Another Strong Personal Vote For the Cloud

HTC Sensation. Credit: Partial screen shot from HTC flash video at http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-sensation/

Friday (I seem to be very lucky with Friday’s–see my earlier vote for the cloud) my “smart”-phone spontaneously started rebooting.

It had done this before. This behavior is inconvenient for the user since one does not realize that the phone is quietly sitting in the pocket waiting for the pin to be entered.

During that time the phone of course does not receive calls, which could be a relieve to some. But I actually have a mobile phone to receive calls.

Another little issue was that the phone refused to sync my contacts and calendars. The “Accounts and Sync” app refused to start and consistently gave me a “Force close.” Since I rely on having my calendar and contacts in sync on my devices this was a real drawback.

A call to the friendly support person from HTC (the phone is a HTC Sensation with Android version 2.3.4 and HTC Sense 3.0) resulted in the advice to do a factory reset of the device.

When I told him that I had been through this before on some of my other earlier HTC models and about the time I had to spend to get all my settings back to where they had been before, he told me that HTC has a backup app that can back things up to the card thus making the recovery much easier.

I received the app (HTC Backup), installed it and fired it up. It proposed me to make a backup of my calendar, backup of my contacts, backup of my SMS and backup of my call-log. That was it. The first two options (contacts and calendar) did not work since the program calls on “Accounts and Sync” app which did not work in the first place.

But it did not do what I had asked for. It did not make backups of all the settings in my numerous apps. While fiddling with this the phone decided that it was time for yet another spontaneous reboot. At this point I clenched my teeth and made the factory reset without an additional safety net.

After the reboot my phone was in the state I had purchased it in half a year ago. So I started to get everything back onto the device that I needed. BTW I had always set the option “back up my settings” in the settings of the phone. But somehow …

So here an (incomplete) list of the things I had to do:

"Look out, it's a vicious circle" -- Credit: Image at http://karch10k.wordpress.com/2011/ 03/30/vicious-circle/

1. Account settings: The first thing you have to do is to enter your user account ID at Google. But since I have two-factor authentication enabled, it asked me for an additional authentication key which I would get from Google Authenticator. This is an app you can download to the phone. But only after you entered your account. So I had the classical hen-and-egg problem where I could not download the app since I did not have the code which I could only get when I had the app. A truly vicious cycle. Until I realized that I could look if the Google Authenticator is also available on other platforms and lo behold, there is one for the iPod touch. So I downloaded Google Authenticator for the iPod and could finally break the vicious circle.
   I still had to set all the other accounts but since I am using KeePassX on all my devices I was able to get all the account information for my twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other accounts and enter them one by one. (Completed after 2 h)
2. Calendars and contacts: Fortunately Android takes care of that due to the Google user account. Just let the phone sit for a while and everything should be back. (Completed after 30 min)
3. Apps: Ordinarily they should also come back to your phone. But in my case something went wrong and no app appeared automatically on the phone. Going to the Google Android Market I saw that all my apps were listed but as “installed.” The only option I was given was to uninstall–something I definitely did not want to do. No option for re-installing.
   Next stop: AppBrain App Market. I had used this in the past and I was happy now that I had done that. I found all my apps under a previous profile name and was able to copy them into the new profile AppBrain had set up for my freshly reset phone. After tinkering with “Fast Web Installer” and tweaking a few settings Appbrain was able to move all my apps back to the phone. (Completed after 3 h)
4. Mail: This has always been my favorite peeve. Not only does one have to recreate all mail accounts (I have 13 different mail accounts due to my collaborations with different institutions and companies) but since some of them use strange server settings one has to enter that information one by one for receiving and sending mail. Name of the server, port used, SSL or TSL and so on. Of course again, when you enter your Google mail account information, your “normal password is not accepted and you have to get the application specific password from a special account website at your Google profile. (Completed after 1 h)
   

