As you may know, Amazon Prime Subscribers can now get a free book every month. Finding the ever expending list is not straightforward but here it is.

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This could be the geekiest thing I’ve ever done.

While I have used Tasker on Android to change settings based on location, it doesn’t quite have the granularity that I am looking for and relies on precise GPS location to work really well (which hurts battery life).

The newest flagship Android phone, the Galaxy Nexus (on Verizon or GSM for T-mobile & AT&T) and a few other Android phones (such as the Nexus S on Sprint & AT&T) support the NFC standard.

By placing NFC tags in my house (nightstand , house entrance, car, office), I was able to set up my phone to switch its bluetooth, wireless, ringer and other settings based on location.

For example:

To do this, all I needed was a NFC compatible phone, NFC stickers (pre-formatted for a bug in Android 4.02 prevents formatting from working) and a $1.99 android application to set the actions taken when swiping a specific tag.

Geeky, right? I warned you

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I made a quick toolbar button to open a file or directory in Sublime Text 2 from the Mac OS X Finder toolbar. Download it there: http://bit.ly/rJyBJp and drag and drop to your toolbar.

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Black Friday and Cybermonday might be over but Amazon is running the Big Deal this week, discounting a lot of books. Worth Checking out.

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In a terminal, enter the following:

defaults write com.microsoft.Powerpoint NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false
defaults write com.microsoft.Word NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false
defaults write com.microsoft.Excel NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

The same thing can be done for any application in Lion. In order to find the application preference name, look at the files names found here (minus .savedState): ~/Library/Saved Application State.

Et voila!

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While large (24″+) monitors are certainly enticing, I find that my productivity improves with multiple monitors rather than bigger monitors. My desktop setup includes two 23″ monitors in Landscape orientation and a 22″ monitor in Portrait mode. While most laptop have a VGA, Display Port or DVI output, that only allows you to connect one monitor.

Wanting to have at least two external monitor, I found a great solution from Kensingon that will work on Mac and Windows PC to add an additional monitor (or two or three…) via a simple USB connection.

At under $60, the Kensington Universal Multi-display adapter works on most recent OS (including the Apple Lion and Snow Leopard, Microsoft Windows 7) is simple to use and just works. The adapter comes with a DVI output and a VGA adapter and support 1080p resolutions (1920×1080) in 16/9 format and 2048×1152 for other aspect ratios.

If you want to add additional monitors, just add more adapters, it’s that simple (up to 6 adapters, that’s 8 monitors total, including your laptop monitor).

Is it fast? It’s fast enough for most tasks. Would I use it for gaming or 3D design? Probably not but it works very well for everything else.

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While one would expect console.log() messages to show up in the Eclipse console tab (which shows the Android emulator being launched), they actually show up in the LogCat tab, a mechanism for collecting and viewing system debug output on Android. However the LogCat tab/windows is not shown by default on Eclipse.

In order to show the tab in Eclipse, select Window -> Show View -> Other… in Eclipse. In the Android section, select the LogCat view which will show log messages for the emulator including your console.log messages under the “Web Console” topic. In order to isolate them click on the green cross to add a Filter, name the filter and assign “Web Console†to the Log Tag. By clicking OK, you’ll show only the Web Console messages including JS errors and your console.log output.

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After reading my friend Steven O’Grady excellent Xoom review and selling my iPad (1) in anticipation of the iPad 2 announcement, I decided to pick up a Motorola Xoom to test it and possibly keep instead of buying the newer iPad. I was told at Best Buy that their new return policy was 14 days with no restocking fee so I thought it was a good opportunity to test Google/Motorola/Verizon’s last offering. I had similarly bought a Nexus One in early 2010 and abandoned the iPhone in favor of that Android (2.1, then) phone.

I will be returning the Xoom.

I won’t pontificate about it but the geist of it is that I don’t like the hardware. As Steven mentioned there are software issues:

But that’s the software and it can be fixed. My problem was with the hardware:

I said I wouldn’t pontificate so I am keeping it short. There are a lot of good things about the Xoom but the hardware mostly falls short for me and as Steven said, you can’t change the hardware. The Xoom won’t work for me, I will be picking up an iPad 2 next week.

I’ll revisit in a year.

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So after a few days, I received Ulysse’s first reply and design, therefore completing the first volley. He called it the Gate of the Sun which seems adequate.

Ulysse-Erik-Etape-02 Sketchup file

So then we had a Stargate type gate with very convenient stairs to walk through it. My turn to come up with something.

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Twenty years ago, I left home and moved to Paris for school. While I had been away to prep-school for a year prior, this was the farthest I had lived from my parents, a 6 hours train ride at the time. I devised a way to stay in touch with my dad by sending him the first chapter of a ‘novel’ that I had began to write telling him he was to write the second chapter then send it back to me. I would write the third chapter, send it to him and so on and so forth. It was an opportunity to work together in a creative framework that I thought we’d both enjoy (Disclosure: it worked for a while but we gave it up eventually).

Twenty years later, recently, I was talking to my godson’s father, Jean-Michel about his son’s enthusiasm for 3D design. I thought that I could attempt a similar experiment with Ulysse, who was one year old when I left France and is now almost twelve. As his godfather, over three thousand miles away, I had always looked for a way to stay close to him when I couldn’t visit him as often as I wanted.

And so it began. Late last year, I sent Ulysse my first 3D scene, done in Google Sketchup with an explanation of the ‘game’ and how it would work. What I sent him looked like this:

Ulysse-Erik-Etape-01 Sketchup file

What do you think? Want to see more? How would you call this process?

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