From 2D to 3D

Switching this TV from 2D to 3D needs some explanations that a person instantiated with this post-it notes. (Seen at CERN last week).

French-Cyrillic keyboard hack

A French Keyboard with stickers showing letters from the cyrillic alphabet, used by one of my students. Interestingly, some of them are absent on letters such as A, E, R, T… which corresponds to the ones most often used in French (I don’t know why Z is in there…)

Kitchen hack

Interesting kitchen hack noticed last week in France. A stopper duct-taped to a pan lid to prevent people from burning themselves. Note the interesting use of grey duct-tape to make it more coherent color-wise. Quite elegant.

How to use a swiss power plug in the UK

It’s not possible to insert this in the power plug/socket, if you try there’s something that block the insertion. The trick consists in inserting something (like a key… which is super bad if you remember what you’re parents/teachers told you not to do) in the ground/earth connection:

Library or antilibrary

Going through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan another time, I stumbled across this inspiring quote at the beginning of the book:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.“

Why do I blog this? mostly two reasons for this on a sunday evening:

1. Because it highlights to what extent books and resources like the one shown on the picture above (some of my books, including weird comics) can be seen as TOOLS. Mostly for researching insights, ideas, methods over the course of projects. Even comic books and awkward booklets have a role in research projects I conduct.
2. As a reminder to avoid the fear of having stack of un-read books here and there. It’s sometimes menacing but reassuring at the same time (still some material to peruse). The importance of the “un-read” is in direct correlation with possible discoveries and new vectors. I often randomly take one of the books and look at it (be it read or unread) and adopt two strategies: quick scan OR focus on one page and deeply explore what is said.

Digital close to physical

Seen at the office today.

When the digital (in the form of a DVD that contains drivers and software) needs to be put close to the physical (this scanner) through the magical use of duct tape. DVD like this often gets lost although they’re generally needed, a quick trick to avoid losing it is to keep it close to the physical items it is related to.

Best tool ever?

For compulsive note-takers like me, this tool is of tremendous value:

The Economist about life hacks

The Economist about “life hacking” (tricks or hacks to get things done, as described by Danny O’Brien and Merlin Mann). I already mentioned that here, here are the tricks The Economist mentions:

• Slow down your e-mail: Set your e-mail program to fetch new messages every 15 minutes or every hour, rather than every minute, so you are interrupted less often.
• Create form responses: Any time you find yourself typing substantially similar e-mails, create a form version and save it for future use.
• Go full-screen: Switch your computer to full-screen mode, filling the whole screen with your current application, minimising the visual distraction of
other programs.
• Park on a downhill slope: When wrapping up work on a task, make a note of what needs to be done next. This makes it easier to get started when you resume work on the task.
• Use a “dash” to beat procrastination: Putting something off? Devote five minutes, measured with a kitchen timer, to working on it. It will make the task seem more approachable.
• Declare a “vertical day”: Switch off e-mail, mobile phones, everything, and devote yourself to a single, important project for an entire day.

Colors in email

In the last issue of Communication of the ACM, there is a paper about the value of color in email by Moshe Zviran , Dov Te’eni and Yuval Gross. The authors conducted an interesting field experiment about it.

DOES COLOR IN EMAIL MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
Yes, if used correctly, it can excite and please, prompting recipients to respond as the sender intended— clicking a designated link or even buying something.

Color has two main functions—attract attention and set the right mood—for responding positively to a message or request. And because of our increasinglyshort attention spans and the relatively quick interaction speed we expect in today’s electronic world, it must do both at the same time.
Color can be a prime attention grabber when and where people’s attention is scarce

Why do I blog this? this kind of topic is absolutely not related to what I do but I am sometimes amazed by color usage in email exchange.

Fake notepads

3 years ago, while becoming a PhD student, I had this wonderful “wireless notepad”:

After 3 years, it’s now an RFID notepad:

Of course, technologically speaking, both are fakes (the former is wireless in the sense that there is absolutely no wires and the latters just had the RFID tag of a cd I bough last saturday).