What if real life was updated, just like Facebook.
May 13I always feel the need to chuckle when I hear people rave against “Changes” and “Updates” to the interfaces of some of our social media platforms. Like 80 year old women cling to their desperate assumptions that Matlock IS (or was) the most sexy man on television, Facebook users think that “the way things are” are always worse then the way ‘things used to be’. I would call us old before we ever the end of our 20’s, but its just a fact of life. So lets take our little autistic crowd of Facebookians and see what it would be like if your boss would go “all zuck” on you … in your real life.
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Leaving your gadgets in the car ? Don’t forget to “Cloak” them.
May 05Traveling around with a bunch of tech stuff in the car is always a little tricky. You might need that laptop with you on your roadtrip, but you are surely not going to drag that 17 inch Macbook Pro all the way up the 298 stairs to visit that random monument of William Shatner along the way ? So you need to leave stuff in the car. Here are a couple of tips on how to do that … safely.
- Store them out of sight. : Leaving your Tomtom gps stuck to your windshield as you walk away from your vehicle is just plain dumb. Don’t even leave your gadgets in plain view.
- Don’t store them in the “Obvious” locations : Leaving your Cellphone on your passenger seat or in your glovebox is also something thats a little tricky. If anyone pops into your car to grab your gear, these are the first places they are going to check. The trunk is tricky but a little better because its completely out of sight.
- Park in sight. : Did you see a parking spot in an alley somewhere ? One of those places where nobody walks by and your car is completely out of sight of passers by ? Don’t ! Make sure you park in a place where somebody smashing your windshield might get “noticed” by other people.
- Take your gadgets “undercover”. : A friend of mine had a greasy pizzabox parked on his passenger seat. When I asked him if he just had dinner, he flipped open the lid and revealed his laptop and smartphone nicely stored inside He had even made nice compartments and had used some Velcro to keep everything in place. With the lid down it was a pizza fest in progress, with the lid UP it was a little datacenter. A cool hack !
- Cloak your gadgets. No matter how hard you hide them .. some of your gadgets might still be detectable… How ? They are actually screaming “I’m RIGHT HERE”. Leaving bluetooth enabled (and having your devices detectable via bluetooth) gives any passer by (with evil intention) a pretty good idea if there is any tech stored nearby. If you leave the “default identification” on , your smartphone might actually be telling them what kind of loot they expect. Its hard to determine where exactly stuff is stored .. But if your car is the only one around … they might have a pretty good chance of scoring if they smash your window. So : Airplane mode !
These are just a couple of tips to keep your tech safe in the car. Do you have some more ? Or perhaps you want to share YOUR secret hack with us ? Do so in the Comments Section below.
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Behold : I have Respawned !
Jul 26
I think its from the bottom of my heart when I say : Boy its good to be back ! After being offline and almost off-planet the last couple of weeks, popping my head back into the realms of cyberspace feels very good indeed. For those of you who don’t know : A couple of weeks ago I ran into some serious health issues. Using her preferred techniques of shock-and-awe, mother nature decided it was time to “tap me on the shoulder” and remind me that I was NOT invincible and my application to join the Avengers was not filed under ‘realistic’. Time for a Kernel Panic !
I say it lightly , but it was pretty serious. In all fairness both myself and my family got a big scare as we were reminded what a delicate an precious thing our “health” is. One moment I was having dinner with the lovely Niejana, an hour later I was in hospital hooked up to heart monitors and with doctors wanting to shove me into MRI’s and bombard me with X-rays to find out just what went wrong. I won’t go into details but let just say that I had some acute bad clusters on my harddrive and those did not only endanger my OS but also threatened to corrupt all user data. The probable cause of this : Trying to fit to many hours in a day, never settling down, never taking time to relax .. trying to ramp up the RPM’s on life’s little treadmill and ignoring the “Overdrive” warnings that both my body and the people around me flagged weeks ago.
So for the last couple of weeks I had to (and still have to) take it slow. Have enough rest, don’t try to overreach and in honesty : Stop and smell the roses sometimes. Its been a scary couple of weeks but things are looking up. After three weeks i’m back to work and tentatively (and with moderation) pick up my hobbies and my online life. I have encountered my limitations and got a peek at how precious (and fleeting) life can be. I hope it changed me for the better.
The people responsible for you being able to read this post are of course the doctors and nurses at both the Vesalius hospital in Tongeren and the UZ Gasthuisberg in Leuven who took excellent medical care of me..
But most of the praise goes towards my beloved wife Niejana. She saw something was wrong, got me to hospital and along with her family took care of me these last couple of weeks. She makes sure that I don’t fall back into the rush and kinda protects me from the ADD-overdrive-Gnome that lives inside me. She had red-flagged my lifestyle weeks before the event and the last couple of weeks have been very stressful for her. But thanks to her love and devotion, I can still roam cyberspace, instead of roaming the big beyond.
I also want to thank you guys and girls for the countless emails, posts, comments and postcards wishing me a speedy recovery. Both Niejana and myself were touched by your kind thoughts and it was a big motivator in getting well. So as we turn a dark page and begin an empty slate …. Lets get this show back on the road.
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No post today
May 13No post today since I’ve been spending the weekend with friends doing tech unrelated stuff. As proof : Here is little old me 40 feet off the ground doing some high-rise adventure course.
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Time for a reboot.
Apr 05“A Reboot” The term has been used many times of the last couple of years whenever it was time to “reinvent” an older concept or tv show into a new fresh format. Take “Battlestar Galactica”, “The A-Team”, “Star Trek”. Many of these old but gold cultural icons have been re-invented into a fresh and novel skin pleasing new crowds with old content.
In many ways THIS is a reboot too. A long overdue overhaul of not only the Knightwise.Com website, but also of the whole Knightwise.com idea that is now finally coming together. For those of you who are new I’ll try to shed some light on the history of the website, for those of you who have been around since the dawn of time, its a little bit of a rehash , but here it goes. Many moons ago I started blogging about my everyday life. Back in 2004 that was “the thing to do” and wether you had something interesting to tell or not did not really matter. More and more those everyday stories got permeated with the use of technology and so this everyday “blog” turned into the story of life on the edge of real and cyberspace. As the audience grew so did the technology and aside from writing up posts everyday, I dove into the adventure of podcasting and later screen casting, bringing all of you the content you’ve come to know and love as the creamy goodness called “Knightwise.com”.
But when comparing the recent material on the website with the original material (that all got migrated over) from 2004 , I started to notice how much content is devoted to technology and “production of sheer content” and how the “backstory” (the “Life” side of the edge of real and cyberspace) has been pushed back. I have evolved from a blogger to a content producer in all those years. A good thing ? Maybe. Not all of you are interested about stories about our hamster, but do perk up when I talk about wiring its little wheel to a usb adapter for hamster powered tweeting. However .. the tech story would not be as interesting if you didn’t know the ‘life’ story behind it .. or would it ?
A major reason for this “shift” can be blamed on social media. I tweet, Facebook and instagram quite a bit, spinning out the yarn that is my everyday life onto the digital frontier, but lately have written almost nothing about it on the blog here. Now lets face it. You guys are not fans of long articles , its a miracle you’ve gotten this far, but I DO want to reach back to the old roots of Knightwise.com a little in this reboot, giving you some more insights on the ‘real life’ behind cyberspace.
So strap in for the ‘reboot’ of Knightwise.com as both the podcast, the screencast and the blog get ready for season three. And you might want to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed just to say in touch with what is going on.
So whats your take on this story ? You want just the tech stories ? Or does the “life” part we tell make the difference for you ? Give us your comments while we do our reboot.
