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Socialthing aggregating several websites at once.

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’m active on more social networks than I have time to go through in a day and that’s where Socialthing comes in. It allows me to follow news from facebook, twitter, pownce, tumblr, flickr, vimeo and livejournal. What I like about this site is how easy it is to see everything that goes on.

Whereas friendfeed is nothing more than a few lines of text this version of a social feed aggregator is the visual aspect. At a glance I can see which social network is giving the content and I can post accordingly. If I see a status update on facebook for example I can view the profile and add a comment. There’s that option with twitter too. I can see everyone’s tweet and I can reply to any friend’s post quickly and easily.

As a positive sidenote I can follow what’s going on on pownce without logging in. I’ve often felt that the limitations of that site is the lack of people outside of California using it. At least this way I may find my interest growing.

If I’m in a rush or there’s an important message to get out I can simply select to “post” a message to all these social networks at once. That saves a lot of time although as expected this should not be used too frequently as it adds a lot of “noise”. I’m looking forward to more services being included

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E-bikes, autumn and the changing seasons.
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E-bikes, autumn and the changing seasons.

Byrichard

One evening this week I was walking in the countryside at the foot of the Jura enjoying the evening when I walked by a couple. They were sitting on a bench looking across some fields towards the Mont Blanc, the Alps and of course the Lac Léman. Leaning against the bench were two e-bikes with good suspension.

It made me think about retirement and free time. It encouraged me to think about the freedom and pleasure of exploring the landscape on a bike without having to make the same effort as if you were on a conventional bike. I thought of the range it would offer and the gradients you could climb. It would in essence give you the freedom of a car with the practicality of a bike.

Of course there is a barrier to enjoying this pass time and that is the price of these bikes. In Switzerland they cost as much as a scooter. They lack the range and flexibility though. Electric bikes, in relation to road bikes are in fact cheap.

I already alternate between a car, a scooter and a bike and with the change in weather I prefer the comfort of the car or the speed of a scooter. If it’s raining then I would much prefer to use the car. It is a shame that they have this promotion at the end of the pleasant season. If they had this promotion at the beginning of summer then I would have taken advantage of it. I will take this option if they offer it next year.

 

 

The Francofous yahoo Live wall

Byrichard

The Francofous are a good group of people and last night we spent a few hours playing with Yahoo Live and skype. Skype provided the audio whilst yahoo live provided the video platform. Yahoo live is limited in the way we can watch and follow video so I created a simple video wall. The principle is simple. i get all the videos embedded into one page and we can watch everyone chat with everyone else. It’s a really nice experience and I’m going to improve the layout for future games.

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A book on Sleep and Sleep Tracking Apps

Byrichard

Why We Sleep

Sleep is something that we do almost every day and yet explore it only superficially. We either say “I should go to sleep” or “I wish I had slept longer”. Recently I read “Why We Sleep”. It’s an interesting book because it explores the topic in such depth. I learned that birds sleep on power lines and the birds on the right and the left of the group are sleeping with one eye open. Half of their brain is sleeping whilst the other half is awake. Half way through the sleep cycle they hop around and the other eye is opened and that half of the brain takes over. Sleep is a fascinating topic.

Sleep As Android

I have been playing with two apps for over a year now. One of these is Sleep As Android. When I first started using this app it required being placed in the bed to detect when I moved. Over time they developed technology so that it uses “sonar” to detect when we move during the night. Thanks to the “sonar” feature I can keep the phone up to a metre away from me.

I might have tracked up to 576 nights of sleep with this app. With this app I can see the duration, the irregularity, how much of my sleep cycle is deep, how efficient it is and how I rate it. It shows my how bad or good my sleep deficit is and what my chronotype is. According to the app I am a morning lark.

This app gives advice. This app believes that to maximise sleep I should go to sleep at 23:15 and that to maximise deep sleep I should sleep 8hrs 10.

