So what is a bot? It’s just software that imitates a human in some capacity (over simplification but true). A chat bot imitates someone chatting. An evil email bot, imitates someone sending evil emails. Anyway, as mentioned, the table at the bottom of this post has all the bots I could find.

For additional translation entertainment, you can hit up the standard Google Translate, which is also pretty amazing. One thing that I often do is paste a web link into the translate box and then click on the link that appears to the left. This will take you to a translated version of the site you requested! Insane!

That’s it for now – as I said, busy as heck.  Enjoy translating!

~ab

The table for your translation bot pleasure:

1. It has to be invincible – rendered illegible by flying coffee or left on bus cannot be reasons to miss a task. I love paper, but hate that it burns, smudges, rips, etc. Digital was the only answer.

2. It has to be everywhere – Paper didn’t just lose because I’m a klutz – I’m also forgetful. A digital task system, accessible from every device I’ve ever owned AND anyone’s computer, was the perfect solution. I couldn’t leave it behind.

3. It has to be simple – If entering a task takes 10 minutes, I’m not going to do it. Duh.

When I decided on those 3 rules above, I never thought about the data that I would generate after using these tools for 4 years. On a lark, I went through three months of data today in Toodledo and was amazed. It’s actually interesting!

Although it’s thoroughly geek, I thought I’d share, just to show how powerful the data we’re generating can be. I’m not sharing anything personal, professional or even the numbers. The graphs of relative values speak volumes.

First thing I did was pull my tasks completed by month from Toodledo.

The result made sense: Late November, I started using Toodledo. December was spent working my tail off. January was when my little girl was born – huge dip there – but by February, I was completing tasks again at full force. March I started a new job, so mid-way through the month, we’re already heading for a record breaker.

Next I tried to find a trend, something to make it more than just a total. Here is how I complete tasks based on the days of the week:

Interesting eh? I come out of the weekend strong, completing fewer and fewer tasks until Friday, when I  push before the weekend. My theory here is one word: meetings. As the week goes on, I have more and more meetings, reducing the time I have to complete my tasks. There is something to explore here…

My personal tasks, often the lesser quantity, generally don’t get done on Saturday and therefore Sunday is higher. This probably contributes to that sinking feeling I get on Sunday when I have to pack in my tasks and try to enjoy the last of the weekend.  Again, something to explore…

Next I grabbed the planned due date of my tasks:

What I love about this data is that it shows how I think about tasks too… These are the tasks by the day I schedule them for. Notice that I tend to come out of the weekend with a lot scheduled for Monday, but Tuesday – Friday, I plan to complete pretty much the same number of tasks. To me, this supports the meetings idea – I’m adding tasks to the list because new things are coming up. However, as we saw before, I’m not completing them.

In a similar story, on the weekend, I tend to forget how hard is to complete tasks on Saturday and I schedule equal efforts for both days.

Finally, I decided to compare how I’m finishing tasks this month vs last month:

The month isn’t over yet, but it looks like I’m getting better at closing out  my tasks on Fridays and keeping a steady stream of completions going through the week. Thursday is still a low point for me. I’m sure it’s related to meetings, but it’s a point of focus for improvement!

After playing with all this data from Toodledo, I exported my data from Remember the Milk going back to 2007 and did the same sort of analysis, finding almost identical results. I’ll spare you the details, but one favorite was that I seem to start the year off strong in January every year, but slow down as the summer approaches. I guess that’s why my resolution each year is to be more organized :)

Thanks for indulging me. The bigger point is that I was collecting this data without really thinking about it. I wonder where else I’m capturing useful information that could improve my efficiency? I’ll poke around and get back to you.

~ab

When babies are born, in case you are not aware,  they need to be swaddled, rocked and given something to slobber upon… As I see it, the result is that technology tends to focus on rocking and/or white noise. That’s about it. Sigh… I write this as I sit up waiting to do our late night / early morning feed and wish that there were magic bullets I could use from my bat belt. No dice.

Instead of telling you about our Fisher Price Cradle Swing (god send that it is), I’ll focus on the tech that I’ve found useful, rather than helpful, for life with a baby.

Camera(s) – iPhone and DSLR

She’s cute and everyone wants to see her, thus we’ve snapped away with both our iPhones and the big DSLR. Although in the beginning we went a bit overboard, expect to take tons of pictures. Having the DSLR, with its incredible resolution, reassures the compulsive in me who worries that we’ll miss the perfect shot. The iPhones have pretty decent cameras too, for all those times when you don’t want to lug around a baby, six pieces of matching baby luggage AND and camera bag…

Ways to share pictures – Picasa and Dropbox

Picasa lets us share our photos with the family, but Dropbox is where we consolidate. With two Macs, two iPhones and a SLR, there are lots of places where pictures end up. We combine our photos into a shared folder in Dropbox and then I upload them to Picasa. Easy peasy.

