Growth, jobs and more

I do a lot of reading on my Android devices, phones and tablets. After a long search I selected  Moon+ Reader , the  Pro  version. The killer feature was the way bookmarks and underlining is handled. I mostly read non-fiction and like to mark important passages. And I want to be sure my marks are available forever. After I am done with a book, I create an Evernote clip from my marks and comments. With Moon+ this is done with a single click. I did most of my reading on my Nexus 7 tablet, but when my phone was getting bigger I realized it would be nice to do some reading there as well. And it would be even nicer if I could synchronize the books, notes etc. Synchronizing book files Moon+ provides functionality to sync books (.epub, .pdf ...) to cloud, but they are just pushed to cloud and this is the end of the story. They will not end up on your other device. So you need to do it like this:  Create a backup of the Moon+ main folder. Just in case. Many android f...

I recently switched from iPhone to a Xiaomi that runs Android. Taking photos is one of those things one uses the phone for and that too had to change. This was my iPhone workflow Take photos in Camera+ .  Review, delete or edit photos in Camera+. Save to camera roll (long process that may required manually preventing iPhone from sleeping). Dropbox then pushed the photos to the cloud (again, quite a pain, because iPhone may decide to go to sleep while doing it). Pick up Photos on a laptop, move them to a non-Dropbox folder. After all I do not have an unlimited Dropbox space. Use Total Commander to rename them and assign the time and date of when the photo was taken as the file name. Reason: one never knows when a photo editing software would change the times embedded in the jpeg. Camera+, for example, changes the file modification date but not, luckily the EXIF dates.  Use Picassa for final editing and organizing photos into native Windows folders. Photos are too ...

Android is quite liberal when it comes the use of battery power and tolerant towards apps that may want to run in the background. There are many apps claiming to save battery. But a few simple tricks using just the standard settings work as well. What is really important, however, is understanding how your phone or table work. While Awake There is not much you can do about conserving the power while you actively use your device. It just has to respond to whatever you are doing - reading books, browsing Facebook, snapping photos, watching videos or playing 3D games. There are a few things you can still do: keep screen brightness lower rather than higher. Just to keep the screen bright can use a half of all the power. If you have an OLED screen, make your backgrounds black. Standard LCD displays use a back-light that indiscriminately lights the whole back of the LCD panel and than the LCD just makes sure what gets through. OLED actively lits every pixel if it needs to be lit. ...

I went through a painful iTunes experience. Had to. I try to avoid iTunes as much as possible, but since I wanted to update iOS version on my iPad, it was not possible to avoid it. The bottom line is that it sucks as a device management tool. Here's why: iTunes is not a device management tool It is a media management tool. It was made to put music and videos to iPod which started as an MP3 player. Some say it sucks there as well. I don't care. I copy photos as files, I transfer music with MediaMonkey and use mail and Dropbox to manage documents. iTunes is patched to be a device management tool with key functions obscured by the media-optimized interface. Sync doesn't One of the most scary checkboxes in the Apple universe is the " Sync Apps ". User is warned that if selected, all apps installed by the user on device will be removed. And they are. The trick is that before one does that, it makes sense to " transfer purchases ". So that after ...

I'm in Seville, Spain, at a final review of an EU project. The only other meeting I was at was the kick off. Some three years ago. Also in Spain. In between I did many things. Among others I was Secretary General of the Wise Men Group chaired by Felipe Gonzalez. From Spain. And while I sit here in a bar without internet connection, in Spain, I am reading an old talk by Larry Page. Brilliant talk. Larry invented Perl. The last language I programmed in before I took a sabbatical in politics. I miss programming. By programming you create. You don't just talk about creation. And ... ... there is more than one way to do things in Perl. I was a liberal when computer programming. Not a progressive. A liberal. And Larry Page Wall is a liberal: The very fact that it’s possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. True greatness is ...

We know it as a platform where: website or other on-line source (any web site or media store like iTunes), media (e.g. MP3), local software or client (e.g. Media Player) and device (PC, Mac, Phone, Flash Drive, Netbook ...) are not coupled with each other. Many competing companies are providing products or services for each of the components. This open model resulted in huge innovation over the last two decades, and spawned a lot of competition in creating the websites, media formats, software and the devices, driving the price down and quality up. All this possibly at the expense of the content providers who have huge problems protecting their content, because, to be universally playable, all parts of the system need to be well documented and interoperable, with any kind of security and copy protection clumsily pasted on top of it all. Apple Closing the Web? Kindle, Nook and much of the Apple Store stuff signal a possible end of this model. But with music and videos is it a lot like p...

From time to time I get unhappy with my twitter experience and join the install party, trying out new clients. So far I did not find a perfect one. This is what I want: handle multiple accounts allow me to define groups of people I follow allow the "join" and "filter" operations over streams of tweets (sounds complicated but it is in fact an enable of so many features. Think of filter like Gmail's labels and think of join like Google Reader's folder). example of a "join" would be to show a single stream of all friends' tweets across all my accounts examples of a "filter" operation would be to split a stream into groups, mentions, directs ... notifications should be based on configurable filters too show one stream (per account or not) of all directs, sents and mentions (it is a join). sort messages with new on top OR old on top (I like reading from old to new, top to bottom) display whole discussion thread at a click of a button...

Empires stood (Roman) and fell (Napolen's adventure in Russia) with communications technology. Today we are building empires of the mind and we need communication technology more than ever. In fact Europe's global dominance started with the communication revolution that democratized paper. The 2nd communication revolution related to the Internet is democratizing electronic communication and inviting a new wave of talent into creative processes. As Florida put it, creativity is the ultimate economic resource and there is a war for talent going on out there. Technology is something that attracts talent, internet technology definitively. So the Slovenian presidency built a strong emphasis on creativity and internet into the updated Lisbon Strategy. IPv6 makes future growth of the Internet possible. This was in a nutshell the contents of my talk at the IPv6 launch event in Brussels on May 30th. I took my mobile phone with me to the podium and recorded the talk. A colleague synced i...

The "Lisbon Strategy" alias "the strategy for growth and jobs" is resulting in growth, does create jobs, but is not something that the Europeans would care about. I tried to run "lisbon strategy" through Google Trends and the result was: Your terms - "lisbon strategy" - do not have enough search volume to show graphs. Translation: nobody cares. Very few people know that the strategy sets targets such as investing 3% of GDP in R&D, that it calls for 70% employment, for 25% reduction in administrative burden or 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy will be updated in spring 2008 under the Slovenian presidency. The discussions about the update started earlier this year. Portugal (as the current presidency) and Slovenia (as the next) established good cooperation. On Tuesday the Commission published its view on the past and future of the Strategy that is taking many of those discussions into account. As a very early adopte...