Beyond Your Nose

Must have and Android Apps

Bergen Larsen — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:44:37 +0200

It has been a little over a month since I bought myself a birthday present. The HTC Desire. Lovely little device with so many awesome features. Sure, I miss the AMAZING camera that was my Sony Satio. But that was a camera, not a cellphone. Although. I have been thinking that this little beautiful device is not really a cellphone. It is a mini PC with a cellphone and a decent camera attached.

The beauty of this phone comes in the fact that anyone in the world can develop a great piece of software for a device that is always available. Beautiful. :) Here's a list of the applications I found useful:

MUST HAVE:

Advanced Task Killer - keeps you phone's memory managed perfectly!
3G watchdog - Living in SA means we don't have unlimited mobile data plans. Essential to help you keep tab.
Battery Snap - Great for monitoring your battery usage over periods and seeing how things chew up battery life.
WeFi - Beautiful tool for when you are travelling around. Helps you find WiFi hotspots, free, password authentication required, etc.
Swype keyboard - Brilliance. Replace your standard keyboard with one you can swipe patterns to write. VERY accurate in beta. Bring on brittish english!
Bar-code scanner - Great for when you want to download an app with a bar-code as a link or if you want to find out who stocks the tissues you like in new york.
Foxy Ring - Brilliance. Manages your ring tones volumes & your phone's data connections just the way you want them.
Handcent SMS - Beautiful application for managing your text and multimedia messages.
Fring - Want skype? This is how to get it working. Not only that, its a great SIP client and it has connections into most instant messaging networks. In one package. Kief bru.
AppBrain - Find apps on your PC, split them into lists and even set them to install on your phone next time you sync. Brilliant.

Cool optional ones:

Body finess - Great for you gym bunnies. And those of who wanna get to the gym and do what needs to be done.
Smooth Calender - Awesome widget which replaces any standard calendar widgets.
Bubble - Ever been left wanting a spirit level. NEVER FEAR!
Foursquare - Now these guys have done a great job of building an application which just works. Brilliantly.
Voice Search - Fun toy to play with C/O Google. Does speech to text and hits google and other bits. Only bitch I have is that it isn't offline for dictation.
TTS Service - Text to speec. Who doesn't like making a computer read Afrikaans.
Bluetooth File Transfer - Great for browsing your friend's phone contents. :P

Got any other suggestions? Leave me a comment so others can take advantage.

#SpeakZA

Bergen Larsen — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:49:03 +0200

A while ago, I wrote about how it looked like the ANC [in control of the government] was aiming to implement laws in South Africa which would mean that I'd have to get a blog post approved before I could publish it. You know. Similar to the way the Nazi party did stuff before world war 2 and the way the apartheid government did to South Africa for the longest time. All of this in the name of "protecting you".

So now it seems their youth league has similar thoughts. I am not amused. Here's a snippet from a movement that seems to be under-way in the social media channels:

#SpeakZA
Bloggers for a free press

Last week, shocking revelations concerning the activities of ANC Youth League Spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu came to the fore. According to a letter published in various news outlets, a complaint was laid by 19 political journalists with the secretary-general of the ANC, against Shivambu. This complaint letter detailed attempts by Shivambu to leak a dossier to certain journalists, purporting to expose the money-laundering practices of Dumisane Lubisi, a journalist at City Press. The letter also detailed the intimidation that followed when these journalists refused to publish these revelations.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the reprisals against journalists by Shivambu. His actions constitute a blatant attack on media freedom and a grave infringement on constitutional rights. It is a disturbing step towards dictatorial rule in South Africa.

We call on the ANC and the ANC Youth League to distance themselves from the actions of Shivambu. The media have, time and again, been a vital democratic safeguard by exposing the actions of individuals who have abused their positions of power for personal and political gain.

The press have played a vital role in the liberation struggle, operating under difficult and often dangerous conditions to document some of the most crucial moments in the struggle against apartheid. It is therefore distressing to note that certain people within the ruling party are willing to maliciously target journalists by invading their privacy and threatening their colleagues in a bid to silence them in their legitimate work.

We also note the breathtaking hubris displayed by Shivambu and ANC Youth League President Julius Malema in their response to the letter of complaint. Shivambu and Malema clearly have no respect for the media and the rights afforded to the media by the Constitution of South Africa. Such a response serves only to reinforce the position that the motive for leaking the so-called dossier was not a legitimate concern, but an insolent effort to intimidate and bully a journalist who had exposed embarrassing information about the youth league president.

We urge the ANC as a whole to reaffirm its commitment to media freedom and other constitutional rights we enjoy as a country.

For me, the solution to the problem would be to cut off the money. We as tax payers should hold off on paying tax for a while and let the 80% of the population that are not paying tax know that we are keeping the country floating. We demand service. We demand that the media report truthfully on the service that is being delivered. The cover-ups in government organisation. The fact that the department of health cannot account for ~ R950BILLION... be it loss, be it corruption, be it bad processing.. this is a story the media should report on. Those responsible should go through the courts and be tried and face the music.The media should be there to tell the story. There should not be ONE man alone who approves what goes to court and what doesn't. The media should be able to report on this. People wonder why there's a brain drain in our country.

But it is the media who are the voice. It is us who are the people who should rise up and do something about this BLATANT misuse of the power we gave them. We should remove their power.

Multitasking: Good or bad?