   My Apps Screen 5 before the Factory Reset

5. HTC Sense Settings: All the settings, which apps appear on which screen, which widgets will appear where and in which form and size will have to be manually entered. I use the Android “Apps Organizer” an app that allows to assign apps to (several) folders (System, Tools, Utilities, Media, Phone, Office, …). This exercise has to be done for the hundreds of apps that have populated your phone since step 3. (Completed after 2–3 h)
6. Application Settings: Many of the applications have their own preference settings, games have counters and statistics, utilities have settings many of which you won’t remember that they existed in the first place. Well you will have to go through all of them and enter your preferences for all apps affected. (Not yet completed. I will have to do this as I go along and use the respective apps. Estimate: 2 h)
7. Pairings: I had my phone paired (bluetooth and WiFi) to several devices — all these had to be paired again from scratch. (Completed after 30 min)

I could continue with this list but I have you, the reader, in mind and don’t want to bore you before I come to my point. So let’s review the situation: For something that should be perfectly easy to automate, I had spent some 12 hours (!) just working to get everything back to normal on my phone after the factory reset. This is not my CPU time but rather the lapse time since I did have to do other things in between while I was recovering the phone settings.

And yes, I know about tools like Titanium Backup, but for those you have to root the phone (and lose any warranty) and I don’t want to go there.

Did nobody so far get the idea to save all these application preferences in the Cloud (on your Google account) or at least on the SD card of the phone? If the phone gets stolen saving on the SD card won’t help anyway but it would be better than nothing.

Here is my strong vote to save all these settings in the cloud. Would it be so difficult to save these preferences to a remote server? Is anybody out there listening? Anybody from Google?

What are your experiences with factory resets? Would you agree that saving these settings to the cloud would help? Do I have to trash Android and buy an iPhone?

Related articles

• HTC’s Android 4.0 upgrade plans: Sensation next month (gigaom.com)
• First HTC devices to get ICS? Sensation, Sensation XE and 4G at the end of March. Others to follow (unwiredview.com)
• Manage Your Android Apps & Discover New Ones With AppBrain App Market (makeuseof.com)
• How to back up your Android phone | How To – CNET
• Email account settings backup? – Android Forums
• Complete Guide to Backing Up Your Android Phone
• Backup Android Phone Apps, Settings
• How To Backup and Restore Your Android Phone with Titanium …
• Google backup and restore for Android is device specific? – Google …

A Strong Personal Vote For The Cloud

My change from a 2008 15" MacBook Pro to a 2011 13" i5 MacBook Pro. Image via Wikipedia

On Friday, January 13, 2012 at 13:00 (yes, really!) I closed the cover of my MacBook Pro. This was when I had seen the computer alive for the last time.

When I re-opened the flap nothing happened. Going through all the measures one can take in cases like this did not help. It remained dead.

The friendly Apple-authorized service point gave me the grim diagnosis after several days: the motherboard was corroded due to a previous water damage for which it had been at the same place some 3 years earlier. A glass of water had flooded the system when it was a few weeks old. Seems that at that time some impending corrosion damage was overlooked. There was no warranty on that repair of 2008. And AppleCare had expired last fall.

I had taken out the hard disk and put it into a USB-enclosure — my rescue disk. Additionally I had a complete carbon copy of the hard disk on another external drive and a separate time machine disk. These copies had Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) as the OS

But the other computer I had available was a 2005 PowerBook with Leopard (OS 10.5, the latest OS available for the PowerBook) which was not able to run some of the software from my dead Intel based machine.

Backups are valuable when you have a replacement machine with the same or a later operating system. An older one is not so helpful as I had to learn.

An interesting challenge was to get the address book and the calendar back. Due to the Android phone that I am using I have been using Spanning Sync to bridge between iCal and Mac Address Book and my Google Account. As soon as I had fired up the old machine Spanning Sync told me that I will have to use a newer version. After installation I had to find out they it would not run on the PowerBook, only on Intel machines. Firefox and many other applications wanted to be updated but could not as I had to realize after several trials and errors.

While doing this, Plaxo sync, which I have been using to sync iCal and Address Book between different machines and Operating systems, started with its own activity…

I want to spare you the details of the numerous other incompatibilities and botched installations. I got the address book to work albeit without most of the people’s pictures. I know about iCloud but this has only been available on Lion (OS 10.7) and iOS 5.

But I could resume working almost normally for two weeks until I decided to buy a new MacBook Pro with Lion (OS 10.7) and 8GB RAM.

