Barry Schwartz on our Loss of Wisdom
Another great video on TED.com
Blog
Soft Power the Way Forward
This video show how the world could learn some great lessons from India’s ability to use its soft power.
There is a fantastic point in this video where he is talking about Indian Restaurants in Britain, which I thought was brilliant. This is what he says:
“Indian restaurants in Britain employ more people than the coal mining, ship building and the iron & steel industries combined. The Empire can strike back!”
- Shashi Tharoor, TED Talk, Nov 2009
Tablets
No I am not talking about drugs, I mean computer tablets. The idea of a mulitouch screen handheld tablet has been thrown around for years. We get so close to having just that but they never quite make the mark. With the iPhone pushing handheld devices to the next level I do wish Apple would make one.
As a design I still love to scribble on pieces of paper to get an idea going. On the other hand I hate using an eraser or making a mistake when I ink the design. Why hasn’t anyone made a simple iPhone style tablet? I only need it to look at emails, view my calendar, draw designs and maybe go on the internet (with Flash enabled!).
Please please Apple make this device.
Control Your Keynote from Your iPhone
As a techy I love being able to do things like controlling my laptop from another computer, and the iPhone extended this for me when Apple introduced their remote app and Keynote remote. With the recent update to the remote app, now using multi touch gestures you can control your Apple TV.
I am not going to go into the uses for these apps as I guess everyone who has them know how they work. I always had a little problem with both apps. You had tpo connect to the computer when they are both on the same WiFi network. I found this odd when in some conference centre they do not have WiFi so the keynote app becomes useless. Also in most hotels one has to pay for EACH computer, and the iPhone is classified (at least according to them) as a computer. Which means one would have to pay twice to connect both and that doesn’t gurantee you will be able to connect to your computer.
I thought to myself Apple would not do this to their customers. There must be a way of coonecting, and then it struck me, create a WiFi connection from your computer. The iPhone can then connect tot your computer without using the hotels or conference centers WiFi hotspot. Wow I thought, this has to be true, so off I went and tried it all out. It did exactly what I wanted, it gave the iPhone and my Macbook Pro the ability to find each other over a WiFi connection, which is what the App needs. This works for controlling iTunes using the Remote app as well as the Keynote app.
There is one downside to this process, you can’t turn your network connection off so calls and SMS will still be received. If I am wrong on this please let me know how to leave WiFi on and turn off the phone section.
It is a simple process, and if you want to know more please david@davidbridle.net . I am currently attending the NSA convention in Scottsdale, Pheonix. Should be a good learning experience.
A Great Experiment with Unexpected Side Effects
I went through a stage awhile back on productivity. I got really into how to be more productive. Obviously I found the GTD process. Which lead me on the a blog post on 43Folders (insert link to post). In a nutshell it was talking about the creative process and how difficult it is to get into The Zone to be creative, whether that is writing, designing,coding etc. Some of the point that I decided to use were to do with emails. The way we has become so demanding of the receiptant and conditioned into replying the instant it arrives. So I put into practice some of the tips, I removed the little red badge from my mail.app icon, I changed the autocheck time to one hour and removed the sound. I suddenly found that I was getting more done without this distraction. I have reached the stage were I don’t even have it open anymore. Great I thought, but the side effect came into play. My iPhone has become my email client! I now check my emails on my iPhone, reply where necessary and if needed will go to my computer application only if I need to send a file. This then moved to my calendar. I now no longer have iCal open.
So now I have only design apps running which my computer seems to love me for and I am not getting distracted by emails. My iPhone is becoming my communications device.
Now that skype have a native app and push notification to follow with the new iPhone update I think skype will only be on my phone. We’ll see what happens when I upgrade the software.
admin
Posted on March 31st, 2009Tags: experiment, productivity
in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Add This!-
Archives
Blogroll
-
Meta
My Tweets
Great Place to Check Out
My Books
admin
Posted on January 11th, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »