This question is asked all the time. The right answer is another question.
A CEO level position is, for some, a large part about networking. Conferences, coffee, drinks, golf.
Social media engagement is the same thing. It’s networking on the other levels of the company ladder/Pyramid.
If the C level understands network on their own level – they’ll understand it on the other levels. If not – they never will.
I was really excited when I found CrashPlan – The idea of being able to backup to both a local server, a friends server and to the cloud with the same tool, sounded to good to be true.
I’ve had a chance to think a bit more about Flattr, and what kind of impact it can have on the ‘net.
(My first post about Flattr, for those that missed it: https://b.tc.dk/2010/05/flattr/)
First of all, and this may seem kind of strange, I’m a bit scared of the negative impact that this can have on the kind of content we’ll see on the net.
The Negative
Consider this: If you read an article on the net, what will make you click the Flattr button?
I got a mail this morning, with a registration code for a closed beta, to something called… Flattr.
I was very close, to throwing it in the spam bin – luckily my brain connected the name to something before I did that, and I took a closer look. Flattr is a “social micropayment platform”. Meh, well, everything bloody social, but anyway, it’s supposed to work like this:
1. If you have something of value on the net, you put a “flattr” button in it.
2. If somebody read/watch your content and like it they will click that button.
3. At the end of the month you’ll get a share of that person’s Flattr money for that month.
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I’ve never had a GPS device before, but one of the place the i780 got points, was on the GPS as I would like to play with one, and especially do geotagging of my photos.
In this blog I run through the software I’ve tested. Please note that my i780 is unlocked and unbranded. Yours may be locked to a specific set of services making impossible to use other GPS software.
My wants and needs are not for navigation – there’s 14 days trail version of Garmin XT included, which I’m still thinking about buying, but there’s also Google Maps which works flawlessly, but needs to download data. So unless you make it cache data before you go or has a “unlimited” dataplan with your provider you are going to pay as you go. And open street map software is getting better…
What I’m looking for is a simple piece of software that will capture my route and allow me to read it into a program that will syncronize it with the photos that I took while walking that route. This blog will mainly concentrate on the logging software. I’ll look at the PC (windows) side later. I’ve limited the search to software that didn’t require payment.
I’ve about 120GB of photo’s that I backup on DVDs and an external harddrive.
What I’m really bad at, is taking these backups off-site (a.k.a. somewhere else that will not be affected if the house burns down).
I used to copy it all to my own server (it was in a hosting facility), but as I’ve moved everything to a hosting service, that doesn’t make sense any more as they have limited storage.
I looked around a bit and mozy.com, seems to have a good reputation. 5us$ a month for unlimited space, is very cheap for that kind of peace of mind.
I can’t help but thinking that it’s to cheap. But doing the math, it’s rather easy to see that, even with 120GB they will be making money of me within the year:
Back of envelope math: a one TeraByte hard drive is about 300us$, (120/1000)*300=36$. In a raid5 array, every fifth drive (depending on implementation) is for error checking so you need to multiply with 1.25 = 45us$, plus admin and network traffics costs. Probablty still less than 60us$.
The software seems quite okay, and is available for windows and OS X. No linux versions seems to be available, but as I do most of my photo work in LightRoom (and windows), this really is a non-issue for now.
The software has been running for a couple of hours now and is a 0.6% of the total 120GB, it’s not maxing out my upload speed, but it’s doing a good enough job, and it will be done in a week or so…
I’ll let you know what I think of it when I’ve used it a bit more…
p.s. one week later: It’s still uploading. It’s uploaded about a fifth of the 120Gb. I’m not sure how I could mis-calculate that badly, as it’s has been running 15 hours a day all week. As I have 2048Kbit upload the max is closer to 1.5-1.7Mb/s, but I’m unsure if the limit is at Mozy or somewhere between me and Mozy. Actually my theoretical daily upload is 22GB, so my first estimate isn’t that bad and my actual throughput is just really, really bad. My guess is that it’s a lot worse during the work hours, where the nets are a lot more busy.
p.s. One month later: nearly done uploading :-).
p.s.: May 2010: I’ve uploaded a total of 337Gb (uploading is a lot faster now)
(bookmarks = Favorites, for those of you, using Internet Explorer)
I’ve transfered my book marks with me from computer to computer for a long time. I’m unsure how far back, but there where bookmarks for site like DejaNews in there, and they got eaten by google (groups) around 2001.
