • Both have a lot of bureaucracy
  • Latin language.

You’d think there would be no problems adapting to the Portuguese culture. And it’s true, in many ways we had no issues. I can actually speak enough Portuguese right now so I can ask for directions and mostly understand the answer. And my fiancée spoke the language quite well already.

But there are some issues I’ve never thought of. Case in point:

I say: I want central heating in the house.

They say: the house has central heating.

I mean: I want electric central heating with radiators in every room of the house and 24 degrees Celsius everywhere in the house.

They mean: We have central heating with fireplace and wood, with heating recuperator, MAYBE radiators, and 17-19 degrees in the entire house because it’s never that cold outside.

We say the same thing. We mean almost the same thing. Yet, it’s really different.

I was thinking of a completely automated heating system and being able to wear shorts and t-shirt in a house. They meant that there is a system to be used, even if not automatic, and it’s not as cold as it is outside. And yes, you might need to add another layer of clothes, but “the winter in Portugal is just 2 months and it’s not that cold anyway”.

It took me some time to understand the difference in perception.

We were using the same words, but our understanding of them was different enough to generate confusion.

The solution?

  • Ask for DETAILED information on everything. Sometimes people will look at you thinking you’re crazy, but keep in mind it’s your money at stake if you make a mistake
  • Ask often “What do you mean by X?”
  • Find someone from your country that has been living in the new country for a longer time (years, if possible) to “translate” the cultural differences. And to translate the language.
  • If the above is not available, find someone native that also speaks your language (or English). They might be capable of explaining the differences
  • Ask A LOT of questions about your chosen country. Ask everybody you meet, frankly, especially in the first year or so.

Well, this is not the perfect solution, but it is A solution. Changing countries is a difficult endeavor in itself, but the small things add quickly to the pressure and lack of comfort.

On the other hand, we were walking the dog around the neighborhood yesterday. One neighbor stopped us and invited us into his yard to give us some oranges and tangerines right from the tree. About 5kgs worth of them. The difference to Romania? If something similar happened, we would’ve left with 5kgs of apples. A little nuance in cultures, for sure, but I would’ve been happy with the apples as well.

Oh, and the photo on the top is not the view from my home, unfortunately. It’s a view from Foz do Arelho, across the Obidos Lagoon, to the Atlantic Ocean. An amazing place to visit. Just sayin’…