Category Archives: bookmarks

• A List Apart: Articles: Organizing Mobile

  Focus on content first, navigation second seems to be the mantra

  tags: mobile design ui development usability content

  • Focusing on content first, navigation second gets people to the information and tasks they want quickly.

• 15 years of Download.com | software-downloads.jpg (620×2667)

  Shows you the technological progress we’ve made in 15 years too. Just look at the way the computing power has increased & at the same time reduced in cost.
  Most stats show the difference between 1996 & 2011. It could’ve done with an intermediate period circa 2002-03 when Win XP was at its peak, especially for browser share (IE had ~90% of the market).

  tags: statistics infographic downloads software

• by Lemony Snicket – OccupyWriters.com

  13 interesting points of which this one sounds ominous:
  “11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.”

  tags: occupywallstreet opinion protest

• Lytro

  A radical development that allows you to focus photos after they are taken. Would require a proprietary format I suppose, but it does take you closer to the way we actually see the world. The image quality didn’t look that good in the gallery, but that’s beside the point for a first gen device.

  tags: camera photography innovation

• Here Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About…

  Many ways of looking at these charts:- Proof that the world is becoming flatter- The wealth for entry level employment is being transferred from US to developing economies- Outsourcing works
  On a side note, even Hollywood acknowledged that the entry level wealth is moving east in the Karate Kid remake…

  tags: economics usa outsourcing wealth statistics

• My Dinner With Android – Four months with Android: reflections, grievances and some tenuous metaphors bundled up into a weighty tome

  Definitely not an Android fan. I agree with the bit about the feel of the OS, but not the app variety on the market\app store.

  tags: android apple Google experience

• The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company

  A pretty long read

  tags: amazon Google facebook apple technology strategy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Bluestacks :: App Player for Windows :: Run apps fast on your PC or tablet

  Useful utility to run android apps on Windows

  tags: windows app android

• Steve Jobs: Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer? – Quora

  A case of conventional vs alternative medicine\treatment

  tags: cancer stevejobs medicine treatment

• My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters | Politics News | Rolling Stone

  Sound advice, but who’ll bell the “bull”?

  tags: advice politics economics wallstreet

• The Man Who Inspired Jobs – NYTimes.com

  Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography, and in many ways similar to Jobs both in terms of taste and in terms of the career path

  tags: apple stevejobs inspiration polaroid

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• A VC: Minimum Viable Personality

  How do you make an interesting product that engages the customer and builds loyalty?

  tags: personality product marketing

• ifttt / Selective delicious bookmarks to wordpress blog

  An easy way to post your bookmarks to your blog. This ifttt recipe posts only bookmarks with a specified tag.
  In case you have not checked out ifttt already, it’s a really handy service that allows you to program the different online services that you use & even integrate with SMS services.

  tags: forblog wordpress bookmarks blog

• Daring Fireball: Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

  Ever wondered why you end up with extra text containing links when you copy text from certain sites? Tynt is the culprit behind. The post includes ways to disable the behaviour.

  tags: copy paste websites online-services

  • If you use Chrome, you can install this Tynt-blocking extension, which does just what it says on the tin. However, you wind up getting a dialog box each time you encounter a different site using Tynt.

• replay your terminal recordings online! (capture shell terminal recording and replay online),

  Quite a bunch of screencasts. Plus, you can upload your own.

  tags: linux tutorials screencast

• The world’s oldest running car up for sale

  Way back from 1884, and steam powered at that.

  tags: car sale history

• Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind

  Just the beginning, but a start nonetheless

  tags: brain imaging science visualization research

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Things Apple is Worth More Than

  Not all are Apple to apple comparisons, but does have some interesting stats nonetheless. It uses Apple’s market cap for comparison.

  tags: apple Business statistics

• “Joke” Conversation Thread in which the Was Invented

  The thread that started it all

  tags: joke thread emoticon smiley

• On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study

  “…certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.”

  tags: spying radiation

  • certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

• Smart meters reveal TV viewing habits – The H Security: News and Features

  Now, that’s something radical. However, I wonder how much it depends on a TV set being “standard”. After all, the power consumption is very different for an LCD vs CRT vs LED, not to forget screen sizes & TV settings.

