Trusting Google with an even bigger part of my on-line life.

The background

For quite some time now I’ve been slowly handing my life over to Google.
In 2005 I started by entrusting it with the access stats of my site.
Then in 2007 I made the big move of having it handle my mail by way of supporting my domain in Google Apps. This also meant that I automatically gained XMPP accounts (or Google Talk accounts if you prefer) for the accounts on my own domain.
By early 2008 I tried (without success) to have Google support my calendars and contacts and by late 2008 even my feed reading needs were taken over by the big G.

The old setup

Thus far I’d been using a system based on my own server at home which basically consisted of using MAC OS X’s iCal for the calendar and Address Book for the contact management.

One of the most obvious and important features I absolutely had to have was full two-way integration (i.e. synchronization) with my phone which, with my recent acquisition of the HTC smartphone, meant that I had to install a program that provided an ActiveSync interface to the MAC OS X sync service. I found that “The Missing Sync” by mark/space was ideally suited to this end and I was a happy user for quite some time.
Apple’s products work great and are more than sufficient for my needs, and I grew ever more fond of the features they provided and which Google Calendar and Gmail contacts’ support sorely lacked.

Time passes… And since I’m not eaten by a Grue I keep looking around for alternatives.
Not that I dislike my old setup all that much, but I’d rather have something that automatically synchronizes over-the-air (thus releasing me from the need to dock my phone at home and only then have it synched-up) and that would let me edit my appointments even if I can’t use my phone at that particular time and I’m not home (I grew fed up with running VNC over my home ADSL line, especially since it’s reliability is less than stellar). Also I’ve grown way too tired of managing my own infrastructure. Life’s too short to waste it managing servers, connections and stuff. I’m old, I want things to “just work”. Preferably by magic. Or something undistinguishable from it.

Are we there yet?

It has been apparent for some time now that Google is starting to pay much more attention to the needs of the “enterprise users”. Indeed it has been wooing the corporate folks with increasingly better features in it’s Google Apps offering, for example, and quite recently I came across news of it offering nice ways for the suit-and-tie crowd to connect their Outlook clients to Gmail’s servers (or something to that effect).
This got me thinking that it was high time that I went over to the admin pages of my Google Apps account and looked around for new stuff that might have popped up in the mean time.

And lo-and-behold, we now have the ability to sync up a mobile device both with Google Calendar and Gmail (for the contacts). This sync service is provided for a number of platforms which I already new about, but what struck me the most was that they provided an ActiveSync server for the users to sync up with.
Woha! The announcement of this feature must have slipped by me some time ago, but this means that I can now sync my phone effortlessly with Google’s services. Over the air. “Magically”.
This together with the fact that Google Calendar’s been getting pretty decent lately (feature- and stability-wise) and that Gmail’s handling of the contact’s information got a really nice bump (feature-wise) some time ago means that it was indeed high time I gave it another go. And a rather serious one at that. Even with all the warnings that Google plasters in our face when we go through all the hoops of activating the sync service. What can I say, I like to live dangerously.
Well… No, not really, I’m just rather lazy and I’d much rather the good folk at Google deal with supporting the servers than having to do it myself. :-)

The new (currently under evaluation, but looking rather good) setup

So now the time has come to finally switch over my calendar and contact management system to Google’s care.
I then proceeded to subscribe my external calendars on my Google Calendar, exported my own calendars from my server at home and imported them into my own calendar at Google, cleaned-out the mess that was my contacts list at my main Gmail account (and did so by nuking it entirely, a move which, in hind-sight, was not all that smart, as it forced me to re-request the authorization for every XMPP contact on my pidgin roster, but I digress), exported my contacts from my address book at home and imported them, nice and clean, into my Gmail account.
I then proceeded to zero out my phone (first sync is always a bitch if you have information on both sides, I’d rather not risk it. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did risk it and ended up with loads of duplicate information, so the second time-around I just nuked the phone’s data and was done with it) and sync it with my Google Apps accounts.