I used the option to “inherit” all my files and settings from the Macintosh HD I had rescued from the dead machine. It worked like charm. But when I booted into my newly created account all the sync services started running immediately before I realized it. Maybe I should have started the machine without a network connection.

I have my calendar and my address book back now. But the address book now lost all my groups(!). Going back to the old machine I realize that also in that copy of my address book all my groups have been deleted by the magic of background syncs.

I will have to revert to a former version of the database without network connection but to do so I might have to boot in Snow Leopard using my rescued disk since the format of the Lion address book is now different from the one under Snow Leopard.

I don’t want to say that these are insurmountable tasks but all these exercises cost me several weeks of struggle. And I still have to go to the old Powerbook and find out what changes I made there to documents and libraries (like iPhoto) that did not yet make it to my new machine since I choose to inherit from the rescued disk. I hope that in a few weeks I will be back at a stable and sustainable state of affairs. This was also one reason that this blog had fallen somewhat silent for close to a month.

Cloud Computing symbolic image. Image location: www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/ cloud-is-good-for-bottom-line-20100503-u3pm.html

In Sun Microsystems for the last ten years we had been strongly advocating the Ultra-Light Client (called Sun Ray). With today’s easily obtainable cloud services and the excellent network bandwidth that most of us enjoy replacing of a defective desk top device would be as easy as replacing a fluorescent bulb.

All the data would be with a trusted cloud provider, no local settings, data, programs. A completely stateless client.

Well–history took a different turn. Mostly due to the lack of good bandwidth and the lack of cloud services. But these weeks I would really have enjoyed having all my apps, documents, media, and settings in the cloud.

Will we eventually move to a model with stateless clients and get rid of local storage, local software and operating systems on the desktop? What do you think?

Related articles

• Adventures in Intel Mac Land, Part 1, John Hatchett, Recycled Computing (lowendmac.com)
• Tiger or Leopard for PowerPC Macs? Does It Matter Anymore?, Simon Royal, Mac Spectrum (lowendmac.com)
• Mac Basics: How to Set up Time Machine (pcworld.com)
• clouds are the next step. (kisstheplanet.wordpress.com)

Act Now: Set Your LinkedIn Privacy

Image at http://sfima.blogspot.com/2011/08/linkedin-pulls-facebook-with-user-data.html

Retweeted from several messages that I received:

In case you don’t know it, without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions.

Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. The network now allows advertisers to use pictures and names of other users in their network of connections who have recommended or followed that brand.

Most likely you want to opt out of this. Some simple actions to be considered:

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small pull down menu that appears, select “settings” (If you are logged into LikedIn this link will bring you directly to the page–thanks to Stefan Broda for this hint!).

2. Then click “Account” on the left/bottom

3. In the column next to Account, select the option “Manage Social Advertising“

4. Finally un-tick the box “LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising”

5. and Save

How to inform your connections? Simple: Via Inbox>Compose message in Linkedin, you can send a message to 50 connections at once. All will appreciate being informed.

Related articles

• LinkedIn has changed its privacy conditions (translationmusings.com)
• Your name + your picture = LinkedIn ad (responsiblemarketing.com)
• How to keep your face out of LinkedIn ads (zdnet.com)
• How to avoid LinkedIn to use your information in it commercials without you knowing you allowed it? (olivierfontana.wordpress.com)
• LinkedIn Can Now Use Your Picture in Ads – Here’s How to Opt Out (tewari.com)
• LinkedIn can now use you name and picture in any of their advertisements (plus.google.com)
• New to LinkedIn or using it for sometime! (poklibpcc.org)
• LinkedIn “Pulls A Facebook” With User Data (South Florida Interactive Marketing Organization)

300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds

Here is a quite interesting video on “300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds.”

Reposted from a Facebook post of Christian Kobler.

A personal observation on the subject of fossil fuels: My last rental car was a Toyota Prius (Hybrid Synergy Drive).

It is interesting to see how the display of energy recovery and the cooperation of the electrical motor and the (gas) engine change the driving style.

Toyota Prius 3. Image via Wikipedia

One can easily see that slower breaking recharges the battery while abrupt breaking just creates heat on the brake pads.

