All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.
One thing that Google Maps could benefit from is a time dimension. Imagine, being able to scroll the time-line while looking at the satellite picture of the same place. You could see how cities are growing, roads built, and rain forests destroyed. You could see traffic jams. You could see how building shadows drop to find the better parking in a hot place like Cyprus…
I guess Google will have to collect much more data than they already have though.
When she brought the tray and put it on the bed table I thanked her and ate a little of the supper. Afterward it was dark outside and I could see the beams of the search-lights moving in the sky. I watched for a while and then went to sleep. I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream. I woke for good long before it was light and heard roosters crowing and stayed on awake until it began to light. I was tired and once it was really light I went back to sleep again.
Can you guess the author? Here is hint : these lines were written in 1929. Yes, you got it right. It’s Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms“, last paragraph of Chapter 13.
While reading the book, I caught myself a few times thinking that it feels a lot like a blog – first person story telling, simple sentences, a few “what I ate for breakfast” paragraphs. But then again, somehow it feels better than a blog – connectivity, metaphors, a tiny hint of old times.
They say that one can improve his own writing by reading great writers. Having this book in mind, I do agree with that. And, it seems, I’m not the only one thinking of what and how to learn from Hemingway for my blogging – Copyblogger published Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well some time ago.
Today I stumbled upon Clippings Firefox extension. It makes it very easy to save and organize bits and pieces of text. It offers really simple and intuitive interface, supports folders and drag-n-drop. It’s the closest Firefox alternative to notes implementation in Opera, and I really enjoy it already, even though I used for just a few hours.
There are only things that I can think of that could make this extension better: search and support for hyperlinks. Other than that, it’s just perfect.
While reading through this post which discusses several office applications and their approach to group collaboration and offline editing, I once again got amazed as to how fast our expectations of technology grow. Just think about the complexity of the problem scope – synchronizing a document which has been edited by serveral people, some of who has probably worked online. And we, end-users, just expect this stuff to work. More so, we expect it to work in all available alternatives. And even more so, we expect this functionality to be given to us for free…
I guess I’m just trying not to remind myself of how things used to be five, ten, or fifteen years ago…
Yesterday I heard the story of toasting origins. It sounded interesting, but somewhat unrealistic. It turned out to be true:
The practice of toasting originated in Ancient Greece, at a time when fear of poisoning was a significant concern. To put guests at ease, the host would pour the guests’ wine from a common decanter, take the first drink to demonstrate its safety, then raise his cup to the guests and invite them to drink in good health.