Dropbox

I have been using

Dropbox

for well over a year now, but very early on it became an app that I could not live without. In fact, I believe I had only used the app for a few months before deciding to pay for the upgrade to 50Gb. For those who may not know,

Dropbox

is an app that you can install on multiple computers and mobile devices that synchronizes everything you store in it, across all of those devices and online. This allows you to have every file you need available at your fingertips at anytime.

Dropbox

is now a crucial part of my workflow and highly recommend this app to anyone that needs quick access to files anytime/anywhere.

Starting a YouTube Video at a Specific Time

It used to be that in order to send someone a YouTube video that would start playback at a certain time you had to manually tweak the URL to include the start time. Google had now made things even easier, according to Lifehacker:

People Helping Robots

Interesting story about people helping robots traverse Washington Square Park in NY.

http://www.tweenbots.com/

Netbook Project: Part 1

Over the past few months I have been thinking about purchasing a

netbook

to use as a note taking device at meetings. I had been looking at the

ASUS

and the

Acer

and liked the form factors. Then one day while I was doing some netbook research I stumbled upon this

article

from

jkOnTheRun

and was inspired.

A few years back my department at work had purchased a few of the

HP tc1100

tablet PCs for faculty to use in the classroom. Eventually our campus added tablet PCs to the computer replacement program so as faculty replaced these machines they found their way back into our office. They were still usable machines so we decided to try loading linux on them to see if we could breathe some life back into them. A few people tested them out but they were never really used much and just started gathering dust.

So after reading the article I decided to try a tc1100 as a netbook. I asked our IT department to image the machine with Windows XP Tablet Edition, the HP apps and nothing else. When I got it back in the office I installed

Evernote

and

ritePEN

. My plan is to use Evernote at meetings and sync using wifi so all the notes will be on my main machine right away. I did all this over our break week. I haven't had any meeting yet since this is the first week of the quarter, but plan to document how this all works once I have my first meeting of Spring quarter.

Presenting with a Back Channel

I read an interesting article today about "How to Present While People are Twittering". It is a great illustration of how to use this technology to engage your audience. I might have to try some new techniques in my next presentation.