January 9, 2012

Backing up your cloud

This tool will keep hackers (or you, on accident!) from deleting precious information.

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October 21, 2011

Tech Tools 1: Instapaper, more

iPad tools redesign increases their effectiveness.

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July 22, 2011

Technology in North Africa

Technology, and most particularly the Internet in its very social incarnations (e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.), were all the rage during the uprisings in the Muslim world (and elsewhere) of 2009 and after. Yet there are distinct limitations to the power of technology which we would do well to remember. In this post we’ll look at the influx of technology, where it has been useful, and where hard non-technological work remains. 1. Internet usage is growing explosively in the region, and will continue to do so. a) In the early part of the 2000s, Internet usage was available but not [...]

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July 15, 2011

The Short Term Future: Tech Driven Trends to 2025

Lots of people make wild guesses about the future. Some haven’t arrived yet. Some are inspiring: we liked what we saw, so we created it (e.g. Star Trek communicators compared with today’s cell phones). Estimates of the future, on the other hand, are made based on what is known about the rate of technological advancement, change and improvement coupled with what is being explored right now. In that vein, here are some pieces that are being worked on at rates likely to bring us advances in the next decade: CISCO’s Chief Futurist Dave Evans projects (and I annotate): 1. The Internet [...]

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July 12, 2011

How to not get distracted by information overload

In JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift? John Robb (Global Guerrillas) has an excellent and concise post on how to avoid drifting off course while multitasking in your interactions with the information flood we all swim in every day. He recommends “Scanning” and “Situational Awareness.” What it boils down to is this: you have to have a very clear understanding of what your vision is, how you’re going to achieve it (the general categories of action), and what the specific behaviors are that will get you to your vision. You need to be daily reviewing what’s happening [...]

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July 12, 2011

The smartphone as primary net connection

Ars Technica writes: 28% of US smartphone owners use them as primary ‘Net connection. Interesting: in the choice between (a) large window, powerful processor and (b) small window, enough-processor, always-with-us, at least a quarter of the US seems to be choosing the always-on-if-smaller connection.

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July 12, 2011

When globalization slaps us

Nell Green (Cooperative Baptist Fellowship) journals about the impact of globalization on her life. What she’s experiencing is the reality of the daily life of many of us involved in missions – or who know people who are involved in missions. Globalization and the technology that assists it can be overwhelming at times: do we use this social network? do we stay on that one? Where do we portion out our rather pitiful amounts of time? Yet these tools can be very empowering, as Nell notes in her example of how technology is being used to launch an anti-trafficking prayer network [...]

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June 9, 2011

Securing your cloud-based service, and why it is better than local computer security

Yesterday I wrote about how secure passwords can easily be cracked no matter how seemingly secure they are (e.g. random letters and numbers). This is primarily true insofar as I am aware for devices that a hacker has physical access to. Brute-forcing a password for a computer within a few seconds or a few minutes means having access to try lots of passwords quickly. The same of course cannot be done with a cloud-based service (e.g. Gmail or Facebook). There, you have a limited number of tries before someone notices something. If you try brute forcing a 1,000 password combinations [...]

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October 11, 2010

2010 Podcast No. 10: John Edmiston & the future of Internet & ministry

A friend of mine sent me a copy of a Powerpoint entitled “The Future of Internet Ministry” recently created by John Edmiston of Cybermissions. You can view the powerpoint here (that’s the original PPT format; we also have a copy here on JustinLong.org in PPT2007/2010 format). John and I spoke on the phone for today’s podcast. He talks about: how our offline world is becoming connected to our online world to such a degree that the online validates the offline; for example, over 80% of people will check out a church on the Internet before ever going to it (just like you [...]

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July 6, 2010

Technology Journal: July 2010

0. General Everything you ever need to know by John Naughton in the Guardian is a long but thoughtful analysis of the impact of the Internet. Growth of the Internet from 1998 to 2008 [INFOGRAPHIC] Undersea Cable Set To Boost West Africa Broadband (Epicenter) 1. Translation The Mojofiti social networking website uses real-time machine translation to allow users to transparently collaborate with others in 27 languages. (SingularityHub.com) The languages aren’t just Latin-based, but Asian languages like Korean, Tagalog or Farsi. The translations aren’t perfect but might be “good enough.” Google Translates Multilingual Web Into One Universal Tongue: Chrome (Fast Company) [...]

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June 14, 2010

Singularity University

http://nyti.ms/9wZF3U – Sponsored in part by Googlers, Singularity University helps promote technologies that will lead to the day when a computer is smarter than a human.

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May 24, 2010

Google launches encrypted search

http://bit.ly/c8z0XI – Hiding from Surveillance, or spammers: Google users can now run encrypted searches by going to https://www.google.com.

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May 14, 2010

Singularity Sooner

http://bit.ly/bPUScB – Former Microsoft programmer Keith Curtis discusses why he thinks the singularity could happen even sooner.

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May 14, 2010

Internet evangelism of the world?

http://bit.ly/bkQ9LU – Walt Wilson, former Apple executive and CEO of Global Media Outreach, is maybe a little optimistic. He thinks we can evangelize the world via the Internet by 2020, expecting total wifi coverage of the world by 2015. To which I ask: rural Afghanistan? Deserts of North Africa? Buddhist monks in Tibet? Hmm.

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May 14, 2010

Spelling Checker for Chrome

http://bit.ly/bp3bk8 – After the Deadline is a powerful spelling and grammar checking tool, now available as a Chrome extension.

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May 12, 2010

Google translating more languages

Google adds text-to-speech translation for additional languages, including five of the largest unreached peoples in the world.

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May 6, 2010

Skype brings 5-way video

http://bit.ly/cvfWNi – @WhereIsBruce: Just saw Skype will be offering 5-way video calling. Huge for global org like SIM.

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April 17, 2010

Google Docs: New Views

I have been exploring Google Docs this morning, working on a spreadsheet of major historical events for my chronology of the world database, and have discovered two new views in the new version of GDocs: Compact and List. Compact simply removes most of the GDocs interface, leaving me with a lot more space for my spreadsheet (useful because on my 17″ laptop I usually have the spreadsheet stretched across the top in a window taking up about half of the space, with a browser below it during research). The List view, on the other hand, is very interesting. Instead of [...]

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April 16, 2010

New Collaborative tools in Google Docs

For all the swarmers out there: Google Docs’ new collaborative editor is phenomenal. They’ve taken a page from the Google Wave codebase and put it into its most natural environment. I used it yesterday to group edit a doc with 3 of us. Fantastic. If you haven’t tried it yet, look at this screenshot tour and then try it out. It’s better than the old system because it shows you “live” what people are typing – and who’s typing it. So no question about what’s being changed or changing. But I do wish they’d bring back the ability to compare [...]

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April 16, 2010

Destroying Language Barriers

Google’s language toolbars now make it easier to translate individual words on a page. But remember it only works for major languages. Minor languages are still neglected (and probably will be for a very long time).

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