Living the Mobile Life
This morning after I left the house, I checked the real-time streetcar tracking to see when the next car was coming by the end of my street, looked over a presentation that I’m working on, checked which subway car to board so that I would exit near the escalator at my destination, read a chapter [...]
Special for Earth Hour: Solar PV at Tower Power Toronto
Tonight at 8:30pm we’ll celebrate Earth Hour, when we all turn out the lights for an hour. Although mostly symbolic, this should actually translate to reduced power consumption; in Ontario, you can track this on the IESO Earth Hour site which will show a graph of actual consumption against that of a typical Saturday night. [...]
CrisisCampTO Planning Meeting
I spent this afternoon at the initial planning meeting of CrisisCampTO, the Toronto manifestation of Crisis Commons. Although this is happening here and now in response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti 12 days ago, Crisis Commons has a broader mandate: We are an international volunteer network of professionals drawn together by a call to [...]
Giving Technology Back to the Community
I’m a strong believer that technology can be a way up for those in financially disadvantaged circumstances: without some computer skills, kids can’t compete in school, and don’t meet the minimum requirements for many jobs. One way that I can help – and probably many of you reading this – is to donate to programs [...]
Hungry geek presentation
Here’s the video to go with the slides from my previous post: Ignite T.O. Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.
Promoting a community market with social media
Last night, I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto, part of O’Reilly’s Ignite! series, in which each presenter has 5 minutes to present their 20 slides, and the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. In a complete left turn from my usual enterprise-y topics, I presented on how I am using social [...]
Why the Globe&Mail redesign sucks on an iPhone
Much has been of the Globe&Mail’s redesigned website (also of their print edition, which I only read on flights), but they’ve totally failed those of us who read their content through a feed reader, especially on an iPhone. On a full desktop platform, their news items in the feed reader contain insufficient information: far from [...]
Rogers Wireless’ website blows
The one good thing about Rogers Wireless’ really shitty customer service is that waiting on hold gives me time to take snapshots of their non-functioning website — the reason that I’m waiting on hold in the first place — and blog about it: I’ve been trying to change my price plan online for 3 days [...]
Free 15 minutes of wifi at Toronto airport
It’s not the nirvana of free airport wifi, but better than nothing: 15 minutes of free wifi via Boingo in the Toronto airport, which is enough time to sync your email in a pinch.
More HD experiments
Living with an electrical engineer is always…interesting. I’m also an engineer, but my desire to tinker is more software-oriented than hardware, whereas Damir likes to build things. After our initial experiments with the HD TV antenna that we bought for $35, he started researching on the web, and ended up building three other HD antennae. [...]
