Inspired by Noah Brier and his One A Day project using a MacBook Pro’s iSight. I own a Canon EOS 20D but that is far too much hassle for a daily photo. The iSight makes it pretty painless. I’ll reserve the better camera for a once-a-year photo on my birthday.
An Taoiseach will be visiting WIT’s Research and Innovation Center building where I work on Monday the 16th for the official opening. The TSSG and SEEP are hosted here and the place is fairly buzzing with activity. Plenty of press and other notables will be visiting. We should get a chance to demonstrate our project to everyone.
The “next” bookmarklet feature of Google Reader is an interesting one. You never need visit your feed aggregator with it. Just hit it everytime you want to read the latest unread item in your RSS reading list and it will take you straight to the referenced page.
I think it can be improved though. For a lot of my reading list it is pretty useless. I click next, have to wait for the page to load, see if I like the page and then hit next again. Hundreds of times on a busy day. Part of the point of an aggregator is letting you quickly skim over hundreds of items looking for interesting ones to read further on.
But some feeds I know I want to read each item. e.g. a Flickr photo stream or a GMail feed. So why not let me specify a folder that the next feature works off of exclusively. Or let me create a custom next bookmarklet attached to a couple of feeds, or to a tag.
I found the phone number for PG&E but the vonage line was out because it needs electricity.
Crikey, of course, VoIP needs electricity. It is a lot more dependant than “old style” telephony. I remember always being amazed as a kid when the phones still worked when the power went out.
Now imagine a world of VoIP and the electricity goes out and your grandpas home heart-lung machine fails. No life saving phone call possible.
We definitley need to think through our rapid adoption of cool technology. We also need to be careful how we use metaphors and portray new technology in old shells e.g. selling phones that rely on electricity and IP networks to people who, on seeing a normal looking phone, think it will work in blackouts and without broadband coming into their homes. Or cars that break down in the desert and require an engineer from Intel to fix rather than your wife’s stockings and a bit of elbow grease.
There has been some backlash against “Office 2.0″ systems of late. Greg Reinacker writes:
I just don’t see the incentive to have an online word processor or spreadsheet.
He lists some problems with the online spreadsheet apps and they are mostly valid.
To me though Google Spreadsheets doesn’t replace Microsoft Excel, it augments it. The other day I was at an internet cafe doing a spot of emailing and wanted to update a spreadsheet someone had emailed to me. It was in Excel but naturally the internet cafe computer I was on didn’t have Excel. Heck, all it had was a browser. No problem though. I imported the file into Google Spreadsheets, did my editing and exported it to be emailed back.
Online apps give me choice. When I am on a plane at 30,000 feet I load up Excel and bang away. When I am in Thailand stuck in a dodgy internet cafe I load up Google Spreadsheets and bang away.
I just backed up the 5.5gig of my music collection to my Amazon S3 account using S3Fox Organiser. It was largely a painless process except for any song that had a # character in its name. Not sure why S3 won’t accept that but a simple rename sorted it.
I especially liked how the transfers are atomic. If for some reason a file failed half-way then it wouldn’t leave a half-uploaded file on S3. This made transfering 5.5gig painless with no worrying about what was and wasn’t uploaded properly.
Total cost? The initial 5.5gig transfer will cost me about one buck ten cents. From there on it will cost just under a dollar per month. Fantastic!
I am really torn by the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LX2. Creative, fascinating 16:9 format, great controls, responsive, good resolution, RAW mode and so on. But any ISO above 200 is pretty much useless.
