Bookmarking is Evil

I am an avid reader. I go through scores if not hundreds of articles every day. Most of these articles are about technology. Why technology? Because it makes for interesting reading. You see, once you read the headline of a tech article, you’ve kind of gained enough insight to know what the article is about. The rest of the article is usually for your pleasure, to learn a little bit more about the topic. But you don’t really have to read the whole thing, you can just leave it in between and you wouldn’t have lost much. That’s also where the problem lies. I’ve been getting lazy. I read the headline and a couple of lines of the article to decide if it’s interesting enough. If it isn’t, I just move on to the next article. But if it is, I bookmark it to read it later.

I have about Seven Hundred and fifty unread articles in my favorite read later service – Pocket. That’s a big problem. Because a lot of those articles are really good ones. Also, because a lot of those articles date back a couple of months and all those articles are each a promise I made to myself to take out the time and sit down and read the entire thing, a promise I’ve broken many times. What I need to do is to cut back on current reading and get back to my read-it-laters. But that’s tough because I’m a news junkie and I just realized that while writing this article.

So what am I going to do about it? Well, I’m going to start opening my Pocket apps a little more over the course of the next few days. Also, to appease my addiction of current tech news, I’m going to stop going to all the news sources that I use and instead focus on reading from just one – LaunchTicker. Why? Because its concise, quick and no-nonsense.

My advice to fellow news junkies – stop reading the headlines. If you think an article is worth reading, keep at it till you read the entire thing. You’ll either come out of it completely enlightened or you’ll realize how stupid you think the blogger writing those articles is and you’ll remove your subscription to that service. Either ways, don’t just move on to the next article and under no circumstances should you bookmark it. Bookmarking is evil!

Stay sane!
N

Your service should be like a bazaar

I’ve been reading a lot of LaunchTicker. For those who don’t know, it’s a service by Angel investor Jason Calacanis where news is aggregated and placed in a platter for you to consume, no added commentary or blogger ideology attached. Interested? Check it out here – LaunchTicker Live

The reasons why I like LaunchTicker are many, but the one that comes near the top is that I get to see what’s on the mind of @jason. He comments on many of the topics posted on the ticker and that gives me an insight into the thinking that one needs to develop towards tech. One of his recent comments, which sparked this blog post is – Continue reading →

Facebook Notifications for Mountain Lion

Hey all,

Seems I’ve discovered a pretty good tool for Mountain Lion users. If you want to get Facebook notifications in your Notification Center in Mountain Lion, you can go to this website here and download a tool called Facebook Notifications.

Of course, if you don’t know, you’ll have to go to your System Preferences and then Security & Privacy to allow yourself to install applications downloaded from Anywhere. This disables OS X’s new feature called GateKeeper and lets you download and install all sorts of cool apps.

After you’ve installed the app and logged in to Facebook on it, you’ll be able to get notifications from facebook right into your notification center. The notifications open up in your default browser.

This app has been developed by a dev who liked the Facebook integration that was present in the Mountain Lion developer version and missed it in the Gold Master version…

So, go ahead, download the app and enjoy Facebook in Mountain Lion…

My long road to the Mountain

Today, finally, I have a working laptop. What happened? It’s anybody’s guess. I recently upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion on my Mac. In doing so, large parts of the OS stopped working, specifically, apps such as Safari, System Preferences and the App Store. Needless to say, work cannot continue without accessing the settings.

So, I began the long and arduous journey to re-installing my OS from scratch. Initially, it was pretty painless, I quickly setup Time Machine and took multiple backups and I booted my Mac into it’s recovery partition. The recovery partition is a good feature, albeit inspired, and allowed me to test my main hard disk, to wipe it clean and start over. Continue reading →

Was just reading Dalton Caldwell’s scathing remarks about Facebook and Twitter and his angst towards ad-based platforms. The whole point will be tested when the deadline for app.net comes by. If he’s able to garner enough money to start executing his idea, he’ll have proved himself right. But then again, there are so many ideas that are underfunded even though they are brilliant… LT itself is a good example. Others are all those kickstarter concepts that do not reach full funding. Is Dalton not advertising enough? Is he taking a very emotional route to solving the problem with today’s social networks? Who knows. What’s clear is that if he’s able to succeed, he’ll have shown all the twitters and disaporas of the world that being free and open is not the only way to create quality platforms.