The white noise app on my phone

Hm… This one was almost a magic bullet… We were told that white noise would soothe her on our way out of the hospital room and by the time the elevator arrived in the lobby, I had a white noise app for the car ride home. The great part? It actually works (provided that she isn’t hungry, sleepy, wet, dry, too hot, too cold…)

If you want extra geeky points, go grab yourself a pillow speaker (very cheaply online) and use an old iPod to make your white noise machine. It’ll free up your iPhone for dropping calls.

Amusements – all hail the iPad

You will spend a lot of time doing nearly nothing (other than rocking your child) and your brain doesn’t have capacity for the russian novels you were planning to read. My iPad holds my books, my RSS feeds, Netflix, Hulu and my email. With a bit of balancing, I can use it one-handed. Late in the evening, ’round about 1-2am, this will become very important.

That’s it. Like I mentioned above, no true magic bullets, but there are plenty of ways to add techie flair to staying up late with your newborn. Best of luck – duty calls…

~ab

Buy an antenna and connect it.

To pick up the free TV signals in your area, you’ll need an antenna.  Often today’s TVs forget their antenna bearing forefathers and mine was no exception.  You should validate that your TV has a connector like the one below.

This is the same connection that I used for my cable television (it’s called Coaxial Cable, if you’re interested).  Once you’ve located this point on the TV, you need an antenna. For those living near a RadioShack, I found this model on sale for $20.

Notice that it says “HDTV” – this means I’ll be able to pickup any free HD (High Definition) channels, as well as the standard definition ones. In most big cities, NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX have free HD channels.

The setup is very easy – just plug it in to the connector in the first picture.

Scan for channels

Your television, if it was purchased in the last 10 years, has a scanning function. Try your settings menu – heck, try any menu. You are looking for “Auto-Program” or “Channel Search” or anything to do with an antenna.  For me, in my settings menu, there was a button that said “Auto-Program”.  With the antenna connected, I let this feature rip and found 52 channels available to the greater NYC area. 52!!!

Bask in your independence!

You’ve done it! You followed 2 insanely easy steps and now you have free LIVE television. Well done you! Enjoy the Olympics!

~ab

My counter attack!

So what did I do to stick it to the man? I cancelled cable. This may sound brash but it’s not as crazy as you might think. Here is a breakdown of my thought process:

• Hulu and Netflix came with my TV – I have a Samsung TV that has “apps” and an internet connection.  It wasn’t that much more expensive and I have access to my Hulu and Netflix content (which is 99% of what I watch).  Both Hulu and Netflix require a paid account, but each is less than $10 per month.
• Apple TV streams all my media from my home computer – The Apple TV was a one time $100.  I can use it to rent movies and TV shows, like pay-per-view on steroids.
• I don’t watch sports – I think this is worth mentioning, as my solution would be hard on a sports fanatic.  Sports are a bit harder to find via the web, but not impossible.  I’d be curious to hear solutions for this in the comments…

Thoughts so far…

It has been 2 days and everything is great! I feel like I pick what I want to watch and I only see a commercial or two on Hulu.  All in all, the conversion went without a hitch.  When I want to watch a TV show, I use Hulu on my TV or the Apple TV to rent/buy the episode.  For older movies, I use Netflix and for more recent titles, I can use Apple TV as a pay-per-view outlet. Finally, I stream pictures, music and movies from my home computer over my wireless network to the Apple TV.  A – MAZING.

Here are some pointers if you plan on doing this yourself:

1. Use wires when possible: When you can, keep everything wired together.  Wireless is great, but the speed is much faster via cables.  If you can’t use wires, try to minimize the distance between your TV and your WIFI router.
2. Invest a few extra bucks in faster internet: You can pay a little more (an extra $10 in my case) and get 50% faster internet.  That burst of speed could be the difference between HD quality streaming and blurry junk, so investigate your options.
3. Learn how to use iTunes Home Sharing: Maybe this will be the topic of a future post, but you can share your iTunes libraries between computers and to your Apple TV. It’s fairly simple to set up, but can get a bit finicky. Try out this link to get you started.

I’ll try to put another post together in the future describing my whole setup, but hopefully this gives you a glimpse of what is possible.  The kicker here is that it’s all pretty easy!  I didn’t code or fiddle with complicated hardware. For the most part, it was as simple as plugging things in.

Good luck!