And I found…

Bliss!

So far I’m rather impressed with the result. I’ve been toying around with changing things on the phone and on the web interface and so far all is smooth sailing. What small differences I’ve noticed from my previous experience with data synching are easily overlooked for the benefits I get from this setup.

As it would happen, just this morning the “sync” link on my Google Calendar page stopped working (which got me worried about the possibility that the service might be pulled off the air), but then this afternoon the link returned and, with it, a new calendar emerged automatically on the “My Calendars” list —the “Tasks” calendar— together with the “Tasks NEW!” link on the top of the page.
Now Google Calendar’s documentation on synching (the link which disappeared temporarily) clearly states that Google’s sync service only supports calendar and contact data, not tasks, but maybe this is up-and-coming soon? Not that I care really, I never used tasks all that much and for the really important stuff I’m perfectly happy with using Hiveminder anyway.

So now I’ve taken the plunge and switched to using Google’s services to manage my contacts and calendars and I’ll force myself to keep at it for a few days until I reach a final decision on whether I should keep it up or drop it and roll back to my previous solution.
Please, please, let it work! I really want to drop the home server and this is a huge step in that direction!

Please note that I’ve enabled the testing of Beta(er?) features for my Google Apps, something that more sane (or less risk-inclined) people may not want to do and some of the stuff I described surely falls under this category.

The Lifestream concept is one that appeals to me in a really strong way.
I have (like most people) loads of content I produce on-line almost every single day of my life —of which this weblog is the least part, actually— and (if only for my own sake) I’d really like to have the possibility of reviewing it in a time-line and aggregate fashion. This is a need I’ve felt for a long, long time, since before the “Lifestream” term was even coined.

Now this concept has been gaining some attention from many people (as it obviously would) and a few services have appeared that address this need in different ways.

My own forays into using these services have been somewhat limited. I’ve been using my FriendFeed account as a kind of content aggregator which can produce a kind of lifestream (which powers the side-bar mini-lifestream gadget that I currently —as of this writing— have on the weblog pages) and that has been going well for the most part.

More recently, however, the concept has been gaining even more traction (as demonstrated by the amount of content generated on the lifestream blog) and a few services have surfaced which are even better suited to this end.
After having messed around briefly with a couple-three of them I seem to have settled —for now at least— on the Storytlr one and I must say I’m quite impressed.

The design is not all there yet (and knowing me it will be a long, long time before it is), but you can take a peek at it at http://lifestream.nunonunes.org/. Neat, heh?

AnyEvent and all of it’s associated modules are my new best friends. In particular AnyEvent::Mojo.

I’m running it over libev (by way of EV) and it seems pretty impressive so far.

There, I’ve blogged again. :-)

I’ve recently been in the market for a new compact point-and-shoot camera so I did the rounds and decided that I should get Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500.

To that effect I went over to a FNAC store, on my lunch break yesterday, to see if they had it available for sale. It turns out they did not have it in the store, but there was another FNAC store nearby which had it in stock and they could transfer it to the store went to for my convenience. It would take 3 working days for the camera to get there and the price was X.

Fair enough, but I decided that maybe I should look around at some on-line stores and do some price comparison, so I took a peek at the usual suspects and ended up ordering it from Expansys.

The order was placed yesterday during the afternoon.

It took Expansys slightly over 18 hours to deliver the camera to me (all the way over from Marseille, France to Lisbon, Portugal) at slightly over two-thirds of the price that FNAC was asking for it.

Yes, it’s the globalization, I guess.

For technical reasons regarding the server where this blog was hosted I had to have it offline for quite some time.
The fact that I wasn’t all that sure that I wanted to keep the site also helped extend the hiatus, of course.

