Tag Archives: personal whatever

The importance of being idle

Achievements for this weekend: walking the distance of marathon, sleeping next to a dog, and signing up for a sailing course.


People partying on the top of a working street sweeper in Berlin, after “Karneval der Kulturen”

I can quite agree with those who follow a perfect daily routine to achieve their goals; I tried Pomodoro and GTD myself, and I believe that all sorts of works can be done faster and more efficient if you set up some rules and follow those. On the other hand: the goals to choose from is almost infinite, and in my field, creativity is rated at least as high as the amount of ticks in your todo list.

So training for that with having some days playing football in the park actually makes sense – let’s try to get payed for that.

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The run of McAfee

The founder of McAfee Antivirus went on the run in Belize after his house was ransacked during the search for drugs and guns – and he kept posting from under cover. Regardless of how the story ends, there’s something important to take home here: the freedom of information is great.

“For those of you who follow the news in Central America, you will know that I am in hiding in an undisclosed location in Belize. Hiding out is no fun. I’ve always wondered why people on the run turn themselves in in many cases. I now know the answer – boredom.” – posted John McAfee. (Quoted from the article explaining what happened on Gizmodo.)

For our age, the Internet is an every day tool: we use it to share data, to connect with friends, to have some fun in the evenings. But it has a greater thing to it that can only be seen in times when someone is in trouble. Because weather it’s soldiers having fun killing civilians, a Cuban blogger who wants to share thoughts from behind the curtain; or, hackers want to prove that Sony is pretty careless with its users’ private data – the information will be out there. And this freedom of information, eventually, will make the world a better place.

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Bike repaired

Breaking news: new tires on my bike! (More in this post: procrastinating and laziness.)

As always, when it comes to tasks that seem to be rather inconvenient, we need a trigger to do those: we take down the garbage when the whole kitchen smells, we go to the dentist when the bad looking tooth starts to hurt – and we change the tires on our bikes when it’s not at all safe to ride anymore.

Or not even then. I should have bought the new tires a long, long time ago, but I kept using it for the last half a year, and did another few hundred kilometers on them – luckily, without any accidents. The trigger in my case was a friend with a flat tire near my apartment and the ever stronger feeling that I’m going to die the next corner.

So, at last, from today on I’m a happy urban cyclist again, riding on a safe – but still rather ugly – bike. And this all took 30 minutes tops (by the way: thanks Katrin for the help).

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The power of Facebook

There is a project, started a few years ago, where everything is about smiles: parents get professional photos of their kids, shopping malls get new visitors – and the website of the project gets lots of attention. After we integrated Facebook this year, it got five times more.


Image from MosolyOlimpia.hu

SmileOlympics is a one week event in shopping malls, where children and their families are photographed in the old-fashioned way. The picture taken is a gift for the parents, and there is a smile-wall set up in the venue where visitors can browse through the whole gallery.

After the event there’s an online competition, where users can vote and the photo with the most votes receives a prize. The website was designed in 2006, and not much happened since then: users could register, log in and vote for any pictures they liked. Of course, on an event like this, the customer support had loads of work – people registered with fake e-mail addresses faster than the moderators could delete them, and most of the mothers wanted to know how the other ones kid can have ten times more votes.

As this year the project will become a road show rather than a once-a-year event, we had the resources to improve some bits – and we integrated Facebook in order to prevent multiple registrations. Dumping all the user data we had (well, not quite… but you get the point), we decided to go with Facebook login, and we replaced the voting system with Like buttons. To make sure that users can’t vote before or after the one week competition, we created a database that is synced with Facebook only in that period.

At this point we were afraid of losing users: since it was possible to vote on Facebook without even seeing the website, some users had no reason to do so – to get around this, we had two things in mind. First, we created a Facebook page to reach more users, and provided information and the customer service there as well. Second, we made another competition running: whoever liked at least five photos on the website, could also win a prize.

The results were astonishing: on the first day of the competition, we registered five times more users than in the previous years, 90 precent of whom came from Facebook (compared to about 10 percent in 2011). From Monday to Friday evening Google Analytics registered 30K unique visitors, and after the first two weeks, at this moment there are 2450 likes on the Facebook page. All this without changing anything else on a 6 years old website.

That’s another smile here.

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Levitated interactions

The way we interact with the world is in constant change – for us, users, the best to do here is to adapt as fast as we can. No matter what the current technical development brings to our homes, we will push those buttons, twist the wheels and touch some screens.

Of course, sci-fi is always a step ahead: we have seen touch screens and something very similar to the iPad in futuristic movies from 30 years ago. But when it gets real and possible, it is a different thing. Or did you blink since you’ve seen the video above?

MIT created a very interesting user interface from levitating orbs. Placing balls in an empty place does indeed look amazing, and the rendered 3D video is crazy as hell – but the real power of this thing is in what user interaction designers think we could use it for.

I just can’t wait to see the first buttonless home stereos and washing machines – operated by levitating some orbs.

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Hacker shine

Updated

Programming used to be a hacker thing: men in black sitting on the floor, bending over a laptop that has some key parts missing (or even wires coming out), and the only source in the dark room at 3 am in the morning is the dim light from the monitor. Nowadays though, programmers get some shine.

Codea is a touch-based programming app for the iPad, that lets developers create games and simulations. Of course, it’s more a toy than a heavy weight development environment (and since the current kit doesn’t support any kind of publishing, the final games will never leave the iPad itself – I was awfully wrong! See below). Not like it’s a big deal, no one will cry over missing out those “amazing things” created with Codea.

So the time is not now, yes, but the damage has been made: as more and more development tools will come out, eventually, programmers will be changing their black bricks into shiny toys – just like journalist did some time ago.

Whoha-hoo.

Update: as @TwoLivesLeft said on Twitter, there is a solution to turn apps made with Codea into native iOS apps, and the code for this is already on Github. One example app in the App Store is Cargo Bot, available for free for iPad.

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