Same as many of you, everyday (especially in the morning) I read lots of Internet news, blog posts, and tweets. If I find any good ones, I like to share it with my friends in Facebook and Google Circle; my followers in Twitter; as well as my peers in Linkedin. With so many to share and so many different social media networks as the destinations, it is not easy to manage this task. For examples:

1. I need to log-in to these websites one by one to post. Yes, there are some utilities to help out but none of those are really intuitive;
2. If I post all the morning stuffs in one go, it not only annoys all my friends and followers; but all my posts also will disappear in my friends’ wall easily;
3. Browser is no longer the primary way to read / share news, therefore there is a need to share also directly from apps like Flipboard and Zite;

Then I came across a very neat solution – the Buffer. Buffer let you first, with a centralized dashboard, create a queue for each of your social networks. And then you can create posts to put into those queues.

Then those posts in the queue will be posted orderly to the designated social network automatically according to a sending schedule. For example in the following screen you will find that I have created four sending times for my Linkedin network.

These two features alone, have solved the first two issues above. The next problem to solve is how to share your posts from other apps. Buffer created Chrome Extension, Safari Bookmarklet (for your iPad and iPhone) and even a special secret email address such that you can send your post to the queues via email.

Lastly, Buffer even includes an analytic screen to let you see how your posts perform – e.g. number of click-thru and retweets etc.

All in all, it is a very good tool to manage your sharings. If you are serious about social media sharing, I suggest you to give Buffer a try and it is the best solution for now.

It’s hard to tell why I need yet another new camera, especially the E-P3 (released just one year ago) is working perfectly along with the E-5, XZ-1.

But I always want to own a vintage Olympus OM camera, so the new designed dust / splash proof body with fast AF, 5-Axis in-body IS, high-speed shooting, tilting monitor and built-in electronic viewfinder is really attractive. Anyway, I bought the OM-D E-M5 body (without the new kit lens), and gave it a try last weekend. Not to test the new AF, IS, but … the new Key-line art filter.

It’s actually very addictive.

It’s hard to take good photos in a rainy day, especially you don’t have those splash-proof cameras. But there are times that you won’t have another chance to visit the same place again (or not in a short period of time), so you have to do something – don’t ever let those memories fade.

Of course, one solution is to get one of those dust-proof, splash-proof cameras (like the latest Olympus E-M5), but still there is no decent weather and therefore your photos will probably look flat, moody and in worst case, off white-balance.

I have no bullet-proof solutions on the latter problem, but one of the approaches is to take photos in Black & White (again !!). Here are some photos (with Olympus E-P3) from Taipei in a heavy-raining weekend.

I seldom upgrade my gears even the gears’ new version / generation are released, instead I always skip one generation between each upgrade. That applies to my M4/3 cameras, iPhone, iPad and of course the Kindle as well. My previous Kindle is a white color Kindle 2, and I skipped the very good Kindle 3 (now the Kindle Keyboard) but waited for the Kindle Touch. So, the day Amazon made the Kindle Touch available to customers outside US like us, I ordered the fourth generation Kindle and the Lighted Leather Cover …

Without a keyboard like Kindle 2 / 3, the Kindle Touch is very small and lightweight. And with the same reason, you need to touch the screen to turn pages and change any settings … quite frankly touching the screen to action is not as easy as pressing a button in previous Kindle verions. However the E Ink display is still very good for reading.

One thing I note from this latest Kindle is the menu options will change depends on what you’re doing – for example, the menu in the main homepage is different with the one while you’re reading and in the Settings screen. Anyway, first few things you need to do after you receive your Kindle Touch:

1. From the home screen (the book list screen), press the Menu button in upper right, and turn on the Wi-Fi (“Turn On Wireless” option). If needed, in the same menu, select “Settings” and use the “Wi-Fi Networks” option to connect to the right Wi-Fi Access point.
2. Then register your Kindle with the “Registration” option in the “Settings” screen.
3. Set the password of the device, the time and personal information with the “Device Options” in the “Settings” screen.
4. You can also set the social network through the “Reading Options”
5. Once connected, and registered, go back to the home screen and you shall be able to download all the books to the new Kindle one by one.