Also when accelerating one sees when one leaves the “Eco Mode” range and goes into “Power Mode.”

Energy Monitor in the Prius

I found myself adopting a much smoother driving style and was awarded with the display of the current gas mileage as well as the gas mileage over the last several 5-min. intervals.

It was easy to observe that when breaking slowly there was enough energy recuperated to have the car running for a while on electricity only (at slower speeds) or see how the electrical motor aided the gas engine (at higher speeds) instantly leading to a much better gas mileage.

The average gas mileage (highway, country, city) that I achieved was between 55 and 60 mpg (3.9–4.3 l/100 km).

Maybe if our cars would give us more information on energy use and would allow us to recuperate breaking energy we would drive more smoothly. As long as we cannot replace the gasoline engines on a wide scale smooth driving will help conserve fuel.

What are your experiences with other technological approaches to energy-saving?

Related articles

• Burning Fossil fuels is expensive or cheap (wiki.answers.com)
• The Global Energy Crisis (Planet for life)
• Why Fuel Efficiency Advances Haven’t Translated To Better Gas Mileage (science.slashdot.org)
• Fuel-efficient driving (Energy Saving Trust UK)
• Modify your driving style and save at the pump (Your Green Path)
• Prius vs conventional drivetrain cars: main differences and subtle ones too! (Blog on Prius 3 experiences)

Teenager + Fibonacci = New Hope For Solar Energy

13-year-old Aidan Dwyer developed a new way to collect solar energy. Photo: Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal

Welcome to my first blog of 2012.

I would like to start the New Year with some hope.

Hope that we experience when we look at the young generation (no—not that one, even younger):

A report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“A Youngster’s Bright Idea Is Something New Under the Sun“) reports on a 13-year old teenager who was curious enough to study the patterns of trees’ branching and apply this to a setup for solar panels.

Wired.com also reported on this subject (Teen Taps Into Power of Fibonacci to Harness the Sun | GeekDad | Wired.com):

“After a hike in the Catskill Mountains last winter, 13-year-old Aidan Dwyer noticed the patterns in the branches of trees. Investigation led him to an important insight about how the shape of the branches can be used by the tree to optimize the amount of light collected for photosynthesis. Some supplies and several sunrises later, he had an award-winning experimental design to improve the harvesting of solar power.

“Applying the Fibonacci sequence — where each number is equal to the sum of its two predecessors — Aidan crafted a bio-inspired design for a solar panel array. The result was a solution that claims to produce more power than a uniform array of solar cells:

Aidan Dwyer graphed his results (source: American Museum of Natural History)

The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!

“Aidan wrote an essay, with citations, reflecting on his experiment and submitted it to American Museum of Natural History. Aidan was one of a dozen winners in their most recent Young Naturalists competition, an annual research-based contest for students from grades 7 to 12. Each submission consists of an essay reporting on a scientific experiment, which is reviewed by a panel of judges (environmentalists, scientists and educators). Participants receive feedback on both strengths and weaknesses of their work, with two selected from each grade to win cash prizes and in invitation to the Museum.”

If you have seven minutes it is worth to watch the video:

I find it astonishing that from all those solar energy specialists no one had this idea before. We seem (at least in solar energy) to follow the “the world is flat” paradigm (or at least the panels are flat).

It needs a boy to walk through a forest wondering and pondering on the bifurcation of the branches of trees.

Do you know of similar examples where we can learn from the young?

Related articles

• Can a 13-Year-Old Change the World? (ecoleader.wordpress.com)
• 13 Year-old Aidan Dwyer Discusses His Fibonacci Sequence-Inspired Solar Tree (Video) (treehugger.com)
• The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees (worldwright.wordpress.com)
• Aidan Dwyer : A Big Mistake? He’s Still Cool. (willsmath.wordpress.com)
• Teen Aidan Dwyer uses Fibonacci sequence to make solar energy … (Yahoo.com)
• The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees (American Museum of Natural History)
• Aidan Dwyer | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World (Inhabitat.com)
• Aidan Dwyer, A 13-Year-Old Solar Pioneer (PHOTOS) (Huffington Post)

Season’s Greetings!