~ab

PS: I’m aware that the large cable company isn’t going to care much about my rebellion… but just wait comrades – the revolution is coming…

As a result, I like to practice using features when I find them.  Some stick, becoming part of my daily routine and ritual, others fade away as simple novelty.  Knowing what your iPhone or Android phone can do is good.  Learning which features are right for you is better.

Just to give you an example, I was waiting for the wifie at the wine store and remembered Google’s photo search called “Goggles” that is part of the iPhone Google App.  Not really needing an excuse to buy wine (“google told me to”), I tried it out on a nice bottle of cabernet.

Googles Goggles (a tongue twister ain’t it?) went to work on my cab, using the image as the search query.  The result was pretty spectacular – even by the standards of the ever impressive Google.

In less than a minute, I was reading a great review of my selection and soon after SOLD.  It was a great shopping experience.  I was selected a bottle that looked about right (2 minutes), Googled it (30 seconds), learned about it (1 minute) and finished my purchase.  Not bad!  The process was fast enough that I would have happily continued to photograph bottles for a while, but the results rich enough to help me make an educated decision.  Sweet.

In closing for this rather short post, remember that the point isn’t Google’s Goggles.  The point is that my phone had a feature that was worth exploring and that a little practice was enough for me to see how I could use it in future.  That’s the key – use it and see if it’s useful to you.  If not, no sweat.  There are another 999,999 features to look into.

For the record, the wine was excellent.

~ab

We’ve all experienced it – that infuriating moment just a day or two after a password change when you realize that you’ve forgotten what you chose (although you’re certain that it was witty and brilliant).  In truth, there isn’t much that I can do for your lost passwords… but I can probably help you create *better* passwords that might be easier to remember.

The recommendations in the articles referenced above will help you understand what makes a password strong.  If you don’t like those, there a millions of other sites – try searching for “how to make a strong password”.  To summarize the common themes, anything that relates to you is bad (names, addresses, etc).  Things that are random and not English are good (extra points for numbers and symbols).

You might be wondering “but then how do I remember it?”.  I’ve given this some thought in past so I figured that I would share my secret.  Here is what I do:

1. Choose a completely random, absolutely impossible to guess phrase like “i ate a watermelon once while naked at the zoo”.  Make yourself laugh, be witty or stupid, but for gosh sakes pick something that you’ll remember!

2. Create an algorithm.  Be creative but not crazy – you’ll need to remember how you did this later to recover the password.  Here are some examples:

- take the first letter of each word in your phrase (iaawownatz)

- take all the vowels only (iaeaaeeooeieaeaeoo – with the current example phrase this would be bonkers)

- before each 3 letter word, count the letters, then add the 3 letter word, then count the letters until the next 3 letter word, etc (1ate27zoo – so much work for a rather lame password, but it shows how far you can take this)

Ok so that’s a fun guideline for creating crazy but not impossible passwords, but we are advised not to use the same password for each site, so how many phrases do you need?  Very few!  You could include the name of the site in your password phrase.  For example, if my phrase was “I’m a lover not a hater”, I could include nytimes.com in there to make “I’m a nytimes.com lover not a hater”.  My first letter password would be “ianlnah” for nytimes, but “iacinah” for CNN and “iaginah” for Gmail.  Not bad eh?

If you’ve followed along so far, at this point you have a unique, strange, password for every site in your life.  I recommend that you do yourself one last favor – create another pass phrase for the really sensitive sites, like banks.  The burden of protecting your data increases as the sensitivity increases – so a bank is obligated to do cartwheels to protect you, but yahoo.com isn’t (as much).  It makes sense to have at least two levels of security in your system.

Finally, for those who think the above solution is a waste of time, you could ignore all that and use a password management tool.  This is a place that saves all your passwords behind a master password.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which you believe is more secure – personally, I trust my way of remembering passwords far more than I trust any one company to hold my data – but that’s just my paranoia speaking…  If you want to try some out, take a look at LastPass or 1Password.

Enjoy creating your new passwords!

~ab

“More than 30 years ago, RiceSelectâ„¢ introduced Texmati®, the first basmati Rice to be successfully grown in America, and still the most popular because of its unsurpassed flavor and aroma. Today, RiceSelectâ„¢ offers a wide variety of delicious rice and other dishes all grown and packaged in America, all inspired by cuisines from across the world. Requested by name in countless recipes and cookbooks, RiceSelectâ„¢ tastes like no other rice.”(Source)

What they didn’t add, but certainly should have, is the following: “RiceSelect products, like our amazing Sushi Rice, can be used to rebuild shattered hopes and dreams!” By now you’re probably checking the URL to make sure that you didn’t mistype the link, but I promise you that this is a technology story.  It’s just a roundabout way telling it…

Virginia Beach is a great getaway spot for a good time in the summer. The beach is packed but there’s sand enough for everyone.  The collection of bars, restaurants and hotels make it easy to find entertainment.  If, like me, you have an iPhone 4 and decide to visit, I hope you’ll heed to the following advice: keep the darn thing off the table and away from your margaritas.