Sleep Cycle

Another app I have played with extensively is Sleep Cycle. I used this app to track my sleep for several hundred nights of which six months was whilst working as an aircraft deicer. This is relevant because I was trying to go to sleep for 1800 and waking for 2am. Of course, I usually went to sleep around 2000 or so. I mention this because if any sleep specialists read this blog I am ready to share the data. Since then I have gone back to sleeping more pleasant hours.

This app provides you with a sleep graph per night, the time you went to bed and got up, sleep quality, time with noise, sleep notes, wake up mood, heart rate, step count and total nights tracked. I have tracked 303 nights of sleep with the app.

When you look at the trends tab you can see sleep quality and you can compare it with entire countries. You can track how regular your “went to bed” graph is, how much time you spent in bed, the time at which you woke up, what factors result in better sleep, decreased sleep, weather effect, air pressure, moon and location. You can also track your heart rate when you wake up. My average is currently 47 bpm, average in Switzerland is 67, Denmark, 65 and Turkey 73. The heart rate measurement comes from shining light through your finger and the phone detecting the change in colour per heartbeat.

Apparently, my best night of sleep is on a Tuesday and it gets progressively worse as the week wears on.

 

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Planning A New Section For My Website.

Byrichard

Today I’ve spent time looking at the website earnings and I’ve seen that with just a few minutes of work I’ve doubled the earnings from my website. I’m not going into the details at the moment but since I seem to be doing nothing productive I’m going to re-work my website to increase my earnings.

Four hundred and sixty visitors passthrough this website with about a million six hundred hits of which most visitors, through search engines get straight to the page they want. What I need to do over the next few days is making sure that there is advertising on most of the pages. in so doing I increase the opportunity for people to click through and find more relevant content on someone else’s web page.

I need to write more articles, rather than blog posts. Blog posts are a lazy method of web mastering because they require no real effort. Find an idea, write about it, post it. At least when you create a page you think about the content. I’ll start by writing a section about a variety of podcasts I’ve enjoyed over the past two years and hope that what I write will be appreciated by others.

Through this process I will be targeting a specific audience, trying to create relevant content and as a result get more visitors.

When working on the Roman section of this website I ran out of knowledge, therefore, the speed at which I added content plummeted. There is one page that I’m proud of from the time. It’s the one on Slavery. I spent several hours doing research, writing notes, and then uploading this page to the website. As a result of the quality of content universities and a number of other reputable websites linked to my own. That’s what I plan to do with the new sections I will add on podcasts I enjoy listening to and why.

It’s going to take a few days to generate this new section but since I’m between studies and work it’s one way of attempting to get a small secondary income. We’ll see how it goes.

Twitter and SMS

Twitter and SMS

Byrichard

Back in the good old days of Twitter the length of a tweet was limited to the length of an SMS. The aim was to make it possible for people to tweet and have conversations using GSM phones. With short messages we could leave the keyboard behind and read messages on our mobile phones.


Jaiku was similar except that it was more advanced, having an app that played well with Symbian devices. With time, and the advent of the iphone and ubiquitous data plans so platforms like Twitter and Jaiku could add images and more. With time Seesmic experimented with video and instagram with images. Instagram thrived because it made uploading and sharing images fast and easy, even in the days of limited bandwidth.


Over the years Twitter and other social media platforms have forgotten about their origins and now a single tweet can take an entire 27″ computer monitor, let alone a laptop screen. What was one short and succinct became long winded, and inefficient.


Twitter wants to extend the character limit to 4000 characters, but that’s absurd. The entire reason for Twitter being, is to have short messages, that are quick to read, a list of headlines, rather than full blown essays.


Remember that blogging platforms have snippets and sub-headings for a reason, to make them easy to skim.


Twitter has lost its bearings now. They are trying to be different products, at a high price, rather than highlight their unique selling point. I don’t want to read long tweets. I want short tweets. I even want to turn off images, to make the feed shorter and more succinct.


And Finally


I want to joke that the reason for “cargo pants” or cargo trousers as I prefer to call them is to store FFP2 masks during a pandemic. They are the ideal size for masks. It’s easy to store them during your outdoors walks, and pull them out once you are back indoors, or near people.

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