This was one of the best impulsive shopping I ever did – buying an iPod Nano and a Nike sensor in one shot!
After more than two years of usage, I have to say that I’m a delighted customer.

This simple “toy” changes the way you work out. By uploading your results to a Nike  online profile which tracks all your moves, running is no longer a boring exercise, tiring and ussualy tied with crazy weight losing programs. It becomes a vicious and competitive game!

Recently I’ve lost my 1st sensor, so I had to buy one new. I found a small and nice Apple Store in Lisbon called Computer Bench and I got only the sensor (I had already the receiver) for only 19 euros (“only” considering Apple or Nike’ standard price, of course).

The only problem I had so far was pairing the new remote. Apple iTunes assume that since the sensor is new, the user wants to create another account. It might seem strange, but it makes sense after all – this would be the situation where the iPod is shared by a family and each member has a different sensor and different accounts… To solve the trouble, I had to use this advice: Unpairing the old sensor.

This is a documentary about the life-cycle of goods and services. 20 minutes that might change the way you look at several products and companies.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Highly recommended!

LaLaClick is a web application to visualize and explore similarity relations of music artists. Warning: if you love music, you’ll get addicted to this site!

It works like this:

• The engine starts with the pre-loaded example: Radiohead. Music starts to play and some nodes appear on the screen.
• When no more nodes are added, you can simply select the option Clear All
• In the search band box, type the name of a band or singer and press the Enter key. Click on Add Aura. You can repeat the process over and over and produce a giant tree of alike artists.
• The nodes added, are bands somehow related to the name you typed! This way you can learn about bands similar to your taste :)

How does this work? Quite simple and interesting – the similarity is based on the principle that people who listen to this artist also listen to that one. The information about these “listening preferences” is powered by last.fm, a music community website which gathers about 20 million users.

A few days ago, I received an email with this website (thx Isabel), with the tag line: “The world as you’ve never seen it before”:

http://www.worldmapper.org/

This site has a huge database with maps, correlating several indicators, population density and countries dimensions. It reminded me a brilliant talk by Hans Roling on TED. It’s hard to understand the huge gap between the countries in many indicators. The question is: what can you do to change the situation?

Music, music… one of my expressions of art.

This guy, Charlie Parker, invited me to the fabulous world of Jazz. His music is contagious and it’s hard to be indifferent: either you love it or you hate it! And it’s so thrilling to learn about the players’ life and relate it to the songs…

However, it’s so annoying to listen to his records after practicing… :P

Every time you repeat something, you tend to make it better and better and one day you’ll have highly optimized methods. However, when it’s up to computers, it doesn’t work like that. Although people spend hours and hours in front of computers, organization methods didn’t improve that much over the last years.

I guess it’s very interesting to acknowledge that people use computers for quite a while but don’t have automatic methods for dealing with data. For instances, can you easily access any file in your computer? Do you remember where did you put that file? Is your desktop organized? Do you frequently backup your data? Have you lost important files due to a Windows failure or hardware malfunction?

Looking back, when you had your old computer with DOS and a tiny disk, you had to be organized! I had to know all the main directories by heart (which was a way to keep everything in place) and since I hadn’t much disk space, I couldn’t afford to collect trash (which made me collect only the right data). Since technology offered me a low liability, I had to backup frequently.

Some months ago, I decided to keep things organized. After reading lots of articles, reading again GTD and several experiences, my model is the following:

• Two Disks: one for Windows and Programs Files and the other for data;
• My Documents should be a folder in the data disk (such as D:\MyName rather than C:\Documents and Settings\MyName\My Documents);
• Keep Music and Video organized (it’s faster to add a new song in the right place rather than losing hours trying to find it) – iTunes and Picasa help a lot, for free;
• Keep a temporary folder – for downloads, temp installation files, sand-boxing, etc – and delete it every week. If you have troubles deleting it, create another folder called “limbo” and pile things here;
• Keep personal data very well organized.

Remember that many files are only useful as future reference. Keep them in one place, but never mix them with the ”hot ones”.

One good strategy is thinking: What would I keep in case of a fire? :) This is one way of thinking: How many folders would I have to browse to collect every important file?

This makes you think what should be backuped. Keep a list of the most important folders and get a backup tool! Even Windows XP has one! Read this article about Backup Made Easy and start your backup strategy NOW!