I also tried the Kindle Shop (the shopping cart icon on top) and bought my first ebook for the new Kindle Touch – Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks)

Lastly, in case you want to take some screenshots of Kindle like what I did for this blog post, all you need to do is to hold the home button for a while and then tap the screen. The screenshot in GIF format will be stored in the root directory of the Kindle where you can copy to your PC once connected via the USB cable. Hope it helps.

Enjoy !!

Following is a screenshot of my laptop at home (no kidding !!) and as you can see, there are only 5 icons in the Windows 7 desktop. How neat … In fact, my computer at work has the same desktop view.

This post is about how I organize my files to declutter the desktop, but more importantly, how to make it work around the Dropbox service (and any other cloud storage services or your private Internet accessible NAS). That basically makes all your important files accessible from Internet, whenever you want, and whereever you are.

Before we start the work, you need to answer yourself one question, that is “how many ways you want to access your files ?”. In my case, I have computers at work, at home and of course mobile devices like smartphone and tablet. Therefore, I can classify all the files I ever created into the following categories, in terms of access methods:

1. I want to access files created from my home computer;
2. I want to access files created from my office computer;
3. I want to access files created from my mobile devices

If I further elaborate those access methods, I have a combination of:

A) Files and folders created by home computer,

i) access from home computer only;

ii) access from any computers;

B) Files and folders created by office computer,

i) access from office computer only;

ii) access from any computers;

C) Files and folders created by any computer,

i) access only from locally;

ii) access from any computer;

As you can see A (i), B(i) essentially are the same as C(i) in the cases of home and office computer, so in principle the access method of files and folders are:

1. Files created by any computer but access only locally; (i.e. the computer that created the files)
2. Files created by home computer and accessible by other computers;
3. Files created by office computer and accessible by other computers, and;
4. Files created anywhere, but accessible by other computers.

To make the above works, all I need is to create 4 folders, of which 3 of them are created in Dropbox. And they are:

1. A folder names – “Desktop – Local“, this is a folder in each computer and stores the local created files / folders and will not share to any other computer and the Dropbox;
2. A shortcut to a folder names – “Desktop – Home“. The folder is created in Dropbox. Files / folders that created by home computer but like to share with other computer shall store here;
3. A shortcut to a folder names – “Desktop – Office“. The folder is created in Dropbox. Files / folders that created by office computer but like to share with other computer shall store here;
4. A shortcut to a folder names – “Desktop – Virtual“. The folder is created in Dropbox. Files / folders that created by any computer but like to share with other computer shall store here.

Lastly, don’t forget to install the Dropbox software to your computer to synchronize all these folders. In summary, with this approach, I minimize all sorts of files and folders in all my computers. In addition, any files and folders that need to be shared are nicely organized and stored in the Cloud storage Dropbox.com and I can easily distinguish where the files are created (home computer or work computer – for personal or work files).

Hope you will find it useful !!

Happy Chinese New Year !!

Guess all of you know that in Chinese Astrology 2012 is the Year of the Dragon. The Dragon is a creature of myth and legend; in fact, it is the only animal of the Chinese zodiac year that is not real. A symbol of good fortune and sign of intense power, the Oriental Dragon is regarded as a divine beast – the reverse of the malicious monster that Westerners felt necessary to find and slay.

Anyway, many of you must be eager to know if you will have better luck in the coming year than previous years. Let me tell you one thing – to get lucky, all you need to do is be a happy person and stay happy.

Following is a photo of the Chinese word “Happiness”.

I started the annual reporting of this tiny blog since 2009, and I found it is a very good way to tell how the blog compare to previous year. The first thing I found is I blogged a lot less in year 2011, in fact I posted only half as many posts as in year 2010. And therefore, the blog also sold only 76 various models of Kindles (33% less compare to previous year).

As usual, people bought many other stuff from Amazon thru the site, for examples:

• Running shoe
• Camcorder
• Zoom lens
• Laptops from Dell and Acer

However, the most funny products sold in the last 12 months, definitely belonged to that pair of Freudian slipper and naked coconut water …

Same time next year, another annual report is waiting for you.

