Kookaburra

Reading in the gaps

I bookmark and tag (via delicious.com) a lot of stuff I need to read later but struggle to find time and access to those articles when I have a gap in my schedule (that magic 15 mins waiting for my daughter to get changed after swimming - which often seems twice as long)

The answer is Instapaper- It's simple
1. Mark something to 'read later' with a bookmarklet
2. On iPhone load (free) Instapaper application & update over your network
3. Read - you don't need to be online once your documents are synched.

It's wonderful and it works. I've loaded up some of the great articles from Zenhabits.net for me to chew over when next I have a gap to fill.

You can also access the Instapaper.com service from a web browser and on a web-enabled phone. The iPhone gets the advantage of offline reading on the iPhone.

A smart way to find time to read - DailyLit

We live in a golden age where most of us have all we need (the basics) and indeed have access to more to more stuff than we really have time for. Indeed time is the only constant - we only have the same numbers of hours in a day that our ancestors had - though we're living longer and have extended our waking hours longer into the night (thank you electric lights and caffeine!)

It can still be a challenge to schedule time to read something other than blogs, email and web pages. Over the longer term will you really be thanking yourself for spending hours researching whether the Canon G10 is a better option for a travel camera than the Canon 50D (I'm hoping the G10 is the answer - lighter, cheaper - weakness appears to be in low light conditions but hey it's a fantastic performer compared to even the best film camera of 10 years ago). The time spent reading about the bits and pixels will not really add a lot to your life in the long term.

Conversely spending some time reading the 'classics' is likely to be much more rewarding. But how to make the time in your busy schedule?

Enter DailyLit - a service that delivers 'chunks' of good learning via email or RSS. So you can chip away at War and Peace (if you wish) page by page.

They're currently delivering me a Wikipedia tour of Wine - a bit each day I am sure will be more likely to be absorbed than one big deluge. (Oz and James wine adventure on Foxtel is helping too!)

I'm also getting a weekly Italian lesson from the BBC - see Italian Steps - I've not been so diligent in taking it on but at least the weekly email delivery is helping me remember my longer term goal of reinvigorating my conversational Italian.

Making the iPhone the universal capture tool

When I'm on the move I still need an effective way to capture information and task which I can then funnel into my chosen tools - MyLifeOrganized (MLO) is my one place for task management on my PC (Windows). For reference material I have an array of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools - Delicious, Google Notebook, Mindmaps in Mindjet and I'm just starting with Evernote.

My former phone - a Windows Mobile 6 - had a great interface for capturing into MLO and it was quite fast using stylus entry - not so good or safe to do while driving!

I'm still really getting started with iPhone and while I was without one I'd resorted to a small notebook to capture tasks for later transcription into MLO.  (It was a Moleskine Cahier A6 size which worked well when I had it on me)

Note2Self shows a lot of promise - it's an audio-recorder for the iPhone which makes is easy to capture 'notes' on the go as audio files which you can email to yourself (or someone else) for later processing. A lot safer when driving a car - just get into Note2Self, raise iPhone to ear, wait for phone to vibrate, speak your note and then put the phone down - done! It's now stored locally on iPhone and you can then choose to mail it to your usual mailaccount for later processing - I'll be happy just listening to them back off the phone when I'm in a position to process them.

For written notes and clippings Evernote looks like the answer. Capture anything via iPhone camera and then sync it into the cloud and your PC/Mac via their online service. The Evernote service will also extract the text from pictures (OCR) so you can search based on the words in pictures.

For Evernote to work well I need to get better closeup photos of clippings from newspapers, books etc. The iPhone camera doesn't focus very closely at all (maybe 20 cm) so I was thinking of carrying a small magnifying glass. But now the geniuses at Griffin have introduced Clarifi, a polycarbonate iPhone 3G case which includes a built-in Macro lens 

The usual rules still apply - to make this work I need to process the input and ensure I get a state of Inbox Zero.

Iphone - doesn't walk on water but remarkable anyway

Hello World - long time, no post

I was lucky to have an iphone - 'was' is the key. Alas it went for an unintended swim (don't ask) and it is no more.

Otherwise they seem incredibly robust as you can see from ArsTechnica's stress test. They managed to do everything imaginable to it and it only really failed the 'drop from a balcony', 'step on me' and 'make me swim' test. That screen seems incredibly scratch-proof. I hope I get a replacement soon. Going back to a 'normal' phone is a real shock.