Anyway now that the old server finally died out I had to get a move on and decided to get the site back up as it was and consider a platform change somewhere in the future, but not just now.
The move was done from a slimed-down backup I had and so it is expected that some things may be broken at this time (most notably images and videos from old blog entries). They will hopefully be restored when (if?) I can salvage the data from the old disk.

Then, in due time, I will probably upgrade the site’s software and things will break in much more interesting ways. It will be most fun, that’s for sure! :-)

I’ve recently parted ways with my beloved Sony Ericsson k750i (due to it’s death by over-usage) and after a brief period of looking around to see what was out there (and what was available to me through my company), I’ve decided to get me an HTC Touch Diamond (a.k.a. HTC Touch p3700).

This is by no means a consensual —or easy— choice and many people said awful things about the phone, both from the hardware and from the software perspective (yes, it runs Windows Mobile 6. Oh the horror!)

So now that I’ve had it with me for a few weeks, I think I know it well enough to make a first appraisal of it and to evaluate the choice I made.
And the verdict so far is that I really like it.

It is small enough to fit in my trousers’ pocket (a must for me), but still has a big-enough screen (mainly because it is a touch-screen-only phone, with only a few physical buttons, but I’ll get to that,) and it works well enough, if you can tolerate the less-than-desirable response time of a few operations. Which I found out I can.

So what is not so good about it then?
Well, for starters the slow response I sometimes get from it when I try to do anything with it while it is “thinking” in the background. I got the hang of it, obviously, and by now I mostly know when the thing is going to take a while to pay me some attention and this is not such a bad thing for me, but if I where someone more of the short-tempered ilk, I’d sometimes go berserk with it, that’s for sure.
Another issue that I have with it is the God-awful quality of the camera, when in less-than-ideal lighting conditions. On a bright sunny day it works great, but take that shinny light away and the results are utterly disgusting. Which only compounds to the fact that actually getting to take a picture with it is not that easy.
Now I’ll grant you that I come from a phone which is brilliant as far as the camera functions go —I could get it out of my pocket and snap that picture within seconds, easily—, but on the Diamond this is just not possible, as I have to wade through menus to pull up the camera and get it working. Also, the shutter-button is positioned in a really awkward place, so taking pictures with it is not as easy as I’d like.
The camera is (or would be) a big deal for me so this phone is really a let-down on that department. Which means I’ll just have to stop procrastinating and get me a nice point-and-shoot to carry around with me, as I knew I should have done long ago anyway.
Other than that, I managed to crash the phone once already, but in all fairness I was testing out so much new software and pushed it so far (HSDPA on, GPS on, camera on, surfing the net, IM-ing with a multi-protocol client, all at the same time) that I really don’t blame it for freezing up on me.

And that’s the main point, I think, when it comes to this (and I’m sure most other pocket computers disguised as mobile phones): what we’re dealing with here is basically a computer, and a rather powerful one at that, so you have to make a choice as to how you’re going to treat it. If you decide to go all out, install every piece of software you can find for it and test it to the limits, it is going to crash on you. Probably a lot. That’s just to be expected. But if, on the other hand, you decide that this is, primarily, your phone and second a handy computer, then you should refrain from testing every bit of software that you can think of on it and, in that case, it actually works quite well, Windows and all. This is the view I’ve been getting from my friends which are already using WinMo-based smart-phones for a while and I, so far, concur with it.

That said, I was kind of fearful I would not get along well with a touch-screen-only phone and I was afraid I’d go nuts without at least the numerical keyboard, but I have to say I’m quite happy with the (virtual) full qwerty I have on it and not having physical buttons for most of the operations turned out not to be a problem at all. Note that I avoid the stylus like the plague and only use it on very specific situations and with certain programs. The “phone” functions work perfectly well with just my fingers, as it should. And so does the calendar, contact list and so on. The Touch-Flow 3D interface, for all it’s slowness, is really well thought out, even for big thumbed guys like me.

