KW Videoblog for 6-15. Drunk dialing half your community and a call to arms.
Jun 15We pick up the weekly video blog tradition at Knightwise.com to give you a peek behind the scenes of whats going down. I talk about the new google hangout client and how I accidently connected 62 ‘wiseguys’ from over the world AND how YOU can contribute to the Knightwise.com community. We also ask you whether or not you want these episodes in the mediafeed or on just on the blog. In short : It’s time for your feedback people.
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Use your smartphone as a portable scanner with Google Drive.
May 22Remember those old spy movies ? Where the secret agent / spy would walk around with a small camera to quickly snap shots of some ultra secret documents in a momentarily abandoned office ? Remember the suspense as you sat on the edge of your seat yelling “Hurry up” in front of your television ? Lets face it : Those spies were geekin out hard : In essence they were the first to master the tedious art of scanning documents.
Somewhere along the way we lost our minds because in the late 90″s we had massive flatbed scanners to do the exact same thing. For those of you who still have a scanner : You know its the most idiotic waste of office / desk space that you have ever owned. Scanners are a kind of high tech coaster for whatever crap you stack on top of them. Why ? because you seldom need them and when you do .. Well after an excavation operation to actually find the scanner under that pile of comics, you then have to make sure the document is the right side up, find a free usb port on your pc and you end up cursing and wasting time.
So why not be Mr Spy all over again ? With the 24 megapixel camera on your smartphone its quite easy to snap up a good picture of a document. Now all you need to do is get those secret plans into your administration system. Enter the new Google Drive app on android that comes with a bunch of new features making it easier to digitize that document. It not only saves the snapshot into your Google Drive, but also preforms OCR right in the cloud. Letting you edit copy and paste the text. Compared to scsi cables, flatbed scanners, OCR applications under Windows .. this is quite a nifty tool.
So start using your smartphone (with the new Google Drive app )as your digital wireless scanner and snap up those documents straight away. Feel the urge to print them too ? Take a look at the long forgotten Google Cloud Print and turn those documents in your Google Drive back to ground up pieces of tree.
Links : Google Drive. – Google Cloud print.
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#lickmyvista : Never challenge the internet !
May 01
If you are not yet a member of our Knightwise.com community, you are surely missing out on a lot of tech intensive geek banter.
To ‘up’ the number of members in the community we have redirected our knightwise.com/googleplus Url to the geekiest community in Sliderspace. (Thank you @kdmurray for helping us there). A sense of togetherness is very important for Knightwise.com because nothing is more rewarding then bringing people together with the same interests. Google+ is a very nice platform to to this so we decided to give it “A Boost”.
While having my morning coffee I noticed that the number of members (stuck at 89 on Thursday morning) was a little on the small side so I decided to “up the ante”. I must have been drunk because I suggested that SHOULD the community reach a 100 members by the end of the week I would post a picture of me “Licking” an old Vista clunker that is parked in our basement. (Its not mine, its a friends pc) The thing does not boot, its dusty, dirty and smells of dead tribbles .. and its a VISTA machine.
And before I knew it : Things got out of hand. a 100 members proved to be easy .. So i had to up the ante : IF … by Saturday morning 8AM GMT … we have a 150 members .. I will post a VIDEO of me .. licking the Vista machine.
It appears personal humiliation is something that reaps popularity because the numbers are going up fast. If you think I should experience what dead Tribble tastes like ? Join us .. www.knightwise.Com/googleplus.
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“No happily ever after ..” as Google reader gets shut down.
Mar 14When I opened up my window to cyberspace this morning, the news was all over the web : Google announced the termination of Google Reader starting June 1st. This extremely handy service that has been a major source of information and content filtering for me over the last couple of years , is about to return a ‘404 not found’ page when summer rolls along. Suggestions for alternatives are abundant and possible “replacements” for Google Reader see their servers crumbling because of the massive exodus off yet another Google product that is sinking. As I fret to find out a way to sustain my automated information scripts .. I fearfully glance towards Feedburner and their single basket holding all my podcast feeds (and the only link to my subscribers). As cries of outrage (in the form of animated gif images) fill the web .. the sets in : The cloud fairy tale has no “happily ever after”.
After the collapse of the web 2.0 bubble and the zillions of startups that had no sustainable business model (aside from burning venture capital) we thought that “The Cloud” had come of age. Surely the big players like Microsoft and Google with their countless free services would be a “Safe bet” for our internet needs ? So we laughed at the nerds who ran their own mail servers. We scuffed our local ISP’s with their POP3 accounts and shoved our entire digital communication stream towards Yahoo, Microsoft or Google. As these giants lured us in with extra services and functionality .. that “webmail” account soon started to become a part of an ever growing ecosystem in which we entrusted our data and our workflows. Pretty soon “Sign up here” became the surrogate for “install now” and we watched our laptops turn into nothing more then pimped out Thin Clients. Office in the cloud, Mail in the cloud, Storage in the Cloud, Backups in the Cloud.. everything was possible and we thought it would last forever.
But there is no such thing as happily ever after.
As a cross platform slider who moves from OS to OS (and from device to device) the cloud was a great solution. The downside is that it is not one that is going to last forever. Somewhere, cloud based solutions from big players got the status of being eternal, but they are not. Google Reader brings another name to the list of soon to be terminated services, Hotmail and MSN Messenger being other A-listers here. As we signed up to yet another free service we boldly shouted : ‘If they ever make us pay .. we will leave’. Today I hear people offer cold hard cash to keep their Google Reader (or IGoogle service) alive.
So not every fairy tale has a happy ending and you don’t always get a chance to pay. Sometimes free services don’t stop becoming free, they stop becoming anything. Think about it next time you sign up for an online backup server to house the pictures of your newborn, or as you drag your tax papers onto Dropbox. Will they still be there tomorrow, and if not .. where can YOU go ?
Thus we dig frantically through our mailbox for the address of that geek who runs his own mail server , we hope its not too late to ask him if he ever built an RSS Reader on his own machine. For as this grey cloud crawls across the sky .. we know Google Reader isn’t going to be in it much longer.
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Myo : Bring on the smart bracelet and control your digital world.
Feb 28In the category “Shut up and take my money” friend of the show Konrad sent us a great new product that we can pre-order if we have some cash to spare. The MYO can be considered the lovechild between the Microsoft Kinect (but without any optics) and a Nintento Wiimote. This “Smart Bracelet” uses the power of gyroscopic sensors with muscle movements to ” See what you mean”. Just like the “Leap” we talked about on a previous post, the Myo offers another deadly nail to the coffin of mice and touchpads all over the world and is heralding the coming of a new age where a we will interface with technology in a way that is dramatically different from today.
Whether or not this is vapor-ware still needs to be proven. The site is taking pre-orders and at 149 dollars its a risk some of you might be willing to take. If the Mo ever gets massed produced depends on the way developers will react to this. Unlike Google with Google Glass , this company does not have a multi million dollar budget or hords of drooling staggering developer-zombies on its payroll. But it all .. it looks amazing.
Aside from the fact that you will look a little awkward waving your hands and arms around to make a point. Some people might mistake you for a Sith lord and await lightning bolts to fire from the fingertips of your outstretched hands, Others might see you as the next leader of the “third reich” as you swing your rightarm upward to control that military jeep. Although I can see the possibilities here, I’m also very worried that you might delete the textfile you have been working on for hours because you scratched your head with the wrong hand.
But no matter if it makes you look as a megalomaniac super villain who is suffering from an epilepsy attack in the middle of the street .. I want this !
Links : https://getmyo.com/
