The Museum of Mathematics has opened in New York. Math is fun and cool again. Will my daughters love math as much as I do?
Good news: Google Apps is no longer free
Companies of all sizes will sign up for our premium version, Google Apps for Business, which includes 24/7 phone support for any issue, a 25GB inbox, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime. Pricing is still $50 per user, per year.
Fair enough! Google Apps provides an amazing service and I’ll be happy to pay for it.
Please Google, let’s forget about ads revenues and focus instead on Google Apps and ChromeOS!
Listen to this 40 minutes lesson by prof. Michio Kaku and you will forever regret not becoming a physicist.
Pelago Linahammar: an awesome cargobike from Finland. Pictures stolen from Pelago Facebook Page. Via @bicicapace.
Steganography in Javascript
Encryption is cool, but sometimes you can get away just hiding stuff. Or maybe you can do both: “encrypt and hide” to escape key disclosure laws in countries that require individuals to surrender cryptographic keys to law enforcement (most notably Australia and UK).
Here is a simple demo and a Javascript library to hide text into any image. Btw, is there anything that you can’t do in a browser window today? :)
HelloSign, for signing docs on the web
I want to switch from OS X to ChromeOS. Months ago I wrote a list of tasks that I’m afraid won’t be trivial to conveniently accomplish in the browser-centric OS by Google. One of them is “edit and sign PDF forms”. Today I’m quite happy with Preview and I was worried about finding a nice browser-based replacement. Good news: HelloSign gets the work done. It’s free and it works not just with PDF files, but with Word or Excel forms too! And if you install the free Chrome app it works right from your Google Drive.
This is a Bucharest subway station. Walls are covered with posters that reproduce the shelves of a bookstore. And Bucharest commuters can buy those books, actually ebooks, grabbing the QR codes on the spines with their smartphones. Not sure QR code are the best approach and not sure how can you grab one from the top shelves, but the potential to sell ebooks right on the platforms of a tube station is there. More details here.
Understanding Bitcoin
[…] Bitcoin does a better job than central entities at creating new money because it does so in a decentralised way and without the need to create debt; it does a better job at storage than banks because it does so for free; and it does a better job at transfer than SWIFT because it is faster, cheaper, available to anyone, and not subjected to the control of Western powers: SWIFT’s ability to blockade Iranian banking transactions shows the ultimately unilateral nature of global financial channels.
A society whose currency is backed by debt (aka the modern world) is a society where freedom is just a word.
The whole world’s “formal” economy is backed by debt, and debt is backed by violence. This can be verified by defaulting, and subsequently resisting eviction: state force will be used sooner rather than later.[…]
The larger our past gets the smaller our present feels …
Both “The Eagleman Stag” and its “making of” are awesome animation videos worth watching.
He’s so boring that the hackers who stole his identity later returned it.
Valuable digital services are easy to monetize, digital content is not.
I cannot agree more with Dalton Caldwell and I really wish his join.app.net endeavor could succeed.
Substance.io, an amazing authoring and publishing tool
Substance is a fully web-based document authoring and publishing platform. Unlike traditional word-processors, Substance focuses on content, by leaving the layout part to the system, not the user. Because of the absence of formatting utilities, it suggests structured, content-oriented writing. Substance exposes documents as data, ready to be compiled into arbitrary output formats ( HTML, PDF, ePub, …) or integrated with other applications (like websites).
Forget formatting and embrace structure and semantic for your texts!
Crowdfunding done right: Symbid and Seedrs
I don’t like the hype surrounding Kickstarter. Kickstarter is just a platform for collecting donations. Nothing more. Pledgers are not investing their money into projects, they are just donating money and their “dividends” are just little “thank you” gifts. This could be just the right thing to do for small creative or social projects that need a patron. And Kickstarter does help them to have hundreds of small patrons instead of a single rich person or institution. So far so good, but which is the rationale in using Kickstarted to pour millions of donations into a videogame or a smartwatch? It doesn’t make any sense. These “kickstarted products” can potentially generate good margins or, as any venture, they can just fail even before reaching the market. I bet that, before the end of this year, some big Kickstarter project will collapse and groups of pledgers are going to start getting very angry.
Then I discovered Symbid, a Dutch company that apparently is quite similar to Kickstarter, but it actually allows anyone to buy shares and become a proper investor of the companies (or wanna-be companies) that are pitching their ideas on Sybid. You can pledge as little as 20 EUR and, if the project meets the fundraising target, you’ll be part of a cooperative of investors that Symbid will setup for this purpose. There is no valuation issue, since each project will clearly state how much capital is required and how much equity is available for that amount.
Seedrs is a similar initiatives that recently launched in the UK. The main differences are due to the different local regulation of financial services. Seedrs doesn’t use cooperatives to manage equity, but shares are issued to Seedrs itself as nominee of the investors.
I just registered with Symbid and I’m looking forward to make my first 20 EUR investment!
A short documentary about the LEGO Turing Machine built by Jeroen van den Bos and Davy Landman in honor of Alan Turings one hundredth birthday.
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