I had just Googled “dog fighting experience” for my brother-in-law.  He had told me of a childhood love for fighter planes and I figured, why not actually get in one?  That’s the beauty of having a great smartphone, you can look this stuff up!  I had the data and we were chatting about whether the rather hefty price tag was worth it, when I gestured a bit too energetically and tipped over all 16 ounces of sickly sweet lime margarita right on my phone.

Panic.

“GIVE ME A TOWEL!” I screeched, while almost overturning the chair of the small boy sitting behind me, and whipped a damp pool towel into action.  I wiped every surface clean of the mess and powered the phone down. I sat stunned back down in the chair and stared blankly into space while my family members discussed the best next steps.  My only thought was “this is why I can’t have nice things”, over and over again,  while I slipped into a self-hating catatonic state. My brother-in-law gets full marks for taking over the situation. Someone at a nearby table mentioned that rice might help dry out the phone and so he sprinted off to the nearest store to buy some.

I’m not sure how many stores he had to visit in Virginia Beach before he found one that would sell him rice (it’s not that kind of place), but 20 minutes later, he returned with RiceSelect Sushi Rice in a very convenient plastic container with a screw-top lid. We dumped out a small portion and shoved in my phone.  It felt a bit like someone was putting one of my chopped-off appendages on ice, to be reconnected later “if there are no complications”.  I ordered another margarita and tried not to pray out loud.  I rallied through the rest of the evening, but my mind constantly strayed to my severed limb, crammed into sushi mix back at the hotel.

The next morning, the second I woke up, I sprinted to the hotel desk and tried to resist the urge to fling the rice everywhere, as I dug out my iPhone.  It looked a bit gritty, but there was no visible damage.  As slowly as I could, I removed the rice grains from the charging port and the headphone jack.  It was time for the real test – I turned it on, half expecting it to catch fire or sizzle in my hands… The beautiful silvery Apple logo appeared and the phone’s main menu appeared. Ok, I thought, now for test two.  My wife, who somehow still loves me despite my complete obsession with technology, called me from her phone.  She could hear me and I could hear her.  Test two passed.

At this point, I wanted to test the headphones, so I was about to plug in when I noticed a lone grain of rice stuck in the bottom of the headphone jack.  Test three was on pause, as I searched my travel gear for a pin. We had to leave the hotel, so I juggled my iPhone, the pin and the steering wheel as we meandered over to pick up the rest of the family.  Again, my wife is unbelievably supportive, so she only yelled at me a few times to pay attention to the road.  After careful prodding, the grain of rice fell out but the iPhone shut off.  I thought I was going to have a heart attack as I tried in vain to get it to start again.  After a few painfully long seconds it started and … worked perfectly.  Our vacation was over, everyone else was disappointed and dreading the coming work week, but I was smiling ear to ear.

Summary:  My unscientific, one data point study brought me to the conclusion that sushi rice saved my phone.  The technique worked for me and I haven’t seen any side effects from the event.  Could I have tried to reboot right after the spill?  Probably.  Would it have fried my little phone?  I have no idea.  All I know is that leaving it overnight in sushi rice worked. If you find yourself in a similar situation, I hope you get as lucky as I did.

On the other hand, you would probably have more sense than I did and avoid the spill in the first place…

~ab

The truth is this:  when your picture goes out into the lovely webs of cyberspace, it’s never gone.  It might be just sitting on a shelf without a label – that is, until the technology to link you to the evidence comes along.  As an example, try Googling yourself on Google’s image search:

When I tried this, I found my photo on page 17 of the results from a site that I had never seen before.  That alone was pretty strange.  However, don’t stop there – add a piece of information about yourself that others might know (like the company you worked for last) and you might be surprised how much the field narrows.  I went from page 17 with millions of hits down to page 1 with my picture as number 2, just by adding a former job to my search.

Companies liked LinkedIn and Facebook are the source of many of these images, but there are also companies that archive older pictures from the Facebook or LinkedIn database.  For example, Radaris (which does background checks) has a copy of my LinkedIn image (how is that ok?).  Long story short, even if you remove a picture from the site you’ve signed up with, you might be too late.

There really isn’t a fix for this. The best answer is probably not to post things unless you’re sure you want the world to see it.  I know that we’ve heard this before, but the supporting evidence is rarely so easy to find.

Best of luck staying safe out there!

~ab