Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
-
A terrifying adventure on my last day.
I had the last class of my freshman year on Friday. It started out absolutely awful, but by the end of it, I was definitely on cloud nine.
-
Effort management, part 2.
I promised to take a look at a bunch of productivity applications last week, and now is the time where I deliver my reviews.
First off, here’s a reminder of what programs I looked at:
And here are their icons on the dock in the order they were mentioned:
-
Effort management, part 1.
I’m not a Getting Things Done goon or a Zen Habits zealot. Last semester though, I used my Google Calendar and iCal (they’re very easy to sync with Calaboration) to help keep track of my assignments. Before that, I’d gotten by just fine by making mental notes, except for some cheap agendas my middle school forcefed us. So, it was my first real baby step into the world of using tools and strategies to manage time and work, and it surprised me that I liked it.
That’s not exactly what calendars were designed for though, and I don’t think I’d ever want to live according to a productivity dogma like some people choose to.
That said, there are programs that are designed specifically to make time management easier. They’re like self-organizing to-do lists, and the most important thing about them is that they have to save you more effort than you would spend without them, or else there’s no point. They must be mindlessly simple, trivially fast to use, and they have to actually be helpful even for the most casual users.
In short, they should enable people to be lazier without anybody else noticing. It’s as much about effort management as it is about time management if you ask me.
Since I enjoy experimenting with new programs, I’ve decided to demo several such programs. Here’s what I’ll be looking at:
-
My recommended Mac programs.
Recently, I got one of the brand new MacBook Pros. Even though I had been planning on this for a long time and waited patiently for the new line to start selling, it surprised some people since I’m mostly known for being a Linux guy. I guess they didn’t know that my first computer was a Mac, I never stopped using Macs, I have always said that I like Macs, and that this doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux (you better believe I already put Linux on here).
Anyway, before it even arrived, I had spent almost a week just diving into various articles about Macs so that I would know all about the obscure, power-user programs that the savvy users had. I’m a geek like that. Then when the Mac actually arrived, I immediately grabbed all the programs that I had marked and began to test them and tweak them.
One of my friends also recently got a MacBook Pro, and he asked me to post up the results of my experimentation. So that’s what this blog post will be. You’ll notice that these are all free and most are open source too, so enjoy them without inhibition.
-
Ideas for verifiable electronic voting.
Elections are coming up, and once again, lots of places will be using touchscreen machines. Many of the exact same machines were proven to be compromised in 2004 and 2006, and one of the main companies, Diebold, was taken to court in California and eventually settled for millions of dollars and changed its name.
Anybody who knows me knows that I love technology though. I think that the current electronic systems are terrible (enough that I voted early as a permanent mail ballot voter), but I also think that they offer the potential of having elections that are more fair and verifiable than old fashioned hand-counting. Here are my ideas for how to do it.
Loading ...
