Today I heard that LinkedIn now has applications. My first thought was: “Oh greeeeat, pretty soon it’ll look like facebook.”
But the good news is, they have a very small set of apps that so far, seem quite well thought out. In particular I like the SixApart application, BlogLink. It says that it will let you link your personal blog to your linkedin account, which seems like a very good idea to me. However, I haven’t had much luck linking my blog yet – but what I found really great is that it connected me up with the blogs of everyone in my linkedin account.
I’m pretty diligent about knowing the people I connect to on linkedin, so it was with great pleasure that I found out that a handful of them have blogs that I didn’t already know about! For example, here’s Don Daglow’s blog (founder of Stormfront and once a director at Intellivision), and my friend Peter Alau (who recently joined Digital Extremes).
Very nice.

I just bought a USB floppy drive from OfficeDepot, so that I’d have a convincingly working, fast floppy drive to use to go through about 100 old 3.5″ floppies I found hanging around in a box when I moved. The floppies were packed next to about 20 Iomega ZIP disks and a NeXT magneto-optical disk. What is on all of these things? Who the heck knows? But I knew I wanted to know.
The easiest problem to solve was the floppies. Poring through them using the new floppy drive I found old resumes, old journals, and old source code – in fact I found what may be my only copy of the source code for the arcade game I worked on in 1994-1995. I also found a whole bunch of old drivers and software for DOS, Windows95, all manner of old things that I don’t need any more. Pretty entertaining.
But now I wonder what is on those ZIP disks… I have an old ZIP drive lying around at home looking like it may just work if I plug it in to something. So I’ll give that one a shot next. The NeXT MO disk though… where the heck can I find something to read that? And would the data even still be on there? The NeXT drives were notoriously flaky, and a quick look through ebay finds a few NeXT workstations for sale labelled “MO drive not guaranteed to work”. So that one may be a little tougher.
It is weird to have all this old media though, and realize just how easy it is to lose data. It seems like I spend too much time thinking about what to do with my data. At the moment I have a Windows Home Server which does a great job of preserving my files, although mostly the machine sits in my office bored and lonely. But at least I know that what I have on there is RAIDed and safe.
The good news is that slowly we are getting to a point where I can put almost all the data I have on a small portable drive. I bet a terabyte would cover it. Within a few years we’ll have portable drives that size, and I won’t need to worry about this – I’ll just keep multiple copies of all my files and sync them to each other as I travel around. The era of carrying around a small portion of my files on a portable device will seem silly.
Unless I start doing a lot of HD video. Oh no, that reminds me… I have all sorts of audio tapes and VHS tapes at home too. I wonder what I have stored on those? Sigh. I guess this process might take awhile.

As I grow older I get more and more interested in what people like me would have geeked out about in their era: whether it be blacksmithing, horse carriages, cars, planes, or whatever. This video was fun to watch this morning, it is a collection of interesting wacky inventions from the 1930′s. Check it out.

I just read that Esquire magazine’s 75th Anniversary issue will have an E-Ink cover that should animate for several months. Here is a video of what the cover will look like:

Pretty amazing stuff! I can’t wait until all magazine’s ship with E-Ink. Oh wait… maybe I can. Can you imagine an entire newsstand filled with flashing, animating magazine covers? GAH! Maybe we should push for something more like the Kindle as the ideal solution.
Anyway, this is pretty cool tech.

This made me laugh – and watch! The Nokia N-Gage website just started a series of videos called “Sauna Talk”, where the head of developer product management for Nokia interviews developers about tools, APIs, and SDKs – in the sauna! Since Nokia is a Finnish company, this makes more sense than you might at first think. And it’s done in a pretty amusing way. Great job Nokia!