I have installed a few pieces of software on the phone, obviously, even if I was judicious about what to put in it, and I expect to write up on that shortly, so I’ll finish up this post with the re-iteration that, so far, I love my Diamond and I haven’t (yet) succumbed to any form of strange and evil disease just because I let a Windows-powered device in my house and in my life. :-)

I’ve been really quiet lately and because I intend this space to be a sort of record of my activities, here goes a review of what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks (/months) musically-wise.

First off, the fun’n’games part: I’ve become hooked on Guitar Hero. Specifically Guitar Hero World Tour.
I was never one for game consoles, but this time I ended up buying myself a full kit including a Nintendo Wii and the Guitar Hero World Tour single guitar pack. (The Wii came with a game which I’ve only touched two weeks after I got it and only that one time. It shows how much I care about video games. And about music.) ;-)
As with almost all activities that demand dexterity and extreme hand-eye coordination, I have to really work at it to become proficient (and it is a given that I’ll never achieve greatness) but the “work” that is involved is really, really fun.
So now I play both real and game instruments. Rawk On!

And I say that I now play real instruments because after quitting the saxophone lessons due to getting braces on my teeth, I decided it was high time I devoted some time to learning music a bit more in-depth and so I enrolled in (theoretical) music classes (my aim is learning enough to be able to write music, I really wanted to be able to express all my feelings, thoughts and even ideas through music). And while this could have meant the (temporary) end of instrument playing, the fact is that I have now turned my attention, once again, to the piano. It started out as a learning aid and I got hooked again. I’m too easy, I know. :-)
Someday I may even get good enough at playing it to loose my inhibitions and start playing for my friends and even other people. Crazy, crazy!

Other than that, things are moving along steadily in the musical realm, 2008 was a good year musically-wise (although not a great one), and I’m still absorbing some of the albums and new bands that showed up last year.
I’m also, as always, discovering and learning about stuff that’s been out there for a lot of time but to which I’d never devoted my attention. One of the latest “discoveries” I’ve made is Chico Buarque.
“Yeah Gods, is he serious?!?”? Yes I am, both in the sense that I’ve started listening to a lot more Brazilian music (and by “a lot more” I actually mean “any at all”) and in the sense that I’ve come to enjoy both the music and the lyrics of a bunch os songs from Chico and a very few others.
In the case of Chico, not all of his songs appeal to me. In fact, given the size of his body of work, I’d say most of them don’t, but the ones that actually do something for me are really amazing.

Last.fm, Blip.fm and 8tracks.com are my current on-line hangouts as far as music is related.
Last.fm is da bomb, Blip.fm is an interesting concept which still has to grow up a bit and prove itself and 8tracks.com is a great ideia whose future I just don’t believe in, due to the difficulties the music industry will undoubtedly cause them (which is a shame as the “mix-tape” or playlist format is one that is particularly near and dear to my heart as far as sharing and enjoying music is concerned.)

Dear lazyweb, I need your help with some song suggestions.

What I’m looking for is songs that talk about each day of the week.

I’ve already got some days down, from my own ideas and from discussing this topic with @phantas, but I am sill a few days short of a week. Nevertheless, I am still accepting suggestions for the days I already have (which are Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday).

But there are some specific rules about the songs I’ll end up choosing, namely:

• Please, please, please, no “Friday I’m In Love”! I’m a big fan of The Cure and I’ve been trying very hard to forget about the ignominy that is the fact that they wrote that song (let alone that they recorded it), so please be considerate! :-)

• The songs have to be about the day in question. Just mentioning the day or even having it on the title is not enough. Something about the “day of the week” or even about that particular day of that particular week is acceptable, but otherwise just mentioning it for no good reason is no good;

• The songs have to have at least one cover version made. Don’t mind too much about this issue, though, I’ll do this part of the research. For now just throw as many suggestions as you can, please.

So lazyweb, can I count on you? Will you come through for me? I hope you do, I’ve been thinking about this list for quite some time now (OK, let’s be honest here, it’s been nagging me on the back of my mind for quite some time, but I haven’t really given it the due attention until now) and I’d like to get this thing done.

