More Free WiFi - Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble just added free wifi for many of their stores, including all of the Tampa locations. I'd love to see Borders follow suit, but not very hopeful.

Besides all the local Panera Breads, I know of free wifi at Atlanta Bread, and most Hillsborough County library locations. I think the Tampa Ale House in Carrollwood and Bar Louie at International Plaza still have free wifi as well.

Tools I Use: Readability

A while ago, I found Readability, an online tool that reformats almost any web page to be more readable. One click of the browser bookmarklet and Readability strips the page down to just the text, in a standard font size, in black on a white background. No more tiny fonts, unreadable color combinations, or annoying blinking sidebar ads.

For example, it takes this:



and turns it into this:

Tools I Use: Dropbox

I'm becoming a big fan of Dropbox. At first glance, it's an online backup service. But it also synchronizes files between computers, keeps a revision history, shares files/folders between Dropbox users, and shares files/photos online. Plus it's cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). It's like the Google GDrive that has never materialized.

It's practically replaced my USB flash drives. No more digging in my laptop bag, worrying about safely removing the drive, forgetting to take the flash drive with me, or finding a flash drive in the clothes dryer. No more worrying about forgetting to back up all those LOLCats photoshops.

Since I work on several computers during the week, this has saved me a lot of time and trouble. No more having to remember to email myself that document to review. No more wondering if I have the latest copy of the readme file I'm editing. No more wrestling with Windows file sharing at home. 

Their 50 gigabyte plan is $9/month, or the 2 gigabyte plan is free. If you use my referral link, we both get an extra 256 megabytes of free storage.

Obama Team and Social Norms

An interesting article on how the Obama team pulled off a very successful "get out the vote" campaign. Their winner? A simple phrase: "A record turnout is expected". 

Wow. That's the same Robert Cialdini and his descriptive social norm I heard about over two years ago. 

The basic idea is that "everybody is doing it" is much more powerful than "you ought to do it". We use it every time we ask somebody else if they're going to X's party, if they're contributing to their 401k, if they're tithing, if they're on Facebook, etc. 

Robert Cialdini's book is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials).

Everyone is buying it.

Nintendo DS Game Chamber - No More Missing Games

I came across this amazing game case for the Nintendo DS in an odd place. David Friedman has a profile and photo shoot with the inventor on his photo blog.

The game case has a unique feature that solves a problem that we've really struggled with. You can only take one game at a time out of the case. To get a new game out, you have to put an old one in. No more empty game cases. No more finding DS games all over the house. No more missing games. (Unless you can't find the case.)