TED is quite possibly the most awesome organisation on earth. They currently have such an amazing array of inspiring and thoughtful talks you would have to work pretty hard to go through and not find something that touches your soul.
This incredible talk by the beautiful Sarah Kay is among the best of the best.
Be Inspired:
I’ve just been over to tweak the settings on my Instapaper account and found that the Kindle options are much improved since my last visit. I tend to use the iPhone app mostly so I hadn’t noticed the changes before now.
If you’ve never used Instapaper and have no idea what it is you should check out Instapaper.com for all the details. In short it is a service which you can sign up to free of charge and whenever you come across an article on the web that you’d like to read but don’t have time to do it now, you can use one of the various methods available to send the article to your Instapaper account to read later.
There is another service that does the same thing called ReadItLater and you can check that out at readitlaterlist.com.
The new Instapaper Kindle options allow you to set it to automagically email a digest of the articles you’ve saved straight to your Kindle. The options are flexible enough to set the interval between mailings and the minimum number of new articles to wait for. Importantly you can also choose between the free.kindle.com address or the default kindle.com address which may incur charges.
This puts Instapaper a step ahead of Read It Later which only has an export to HTML option and frankly makes the service far more functional. It is especially useful if you commute to work and want to catch up on all those web articles you never read.
I heard about this thing on the radio this morning where several key systems around the world rely on the signal from GPS satellites to get their time signals. I thought it nuts and then a buddy of mine sent me a link to the article on the New Scientist website.
First class example of how we cut corners too much in our ‘progressive’ societies. When the apocalypse comes you want to be in the Australian outback with an Aboriginal tribesperson or in the African plains with a Masai warrior coz those ‘backward’ people will survive while the rest of us burn and starve coz the fracking Microwave won’t run and we’ve no fracking idea how to rub two drops of water together to make a fire. Which reminds me, anyone got Ray Mears’ phone number?
Two of my favourite things just came together in a fanstastic way. TED – the most incredible source of inspiration on the planet and Coffee – the most incredible source of inspiration on the planet. (just try some of either next time the neurons fail to fire and you’ll get my drift ;0) )
Coffee Common is an initiative to bring roasters together to “improve the coffee experience for the industry and consumers”. Recently they got together and shipped enough coffee to supply TED attendee’s at their own expense. The idea is to collaborate and improve.
As part of the build-up to TED, we’ve asked that each of the participating roasters write a brief introduction for one of the others. This would typically be a tough exercise, but the mutual admiration shared by these companies is really amazing.
I was really chuffed to find that Has Bean, my local and regular supplier of premium quality fresh roast beans at incredibly affordable prices is one of those few roasters that are part of the initiative. Interestingly each roaster has been asked to introduce another roaster in the spirit of collaboration.
Check out the Boing Boing post here, and the Coffee Common site here, and here is what the competition had to say about Has Bean coffee.
If you are a software developer or web designer, chances are that at some point you have come across a book published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf guy’s. They do carry a very good range of books covering all sorts of topics from iPhone Development to getting your head right in the Pragmatic Programmer series of books.
One of the cool things about them is that they will sell you a regular paper book or a digital copy of the book in various formats. You can buy books in Beta form too which is different to most publishers. Beta books are unfinished and updated regularly, you get emails letting you know the update is ready and all you do is go download the new version. It doesn’t stop there either. Once the book is finally released any updates to the book are added to your account and you can go get the new version with all fixes and tweaks in place.
This sort of service makes eBooks well worthwhile to me and the guys at the Pragmatic Bookshelf are leading the field in every respect, especially when it comes to offering a top service for punters like me and you.
eBooks come in PDF, epub and mobi formats. One very cool feature I noticed this morning when downloading an update to one of my books is that you can now opt to have your mobi format books emailed direct to your kindle if you want. the site detects that you are downloading in kindle friendly format and asks you if you want to go set it up to email you the book direct. Input the name part of your kindle email address (the bit before the @) and add the prag prog support email address to your accepted senders list via your Kindle management page on Amazon (they give you the address when you are setting this up) and it’s job done. Now when you want to get your books you can select the send to my kindle option from the download section. After a couple of minutes if your Kindle is connected to wifi or 3G too I guess (I have wifi only so I’m not 100% sure) your shiny new book arrives ready to be categorised.
Very Awesome, I likes that a lot.
You can check out the range of books available on their site. Prices are in Dollars and are about $21 per eBook (about £13 at the time of writing) which is only marginally less that the $28 (17) paper version, but the eBooks are drm free (a good thing – look up Cory Doctorow and read some of his stuff on copyright and drm) and you do get constant updates. Plus, these are technical books so are usually priced higher than regular fiction or non fiction due to the much lower sales figures. They also have Audio and Video casts available for download covering various subjects, there’s a lot of choice and they are expanding their range all the time so be sure to check them out.
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