Michael's Blog

So far for Android :<(

Curious as I am I tested an Android HTC Magic the last few days. Although the device is very user-friendly, fast and has a nice UI, great and filled App Store, cute look and feel but I already bumped into some things making me abandoning the thing as fast as I can. For example:

• Syncing my contacts does not work – I have 1100 contacts and the device gives an “out of memory” error – looks like the old days.
• If you connect it to your Windows 7 PC it completely reboots.
• The notifications UI is a pain – everything happening on the device makes it scream for attention and I cannot figure out how to turn it off.
• Outlook syncing (Contacts, Mail and Calendar only) is very slow and inefficient. Takes ages to sync decently.
• It killed all my appointments today by removing all attendees in the Invited field of my whole Calendar (Thank you Google or HTC) and emptying the notes fields of the same ones. Keeps my assistant busy for a day…..

So overall – it needs to grow and get mature. It’s definetly better than an iPhone  but still does not match my HTC Touch Pro 2 experiece (by far not I should say). So I will stay away from it for a while…. Sorry Android….

Twitter becoming scientific – analyze your Tweets with TweetPsych

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets.

There I go:

Try yourself - www.tweetpsych.com

Nice posting on my Multimedia Home setup on ZD Net

Good story on my setup at home and very detailed. Amazing the journalist remembered all of this.

http://www.zdnet.be/reviews/106651/heel-je-huis-digitaal/

I want more Coyotes on the highway

Got myself a Coyote 4 weeks ago and it has proven itself multiple times the last weeks. The principe of the Coyote is the kind of Social Networking in the car – everytime you see a speed camera on one of the sides of the road you report it using your Coyote button. Then the Coyote transmits this using GPRS and all Coyote owners get the warning if they are on that roade and close (tracked using the GPS built in the device). You get all fixed speedcamera’s (including the type like speed or traffic light and maximum speed), mobile ones but most interesting is that it also tells you how many Coyotes (Scouts) are ahead of you on the same road and how far the first one is away from you. If you know that there are 8 Coyote’s in front of you the drive is very comfortable. A must have for people on the road and my Gadget of the Year so far….  www.coyotesystems.eu

 

I want a 0 GB harddrive. Very useful indeed...

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Sent from my Windows Phone

Woofer – for those of you who cannot write their thoughts in 140 characters on Twitter

For those few, however, there is Woofer, the anti-Twitter site where every woof (their equivalent to the tweet) must be at least 1400 characters in length. The new novelty macroblogging site pays homage to Twitter in look and feel.

 

Sony Unveils 3G E-Book Reader

I have the “older” version – the E505 E-Book Reader and love the device. It’s a whole new experience of reading – no carrying of big books anymore, easy reading and you can just take anything you want with you – drop PDF, eBooks, Word or whatever. Big recommendation ! Especially with the new models coming out - http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3836106/Sony+Unveils+3G+EBook+Reader+Hooks+Up+With+Librari.htm

Nokia announces their first Netbook – pretty impressive I must say…

Good and fairly cheap way to extend your IR signals over CAT5/6 Cable

As you know I’m a bit into Home Media and Domotics. One of the things which has kept me busy for a while was how to extend IR (all my equipment is in the basement, only screens in the house) in a working way. Have tried everything and now I have the best solution – the Marmitek MegaView 51 extender. Works beautifully (after heavy duty testing by Katrien) and is very accurate. A must have… It also does TV/Video signals but analog so I don’t use this. Just the IR part.

Composite Audio Video Extender over CAT5 with Infrared Return channel. Broadcast your Audio/Video Sources to your TV's over CAT5 cable network.

More on my Home Setup can be found on my blog…

 

MIT Personas Project – Pretty Impressive

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Below is my identity:

Try for yourself - http://personas.media.mit.edu/