Thank you! :-)

OpenID authentication rocks.

I’ve been using TypeKey as the OpenID provider for my domain for a long time now and until today things had gone by without a hitch. But tonight, as I was in a hurry to log in to tarpipe to write a quick workflow to use on my upcoming journey, it just failed me.

Now tonight, of all nights, I became aware that not only has TypeKey undergone some changes, but also tarpipe itself changed something in the authentication page so I was confused for a brief period as to what was failing where. But then I followed the authentication steps and it became obviously clear that TypeKey was the one failing me and having zero time to read all their explanations about the changes they performed (and really annoyed that those changes broke the service they’d been rendering me without any kind of previous warning whatsoever —I’m assuming it is a bug, not a conscious decision, but still, a failing authentication service? Ouch!) I decided to take the only course of action that was available to me on the spot.

So TypeKey is misbehaving but this being OpenID, tarpipe doesn’t really care who authenticates me, as long as they do authenticate me, right?
So I just had to open an account on any other OpenID provider, set up my domain to refer that provider as the one that authenticates me and then everything should work, right?

As it turns out yes, that is all there is to it. I created an account on myOpenID.com (don’t know them at all, maybe it was a good choice, maybe it was a bad choice, I’ll have to look into them more carefully later, but for now I just needed to be able to log into tarpipe and do it NOW), I made the necessary changes to my site to reflect the new authentication provider and voilá, instant gratification! I can now log into tarpipe and create and tweak my workflows at will.

It took me all of 20 minutes, from coming across the problem to solving it. Good heh? :-)

Earlier today I tweeted a couple of lines from a song I was listening to and enjoying a lot. This is something I do quite often.

o/’ And if a double-decker bus crashes into us, To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die o/’

This is, of course, taken from The Smiths’ “There is a light that never goes out”.

I broadcast those lines because I was thrilled by the song and it was natural for me to express this feeling in this particular way, but then a strange thing happened: people reacted as if I was having dark and dangerous thoughts and while I must admit that my previous tweets, from the day before, taken together with this portion of the lyrics, could have given them that impression, I was actually in a pretty good mood at the time. I was just listening to, and thoroughly enjoying the pain, drama and misery that is the hallmark of The Smiths and it was great! So I responded with another tweet to try and restore the “truth of the matter”.

Lol, I’m not having dark thoughts, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” is not a sad song, m’kay?

And yet, people still thought I was troubled somehow. Which was something that gave me a bit of pause, I must admit.
When I realized that they were actually (in the joking/scoffing way that is appropriate to this channel) convinced something was up I just had to reply with:

If I were as susceptible to pop music-induced depression as people apparently think I am I would have been dead by age 14. Get a grip, people. ;-)

But then my own reply gave me even more pause. Yes, I pause a lot.

Nick Hornby wrote in his great novel “High Fidelity” (which most people will have gotten to know by the excellent film that came later by the same name and which constitutes probably the sole best adaptation of a novel to the cinema that I am aware of, but I digress…) the following paragraph:

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Just to set the record straight, this quote is taken from the opening line of the film, the book version is a little more elaborate, but that is beside the point now. Go read the book. I mean it. Do it. Go! Oh and the soundtrack for the film? Go get it! :-)

Getting back on track here, I think the previous quote, besides being an astonishing tirade as a film opener, has in it the kernel of something really, really serious.
Pop music (most music really, but I’ll mostly stick to this one genre for this discussion) is mainly about feelings —romantic or otherwise— and the most prevalent feeling found in it would seem to be romantic love.
Now love, as we all know, is a bitch. And so while many songs are about the heights you achieve when you’re in love, inevitably there are far more songs about the loss of love and all the pain and misery those situations always bring with them.
Hence the “thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.”
Well yeah, that’s part of life, isn’t it? And if you believe pop music and cinema (Hollywood may be disqualified for obvious reasons —they usually try to sell happiness to counter-act the seemingly natural state of unhappiness people tend to live in) it is indeed a big part of it.

