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Remember two or three years ago? Before Britney got fat, the dollar tanked, and the iPhone was only an Apple fanboy’s wildest dream? Back then urban computer nerds were promised fast, cheap, wireless Internet access courtesy of their good friends at the government.
This weekend I spent some quality time in front of a scanner archiving important documents (yes, in Wonderfile). Our office scanner rarely gets any use these days. With PDFs, vector art, high quality stock art, and the growth of digital photography, using a scanner is becoming a dying art.
If you are like me and have built a multitude of computers over the years, you surely have a box or two of spare parts lying around. I call mine “Nick’s Box Of Wonders.” When desperate enough I reach into this treasure trove ofoutdated RAM and ZIP disks to bring a sickly machine back to life, upgrade an old clunker, or even build a Frankenputer.
There has been a lot of talk about Wonderfile lately. For those of you in the dark, Wonderfile is our answer to the problem of organizing, sharing, searching, filtering, archiving, and distributing digital information.
Flickr has a great feature that lets you annotate your pictures by drawing little boxes right over the image and adding text. You don’t have to browse Flickr long to find some incredible photos enhanced with this fun feature.
Vimeo, a video sharing site akin to YouTube but for a more discriminating user, has now launched HD video streams in gloriously sharp 720p. For those of you stuck in the analog, rabbit-ears age, that is 1,280 by 720 pixels of resolution.
I once saw a woman driving her Hummer while wearing huge sunglasses, drinking a 64 ounce Big Gulp and eating a foot-long hot dog. Well, not really, but it seams probable given our preoccupation with all things enormous.
Wonderfile works very much like your brain when it comes to retrieving information. Most people think – “Ahh let’s see, I need to find that file – I was working with Charlie on the Frederickson project, it was last summer, and we were using an Excel spreadsheet.” Most people don’t think in terms of a file location in some obscure path on their hard drive.
Well we did our first public demo of Wonderfile last night at Minnedemo. I think a good time was had by all. Our demo went fairly smoothly with no significant hiccups. A heartfelt thanks to the ArcStone contingent and some friends who came to show their support.
My wife and I have been using Microsoft Money since 1997 to manage our personal finances. Overall it has been good – but over the last couple years the system has started to break down for us.