  tags: security research electricity analytics tv

• 10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster – SplatF

  Very valid points that make sense of the Netflix decision to split the DVD & streaming business.

  tags: netflix businessmodels ecommerce

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than a Tablet | Epicenter | Wired.com

  Bottom line is that you need a strong business model backing your products. Apple has one, and Amazon is just pushing into the new space, while Google is still not sure what to do.

  tags: amazon tablet ecommerce

• Was Marx Right? – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review

  So, Marx had something in his diagnosis of capitalism. Now, if we could only find a suitable prescription for the economy.

  tags: socialism capitalism politics economics communism marx

  • America’s largest private employer is Walmart. America’s second largest employer is McDonald’s
  • while Marx’s prescriptions were poor, perhaps, if we’re prepared to think subtly, it’s worthwhile separating his diagnoses from them

• Coming to terms – WWW.THEDAILY.COM

  Proposed redesign of the iTunes agreement. One aspect that Apple has not been able to simplify thus far.

  tags: apple agreements design

• What makes someone leave a website? [Infographic]

  Nice bunch of tips to consider for your website design

  tags: infographic design webdesign

• Capitalism is dead! – Our weekly editorial cartoon: KAL’s cartoon | The Economist

  More relevant now than ever before

  tags: cartoon economist capitalism

• Jobs Will Follow a Strengthening of the Middle Class – NYTimes.com

  Communism didn’t work that well, and neither does unrestrained capitalism it seems…
  The infographic on top is particularly enlightening

  tags: jobs nytimes economics usa depression

  • Most telling of all, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. In so doing, it allowed finance — which until then had been the servant of American industry — to become its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits.
  • Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread.
  • Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.

• ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up

  It makes you wonder how startups manage to even survive, much less grow to become Apples, Microsofts & Googles, once such “mangers” come into the picture.

  tags: startup entrepreneurship

  • What really sent him over the edge, as far as I can tell, was when I related my  response to a member of the Harvard faculty who asked me what it was like to  watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita (I replied  ”like watching a group of nursery school children who’ve stolen a Boeing 747 and  are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off”).

• Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker

  All the tools do is to make the weak ties more accessible, but that’s not going to lead to too many revolutions outside of slacktivism & clicktivism. Unless of course, the internet is turned off. That would be the real stimulus to get people off the armchair.
  Time to revisit the high context & low context culture definitions too

  tags: activism socialmedia facebook gladwell

  • Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?
  • In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.
  • “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
  • Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
  • The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life
  • By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf.
  • In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.
  • No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
  • Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.
  • A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.

• Sheeple – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Are we people or “sheeple”?

  tags: activism culture wikipedia language people

• Slacktivism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  And so we have a proper definition & wikipedia page for it

  tags: activism socialmedia culture language wikipedia

  • posits that people who support a cause by performing simple measures are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change
  • the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair

• Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth – Adrian Slywotzky – Harvard Business Review

  It’s not enough to just have a vision & supreme taste. You need to be able to really refine them & make them a reality.

  tags: apple stevejobs innovation design

  • But the idea, so common in this week’s media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and “going with your gut,” the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple’s success.
  • And, oh, the marketing: brilliant marketing. No one is better at creating attention than Apple. But attention without fulfillment is a straw fire. The magicians say “Presto!” and we gasp in delight. But they deflect our attention from the back-breaking labor that goes into assuring a perfect customer experience, hundreds of times a day, at 300 stores around the world, and countless conversations on the phone.
  • Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple has done 10 times the amount of relevant homework of most companies — internal competitions, supply chain training, endless deal-making, endless recruiting, training, and generating and sustaining employee excitement that you just can’t fake.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Draw – Google Correlate

  Draw a curve & have Google find query terms matching a similar search frequency

  tags: google visualization search draw

• Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain? – NYTimes.com

  So, it’s more important to give your eyes a break every 20 min or so, than to bother about e-ink & LCD displays.
  “The new LCDs don’t affect your eyes,” Mr. Taussig said. “Today’s screens update every eight milliseconds, whereas the human eye is moving at a speed between 10 and 30 milliseconds.”

