I’m sure you, like me, have seen the articles over the years. They come around every so often, with headlines saying “<IM TOOL> is THE email killer”, “Death of email spelled by <IM TOOL>”, and “<GENERATION WHATEVER> says no to email, yes to <IM TOOL>”. I’ve seen these headlines for the better part of two decades. And yet – curiously – email is still around, while many of these tools aren’t. There are a number of reasons why this is so. Some of them are deal with the different paradigms of communication, while others hinge on technological differences
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Excel: Calculate percentage
I need to calculate what percentage one number is of another on a relatively regular basis. Luckily, it is relatively easily done using functions in Excel. Here’s how:
This past week has been a very Jewish one for me, in so many senses. In Jewish tradition, there is no such thing as joy without the element of sorrow, nor sorrow without the element of joy. The most famous example of this is the breaking of a glass during a wedding, to remind us of the breaking of the temple – as well as to signify that this newly created house is another stone of the rebuilding.
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SmartHalo2 review: Update
Since I published my two-part review of SmartHalo 2 back in the beginning of October, there has been a bit of a development – and not in a positive way. The SmartHalo team has made a long post over on Kickstarter, announcing that whoever hasn’t gotten their device won’t get it, and that they are shutting down their servers. In their own words:
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Review: Polar H10
I’ve written previously about my use of my Apple Watch to track fitness. This summer, I bought the Polar H10 chest strap wanting to add another, and more accurate, metric to the metrics already being recorded by my Apple Watch. The hope was that I could leave my phone at home altogether, and simply take my Apple Watch for a ride or run, preferably recording with Strava.
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Low-skill recruiting is spam
My experience with recruiters has become somewhat of a recurring theme here on the blog, and for good reason. For some reason, my LinkedIn profile attracts a relatively regular stream of them. Here is one example that I would like to draw your attention to – identites hidden to protect the inept:
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Excel: Combine two columns
While analysing an Excel sheet the other day, I needed to combine two columns so that I could get names in the format firstname lastname (the list had been provided as lastname,firstname). As it happens, doing so is relatively easy. You do it on a cell by cell basis, by using basic excel commands.
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Ethics: Intention versus consequence
When getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, public officials tend to offer their good intentions as a defense. I don’t understand why we keep accepting such defenses. Who cares that your intention was to ensure proper tax planning? You still lied about whether or not you were domiciled somewhere else. I don’t see a valid argument that your so-called “good intentions” – an appeal to the ethics of your intentions, rather than the ethics of your actions – is relevant at all. It is certainly not a mitigating circumstance.
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Expanding on the digital divide
This week’s post follows on to last week’s to talk a little about the digital divide. It is adapted from a paper I wrote back in 2017 as part of my Bachelor’s degree with the Open University.
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Ensure redundancy for critical systems
As I’m sure you noticed, Facebook suffered massive downtime to several services last week, including Messenger, Instagram and so on. Such events often serve to highlight what services we have rely on. While I’ve been (at least attempting to) phase out Facebook for some time, there are still some things that I actually need it for.
This is part two of a two-part series on my experiences with the SmartHalo 2 bike computer. Last week I talked about my general views of the device, and this week I’ll discuss both the displays and the touch interface.