2012
How to motivate students to perform better in school
I am always looking for new tricks to help motivate kids to perform better in school and I recently read an interesting report from some researchers from the University of Chicago. They performed tests on children in under-performing schools to determine if money or a trophy could motivate a student to better grades. The researchers wanted to know if the money would motivate the students, how much money it would take to motivate them and how quickly the money would have to be paid out for it to be a motivator.
Real world phishing scam with the mail service
When I mention phishing scams, you rightfully think about online tricks used to steal user information. But many of us still use the national mail service and some backwards thieves have started using a real-world phishing scam with USPS (blue) mailboxes. Would be phishers are coating the inside of the mailbox chute with an adhesive. This means they can then easily pass by and steal your mailed check or letter containing your personal information (useful for identity theft). Although this latest scam is in Texas, the USPS has said there have been over 30 arrests for similar scams in the last year.
Test Microsoft Office 2013 Now for free
Microsoft announced Office 2013 last week which will be touch optimized, have added functionality and of course be cloud connected. Some of the coolest new features are: Touch optimization : using Office 2013 via touch is as natural as using the traditional keyboard and mouse. All of your standard gestures are supported. Stylus support: Office 2013 now has built in stylus support which means you can now jot down digital ink notes and send them or have Office convert your written notes to text.
New York City Payphones getting a new lease on life
Payphones of yesteryear get a new lease on life in New York city as WI-FI hotspots. This interesting program is starting with 10 locations but the hope is to expand it to 12000 locations in all 5 city boroughs. Since they are using standard WIFI, each access point will cover about 100 feet and will be an incredibly useful feature for tourists. This effort is being spearheaded by the mayor Bloomberg as part of his NYC Digital Initiative.
Long term testing and review of ZAGGsmartbuds
My last review of Zagg was for their InvisibleShield screen protector here. I loved the product but hated the hyper inflated cost of shipping on the replacements. Today I will be reviewing their ZAGGsmarbud earphones. I have been testing these for the last 6 months and wanted to share my opinion. For the record, I purchased these myself for this opinion is completely unbiased. Packaging The earphones come in a triangular easy to open box. Within this pyramid, you find the earphones, a small zippered carry pouch and 5 eartips.
Retailers may not accept scanned receipts
2 years ago, I was tired of reshuffling papers and made the move to go paperless. This means that almost all paper is somehow converted to a digital image and stored in Evernote and/or TheBrain. I scan them using my flatbed document scanner or Scanner Pro on the iPhone. Why did I go paperless? It is cleaner and helped de-clutter my work area. It also makes information much easier to find year later when I actually need it (aka searchability).
Your smartphone has problems too
Fanboys aside, most smartphone users have some complaints about their chosen product. Whether the screen size is too small, the screen resolution is not enough, the battery drains too quickly or a certain feature just doesn’t seem to work. As social creatures, we want to know what problems others are having and now FixYa has the answer. They analyzed data from their 15 million user reports tocompile a list of the most common complaints against the best selling smartphones. Samsung Galaxy S3 Iphone 4s Nokia Lumia 900 HTC Titan II Galaxy Nexus Blackberry Curve You can find the summary of their findings in the below press release.
Microsoft Windows 8 upgrade priced at $39.99
Apple customers have had fantastic upgrade pricing for the last couple of years. While they were paying less than $30 (Lion was $29.99 and the new Mountain Lion will be $19.99) for their OS upgrades, most Windows users ended up shelling close to $100 to upgrade to Windows7. Many of us anxiously waited to see if Microsoft would respond. We can all sleep easy, knowing that the next major Microsoft OS upgrade (Pro version) will cost $39.99 in 131 markets. Anyone who buys a new PC starting now until February 2013, will be eligible to buy Windows 8 Pro for $15.
Apple iPad Mini may launch in October
This rumor simply won't go away but when two reputable news organizations pick it up, we should sit and take notice. Bloomberg and the WSJ are both reporting that Apple is working on a 7.85 inch (Sharp IGZO screen) iPad mini that will retail between $250 - $299. Google's Nexus tablet will try to break Apple's stronghold on the tablet market by offering an extremely well equipped consumption tablet (made to consume not create content) for less than $300. Analysts saw this as a competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire but many new would be tablet buyers may be swayed by the competitive price and nice featureset.
