Want to Remember Your Notes? Write Them, Don’t Type Them
Showing posts with label the state of technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the state of technology. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
For better note-taking, write longhand.
Pacafic Standard Magazine (a favorite subscription of mine) has a web article entitled:
Monday, March 31, 2014
Microsoft Office now available on iPad app... a little bit
Microsoft is offering a free app for iPad users of the Office productivity sweet programs: Excel, PowerPoint and Word.
It allows viewing documents sent to you in those programs on an iPad, but there is a charge of $70/year to actually create spreadsheets, presentations and documents, so the free app is basically a document reader.
Read more here.
It allows viewing documents sent to you in those programs on an iPad, but there is a charge of $70/year to actually create spreadsheets, presentations and documents, so the free app is basically a document reader.
Read more here.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Facebook brings Internet access to millions
Facebook is joining up with a British firm for a new "Connectivity Lab." Nice to see they are doing something that has great potential to bring the Internet to more people.
Here's an excerpt from the news story today on The Telegraph website in the U.K.
Over the past year, Facebook's has worked with mobile operators in the Philippines and Paraguay to help three million new people access the internet. The Connectivity Lab will aim to extend this work with the invention of new technologies capable of reaching more remote areas in developing countries.
Read more here:
Here's an excerpt from the news story today on The Telegraph website in the U.K.
Facebook has launched a 'Connectivity Lab' to explore new ways to beam
internet to parts of the world that are not yet connected.
In a blog post, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that the company
is investigating the use of drones, satellites and lasers to make affordable
access to basic internet services available to every person in the world, as
part of the Internet.org project.
Over the past year, Facebook's has worked with mobile operators in the Philippines and Paraguay to help three million new people access the internet. The Connectivity Lab will aim to extend this work with the invention of new technologies capable of reaching more remote areas in developing countries.
Read more here:
Friday, October 25, 2013
More wise words to ponder...
David Allen, the man who created the "Getting Things Done" concept continues to stress the importance of being organized. And he's not talking closets, but data, information, lists, and all the things that make us run through the day to reach our goals. and he makes his living as an evangelist for just that... keeping people focused on reaching goals.
David runs the davidco.com enterprise, and is a major keynote speaker at tech and business conferences. The concept is as simple as making a list, but the benefits of doing so are far greater than organization. List-making clears your mind, so you can focus on what matters in the now. He also teams up with Evernote, the info-gathering note-taking tool. As keynoter at their recent conference, David was quoted with these nine inspiring words.....
Think about that, then use paper or your computer or smartphone to list everything you need/want to do and then clear your mind so you can choose the most meaningful ideas to work on now.
Helen Gallagher
David runs the davidco.com enterprise, and is a major keynote speaker at tech and business conferences. The concept is as simple as making a list, but the benefits of doing so are far greater than organization. List-making clears your mind, so you can focus on what matters in the now. He also teams up with Evernote, the info-gathering note-taking tool. As keynoter at their recent conference, David was quoted with these nine inspiring words.....
"Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them."
Think about that, then use paper or your computer or smartphone to list everything you need/want to do and then clear your mind so you can choose the most meaningful ideas to work on now.
Helen Gallagher
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
A few wise words from Twitter founder, Ev Williams
It figures. the man behind Twitter is a man of few words. Yet they are worth absorbing into our tech life.
At a recent conferennce, he is quoted as saying the key to making a fortune online is to remove extra steps from common activities as he did with Blogger.
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company,” he said. “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
Williams’ philosophy might seem pedestrian. But that’s the point. Twenty years after people began using the web en masse, it’s time, Williams said, to accept that the internet isn’t a magical universe with boundless potential. It’s just another engine for improving quality of life.
So, think of ways you can continuously improve your tech life, now that we've all got the basics covered. How can we streamline more?
Take a tech break....
At a recent conferennce, he is quoted as saying the key to making a fortune online is to remove extra steps from common activities as he did with Blogger.