Photo by Gebril (commons.wikimedia.org)

Dear reader of this blog.

I want to thank you for your interest in these articles, for the numerous emails, “likes” and your encouraging comments on this blog and different other social media platforms where the links to this blog are being published.

As this year comes to a close we wish that the new year will bring us new hope for better times, peace and freedom.

Have a joyful festive season, forget technology for a moment and make some time for family and friends and enjoy good company also in the real world — and not only on Social Media.

Merry Christmas,

Happy Holidays, and

Season’s Greetings!

Plastic Bottles Lighten Up the Slums

A water filled bottle brings light into a windowless slum dwelling. Illac Diaz (left). Image source: AFP; as pictured in the article of the Basler Zeitung

As recently reported in our local newspaper in Basel (Plastikflaschen für den Klimaschutz – News Wissen: Technik – bazonline.ch) philanthropist Illac Diaz from the Philippines is using simple low-tech discarded plastic bottles filled with water to bring light into the windowless dwellings of the poor. During daytime such a bottle can illuminate a dark room with the brightness equal to a 55 W incandescent bulb.

Diaz received positive feedback from UNO: Compared to a normal bulb his plastic bottle saves 17 kg CO2 per year.

Diaz was not the original inventor of this applied science technology, it was first used by the Brazilian Alfredo Moser some 10 years ago.

But that was before the time of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The attention Diaz is successfully enjoying today has been made possible by Social Media. See here the original YouTube video:

To better understand how to build one for the dark corner in your attic watch the video below ”How to Build a Solar Bottle Bulb 2.0″

I am elated to see how Social Media can play a pivotal role in spreading the word of simple low-tech solutions to every-day problems. If you want to support Diaz’ efforts this might be a good time of the year (with the festive season approaching) for a donation to the project. You can donate at the project’s website “A Liter of Light“.

Do you know of other such fascinating examples of successful low-tech in an otherwise high-tech world?

Related articles

• Light by the bottleful (thehindu.com)
• Plastic bottle, water help light Kenyan slums (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Plastic-Bottle Bulbs Shed Some Light on the Situation (Good Design)
• Payatas homes to use plastic soda bottles as light source (Yahoo! News)
• Plastic Bottle, Water Help Light Kenyan Slums (abcnews.go.com)

Telekinetics? Bed-Bound Patients Move Robots Using Just Thoughts

Deus in machina. A semiautonomous robot can be controlled with the brain waves of paralyzed patients. Credit: José del R. Millán. From Science Now

“They’re not quite psychic yet, but machines are getting better at reading your mind. Researchers have invented a new, noninvasive method for recording patterns of brain activity and using them to steer a robot. Scientists hope the technology will give “locked in” patients—those too disabled to communicate with the outside world—the ability to interact with others and even give the illusion of being physically present, or “telepresent,” with friends and family.

“Previous brain-machine interface systems have made it possible for people to control robots, cursors, or prosthetics with conscious thought, but they often take a lot of effort and concentration, says José del R. Millán, a biomedical engineer at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, who develops brain-machine interface systems that don’t need to be implanted into the brain.

“Millán’s goal is to make control as easy as driving a car on a highway. A partially autonomous robot would allow a user to stop concentrating on tasks that he or she would normally do subconsciously, such as following a person or avoiding running into walls. But if the robot encounters an unexpected event and needs to make a split-second decision, the user’s thoughts can override the robot’s artificial intelligence.” Reported by Sara Reardon in Science Now. And Janet Fang explains in Smartplanet.com (emphasis as in the article):

Brain Activity as depicted at www.brainwaveentrainment101.com

1. “They modified a commercially available bot called Robotino (pictured), which is essentially a platform on 3 wheels that can avoid obstacles on its own using infrared sensors.
2. “On top of the robot, they placed a laptop running Skype over a wireless internet connection. This allows the human controller to see where the robot is going. And since the laptop screen also shows a video of the controller, other people can interact with you as though you’re there.
3. “The user wears a cap of tiny EEG electrodes that measure brain activity. The system translates the EEG signals into navigation instructions and transmits them in real-time to the robot.
4. “Then the team recruited 2 patients whose lower bodies were paralyzed and who had been bedbound for 6 or 7 years.

