Nick Projects

Recently there was an article on Forbes about how the GPS industry is getting hammered.  Basically,  cell phones are providing much of the same functionality and most people who own GPS systems won’t upgrade.  I agree with both of these points which is why I would like to throw out some ideas for the failing GPS manufacturers everywhere so they can build some better tools for the world to have.

Forbes Article

First:

Dump the idea of buying a GPS device,  instead think car companion. I need a GPS for 3 things: Finding places that I haven’t been before, Finding things along the side of the road when I’m traveling, Getting traffic updates.  My GPS doesn’t actually provide the third function  and I don’t care enough to upgrade it.

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Everyone has stuff that should be backed up.  I know everyone worries about loosing their photos in a fire or flood ( I even did surveys on it in college) but what if it was a simple hard drive crash that wiped out your digital archive.  Years of digital camera photos gone from one good virus.  CD’s are a good option, but cmon who really has the time or the discipline to burn a dozen CD’s every week or month.  Online backup should be cheap and easy.  This is exactly what you can do using the Amazon S3 service and Jungle disk.  There are other solutions out there that try to allow this ( Life Hacker Online Backup) but I think the beauty of these two combined services is that they are both built to be enterprise level applications.  (more…)

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Over a year ago a company called Eye-Fi created a cool device.  It’s an SD card that connects to your existing wifi network to send pictures from your digital camera to your home computer.  Their software works with several online services to allow easy blogging and social networking updates.  Also it instantly downloads the pictures to your hard drive so you don’t need to sync your camera.  Overall this is a cool thing, but, I can’t convince myself to buy one because I don’t cringe at the thought of dumping an SD card. (more…)

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As a college student,  taking notes is a big deal for me.  I decided that having information digital rather than on paper ( exclusively) had many advantages.  Additionally, I give a lot of thought to information and attempting to capture all of it efficiently.  In a perfect world all of my classes would be professionally recorded with one camera on the professor and one camera on the board/LCD screen that the professor was using.  I would be able to switch between each like using the angle feature on a DVD player.  And lastly there would be a detailed summary in paper to compliment the package so that I wouldn’t have to watch an entire class just to find one point. (more…)

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PRS 505

I have spent several days now with a Sony E-reader that I picked up on Ebay for $200ish.  I went this rout because the kindle is back ordered for another month (at least) also it’s $375.00.  Since I don’t travel constantly and own a computer that stays on all the time I decided that being constantly connected wasn’t a large enough feature to wait for/ pay for.  Also, the sony has a little bit nicer screen and looks quite a bit cooler despite having obviouse limitations.

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