Things I Learned This Week – #40

Offline this week I learned to check I’m on the correct train before insisting someone’s in my seat, not to eat jam doughnuts when I’m in a rush, and that it’s still OK to buy paper books even though I’ve got a Kindle… 😉

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW40

Tech.

• Need a comparison of the latest, greatest and upcoming tablets? Engadget’s got you covered.
• I’m not sure how long Evernote Site Memory has been in existence, but it’s a great idea. Got a website? Add a button (like the one you’ll see at the bottom of this post) for people to be able to ‘clip’ or ‘remember’ your post/article into their Evernote account!
• The video below shows another reason why I get Android envy from time-to-time even though I’ve got an iPhone 4 (more here)

• Windows 7 has one feature that’s better than Mac OS X. It’s the feature where upon hovering over an application icon in the dock all instances of that application are shown. Thankfully, Hyperdock adds that functionality to your Mac for free. FTW!
• Chris Messina’s got a nice homepage (that I, er, ripped off until he told me off about it). Zach Klein’s is similar but even bolder. The rest of us without Chris and Zach’s ninja skillz can use Flavors.me! 🙂

Productivity & Inspiration

• As I explain in #uppingyourgame, exercise is important to productive people. That’s why I was nodding my head in agreement whilst reading Why you don’t have time NOT to exercise. There’s more at Unclutterer, too.
• Fantastic point about messy organization at Productivity 501:

Organization needs to be designed around how we actually  use stuff otherwise it can become a time waster just like being disorganized.

• There’s some great life lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson (go proto-Pragmatist philosophers!) here.
• Scott Berkun quotes Matt Mullenweg (who’s now his boss at Automattic) about the make vs consume ratio:

I wonder if there could be some sort of metric for writing that told you the ratio of time-to-create versus time-to-consume. On Twitter it’s basically 1:1, you can craft and consume a tweet in a time measured in seconds. For this blog post, it may take me an hour to write it and 5 minutes to read (not skim) it. You can work your way all the way up through 8-10,000 word essays, and books that may take years and years (or a lifetime) to create.

• Simple Productivity Blog has a nice list of 18 stress reducers, by waking hour. 9pm is important to me. :-p

Education & Academic

• AppsFire is a place to share what apps you keep on your smartphone. As Wes Fryer points out, that’s great if you’re an educator wanting to quickly show others a collection of your favourite education-related apps!
• Joss Winn’s definitely someone to follow if you’re a reflective educator. His Things That Stick blog for collecting ‘clippings and quotations [he] doesn’t want to forget’ turns up gem after gem. Check out What would be the determining feature of a society that was not capitalist?
• I’ve been learning about the ITQ for Mobile Learning this week, available through City & Guilds as a qualification for students aged 14 and older. Looks like a winner to me!
• Malcolm Gladwell wrote a widely-circulated piece for the The New Yorker entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted in which he denigrated social networks as promoting a ‘lazy activism’. Leo Mirani summed up all of our responses in hisriposte for The Guardian:

“We seem to have forgotten what activism is,” writes Gladwell. If activism is defined only as taking direct action and protesting on the streets, he might be right. But if activism extends to changing the minds of people, to making populations aware of what their governments are doing in their name, to influencing opinion across the world, then the revolution will be indeed be tweeted.

• You can now view Kindle ebooks via a web browser. Which is handy.

Data, Design & Infographics

• Need to test a user’s first impressions of a website? Check out Clue. It gives users 5.5 seconds to look at an image of your site and then give as many impressions of what they remember as possible. Works well!
• CyArk is ‘digitally preserving and sharing the world’s cultural heritage’. More (including amazing images like the one below) at National Geographic:

• Michael Hyatt’s blog is a masterpiece of design and usability. Don’t be surprised if this blog starts to gradually imitate parts of it!
• I enjoyed this post on the Japanese concept of Mu (although thought embedding the almost hour-long video here might be going a bit overboard):

Traditional rooms in Japan (which are becoming rare) often have nothing that is permanent, even the “walls” or fusuma, slide away to create a larger expansive empty-space. The people, wall, furniture, and artwork, enter and then leave the room, to return it to empty-space, full of potential….

This philosophy can often be seen in many parts of the country, from objects to culture, to even an international company like Muji (“Mu” meaning “empty” or “absence” with a hint of “tranquility” and “potential”. That would be the closest translation in English. )

• Oh dear, this infographic on the ‘tax gap’ isn’t pleasant viewing a UK tax payer given our current economic situation (click for full version):

Misc.

• You’ll be delighted to know that the First World War officially ends today when the last reparations payment will be paid from Germany to the Allies.
• Vodafone’s got an awesome Google Maps mashup racing car game called Hometown GP. You can literally race around the roads of your local area! 😀
• Readness is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to ‘compare yourself to your friends to learn who reads what online’. Login by Facebook Connect only at the moment, but they’ve assured me they’re looking at other methods of authentication (including Twitter!)
• There’s a spider that can spin webs so large that they span rivers. Scarily awesome.
• Streamdrag is an effortless way to create music playlists from YouTube videos.

Quotations

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. (Winston Churchill)

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. (Peter Drucker)

High achievement always takes place in a framework of high expectation. (Jack Kinder)

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. (Wayne Gretzky)

(more quotations at my quotabl.es page)

Main image CC BY Mikael Miettinen