Bergen Larsen — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:27:49 +0200

My mother told me a few years back that from the moment I was conceived, I never stopped wriggling or moving. I still find it difficult to sit still. I must be entertained or my body will find a way to occupy itself on a subconscious level. I believe this is an trait I inherited. I've had grandparents, great uncles and aunts who all sit around drumming their fingers without realising it. At another point an ex girlfriend of mine claimed I had ADHD.

In my youth, I played with random toys while I was watching TV. In my teenage years, I was surfing the web, chatting, playing music or watching the TV and chatting online all at the same time. Towards the end of my teenage years, I was working for an internet call centre where I would be helping a customer on the phone connect via his PABX in the hotel he was staying at, assist a colleague with a random email application that their client had and be holding 5 personal chats on IRC ..... AND still maintain a presence in a chat room.

My weekends I use to bounce from party to party at on one night and maintain hundreds of friendships.

According to articles, my environment may have resulted in me having a mild case of ADHD. Maybe this is the case, maybe it isn't. Let us wait for conclusive evidence of me having ADHD first. :P

Nearly a decade on and I'm facing my thirtieth birthday in just a short few months. While I still struggle to focus on just ONE thing at a time I am making a concerted effort. The reason, when I do multitask, I feel I am getting less done than when I take time and just focus on one item at a time. Its like my brain was burnt out from doing so much of it when I was a decade younger. After having just typed that, another thought occurred [care of Nicole... second tea break], that maybe it isn't the fact that age [since I'm still young at heart] is degrading my ability to keep up with so many. Maybe it is the fact that the tasks that are being performed are so much more complicated. There are some scientists out there who may disagree with this theory though. :/

On a social level,my monkeysphere has gotten a lot smaller these days. I'm glad for it in some ways because it allows me to interact more often with those people that mean more to me more often. This isn't to say that I don't go out and expand my social circles through random activities which keep me entertained during the evening. I'm not going to lie. It takes work sometimes to maintain relationship. I find that those people I don't put in effort with sometimes just fade out of my life. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes because life gets busy.

Obviously, there are some dangers to multitasking. Think bout texting while driving. Think about checking and responding to your twitter feed while you should be listening/calling/emailing/paying attention to your significant other.

If we flip that thought on its head, there can be some advantages. Multitasking I believe our ability to multitask (efficient or not) is necessary to be able to adapt to our environment. Apparently 3 animals that are really good at multitasking are humans, horses and dogs. Personally. I think cats are better at it than dogs, I wonder why that stupid web site didn't mention it. If we think about what we had to face when we lived in the great out doors, we needed to be able to cook our food, eat it and beware of other animals trying to steal it. Hell, if we think about hunting for food, that takes a lot. You have to be aware of whether you are visible, if you are down wind, if the wind is changing, the light is changing whether the animal being hunted is aware..... this all equates to one end result, but it is factoring in multiple variables and responding to those variables in order to be successful.

These days we have cows and slaughter houses. Life is a lot simpler on the hunting front. Leaving us to use our brains for other things. Welcome to the digital age. I watched a video which was sent to me yesterday by my good friend Glynis. It mentions how much more information we have to process in this day and age. One interesting thing I noted in the video was the number of words in the English language. Currently it is around 540 000 words. That is HALF A MILLION WORDS! In William Shakespears time this was around 110 000 word mark. A mere 400 years ago. I'm willing to put money on the table that the majority of the additional words were adding in the last century.

Whether multitasking is good or bad or even a bit of both, one thing is for sure. We are living in exponential times. More information gets to be processed. More effectively. More efficiently. The kids growing up have a tough time ahead being trained for jobs that haven't been thought of. They need to be able to adapt far quicker than the hunter with all the information being presented. Hell, forget the kids, we the adults of this world need to be able to adapt to this fast pace environement. Multitasking is an essential part of daily living in the information economy.

If you do a bit more reading, you'll find "the depth of our attention governs the depth of our thought and our memory, when we multitask we sacrifice understanding and learning." I quote this from here.

So is there a way to get better at multitasking? According to scientists yes. However, if you read closely, you'll start to understand that there are two elements at play. Firstly, to get better at the things you will be multitasking with, you have to exercise you brain both in the way it starts processing information and in the practice the tasks which you multitask with so your brain can process the individual tasks quicker. The second point to note is that we are not really multitasking. Time splicing... i.e.: doing things in serial very quickly that it appears as if we are doing two things at once. We just happen to have our attention focused on the most important task before switching to the less important.

My observations and closing thoughts:

If you are looking for quality over quantity... and according to some research, quantity too. Do things in serial. Focus on one thing at a time and get it done.
Multitasking will become essential as the years go on and more information comes our ways that we need to process and react to.
Practice makes perfect if you are going to multitask. Just don't endanger yourself and others IF you do decide to multitask where you shouldn't have to.
"The less we practice these habits of mind, the more we risk losing them altogether." ... "You can improve your agility at multitasking, but you will never be able to multitask and engage in deep thought at the same time." again taken from here.
The extreme use of twitter a few months ago nearly killed my ability to stay focused and read anything greater than 140 characters. *twitch*

Whilst writing this article, I had 2 cups of tea and numerous discussions on various topics, I answered word questions, helped tested MyPhoneExplorer, read and replied to various emails, took a few phone calls, listened to my music, did research for this article and tweeted. Do I NADD?

Tampa Dayz and Tampa Nights

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:32:54 +0200

Driving around sunny "winter" Florida, hanging out at interesting venues listening to great live music. Oh, and eating Gator!

USA - 2007

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:08:52 +0200

2007-2008 New York Winter!

27th Burpday

Sun, 20 May 2007 15:14:03 +0200

Celebration's at Primi Piatti Design Quarter