Relax, Think, Imagine, Make it possible

Music on devices will eventually be free

One thing is for sure when talking about the music industry: Everyone wants free music on his computer, phone or mp3 player. And since it’s very easy to obtain your music free (not legally) the music industry has to legalize the use of it by searching for other ways to make money from it.

With Qtrax launching today people will have immediate access to over 25M songs for free. That’s almost 10 times the whole iTunes collection and about 8 times the Amazon mp3 titles. But still, Qtrax does not provide the final solution. Qtrax is a p2p network where users can download music which can be played only on players that support Microsoft’s subscription DRM. It’s an ad supported music download service but at the same time it has some restrictions caused by not using a DRM-free format.

The ultimate solution for music would be totally free distribution. The labels should be able to monetize other activities like performances, movie licenses, sponsored events, etc. to a greater extent so that all of us could enjoy free, legally downloaded music.

And the question is: Music industry takes some actions now to be better. Is movie industry next to follow?

Posted in Music | No Comments »

Test drive of Tesla car!

Now these are great news for everyone expecting the new Tesla, EV sports car. Let’s hope that other car manufacturers will get in the game and product smaller, green, all electric cars for city driving.

Posted in Cars | No Comments »

Your DNA analyzed for $999. Would you do it?

Time has come and your DNA can be easily analyzed through a website. The only thing you need to do it to pay the $999 fee and receive a kit that includes a plastic tube where you spit and send it back to the company.

As a first point of view, this sounds interesting. You can get a lot of information about related diseases such as:

• Alcohol Flush Reaction
• Bitter Taste Perception
• Breast Cancer
• Colorectal Cancer
• Crohn’s Disease
• Earwax Type
• HIV/AIDS Resistance
• Heart Attack (Myocardial Infarction)
• Lactose Intolerance
• Multiple Sclerosis
• Muscle Performance
• Obesity
• Prostate Cancer
• Restless Legs Syndrome
• Rheumatoid Arthritis
• Type 1 Diabetes
• Type 2 Diabetes
• Venous Thromboembolism

The company also states:

“Compare yourself to more than a thousand people from around the globe to see which present-day populations likely share ancestors with you most recently. You can even use our tools to investigate family tales about Native American ancestry or genealogical links to distant lands.”

The thing is that would you actually want to do this? Would you care to know that you are most likely to have a certain disease? Would it make you happier? Furthermore would you be comfortable sharing your most valuable information (your own DNA) with a company?

Update: All these available at http://www.23andme.com

Image from Wikipedia article on DNA

Posted in Websites | 1 Comment »

Most useful Gmail keyboard shortcuts

It’s been quite some time since I switched by email to Gmail mainly for accessing it from everywhere. But it proved that Gmail is actually a lot faster than my outlook was. The best part of it is that there are several keyboard shortcuts that can make your life a lot easier and handle emails faster.

If you have not enabled keyboard shortcuts this can be done easily by visiting the settings page and clicking the keyboard shortcuts on radio box:

Once you enable them you can simply type “?” and a list of all available shortcuts will appear on your screen like this:

There are several shortcuts, but after using Gmail I’ve found that the most useful ones are:

gi: Go Home: When you type this, you go straight to your inbox.
gt: Go Sent: When you type this, you go straight to your sent mail.
gc: Go Contacts: When you type this, you go straight to your contacts.
u: Back to threadlist. I use this shortcut either from the mail reading page or at the inbox page as a refresh button.
o or <Enter>: Open conversation (very useful!!)
p/n: Read previous / Next message: Browse through messages
c: Compose message: Use this when you want to send out a new message
/: Move to search box: The fastest way to search your emails.
r: Reply: When reading an email hit “r” and go straight to the reply box
f: Forward
#: Delete: This is my favorite one. Actually I am really used to hitting Shift+Del on Windows to permanently delete files go Shift+3 (#) comes very naturally:)

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Dataportability.org and the future of web

The last few years, people got “socialized” over the web. Someone might say that the web looks exactly like real life. You have an identity, a house full of photographs/videos/messages/books and you can share your data with your friends or new people you are looking to meet. That is definitely a good step but also causes many problems. The biggest problem of all is who holds our private data and how and when they are transfered to someone else.

The first part of the problem wouldn’t exist if the internet was a single social network. In real life though we have facebook, myspace, linkedin, and many other social networks. Each one serves it’s own purpose and most of the people need to use more than one social networks. This is the part of the problem that dataportability.org is trying to solve. Basically, there will be “trusted” banks of data where users will be able to grant access in order to share their data with other social networks. It’s a great idea since it will allow us to control which data we want to share on which social network. Moreover we will have a permanent identity on the web. We will be a live part of it no matter what happens to a website or a social network.

In real life though there is a quite significant problem: Will people trust those data banks that will be holding their data? From the first point of view I would say yes, because there is no difference than giving your data to facebook or myspace. However, on the other side I would say that the ultimate goal is that every person holds his own data and decides if and how he wants to share them. This could be a perfect solution but there is a huge problem! People are not connected on the internet 24/7. If I hold my data and someone searches for me, nothing would appear if I am offline at that time because my data would be with me. In a few years though I am pretty sure that everyone will be connected 24/7 either by his cell phone, his computer or even his car.
Saying so, we will have a world of always connected people who will be holding their private data. Practically, we will be able to build a p2p network where only a map/filesystem of people names (very basic data) would be hosted on a data bank and all their private data they want to share would be served by them directly.

As a conclusion I should say that technology is not there yet. It might take several years to make the internet so reliable that this whole thing could work flawlessly. But the data portability project is a good way to start with. It will make things a lot easier for everyone.

