Being “in the flow”. The nicest state of mind known to mankind. You act without thinking, and everyone of your actions is the perfect response to the situation. Riding a motorcycle on a beautiful road without a destination can easily get you into this state. With an empty mind, you see the next 2 corners, feel your bike as your brakes hit the disc, smell the forest, and hear the wind as you start accelerating out of the first corner while naturally placing the bike into position for the next.
Tag: technology
T(w)inkering
Now that the twitter hype is cooling down, and companies tart to realize that it is, in fact, just CB radio in a new asynchronous form, only the “true tweeps” still hang around. And now, it’s time to t(w)inker with it.
Design Gripes
Dear Akio Morita,
Lately I have some small issues with a lot of design decisions being made by the company you founded a while ago. If you look at my irritations seperately they’re just small gripes of a grumpy old customer. But the increasing number of design mistakes have me worried about your user acceptance testing and quality assurance processes. Given the sheer size of your company, and the fact that the very same people who are sabotaging your overall product quality can silently delete my complaint, I thought I’d share it with you here, on my very private blog. Nobody else will read this. Honest.
LED’s in your livingroom?
In some countries, there is some talk on banishing the classic (incandescant) lightbulb. I think this whole discussion is needless. The only reason why it exists, is that the fluorescent bulbs are often of mediocre quality, and certain people are here to enforce their bad tastes upon us “for a greater purpose”.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like trees and birds around my house, and I would be more than happy to install energy-efficient appliances in my home, even if they cost me slightly more. But especially if I’m paying more, I expect to get a certain level of quality.
Because of the inefficiency of incandescent bulbs, and the number of bulbs in my household, I decided to look around for energy efficient solutions. Particulary LED lighting caught my interest, because it is not only energy efficient, it’s also dimmable with normal (cheap) floor dimmers. They even stay cold enough so that children touching them do not burn their fingers.
Tweet Week
About a week ago, I was a bit bored and decided to see what Twitter is all about. I created an account, and I Tweeted for a week. I tried to keep to the original idea, where a Tweet should answer the question “What are you doing”? Looking back, my tweets include Coffee, Podcasts, Global frustration, Small joys, Small irritations, Re-tweets, and Replies.
DLNA on OSX, done right
My wife bought me a playstation 3 last year, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of gaming on it, finishing Tomb Raider underworld, and now making decent progress in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction.
I was a bit sceptical about the DLNA capabilities of the PS3, because I read a lot of bad news on this fairly new “Interoperability Guidelines” concept. It sounded like a lot of trouble to go through to simply watch the photos and home videos on a TV. For weeks, I was not able to find a single site telling me how to install a DLNA server on my Mac, or where to find a decent one.
Altgough they’re hard to find, there are a few OSX DLNA servers out there. One of them is actually very good. Here’s what I found:
Technology does not sell
Seth Godin did a talk at Google campus in Februari last year. I recently stumbled upon this video of his talk, in which he explains to the Google people why Google sells.
He is very clear in explaining to technology people that technology does not sell. It’s technology that gives you a shot at marketing, nothing more. He makes some very good points which I’ll try to summarize, because the video takes 48 minutes to watch 🙂
Thoughts on Widgets, Gadgets, Screenlets
Just now, I was listening to the Java Posse podcast about the ab5k screenlet framework for Java, and I am finally convinced that software developers are a bunch of crazy, unrealistic, memory-hungry, cpu cycle stealers and by lack of normal people telling them otherwise are proud of it, too. The problem? Look at this list (no particular order):
Soybean racer
The big car manufacturers could have done this, but they didn’t, because they are sponsored by the big oil companies. And your local governement is swimming in taxmoney that’s added to your oil price. And no, they don’t want to get rid of the cars, despite of what they say. The nicest thing for governements would be the complete population sitting in single-seated, gas guzzling cars in a traffic jam accross the country!
Now that a few school kids have proven that you don’t need oil to race, and several American race series run on methanol (no that’s not an oil product), can we please stop making cars that run on gasoline? And by the way, also stop pumping money into the super-dangerous liquid nitrogen cars? All that is purely to keep the oil companies in the same place: monopoly. Do you really think they do it for the environment? What if I told you that your current petrol car can run on bio-degradable methanol, with almost no changes? If you have a very modern car, the fuel system will even auto-adapt! But noooo, they won’t tell you that, because the oil companies and governements want to keep the monopoly intact!
Not that you can really do anything about it though. Except maybe not buying liquid-nitrogen or hybrid cars. There are better technical alternatives, although not on the market yet. Boycot the “environmentally friendly” car, force them into making a *real* environmentally friendly car.
Yes, I’m driving a diesel, and a motorbike. And no, I’m not worried about oil-shortage. It’s all bullshit from the oil companies, who could have come up with alternatives a long while ago, but chose not to. If there really was an oil shortage, we all would have been driving on methanol for quite some time now. And co2 emmisions would have been reduced to absolutely 0.