“After 6 weeks of hour-long training sessions, the patients (in the hospital) were able to control the robots (in the lab) from 100 km away. They drove the robot to various targets – furniture, people, objects – around the lab for 12 minutes.

“In the future, Millán imagines modifying the shared control brain-machine interface so the user can control a prosthetic limb or a wheelchair. They may eventually add an arm to the current robot so it can grab objects.”

This is a remarkable development and will really open worlds for the bedridden.

What do you think could be further usages of such a brain-computer interface?

Will we soon be able to stay on the couch and send our car shopping?

Related articles

• Bedbound patients move robots using just thoughts (SmartPlanet, quoted above)
• Disabled Patients Mind-Meld With Robots (news.sciencemag.org, quoted above)
• Man/Machine Interface Makes Muscles Obsolete (escapistmagazine.com)

Liquid Robotics’ Wave Gliders Begin Historic Swim Across Pacific

A few days ago, “four Wave Gliders—self propelled robots, each about the size of a dolphin—left San Francisco for a journey that combined will total 60,000 kilometers. Built by Liquid Robotics, the robots will travel together to Hawaii, then split into pairs, one pair heading to Japan, the other to Australia. Waves will power their propulsion systems and the sun will power the sensors that will be measuring things like water salinity, temperature, clarity, and oxygen content; collecting weather data, and gathering information on wave features and currents. It’s not going to be an easy journey—the little robots will face rough weather and have to dodge big ships” reports Tekla Perry in IEEE Spectrum–Automaton.

Bloomberg recently published a video clip on the project. The video helps to understand the workings of the wave glider: Bloomberg Video on Wave Gliders

The next video shows underwater footage and helps understand the mechanics:

Java Father James Gosling (Image via Wikipedia)

Says Java father James Gosling, who now heads up Liquid Robotics’ software operation: Liquid Robotics has “a technically interesting challenge, that could save the world, and is economically viable—these three things don’t come together that often.”

I find this a fascinating technology and it is good to see that my old friend and colleague at Sun, James Gosling, has found a new challenge here.

Read the full article here: Liquid Robotics’ Wave Gliders Begin Historic Swim Across Pacific – IEEE Spectrum.

What do you think? Will we move cargo this way in the future across the oceans?

Related articles

• Liquid Robotics’ Wave Gliders Begin Historic Swim Across Pacific – IEEE Spectrum (archon236.wordpress.com)
• ‘Wave Glider’ drones zero in on ocean record (msnbc.msn.com)
• Autonomous Wave Gliders Attempt Historic Solo Pacific Crossing [Science] (gizmodo.com)
• Ocean Robots Race Across The Pacific (gcaptain.com)
• Seafaring boffin bots in record-breaking bid to chart Pacific (go.theregister.com)
• Ocean-faring robots set sail on Guinness record attempt (news.cnet.com)
• 4 Wave Gliders Begin Their Autonomous Pacific Crossing Attempt (tech.slashdot.org)
• Java-Begründer arbeitet am “Rad für den Ozean” (silicon.de)

If Zuckerberg Deleted Facebook: Social Networks – Can We Survive Without Them?

Image at blaugh.com

In many previous postings I have been pondering on the importance of Social Media for business and how it will change our cooperation. Today I would like to discuss our dependence on such technologies:

I still remember the days in the mid-80′s when email addresses were written with exclamation marks and you had to know the path through the servers for the mail to arrive. E-mail was a “nice to have” gadget and nobody entrusted important information to it. All the “real” company and external information came per paper mail.

These days passed more quickly than I anticipated. It was in the late 90′s when a pharmaceutical company in my town had to send the employees home after an email outage. It had taken a mere 10 years for email to become an indispensable business tool.

If Facebook or Twitter would be down today there might not be a big stir in the business community except for the guys from the marketing department but in a few years a Social Media outage could very well bring business to a grinding halt.

Certainly if a blog site would go down we would feel the pain. Maybe not immediately but after a day or two. A Twitter outage could very well lead to more severe withdrawal symptoms.

