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Take note (or loose notes)

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I like a tablet-only travel style: going to conferences without a laptop. I usually just want to take notes, follow social media, and do email. A tablet gives me mobility, both in weight and in battery life.

But at OKCon last week, I had major fail. I have an Android tablet, and I had been using Epistle for some time: a simple but useful text editor, that nicely connected with Dropbox to make my files available on my laptop.

A recurring problem with text editing (on Android devices, at least) is the lack of undo options in almost any app. Swipe your finger slightly wrong, type a letter, and your precious text is gone. Forever.

The epiphany of “open” and IATI

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The IATI standard is meant to make it easier to exchange and compare information about activities and funding flows in development aid worldwide. But it can be useful within a (network of) organisations as well, even if you don’t feel ready to share that data with the rest of the world (yet).

Large organisations are starting to see the benefits: adapt your internal project management system so that it contains the necessary information in the right format, then export it to IATI data from there.

You then have an internal, vendor-independent format for your data, and have a choice of tools to put that data to use.

Around the web in week 47, 2012

../spider-web.jpg Fundstücke published this week:

Open Tea last Friday

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We’ve organised another Open Tea, last Friday at the Vrije Universiteit, with updates, two presentations, and networking drinks, kindly hosted by CIS-VU, the Centre for International Cooperation at the VU University in Amsterdam.

Victor de Boer and Anna Bon helped make this possible, and Victor wrote a blog post about it. And Araz Najarian of Connective Age wrote up a summary of the presentations, including a link to a with co-presenter Nana Baah Gyan video demonstrating RadioMarché.

Engineering 1984

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While catching up with the nettime mailing list, I came across two articles that give me the creeps.

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘It’s been a fact that modern phones are in reality tracking devices that let us make calls, but the idea that awkward citizens might find their phone shut down at the behest of a Government agency is a very worrying thought and not one that fits with democratic principles.’

Around the web in week 44

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Early 2009, I started using Friendfeed as a way to aggregate various sources of web links to share. August that year, Facebook bought FriendFeed, ripped out the innovators, and left the site to bleed to death. (I’m sure it felt less dramatic to the fine folks who built it.)

I’ve had a nagging feeling since, wanting to move away, but (luckily) the great features of their service stayed on air, and (sadly) no real open alternative showed up. But with the 1.6.0 release of tt-rss, my current news reader, came a “share…” bookmarklet, with the lacking piece of the puzzle: a way to inject any web page into a feed of web links to share.

When I suggested what I still missed, the developer almost instantaneously responded, completing the feature for my use case.