iPad Owners Are ‘Selfish Elites.’ Critics Are ‘Independent Geeks.’ Discuss. | Epicenter | Wired.com.
This post written on my iPad. You luddite.
Category Archives: Science & Technology
Tracing the Journey of a Single Bit
I great article from Wired Magazine. If you ever wanted to see where (and how) your data gets around this article is a great overview.
Flock this!
While I was searching for a desktop client for my WordPress blog I came across some good reviews of the “Social Media” browser, Flock and while I was skeptical at first that this was just a skinned version of Firefox with some weighty add-ons I figured I give it a try. I had actually abandoned Firefox a few months ago in favor of Safari (Mac) as Safari seemed much faster in all respects and the recent Safari 4 upgrade was impressive in my opinion. Nonetheless I installed Flock and much to my amazement the damn thing is just as fast as Safari (in my limited experience) and I found the ability to add all of the “social” networking profiles to be both easy and useful – a rare combination. From Facebook to Flickr, Twitter to WordPress Flock is now the one-stop shop for all interactions. This is extremely useful. In fact I’m writing this post on the Flock-supplied desktop WordPress plugin! Maybe this will be the ticket to get me to update my blog more frequently than every 4 months. Now my only problem is dealing the massive amount of social data being thrown at me everytime I open my browser.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Web Innovators Group
Last night I had the opportunity to attended the monthly Web Innovators Group at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge. In short this is a place for people working in, or looking to join, Internet and mobile technology. The scene was basically this: 3 main presenters called the “main dishes” and 8-10 other companies scattered around the hall called “side dishes.” The main pdishes were given 5 minutes to present their technology and at the end everyone was given the chance to text/vote on their favorite. The place was packed; 500 or so techies were out and you could feel the geek rush over the Royal Sonesta. There were more iPhones, Blackberries, texting, and twittering then you could count and the conversations ranged from a) where do you work? to b) where do you work? I met some nice people, however, and it was great to see such cool technology. Yeah, some of the stuff will never see the light of day but it was cool nonetheless. Here are some of my technology hight lights:
Snipd (snipd.com) – Think super granular Digg. Allows a user to “snip” out content from a page and share just that content. Lets say, for instance, I see a quote on a blog somewhere that I think is really good, rather than send a link to the entire page to my group of friends (or Digg or Del.icio.us) I can simply snip the quote and send that. Snipd allows you to mash-up all sorts of content in this same manner including video and pictures. A link to the referenced site is always included so the authors needn’t worry about not getting credit. Still in private beta but they promised to give me an account so I’ll post more after I test it. snipd.com.
Webnotes – A main Dish. Webnotes is like it sounds. It functions primarily as a browser plugin (both IE and FF) and allows you to highlights text in a page and create sticky notes on that page. It saves that information to their servers to be displayed on-demand either on your customized Webnotes page or in a browser sidebar. What’s very cool about this is that it allows plugin-free sharing, meaning that I can highlight text and create stickies and share it with you and you do NOT need to have the plugin installed. For a test of this check out this article in boston.com. Still in beta but sign up is allowed. webnotes.net
The Switch is On
Over the past ten years or so I’ve worked with different flavors of the Linux operating system. In almost all cases my work with these Operating Systems stemmed from the fact that the company I was working for at the time ran Linux in their data center. Every now and again I would attempt to run Linux on my desktop and use it as my primary personal computer. I always liked the ideals behind the Free Software Foundation and the Open source movement in general – although I have never felt that Microsoft had bad products and they certainly made a fine (but expensive) desktop operating system. Each time that I tried to switch over to Linux on my desktop I was stopped dead in my tracks for one reason or another. Typically I would find some showstopper: The Word and Excel replacements weren’t up to snuff, the desktop took too long to actually configure, or it was flaky in general. All of these reasons led me to continually return to some form of Windows on my desktop. Get the whole story
GreenDimes
GreenDimes | Stop Junk Mail Now | Plant Trees | Save the Planet
This was sent to me by Christian and is a great example of environmental policy and capitalism. This company has a very interesting value proposition; it solves a problem common to almost all people, it taps into a people’s desire to be more environmentally connected, and it charges a fee that is easily absorbed by most. I put this into the “Science & Technology” category because I think this is the perfect combination of Web 2.0 and Clean Technology. Clean Technology is typically thought of as alternative energy but in the old “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra, GreenDimes provides a solution for reducing waste and using cool technology to do it.
A Week With No Phone
Tonight concludes my accidental experiment of life with no cell phone. As many people know I am a smartphone addict. Truthfully I am an email addict. I have read some recent news articles that claim that there are now 12-step programs for those of us that are addicted to email and I think that is wonderful for people that feel they need such a program. I might contend that those people just need someone to talk to. I mean, c’mon. If you really want to join a group that badly then get a really addiction. Email just doesn’t count as a bone-a-fide addict, period. Nonetheless, I feel naked without my email-enabled phone so it was an interesting trial for me this past week when a co-worker of mine lost their phone while on vacation. Since this particular person needed a phone much more then I did I was happy to FedEx my phone to them so they could get their email while atop of some mountain out in Colorado. This happened Monday so since then I have been walking around naked…or so it felt. Get the whole story