Susan is a bookworm and regular library user. She filters the RSS feed of new acquisitions at her local library for the names of authors which she likes and reads it on her phone. One morning a new book by one of her favourite authors appears on the list. She reserves it with a single tap. At lunchtime she walks to the library and picks the book off the shelf. Susan scans the book’s RFID tag with her phone and with another tap she checks it out. (Anyone can check out or renew any item with an RFID-enabled phone but they must use the library’s own scanners to check things back in.) Her phone also shows two local events: the first for the library’s book club and the second for a reading by that author at a nearby bookshop in two months’ time. She adds the book reading to her calendar with a single tap. Two months later, Susan’s openly-licenced, tagged and geotagged photos of the author that she takes at the book signing appear automatically within minutes on the book club’s website, with a credit to her, a link back to her own profile page on the photo sharing website and a link to the author’s page on the local library’s website. Nearly all his books are out.
Click on the image you want and use the All Sizes button above the photo on the Flickr page to download the appropriately-sized image for your desktop background. Resize to taste in your own software if required.
Enjoy.
While this won’t be news to some, most people still don’t know that you can use the standard Google search box as a sophisticated calculator and unit conversion tool. So if you type:
2 * 3
into the search box, you’ll get 6. Pretty handy, but nothing you couldn’t do easily with your desktop or computer calculator.
Where Google Calculator comes into its own is handling almost every conceivable unit of weight, volume, time and even computer storage. This is great if you need to estimate an upload or download time. Here’s how you do it.
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As my own small contribution to the literature on featuritis, here’s a personal illustration. My mobile phone isn’t anything fancy. It’s cheap and very basic by today’s standards. No internet, no camera, no MP3 player. I bought it because all I wanted to do was to make calls and send texts.
So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.
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Context
You want to collect the dates of birth of a group of people so that you can analyse and segment the group by age, but asking for a date of birth isn’t necessary for any specific reason and many people in the group may balk at giving you this private information.
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We have a winner!
The 2008 Opportunistic Book Title of the Year Award goes to…
Giles Milton!
Paradise Lost is an account of the great fire that destroyed large parts of the Turkish city of Smyrna in 1922.
Of course it is.
Mr Milton wins a £10 book token for his efforts in getting the book to come up fifth in the Amazon search results for “milton paradise lost”. No small achievement.