Posted in Development | No Comments »

Common interests != Good friends

I see on facebook and other networks some apps that show how similar you are with your friends. In the real world as well it is a common belief that people with the same interests are a great match.

From my point of view, this is quite boring. It’s good to be with people that have other interests than the ones you have. It’s the only way of getting out of a world that you have built and exploring new activities. You can gain some life-changing experiences when you do this, trust me.

So next time you hear about a “perfect match” think again if that’s what you are looking for. It is safe to say that you want to live your life with people that like and do common things with you but as most of the times, safety kills the excitement.

Posted in Extreme thoughts | 1 Comment »

Casino winning strategy

I like maths a lot but most of all I like anything that has to do with a probability. But what really amazes me is how probability is connected to human perception. People are not robots and they don’t act always in a logical way. What sometimes might seem as reasonable can also be impossible if you put it down to numbers. How strong you feel that something might happen is totally different about how possible it is to actually happen. Based on that theory there are a lot of businesses created all over the world. Casinos are one of them.

I don’t know if you have ever been at a casino but if you haven’t you should visit one. Be careful though… go there not for the obvious reason (winning/losing money). Go there to see and analyze how people act knowing the probabilities of winning a game. You will be amazed on how stronger the emotions are from logical thinking.
That being said, I am going to describe my method of playing which most of you will find stupid and boring. I call it “I am very happy once every 18.5 days”. But first let’s do a flashback. Remember when you where a child and you had a small piggy bank? Probably most of you had one and you were collecting money frequently. When there was a special time like your birthday for example you had to broke mr. piggy and you could use the money to buy anything you wanted. Note that you were not disappointed when you put money into mr. piggy because you knew that some day you would take them back but you were very happy once you got them all together.

So this is my method: Play only an amount that you are comfortable of losing (I play 20 euros) and play it only once on the roulette (I split it into two numbers). Believe it or not I am only playing once each time I visit a casino and I don’t go there often. But once every 18.5 times I leave the casino very happy because one of my 10 euro bets gives me 360 euros. The rest of the times I am just leaving the casino happy knowing that the 20 euros were a reasonable amount to spent to have a drink (which by the way is free at the casino). Over time, the experience to be very happy costs you 10 euros for every time you are very happy (this is what the casino makes from paying you 36 times the bet and not 37). Well, that’s the cost of breaking mr. piggy!

But why once every 18.5 times?

Well, obviously if you had split your bet over red or black you would be happy once every two times. But you wouldn’t be much happy. You would just double your money. It would happen more often but you wouldn’t get the excitement of a *36 return on investment:) Depending on how often you visit a casino and how you set your happiness level you might want to change this. On another point of view, if you play at a lottery the most chances are that you won’t win even if you played everyday for 1000 years but if you do win you will be a lot happier than winning 18 times your money at the roulette.

So as a final advice: Setup your happiness levels and don’t play out of them. At a range of 1 to 10, 1 is losing a reasonable amount of money (not more than what you would have paid for a typical night at a bar) and 10 multiplying your money by a great factor. Remember though: Always leave happy. Because if you do the mistake to play that reasonable amount of money several times the same day you won’t leave happy!

Posted in Extreme thoughts | No Comments »

Weekend drivers

Is it my assumption or do you find as well that during the weekends more people do crazy stuff on the road? I am sure  they don’t drive during the week at all. They go out with their car only during weekends or even worse only every other Sunday… Typically I can expect anything to happen on the road on a sunny Sunday between 11am to 6pm. Maybe I should start shooting some videos about what I see.

p.s. it also happens for me to live in the country with the worse roads in the world.

Posted in Cars | No Comments »

Moments of inspiration

Ok.. First of all I have to be honest. I have so many weeks to write on by blog that I forgot the password to login

But, after an exciting weekend I think I should follow the advice of a good friend and start writing again.

The story begins on Saturday when I met Andrej who was visiting Greece. Andrej is a fantastic young entrepreneur and he has a great experience in several aspects of life (not only business related). So when he called and told me he was visiting Greece I thought it should be great to arrange a typical Greek day for him. We went for launch near the Temple of Poseidon at a seaside restaurant. What really amazed me is that Andrej found this place to be one of the best places he had ever visited. And that made me rethink some things… In my daily life I usually hate the too-much-sun we have in Greece. But when I found out that the same time in Ljubjana the temperature was at 1C I immediatelly thought that I was at the right place:) Well, that’s just an example of how many things we have but don’t respect. I really like that I can work half of the year at a beach with a laptop but I almost take it for granted. Maybe I should respect such values more when I hear that some friends in the UK have never seen sun for the last weeks maybe months.

The other advice I got and I think I should follow, has to do with my blog. We were discussing about blogs in general and I told Andrej that I am afraid of writing on my blog because I might have language mistakes since English is not my mother language. But after him giving me some examples of very popular blogs with really bad English I was definitelly persuaded to start writing again. Moreover, sometimes I think I should delete some posts from my blog. But even this is wrong. I should be writing whatever comes to my mind since it would be quite fun to look at it after 2,3 or even 20 years.

btw, Andrej has some excellent blogs: Personal blog, hotels, restaurants and events

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Will robots become humans or the opposite?

The idea that some day a robot smarter that humans will be built was always strange to me. Let apart that we don’t know if we can manage to make the robot have actual feelings nor have a certain way to know that this robot will be able to do more than humans (as been smarter only in “papers”).

However, the opposite can happen and there are several examples confirming it. Scientists develop artificial hearts, legs, arms, eyes and now are even considering building brain enhancements and memory chips for humans. So finally, after some years when we are able to reproduce or alter any part of the human body in a technical manner why we should ever need to build a robot that will be like humans and smarter than they are?

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