If you’ve upgraded the hard drive in your laptop or desktop machine, then you’ve got a naked, homeless hard drive sitting around in one of your drawers. Put that puppy to use by plugging it into ThinkGeek’s External USB SATA Drive Dock and boom, you’ve got extra storage without the enclosure.
A professional photographer buddy of ours (who requires massive amounts of storage) uses the Drive Dock the way we used to use floppy drives: He’s got dozens of hard drives lying around, and he plugs them into the dock as needed.
At $39.99, buying a Drive Dock (and naked hard drives to go into it) is way cheaper than going the conventional enclosure-bound route, and it takes up less space on your desk. Drive Dock: turn bare drives into “floppies” – Core77
You might wonder why I regurgitated this post of Core 77
Well it instantly hit a button in my mind, because I have a sort of museum here in my office of outdated unused gadgets. Among which these:
My first “Laptop”…..a Sharp that was kept in quarantine in Marseille, because of some anti Japan import regulations en vogue those days (20 years ago) for six months. I was able to negotiate some rebate with the seller…but it cost me the equivalent of Euro 8,000 those days… among a couple of Hard Disk drives that I would love to run in this HD docking station….and some stale nokias.
Without fluids man is doomed to die. Why not treat our basic necessity with the respect it deserves? Fort Knox is a luxurious wine rack reserved for a single bottle, a gilded cage for the most precious bubbly.
A unique design, as each object is numbered by hand. The hammered-in digits adorn the golden halter like a beautiful scar, playfully flirting with the logo’s engraved letters. Its simple structure, bearing resemblance to the basic wooden archetype, is just a trick to fool the over-stimulated mind.
Fort Knox doesn’t need to scream for attention with ornamental curls and provocative patterns; its decadence and weight show off just by being there – or by an attempt to lift the five hefty kilos for that matter. Beauty is ensconced in the perfect finish, precise inscription and frugal make-up. It’s the peach at each banquet, the pièce de resistance at every table, the icing on the metaphorical cake. Eat as much cake you like, since gold will never lose its value.
When, after a long flight, you are awaiting a bit groggily at the airport luggage check out for your luggage to appear, it can happen that your suitcase travels three times the carousel without you noticing it. At least that has happened to me. That won’t happen anymore when you apply the “Pop Top personalize your luggage idea” of Public, a British design studio working in a range of fields from graphic design to product design.:
PopTop is a new type of hard-shell luggage. Using a matrix of multi-coloured dots to create a glossy surface graphic, the further one gets away from the piece, the clearer the image becomes. Lines will initially be limited to a few designs, but PopTop hope to make a web-based design-it-yourself range in the future. Public was charged with delivering the concept as well as a PDF presentation to take to retailers.
I’m rarely totally and completely blown away by anything, and yesterday at Dallas WordCamp, John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog, who works together on this project with Elie El Khoury [italics added by HH], who blew the whole crowd away with his new blog statistics program, Woopra.
I now fully concur with Lorella’s observation. I am not such a stats lover that I write for my stats. I blog because I find blogging a reasonable orderly way of cataloging my work / life / interests / finds for myself and sharing them with my readers. I use my stats mainly out of curiosity, because it shows me how people land on my site and what they are interested in. It always gives me (too) many ideas what to write about.
What is Woopra?
Woopra is not just another stats program, it is the re invention of the blog stats program.
Still a Private Beta
It was launched recently. Is still in private Beta. It is a small 4 man operation. You can sign in on their site. Then it takes quite some time before they let you in, because the demo at Dallas WordCamp drew so much attention that they can’t handle all requests in a timely way.
My short experience
I signed up shortly after Lorella’s post dated March 30, 2008. My patience was honored and I was let in on April 27.
I am in the process of installing several new workstations and a new server. Especially for Woopra I now have installed a second screen that constantly features Woopra. It is fascinating to see readers check in real life. You can see where they landed from, which search terms they used, where they land and which posts or pages or categories they read. It is almost too addictive and together with Twitter makes me forget Face book entirely.
Woopra has a built in chat functionality. I have tried it out with some of my readers and it works. I presume it scares the hell out of a reader when he gets a pop up screen out of nowhere and there are some concerns about the safety of the chat function. I take it that has to be ironed out yet. Also they have a plug in for WordPress that I haven’t even downloaded yet. You can tag your readers, so you can really start communicating with them if you wish via the Chat box. Twitter or mail.
For me the biggest surprise is that Woopra shows me that from all my posts here the two posts that draw the most readers are almost totally unrelated with my main subjects.
I suggest you check it out!
Update
If you want to see other peoples raves on Twitter, just check out Tweet Scan on Woopra. A link I found through a visitor just a few minutes ago.
Some time ago I came across Piclens from the company Cool Iris via a recommendation from Internet Guru Doc Searls. Doc has no search function on his Blog. A severe neglect! At first I couldn’t find his post back.
As an aside: He also recommended Flickrfan in a post Less T, More V , but that is for the Mac aficionados. I have no Mac.
Eventually my persistence did find me Doc’s: Nice Plugin.
Another aside is that a commenter to that post advised to have a look at Photo Synth. I didn’t (yet). What is Piclens?
Piclens is available as a plug in for Firefox and some other browser flavors to view large numbers of pictures on sites like Flickr. It is an amazing quick way of browsing around a lot of photos. Much quicker than Flickr’s slideshow and also much quicker than Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom of Adobe for those who work with it. Brilliant!
The Full Screen
My first impression:
Wow! Cool! but you can’t link to the photo you like. This has been fixed with version 1.6.3 and hence I believe it is ready to become a mainstream plug in.
The Full Screen with one photo in the centre zoomed in
and following you each time you move your mouse
A video wall alike browsing screen
For these examples I used the ITB2008 Berlin Travel Blogger Summit Flickr Pool.
A Screen with one photo zoomed in maximally
Be aware!
Today the plug in page of Firefox only offers version 1.6.2 without the tagging and linking possibilities and not yet version 1.6.3 with the tagging and linking! That you should obtain from the Piclens site.
Piclens now for Youtube!
It took me some time to find out how Piclens would work with Youtube. It is only a small indication somewhat forlorn on the site of Piclens:
The only way to open a Youtube video search
You always should launch Piclens first from your tool bar where it installs itself. In the Piclens screen you then open the Youtube search tool of Piclens which you find at the top of the Piclens screen.
But then you have something!
The result of a Piclens search on Youtube. The video starts playing immediately!
I like this instruction video and its song best
Here is the video itself:
The song is “Technologic” by Daft Punk, also a must have:-)
Further goodies
You can download a tool to make your own site Piclens compatible.
There is a WordPress plug in: A must investigate.
Disadvantage
I see one big disadvantage of Piclens. Flickr Photos are uploaded under various licenses and cannot be copied easily. With Piclens you can make a screen dump and avoid the license protection of Flickr easily.
Rest assured: I am not trespassing copy rights here, because most photo’s I showed you are my own.
Post Alia
Today again Philippe Wolff was talking about the perfect storm he sees in the online travel world. See Kevin’s post at Travolution’s Blog. Well I would say this small plugin will definitely add to that storm!