I like black and white pictures. A lot.

But I am not exactly know why, may be it’s like what the famous writer Stefan Kanfer writes – “There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.“. Or may be just because I am now old enough, and the world is no longer colorful.

“Shades of grey wherever I go
The more I find out the less that I know
Black and white is how it should be
But shades of grey are the colors I see.”

Billy Joel

Unlike others, I don’t take photos in color mode and then process those to black & white with retouching software. (Yes, I switched to digital photography for quite some years) Instead, I toggle on the black & white mode with my camera (e.g. Olympus E-5, E-P3), and just take the photo as is. Many times, I used the “grainy” mode to add some textures to the photo as well.

So, what’s your story of taking black and white photos ?

How many apps you have downloaded to your iOS devices ? And is it easy to find them from within the devices – then run your favorite game or utility apps, move them or delete them ? Yes I know many of you have your favorite apps in the home screen and you can organize the apps into folders as well … but more questions pop up – how to name the folders ? How to arrange the folders ? And is it easy to find the folders you created last week or month in your iPhone / iPad ?

iPhone and iPad are smart devices but you need to be very smart as well one way or the other, to make that device works for you. Other than downloading good apps, I firmly believe you also need a smart(er) way to organize your apps and folders – and in turn, better user experience.

And here are 8 tips and tricks on that:

1. First, only download the apps your need. A simple but important trick, for example, if you don’t play games at all then why download the Angry Birds ?
2. Second, organize all standard Apple apps (Clock, Calendar, Contact, Map etc.) in the home screen of the device. With this approach, when you know you need to run those standard Apple apps, just go to the home screen to find it. Free up your mind, you don’t need to memorize where are those apps – like, where is the Map apps ? However, if there are really some Apple standard apps you don’t need in the home screen – save those into a separate folder, say “Apple apps”.
3. Always leave a row in the home screen for your apps and folders though, in other words, only keep at most 12 standard Apple apps in the home screen (in the case of iPhone). That will leave you 4 ”slots” to place your own apps or folders. For iPad, keep 15 standard Apple apps in the home screen and leave 5 “slots” for the apps folders.
4. In the case of iPad, you can also move one of your favorite apps to the apps docking bar in the bottom of the screen. In my case, I added Zite to it.
5. In the home screen, keep the most used apps on the left most column (if you are a right-handed person), or the right most column. That will help you to access your favorite apps with only one hand and your thumb.
6. Probably the most important tips – sort your folders position by their names. For example, place the folder sequence like “Finance”, then “Games”, then “Health” etc. That will help you easy to find one folder just by a glance to the screen. In other words, if you want to find the folder ”Health”, the first glance of the screen you found “Finance” and you will certainly know the ”Health” folder is somewhere on the right or below the folder “Finance”. No more folder hunting.
7. Keep the folders names the same between iPhone and iPad. So you can easily find the same apps in the same folder.
8. Lastly, review the apps and folders once every few months – remove the apps that no longer needed; rename the folders or create new ones if new needs arose; reorganize the folder position again.

I hope all these tips and tricks make sense to you, following you can find few screen shots of my iPhone and iPad set up.

Once in a while I have nothing to blog.

No more Kindle posts, no more photographs or camera gears, no more gadgets and of course, no more cloud computing stuff (guys and gals, we are tired of keep talking about cloud computing, by someone who have not implemented any cloud computing platform before).

I suppose I can also write something about SoMoLo (or SoLoMo … whatever you like it) apps, something about Liquid Newsroom Project, something about the latest Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco, or even why my iPhone 4 battery runs out faster with iOS 5.0.1; still, my mind is blank.

Then I finally find out the reason this morning … if something is really important to blog, I will tweet it, Facebook it, Google+ it … but if something is not that really important to blog, I will just leave it aside – till one day, I forget all about it.

Technology and mobility do not make us more productive, it just make our life run faster – without any goal.

“Life in the fast lane, surely make you lose your mind.” – Eagles