Entrepreneur Geek

I have trained my eyes to skip all ads on a web page. But today, I saw something I had to click!

Live Scribe is a pen, an audio recorder and much beyond that. It records everything you write, scribble and draw. Along with audio. You can then play it back from anywhere. You can even search what you wrote and share your recordings / notes with others. It’s amazing!

Live Scribe Pulse Smart Pen

This is a great tool for students, journalists and anyone who would like to record everything from a meeting. Even great for brainstorming sessions!

The 2GB pen is $199, 1GB is $149. A refill costs $5.95.

Would make a nice gift, isn’t it?

What say?

Big Lie Repeated Audaciously becomes Truth

Hitler, for good or bad, changed the world history. Some of the things going around me, just reminded me of Dr.
Joseph Goebbels – Adolf Hitler’s public relations / marketing / propaganda man.

What’s most remembered of Goebbels is his explanation of Britain’s Big Lie theory (which was adopted by Hitler / Goebbels very well). Quoting:

That is of course rather painful for those involved. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

So a big lie + repetition + audacity will soon become truth! People won’t care to find the truth, they will just listen to the big lie, and blinded by it, soon they will start believing that’s the real truth.

If you look at it, what were the primary rules of Hitler?

• Never allow the public to cool off
• Never admit a fault or wrong
• Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy
• Never leave room for alternatives
• Never accept blame
• Concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong
• People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

The mentality of people is such that they will believe a big lie sooner than they would believe the truth. Malintentioned people use this to their advantage. They skew the facts and present only portions of it to public, omitting the original context and adding their own “big lie” context to it.

Some people realize this is so ridiculous, since they know the original facts. But the number of such people is generally less. And the propaganda man walks away to his advantage fooling everyone. By the time people realize the truth, it’s too late for them.

Have you ever experienced this happening? With you?

How would you fight it?

• Would you start countering every big lie?
• Would you keep quiet and wait?
• Would you expose the big lie?

(Image courtesy: notionscapital)

For more such cartoons, visit BrainStuck.com

I love National Geographic photographs. Sujeet linked to a Nat Geo photo on a tweet today, and that led me to setting up National Geographic Photo of the Day as my Mac desktop wallpaper using an Automator action.

Interested? Here are some notes:

• Nat Geo offers free Windows and Mac screensaver applications of their best Photo of the Day. If you want a screensaver and not a desktop wallpaper, that’s your best bet!
• This work on Mac. Haven’t searched for Windows / Linux alternatives yet.
• Download the NPODWallpaper Automator script by Maxwell Duncan.
• When unzipped and installed, it will create an Automator application in your Applications folder.
• Double click and run it. Status messages will be shown in top menu bar.
• If all went well, your wallpaper would have changed. Hit F11 to quickly verify.
• If you are happy, setup an iCal event to run the script everyday. That will give you the latest POD from NatGeo automatically!
• Sweet, uh!

I still remember the sweet old Webshots days! Beautiful wallpapers are always refreshing! May be time to try out their beta mac application!

Unicode characters and webservices always create one or the other problem for me Working on PlannerX backend was not any different. Spent some good hours fixing Unicode / UTF-8 related issues.

And while I was searching for some solutions, I found an excellent “PHP UTF-8 Cheat Sheet” by Nick Nettleton of DropSend. I highly recommend it if you are going to do anything with PHP and Unicode!

And BTW, don’t use Base64 encoding with UTF-8. It will not work!