App Review: Cooliris

I have close to 130 apps on my phone. Recently, I filled up a folder of apps I’ve been testing out and decided to review one as soon as the folder is full and needs movement.

Today is that day and the app that I’ll be reviewing is – Cooliris.

Cooliris first started out as a web app and a browser extension to look at Google Image searches in a fancy way. The app, long time in the making, also does that. Plus, the app lets you look at your facebook feed pics and your phone or iPad’s photo roll too. Continue reading →

Google-

I have practically no use of Google+. My common friends are sticking with Facebook and twitter, my tech follow ups happen mostly on twitter and rss feeds and I’ve not joined a single hangout ever. Instead, a lot of strangers keep adding me to their lists.

I am not saying GP isn’t growing. It certainly has good numbers on its side. But somehow, it all doesn’t make any sense to me.

Hopefully, in the future, I’ll see more on GP, else I’ll just let it stagnate.

VMware buys Nicira for $1.26 Billion

The big news for today is VMware’s acquisition of Nicira for $1.26 Billion. For those who don’t know, Nicira is a pioneer in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Openflow. SDN is a technology that allows the virtualization of the network, thus abstracting the network and allowing a company to create multiple virtual networks based on their needs.

This is big news because of two reasons –

1. This opens doors for VMware into the networking world. Traditionally dominated by Cisco, Juniper, Brocade and a few others, the networking industry is now ripe for major disruption. There is a lot of buzz with the Cloud and SDN and now these buzz words are becoming a reality. By buying Nicira, VMware, traditionally a server virtualization company has stepped into the networking world, allowing them to take their expertise of virtualization and apply it to data centers. This way, VMware controls major portions of the data center world, from servers to the networking itself. The acquisition seems befitting too, considering that Nicira is often called the VMware of the networking world.

2. Nicira is not just an Openflow/SDN company concentrating on networking. It is a backbone to another project called OpenStack. OpenStack is a complete data center solution that has components that help a datacenter control the servers that store information, that do large computations and those that provide networking. By acquiring Nicira, VMware has enabled itself to be an end-to-end solution for datacenters and thus expanding their presence in that market.

This news comes at a time when the entire tech industry is in a flux, with many companies taking on new roles that are not traditionally theirs. If anything, this proves that the future of the networking industry is big and led by companies you wouldn’t expect to take the lead.

In the Tech: Evil 3D printing and Instagram Anniversary

I’ve often talked about 3D printers and how they can and will take an ugly turn some day. It seems that day is going to come sooner than later. A hacker has created a key that can be printed by a 3D printer and opens the doors for criminals, literally. The key, which still needs to be cut with a laser cutter after being printed, can open handcuffs made by German and English handcuff manufacturers. What’s worse? He is open sourcing the design and uploading CAD files to let anyone produce these keys. This doesn’t just spell bad for business but also for law enforcement agencies who’ll now have fake keys floating around, just like the government has to deal with fake notes.

Hacker Opens High Security Handcuffs With 3D-Printed And Laser-Cut Keys – ForbesTwo 3D-printed and one laser-cut copy of restricted handcuff keys. (Click to enlarge.) The security of high-end handcuffs depends on a detainee not having access to certain small, precisely-shaped objects. In the age of easy 3D printing and other DIY innovations, that assumption may no longer apply. In a workshop Friday at […]

via Forbes

The second interesting link I came across today was about Instagram’s second year anniversary. Open it to check out the photo that began a wave that continues today with 50 million users and 1 Billion photos…

2 Years Later: The First Instagram PhotoTwo years ago today, we tested the first photo upload to an app we called Codename. Three months later, in October 2010, Instagram launched to the public. Today, 1 year and 9 months later, over 50 million people have shared more than 1 billion photos on Instagram.

via Tumblr

Note: I tried a different tone today – that of a news report. Hope you liked it. If not, leave a comment in the comments section.

Chrome Web Store – Undirect

Undirect

Removes redirection tracking of clicks on search results in google.

Just wanted to highlight a great tool in Google Chrome. When you do a google search, each search link is a weird long link that Google generates to track what you’re doing.

This tool simply replaces that long link with the original link, making your life easier. Redirection is an issue because in countries like India where the Internet is already slow, redirection Google-style wastes your time.

Next up, I’m looking for a similar tool to fix Facebook links…