17 Reasons to Avoid Technology (for a few days)

Can you live without the internet? Can you stay away from your daily intake of RSS feeds, email and Twitter? Are you addicted to your social networks? There are many reasons why I think it’s good to shut down your computer for a few days and live like people lived before the time we all had a broadband connection, or even before there was TV.

Holidays are a perfect time for this ‘experiment’. We have a few days off, how are we going to spend them? We’re so used to being entertained all the time. We can listen to the radio, watch TV, surf the internet, play a computer game, rent a DVD, and our vacation will be over before we know. We could also spend those days to find out what’s really important in our lives. Let’s leave that laptop alone for a few days and: [Read more]

And the Winner of a Poken is…

It’s 2009, time for a new year of productive learning! And time to give away two Pokens in the giveaway contest! I used a random number generator to pick the two winners.

And the winners are:
Cher and Palma

Congratulaions! Your Poken is on its way.

Have a Wonderful 2009!

Avoid Distractions: Keep Your Desktop Clean

For some time now, my MacBook Pro’s desktop is totally black. There’s nothing on it. No Dock, no menu bar, no hard drives or inserted CD’s, and most important of all: no files and folders.

Two years ago Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte discussed the ‘Undistracted Mac‘ on MacBreak. The Undistracted Mac basically means you hide away as much unnecessary items from your screen as possible so you’ll not get distracted by anything on your Mac except for what you’re doing right now. [Read more]

Giveaway Contest: Win a Poken!

Since I wrote about Poken in my article “Poken: The Future of Social Networking?” a lot of people responded, and some people seem to like it a lot while others don’t understand what all the fuss is about, as you can read in the comments on digg and on my article.

For the end of the year I’ve decided to give away two free Pokens to readers of Streamlined Mind. To enter the contest you just have to do two simple things:

• Sign up to receive new Streamlined Mind articles by email, using the field in the sidebar on the right of this website;
• Tell me your New Year’s resolution by leaving a comment on this post.

That’s easy isn’t it? The contest will be active till the end of this year, so you can enter before the 1st of January 2009. You can enter only once. [Read more]

11 Ways to Make Your Teacher Happy

How we feel has influence on what we do. This partially has to do with ourselves, we all have our off-days now and then, but it can also be influenced from the outside. What people say to us, how they act. Are you aware of this, also in a learning situation? Let’s have a look at the following 11 ways to make your teacher happy. [Read more]

Poken: The Future of Social Networking?

At a conference about internet and society last week in Amsterdam the first Pokens were given away to participants. A Poken is a small gadget you can keep on your key chain. When touching someone else’s Poken you automatically exchange ‘business cards’ and links to your social network profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook. Is this the future of social networking?

A social networking gadget

Have you ever been in the situation when you’ve met an interesting person at a party and afterwards you tried to find his or her profile on the internet, but you forgot the exact name and you didn’t know where to start searching? In such a situation Poken could have saved you from a lot of trouble: You both grab your Poken, hold them together, they glow their lights and you’re done! [Read more]

10 Tips For More Productive Learning

If you are in a learning situation you’ll have your own way of doing things. You take notes, and read them back later. You do your weekly assignments. Is there anything you could improve to this? Could you be more proactive? The following 10 tips for more productive learning might give you some new ideas on how to be a more productive student. [Read more]

My Favorite OS X add-ons: Quicksilver

Last but certainly not least in my short series of favorite OS X add-ons: Quicksilver by Blacktree. Quicksilver is a perfect example of a piece of software that I use all the time without paying attention to it. The only times I notice it is when it doesn’t work the way I want (which doesn’t happen a lot). I wrote an article about Quicksilver before which describes why I love it so much: How Quicksilver Streamlined my Computing Experience.

Quicksilver can’t be described in a few sentences. It can do so many things for you. It can launch applications, open bookmarked websites, move files around on your harddisk, append text to documents, look up words in the dictionary, and much more. If you don’t use it yet, definitely consider giving it a try. Using it might seem awkward in the beginning, but give it a week, and it might become an essential add-on to your system too [Read more]

Follow Me on Twitter!

I waited for a long time, as I just didn’t understand why I would use it. But from now on you can follow Streamlined Mind on Twitter. Let’s see it as an experiment. I don’t know what it will bring me and if I’ll enjoy using it for a long time. We’ll see. In the meantime, become my twitter friend and we’ll talk!

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