Reda’s Social-Network Independent Pages

I (as many other people in the blogosphere strangely enough) don’t have a lot of time to write a proper post, so I’ll just post some quick "notes".
I think the starting point is the fact that Nokia wants to keep having a fat profit in the near and long term future and can only do so by delivering internet services as well as selling mobile phones. [Read more →]

I decided to try the Out of Bounce effect and found a very nice picture from a trip I did to Paris in 2005 (one of the first pictures I uploaded to Flickr actually) and this is the result…

Picture in Flickr

It’s really easy to do. You can find a very nice tutorial here (www.logicscape.com/oob_tutorials/)

I’m sure some of you all read the NY Times article (In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop) but I wanted to add my two cents and that is… not only bloggers are the one affected by the "24/7 disorder"!!! It’s “every content producer” who ends up in some sort of system which is 24/7 and in a social-network everyone is a content producer! Internet addiction is almost an official mental illness now but the active participation in the tens of social services we have today (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…) makes Internet even more addictive and makes anyone who’s “exposed” more at risk to this "disorder"

I think the whole experience is very addictive because is basically a positive feedback loop (very engineering view, I know ) and you can potentially end up in an "unstable" mental and physical state so watch out . You know how "greed and fear" drive the economies around the world? Well, I’ve been trying to understand what are the factors that influence the social interaction and basically I think it’s all down to "narcissism and control (of your data)". Each one of them affects each other and both can drive you nuts!

Personally, [Read more →]

Recently I started playing with a small heart anti-stress toy and I found it quite nice. The only downside is that I don’t want to carry this toy with me all the time so I leave it at home most of the time. However, there’s one thing I carry with me all day long (in my hand actually) and quite incidentally :-) it also needs some sort of protection: my N95. So I started looking for a bag/protector for my mobile phone that is also an anti-stress toy…well, there isn’t one ! There are all sorts of cases, holders, bags, protectors (as shown at the end of the document)… everything you can wish for except mobile anti-stress bags for my mobile phone!!! How’s that possible? Arghh…

-Reda

 Following images are from http://www.ishoppe.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=n95

Just wanted to test Zemanta, so I needed an excuse to post. I looked for the first interesting topic from today news (Google sued for Street View privacy invasion) and tried to dress it up as a post… sorry, it’s just a test. [Read more →]

I’m sick as hell (I’ve got chicken pox or chicken porx since I’m a little overweight these days) and got time kill in bed. So I started spending more time in my latest hobby: photography. It’s strange how I used to take pictures just because of my photo obsessive-compulsive disorder and never realised I really like photography;  that is. the urge was primarily to remember the moment than to enjoy the picture - I blame Kodak  because it used to say remember to remember
Now, slowly, thanks to Internet, my N95 and in particular Flickr and its community, I’m looking at my pictures in a “different light”…

So, considering I had a huge selection of pictures and I could not go anywhere I started to look at my past pictures and started playing with them using Photoshop… Few things I learned so far:

1. You can take beatiful pictures even with a N95
2. You’ve got lower chances of taking nice pictures with the N95 so you should take as many as you can unless you want to take a proper camera with you. Thanks to Nokia (in a sarcastic way though) and the extremely high compression of its photographs (notice the high variation in size), you can take a lot of pictures before you fill your memory card…
3. Black and white conversion seems not give the best result with N95 pictures. There is always a lot of noise in the pictures and the image does not look crisp and clear as it should (compared for example to a 5 years digital camera)

Some examples:

N95 - day example. OK

[Read more →]

It’s strange how sometimes people are very aware of the battery consumption of some applications but put all concerns aside when it comes to applications that use the internal accelerometer. Is it because they are all nice or because the application does not really give the impression of running in the background all the time? Ok, not all applications are the same but I’m not just talking about GUI differences here, I’m talking about how the application was implemented and how the battery and performance is affected by the application.

[Read more →]

Whoooa, I was going to write about how compelling are becoming Web2.0 online applications compared to self-hosted solutions and another big player just beefed up their online solution: Adobe. The new service is Adobe Photoshop Express and can also be used to edit pictures (similar to Picnik in Flickr) but this is completely flash, so you can imagine quite well how good the interface is…

[Read more →]

Two issues not related to each other but just wanted to very quickly comment few things.

Regarding blogging I found this nice pic in a post from microblogging.it (in Italian). The red part is my modification…isn’t blogging the platform which covers all the quadrants and likely be the core idea in future communications platforms? My guess is yes. Sure it will take different forms: a blogging platform on a mobile phone, a cool application somewhere in the web or a new window in outlook… it won’t really matter. We will also blog more things more easily; show exactly where we went step by step, send links to a gallery full of videos and pictures… actually scrap that, we are already doing that … anyway hopefully we will soon make use of the other 3 senses (I don’t know which one is going to be first: touch or smell?) . Finally we will be able to specify our audience; no more one2one vs broadcast, we’ll just do a very clever multicast. I really wish someone (like Google) will add another dimension to this: originality or value of the topic… Anyway.. it was supposed to be a quick post…

Next one: photography. I was just playing around using some photos from last year and tried to apply the tilt-shift miniature fakes technique…have to say, it’s not easy (ok I was limited by the type of pictures I had from last year ). Anyway, surprisingly, the picture that I took with my N95 during a short stay in Munich came out really well (the others are from my digital camera)… Here’s the results.

…I wanted to give the award to the best hidden feature in Excel 2003… I often copy charts as part of my job and I have to say that this feature is great if you know how to find it in the Edit menu…

The best part about this feature is that Microsoft thought it should be used only by advanced users, so they didn’t gray out the feature…they simply hid it [Read more →]