Category: Tools

Twitter puts the bird in a cage

When I came across Twitter, years ago, it first looked like another chat service. But with the ability to interact via SMS, and easy ways to feed tweets into websites and applications, it quickly became a rich ecosystem for exchanging all kinds of status updates. You see metro lines on twitter, announcing disruptions in services. […]
Rolf 2 Comments

Denying service to my own mail server

We had some intermittent problems recently with a mail server not being available. As it turns out, I basically was doing a “denial of service” attack on my own mail server, thanks to some caveats in how IMAP, push notifications, and my mobile email client, K9 work together. The problem One of the mail servers […]
Rolf 2 Comments

Drones for good, pirates in the sky

You’re enjoying a sunny day in the park with some friends. You get out your smart phone to find that piece of music your friends really should hear, and all of a sudden, a flock of colourful mini helicopters appears out of nowhere, and perform a gracious dance in the sky above you while the […]
Rolf 0 Comments

The Cardiopad: an African invention to save lives

The Cardiopad: an African invention to save lives: via iConnect Online
Makes remote diagnosis possible
Can save patients long travel to a big city
Recollection 0 Comments

OpenOffice as (blog) writing tool

I’m a geek. So when it’s not a writer’s block keeping me from producing a blog post, I’ll dive into tools and techniques to “optimise” my writing experience before I start typing out sentences. Lets call it preventive productivity: getting a lot of related things done in order to be more efficient later. Like getting the tools and the work flow right. Perhaps I managed that, now that I can really use OpenOffice to write blog posts, with Zotero to manage my reference, and the Sun Weblog Publisher to push the result towards my website.

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Creating wire frames and mockups

Mockup sampleCommunicating web concepts for user experience and site structure is a challenge. Wire frames and interactive prototypes are great for this, and over the years, I have been using those with many designers and developers in a variety of web projects. But creating and sharing such mockups still is a laborious task, so I went around the web again to look for a tool that truly makes that task easier. Pidoco seems to offer the best way forward for me.

Rolf 15 Comments

Plumbing on the web

Social Media Plumbing: Flow chart to sketch how I use different tools and social media sites feeding into one FriendFeed room, and then use that as input for my websiteSocial Media Plumbing:

A post by Robert Scoble made me have another look at rooms in FriendFeed. I set things up over the weekend, and decided to document it, to maybe succeed in explaining what this is all about. Here’s my situation:

  • I post content on various social media sites through various tools
  • I want some of that content to appear on my own website
  • I switch platforms quite often, or start using them in a different way, so keeping it up to date should be easy

So I decided to start a FriendFeed room with content that I want to appear on my site1, and use their feed widget to then display it on my home page. It still took some effort (to get the styling how I wanted it), but it’s done, and here’s how.

Rolf 2 Comments
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