Technology | Matt's Cuppa

15 Ways to Digg your mind for new ideas

telecommatt | October 20, 2008

Here’s a few ways you can spark your creativity, just in time for another Monday morning.

clipped from www.manageyourlifenow.com

15 Ways to Digg your mind for new ideas

1. Exercise your mind by reading

2. Write your ideas down

3. Discuss your new ideas with others

4. Find your creative environment

5. Break the barrier between generations

6. Challenge the rules - innovate

7. Explore your areas of expertise

If you need to enter into unknown territory for you, first discuss your ideas with a specialist on that area and allow him to adapt your idea to the needs of this sector.

8. Digg the ideas out of your mind

9. Digg your memory for ideas you had in the past

10. Find your inspiration mousse

11. Utilize your time better

12. Exercise

13. Digg it, Google it, Buzz it

14. Organize your thinking

There are 4 ways to organise your new ideas

Collection of information

Evaluation of data

Estimate the probabilities

Implementation of the idea

15. Do not give up

It may take some time or it may come to you suddenly when you are not expecting it.

be patience and your new idea is on its way!

Popularity: 63% [?]

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The Internet of things

telecommatt |

In doing so, the internet of things promises to reshape our lives as fundamentally as the introduction of the railway, but with less public consent or even debate about its arrival. Before it does arrive, perhaps we could spare a moment to think what it might mean. As one day in the future you might even get assigned your own unique IP number. By then, of course, it will be too late to complain.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

The net shapes up to get physical

just as many of us are getting to grips with its second stage, the mobile
internet, very few are prepared - perhaps even aware - of the third and
potentially most revolutionary phase of all: the internet of things

Sometime between now and 2010, the internet is poised to reach beyond virtual
space and take root in the physical world. According to many futurist thinkers,
almost every object you can see around you carries the possibility of being
connected to the internet. This means that your domestic appliances, your
clothes, the books on your shelves and your car in the driveway may one day soon
be assigned a unique IP address, just as both computers and web pages are
assigned them today, to enable them to talk to each other.

Whatever it happens to be, we can IP-enable it.”

every human on the planet could have a personal network the size of the today’s
inter

Already in Japan cows

wireless RFID chips beneath their skin

Farmers can now track their livestock

Popularity: 59% [?]

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Ever forgot a site password? Use Firefox to retrieve.

telecommatt |

This is a pretty good tip for retrieving lost passwords. It’s also a beautifully easy way for your roommate to gain access to your digital life. Personally, I’d rather just click on the “Lost Password?” link that most sites put just below the login screen, but the Firefox thing is still a good thing to be aware of.

clipped from muzich.blogspot.com

To view the passwords associated with any site, go to the log-in page and right-click anywhere on the page.

Select View Page Info, and then the Security tab.

Click View Saved Passwords. Another window will pop up showing the usernames associated with that site

Click Show Passwords to see the passwords for each username.

If you want to view all of your saved usernames and passwords, open Options under the Tools menu and select the Security tab.

Click Saved Passwords to open a list of every site you’ve ever saved a password for

Again, click View Passwords and the list will display all of your passwords. You can’t print this list, but you can just as easily take screenshots if you want to print out your passwords for safekeeping.

Of course…this a security hole

password-protect your passwords

Options | Security tab, click Use a master password and enter a password. Now this password will have to be entered any time you or anyone else tries to view saved passwords.

Popularity: 56% [?]

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Why Your Homepage Doesn’t Matter (As Much)

telecommatt | October 13, 2008

I found this article completely by accident on a blog I’ve never read before while looking for reviews on a beta service I’d forgotten I signed up for. And best of all, I happened to be looking at landing page options for a client when I got side-tracked by this post.

Mr.Amer is 100% correct. Not much about your homepage really matters anymore. It’s nothing more than your reception area. If you go to the dentist, you’re there to see the dentist, not to sit in the reception area. And I bet that if the dentist is a really good dentist, you’ll sit in the reception room for a bit even if you can’t stand the wallpaper.

Amer’s point takes us back to Internets 101, where the purpose of a website is to organize information around a topic for easy retrieval. A decade ago, when internet search was still in infancy, a search engine would lead you to the site’s homepage, drop you off there, and say good-bye. Today’s search? Think a gargantuan gorilla that will run out, snatch and grab the data you need straight from the page it is on, (forget your reception area- he doesn’t use doors.) and bring it back all neatly organized in a hierarchical fashion akin to a dinner menu at a fancy restaurant.

Like the image? The point is that when someone Google’s your content, they go straight to your content. Therefore, your content must function as a landing page in a minimalist sort of way. What does that mean for the designer? If a site has 14 topics covered under the main topic of, say, frogs, it means that at least 15 page must be treated as if the user landed on that page first.

