Recently in Technology Category

email exists to stay on top of things,… I am much more interested in getting to the bottom of things

Via Adventures in Home Working

I could simply write here that I am too busy to write on Brain Tags, but I guess it is more interesting for you to read what I am doing currently. So this is a short list of my most interesting current projects:

New web site for Fimcap
This is a project on which I have been working for a long time (not always as active as now) and which should have been finished a long time ago. I am now finishing off the new design, after which we can finally show the world the work we have been doing. Working on a graphical design is quite an adventure for a technical person like me. I can easily tell whether I like a design or not, but to make one yourself is a whole different thing.

Renewed site for Brytenet
Hopping along with the Fimcap redesign, I am also reworking the site where I station my side-business. Both sites are built on eZ Publish, so I use the experiences on ons site to advance on another. I am also working to leverage some of the karma I got with blogging to new profitable projects under the Brytenet umbrella. You will read more about that when these plans have crystallized a little bit more. Anyway, currently the Brytenet site is off-line while I restructure the content, but before next week I hope to be open for business again.

A home project

There is still one room in our house where we didn't do anything since we moved in, the room where our visitors sleep. Those who have visited us can confirm that the beds in that room have had their time. So we are going to use our holiday in November to get rid of the current furniture and paint the room. In the mean time we are already looking for two new beds and a wardrobe to provide our guests with better rest and ourselves with more storage room.

Teaching sells
And finally I started an on-line course about making on-line courses (?) called Teaching Sells, which will probably help me getting all that information I have been absorbing over the past years out of my head and into my wallet. I am sure some very interesting new projects will arise from that course.

Blogging
The blogs are still there, and will stay, though I am considering stopping to write on the Wizard of POS.

When I take my breakfast in the mornings, I usually sit ion front of a window looking out to the entrance of a school. Some days ago I looked at some teenagers and noticed that all of them were listening to a MP3 player, but none of them had an iPod.

As the iPod is certainly the hippest and easiest to use MP3 player on the market, I assumed that at least some teenagers would have one, while others would settle for a cheaper model. The iPods is indeed more expensive than other players, but usually pricing is not that big problem for teenagers if the device is cool enough.

I decided to ask a teacher who also owns an iPod about his view on the subject, and he gave me a very simple explanation.

Lately --especially since I use Twitter-- I receive a lot of URLs in TinyURL format. That made me think: if TinyURL gives out a unique URL each time it is used, when will they run out of URLs?

On their site they state that they have more than 42 million of them, which doesn't sound like an awful lot. All TinyURLs I receive have a six character identifier, such as 3bso2z. A little calculation (six positions with 36 options per position) gives me 2.238.976.116 unique identifiers. More than two billion, that sounds already better. And if they run out of Ids, they can simply use seven or eight characters, which I still consider tiny. Eight positions give 2.984.555.162.628 (2 trillion!) unique identifiers!

It is clear: TinyURL is here to stay.

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters.

I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn't tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim's trick only works because his workload is very low. When you're workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.

For quite some time I have been happily using coComment. For those who don't know this service: coComment basically keeps track of the comments you leave on web sites. If you're like me, reading and commenting on many sites, it can be difficult to track the replies to your comments. coComment captures your comment and tracks the conversations started by those comments on a single page instead of having to revisit all sites you've commented on.

Yesterday coComment released a new version, bringing more social features. By doing that, they threw out the real value of their service: tracking conversations. The new page reserves 75% of screen real estate for groups, friends, favourites and neighbours, leaving just enough space for only five conversations:

Furthermore, all my conversations have been marked as unread, and I could not find an option to mark them all as read. This is not an upgrade, this is a downgrade!

Next week we'll be going camping in France. That means amongst others that we will be making quite some kilometres, and if you know me a little bit you know that I am not that fond of travelling large hours. One way to make the trip more pleasant is music.

The traditional source of music was the radio, but when travelling long distances in several countries, you'll loose your station every two hours. The past years we brought some CDs with us, but CDs are bulky and we can only take a few of them.

For this year's trip, I bought a Belkin TuneBase FM, allowing us to listen to all the music stored on MJ's iPod.

The TuneBase converts the iPod into a radio station. It has four button to select pre-stored frequencies and up and down buttons for manually selecting frequencies. All we have to do is tune our car radio to the TuneBase frequency, and we can listen to all the music stored on the iPod.

We're ready for the trip!

when the message Please wait while we install product X. This may take several minutes stays on screen for almost two hours.

From the Twitter Support page:

Delete: use delete to remove a person from your friends list, like so: delete jade.
Remove: this command will delete a person from your friends list: remove jade.

So if I want to delete a person I have to use the Remove command, and if I want to remove a person I have to use Delete?????