TechCrunch recently pointed to a nice parody video on YouTube called The Social Network 2 – If Zuckerberg Deleted Facebook Parody Trailer. It is worth watching.

Sometimes we feel already depraved if we have to turn off our devices during a presentation. Enjoy the video “Gotta Share!”

What do you think? Which Social Media Apps could you not live without?

Related articles

• The Social Network 2 – If Zuckerberg Deleted Facebook Parody Trailer (techcrunch.com — quoted above)
• Could You Live Without Social Networks? (DannyBrown.me)
• Why People Can’t Live Without Social Media (ContentCustoms Blog)
• Imagining College Life Without Social Media (US News)
• How to Back Up Your Social Media Accounts (ponderingtechnology)
• Could your inbox soon be permanently empty ? (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• Twitter, There’s Nothing Wrong With Being A Social Network – TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
• Aus Papier, Leder und Metall: Account von sozialem Netzwerk aus den 90ern gefunden (Der-Postillon.com)

How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC]

Josh Catone yesterday published a blog on “How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC]“. Although the Infographic is geared for students us mere mortals might benefit from it as well.

Efficient use of search can really save you time and bring you much faster where you want to go.

Inforgraphic as it appears in the article quoted

Do you know of similar tricks and tips you want to share with us?

Related articles

• How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC] (article quoted above at mashable.com)
• 15 Awesome Google Search Tips and Tricks (The Geek Stuff)
• 25 Awesome Google Search Tips and Tricks (Appstorm)
• Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks (Lifehacker)
• Best Google Search Tricks and Tips (knol)
• Google Tips & Tricks (About.com)

Ten Sloppy Social Media Mistakes to Fix NOW

Corey Eridon has some advice on mistakes to avoid and she warns not to be sloppy about Social Media. She writes in her blog on hubspot.com:

“What makes the following social media mistakes particularly sloppy is that they cost little time and no money to fix, have tremendous returns, and as such are huge misses to your overall social media strategy. Stop being sloppy, and make sure you’re not making any of these 10 social media mistakes (+1 for good luck).”

How to Back Up Your Social Media Accounts

Image at www.glasbergen.com

Now that we learned to make the occasional backup of the files on our computers using external hard disks and — the audacious ones among us — using cloud services (BTW: check out Wuala for backup. Files get encrypted on your machine and will be packet-distributed to their storage computers. Like DropBox, just safer) here comes the next backup pattern: Backing up your Social Media.

Lou Dubois (@lou_dubois) explains in Inc.com:

Slow Food for the Mind

For many years our focus has been on making things faster and faster. Computer chips are doubling their speed about every 18 months (Moore’s Law). But in our faster and faster spinning world we rarely focus on really long-lasting or long-term projects. One of them is John Cage‘s piece for Organ, the other one that impressed me is the 10’000-year clock.

Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)

Organ in Halberstadt with the three pipes currently being played (Image via Wikipedia)

is a musical piece composed by John Cage and is the subject of one of the longest-lasting musical performances yet undertaken. It was originally written in 1987 for organ.

The actual performance commenced in the St. Burchardi church on September 5, 2001 with a pause lasting until February 5, 2003. The first chord was played from then until July 5, 2005. The most recent new chord from the organ was a three-note chord, A above middle C, C above middle C and the F# above that (A4-C5-F#5), which began on January 5, 2006 and concluded on July 5, 2008. This sonority can currently be heard on a website devoted to the Halberstadt event.

St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt (Image via Wikipedia)

Fraunhofer Sends Spiders to the Rescue

20 cm long legs and elasic bellows for the joints support the high-tech robot spider built by the Fraunhofer IPA. Picture: Fraunhofer

Silicon.de recently reported on a new robot for hazardous missions: The high-tech spider developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart (Germany). The spider is built using a 3-D printing technique and is extremely lightweight. The Fraunhofer IPA reports in its research news:

QR Codes: From Bus Stops to Art and Tombstones

We can observe more and more adoption of QR codes and their pervasiveness. In Asia you find these codes anywhere in the meantime and they allow quick responses usually by use of a smart phone’s QR reader. I have seen them above urinals (in the mens’ room at the Volta Exhibit during the Armory Art Show in NYC last March) as well as on city walls, in art and many other places. In Florida there is now a bus line where you can get the schedule by pointing your smart phone to a plaque at the bus stop.