Apple may launch new Retina iMac in October
Digitimes is reporting that Apple will launch a new Retina display equipped iMac in October. Their source said Apple is bringing the Retina display to all of its products so this is a natural extension. Apple may use the fall launch of the Iphone 5 as the platform to announce the new iMacs. Some have even speculated that the rest of the Macbook line (air and pro) may also get a Retina display makeover before holiday shopping starts. This is Apple so we’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be true.
Simplify password management [for free] with LastPass
Every couple of weeks, we hear about another site being hacked and user account information being stolen. Security evangelists are constantly asking the community to choose complicated passwords and to not reuse the same password for multiple sites. The biggest complaint I hear is that the above makes remembering passwords impossible. But guess what… you don’t need to remember them because of a fantastic free tool called Lastpass. Lastpass is a strong and easy to use password manager that offers 85% of its functionality for free and has plug-ins for most modern browsers.
A social networking privacy experiment
All too often, people forget to secure their facebook profile page and then post stupid self deprecating comments that site can easily scoop up and archive forever. This may be a good time for you to read my post on securing your Social Media information found here. We Know What You’re Doing is the brainchild of an 18 year old web programmer who wanted to show the world just how stupid people can be. Using the publicly available Graph API, his site collects interesting updates and categorizes them into one of these categories:
Take 2 minutes to secure your social media information
If you are like most social media users, you grant [app] access to your account way too easily and probably have dozens, even hundreds of apps with read and write access to your accounts. Take a second and think about what this means for your online privacy (or lack thereof). The tool Tech entrepreneur, Avi Charkham, faced the same dilemma and was frustrated by how much time it took him to locate the account permissions pages for the 8 most popular social media sites (often taking 5 clicks or more ).
When buying cloud, think redundancy
Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (U.S. East data center in Virginia which is one of its oldest and largest data centers) experienced a major outage which impacted some large name brand internet sites for several hours. As expected competitors were quick to jump on social media sites to announce that their services remained available and some enterprise pessimists may use this to justify not moving some of their enterprise services to the cloud. The reality is that outages happen whether your apps run in the cloud or your own datacenter.
Governments are requesting more user info from Google
Google geeks and privacy advocates love Google’s “Transparency Report” (now in its 5th version). In the latest version, it is interesting to note an upward trend of requests Google defines as “troubling”. An interesting new feature is the ability to see aggregated court orders and other requests worldwide. To add some meat to this discussion, consider the fact that from July to December 2011, governments requested information on 28 562 user accounts. This number includes requests for user information and takedown requests for blog posts and videos.
Microsoft tablet "surface" won't dent the tablet market
Microsoft announced its new self-made tablet called Surface on Monday. The product looks like it could be interesting but none of the reviewers were allowed to really test the device, it performance or feature set. We don’t even know the cost. After the presentation, we saw dozens of articles about why this product is a failure even before it hits the market and research firm ABI Research is no exception. On Wednesday, they declared that Windows based tablets will have “little impact” on the tablet market for 2012 (they estimate it will account for no more than 1.
Followupthen.com free email reminder service review
If you are anything like me, you probably get a few hundred emails a day. Some of those emails require immediate attention but most are for future actions that I don’t need to look at now. So how do you clean up your inbox without losing the reminder for these future actions? Enter a cool new free service called Followupthen.com. Ubiquitous Using the service is simple, you send the email to a special (time coded) Followupthen.com email address and the service will then remind you at the designated date and time.
10 minute time management course
I love Getting Things Done and it is the basis of my day to day time management system. Like any skill, it takes time to learn and practice to master. Some people aren’t ready to make the time commitment to learn GTD but want to improve their time management. So if you fall into this category, these tips are for you: Start with the end in mind For each activity you will undertake, spend a couple of minutes to determine what a successful outcome would look like for that activity.
Virtual Meeting Etiquette
We are living in a global just-in-time community where more and more of our meetings are held in cyberspace. This new reality is sometimes drive by cost and other times but convenience. Regardless of the business drivers, it requires an entirely new approach. In real estate, the most important quality is location, location, location. In the world of virtual meetings, it is communication, communication, communication. To have efficient communication, you need trust and your remote participants need to feel like part of the team.
A good video intro to Evernote
I love Evernote and I have written about it many times. For those who are more visual, here is a neat video done by Dotto Tech.