Before I began the clean up it had about 650 book marks and the bookmarks.html file was about 150Kb.
Luckily I changed the way I use bookmarks a couple of years a go – when Firefox got the bookmarks toolbar – making it fairly easy to search out the old bookmarks, that hadn’t been used since I switched (I started putting all bookmarks in the “bar”, and never used the bookmarks menu item).
I looked through the old bookmarks and nearly non of them worked! Most of them gave 404’s (server working but page not found) but quite a few of them gave a Server Not Found error. I didn’t count but I think that about one in 10 worked, but half of these didn’t give the expected results. I fund ONE bookmark that I found useful (PhotoZone.de), which I hadn’t already added to the bar. So delete, delete.
The web is a lot more dynamic that I thought! Not that I though that all site would live forever, but I didn’t think that it would be as “bad” as that. Is it bad? I don’t really know – manually keeping a bookmark file up to date, would be a chore, but I really don’t use my bookmarks that much any more. I often find myself typing the url of my most used sites, even though I know exactly where in my bookmarks to find them, or I’ll even search for just as much as needed on google.
Now, I’ve 220 bookmarks in a 70Kb file (the reason the file isn’t that much smaller is that Firefox now stores the site logo in the bookmarks file, so any site that I’ve browsed since they started doing that will fill a lot more in the file)
Inspired by a much ruder site, I’ve created a homepage with the simple address of:
Just something to send to people who are bugging you, explaining the nature of being busy.
(if you can’t seen the page, it’s because the Domain Name Servers need to be refreshed – try again in an hour or two)
As a long time google fan it pains me to say this… but of the big three google.com seems to return the worst results for my sites.
Search for “link:http://blog.tc.dk”:
Google: 6 results, 5 of them from blog.tc.dk itself
Live.com: 6 results, 2 of them from blog.tc.dk itself (plus a “view more from this site” option).
Yahoo.com: 13 results, 2 of them from blog.tc.dk it self.
Search for link:http://barbue.dk
Google: one page (from an ODP mirror page)
Live.com: 36 results (largely relevant!)
Yahoo.com: Several hundred, but most of them seems to be ODP links
Search for link:gallery.tc.dk
Google: Nothing
Live.com: 6 results (including one from blog.tc.dk)
Yahoo.com: 9 results (including two from gallery.tc.dk)
Overall it seems that Yahoo.com has the best index, but it also returned more irrelevant results. Google just seem to suck.
I’ll try some more searches later…
NO LONGER RUNNING!
Update June 2010: I haven’t used this for a while and as you probably have noticed it’s no longer working. It did it’s thing, while there was not such service, but now at least Google financial provides some of the same services. Anyway, the source is still here, if you want to run it…
Inspired by Xanadb’ RSS Stock Ticker (which in turn was inspired by the now defunct Yahoo Finance RSS), I decided to try to make my own. I wanted to add a few things, mainly the ability to calculate loss/win for each stock and a total loss/win for all stocks.
The data for the feed is gotten from finance.yahoo.com
and you need the stock symbols that they use to build up a URL string that you can feed to your RSS program. But here’s an example:
http://tc.dk/stock.php?symbols=msft:100:20+csco:200:20.9
This will give you two rss items with the current stock price of Microsoft (msft) and Cisco (csco). The total value of a 100 Microsoft stocks is calculated and the win/loss if you paid 20us$ for them is calculated. The same is done for 200 Cisco stocks brought at 20.90us$.
Here’s an example of how Thunderbird will show the data:
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