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company,” he said. “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
Williams’ philosophy might seem pedestrian. But that’s the point. Twenty years after people began using the web en masse, it’s time, Williams said, to accept that the internet isn’t a magical universe with boundless potential. It’s just another engine for improving quality of life.
So, think of ways you can continuously improve your tech life, now that we've all got the basics covered. How can we streamline more?
Take a tech break....
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Computer Clarity
Helen Gallagher, email: helen@cclarity.com.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Can a tablet computer be "too difficult"?
That makes no sense -- the Surface is superior because has more features, not complications. In an effort to compete with Apple, Microsoft added jut about everything that was missing from competitor devices. Things that make a tablet really useful: Surface has a keyboard, folks! And a USB port, a memory card slot, it works with a Surface pen, and has a kickstand.... Oh, and Office 2013 is pre-installed. How complicated is that?
Have we really become so spoiled by gadgets that a few practical enhancements actually overwhelm us? Not me! Please tell me its not true.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Are you wasting your summer days with email overload?
It's summer and you want to go out and play. but instead, you're losing precious time struggling with your bulky email inbox.
InformationWeek has a roundup of a dozen tools that might give you some relief, just in time for the official start of summer on June 21...
InformationWeek has a roundup of a dozen tools that might give you some relief, just in time for the official start of summer on June 21...
Monday, May 13, 2013
Google Glass: The end of privacy
Photo source: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com
The latest news on Google Glass....
The Congressional Privacy Caucus has asked Google for more information on the privacy policies it will include with its newest interface, Glass.
The bipartisan committee, led by Joe Barton (R-Tex.), presented Google with a series of questions related to how the privacy of non-users will be protected with Glass. Glass has the potential, though it’s not currently active, to take photographs when the user winks, for example. As image recognition technology becomes more sophisticated, those captured in images may be linked to online profiles or other sources of information about them.
Yesterday, in its roll-out of automatic image-enhancing technology, Google said that it could tell which photos in an uploaded set included family members, suggesting that it can identify people who appear in a photograph.
Glass doesn’t include any new features per se, but because its users wear the eyeglass-shaped interface constantly, those around them may not know when and how it is being used.
“From beginning, social implications and social etiquette has been at the top of our mind in how we design and develop the product, not only for people wearing Glass but also for the people around them,” said Steve Lee, the product director, in response to a question.
excerpted from: Social Times
Let's hope we're ALL too busy to embrace this and it will become another bad idea in search of a purpose.
Monday, April 29, 2013
A Nobel Prize-winner on rational decisions
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and the author of the new book: "Thinking Fast and Slow,"
Kahneman was featured on NPR's Desktop Diaries, and ironically, much of the interview centers on the fact that he does not use a desk. While I plan to review his new book, it may be beyond me, to do a critical evaluation of a Nobel Prize winning author. But maybe I'm being irrational. ...
The NPR interview with Ira Flatlow cites: "But the basic premise is that people operated in their self-interest and that there are - people can be rational decision makers, you know, except maybe when passion or love or fear is involved. And what Dr. Kahneman and his colleague, Amos Tversky, showed was that people make irrational decisions all the time."
Kahneman was featured on NPR's Desktop Diaries, and ironically, much of the interview centers on the fact that he does not use a desk. While I plan to review his new book, it may be beyond me, to do a critical evaluation of a Nobel Prize winning author. But maybe I'm being irrational. ...The NPR interview with Ira Flatlow cites: "But the basic premise is that people operated in their self-interest and that there are - people can be rational decision makers, you know, except maybe when passion or love or fear is involved. And what Dr. Kahneman and his colleague, Amos Tversky, showed was that people make irrational decisions all the time."
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Book review: Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
The multiple tales in Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe take
place in America during the days of spies, World War II, the hydrogen
bomb, and the century’s most constructive invention: the birth of the
computer industry.
A fellow named John Von Neumann and a dozen others, including Albert Einstein, formed the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), at Princeton University and began planning for the future by writing 1’s and 0’s on a sheet of paper.
