CogBlogged from ‘January, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ryancr While the blogs continue to bounce more banter on openness and open education, one more oblique suggestion based on the deep philosophical musings of The Gumped One: Open is as Open does.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by hangdog Ah, there is nothing like the smell of serendipity in the morning… One of my favorite things in looking at web sites is finding some secret or some method entangled in the HTML of the source code of the page. I love view source. I love the tags. Color me geek. I was looking at this story on Wired Gadget Lab about a new Samsung ebook being shown at CES that offers potential for not only reading content, but also writing/annotating on it. In doing my delicious tagging, I noticed the key descriptive sections are in two different parts of the page; so my method is to copy the second section to my clipboard (select, command C), then hilite the first section, hit the TAG button (I used the firefox extension). The tool inserts the hilited text i the description field, and then [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by clarksworth Holy smokes, it is 2010, and despite all of the dreams (the heck with flying cars) we are still typing on keyboards designed to make typing difficult… so aren’t we supposed to be far into the future where we talk to our computers? Voice recognition and identification software has been on the advance in development, and someday perhaps we will have the Star Trek ability to talk to our computer? While there is no LCARS app as pictured above, there is a fun interface you can poke at with your 20th century mouse http://www.lcars.org.uk/. Go at it. Dragon Dictation has been at this game a long time– they’ve just come out with a free iPhone app that I gave a brief spin with tonight. It is simple enough. You press record and start talking, getting some sound levels as feedback: And when you [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Photo Phiend I had this fantastic part time job in the late 1980s during my senior year at the University of Delaware- I worked an evening shift at a Dupont lab running samples through an electron microscope. It was a whole new world up close. I never knew what the compounds were I was photographing, but sometimes they looked liked strands of webs, piles of gold bars, or even cheerios. When bored, sometimes I looked at what my fingerprint looked like on the sample plate: But I wander off point, even before I start. I don’t have any definitive thing to say on whether the volume of information available to us daily makes us “smarter” or not, or whether all of this content we are reading is adding or subtracting to the human experience, its just happening. This is not about bemoaning the loss [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Roberto Rizzato ►pix jockey◄ Facebook resident We need some good ol’ radicals in being cool. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries. Today, I fear, being cool is beset with a more moderate spirit. People are trying to make a living off of being cool – i.e. coolness as a utility to advance a career, gain recognition from peers, or make money. This is fine. But it’s not what I’d expect in the early stage of a movement. Ideological purity in being cool had a very short existence. Instead of building a future foundation, we see instead a foundation to serve for career advancement. We need more real coolness, you know…. leather jackets and motorcycles. cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Hamster Factor See the problem? George, though, [...]

Trying to see if Twitter Tools plugin can actually tweet the URL for this post. Update: Yep, it works, It seems like the Bit.ly url shortener plugin was not working.

My friend Nick in Hong Kong emailed me recently eager for some recommendations to fill up a few screens of his iPhone (I should really send him to the King of Apps, Marco Torres, who I am sure has filled to the max his screens). Rather than trying to page through screens and type names, I found a slicker and more elegant solution for sharing your apps – the AppsFire site/tool. You download a small addon for your desktop (a preference pane for Mac OS X) that does some sort of communication (I am guessing) with your iTunes to get a list of installed apps. From there, you can go to a web site, where you have options to share all or selected apps by link, email, widget, or social media tools. Here’s the widget version of my apps (no snickering) Each icon leads to the link to the app [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Wow it has been so nice to be lazy, to be spending what feels like more time offline than online. All of the tech todos on my list for the holiday vacation remain undone (the list crumpled up and is burning in the wood stove now). The plan to to the Epic Year End Blog Reflective post? Never drafted. The list of predictions, dreams, resolutions for 2010? Not happening. But without dropping the intent to do something to wrap the year in a bow, is to say that the 2009 thing that has kept my sanity and sense of purpose on track has been for a second year doing the Post a Photo a Day Thing on Flickr started in 2007 by D’Arcy Norman. People like D’Arcy and Dean are resilient enough to put their 365 photos into video form; I’m too lazy, [...]