It also means the the homepage, or landing page, should not be a content page. Use it to teach the user how to navigate the site, what to expect on the site, recent changes to the site, but don’t use the homepage to display content that could be displayed elsewhere on the site.

It’s interesting watching the net change over time, mostly because it changes fast enough for use to see it happen. Mr.Amer brings up a great point about the changing web. We’ve always surfed the web for content. Now, with the maturation of search technology, we have the ability to reach out and grab just the pieces that are important to us.

clipped from jdamer.com

The homepage really serves one purpose: getting people off of the homepage. That’s it. A website is about the content that is inside, not whatever meaningless information you’ve thrown on the homepage.

People are looking for content, and that’s what their searches are going to take them to. Unless the majority of your content lives on your homepage, it’s not THAT important.

here is no single landing page. Every page is a landing page. Every page that can be found in a search, can be a landing page.

Popularity: 51% [?]

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Something Familiar About the Blackberry Storm

telecommatt | October 8, 2008

Did someone say “iPhone”?

clipped from www.engadget.com

We can’t put our finger on it, but there’s something vaguely familiar about this new Storm 9500.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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how to “future-proof” a PC against obsolescence

telecommatt | October 7, 2008

This is some good advice to follow if you’re thinking of building your own box. Also, if you install a Linux OS on the machine, you’re adding years of usability to the machine, since most Linux distros use far fewer resources than a Windows OS.

clipped from lifehacker.com

Whenever I’ve built a PC I have done my best to *future-proof* my purchase to the extent possible.

Find out what the fastest, best processor out there today is.

Next find the cheapest processor that uses the same socket.

scout reviews for motherboards that support that socket

You’re looking for a board that supports the latest processor, the latest video card standard, latest hard drive technology etc. But you’re not looking for the latest model of this board.

Buy two steps down fromt he top in terms of hard drive sizes

one or two steps down from the top in terms of Video card.

What you end up with is a very capable system that costs a lot less than today’s state of the art, but that may have been state of the art a year or so ago.

for some applications (photoshop comes to mind) nothing improves performance like a killer fast Hard Drive. Except those are killer expensive. The on-the-cheap solution is to buy VERY FAST but cheap hard drives and set them up for RAID 0 (striping).

Popularity: 46% [?]

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Why DRM-protected Music is a Waste of Money

telecommatt | October 1, 2008

This is a shining example of why DRM is flawed. Why should our music collection depend on the continued support of some retailer? Any time you pay money for DRM-protected music you are renting the music that you purchased. And once those DRM servers shut down, they walk away with your money AND your music.

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com

Customers of Wal-Mart’s digital music service will be in for a big shock very soon, just as Yahoo Music customers were. Wal-Mart has announced that they will shut down their DRM servers on October 9th. What does this mean for Wal-Mart digital music buyers?

Popularity: 40% [?]

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Dell’s ‘Holy-Crap!’ Laptop

telecommatt | September 25, 2008

What would you do with 16GM of RAM?

clipped from www.tomshardware.com

Dell dell has released its new Precision M6400 mobile workstation featuring a 17-inch display, Intel quad-core http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core processor and 16 GB of memory.

Popularity: 36% [?]

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Nothing But Prod

telecommatt | September 18, 2008

On the train headed home. I think I had a record number of meetings today. Somewhere in there I think I’m supposed to actually do some software development. But then again. whatever I’m supposed to work on will change after the next meeting. So, by not doing any work I’m really increasing my productivity through the lack of re-work I would otherwise have to to do. Does anyone else get the impression that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be?

Popularity: 43% [?]

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Bringing Them Into the Social Media Fold

telecommatt | September 15, 2008

This is another really great (and relevant) post from RWW. My first thought after reading this is, what if we were to reverse this. Turn Kirkpatrick’s strategy on it’s head as a way to gently introduce people to the social-medivaerse. Because, at the end of the day, don’t we want to put our audience in one place and spend the greatest amount of effort where it will reach the greatest extent of our audience?

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com

Nuke! on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.jpg Are you the only person at work who likes to read blogs? Is it your job to sell things to people who would probably throw you out of their offices if you said the word “twitter?” Are you trying to reach audiences who’ve never visited a social networking website because they’ve heard those sites are used by no one but virus peddlers, sex fiends and 14 year old losers?

Sometimes it feels like social media is just not relevant to the people you’re trying to reach. That’s a common dilemma, but we believe it doesn’t have to be that way. In this post we discuss five strategies for using social media to reach people who don’t use social media, and we’ve listed specific tools you can use to do it.

Popularity: 43% [?]

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