1. Get a GorillaPod for your iPhone and download GorillaCam (free) or iTimeLapse (paid).
2. Set it up somewhere to capture the “assembly zone” and start the capture.
3. Curse and swear at the IKEA parts and instructions for hours
4. Stop capture, assemble video and post to YouTube so everyone can make fun of you.

It’s that easy! Here’s the result:

We’ve heard amazing talks and ideas already in this first hour… Some that stood out for me were -

Ian Goldin, who presented “6 Things You Need to Know about 2030″ and talked about both the perils and amazing opportunities of continues growth in technology and globalization.

Rachel Pike, who presented “What makes a climate headline”, talked about the massive amount of work that is behind even the tiniest of publications for climate research.

Jim Walker unaided by visuals gave us a great imagining of the future of power controlled by intelligent application of information technology.

Julian Treasure, who presented “Sound Affects”, talked about the physiological and psychological effects of sound.

The list goes on and on…  but what I loved about their presentations is that many of them proposed a strong and viable solution to the problems they discussed.  Their ideas filled me with hope about the future.  So what really struck me was that our key to surviving and thriving as the human race will not be whether we can come up with solutions to problems in education, energy, climate change, globalization, etc…  Many solutions are already there.  The main question is:   Will we collectively listen and act?

So, will you listen?

Now, because of this inclination, I love minimalist interfaces and, of course, the iPhone which has tons of very simple apps that make your life easier, better or generally more fun with very little input.

Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time on my road bike.  I’ve been cycling since I was a teenager and never have I seen a sport so over techno-fied (except maybe golf).  Cycling computers can report all kinds of information these days:  your heart rate, speed (in a million different forms), cadence, power, elevation, grade, etc, etc…. it goes on and on.  This information is absolutely critical to professional cyclists riding in the Tour de France, but I’m definitely no Lance Armstrong.  I mostly enter races for fun and to have a goal to train towards.   I always want to get better but for me that usually just involves getting off my butt and riding more.   But of course I, like many others, just can’t help analyzing every ride to see whether I was a tiny fraction better than I was the last ride no matter how irrelevant that information actually is to my amateurish, squeeze-in-between-wife-3 kids-and-job workouts.  My problem is that if I have all that information constantly being reported to me, I obsess over it and forget about enjoying the ride.   But can I let go of that information?  It is useful and motivating in the long run to see where you were and how far you’ve come.

Enter my trusty iPhone and the app iMapMyFitness.  With this app, you press Start and put it away in your jersey pocket.  You can ride, run, mountain bike wherever and however you want, and it records everything:  how fast you went, what route you took, elevation gains, and all kinds of other tidbits.  This way, I can just ride, enjoy the fresh air, great scenery and general burning of my lungs and legs.   Once I get home, I hit Stop and my ride is uploaded to Mapmyfitness.com (a.k.a mapmyrun.com, mapmyride.com) and their legendary training analysis and fitness social networking service.  There I can obsess about it all I want when I’m back in front of my blinking, blipping computer.

2 buttons to press, TONS of value… my kind of technology.

• How do you balance innovation with standardization in a school?  You want to have and encourage innovative teachers but there does need to be a common experience for students both across sections and across courses within a school.
• Cloud services – huge wave hitting IT across industries…  where is it going and how will schools ultimately benefit from them?
• Google Apps For Education vs. Microsoft Live @ EDU – both are very attractive offerings for schools (especially considering the price tag).  What’s the better offering?  Will one win out?
• Frictionless collaboration – see this amazing post by Andy McAfee (a blog on Web 2.0 worth following) for more details
• Microblogging tools like Twitter and Yammer- how can these change / improve collaboration within an organization?

I have more questions than answers these days but hopefully over the next while I can post some thoughts and results from my ongoing research.

Note: Although there are exceptions, F11 is a fairly standard hotkey for fullscreen in most applications. Not sure what the Mac equivalent is… anyone?

For almost as long as Wifi has been around, I’ve heard about this idea of free Wifi being “everywhere” like airports, hotels and coffee shops. “No worries, you can just jump on some free wifi at Starbucks or something and connect”, is what I constantly hear or read. Now, I admit I travel only 2-3 times per year. However, I’ve yet to see much evidence of “wifi everywhere”. I do see paid wifi everywhere available for ridiculous amounts of money. I do see the odd coffee shop (usually not Starbucks) offering free wifi. Paid wifi service generally doesn’t work for me (and I suspect alot of others) because if I need public wifi, it’s usually for a short period of time (5 minutes to quickly check something). I’m not paying $5-10 for a few minutes of access time.

Am I crazy? Is free wifi actually available “everywhere” and I just have bad luck?

According to Jiwire, a company that provides a Wifi provider search tool, I’m right. Toronto, for example, has a dismal 35 free Wifi access points in the whole city. My home town has 6. That’s hardly ubiquitous public, free Wifi.

Since it isn’t all that easy to find free Wifi access points, I recommend Jiwire. Its database of both paid and free Wifi service is surprisingly complete and they offer a variety of ways of getting at it.

• Feeds can be grouped with tabs and layed out in any way you want. That way I can put the more interesting feeds in a more prominent location.
• Grouping feeds by topic and laying them out as soon allows me to quickly scan the “headlines” from a number of different sources on a topic. Gives me a “pulse” on what’s going on in a given area.
• Traditional RSS feeds can be mixed with widgets that provide data from other sources like Gmail (for new mail), Facebook (Friend updates, etc.). Netvibes has a ton of widgets that can be added from its universe.
• It can be accessed from any browser (I have it set as the homepage on all my computers.)
• It’s simple, slick and effective.

Update:  Check out my public Netvibes profile.

Some additional commentary: So what does this mean to you? Well, if you’re conscious about where you material comes from (i.e. whether or not it’s legal to use, modify, etc.), you’ll know that it’s often difficult to either get permission or know whether you need it in the first place. This search narrows the content to only that which explicitly states what you can and cannot do.

If you’re a student looking for things to reference for an assignment, project or essay. You can now find material that you’re teacher will not hassle you about copyright issues.

If you’re a teacher, you can now find images, videos and other materials for your class activities, lectures, assignments, etc. without worrying about whether or not you have the in-class rights.

If you’re a web developer, you can find content to use for your web projects that you don’t have to pay for and are not going to get sued for.

etc., etc…

Copyright issues come up all the time at my school (and every other school I’m sure). This is going to help. Thanks, Harold!

It’s a pretty easy feature to set up in WordPress.

Recently, in order to get my Motorola Q to connect to our Exchange server via SSL, I needed to manually load our domain root certificate onto the device. Here’s how:

1. In IE, go to Tools – Internet Options
2. Under Content, click Certificates
3. Under Trust Root Certification Authorities, highlight the most recent Appleby Certificate and click Export.
4. Click Next
5. Choose DER encoded binary X.509, click Next
6. Choose a file name and location. Click Next
7. Click Finish

Step 2 – Download Certificate installer from Microsoft.

Step 3 – Load Certificate into your device

1. In File Manager on your Q, create a folder called ‘storage’
2. Using your SD card, Bluetooth or ActiveSync, copy the files from steps 1 and 2 to the storage folder (I used Bluetooth)
3. Within File Manager on your Q, browse to the storage folder and run the executable.
4. Choose the certificate as prompted and finish