Underestimating Technology – My Tryst With Monitors

A lot of us have made the mistake of underestimating technology. How big can the internet be? What real work would our computers or mobiles be capable of? There were plenty of questions in the early days of internet & mobile that had experts puzzled and take polar views. I may have many such tales myself, but here is a simple one. Also personal.

I have had a desktop computer for most of my life. I think the earliest I got one was sometime in 90s. It was a privilege. And in over two decades of computing it is only in 2020 that I have learnt how useful large screens are. So much so that I believe it is a disservice to spend on a good laptop before buying a large external monitor (27″ or more!). I also think organisations need to promote use of large external and even multiple screens for professionals. It is a must have for productivity.

Using an external screen is increasingly common for coders. But the benefits are far from limited to just software engineers. During my international visits, I found it lavish to see even admins & operations staff at co-working space using external displays with their laptops.

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A Week With The MacBook Pro Retina – Everything I Wanted

Bidding Goodbye To MBP

I got my first laptop in 2010 during a trip to US. Having been a desktop only person and managing my college projects / work from home or cyber cafes until then, I was thrilled to be an owner of the MacBook Pro 13”. Back then my decision to go for the Pro vs the Air was influenced by several Mac lovers. While I really appreciate a light weight machine that the Air would have been, the MBP was a great choice for me lasting almost 5 years. I was a full time writer back then with a lot of video editing and typing being part of my computing. The MBP served more than well all these years. In fact, even today it is fully functional with upgraded RAM (8GB) and an additional 128GB SSD to support the 250GB regular HDD. Safe to say, Apple has a customer for life — at least for laptops.

Last week I treated myself with a new MacBook Pro Retina. Read More

Focused vs Unfocused – The Larry Page Perspective

The Vinod Khosla fireside chat with Google founders is great. My favourite part from the interaction is this:

 

VK Let me go back to Larry. As CEO of Google, a lot of these guys have board members who keep saying, Focus on a few things. Self-driving cars is one. You’ve done some things in health and others. How do you decide what’s focused and what’s unfocused?

LP I’ve been thinking about this change quite a bit over the years. I think it sounds stupid if you have this big company, and you can only do five things. I think it’s also not very good for the employees. Because then, you have 30,000 employees and they’re all doing the same thing, which isn’t very exciting for them. So I think, ideally, the company would scale the number of things it does with the number of people in a linear fashion. As far as I can tell, that never happens. It’s logarithmic with the number of people, if that.

I would always have this debate actually, with Steve Jobs. He’d be like, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah that’s true.’ And he was right, in some sense.

But I think the answer to that – which I only came to recently, as we were talking about this stuff – is that if you’re doing things that are highly interrelated, then there is some complexity limits. It’s all going to escalate to the CEO, because you have things that are interrelated. At some point, they have to get integrated. A lot of our Internet stuff is like that. The user experience needs to make sense. It needs to feel like you’re using Google, not that you’re using something else. So I think there is a limit on how much we can do there, and we have to think carefully about it.

Everything about the automated cars is like– Sergey can do that, and I don’t have to talk to him. I like talking to him. But I don’t really have to talk to him about that, because there’s almost zero impact on the rest of our business. Although it does use some great engineers who we have on mapping and other things. Naturally, they move to that project, but that’s a scalable process. I don’t have to talk to those engineers. They just move magically.

So I do think companies usually try to do very adjacent things. They figure, “We’re going to know exactly how to do something that’s very similar to what we already do.” The problem with that is that causes a management burden. Whereas, if you did something a little less related, you can actually handle more things.

Made a WindSurfer!

I would be home in December recovering from an Ligament tear (ankle), and so I got loads of free time to play around. And here is one of the geek stuff I made … A WiFi range booster that works GR8!

Now I can confidently roam around anywhere in my house enjoying the convenience of WiFi. Anyone looking for a similar solution? Well I might get the tutorial on OnlyGizmos or I might even make one for you 😉 – Just give me a buzz!