Rob the Geek

I need to start reading some more books to get my brain over it’s current hump… (sorry, but  MPLS Fundamentals, while interesting, isn’t exactly sparking my intellect). Anyway, in an effort to kick my brain back into action, I’ve been trolling some of the groups I’m a member of in various online communities for recommendations and listing them here. The plan is to strike them off the list once read and do a quick review for the benefit of others who may be interested in the title.

Innovate Like Edison

The Ten Faces of Innovation

Wikinomics

Blue Ocean Strategy

Photoreading, 3rd Edition

Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV

Breadwinner: A Fresh Approach to Business Success

Tom O’Toole’s Breadwinner II

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee

… and more to come. Drop your recommendations into the comments (and let me know if you can lend me a title )

Edit: I’ve just found ‘Shelfari‘ and I may try using that to list my readings to

Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers (for now). Shelfari was the first social media site focused on books, and will continue to innovate as it brings together the world’s readers. Our mission is to enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.

Shelfari were recently bought by Amazon which may also help their reach into the community of readers, speaking of which… I’m ‘NZRob‘ if you’re looking for me on there.

Another Edit (27/08/2008): Thanks to NZTebs for suggesting the addition of “BreadWinner” to the list

Update (13/10/2008): Thanks to @Gnat for suggesting “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee

A friend of mine wrote a post pondering the believability of images now that digital capture tools and manipulation programs are so accessible to whomever wants them. Specifically he raised the question also raised by newsweek in this article. Dale went on to ask the question “what about photos of – say – someone committing a crime? Useless in a court of law?”

I think his concerns were addressed by other commenters, but the question got me to thinking, and that started off what ended up being something of an epic comment of my own, which I’ll repost here to remind me to return to this subject later after a bit more research as it’s quite an interesting issue that Dale has raised.

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I had an interesting discussion / exchange of tweets today around the subject of customer service with @audaciousgloop and @Gripnostril twitter certainly is starting to become more of a conversation hub for me than a unidirectional notification/microblog and this exchange was one which really got me thinking.

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I’ve had an HTC Apache for a number of years now, and I quite like it as a device, unfortunately – it’s an end of life product and as such, the device supplier hasn’t (yet) offered anything in the way of ROM upgrades to let me take advantage of patches for security/functionality or even improvements on battery life.

Like many others, I turned to the web to help sort this out, and with the assistance of PPC Kitchen, I’ve been running Windows Mobile 6.0 for about 6 months or so without any issues. I’ve recently decided to upgrade to WindowsMobile 6.1 and thought I might take this opportunity to document the process.

Note: It is up to YOU to investigate the legality of this in your service area, what your provider will do if things screw up – and of course, if you brick your device, then you’ll need to turn to the community – not to me.

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The New Meraki Indoor Device

Meraki have just released their latest generation of the Meraki Indoor device. This is essentially an access point which supports mesh networking and while it is “small, sleek, low-profile, with an integrated antenna” it’s also pretty pricey at US$149.

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I’m going back to the dark side (for awhile) with my EEE OS and have decided to install Windows XP on the internal SSD.

NOTE: I haven’t bothered (too much) about reducing the SSD writes as I have 2GB of RAM in the EEE and the calculations I have seen in a number of places put SSD failures in around the 5-7 year timeframe if excessively written. I’d hope that I’ll get a technology refresh green light within this time to move my EEE onto a less critical role. continue reading…