  tags: kindle display eink lcd

• Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, Mac OS X Lion : Crowning A Web-Browsing King In Windows 7 And OS X

  Chrome 13 on Windows & Safari 5 on Mac OS X
  Firefox 6 remains a decent performer on Windows too
  IE9 has its strengths on some hardware accelerated stuff, while Opera is an erratic performer – poor memory management & javascript conformance, but decent page load reliability.

  tags: chrome web windows mac safari opera ie browsers benchmark test

• Falser Words Were Never Spoken – NYTimes.com

  “But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all. “

  tags: words quotes attribution

• The Elusive Big Idea – NYTimes.com

  “This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.”

  tags: idea socialnetworking intellectualism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Steve Jobs’s Patents – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com

  Quite a varied bunch including the iPod, iPhone & the likes. Also include the notorious hockey puck mouse.

  tags: apple patent stevejobs

• Coconut Chutney: The Chetan Bhagat Plot Generator

  I haven’t read any of his books yet, but the ones generated by this do seem really interesting. Then again they are only 1-2 para summaries.

  tags: plot generator story

• namebench – Open-source DNS Benchmark Utility – Google Project Hosting

  Handy little tool to benchmark the DNS servers locally & thus choose the best one

  tags: dns tools benchmark performance network software

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• IBM PC @ 30: Original review of the Personal Computer Model 5150 – reviews for UK IT professionals – V3.co.uk

  Key points:
  - You could actually use a TV as the monitor
  - The function of the scroll lock key was a mystery even then
  - BASIC (stored in the ROM) came before DOS
  - Esc, Alt + Del was the reboot combo
  And from the review in a nutshell:
  “This is probably the most professionally put-together system I have seen. The only thing missing at the moment is a wide selection of packages, but I rather feel that the whole world and its grandmother will be frantically trying to fill that particular gap.”

  tags: review PC ibm history

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• How to Add a Snooze Button to Gmail, No Extensions Required

  Making use of Google Apps Script functionality in Google Docs to snooze mails in Gmail

  tags: gmail hack script

• Psychological Self-Help – new – Table of Contents

  Quite a lot of reading material

  tags: psychology self-help health book

• The Cult That Is Destroying America – NYTimes.com

  The case against centrism from Paul Krugman

  tags: politics opinion usa economics

• Innovative Audio – Receiver Shootout

  A comparison of the sound quality between a couple of vintage a/v receivers from 1978-80 to a modern one. The vintage ones still have it in them for pure sound quality.
  Old is gold stills rings true even after all the “innovations” over the years.

  tags: audio test receiver

• You Can’t Keep Your Secrets From Twitter | Fast Company

  Very interesting study on tweets to find correlation between the user & their demographic

  tags: Twitter research gender

• The Best Self-Help Book of All Time

  A candid take on self help books by a person who read 340 of them in a 2 year period. The only book he finds useful is Richard Wiseman’s “59 seconds”. One thing interesting about the amazon links to the books in his reviews is that they are affiliate ones…
  Quote: “Here’s the thing. Self-help books are written to sell, not to help.”

  tags: Self-Help books criticism

• John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad

  A really long long piece

  tags: finance education books criticism

• The case of the 500-mile email

  A very interesting story that shows why things shouldn’t be taken at face value

  tags: Email networking technology Internet

  • One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

• Microsoft Camera Codec Pack

  Adds RAW support to Windows Photo Gallery & Explorer on Windows Vista & 7

  tags: download microsoft camera codec

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Ten reasons to avoid Google’s IPO

  An oldie from before the Google IPO in 2004, that seems hilarious in the current scheme of things, especially with gems like:
  “Look at Google’s competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?”
  “Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?” – Going by the recent hype over G+, the saturation doesn’t seem to have set in even after 8 years.

  tags: google ipo criticism

  • Yahoo is trying too hard to monetize their new search engine, but apart from this they’ve already shown that their technology is as good as Google’s.
  • Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?
  • personalized search is the Next Big Thing
  • Look at Google’s competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.