Blog
In the Spring of 2010, I was writing for a small tech blog, and was asked to produce a piece about the forthcoming iPad. I’d never seen or used one, but I did a bunch of research about it and, as usual, formed a fairly negative opinion about Apple’s latest introduction before ever using it. It reminded me of my reaction to the introduction of the iPod, when I said that first no one would want to carry a portable disk drive with music on it, then I said no one would want to carry around their photos, nor watch video on such a small screen. At least I am consistent. In any case, the piece never ran, I stopped writing for the blog, and then went out and got an iPad for myself.
Here in three parts is my take on the iPad- before owning one, now that I have one, and essential Apps on my iPad.
I thought I’d take a moment and give a shoutout to all my buddies at the EFF and remind everyone about all the good work they do protecting freedom of speech online! ›› Bloggers’ Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
When Google announced and subsequently unleashed Buzz on the world, on February 9, 2010, it was hoping to have a social networking hit on its hands. Instead, it was met with a lot of frustration and anger from users, who found Buzz thrust upon them, turned on and connected to the rest of the internet before users even knew it.
And when I say connected, I mean connected! Everything in your Google profile, including all your contacts and links and your YouTube Profile (like your sharing links to Twitter accounts), Picasa, your Google Reader shared items, and more, became available to anyone familiar with your Gmail address who wanted to follow your Buzz account. And this wasn’t a choice to opt-in, but instead was switched on all at once from Google headquarters and shoved out the door.
My 90 year old stepfather was just recently claiming to my mother that kids didn’t pick on each other back in his day. When she told me about it, we nodded knowingly, smiled, and agreed he has a touch of the old-timer’s. Anyone who is a kid, has been a kid, or has a kid of their own knows that bullying is a big problem, at home, at school and on the playground. But with the advent of the internet, it’s moved into an entirely different arena- online, and taken a new name- cyber-bullying.
Excuse Me, You Have Email On Your Shirt!
Chris Ball is the lead software engineer for One Laptop Per Child, who is a geek and wears t-shirts and has an Android phone, pretty much like a lot of the rest of us.
But recently, a local electronics retailer had a promotion where they gave away free parts to 1000 people, and Chris was one of the lucky ones to participate.
Chris made off with $100 in free electronics and decided, with the help of his wife Madeline, to put them to use in a way no one had ever thought of before- making a t-shirt that keeps count of unread emails! Right there on the front of the t-shirt, using LEDs, it keeps a total count of how many messages are waiting to be read in the Inbox. It uses an Arduino Lilypad and Bluetooth dongle to talk to his Android phone and the count displayed right on the shirt for everyone to see!