Yes, today’s digital universe started with one computer in one laboratory in one building, and with a tiny five kilobytes of memory.
As simple as it started, George Dyson’s book generously lists over eighty names of principal characters involved in this technology adventure, including Vannevar Bush, Richard Feynman, Julian Bigelow, and Kurt Gödel, along with Alan Turing, a British logician and cryptologist, creator of the Universal Machine. This creation moved technology beyond the counting machines in use in the early 1940s. It made the difference between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things.
In its simplest form, data is a bit, which can either be a one or a zero. That is the essence of the digital universe, for logic and mathematics. Today, as we dawdle through our days with gigabytes of memory and processing power, we can hardly appreciate that in March 1953 there were exactly 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory in the world. Five of them were in use at the IAS lab at Princeton, 32 kilobytes were divided among eight clones of the IAS computer, and 16 kilobytes were unevenly distributed across six other machines. Without cross-communication, Dyson considers them: “Each island in the archipelago constituted a universe unto itself.”
Alan Turing, on the IAS team, configured machines to read, write, remember and erase marks on tape, in both directions, giving birth to the Universal Computing Machine.
Dyson takes us through the 20th century with a fascinating American history of mathematics at a time when sugar was rationed and super-calculation power was more experiment than science. It was also a time of using accelerated knowledge to help design weapons and power explosives.
As the U.S. was immersed in WW II, there was an urgent need for computing power. Engineers were busy building computers using electro-static storage tubes and vacuum-tube technology, equivalent to modern silicon memory chips. Suddenly the effort involved for a human to calculate ammunition trajectories could be done within minutes, instead of hundreds of hours.
These hand-built, room-size, machines also fostered next-generation nuclear weapons, and led to development of the Internet, the microprocessor and multiple-warhead ICBMs. Soon, the ENIAC computer, occupying a 33 by 55 foot room, built with 500,000 hand-soldered joints, had the power of twenty human processors, and remained in use until 1955.
The work of John Von Neumann and Alan Turing gave birth to software and established principles that would guide the future of computers.
As Alan Turing enters the story, he says goodbye to his family and sails in steerage from London to New York in 1936, heading for Princeton to work with Von Neumann. He carried with him a heavy brass sextant and soon after arrival delivered his 35-page paper, “On Computable Numbers,” said to symbolize the powers of digital machines. The men worked together for two years while Turing completed a fellowship. His paper described a Universal Machine, able to compute any computable number.
Turing’s Cathedral should be required reading for today’s techies, who will delight in every new development along the way, including a high-speed wire drive, coiled via bicycle wheels, running at 90,000 bits per second. A memorable forerunner to the tape cartridges and removable drives that came along in the late 20th century, indeed. As we know today, technology also brought about the ability to conduct computer-assisted weather forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation statistics, and grew exponentially to include many thousands of innovations.
The history of computers and statistics is part of the history of the U.S., WW II, immigration, university life, weather, Los Alamos, and beautiful story telling. Through a well-told story and rare photos, Dyson’s book is both a history lesson and a tribute to the pioneers of technology who changed the world.
A fellow named John Von Neumann and a dozen others, including Albert Einstein, formed the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), at Princeton University and began planning for the future by writing 1’s and 0’s on a sheet of paper.
Yes, today’s digital universe started with one computer in one laboratory in one building, and with a tiny five kilobytes of memory.
As simple as it started, George Dyson’s book generously lists over eighty names of principal characters involved in this technology adventure, including Vannevar Bush, Richard Feynman, Julian Bigelow, and Kurt Gödel, along with Alan Turing, a British logician and cryptologist, creator of the Universal Machine. This creation moved technology beyond the counting machines in use in the early 1940s. It made the difference between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things.
In its simplest form, data is a bit, which can either be a one or a zero. That is the essence of the digital universe, for logic and mathematics. Today, as we dawdle through our days with gigabytes of memory and processing power, we can hardly appreciate that in March 1953 there were exactly 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory in the world. Five of them were in use at the IAS lab at Princeton, 32 kilobytes were divided among eight clones of the IAS computer, and 16 kilobytes were unevenly distributed across six other machines. Without cross-communication, Dyson considers them: “Each island in the archipelago constituted a universe unto itself.”