I only had the iPhone 3G for three days before tragedy struck. I was getting more comfortable with it - thanks to some tips from Craig W and Peter M. Both of which were in the 'Finger Tips' guide, which, though slim, was still too long for my short attention span!

Tog of AskTog.com fame neatly dissected the iPhone user interface - I'm with Tog in having lumpy fingers and thus the iPhone being (at first glance) hard to use. The key is the press-drag-release sequence on the keys - it is is only the key you are on when you release that counts. So if you miss the right key you can slide to the right key and then release. A subtle but very clever touch.

That first experience with the iPhone is glorious - incredibly sharp vibrant colour screen.

And even the death throes of my iPhone were remarkable (but sad) - it slowly ebbed away in my hands. First the screen, then the pulsing of its body until all that was left was a small red glowing light in the top left. Then it too faded. It was rather like the death of a Terminator or the last moments of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Apple Envy - solved

As a reformed Mac user I have joined the hordes of Windows users with Apple envy :-) I have tricked out my Windows Mobile phone with PointUI - a skin that makes it iPhone like - bigger buttons more functions accessible without using stylus. I was a dedicated Quicksilver user on Mac (an excellent, free application launcher and more) - now experimenting with Enso from Humanized - as of 15 Jan 2008 it too is free (I think partly because the lead developers have been hired into the Mozilla Foundation) - a worthy fast launcher.

DVD playback on Windows?

OK it's been a while since I muttered anything ... so here's a start. I was rather shocked to discover that Windows XP does not include DVD playback! This has been a standard feature of Macs for as long as I can remember. (It arrived in Mac OS X 10.1 in 2001) Guess I have been taking my Mac for granted.

Realistically if you bought a Windows laptop with a DVD drive in it then I am sure it comes with the DVD codec (well it should).

Just shows how our expectations rise over time.

Memo to Bill G - Be careful what you say - we can all hear you now

On the launch of Vista, Bill Gates was interviewed several times and was quizzed each time in part about how Vista appears to be similar to Mac OS X in many respects (so it seems Apple's positioning as the innovator is working).

I don't particularly care which is better (they're both amazingly advanced from where we were 20 years ago; and at the same time not nearly advanced enough - the file/folder metaphor is archaic - give me deeply integrating tagging and retrieval).

I do care about the truth and business people acting with integrity. Bill Gates was either badly briefed, ill prepared or just prepared to make a bunch of false statements to the media. Here's just one example:

Daring Fireball:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates
Friday, 2 February 2007

In his interview with Bill Gates in Newsweek, Steven Levy pointed out that many of the new features in Windows Vista are similar to features already in Mac OS X. Gates’s response:

I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so
publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new
security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security
guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come
out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user
interface-wise.


This is fascinating. In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.

Gates’s claim about Mac OS X security is simply false. Flabbergastingly false.

Calendar cross-publishing concepts

In many ways information sharing has become easier with near ubiquitous email, web and broadband access. Each of which have been reduced in many ways to a commonly understood cohesive experience for most of us. There is potential for so much more but sadly the layers of complexity make it hard to fully embrace Internet 1.0 let alone what more is to come. Jon Udell of Microsoft demonstrates some of that complexity by trying to wire up different calendars together.

Jon Udell on Calendar cross-publishing concepts: A growing number of people will be keeping their work calendars in Microsoft Outlook and their family calendars elsewhere, say on Google. How can they cross-publish their work and family calendars? It's possible, but the conceptual hurdles are formidable. Here's what I found when I did the experiment.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang meets the jetski

50 mph Gibbs Quadski Converts from Jetski to ATV in Five Seconds: - holy amphibian crossover vehicles Batman. This is cool (setting aside the peril to our environment for attacking semi-wilderness with wild machines).

Check out the video c/- of YouTube

Steve Jobs on TV

Who knows what Steve Jobs will announce at Macworld Expo but he has previously announced the iTV so perhaps we will see an update.

Perhaps he can begin to revolutionise TV as he has done with music (iPods and iTunes Store)

Coincidentally I stumbled across this Steve Jobs' quote from almost 11 years ago.

Steve Jobs - Wikiquote:
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

Wired (February 1996)