But this report is hinting to a novel use for QR codes: QR Code on Tombstone Creates Dynamic Memorial.

Here the picture of the QR code enhanced tombstone in Israel:

Tombstone with a message. The message points to a memorial website. (Image as it appears in the article)

QR code from picture above

On the right is the code from the picture above:

New EU Directive Might Reshape the Clouds

Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship will strengthen consumer rights and protection in the cloud . (Image at www.experian.it)

As reported in Silicon.de, in Experian.it and in other sources, the European Commission is planning to release a new directive on data protection, which will affect the Cloud Computing industry. Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenships is planning to update the Data Protection Directive. The Data Protection Directive was first introduced in 1995, and a lot of new challenges for personal Data Protection have appeared, from social networks to cloud computing and the current digitalization of public data assets.

Experian reports: The process to update the Directive has just started. Over 160 responses were collected to a public consultation that lasted until December 2009. These responses were crafted by citizens, businesses and other organizations and public authorities. The objective of this public consultation is to gather “views on the new challenges for personal data protection, in particular in the light of new technologies and globalisation”, and what steps should be taken to overcome those challenges. Now Reding plans to present a first draft of the legislation by autumn this year.

In her speech in January she outlined the main issues to be covered in the updated directive (quoted from Experian):

Star Trek’s ‘Tricorder’ Device Coming Soon?

Mobile phones as doctors? This vision will be tested, starting in a few months. Photo Credit: X-Prize Foundation. From the article quoted.

Star Trek’s Dr. “Bones” McCoy made no bones about the state of 20th Century medicine — invasive, primitive, “Dark Ages,” were a few of his pejorative terms for modern medicine. In the 23rd century, Bones and other starship crew members used hand-held devices called “tricorders” that instantaneously diagnosed people’s injuries or sicknesses — and healed them as well. “It’s a wonder anyone made it out of the 20th century alive,” he once sniffed. 

Early next year, the X Prize Foundation — noted for competitions to in private space travel and moon probes — announced it will be launching a $10-million-prize competition to any team that can design the first functioning tricorder, that “will enable consumers in any location to quickly and effectively assess health conditions, determine if they need professional help and answer the question, ‘What do I do next?’” Quotes from the first article cited below.

OSBF: Opening Clouds

Image via CrunchBase

The Open Source Business Foundation e.V., the European network for the Open Source Industry, just launched an “Open Cloud Business Initiative” (OCBI). The goal of the OCBI is to promote the principle of openness, which is responsible for the success of the Open Source Software movement, in the area of the cloud: the future lies in the Open Cloud – especially in a business context.

The Open Source Business Foundation eV (OSBF) lays out the following six principles under their “Open Cloud Future Initiative”:

New Security Threat: Infected QR Codes

This QR Code says: "Go to website" and is harmless. But it could contain dangerous instructions to the phone. Picture from article quoted.

Tod Wasserman recently warned on “Mashable Tech”:

“Be careful the next time you scan a QR code, because it might just cost you money and wreak havoc on your smartphone.

“That’s the warning from Kaspersky Lab, which has noticed the first instance of QR code tampering. The incident took place in Russia last month and hoodwinked consumers who thought they were downloading an Android app called Jimm. The code actually contained malware that sent SMS codes to a premium rate number that charged for each message.”

Read the original post here: New Security Threat: Infected QR Codes.

So — as an extra precaution use your QR Code Reader’s “Edit” or “Display” function before you embark on an adventure with unknown outcome . . .

BTW the QR Codes displayed on my “About” page on this blog only contain my contact data and no 900-Number SMS malware.

Related articles

• How to Create QR Codes (mycricket.com)
• QR malware arrives (wired.com)
• iQRazy for QR codes (appsider.wordpress.com)
• QR Codes -Make yourself a ‘bar (QR) code’! (aktechnation.wordpress.com)
• Is The iPhone Safer Than Google’s Android? (forbes.com)
• QR codes being used for scamming (mobile-ent.biz)