Alan Turing, on the IAS team, configured machines to read, write, remember and erase marks on tape, in both directions, giving birth to the Universal Computing Machine.
Dyson takes us through the 20th century with a fascinating American history of mathematics at a time when sugar was rationed and super-calculation power was more experiment than science. It was also a time of using accelerated knowledge to help design weapons and power explosives.
As the U.S. was immersed in WW II, there was an urgent need for computing power. Engineers were busy building computers using electro-static storage tubes and vacuum-tube technology, equivalent to modern silicon memory chips. Suddenly the effort involved for a human to calculate ammunition trajectories could be done within minutes, instead of hundreds of hours.
These hand-built, room-size, machines also fostered next-generation nuclear weapons, and led to development of the Internet, the microprocessor and multiple-warhead ICBMs. Soon, the ENIAC computer, occupying a 33 by 55 foot room, built with 500,000 hand-soldered joints, had the power of twenty human processors, and remained in use until 1955.
The work of John Von Neumann and Alan Turing gave birth to software and established principles that would guide the future of computers.
As Alan Turing enters the story, he says goodbye to his family and sails in steerage from London to New York in 1936, heading for Princeton to work with Von Neumann. He carried with him a heavy brass sextant and soon after arrival delivered his 35-page paper, “On Computable Numbers,” said to symbolize the powers of digital machines. The men worked together for two years while Turing completed a fellowship. His paper described a Universal Machine, able to compute any computable number.
Turing’s Cathedral should be required reading for today’s techies, who will delight in every new development along the way, including a high-speed wire drive, coiled via bicycle wheels, running at 90,000 bits per second. A memorable forerunner to the tape cartridges and removable drives that came along in the late 20th century, indeed. As we know today, technology also brought about the ability to conduct computer-assisted weather forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation statistics, and grew exponentially to include many thousands of innovations.
The history of computers and statistics is part of the history of the U.S., WW II, immigration, university life, weather, Los Alamos, and beautiful story telling. Through a well-told story and rare photos, Dyson’s book is both a history lesson and a tribute to the pioneers of technology who changed the world.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Two more options for managing email
Thanks to John Brandon, in the September 2012 issue of INC magazine for this suggestion.
He has found two options to help you stop the time-drain that is known as email. We've all tried unsubscribing to newsletters, and avoiding getting locked in to daily updates, but still, we waste hours each day plowing through a full mailbox, just to get it down to a manageable number. And then, the next day, we start all over again. Yes, we all know its a losing battle.
John's suggestis are for inbox tools that might help:
Unroll gives you a fast way to unsubscribe to all the sites that have you as a subscriber.
SaneBox is a fee-based service, $4.95/month, that analyzes your messages before delivery, to pre-sort by priority. The low-priority items are then summaried and pavailable for you to scan na single message.
If email continues to waste your time, try these or other resources to keep you from losing productive hours each week.
He has found two options to help you stop the time-drain that is known as email. We've all tried unsubscribing to newsletters, and avoiding getting locked in to daily updates, but still, we waste hours each day plowing through a full mailbox, just to get it down to a manageable number. And then, the next day, we start all over again. Yes, we all know its a losing battle.John's suggestis are for inbox tools that might help:
Unroll gives you a fast way to unsubscribe to all the sites that have you as a subscriber.
SaneBox is a fee-based service, $4.95/month, that analyzes your messages before delivery, to pre-sort by priority. The low-priority items are then summaried and pavailable for you to scan na single message.
If email continues to waste your time, try these or other resources to keep you from losing productive hours each week.
Monday, April 02, 2012
The 1940 U.S.Census is now public
Where were your parents in the 1930s? How much money did your dad make back then?
The U.S Census data from 1490 is now public, as of 8 a.m. today, April 2, 2012.
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