But the fact that most of pop music is about pain and heartbreak doesn’t necessarily mean that people must be miserable to enjoy it. People empathize with feelings they know (and even with those have only experienced second-hand) even without being in the process of having those feelings right now. I enjoy Morrissey’s dramatic flare and thoroughly despondent renditions of all those sad and miserable Smiths songs even when I’m happy as can be.
But the question that Nick asks is very relevant and I do believe there is a definite answer to it.

Something happened today, after the tweet exchange that prompted this post, that really brought me down, something that’s been brewing for a while and that was rather inevitable (and which may have come across a bit too strongly in the last few days, thus prompting the aforementioned response to my tweets today), so now, as I’m writing this, I really am sad and of course I, as always, turned to music —pop music— to help me out a bit.
Right now Abbey Road is spinning on my record player and it brings about, as always, the best of feelings.

The Beatles. They’re always there for me.
As is Bowie, as is Iron Maiden and Róisín Murphy and Chico Buarque and Jeff Buckley and Keith Jarret and Coltrane and the Pet Shop Boys and Bach and… And hundreds of others (and yes, I know I failed to restrict this list to pop music).
But they do not control my moods, they don’t bring me down or pick me up, unless I explicitly want them to (and for that purpose I have the appropriate playlists to help bring about those particular mood-swings).
I listen to pop music because I am depressed. I listen to pop music because I’m happy. I listen to music —any genre— because it fits my mood, because of the feelings it evoques or because it helps me to get to whatever state of mind I wish to attain.
Maybe not everybody is like that and I am indeed quite fortunate to have this relationship with music. But I do. And I love it.

So there! :-)

Não se faz.

É que não se faz mesmo!

Como é que eu alguma vez poderia escolher??

Não consigo votar, pronto.

The Smiths vs. The Cure.

É que não passa na cabeça de ninguém!!

This morning, on my way to work, I was catching up on my (huge) podcast queue and I happened to listen to the whole of the “Poetry Intros” episode of the Contrast Podcast.

What an amazing episode! Seriously, I don’t know if it was the theme that brought out a different mood in the contributors, or if it was just one of those lucky coincidences, but most of the songs are really, really good (some better than others and a really varied mix —as it should be, this being the Contrast Podcast).

It is one of the rare times when I feel the urge to keep a podcast around to listen to it again.

And all of this reminds me that I haven’t contributed in a long, long time and I’ve already missed a few very good themes. Nest week’s theme is “Change”. I just can’t miss that one!

On this episode of Nuno’s random thoughts: social calendar wars; Winter is coming and what’s good about it; and music on movies and TV shows. Skip it if none of these interest you at all.

• I’m a paying subscriber of Last.fm and I absolutely love the service. I use it a lot (as my numbers clearly indicate, 36.000 songs reported in roughly two years is a wholesome figure) and I use it for many purposes, not the least of which is to manage my music shows calendar.
  I use it as my primary —actually, make that my only— repository for gig dates, interest, etc. If I’m interested in a gig which is not yet listed, I simply create it in the system and go from there.
  But I obviously have other calendars to manage. And for those I use a mix of my own private calendar on my home server and, for other social stuff, I use Yahoo’s upcoming service.
  Now, the thing is: while I really do like Upcoming, Last.fm absolutely blows it out of the water for the music events scene and I’m definitely not going to leave it. But then, I’d like to have all the shows I’m attending listed on Upcoming for my friends there to know about them.
  I’m not going to even try to build something to that effect, this is just a thought that crossed my mind.

• Winter is coming. Days are getting a lot smaller (and we’re about to have DST thrust upon us to compound the effect) and souls are getting discouraged all around me.
  Me? Well, I’m not all that worried about cold, rainy days… I’ve got a plentiful stash of great tea in the cupboard (more to come when I hit London again in November), the fireplace is clean and ready to go and, of course, with winter comes that wonderful time most people call “Christmas” and which I think of as “It’s time to watch ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ again.” And it nearly is time for that. Sweet!

• I’ve been finding some really good music in a few places which I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find it in. More specifically, in TV shows. Even more to the point, British TV shows.
  American series have some fine music sometimes, but the ones I follow nowadays use it as nothing more than a nice background filler and leave it at that.
  But take something like, for example, the Secret Diary of a Call Girl (if you’re old enough) ;-) and actively listen to what’s playing in the background during the whole show, paying special attention to the more thrilling or emotionally intense scenes. You’ll find lots and lots of music playing, a fair amount of it fairly recent stuff, and much of it really great. You’ll also find some lesser-known bands which are, by and large, well worth the effort to look into.
  On a tangentially related subject, Paris (the film) also has some excellent tunes in it’s soundtrack (enough to make me wonder if I should actually get the CD) with the return of the most excellent Wax Tailor with a song which I assume is new (although I’m not really sure about it) and is sufficiently similar to “Que Sera” —from the great “Tales of the Forgotten Melodies“— to trick me into thinking it was a remix of that same song. Well, it wasn’t, and I let my film-companion think otherwise, so now you know. Sorry, my mistake! ;-)

Here are a couple of things that caught my eye in recent days:

1. Dropbox: a file storage/sharing system with clients for Windows, Mac and Linux (not to mention a really cool web interface) which “just works”. You know, not unlike the way the iDisk was supposed to work on a Mac, but never really did?
   It uses Amazon’s S3 service for storage (but this is just a fun geek factoid, you don’t need to worry about that) and it allows for 2GB of free storage —more if you become a paying customer.
   I’ve been using it to share stuff between a couple of Mac and another Linux machine and you know what I said about it “just working”? Well, it’s true;

2. Evernote: a huge “memory outside my head” system. You feed it web-clips, links, documents, images, audio-clips, etc, etc and it stores, indexes and remembers everything for you.
   Now I’m not using it’s full power because I’ve only used it via two interfaces: the web interface and the mobile one.
   Actually that’s not entirely true, the one thing that amazed me the most was using the email interface. I took some pictures of a book and a few business cards with my cell-phone and then sent them (via MMS —low, low rez) to my Evernote mailbox and after a little time voilá: all of the pictures indexed and —get this— OCRd!
   The OCR works incredibly well, even on crummy cell-phone pictures. When I later searched for some of the words that I knew were on the business cards the card pictures popped up in the results and if I selected them they came up with the words I searched for hi-lighted in it!
   So far (it’s only been a couple of days), I’m extremely pleased with it.

Yesterday I finally made it to my first Twittlis meeting —Twittlis #5.
.oO( About bloody time too! )

Excuse me? “What in the world is Twittlis,” you ask?

Well, I’m glad you did ask that question! :-)
You see, Twittlis is a meeting of people who use Twitter, who also happen to be around Lisboa on the first wednesday of any given month and who also like to chat with other people (which is obviously a given for almost anyone using Twitter.) The fact that this chatting happens over a few beers and, possibly, a nice pub-food-based dinner doesn’t hurt in the least. :-)

The (sub-)thirty-second pitch is, in words of Pedro Pinheiro (the organizer and afaik “father” of the thing):

Completely informal - arrive at any time, leave at any time. Come meet in person the people who you follow or follow you on twitter.com.

The venue that hosts Twittlis is, at the time of this writing, the most excellent O’Gilins Irish Pub and in it, again in Pedro’s own words:

Besides the wonderful assortment of lagers and ales (and non-alcoholic drinks too), there is a good and hearty selection of dinner choices, at affordable prices.

Oh and contrary to popular belief, the conversations are not all geek-oriented. Really. It’s nice! ;-)